Auckland – The NZ fintech summit next week is crucial for the future of financial technology in New Zealand, virtual assistant company FaceMe chief executive Danny Tomsett says.
The summit in Auckland on November 29 includes most of the country’s leading financial tech specialists.
Tomsett, a key speaker at the event, says financial technology in New Zealand is facing growing tension between reducing cost to serve and maintaining margins; and investing enough into growth and improving customer experience.
“At the intersection of these, banks are hyper-focused on leveraging technology to solve this conundrum. Digital strategies have been highly effective in lowering cost to serve as well as meeting growing customer expectation,” he says.
“But this has opened banks up to new risks around the value of a physical branch and the need for people contact which has historically been a huge differentiator.
“For many businesses, emotional connection with their customers has been compromised by their digital strategy and this directly impacts on brand value, revenue growth and churn. This backdrop sets the scene for incredible innovation.”
“At FaceMe, we believe technology will increasingly be used to solve for regulation and compliance issues. In addition, customer experience will move beyond digitisation to personalisation.
“In a hyper-connected world, we’ll start to place the customer at the heart of every single innovation. Technology will empower companies to do this.”
FaceMe is an AI company that has solved the problem of creating emotional connection through existing and digital channels.
FaceMe’s platform supercharges a brand’s ability to create incredible, real-time interaction based on tailored content and memorable personas who build emotional connection with your customers using the power of the human face.
“We enable banks to reduce the cost to serve at the same time as enabling opportunity for growth and improving customer experience. That’s why the summit so important to New Zealand’s economic future,” Tomsett says.
Fintech in New Zealand is showing real openness to open banking and a few the banks have 20 or 30 collaborative fintech projects on the go.
The summit will showcase some of the successful Kiwi financial tech innovations on offer in a new environment.
New fintechs are entering the market daily giving people choice, making for more competition and being more inclusive which is what summit speaker and cabinet minister Kris Faafoi wants.
Speakers at the summit will delve deep into a range of fintech topic areas including artificial intelligence, blockchain applications, user experience design, cyber security, open banking and how they will impact on a broad subset of financial services such as payments, insurance, funds management, capital raising and insurance.
Other speakers include Delta Insurance director Craig Kirk, Xero small business director Nicole Buisson and NZ Venture Investment Fund chief executive Richard Dellabarca.
FintechNZ general manager James Brown says fintech is the fastest growing segment of the New Zealand tech sector with growth of over 33 percent last year bringing an additional $220 million of exports into the New Zealand economy.
The growing number of firms engaged in the fintech sector was recently captured in a new infographic showing just how vibrant the New Zealand fintech sector is, he says.
“I talk with my fintech counterparts around the world and I see more and more interest in collaborative projects, investment opportunities and test bed environments for large organisations. This summit is vital for New Zealand as a digital nation heading into 2019,” Brown says.
For further information contact Make Lemonade NZ editor-in-chief Kip Brook on 0275 030188.
Photo: Danny Tomsett
