Stefan has more than 25 years of experience in the international payments and banking technology space as Advisor, Operator and Investor. He is an early investor and advisor to founders of N26, Wefox, Billie, Moove, Curve, Wayflyer, Bitpanda, Khazna, Shopup, and Abhi amongst others. Also, Stefan has successfully exited payworks (to Visa), iyzico (to payU/Naspers) and Holvi (to BBVA). His main focus and interest currently are scale ups in Africa, MENA and other Growth Markets.
Previously, he was President of Central and Southern Europe at First Data, Partner at Roland Berger, and Principal at A.T. Kearney, based in New York and Vienna. He holds Master’s degrees from Columbia University and Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration.
Hall C (Level 2)
Forming Frontier Tech
President of France said ‘we are regulating things that we have not yet produced or invented. It is not a good idea.’ CEO of CB Insights echoed the thought ‘The EU now has more AI regulations than meaningful AI companies.’
The questions:
- The risk of a larger non-EU-based partner using its market power to pull high-potential EU-based AI startups out of the EU. Mistral-Ai proves that risk. Germany’s Aleph Alphi and UK-based Synthesia and StabilityAI too.
- Voluntary flight of startups to non-EU locations including US, in search of capital, and more open to innovation policies. E.g. USA, Japan
- EU-based startups having to develop new code bases if they wish to sell outside of the EU, which means more time, cost, and risk
- Foundation models such as GPT-4 have been termed ‘systemic’. Has this aggressive categorization come too early?
- Need for greater transparency. To publish publicly available summaries of training data which might affect competitiveness and IP
- How does one go about educating citizens of how algorithmic harms happen if citizens have been given more agency to complain about AI systems.