Leda Writes for Fintech Futures: dispatches from industry conferences

Every Thursday, Leda Glyptis, 11:FS Chief of Staff creates #LedaWrites. This week she turns her attention to industry conferences and forgetfulness.

One of the best things about industry events is that you see your fintech friends. It’s like a family reunion of sorts with drinks and dinner paid for by corporate marketing budgets and in exchange you have to do some speaking and some panelling on top of hiding away to do the actual work. It’s exhausting. But it’s nice to see folks.

That said.

It’s all of us, getting together periodically, to lament the state of the industry, bash the incumbents and disseminate wisdom.

It’s all of us. The same folks. The thinkers, the doers, the moaners and the tinkerers, who get together in between bouts of intense activity. To talk. Share and reflect.

Same folks. Same concerns. Same conversations.

It’s been ten years of conversations about whether banks should partner with fintechs. Ten years of partnerships, some successful, some not. Some purposeful, some not. We know the answer and the answer is: it depends.

We all know not to ask the turkeys what should be on the Christmas menu. Their answer may be biased. And something similar may well be in play here. Most conferences, with a few notable exceptions, are organised by conference organisers, not industry practitioners.

So if they are not setting the scene for the right questions to be asked, it’s not their fault. They are not to know we have moved on, they can’t know what we’ve learned until we tell them.

So why don’t we tell them?

It could well be that regular influencers still standing by the podium don’t even know what the engines inside banks and start-ups are really doing.

This is the “messy middle” and influencers tend to deal in broad narratives.

Even the best ones have nothing to contribute when discussing release cycles or breaking down visions of future profitability into user stories.

And before I go down the rabbit hole of who influences whom, on what grounds and with what certainty, I will come back to my original point which is, unless we are forgetting and losing ourselves, why are we repeating ourselves, chewing on topics long rendered irrelevant if not resolved?

Read the whole story at Fintech Futures.