FinTech Sandbox

FINTECH SANDBOX Sandbox, Oct.11 and 12, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. This year’s theme is “On the Brink: Building the Infrastructure We Need for a Bold Financial Future.” To learn more, be sure to consult the Website at www.bostonfintechweek.org. “We hope to see you there” Fryer enthuses. She explained the term, “fin tech,” a neologism referring to the financial services sector and its convergence with technology. It’s all about innovations and technologies that are focused on pushing financial services and products forward. “Honestly,” says Fryer, “it trickles into many other industries. If you think about payments as being an underlying infrastructure technology across every single industry, if you think about your credit card or anything like that, that’s really what fintech is at its core.” Fin tech, she adds, is a ubiquitous phenomenon that plays an often unseen role, or at least one not often thought about, in the lives of almost all people throughout the modern Western world. Fryer also spoke of the recently-repealed government-mandated restrictions regarding the COVID outbreak. This only sharpened the need for 3 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 12 fin tech-related functions and shone a light upon not only cracks in financial systems but also how the modern world can’t do without such services. “It was fin tech that jumped in to fill the holes,” she says, citing deficiencies that both financial institutions and governmental entities alike were unable to supply. Especially because of the speed with which it acts, technology was truly able to save the day during these times of less interpersonal communication and increasingly remote-based work, as Fryer notes. “I think we saw a big realization in the gaps that we had in our payments,” she says, citing the digitalization and infrastructure of small businesses—entities that were not at that time yet able to optimally work in a computer-based world. “Fin techs were able to luckily jump in and fill those gaps, which was great to see.” Endless possibilities Fryer says the list of companies with which a fin tech can potentially work virtually runs the gamut. Name any company. Chances are, a fin tech could work with it. Big banks quite readily come to mind, of course.