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In fact, banks in Switzerland are taking this perspective that they want to bring trust to new technologies by lending their name to the industry.

How is that working out?

There’s a scenario where old world meets the new world and works together. We just don’t know if that’s what the blockchain and crypto community needs today.

How do you rate the tech innovation coming out of Switzerland?

There’s a lot of talent here coming from every part of world. The world’s suddenly woken up to entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Universities in Europe are open to creating that culture also, so they’re funding a lot of projects like Google DeepMind, which came out of the U.K. There are a lot of different disciplines in different parts of the world that can bring that knowledge and intelligence to different industries. If those industries are open to innovation, then marrying with good technology and a start-up ecosystem is a great way to move forward.

 What are Switzerland’s toughest competitors in tech? 

Israel has done a great job, Berlin’s tech scene is growing, London definitely, and obviously India and China have been moving very fast.

Does Switzerland’s wealth management have its back up against the wall in terms of needing to be more efficient, or is it still coasting? 

I think Swiss banks haven’t been moving fast enough. There’s still trillions of dollars of cash that flows through the traditional industry so there is no urgency to innovate. But demographic needs are changing and the wealth managers won’t start noticing until their customer needs suddenly change overnight and they will have to struggle to keep up without any good succession planning options.

Speaking of succession, what will it take for UBS or Pictet to have a tech-based CEO?

I don’t think it’s just tech. The culture for big companies has been a very closed one, a sort of boys club. New entrants cannot make a difference right away. It’s a long ladder they have to climb, and it won’t happen overnight.

Shruti Gandhi is managing partner at Array Ventures in San Francisco, CA. An engineering graduate of Columbia University, she was previously a venture capital investor at True Ventures and Samsung Electronics and a software engineer at IBM. She also founded Penseev, a start-up for social media connections using big data. Gandhi obtained an MBA from the University of Chicago before making the switch from engineer and founder to investor.