Industry growth a group effort



Saxo Capital Markets chief executive, Ben Smoker, called on fintech disrupters to put their heads together with traditional financial services industry players at the inaugural Saxo Fintech Agility Conference at the Stone and Chalk fintech hub yesterday.
As digitisation continued to move the financial services industry forward, Smoker said that the key focus for the space was to continue to create customer-centric products that focused on usability and simplicity.
Speaking at the Saxo Fintech Agility Conference yesterday, Smoker said that companies could accelerate their growth by collaborating with firms that filled the gaps in their infrastructure.
"Instead of spending energy and countless resources in developing technological infrastructure... companies can instead focus on their customer's experience and outsource projects that take years to build," he said.
"In this highly competitive sector, collaborating with fast execution will be a defining factor for businesses to increase or even maintain market share."
Smoker said that Saxo was focused on continuing to build relationships within the industry, with more than 150 partnerships already achieved through Saxo's open source trading technology, OpenAPI.
"We know there is a limited benefit for us in keeping our technological innovation to ourselves," he said.
"The greatest success for financial services companies... is when businesses of different capabilities combine efforts to deliver more value."
The Fintech Agility Conference saw executives from H2Ventures, AMP New Ventures, Macrovue and Saxo Bank come together in the subsidiary's first event of its conference series.
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