Celent held our most recent Innovation event in Singapore the last week of November, following similar events in New York, Boston, Toronto, Tokyo, London, and, most recently, San Francisco. Most of Celent’s work is focused on specific financial industry verticals, but Innovation is a topic that transcends industry barriers, and so—by design—do many of our Innovation events.

In Singapore we had representation from the entire financial services spectrum—banks, credit cards, insurers, capital markets firms and exchanges. We presented some of Celent’s recent thinking on innovation, much of it from our new innovation survey. But the main event was a peer discussion between the participants themselves.

It was one of the more lively discussions I’ve seen. We set aside two hours for the peer discussion, and it went by in a flash. Participants jostled to get their say in, and the session ended with the feeling that it could have gone several hours more. I think one of the keys was that there were a lot of different types in the room: the abovementioned full spectrum of FIs, from both the business and IT side, and even from compliance.

Everyone was naturally interested in how their “colleagues across the aisles” looked at innovation, how far each had come in achieving it, and what their technology, operational and cultural approaches were—or were not. Participants brimmed with on-the-spot case studies of initiatives at their firms. This was also refreshingly unusual, since firms are often reticent to divulge competitive information and “secret sauces.”

I think the reason for this relatively high level of enthusiasm lies in the industry’s realization that innovation is crucial to long-term success--and considering the rapidly expanding number of disintermediators, and the remarkable success of some of them, maybe even needed for short-term survival.