Crypto fever has truly broken.
That was a big takeaway this week from the Paris Fintech Forum, one of the biggest annual gatherings of its kind in Europe. On Tuesday and Wednesday, about 3,000 entrepreneurs, investors, bankers, and regulators descended on the neo-classical Palais Brongniart, once home to the stock exchange. Last year, with Bitcoin and its imitators soaring, attendees jammed discussions on blockchain technology.
"I nearly lost my whole team to cryptocurrencies," said Will Andrich, the CEO of Switzerland’s Thaler.One, which says it creates real estate-backed digital securities.
No such problem this year. With the top 10 crypto assets down 80 percent in the last 12 months and skepticism mounting, many fintech pros concluded that the technology may not be ready for prime time, especially in an industry this heavily regulated.
Instead, the conference was about getting back to banking basics. Sessions on building branchless lenders were standing-room only, investors buzzed about how 2019 could be a banner dealmaking year, and the most controversial moment came at a panel on old-fashioned lending.
Backstage, luminaries from traditional finance and the startup world sipped coffee and geeked out. Fresh from Davos, Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, chatted with Kathryn Petralia, a co-founder of Kabbage Inc., an Atlanta-based firm that does automated credit scoring and lending. On stage, the governor of the Bank of France, Francois Villeroy de Galhau, held forth on artificial intelligence with Olivier Guersent, the director-general of financial stability at the European Commission. "I’m pretty excited about supply chains," said Ann Cairns, the vice chairman of Mastercard Inc.
With Europe’s new payments law now requiring banks to share customer account data with fintech firms, the prevailing vibe was that there’s plenty of action without messing around with crypto.
Perhaps nothing drove that point home more than the face-off between Gottfried Leibbrandt, the chief executive officer of Swift, and Brad Garlinghouse, the CEO of San Francisco’s Ripple Labs Inc. Swift is a 46-year-old cooperative that directs trillions of dollars in cross-border payments between thousands of banks. Garlinghouse has repeatedly vowed to leapfrog Swift’s 1970s-conceived system with a faster, cheaper blockchain-like one.
“I look at the dynamic between Ripple and Swift, and I liken it to Amazon and Wal-Mart,” Garlinghouse said on Wednesday to a packed auditorium.
Leibbrandt countered that for two years, Swift’s latest payment standard revitalized its system, letting customers track a payment like a FedEx package, and cutting transfer time to hours. Unlike Ripple, which has struggled to sign up major banks, Leibbrandt said the world’s top 60 lenders are utilizing its technology, which is already embraced by regulators.