3 Questions Answered about Boston FinTech Week & the Future of Fintech

By Sarah Biller and David Jegen

The 2021 edition of Boston FinTech Week will be held online September 28th — October 1 in Boston. It’s hosted by FinTech Sandbox, which was co-founded by David Jegen and Sarah Biller in 2014 to promote global innovation in financial technology and financial services by providing fintech startups with access to critical data and resources, at no cost.

This year’s theme is Financial Services for Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere. Each day will have a special focus:

• Tue Sep 28 — Our current state. Where are we today?

• Wed Sep 29 — Building back better with sustainable and inclusive finance.

• Thu Sep 30 — A special day devoted to decentralized finance (DeFi) sponsored by Algorand.

• Fri Oct 1 — The big picture. Where do we go from here?

David is a Managing Partner of F-Prime Capital’s Tech Fund, where he invests in early stage fintech and data analytics startups. Sarah is the Executive Director of Vantage Ventures and sits on the boards of multiple fintech startups.

David and Sarah sat down to talk a bit about the themes they’ll explore in this fourth edition of Boston FinTech Week, as well as about some other current fintech trends and topics.

Sarah: This year our theme for Boston FinTech Week is Financial Services for Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere, which is particularly important as COVID showed us acutely what we need to be doing around innovation in financial services. 

Question: Can you talk about why this is an exciting time for you, what you’re seeing, and what we can think about going into Boston FinTech Week?

David: Since the beginning of the pandemic, one thing that was revealed was the tailwind behind digitally native companies. As people were forced to move online, and as so much economic activity was forced to move online, companies that had ‘grown up’ that way, whether payments companies like Stripe, or Shopify, were the beneficiaries of those tailwinds.

Looking longer term, one reason why fintech is particularly exciting is because so many more startups are launching with so many more venture dollars flowing to them. I still remember the days when fintech was a sleepy niche sector with about a billion dollars invested every year. Now it’s easily $17B a year and with an even higher run rate this year.

I’d argue fintech isn’t niche. Many people now joke that every company is a fintech company. And that’s because software companies in any vertical camp are incorporating financial services into what they do. So that is exciting to see — the breadth and depth of financial services.

Sarah: Boston FinTech Week is going to look at the current state of sustainable and inclusive finance, and see where we’ve leapfrogged in terms of digital adoption during COVID. Then we’ll ask how fintech is being utilized by other industries, to drive environmental or societal or governance outcomes — or more broadly, health and well-being outcomes. 

Question: If you really think about sustainable and inclusive finance defined broadly, are there innovations that you see coming down the pike?

David: We’re seeing efforts to make financial services and products available to many in the unbanked and underbanked populations in our country. And we’re in the early days of that. When you lower the cost of the product and the cost of distribution, you can give people access to credit, traditional banking products, new products, and better payment terms while still serving them profitably.

We have companies like Dave and Cleo and Even with the ability to make small loans to people with acute credit or acute cash needs thereby helping bridge week-to-week paychecks. Those are some great ways that fintech can help on the inclusion side going forward.

What’s also important is all the fintech startups that have decided to underwrite in different ways, using different data sets, taking different approaches, and doing so specifically to say, “How can I serve this group that no one else has served?” To do so they use different data sets and different standards, and in the process, find what drives low default rates for a group that historically might have appeared to have high default rates. We think that’s essential.

Question: Do you have any thoughts about this as it relates to ESG data? We are often asked about the role fintech can play in reducing carbon emissions. 

David: It’s a fun question. It started 20 years ago with carbon trading and caps and markets around that, and some of those are still very relevant. Progress will be built around data and transparency.

On the data side, there have been significant steps forward in aggregating and beginning to standardize what ESG data looks like. But, what does a sustainable company do? What are the standards? We don’t have agreement yet, and there shouldn’t be one standard for every type of company. At a minimum, it should be by sector, or by size, or by country, or by any number of things.

Companies like Clarity AI, which was a participant in FinTech Sandbox and Truvalue Labs as well, are great examples. We’re able to now look at the next step, which is how do we help companies pull together their own data and make it transparent to their shareholders? Or how do we help funds like BlackRock or Fidelity do the same to reveal the carbon footprint of their vast holdings?

This topic is going to make Boston FinTech Week exciting for us because it also takes us into the need for new and differentiated datasets. 

To hear more from Sarah and David and other valuable insights from Boston FinTech Week, register here. For the impressive lineup of speakers and topics you can view the agenda.

For the full list of event sponsors that are making Boston FinTech Week possible, please visit this page.