A little less than a month ago I posted – here – the first idea of FintechStage.com and took the month of December to set it up.
Now I give some more details. In a couple of weeks, we will open up the links to officially subscribe to the event (in any case, you would have better things to do then thinking about it on a Jan 1st, right ..?)

The news :

1- We have secured the venue. It is nothing else than the most photographed building of Milan, the Unicredit Tower and its beautiful Tree House.
One of the most beautiful co-working open spaces I have seen… EVER !

2- We have finalised the program and the streamlined version is :

• March 30^th Morning : InvestmentLab, moderated by a lawyer, a live simulation of a deal between a start-up and an investor, plus some Business model Canvas , plus some pitch advice. This is OPEN TO ALL STARTUPS, not only Fintech and we have 150 seats available
• March 30^th Afternoon : Invitation-only meetings
• March 31^st All day : conference, aperitivo and party

3- There are a number of speakers already confirmed :

• Gustavo Vinacua, Head of Innovation and Open talent program, BBVA
• Pascal Bouvier, Partner, Route66 Ventures
• Manuel Silva, Partner, BBVA Ventures
• Arjuna Costa, Partner, Omidyar Fund
• Mariano Belinki, Managing Director, Santander Fund
• Riccardo Prodam, Head of R&D and Open Inovation, Unicredit
• Matthias Kroener, CEO and co-founder, Fidor Bank
• Kosta Peric, Deputy Director, Financial Services, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Mircea Mihaescu, Partner, SBT Venture Capital
• Nektarios Liolios, Co-Founder, Fintech Bootcamp
• Peter Venderauwera, Co-Founder, Innotribe
• Leda Glyptis, Vice President, Global Innovation BNY Mellon
• Claire Calmejane, Head of Digital Centre of Excellence and Innovation labs, LGB
• Julio Faura, Head of R&D and Innovation, Santander
• Dan Marovitz, CEO, F1000
• Samarth Serkar, Founder, Fintech DACH Forum
• Steve Pulley, Global Head of Industry Solutions and Partners, Thomson Reuters
• Matteo Stefanel, Founder, APIS Partners
• Reinier Musters, Partner, OGC
• Tony Fish, Founder, AMF Ventures

This list does not include yet the speakers from the Italian community (apart Riccardo from Unicredit), for which I will come back to you very soon.

4- The initial version of the Program of the plenary day :

Three panels :

**Incubators, Accelerators, Start-up programs 
– What’s in it for the banks ?
– How to create the right eco-system for it ?
– What are the measures ?
– Simply, how do you do it ?

**Innovation Panel
– Selling innovation internally
– Foster collaboration and picking champion
– Ok, now we have an Head of Innovation, so what ?

**VC Panel
– Where does the money go ?
– US vs London vs Rest of the world… Different perspectives
– How do we give the right values to a company ?
– How do we relate with banks in helping the companies grow ?

**10 Power Talks
Here are some of the topics :
– Alternative Lending
– New Banking Models
– Ubiquitous payments
– Next Gen Card Services
– Bank APIs and Open source (Innovation in insurance, Money management)

**Start-up Pitches : 10-12 start-ups with revenue, customers and a proven model will pitch to the community.
Once again, format of the pitches will be unusual : when possible, the Investor and the Start-up founder or CEO will be both on stage, explaining what the start-up value proposition is and why the company has been funded.

**Networking time, also during the Aperitivo, where meetings will be pre-arranged and qualified

 

What is the objective of FintechStage ?
Bring the best possible mix of players of the fintech industry from the Investors, Start-ups and Innovators (bankers) community, in a number of European cities (to start with) to help the innovation dialogue in a different way. 

How different ?
We like to think we know the feeling of going to conferences and being left with no personalized content, with the opportunity to enlarge your network left to your own initiative, with no or very little interaction. And we want to change this.

How about the “social” side of the conference ?
There will be an invitation-only dinner in the evening of the 30^th, sponsored by CheBanca! and an aperitivo in the amazing Unicredit Tree House on the 31^st.
Copernico, the big innovation co-working space just beside the main Milan train station, will host a post-event party where we hope we can consolidate all the good networking shared in the two days.

Next steps :

• subscribe to the Start-up Investment LAB session of Monday morning, as of jan 15th we will send the link
• as of January 15^th, we will open the Eventbrite page to the event ticketing,
• follow us on @fintechstage where we will post speakers announcements and other news,
• the detailed program will be out soon and you will be the first to know…

Stay tuned and – again – lots of joy for next year !

Matteo