Eurogiro Community meeting 2016 – Investigating disruption

In Prague from 10-12 May 2016, the Eurogiro delegates investigated the significance and potential impact of ‘Disruptive Financial Services’ – asking whether these are a blessing or a threat?

The meeting investigated various angles of the theme, many with direct impact on Eurogiro members. The considerations spanned from specific disrupting services to a broad overview of the points of disruption to expect in the future. Main impact were:

• Disruptive trends from a European perspective: how customer pressure, supported by EU legislation such as PSD2, pushes towards frictionless commerce where the financial institutions must provide open API-banking and access to accounts, and stand a good chance to be successful if they achieve being part of the flow
• Fast or instant payments being the new norm, initially for retail customers, but several speakers saw the potential as most interesting within the ‘corporate-to-corporate’  or ‘corporate-to-private’ space
• Mobile access is a must in being successful at winning the loyalty of private customers, but is expected also to be essential towards (small) corporates. The meeting featured Fintechs presenting their mobile solutions used today by Eurogiro members
• Competition, but also cooperation opportunities, from mobile operators that are successfully using their top-up services and global network connections to offer very in-expensive payment solutions for instance to immigrant workers

Michel Stuijt, Eurogiro CEO, thanked the participants for attending the annual Eurogiro member meeting, for their interest and engagement in the discussions and in Eurogiro. Michel also expressed his gratitude towards the co-hosts from CSOB, the Eurogiro member in the Czech Republic, for their support in the planning of the conference and for generous event on the first night of the conference.  

Michel noted that Prague was a lovely and much appreciated venue for this year’s conference. 

SeABank of Vietnam presented itself as new member in Eurogiro, and invited all members to partner with them and take advantage of their unique partnership with Vietnam Post. The partnership will ensure access to the largest branch network in Vietnam as well as access to Vietnamese accounts when it goes live in Q-3 this year.

There were also presentations about CSOB, on technical and operational updates from Eurogiro and a panel discussion on Compliance, KYC and AML issues.

Eurogiro’s Annual member was attended by around 100 participants from most Eurogiro member organisations, as well as by special guests from prospect member organisations and featured speakers from various organisations with expert experience within many types of financial services. 

As is custom with these Eurogiro meetings, a substantial time and greatly appreciated element is the bilateral talks, where many deals are made, issues are solved and friendly relationships are nurtured.