En route to FinovateEurope in London last month, a cab driver asked me what I did for a living. After giving it a few moments of thought (“fintech research analyst” doesn’t always cut it), I told him, “I get to meet interesting people and ask them interesting questions.”

This year at FinovateEurope, I had the opportunity to sit down with more than a baker’s dozen of fintech entrepreneurs, analysts, and authors to talk about some of the top trends in fintech and financial services. Here, as part of our Finovate Speaker Series, I’m looking forward to sharing these conversations with you over the next few weeks.

First up, in commemoration of International Women’s History Month, my interviews with Samantha Seaton, CEO of Moneyhub, and Anette Broløs, founder of Finthropology.

Samantha Seaton is CEO of open banking, open finance, and open data platform Moneyhub. The company’s technology helps transform data into personalized digital experiences and initiate payments. Seaton is also a Non-Executive Director at the Charities Aid Foundation Bank and at The Investing and Savings Alliance (TISA).

In our conversation, Seaton discusses the contemporary “obsession with personalization.” We also talk about the latest trends in financial services, the impact of AI, and what financial services can learn from other sectors when it comes to best leveraging new technologies.

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How can the study of human cultures benefit banks? We posed this question to Dr. Anette Broløs, co-founder and Director of Finthropology.

For all the discussion of the power of data in financial services in recent years, Broløs believes that companies in this space have not yet done all they can do in order to take advantage of qualitative research that can help them become more customer-centric. As the co-author of the soon-to-be-released book, Customer-Centric Innovation in Finance, Broløs explains how methods common in anthropology can be effectively applied to financial services, potentially revealing insights that banks have been missing for years.