Build, buy or both: TechIsland's payments people take the question every fintech team gets wrong

TechIsland's FinPro Community holds its sixth meetup in Limassol on Wednesday 8 October 2026, 19:00-21:00, powered by payabl. The title is “Scaling Payments & Banking Infrastructure: Build, Buy or Both?” and the framing is the operational one: how a company growing across several jurisdictions and several providers decides what to run itself and what to rent.

The panel is unusually senior for a free evening event: Maro Drakou, Group Head of Treasury at payabl.; Alexis Yiallourides, Manager of the International Business Unit in Limassol at Bank of Cyprus; Anastasia Muzychuk, Deputy CFO at PM Group; and Alexis Ioannou, Global Head of Treasury at KAPE Technologies. Tanya Romanyukha, TechIsland's general manager, moderates. Format is a focused panel followed by informal networking with refreshments. It is aimed at finance, treasury, banking and payments professionals, and at anyone running financial operations for a scaling company. Registration is free.

The named questions — provider concentration, operational risk, and when in-house capability beats an external partner — are worth reading if you write code rather than manage treasury. That is the same decision a fintech hackathon team makes in its first hour and usually makes badly: wire up a provider's SDK and demo in 48 hours, or build the ledger and settlement logic and demo nothing. The people on this panel have made the call with real money and real regulators, and they will say which way it went.

The timing is direct, too. BoC Fintech Hackathon 7.0 runs 27-29 November at the IDEA Innovation Centre with Open Banking & Embedded Finance among its twelve tracks and €7,000 for first place. An evening in October listening to four treasury leads argue about provider concentration is cheap preparation for a challenge brief that will assume you understand it.

One practical warning: 8 October is a crowded night in Cyprus tech. The 2nd ECT Forum occupies the UNESCO Amphitheatre the same day, and INSPIRE 2026 takes Makariou Avenue on 7-8 October. If you are choosing, choose by what you need: FinPro is the small-room, specific-answers option, and the panel is the reason to go rather than the networking.

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