Fintech continues to grow each day as a leading area in the startup nation. You can see this momentum in the larger institutions, such as the banks, where they’ve successfully started accelerators, as well as in the basic level, like our very own meetup Fintech Aviv!
After the first Fintech Aviv event back in May, and it’s wild success, I started to think ‘how can I replicate this and then make it even better?’ The first step to do this was joining up with DLD Tel Aviv Innovation Festival. In addition to the lectures and events, DLD orchestrated an evening of 30+ simultaneous meetups. Exciting! Taking part in this offered us publicity and a strong partnership, two things we love. In addition, the chance for us to bring new faces to the event, faces of people who truly care about startups and fintech, was now much higher. On the flip side, participating created more competition for our meetup. We needed to be sure to offer something interesting and captivating, otherwise people would chose another meetup over ours. We love a challenge, so we worked to create a Fintech Aviv event that people couldn’t say no to.
The Startups Pitch
With fresh new technology oozing out of the Tel Aviv fintech community, we felt it was important to replicate the last events format and have 4 startups present.
AlgoValue is a cloud based solution that computes the value of stock in privately held companies, and the first to take the stage. AlgoValue set the bar high for the rest of the evening with their product and presentation.
Next up was Shift, a startup that fell slightly outside of what we’re used to seeing at Fintech Aviv. Shift offered a glance at various custom made currencies and how they can add strength to your network.
PayBox was the next to follow presenting their social payment platform. Each of us know the feeling of co-hosting an event and needing to ask everyone to pay you back, and I’m confident saying most people don’t like it! It’s uncomfortable and generally avoided if possible. PayBox was developed in order to ease the complexity that accompanies this process.
Lastly, we had Neema, who recently won best startup at the Geektime conference. Neema is a dollars to dollars banking system that uses Bitcoin as the middleman.
Panel Discussion: Compliance, Security and Identity
Following the presenters we held a panel on Compliance, Security and Identity. In order to make this topic sexy to our community we invited 3 experts, from 3 different areas to join us. Yael Elad, CFO at Aleph VC, offered insight on the VC’s view on these topics. As much of the audience was made up of startups, Yael’s angle on was invaluable. Next to Yael sat Ofer Friedman, VP Marketing at AUX10TIX. AU10TIX provides solutions for automating ID document authentication, validation and conversion to workable digital records. Ofer works daily in the technical side of this subject and contributed quite a bit of clarity to the discussion. Lastly, we had Alon Paiss, who sits in the data security department of Bank Leumi. As fintechers we’re often thinking about the banks, which made Alon’s involvement key for this panel. Everything from whether technology can replace manual back office work for costumer identity authentication, to whether current identity verification and onboarding practices contribute to loss of business was discussed and broken down in laymans terms for understanding.
The most fun component to our meetup for team CurrencyTransfer was to have our new Head of Sales and Operations, Paul Plewman, joining us from Headquarters in London. Paul facilitated the panel adding his 10+ years of experience in the field, to the conversation. Overall, we walked away feeling a sense of pride for our event, as well as our fintech community. The enthusiasm, intelligence and love for what we all do was evident in each attendee at DLD, as well as our event, and leaves us excited to plan the next event.
