In 1903, the President of the Michigan Savings Bank advised Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company. “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty – a fad,” he said. Not his best professional moment. Disruption can be unsettling and blindsiding in the short term. But underestimating it can have lasting consequences.

Digitization has blown the doors off barriers to entry for new fintech market entrants. Blockchain, Machine Learning, Cloud and IoT have accelerated the pace and tempo of day-to-day business, giving financial services a new resting heart rate. And disruption is eating market share for breakfast.

Whilst many are still adjusting to the new normal, others have already blazed a trail to show us what good actually looks like. These exceptional doers - who have baked innovation into their thinking, shaken the corporate tree, and drawn a line between traditional twentieth century business models and their digitally fluent mindset – are the true industry leaders of our time.

Everyone wants to know how they’ve done it, what they’ve learned, and what advice they have for doing things differently. So we thought we’d make that possible for you. The SAP Financial Services Forum 2017 on 4-5 July brings together an extraordinary line-up of C-level speakers from the coalface of successful digital disruption and innovation.

And when I say exceptional, I mean the likes of Ashok Vaswani, CEO of Barclays UK (if you’ve ever heard him speak, you’ll know it’s inspirational gold dust), as well as some of the industry’s smartest CFOs, CIOs, CMOs and industry luminaries from across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Leaders from Emirates NBD, Swiss RE, Lloyds, HSBC, Discovery Vitality, Ageas, and elseco Limited will all be sharing their insights. And we’ve also lined up strategic input and commentary from Apple, McKinsey and other strategic consultancies as well as challenger banks and fintechs.  

In the six years that we’ve been running this event, we’ve seen some marked differences over time. The most obvious is the shift we are now seeing in traditional vendors and fintechs moving from competing to collaborating. In the era of Open Banking, and open APIs, the focus and opportunity clearly lies in partnerships and collaboration.

That’s why one of our objectives in creating this year’s event was to ensure we showcase the innovation taking place in both large established vendors as well as agile fintechs – whether it’s Emirates NBD piloting Machine Learning to provide better customer service, Discovery using IoT to help lower customer premiums, Klarna out innovating competitors with faster and better client engagement, or Ageas leveraging cloud models to set up and enter new Asian markets in record time.

Our theme for this year’s event is “Winning in the Digital Moment”. The real-world case studies, inspiration, and innovation you’ll see and hear - combined with the networking opportunities with more than 500 peer level delegates - are designed to enable you to do exactly that. I look forward to seeing you there.