EuroFinance 2019 in Wonderful Wonderful Copenhagen

According to one of the speakers at an evening event during EuroFinance 2019; it has been scientifically proven that the residents of Copenhagen are the happiest in the world. Funny, I always thought that was Glaswegians. However, if it is Copenhageners then it certainly showed through in the warmth of their welcome to the attendees of the conference. From taxi drivers to the enormous Viking-like doormen at the local nightclub, they were welcoming, smart and polite; leaving us thinking that Danny Kaye was right when he sang about this “friendly old girl of a town”.

The event is attended by some of the biggest European and global banks, asset managers offering liquidity, the treasury functions of major global companies, and fintechs like Cashfac. Although most of the fintechs are offering treasury management solutions rather than virtual bank accounts, so there was an opportunity for us to seek alliances with them as well as promote our software to potential clients.

It was a busy event for Cashfac and our sister company – Slide. One of our clients, Peter Robinson of XPS Pensions Group was speaking on a panel ‘Should Treasury Investigate Virtual Accounts’. As an exhibitor, we are not allowed to attend the panel sessions but Peter must have said some good things about us as he certainly “drove” people to our stand to find out more. It is odd when we are promoting the Cashfac software we tend to focus on the more sophisticated use cases combining several aspects of the system software. At these conferences, you often find that people just want a basic problem solved, like consolidating all their real bank accounts in one place with a single sign-on to access them all, or a solution that helps them account for their receipts using the Cashfac accounting engine and general ledger.

There was a steady stream of global corporates and banks to our stand to hear what Cashfac could do for them. There was a big interest from corporates for our receivables management solution in the Order-to-Cash space.

Another conference highlight for Cashfac was the well-attended presentation by Simon Lyons, our always dapper CCO, on the ‘Evolution of Virtual Accounts’ from the early first efforts to the multi-layered banking, accounting and operationally efficient cash management platforms we have today.

So how did the conference compare to Money20/20? Well, it was probably a two-all draw. Money20/20 had more attendees and was a bit more focused on innovation. But EuroFinance’s attendees were heavier hitters with key decision-makers in attendance, allowing for more effective networking with existing and potential clients. I suspect therefore we will be back at Eurofinance next year because, with apologises to Ed Sheeran, we just “want to be in Barcelona”.