Toronto FinTech Conference

The Annual Toronto FinTech Conference

We are pleased to announce that our founder, Dr. Salvatore Moccia, will be present at the First Fintech Academic Conference that will be held in Toronto, next October. The Academic Conference is sponsored by the Scotiabank Digital Banking Lab at Ivey Business School. If you want to schedule a meeting with him, send an email to: info@fintechnews.com and to salvatore.moccia@unir.net

The Annual Toronto FinTech Conference is an event where scholars in the fields of strategy, entrepreneurship, innovation, organization theory, finance, and economics can discuss their research on the rise, diffusion, and disruptive potential of financial technologies (“FinTech”). Academics will have the opportunity to interact with leaders from financial institutions, FinTech startups, and policymakers working in this fast-moving and dynamic field.

Financial technologies such as digital currencies, blockchain, marketplace/P2P lending, equity crowdfunding, robo-advisors, Big Data, and the Internet of Things are rapidly reshaping the economy by promoting decentralization, disintermediation, and digitization. These emerging technologies are disrupting the financial sector as well as other industries, and are described by some as a new industrial revolution. Now it is time for scholars to address these trends with rigorous research.

The First Annual Toronto FinTech Conference has three objectives:

  1. To build an academic community of leading scholars (both professors and PhD students) researching FinTech topics across a range of related disciplines.
  2. To discuss cutting-edge research papers, both theoretical and empirical, which address important issues related to the antecedents and consequences of decentralization, disintermediation, and digitization in the FinTech sector and beyond.
  3. To facilitate a dialogue between academics and top executives, entrepreneurs, and policymakers from the private sector.

Event Details

Date: October 20-21, 2017

Conference Venue: Scotiabank Centre, 40 King Street West, 2nd Floor, Toronto, Canada

Program: to see the program, follow the link.

FinTech: A Multifaceted Innovation
The rise of financial technologies, known as “FinTech”, is reinventing money, banking, contracts, and cooperation. Driven by start-ups with innovative use cases, FinTech covers a wide range of applications from digital currency, payments, marketplace financing, robo-advisors, to smart contracts and decentralized autonomous organizations. In addition, sectors such as education, logistics, online gaming, cultural industries, the legal industry, and international trade are also affected by this shift. To capture its multifaceted nature, the conference’s organizers put forward a high-level definition of FinTech as
a movement toward the digitization, decentralization, and disintermediation of economic transactions, powered by information technologies such as peer-to-peer networking, big data analytics, machine learning, blockchain technology, and open APIs. This wave of innovation brings about huge business opportunities—in 2015, FinTech start-ups raised $13.8 billion across 653 deals (KPMG & CB Insights, 2016), and hit a record high in 2016 (Verhage, 2016). What kind of new markets and organizations is FinTech going to create, and how? How will dynamics of competition and cooperation change in this context? And what are the implications for firm strategy, financial stability, organizational governance, and the broader economy and society?
Certainly, the breadth and depth of the revolution underway will require scholars to develop new knowledge and empirical studies in the related fields of strategy, entrepreneurship & innovation, finance, economics, and organization theory. As delineated in a recent Academy of Management Journal editorial, digital money, for example, stands as an innovation that has profound business, social and economic implications, which requires close research attention (Dodgson, Gann, Wladawsky-Berger, Sultan, & George, 2015; Philippon, 2016).