The fast-paced agenda and energetic crowd made the recent Benzinga FinTech Summit in San Francisco one for the books. Benzinga did a fantastic job bringing the vibrant fintech community together for a lively day of discussions that spanned the fintech landscape — from lending and crowdfunding, to AI and blockchain, to our world of wealth and investing.

The event covered the spectrum from seed-stage startups pitching brand new ideas to incumbent firms’ response to the disruptors, plus late-stage private companies positioning themselves for partnerships or acquisition.

For us there were two big highlights: the FinTech Town Hall, and our People’s Choice Award for Best Exhibitor.

First was the star-studded “FinTech Town Hall: Disruption vs. Collaboration,” featuring our CEO Anton Honikman, Aaron Klein, CEO of Riskalyze, and Tom Eck, CTO of IBM Watson, moderated by Gabe Dalporto, CFO of LendingTree.

It was an animated discussion about the premise that forward-thinking financial institutions aren’t sitting back passively waiting for disruption to happen, but are actively trying to figure out the best way to bring these innovations into their organizations. They face three key collaboration choices: vendor partnership, equity investment, or acquisition.

Some of our favorite quotes from the panelists:

“‘Disrupt vs. collaborate’ is a false dichotomy; fintech disruptors want to collaborate with the big banks.” – Anton Honikman, MyVest

“We exist to help good advisors disrupt bad advisors.” – Aaron Klein, Riskalyze

“Success of fintech acquisitions lies in autonomy, preserving their brand & culture. If you subsume the acquired company, the value of what you’ve acquired goes down.” – Anton Honikman, MyVest

“Here’s the fintech collaboration recipe for success: startups, take the algorithm you created to a bank with mass amounts of data.” – Tom Eck, IBM Watson

Want more? Watch the full video of the Town Hall, or Anton’s post-panel recap with Benzinga Editor Spencer Israel.

And second, we were thrilled to have been named People’s Choice Award for Best Exhibitor. The award is partially a reflection of how much fun we had meeting so many great people at the event, and it’s really a wonderful reward for the effort we put into refreshing our brand last year. The goal was for our brand to demonstrate how MyVest enables innovation on top of the solid foundation of a scalable enterprise software company — that’s what wealth management firms and banks are looking for as they modernize their services.

We’re looking forward to attending next year’s Benzinga Global FinTech Awards in NYC with the other finalists, and to see what other companies are bringing to the future of fintech. And we can’t wait to attend next year’s FinTech Summit in SF.