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The Financial Services capital of Europe has always been London – and it will likely remain that way (save a Brexit) – however, all of Europe seems to have caught the F-bug. This week BBVA announced its acquisition of Finland’s Holvi<\/a>, an early player looking to reinvent the consumer banking experience. In\u00a0Germany, the launch of Finleap in 2015<\/a>, one of the first vertical accelerators in this space has seen startups like Savedo<\/a> (a competitor to UK-based Savings Global) grow fast and aggressively. Startups like Number26 are spreading quickly across Europe<\/a> in a Rocket Internet-like fashion. In France, Leetchi\/MangoPay received significant investment from established bank Credit MUTUEL Arkea<\/a>,\u00a0and several of France’s leading VC firms have investments in Spending(Seventure – Payleven<\/a>), Sending (Partech- Kantox<\/a>), Lending(Pret d’Union – Eurazeo<\/a>) & Investing (Elaia – SmartAngels<\/a>).<\/p>\n This is why we’ve decided to organize our first conference dedicated to Spending, Sending, Lending & Investing – It’s called SPEND<\/a>, because we want to focus on consumer & enterprise habits around dealing with money. We’re proud to have the support of BNP Paribas, with whom we’ve been working for the last year on a variety of events like ParisFounders<\/a> & HIRE<\/a>, and, after seeing their worldwide BNP Hackathon last November, we knew there was something big happening that we could do together.<\/p>\n We’ve already lined up speakers from San Francisco<\/strong> (Raphael Ouzan – VP of Product of Prospect), London<\/strong> (Philippe Gelis – Co-Founder & CEO, Kantox),\u00a0Berlin and, of course, Paris. Partnering with great products for Spending\u00a0(Slimpay), Sending (MangoPay), Lending & Investing (SaxoBanque), we’re excited to tackle great consumer- and enterprise-centric topics.<\/p>\n You won’t hear us call SPEND a F!ntech conference, because it’s not. In fact, what is<\/i> Fintech? A techwashing of the financial services industry? A way to say “we aren’t banks but we want to kill banks & eventually\u00a0become a\u00a0bank?” These aren’t topics that we will be talking about at SPEND. Everything is tech, and tech is everything, so we’re not talking about the tech\u00a0as an end itself. We’re going to talk about user experiences:\u00a0“a consumer walks into a retail store and wants to buy a computer. What do they do next?” The retailer has one opinion, a blockchain startup might have another. An eCommerce player might have their argument, and a mobile POS provider might have another.\u00a0We want to put these four people on stage together and have them explain why the consumer cares.<\/p>\n We’ve only just teased out our first speakers, but our agenda is filling up fast, so if you’d like to\u00a0speak or demo your product on stage, pitch me your company here<\/a>. We have 2 for 1 tickets available for 99\u20ac until the end of this week, then they’ll go up again.<\/p>\nWhy I hate the F-Word<\/h2>\n