The beautiful setting of the Saïd Business School in Oxford played host to the Future of Finance 2016. The second of a series of conferences which aimed to discuss challenges and issues in the financial services sector in an independent and collaborative fashion involving a wide array of stakeholders: traditional economists, new economists, quant scientists and mathematicians, high power computer scientists, innovators, policy-makers, regulators and the financial service industry.
Over the two days a range of topics were covered from personal digital identities, alternative finance of Crowdfunding and Peer-to-Peer lending, artificial intelligence, blockchain, distributed ledger and bitcoin, and how to restore trust and inclusion back into the financial sector.
Brian Bartaby, Founder of Proplend, participated in a panel which covered how we can use technology to reduce frictional costs in financial services. Proplend being a perfect example where both individual and institutional investors can benefit from lending directly to borrowers in order to receive attractive rates of risk adjusted returns. The individual investors benefit from earning the majority of the margin, which historically would have been retained by the banks and institutional investors earn higher returns from investing directly in commercial mortgage assets when the professional fees and costs of CMBS securitisation have not been stripped out.
Each panel provoked lively debate between academics and entrepreneurs, the old school and the new, the naysayers and the optimists and the never ending debate over what is Bitcoin?
There was a concerted agreement that the financial services sector was being disrupted, and financial technology was here to stay.
Best of all, Brian is now the proud owner of 0.068 of a Bitcoin.
