Yesterday in London the Finovate conference took place in Europe.

Disappointing and incomprehensible to me was the absence of German banks. Either there was a lack of the necessary awareness for future trends or the priorities were simply set wrong.

The show focused on the following topics:

• Management of personal finance
• Security
• Investment and the use of social media (“Social Investment”)
• Online and Mobile Payment
• Online Banking for Small Business

Each of the 35 exhibitors had exactly seven minutes to present his ideas. A pretty cool format, I think. As a result of the day, there has been a proof, that innovation in the financial services sector are not only possible and that there are many ideas available, but also that there are concrete approaches and solutions. For banks that are constantly asking how they can integrate new good ideas into their business model to boost profitability really a paradise. This brings me this back to the initial remark, because especially the German Banks are generally very loud complaining about the poor margins in retail banking.

The four “Best of Show” winners are:

• Meniga, a young Icelandic company, which offers great white-label solutions for Personal Financial Management (PFM) for European banks.
• EToro, a platform for currency trading.
• Finantix, an established manufacturer of customer-oriented solutions for asset management, sales and services.
• Liqpay, a payment system for immediate reservation of funds via phone or Internet.

These four winners and the contribution of the only German participant Fidorbank I will present in the next few days in my bank-blog in a little series of articles with visual additions in detail.

Although my Blog is written in German, I installed a translator service on the side to make it interesting for English-natives too.