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Sofie Blakstad

Sofie has spanned technology development, system architecture, infrastructure delivery and business transformation and has built technology and businesses for eight major international banks, in 60 countries, with projects worth over USD 1bn. Sofie’s career includes writing two books and multiple research papers, delivering 5 core banking systems, multiple payment systems and transformation of Citigroup’s technology and retail operations. Sofie advises international organisations on sustainable applications of blockchain. She is Chair of the Edinburgh Futures Institute FI and Fintech advisory board and holds an MSc in Informatics. Sofie has twice been included in the Innovate Finance’s Women in Fintech Powerlist.

hiveonline at the G7 in Venice

Sofie Blakstad at the G7 Venice

hiveonline is proud to have been asked to support the UN Environment Programme Inquiry into Design of a Sustainable Financial System, recently accompanying them to the G7 Green Finance for SME policy making meeting in Venice. Six of the G7 governments (all except USA) were represented, with a combination of Environment and Financial departments sending delegates.

Following an opening speech by the State Secretary for the Ministry of the Environment, Ms Barbara Degani, Advantage Financial presented their views on the future, with Fintech and future finance driving the agenda but also highlighted the shortage of equity capital available for research and investment. UNEP Inquiry paper co-author Nick Robins presented a summary of the findings, followed by analytical observations by PwC, which centred on the gap between the report’s ambitions and the backing of banks and nations to mobilise practical steps.

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March Newsletter

Building Bridges

Following the Nordic tradition, the Bee has two homes and we attended the launch of the Stockholm Fintech Hub, hosted by KPMG, where the room was packed to capacity and 180 people had to be turned away!  The hub itself, based at the No. 18 shared working space in Stockholm’s Central Station, opened  its doors in March and a number of fintechs have already moved in. With 141 funded FinTechs in Stockholm alone, this facility is much needed.

stockholm fintech launch.jpg march newsletter

We’re proud that the Stockholm Hub has asked Sofie to sit on its advisory committee, and represented it at February’s OsloFin Tech Fest in a lively discussion about collaboration across the Nordic Fintech Hubs.

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Building Capabilities

If you’ve been following our series, you’ll know that we believe that whether you’re restructuring an existing business or building a new one, the base unit of building a service aligned business is a capability.  We’ve explored elsewhere the different types of capabilities (Case Managed and Core Standardised), how to structure services and the practicalities of building services.  This article is concerned with the practicalities of building a capability.

As a reminder, a capability is the base unit of the purpose of an organisation, something the organisation does to fulfil its customer proposition.  There are levels of capability, from top level capabilities such as “payments” or “customer relationship management”, to much more granular capabilities like “instant payments”, “customer onboarding” and beyond.

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Microfinance, fractional ownership and crowdfunding

We’ve described service alignment, ecosystems and how these impact trust in previous articles.  In this article we explore the impact of technology on community financing, and in particular how technology can support disintermediation of financial services and serve to empower communities in taking back control of their financial arrangements.  This is an opportunity for developing economies, where many people are poorly served by the financial system and exploited as a result, but also in developed economies where there’s a real opportunity to rebalance the power of individuals and small businesses.

We believe an effect of this empowerment will be to encourage communities to make more sustainable choices about how their environments are managed; community ownership will allow longer-term and more community focused decisions to be made, while practical applications of fractional ownership and cryptocurrency rewards for sustainable energy production will reduce need for fossil fuels and costs.Read More »Microfinance, fractional ownership and crowdfunding

Career as microservices – reputation based skills validation

In other articles we’ve covered reputation systems, truth, identity and authentication, and how hiveonline’s truth-based contextualised reputation system will address this.  We’ve also observed a number of applications of similar approaches in fields as diverse as medicine, trade finance and community agriculture in developing economies. We’re confident these reputation systems… Read More »Career as microservices – reputation based skills validation

Plebocracy bias

Plebocracy bias: Post-truth. Information bubbles. Echo chamber. Confirmation bias. We’ve all heard a lot about these phenomena recently, but they’re not new. Opinion, regardless on whether it’s founded on fact, has always influenced apparently impartial decision makers, often unfairly disadvantaging individuals and organisations. In New definitions of identity and authentication… Read More »Plebocracy bias

New definitions of identity and authentication for trust-based ecosystems

This article is part of our randomised, post-structural Let’s Build a Bank series of articles. In this article, we explore concepts of customer authentication and identity, arguing that in the ecosystem economy we need to take a fresh look at what we mean by a customer, break the traditional human-based paradigm… Read More »New definitions of identity and authentication for trust-based ecosystems