While cities like San Francisco, New York, and London are well-known FinTech markets, there's also a lot of growth in trading of commodities, futures and derivatives happening in Chicago.
We saw a need for an event in Chicago that focused on technology specifically for trading in the financial markets, so we organized the FinTech Exchange, and this past April, we held our third conference in a modern theater on Michigan Avenue to a sold-out crowd. The topics included key trends in machine learning, exchange technology, data analytics, artificial intelligence, market data and trading software, APIs and alternative data.
FinTech Exchange was hosted by my company, Barchart, and our partners at FinTEx Chicago, a collaboration of financial and technology partners seeking to turn Chicago into a major FinTech hub (Note: Envestnet® | Yodlee® is one of the partners of FinTEx Chicago). In fact, our city was named as one of the top global FinTech hubs in a recent Deloitte study. This year's event was focused more on data — the way data is delivered, stored, analyzed, and visualized, as well as the new types of alternative data that are available, such as social media monitoring and sentiment, or the way the commodity markets look at the supply of energy or condition of crops using satellite imagery, or even tracking the amount of grain flowing between elevators and on the rivers.
We also saw a lot more people who were focused on artificial intelligence, machine learning and automation, data mining, and how to manage these massive storage sets. At FinTech Exchange, over 400 people attended to hear 10 lightning round presentations, a keynote address, and round table discussions that let us dive deeper into topics relevant to financial markets and trading technology.
We hosted experts talking about high-speed news, the future of market data, and even what's happening in the Chicago FinTech scene. We made sure the whole day was highly engaging with music and backlighting to give it a more entertaining feel. This is different from most of the FinTech events we've attended in the past, and we wanted to stand out from all the other industry events we've seen.
We've already started talking about next year's event too. We'll be adding a startup session and bringing in more startup attendees and speakers. And we've uploaded videos and photos from this year's conference, so you can watch some of the outstanding presentations. If you'd like to learn more about what happened at #FTX17, or even start thinking about #FTX18, please visit the FinTech Exchange website.
