Double the action at Leeds Digital Festival
The Leeds Digital Festival has doubled in size, with 115 events taking place across the week.
The event, running from 22-29 April, was launched last night and more than 10,000 people are expected to attend the seven-day event.
Hundreds of Leeds-based firms and speakers will be taking part in the event, including large employers such as NHS Digital and Sky Betting & Gaming, as well as agencies such as Bloom and Epiphany.
Other international brands represented include Google, Amazon, and Wells Fargo, with speakers flying in from the US, Canada and Estonia.
Stuart Clarke, Festival Director, said “It’s great to see the digital community of Leeds come together to build the Leeds Digital Festival. The Festival is an open platform which truly belongs to the city, not to any one particular group or individual. This year firmly establishes Leeds as the Largest Digital Festival in the North.”
One of the events is the Fintech North event, taking place at aql’s base at Salem Chapel in Leeds on 26 April.
The event, organised by White Label Crowdfunding, Whitecap Consulting and FiNexus, the second edition of the annual event will see members of the industry offer keynote speeches and take part in panel discussions.
Dr Chris Sier will be in attendance, as will Christopher Woolard, executive FCA board member; Karoli Hindriks, Estonian entrepreneur and founder of Jobbatical; and Stuart Sherman, founder and CEO of IMC, who is based in Toronto and will be flying in for the event.
“There’s undue focus on London FinTech space,” said Dr. Chris Sier, FinTech envoy for the North, in the runup to the FinTech North event.
“Everyone knows that London is ridiculously expensive,” said Dr Sier. “When you have a startup, you don’t have a lot of funding and going out and finding more is really hard. You need that money to last as long as possible, so you’ve got to take the low cost option.
“The only reason to stay there when you’re a startup is that you have resources; skills, access to funding etc. Analysis of the rest of UK has proven that none of this is true. From an overhead point of view, they are extending their runway five times into future and improving working capital which means they can get on with working on their projects, not finding investors.
“The excuse of London clients doesn’t work anymore. The money you save being in a place like Sheffield can more than buy a season ticket to travel down to London.
“There’s an almost unlimited resource pool in North of England: Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool – all have multiple universities. When you’re looking for expertise, research expertise is found at universities, never in London.
“Events like this one are integral to my agenda of promoting fintech in the North,” he said.
Commercial director at Open Data Institute, David Beardmore, and Research Programme Manager at the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Tania Ziegler, are also confirmed as speakers at the event, discussing open banking and alternative finance respectively.
Daniel Rajkumar, founder and managing director of three Leeds-based businesses, two of which focus on the FinTech industry, will also speak, giving insight into his company’s journey to become an FCA-authorised enterprise. Dr. Chris Sier, Julian Wells and Stefan Haase, directors of Whitecap Consulting, and Richard Carter, CEO of Yorkshire-based FinTech company Nostrum, will chair the four panel discussions.
