Payments and Digital Banking continued to be strong themes at FinovateEurope 2014. Rather than seeking to disrupt the world of banking, many demoed solutions focused on helping banks deliver innovative services to their customers.

In the report Financial Technology Innovations: Reporting from FinovateEurope 2014, Celent reviews financial services innovation themes and how they have changed over the last few years based on the companies presenting at FinovateEurope. This report includes an overview of FinovateEurope 2014 and also looks in more detail at key themes in payments, digital banking, and other areas by discussing the most interesting solutions presented at the conference.

FinovateEurope, now in its fourth year, was again a two-day event with a record 67 companies presenting their solutions. The show had an interesting mix of startups and young firms alongside large established vendors, and even banks. Remarkably, 50 out of 67 firms have never presented at FinovateEurope before.

“Shovel manufacturers benefited the most in the gold rush days. Similarly, the most interesting demos to us in payments were from platform companies focused on enabling others to rapidly deliver payments propositions,” says Zilvinas Bareisis, Senior Analyst with Celent’s Banking Group and author of the report. “Overall, cloud has been an overarching theme at this year’s conference. Clearly, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and other cloud-based platforms are rapidly becoming credible alternatives to the more traditional IT deployment.”