From March 19 to 22, several members of the Torpago team joined our fintech industry colleagues for Fintech Meetup 2023 in Las Vegas, Nevada.
“It was great to put a lot of faces and names together,” said Torpago CEO Brent Jackson of his time at the event. “I know we got to meet more of our current customers. Specifically just seeing people that you talked to on Zoom over and over and actually getting to put names and faces together was great for us.”
With thousands of people in attendance and hundreds of exhibitors on hand, Fintech Meetup provided a great opportunity for networking as well as to get a read on what's happening in the fintech ecosystem. Here are our top three takeaways from the event:
Banks Are Recognizing They Need to Modernize
Russell Hampton, Torpago VP of Sales, noted a general understanding among the banks and credit unions in attendance that there's a need to modernize their businesses.
There’s a recognition that “the modern client, they need modern technology, they need modern products, they need modern tools and services,” said Hampton.
Different institutions are at different stages of this recognition and the associated transformation. “There are people all over when it comes to their progress on actually doing that versus evaluating how and what they want to do,” continued Hampton. “But I think everybody's starting to recognize that it's time, which I think is a positive side.”
Banks Are Looking for Growth Partners
In addition to recognizing the need to modernize their product offerings, banks are recognizing that they won’t be able to move fast enough if they try to go it alone.
“A lot of the conversation was surrounding how to partner, who to partner with, and making sure that you could use other already built solutions to scale versus trying to build these things in-house,” noted Noah Martin, Torpago Head of Capital Markets.
He considers this a positive for the space as that frees the banks to focus on their strengths while leveraging the strengths of specialized vendors to power growth.
“They have expertise where they have expertise, which is their client relationships, their ML management,” said Martin. “It's not necessarily new products and services and they get to test out as many things as they want in the market without any commitments for trying to do that in-house. That could take years and lots of CapEx.”
FinTech Remains an Energetic, Exciting Place
When it comes to the atmosphere at the show, “people seemed very excited,” said Martin. “There were lots of opportunities, new firms, people trying out new strategic initiatives. All of the conversations seemed incredibly positive and momentum-driven.”
Jackson, meanwhile made positive observations regarding the fundraising environment.
“I felt like there's a lot of capital, a lot of dry powder sitting out there, a lot of debt capital markets, lenders that want to put money out,” said Jackson. “A lot of venture folks there. I felt like there were a lot of investment community members that were kind of circling and looking to find deals. I don't know how many deals they're doing, but I just got the sense that there's a lot of money on the sidelines when I left there.”
