FINTECH Circle, established in 2014, is a global community of over 100,000 FinTech entrepreneurs, angel and VC investors, financial services professionals and FinTech thought leaders. It is focused on FinTech investing, education and enterprise innovation. To be part of FINTECH Circle, members can join events and online newsletters, follow news on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram to get daily FinTech, WealthTECH, InsurTECH and RegTECH updates and purchase the FinTech books as hardcopy, e-books or audio-books.
FINTECH Circle Institute was launched in 2017 to facilitate learning via online courses. It is a peer-to-peer learning platform designed to empower finance professionals with the necessary digital skills to adapt to the rapidly changing finance industry. With board members ranging from traditional banks and FinTech experts, through to academics from leading universities, the platform offers practical bite-size courses on topics including WealthTECH/Robo-banking, InsurTECH, RegTECH, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence, Enterprise Innovation and Start-ups. Every quarter, new classes are released online to ensure that members and industry experts working on the most cutting-edge FinTech innovations globally have access to the latest FinTech insights.
FINTECH Circle’s CEO, Susanne Chishti, co-edited “The FINTECH Book” published by WILEY, which is the first globally crowd-sourced book on financial technology and a global bestseller across 107 countries in 5 languages. FINTECH Circle also launched the “WealthTECH” and “InsurTECH” Books, which have been published by WILEY in May 2018, sharing global insights about the future of wealth/investment management and insurance. The FINTECH Book has been selected among the ‘Top 10 Finance Books’ in China in January 2018.
Leader Holding the Reins
Susanne Chishti is the CEO and Founder of FINTECH Circle and the FINTECH Circle Institute. Susanne is recognised in the European Digital Financial Services ‘Power 50’ 2015— an independent ranking of the most influential people in digital financial services in Europe. She has been selected as Top 15 FINTECH UK Twitter Influencers and as a City Innovator-Inspirational Woman in 2016. During 2017, she has also been a FinTech TV Commentator on CNBC and is a guest lecturer on financial technology at the University of Cambridge.
Susanne has been selected as a Leader in the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Power List since 2015. In 2017, the US Magazine Inc. selected her as one of the Top 7 Global Bitcoin Experts who “help you to understand cryptocurrency” and in the same year itself, Onalytica selected Susanne as the 13th Most Important FinTech Thought Leader globally, as part of their Women in Tech–Hot topics & Top Influencer Study.
After completing her MBA, Susanne started her career working for a FinTech company (before the term “FinTech” was being invented) in the Silicon Valley 20 years ago. She then worked for over 15 years in senior positions across Deutsche Bank, Lloyds Banking Group, Morgan Stanley and Accenture in London and Hong Kong, China before founding FINTECH Circle in London, UK.
The Will to Win
When Susanne Chishti left her banking job in 2014 to set up FINTECH Circle, she was told that FinTech is “too niche” and it would be a bad idea to focus so narrowly. She stuck to her gut feeling, which said, FinTech will be huge—in fact, Fintech will be the future of finance.
Susanne launched the first angel network bringing together private investors who wanted to find the next Googles, Amazons, and Facebooks in the finance world with those entrepreneurs who were looking to raise outside funding after their family and friends round was completed. When The FINTECH Book was launched in 2016, it was also the 1st crowd-sourced and crowd-voted book in finance sharing the insights of more than 70 FinTech entrepreneurs, investors and thought leaders globally. FINTECH Circle believes in the wisdom and power of the crowd and giving everybody a chance to participate in designing the financial world.
Empower People
FINTECH Circle respects its entrepreneurs, investors, readers, lecturers and students, course participants and its innovation leaders in larger companies and treats each person with honesty and integrity. “We follow a “no jerks” policy! We also fully encourage diversity and Susanne Chishti, our founder, often speaks about the empowerment of women and how our society needs to encourage more women to take on tech roles and leadership positions in finance and technology sectors”, asserts the team FINTECH Circle.
FinTech can be a force for good, especially when considering the 2.5 billion people worldwide living in poverty without bank accounts, many of them have a mobile phone and with FinTech solutions they can get access to safer and cheaper ways of spending, saving and transferring money.
Helping People Prosper
The key challenge is that most people still rely on conventional practices rather than adapting to the technological changes in the financial sector. Considering the present scenario, everyone in an organization ought to change significantly to stay competitive. Also, the increased automation via AI will undoubtedly impact all financial firms, each person needs to take their future and career literally in their own hand and learn as much as possible about new FinTech skills & insights. The FINTECH Circle Institute helps to give individuals the power to invest in themselves so that they don’t become victims of technological disruption but quite the opposite, get access to more exciting and meaningful opportunities which will shape the future of finance.
Future Proceedings
FINTECH Circle is committed to stay at the cutting edge of FinTech innovation worldwide and collaborate with FinTech stakeholders and FinTech nations. In 2018, the company has added three key initiatives to its service offering, Blockchain focused CryptoValley Tours —a 2-day Blockchain bootcamp to help investors and financial services professionals truly understand the power of blockchain, smart contracts, crypto finance, digital IDs, tokenomics, and ICOs, a partnership with Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) to bring FinTech Education to the United Arab Emirates and the Middle East and a partnership with China’s Global Fintech Lab to enable international business and investment deals and fintech education with courses from the FINTECH Circle Institute.
FinTech connects the world and FINTECH Circle is all set to play its part in improving financial services for both developed and emerging markets globally.
Source :-The 50 Best Companies to Watch 2018
