12-05-2025
- Business
- Irish Independent
The week ahead in business: fintech summit, eurozone GDP and online safety panel
Organised around the theme of 'Trade, Technology, and Policy: The Changing Dynamics of Growth,' it will look at the challenges facing the US and EU economies. Speakers include Adriana Kugler, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
The annual one-day National Fintech Summit will be staged at Croke Park tomorrow.
It's billed as a platform for players in the Irish fintech sector to network and collaborate. Attendees will include banks, start-ups, SMEs and policymakers, and they will take part in discussions about EU regulations, tech transformation, open banking, global fintech trends and, inevitably, AI.
On Wednesday, the Institute of International and European Affairs (IIEA) will host a panel discussion on the Digital Services Act, which is an EU regulation that aims to protect people online by pushing platforms to address harmful content.
This event is being held in collaboration with the Economic Regulators Network and speakers will include John Evans, the Digital Services Commissioner with the Irish media regulator Coimisiún na Meán.
Members of Financial Services Ireland will convene on Friday at the Alex Hotel in Dublin for their annual lunch. Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe will deliver the keynote address at the event.
On the same day, Enterprise Ireland will host a semiconductor meet-up for people from the industry, with the aim of offering a platform for discussions on innovation and collaboration in their line of work.
This week the Central Statistics Office (CSO) will announce Ireland's trade balance for the month of March, showing the level of goods exported and imported.
There was a huge spike in exports in the first two months of the year, due to US importers stocking up their warehouses as a precaution against US president Donald Trump's tariffs. That trend probably continued into March.
On Thursday, Eurostat will release an initial estimate of the eurozone's economic growth for the first quarter of the year. It will also provide an Industrial Production report for March, looking at the performance of factories, mines and utilities, which might give us an insight into how much all the recent global uncertainty has affected the euro area.
There will be results on Tuesday from DCC, the leading Irish international sales, marketing and support services group which is listed in London but has its headquarters in Dublin.
