Sarah Biller is co-founder of Fintech Sandbox, a Boston-based nonprofit providing entrepreneurs access to high quality data sets.

Entering its seventh year, Boston Fintech Week 2024 is hosted by Fintech Sandbox and will be taking place between October 14-18. Boston Fintech Week 2024 includes the two-day ticketed conference — the Fintech Sandbox Innovation Forum — at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on October 16-17, with additional community events taking place in locations throughout the city. 

The Financial Revolutionist interviewed Fintech Sandbox’s Co-Founder Sarah Biller, about key features defining this year’s Boston Fintech Week, the theme for which being “Fintech at Full Throttle: The Rapid Advance of Innovation.” 

The Financial Revolutionist: What makes this year different from others?

Sarah Biller: At Fintech Sandbox, we have always looked at Boston Fintech Week as an opportunity to shine a light on the next generation ideas emanating from the entrepreneurial community locally, nationally and globally and provide a platform for discussion, debate and one-on-one engagement. 

We want to push the limits of innovation while being good stewards of an interconnected financial services system, where digitization could conflate systematic and systemic risks in ways previously unthinkable. It’s an important time to think about how to maximize growth to ensure financial services work for everyone with the pace of legacy infrastructure upgrades. We also want to know what investors think and what new markets are forming.  

This past year brought profound change to the fintech sector. The progress of generative AI and computing on the edge expand and accelerate fintech capabilities and the delivery of services exponentially. By making these capabilities easily accessible for everyone, industry practitioners have changed the rules. Change is no longer incremental: We are witnessing transformation taking place considerably faster than many had anticipated

The rollout of generative AI and edge computing was sudden, unpredictable and course-altering. These capabilities have also led to speculation about the future of financial services which can often be untethered from the experience of the inventors and early adopters. I expect this year we will learn an enormous amount in a very short time about the long-term effects of these new capabilities and how the aperture of opportunity for fintech has changed seemingly overnight

What can you tell us about Boston Fintech Week’s programming, speakers and venue in 2024?

Undoubtedly, opportunities for fintech grow every minute as do challenges. Our programming at Boston Fintech Week will tilt toward what new technologies fintech is adopting and how this will impact our future. Equally important, Boston Fintech Week programming will dive into the inevitable evolution of data to fuel this surge in AI adoption and, given its criticality, how it will be created, stored and shared.  

We also know that like in nature, the acceleration of innovation in fintech is proportional to the applied force. We are drawing heavily on the wisdom of industry vanguards like Bain Capital’s Matt Harris, Wells Fargo’s head of Digital Transformation Reetika Grewal and Global Atlantic’s Tricia Abella to help make sense of this period of rapid change.

We look forward to a variety of community-hosted and sponsored events, such as fireside chats, masterclasses, roundtables and receptions. The week will allow for a wide variety of voices to be heard, along with invaluable opportunities for attendees to build lasting relationships and partnerships. 

What is your goal for this year?

Our goal for Boston Fintech Week is to resist the urge to be satisfied by discussions around the obvious implications of the new capabilities. Generative AI provided us a ‘jump the shark’ moment. Undeniably, it has proven to be an effective tool for synthesizing existing content into something new. It is still open to debate if AI and other technologies that are exponentially speeding up innovation in financial services can reach human-level critical thinking. We also debate if these technologies will be able to, minimally, move from generative to iterative. We look forward to hearing the views of some of the most forward thinking individuals in the industry on what comes next for fintech.