FinTech West @ Future Space 24/1/20
On Friday 24th January the first FinTech West event of the new decade took place at Future Space, where we were kindly hosted by the team from UWE and Future Space.
Julian Wells, Director of Whitecap Consulting & FinTech West, opened the event and welcomed delegates to Future Space, which is also where FinTech West is based. This year FinTech West aims to broaden its programme of events to include breakfast and evening sessions, and will be hosting some of these events at new locations in the South West, having been focused on Bristol to date.
He handed over to Laura Stevens, Centre Director of Future Space, who explained how the building fits into UWE’s work in the field of innovation, which includes providing an incubation space for entrepreneurs.
Stu Charlton, Experience Strategy Director at cxpartners, delivered the first keynote of the day. He explained how cxpartners had created a technology-based solution that sits between compliance and marketing functions and provides a transparent and engaging means via which consumers can be taken through terms and conditions and other compliance processes. cxpartners will be hosting the next FinTech West event, an early evening session on 20th February.
The next speaker was Tracey John, Director of Research Business & Innovation at UWE, who gave an overview of the many ways the university is engaged with the business community and is supporting innovation and entrepreneurship in the region. The University Enterprise Zone, which includes Future Space, has been home to 60 graduate enterprises, creating 90 jobs. Its successes include £13m investment raised by robotics hardware incubator businesses. Future Space is operating at 100% capacity, supporting 50 businesses and creating 300 jobs, and £7m of R&D and innovation grants won have been won by businesses connected to the University Enterprise Zone.
The final presentation was a walk through of the near final findings of the Bristol & Bath Region FinTech Ecosystem Research that has been conducted by Whitecap Consulting over recent months. Stuart Harrison (Associate Director, South West), and Julian Wells, (Director & FinTech Practice Lead) explained that the research has found the region to be a hotbed of activity in terms of the number of startups and scaleups, with a strong representation of such firms when compared to other regions outside London that Whitecap has analysed. The South West has had more firms go through the FCA’s sandbox than any other UK region outside London (5 to date). The region’s strength in tech / digital had been a strong theme from the research, which included interviews, an online survey and discussion group sessions. There is also a significant presence of large established financial services businesses in the region, but increasing the level of interaction between these firms and the early stage FinTechs is one of the recommendations of the report.
The research findings were discussed via an interactive Q&A session with the audience, which included an expert panel of David Henderson (Head of Transformation, Hargreaves Lansdown), Dan Read (Partner, TLT LLP), Matt Tudge (Business Development Manager, Invest Bristol & Bath), Alan Pratt (Partner, DAC Beachcroft), and Tracey John (Director, UWE). The full findings will be published imminently, and the event provided useful feedback which is being fed into the final report.
The next FinTech West event will be at cxpartners on the evening of Thursday 20th February, and the next breakfast seminar will be hosted by DAC Beachcroft on Friday 6th March, with a focus on Women In FinTech.
Tracey John, Stuart Harrison, Matt Tudge, Alan Pratt, David Henderson, Dan Read.