Last Thursday was held the ITnation’s Golden-i conference. More than 800 persons, experts in the IT and tech sectors, attended this event at PwC Luxembourg’s premises. A night of networking, sipping beers and champagne, but also a night to think about the real impacts of new technologies on our world. For the first time, a prize for the “Tech Talent of the Year” was awarded.
Luxembourg, a smart nation
The opening speech was given by Marc Hansen, Minister Delegate to Digitalisation. The Minister reminded the crowd that the newly appointed government has created this ministry last December, to crystalize its desire to place digital transformation in the heart of their action. “We need to seize any opportunities in that field. Our main activities shall be to ease the day-to-day life of the citizens by reducing burdensome bureaucracy,” told the Minister.
Marc Hansen underlined the Luxembourg’s ambition to become a smart nation. “To achieve that goal, our main challenge is to proceed to a digital inclusion of all citizens, with no exception made. Digitalisation must be seen as a chance for all!” said the Minister.
“Our society needs to find its balance despite the technological tsunami.”
The Datanumi
Already present in 2018, Olivier Babeau, economist, professor and president of the Think tank “Sapiens”, was back this year as the perfect master of ceremony! Olivier Babeau made the interesting, even though frightening, observation that our society now suffers from a new sort of dichotomy, created by the technologies. “Our society has shattered! There is a diffraction between techno-leaders and techno-abandoned. Technology can bring you a lot if you know how to use it, that is not true for non-connected people that are left behind,” declared the master of ceremony.
Laurent Alexandre, founder of Doctissimo and author of the renowned book, “Will AI also kill Democracy?” gave a powerful keynote speech on the challenges faced by us, humans, not fully prepared to deal with this “Datanumi”, this tsunami of data. “Our future is hanging by a thread! AI is now used by humans to enabling them to become super-powerful, to act as God!” told Mr. Alexandre.
He gave the recent example of China using facial recognition technology to identify its citizens in a matter of seconds granting them social points, as a surreal example of what society has become thanks to big data. “Our society needs to find its balance despite this technological tsunami” declared Laurent Alexandre.
Tech Talent of the Year
The Tech Talent of the Year prize was a first this year, to put the focus on the great achievements of Tech startups in Luxembourg. “This prize awards the past, the present and the future of Luxembourg” declared Eric Busch, founder of startup nexten.io.
Luxembourg has found way to innovate, to seize new opportunities to flourish but needs to remain competitive. “We need to find new ways to attract talents. That’s what we are working on at nexten.io, by actively supporting the local tech community bringing tech experts to Luxembourg, but that is still not enough,” continued Eric.
WE HAVE A WINNER! @gberscheid of @finologee is the Tech Talent of the Year! Congratulations!!
Thanks to all our judges, ITnation, PwC and the Luxembourgish Tech community for making this possible! #techaward #luxembourg pic.twitter.com/ohSULqwYVL
— nexten.io – Tech Hires Tech (@nextenio) 17 mai 2019
With 60 nominees, and more than 4,000 votes in 10 days, this award was a success. 5 finalists were selected by 20 advisors and judges. The 4 finalists also selected in this award were, Examotive, Morfin, Apla and AssurBox.
The awarded Georges Berscheid is the co-founder and CTO of Finologee, a FinTech & RegTech specialist who runs a trusted and versatile digital platform that simplifies connectivity between financial institutions and a variety of FinTech solution providers. The startup recently announced a partnership with Foyer Group in Luxembourg to digitalize its remote consent process (see our article “Finologee Built Foyer’s Remote Signing System“).
3 questions to Georges Berscheid
Can you give us your thoughts after having just received the Tech Talent of the Year award?
“This prize is the recognition of our hard work in the past 15 years that has enabling us to bring more innovation in Luxembourg! We keep working toward a better digitalization in the financial sector, with the creation of an API platform which is the future of an IT collaboration.”
What does it take to achieve a tech project?
“A good team obviously! But, more importantly, what we learnt in the past years, is to focus on the clients’ needs. Developing innovative projects is one thing, but you must keep in mind client’s needs that are already existing. As a startup, creating needs is time consuming, we had the personal example of Digicash! I would advise to focus on maybe less prestigious projects on the paper, but more rewarding on the short-term.”
Can you tell us a bit more about recruitments of tech profiles in Luxembourg?
“It won’t come as a surprise to you, recruitment of Tech talents in Luxembourg is hard! In the last year, we have tripled our staff, growing from 10 to 30. The graduates from the University of Luxembourg in IT and Tech is simply not sufficient, so we needed to look abroad. We are lucky enough to be well-developed now in our technology and tech talents want to join our team!”
Photo: Georges Berscheid, CTO of Finologee © Finologee
