Last 2019 half-year I actively followed local Banks how they implement new European directive Payment Services Directive 2 (PSD2). In short, this directive says to Banks in the EU to open their API to other players. And I was quite surprised when got information about organizing PaymentConf in Riga. Topics correlates a lot with my interest, so I decide to visit that conference.
From 4th-5th February I had a chance to participate in FinTech conference PaymentConf in Riga. FinTech was a quite new industry for me. My goal to visit this conference was to clear and structure my current knowledge and get answers on some unclear questions.
Speakers in this conference were from big companies (comparing from my perspective), like Revolut, TransferWise, TransferGo, N26, etc. All talks were split into two parts, the first day was more business-oriented, licensing, new products, KYC (Know Your Customer), AML, 3D security, POS terminals on Android and internal culture in big companies. The second day was more technical covered payment cards, the experience in global product implementation, payments in Cloud. Liked a lot Panel discussion found this valuable. Experts looked at a variety of questions from different viewing points, thinking globally.
After the first day, I surprised how much rules, regulations, and licensing processes you should go thought to be part of the FinTech industry. But this is good because payments are a very sensitive part of our lives and that has to be very secure. This kind of stuff a scare new Startups. Speaker Lauri was excellent compared to all available Baltic banks API (PSD2) and provided a little criticism to Banks. That is a good message to developers and solution architects, how friendly is your API for end-user, developer.
In the first day, my favorite speakers were: Kristaps Strazds (Changes in payments world. Bank’s view.), Lauri Teder (Implementing Open Banking APIs: based on a true story) and Edijs Tanons (Next-gen retail payment device from dream to delivery in 1year! Story of Tiki-Taka PAY.). An absolute winner of all speakers was Ieva Elvyra Kazakeviciute (Revolut: Building the world's first truly global bank). The level of presentation was exciting, from Ieva I can learn a lot about how to make a perfect presentation.
The second day was more technical payment cards, solution architectures, scaling, cloud security. Didn`t know that all Cloud providers need to be certified when you choose some of them for infrastructure. And certification calls PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard). All three big players in the Cloud industry AWS, Azure and Google have this certificate already, so without any worries you can choose them. Few speakers cover also technologies they use for payment solutions. What is interesting, that technologies they use are quite similar I use daily PostgreSql, RabbitMq/Kafka, Docker, Kubernetes, etc. Only our difference is user quantity and scale. The second-day speaker's favorite was Armands Antans (Security for Cloud-Based Payments), Jelena Antipova (From debit to credit card – building credit system for card product) and Abhijeet Pawar (Global Card Processing: Getting the Abstraction Right).
In total conference was interesting and covered a lot of hot topics in the FinTech industry. Get an impression where this industry is going and what challenges software developers have beeing in FinTech.
Thanks a lot to the PaymentConf team!
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