Fintech in Scotland – Connect, Collaborate, and Cultivate
Over the last few weeks, the FinTech Scotland team has had the pleasure of working with an intern from Portobello High School as part of a Career Ready programme. It provided us with an opportunity to support a young person think about the future of work, but more importantly it helped us see through a young learner’s eyes, the excitement and curiosity fintech generates. The power of those questions from a someone with no industry baggage or background yet, is striking.
His facial expressions and questions ranged from sheer surprise to genuine delight, and with a work focus on planning the FinTech Scotland Festival we were delighted to have another set of eyes, ears and thoughts help develop the plan.
Our new young colleague summarised his experience under four key themes. In his view FinTech enables communication, connection, and collaboration, and together these are helping to cultivate the future of finance. As we look towards the FinTech Scotland Festival these themes really set the tone.
The FinTech Scotland Festival
This year We will connect and reconnect with new and old colleagues across the UK and across the world. We will share, listen, learn and have the privilege of some key messages, communicating on the journey so far and the ambition for more.
We’ll celebrate the growing strength of the fintech community in Scotland, and the brilliant entrepreneurs cultivating the future of finance and achieving record levels of investment.
Across the festival we’ll hear more about their plans and ambitions including Snugg’s plans to enable us all to make our homes more energy efficient through fintech, DirectID’s global growth in helping people get fairer access to necessary lending, and Legado’s continued focus to help us get all of our financial lives more digitally organised as we move away from paper-based experiences to digital ones.
We’ll also see Know-it who are gearing up to help businesses manage credit, and Waracle who are helping so many larger Enterprises embrace the possibility of doing business through mobile. Amiqus, will share plans on driving fairer access to better services for people, while Float will show the future of financial management for businesses through a business unique financial command centre. The list goes on and we’re proud to show the advances and flourishing potential.
We’ll also explore emerging fintech innovations, be curious about next generation finance and discover the art of the possible as we collaborate across FinTech and Space innovation to help the climate agenda.
The Festival lift off is on the 15th of September with the FinTech Summit. As ever this event and the Digit team set the scene, tone and ambition for the following three weeks where we will explore the world of fintech. We will land on the 6th of October to celebrate the journey with the Scottish Financial Technology Awards.
I’m really looking forward to it all, meeting people, learning, sharing experience and celebrating success.
And a final note of thanks to Jack, our new intern colleague. While Jack will return to school in the next few weeks, he has left an lasting impression that we’ll not forget.
