The Fourth Industrial Revolution: FinTech at Davos 2016

This month our co-founders Christian Faes and Ian Thomas flew off to Switzerland for The World Economic Forum – a meeting of the world’s political, business and philanthropic leaders to discuss pressing issues. 

The theme of this year’s meeting in Davos was ‘Mastering the Fourth Industrial Revolution’. The words ‘industrial’ and ‘revolution’ tend to conjure up images of factories, heavy machinery, railways and smoking chimneys, but this is talk of a digital revolution, where tech can address major global issues and transform the 21st century.

Hot technology topics at the World Economic Forum included robots, cybersecurity, refugees and of course, financial technology. Christian and Ian were there representing UK FinTech with Innovate Finance – an independent organisation representing the global FinTech community. The Chief Executive of Innovate Finance, Lawrence Wintermeyer, wrote this great post in City AM about FinTech’s role in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The word FinTech was on everyone’s lips at Davos and we’re proud to be part of a group of companies and startups that are disrupting the financial services industry.

FinTech is bringing about much-needed changes, and every business line from traditional banking is under threat. New, exciting companies are using technology to come up with new innovations, making finance more transparent and efficient for consumers.

The large tech companies had a big presence at Davos; attendees included Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and Airbnb’s co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk.

LendInvest’s co-founders attended a fringe event at The English Church organised by TechCrunch, which included fireside chats with Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. The hashtag for the event was #TCDavos.

As always @alastairlukies gave a passionate pitch for #FinTech tonight at @InnFin #Davos. Great to have @LendInvest as part of it. #WEF

— Christian Faes (@ChristianFaes) January 21, 2016

Great event by @TechCrunch tonight at #Davos. #TCDavos. Really great speakers and chat @jimmy_wales @ariannahuff #WEF — Christian Faes (@ChristianFaes) January 20, 2016

Don’t forget to follow @ChristianFaes and @LendInvest on Twitter to see what we’ve been getting up to!