Changes take time, until they just happen. Financial services are at the cusp of a remarkable change that few bankers realize. The decentralization of technology, new regulation increasing competitiveness and ecosystem strategies - all these trends will mark the rise of a new era of financial services. This era will be fundamental to end user value, and those who provide it, will thrive.
​

The only methodology that yields proven and measurable results is trial and error. No matter the MBAs in the room and the PowerPoint charts and simulations, nothing will compare to trial and error. If we accept this fact, and we should, then the thing to aim for is to maximize the amount of experiments in order to observe and measure what in fact works and yields the result we desire. Move fast and break things, so to speak. 
​

The fintech industry has grown exponentially in the past few years and along with that the number of events and conferences covering topics related to financial technology. Here we have compiled a list of those we think are the fintech events that you can’t miss in 2018. We bet this is the best list that you can find around!

Tokenization has become a key trend with digital currencies and cryptostrategies in financial services. Tokens seem to be raising hundreds of millions in real time left and right. For an existing financial services firm, should you look at a token strategy and if so, how should you look at it? 

With the advent of PSD2 in Europe, financial services companies have embarked on their Open Banking initiatives, which are set for full swing in 2018. Banks have been writing and exposing APIs for third parties to pull data and perform actions on the banks platforms through these APIs in order to provide more customer facing service innovation. For many banks this is the final step for complying with the PSD2 regulation, but the reality is that it’s only the very first step in the total transformation to an open financial services ecosystem. 

Big changes are happening in the financial services industry, with Fintech that has experienced a fantastic growth and with financial technology companies now on pace to see the level of investments to reach a new record in 2017. As part of this, there is a case represented by Real Estate, a trillions dollars sector that has been slow to change, which is seeing a wave of innovation with property technology, or Proptech.
​

As the adoption of innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, etc. increases, it impacts the rate at which the Fintech ecosystem evolves and affects different markets. 

Having discussed the very best Fintech events and conferences for this year, and our suggestions on the 5 best newsletters for Fintech innovators, we thought it would be beneficial by presenting the 20 best Fintech blogs and publications that you may like to follow to keep up with the latest news and developments in the fast changing financial services space.
​

​The sharing economy is defined as “the peer to peer based activity of obtaining, giving, or sharing access to good and services”. Alternative names for this phenomenon include gig economy, platform economy, access economy, and collaborative consumption.
​

Managing regulations and compliance is becoming increasingly difficult for banks because it is time consuming and expensive, experts claim. For example, when asked by a journalist about the difficulties for top banks in managing compliance costs, a top investor commented: “(…) that is a massive challenge for these banks.”