By
Tokoni Uti
December 29th, 2023
Shift Money, a conference floor jampacked with content and amazing after-parties, has become famous for its atmosphere. Holding purpose to explore new ways to disrupt the world of Payments, Insurance, Lending, and Blockchain, it gathers industry’s representatives to find new partners and new opportunities.
“The Shift Team has been creating technology conferences for over 7 years. With our premier event being Shift Dev, the largest Developer Conference in Southeast Europe, which brings over 1300+ attendees from around the world in one place. Now, Shift Money will take that mantle as our biggest event, bringing delegates from around the world of Fintech to the beautiful city of Zagreb, Croatia.”The conference was opened by the main organizer Ivan Burazin and creative director of the s4fe.io company Joel Wasfy. They emphasized the importance of the Fintech industry in Croatia and south-east Europe as well. Daniel R. Döderlein, CEO of the Auka company spoke about cashless society and ways of acknowledging it between companies. Sitting on the Google cloud advisory board, Mr Döderlein has a string of firsts to his name. He was the first to develop mobile payments technology in Scandinavia, the first to launch a mobile payment service in Norway (mCASH), and the first to create and run a regulated financial services platform on a public cloud. After Norway’s second largest bank, Sparebank 1, acquired mCash for exclusive use in the country, Mr Döderlein started his current company, Auka. Auka helps banks anywhere in the world to create, launch, and monetize their own mobile payments offering, following the same successful formula of banks in Scandinavia. Auka has been awarded Deloitte Fastest Growing Fintech in EMEA and best mobile payments platform by CFI.co magazine. Robert Wiecko, COO of Dash explained why decentralization is important. He pointed that governance in a decentralized project is difficult because by definition there are no central authorities to make decisions for the project. In Dash, such decisions are made by the network, that is, by the owners of masternodes. The DGBB system allows masternodes to vote for or against proposals, which can then be implemented (or not) by Dash’s developers. A key example, said Wiecko, is early in 2016, when Dash’s Core Team submitted a proposal to the network asking whether the block size should be increased to 2 MB. Within 24 hours, consensus had been reached to approve this change. Compare this to Bitcoin, where debate on the block size has been raging for nearly three years. One of the speakers was also the CEO of Wirex, Pavel Matveev. Wirex, a crypto wallet, and payment app recently has announced its first corporate partnership with the blockchain-powered ‘piggy-wallet’, Pigzbe (WLO). The partnership will see Wirex list Pigzbe’s native WLO token alongside its existing Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and XRP wallets. In turn, Wollo holders will be able to buy, store, exchange and spend WLO through the existing Wirex app and Visa card. Wirex currently provides a debit card that links to user crypto wallets in Europe, allowing them to convert and spend their crypto-assets in shops, bars, restaurants or on public transport and this year received an FCA e-money license. Already working in Europe, the company recently announced plans to expand its card offering into the US.