Fintech talents was a unique experience like no other, it is the UK’s only event connecting tech start-ups, financial institutions and academia, which involved live tech demos, music & craft beer.

Thrive partners were one of the many exhibitors at the event, which offered unrivalled opportunities to drive innovation and connect with the future talent.

The event was full of industry innovators, start-up founders, financial institutions, and academics with a festival atmosphere focusing on current trends around technology, innovation and talent.

Thrive’s purpose at Fintech Talents was to demonstrate our platform for attendees (which included students) to show the easy and affordable access to coaching available through the Thrive Platform. We also wanted to showcase the platform for feedback and to demonstrate how it can give expert support to organisations.

We were also in attendance for networking purposes, to connect to attendees and exchange business cards to follow up on in the future and work together.

We conducted interviews with the exhibitors in attendance and students, also our CEO Pam Bateson hosted on the Strategy Stage and took part in the discussions.

The main aims were to:

• Find out the core business/personal challenges others faced within their business or internally.
• How they currently work with coaches if they do work with in-house coaches or if they use externally.
• What learning and development they provide and if so is it impactful to their organisation and employees.

The key insights we found from the interviews we conducted were as follows:

Elizabeth Lumley, Fintech director of content and fintech ecosystem at VC innovations

Discussing the major people challenges they face in their business today, what they are doing to address them

“So in terms of culture especially, people need to come together more and understand points of view on both sides, that’s really where success is found. So both sides the agile young startups and the older bank, both of them need to leave their arrogance on the table and come in to work on projects and make it better at the end of the day.”

How has coaching helped in the past or how can it help challenge your problem?

“Coaching can help people in terms of interpersonal business skills, if someone who is an expert in compliance or agile ways of working you can be very sure of yourself. Sometimes it’s hard to communicate things over to someone who doesn’t have your level of expertise or experience. So, if you have a coach that can say these are some strategies and techniques you can use to communicate more effectively with the person you are talking to.
Coaching can very much help and ultimately communication is a very important thing to get clear.
You can be the biggest expert in the world but if the person you are trying to talk to is not listening to you and is not understanding you, you need to change your tactics , coaching can help in giving you vital tools”

Andy Moffat, Business Development Director of Aire

Discussing People Challenges the company faces

“The biggest people challenge in a role like mine in business development in sales and commercial roles it’s definitely motivational and that drive that sells people have definitely in terms of the lead time in sales cycles but also when you’re a new business as well and you’re establishing yourself in a market knocking down doors and getting to see people when you don’t necessarily have the blue-chip reputation this can be difficult so keeping people motivated throughout that time and show them the clear path to that a goal”

Also discussing how coaching can help support those problems

“Well I think coaching from people who have been in similar situations who understand that journey who understand maybe FinTech organizations versus the corporate world is very different. I think that can help just to keep them motivated to have that whole period in showing them that we can be successful”

The key insights we found from the discussions on the strategy stage were as follows:

Pam Bateson our CEO at Fintech 2019

Discussing contribution towards the workforce

“You need to be completely preoccupied with enhancing the way in which people can move through your organization. Can you give a career pathway, can you design a job where they see a future? Where do you people see that purpose, where do they see a reason to belong, where do they feel passionate about what they’re building, where do they feel excited about that ability to be able to make a personal contribution – those jobs should be designed with that personal touch.”

Discussing leadership within a company.

“The critical role for leaders is to be able to address the challenge of people needing to know what their targets are, need to know where they where they’re going in the business and how it’s relevant to the work that’s being done, but they also need to demonstrate that they understand the context, can deal with uncertainty and complexity and can encourage your whole workforce to be more digital savvy.”

Fintech Talents was a tremendous success for us at Thrive and as an event overall. It helped facilitate insightful conversations in team building, digital transformation and open banking.

We look forward to reaping the rewards from the connections we made and attending Fintech talents in 2020.

The trends revealed and the insight gained from both the strategy stage and the personal discussions/interviews we found were invaluable and we are excited to take that information and look forward into the future to implement that back into the Thrive platform.