When they digitalise, banks often focus all their attention IT part, but digitalisation also applies also to processes, culture, people and a new way of management; this realisation was one of the exciting highlights of the Business Breakfast “Luxembourg meets Slovenian Fintech Ecosystem: Innovative and concrete solutions” held on Tuesday 25 at October Hotel le Royal in Luxembourg city.
The event, organised by the Luxembourg Slovenian Business Club (LSBC), in cooperation with FinnoLux and supported by Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia in Brussels, attatracted a full-house audience, giving the attendees the opportunity to explore collaborative potential between both countries.
In his opening speech, the Slovenian Ambassador, Matjaž Šinkovec, emphasised the strong support of the Slovenian Government for Slovenian companies to enter Luxembourg market, especially in the ICT Sector.
See the opportunity being opened for all Slovenian FinTech companies
At the event five Slovenian companies, Comtrade Digital Services, Netis, Bitnik and SilverBullet Risk presented their highly innovative and concrete projects in the fields of digital transformation, in accordance to the PSD2 directive, blockchain technologies, cryptocurrencies and risk management.
The overall message from the audience was that Slovenian ecosystem’s FinTech talent and capability to deliver should be seen and made available to Luxembourg Financial centre. Pierre-Olivier Rotheval, Head of Innovation at BIL and one of the panelist at the roundtable discussion stated that they, as a bank, are not afraid of FinTech innovators and mentioned their partnership with Slovenian BitStamp, a major FinTech company in the country. “It was a real opportunity to discover new solutions and new companies that could add value propositions, and I do believe that Luxembourg could be a perfect headquarters for companies from Slovenia. It’s a win-win.” he said.
Real solutions for real problems
The banks are running out of time to meet tight deadlines for compliance with the PSD2 Directive which will come into force in a year. By that time they need to open their core banking applications to the third party payment providers. Johan Lönnberg from Comtrade Digital Services presented concrete solution for the PSD2 compliant digital transformation based on their innovative platform which deploys “Unified API” technology. “I think it was a good opportunity to meet with some of the Luxembourg FinTech Banks and talk to the people that are relevant for the market in a small atmosphere” summarised Lönnberg.
The perfect match
Whilst on the surface one may think that Slovenia and Luxembourg have little in common with each other in terms of potential for business collaboration, the event has, in fact, shown that Luxembourg and Slovenia are a perfect match.
“Luxembourg, with its financial centre, has no shortage of knowledge in the world of finance - if there are game-changing use cases to be found, Luxembourg is where you will find them. Slovenia, on the other hand, has become the hub of the South-East European FinTech ecosystem, providing a gateway to a pool of expertise which is hard to find here in Luxembourg. It is through creating partnerships between ecosystems, with complementary profiles, that we can identify truly innovative opportunities and develop these into real solutions,” explained Matt Elton from FinnoLux.
Next steps
Plans are already underway for a return visit, taking Luxembourg to the heart of Slovenian FinTech in Ljubljana in early 2017, whilst discussions are taking place between Luxembourg financial centre and Slovenian companies on how to implant Slovenian FinTech solutions in Luxembourg.
