Dr. Vincent Pignon, CEO at Wecan Group talks about the influence of blockchain on compliance technology and fintech in this quick end of year chat with us where he also takes us through his biggest 2020 fintech observations:
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Tell us a little about yourself Dr. Vincent, we’d love to hear about Wecan Group’s story so far?
 After a traditional academic background, with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, a master’s degree in entrepreneurship, a master’s degree in science and a doctorate in economics, I created my first companies and took a professorship at the university.
Studying the impact of technology on finance and in particular the Blockchain, I founded Wecan Group in 2015 with the conviction that we were in the 90’s of the Internet. Wecan Group is a venture builder blockchain.
We have created 4 Blockchain B to B software in investment and compliance. Today, we are a scale up company with a strong growth of our turnover.
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How have you seen compliance platforms transform how banks and financial institutions function today? What are some of your top thoughts on the future impact of compliance platforms in finance?
 Compliance is increasingly strong in all areas of activity and particularly in finance. A large part of the work is done manually and with quite old tools. The potential to improve efficiency, reduce costs and improve real-time compliance control is very important and this is what we are working on with Wecan Comply.
How do you see financial institutions still struggle to optimize use of their fintech and compliance technologies at their disposal today and what are some of the top best practices you’d share with them?
 Today, all initiatives are in silos. The future evolution is the creation of industry standards and private networks to increase the pooling of resources, the fight against fraud and the connection to official registers to guarantee the quality of data.
The basis is the quality of the data. Once this problem is solved, it will be possible to add intelligence to optimize their exploitation.
In what ways have you seen Blockchain impact global finance trade and global fintech innovations? How do you feel technologies like Blockchain and AI will further impact how the fintech market shapes up?
The blockchain impacts the financial industry on three levels. The first will impact the infrastructure for storing and exchanging value. Tomorrow, all assets will be tokenized, everyone will be able to store and exchange them securely, and financial players will be able to leverage illiquid assets such as real estate or shares in unlisted companies. We work on it with Wecan Tokenize.
The second concerns compliance. It will be greatly improved thanks to the pooling of resources, market standards and systematic and in real-time monitoring. We work on it with Wecan Comply.
The third concerns monetary issuance. It will be done on a blockchain infrastructure for national currencies, but also for alternative currencies. We work on it with Wecan Accelerate.
 We’d love to hear your thoughts on the global fintech startup marketplace- can you talk about some interesting innovations you’ve comes across? Your thoughts on a few startups that you feel are set to turn into fintech unicorns in the new future?
Among the unicorns of tomorrow, there will be startups that will have created large-scale networks on the blockchain. It could be for value exchanges as a company like Binance does or for compliance as Wecan Comply does.
Startups will offer e-wallet solutions that will have an even greater impact than Revolut and will be unicorns.
And finally, startups will capitalize on this data to add intelligence, thanks to AI.
In my opinion, these will be the future unicorns in this field.
 As global fintech trends change and the market shifts due to business environments (and also Covid-19), what are your comments on the state of fintech in 2021 and beyond?
Since the beginning of covid, there has been a very strong acceleration of investment in technology. Fintechs are increasingly integrated into banks thanks to open banking and the current context is an accelerator of this trend.
We’d love to hear about some of WeCan Groups’s upcoming plans and innovations?
 Wecan Group has been creating a new product every year for 4 years. We invest a lot in innovation and work in particular on being able to put Security 1st, with blockchain based decentralized network, to respect Data privacy, with Zero knowledge proof, to make data standardized and interoperable, thanks to integrations and oracles, to give back data ownership, never monetized and under the sole control of its owner and to make it accessible, by putting the user and the design at the center.
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 Before we wrap up, what are the biggest learnings and tips you’d share with fintech innovators and leaders?
 I’m going to publish a book in early 2021 that will be a Fintech guide with all the analysis and learning from the last few years. So I should leave you the suspense and invite you to follow its release.
Wecan is a swiss based company created in 2015. First active in crowdfunding we started actively looking into blockchain as a way to improve our solution. Realizing that we needed to pivot hard to put this technology at the core of our business, Wecan shifted to blockchain technology in 2018. We are now helping others to reinvent their business thanks to blockchain rather than witnessing others disrupt them. Our team is dedicated to unleash blockchain potential. We create business value by improving data quality, data management and data ownership through decentralized technologies.
Dr. Vincent Pignon is the CEO at Wecan Group
