Education or Funding, What Comes First? Key Takeaways from Unchain Fintech Festival 2023

Author: Elena Vrabie

To bridge different gaps, like research and innovation, but also access to capital in CEE, comes the second edition of Unchain Fintech Festival. Between the 29th and 30th of June, over 400 fintech professionals and financial aficionados gathered at the Oradea Fortress in Romania to connect and share knowledge about the future of finance.?

Like medieval fortresses, which served as administrative centers, this edition brought even regional professionals from 30 countries, like Bulgaria, Hungary, Spain, Japan, Luxembourg, the U.K., and the Czech Republic, among others.

The festival is led by a veteran of the local tech events industry, Alexandra Pollack as co-founder and CEO, and Cosmin Cosma in the role of Advisory Board Chairman and CEO of fintech startup, Finqware.

Fintech in CEE

In our neck of the woods, fintech is an emerging vertical that has already started disrupting traditional financial services. This means that the vertical isn’t being held back by all the global downturn whispers, but it has its own set of challenges, besides regulations.?

In a nutshell, with new generations’ appetite for fast, cost-friendly, and transparent transactions, fintech is here to stay and grow, especially in sectors such as digital payments, and embedded finance, with support from AI and blockchain technologies.?

The European Commission understands this growth, which is reason enough to introduce four new regulatory packages - e.g. the Open Finance Initiative, the PSD3 proposal, the green finance proposal, and the digital Euro.

Discover below more insights about two important pillars of fintech development: education and investments.?

Day #1 | The Role of Academia in Finance & Innovation

The Content Track Stage was hosted by Andrew Samu , a London-based editor at Disruption Banking, a publisher covering stories in banking and finance from Europe, Asia, and the U.S.

We explored the way fintech is changing the economic education landscape and how education, in turn, gives back to support the growth of the fintech industry.?

Part of the panel were esteemed professionals from Bulgaria and Romania:

• Deyan Radev, PhD - Assoc. Professor of Fintech and Banking @ Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski and Director of CEE Centre for Digital Finance,
• Vasile Alecsandru Strat - Dean @ Bucharest Business School, a leading Financial college in Romania, as well as co-founder of RoSIF, the first Romanian Sustainable Investing and Finance Association.?
• Codruta Mare - Professor of Statistics-Forecasts-Mathematics @ the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration and Scientific Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Data Science at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj;
• Ioana - Florina Coita - Lecturer @ the Faculty of Economics from Oradea and Wroclaw University of Economics & Business, where she teaches Fintech in Company, ML for Finance, Taxation, and Indirect Taxation, among others.?
• Marius Vlad Pop - Fintech scout for Open Innovation with a background in law and innovation management, Lecturer in business law, and researcher in AI and Fintech.

Key takeaways?

→ Academia curricula are adapting, slowly, to integrating courses for educating the new generations with the skills needed for the fintech sector, like data analysis tools, and ML for finance, and instilling the idea that professionals need to wear more than one hat and continue learning.?

→ Academia is an untapped resource for innovation and researchers are more than open to collaborating with the business sector to develop new solutions. The key is to communicate. Corporations are already joining forces with academia so the speakers made an official invitation for fintech entrepreneurs to join classes and empower the new generation of students.?

→ There is a new Romanian-Bulgarian collaboration in sight. Deyan Radev from Sofia University and Vasile Strat from Bucharest Business School are working to bring to fruition the next Fintech report and exchange knowledge between the markets. They will continue the work they have already started with the Romanian Fintech Report 2022 and the Bulgarian Fintech Report 2022. One interesting insight from the two reports is that while Bulgaria mapped around 150 fintech startups, Romania’s pool is around 50 fintech projects. This means that there is room to grow.?

Day #2 - Fuelling Innovation with Capital

The Main Stage was hosted by Alex Panican , Deputy CEO at The LHoFT (Luxembourg House of Financial Technology), a public-private initiative dedicated to advancing the Luxembourg fintech sector.?

The panel aimed to discover investors' perspectives and strategies when it comes to the fintech market, and also the potential direction of the vertical in CEE.?

Part of the panel were esteemed professionals from Bulgaria, Spain, and the Czech Republic:

• Rumen Iliev - Partner @ LaunchHub Ventures, a Bulgarian VC with over a decade of focusing on South Eastern European early-stage tech startups.
• Jose M. Moreno de Barreda - Spain-based Principal Digital Finance & Fintech Advisor @ the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group, which supports European businesses, governments, and Central Banks in their quest for Digital Transformation to reach Financial Inclusion targets.?
• Beáta V?r?sová - Prague-based Portfolio Manager @ Seed Starter, the venture capital fund of the Erste Group, whose strategy revolves around supporting European pre-seed and seed companies to accelerate their business through closer collaboration with banks.
• Kateryna Kovalenko - Associate @ Czech Depo Ventures, which aims to support tech founders from CEE & the Baltics and facilitates the investment process for business angels.

Key takeaways?

→ Investors are partners that entrepreneurs join forces with and that they can count on to open other doors, for example, that of banks or corporations. But this doesn’t mean that they will do their work for them.

→ To go big, it all starts in the brain. Founders from our region should try to be bolder and put their solutions out there faster to be tested by clients and improve in time with feedback.?

→ It's true, investors' strategies have shifted towards financially sustainable projects this year and, most probably, in the years to come, and are more open to joining forces with neighboring VCs.

Final thoughts

The fintech sector looks promising in emerging markets. When it comes to growth, and ecosystem players joining forces, I think there’s a matter of the chicken and the egg.?

What comes first? More funding for fueling innovative solutions or programs to educate the new generations and open communication channels between the academia and business communities??

Let’s find the answer together in the comments section below.?