The year finished with 'fintech' as the flavour of the month, and the special sauce that is likely to dominate discussion next year is blockchain.
It's also called a distributed ledger - that is, information on transactions is securely held on open, decentralised, consensus-based authentication protocols, with records updated according to agreed coding.
For some , this eliminates the need for trust as all parties can verify for themselves, so in one sweep the need for a 'trusted third party' such as a clearing house is removed.
The potential savings in time and money were underlined when Australia's two largest banks ran separate blockchain events earlier this month. Commonwealth Bank was principal sponsor of a five-day series of workshops and presentations. The final two days were open events looking at the technology for forcing change onto the financial sector.
And while the CBA show was being kicked off by chief information officer David Whiteing, Westpac was running a rival blockchain event in the newly established start-up space, Stone & Chalk.
Lawrence Lessig, the prominent US legal academic, attorney, and political activist - and founder of Creative Commons - delivered the final keynote address for what was effectively a whole week of blockchain workshops in Sydney.
He warned that the community needed to understand the implications of technology such as blockchain but not to expect it to be the answer to all that Internet Freedom proponents desired.
He reminded the audience that the initial "wild frontiers" promised by the internet have been chipped away, over time, so that there is less privacy and more control by governments and corporations and business.
The blockchain technology promises what Lessig called "radical efficiency" - the ability "to do much, much more with much less."
Even so, learning from the mistakes of the past, Lessig proposed to run regulatory wargames using blockchain technology to ascertain the correct architecture -"do not regulate the code but possibly regulate the players who seek to use blockchain," he suggested.
Lessig's been looking at other practical and legal angles of the new technology. "There is also the aspect of the digital property digital assets and how to manage that as, through this technology the assets live on even after an owner's death," he said.
Nevertheless there are certain terms that need to be taken as uncontested - for instance 'decentralisation', which Lessig characterised as "the DNA of blockchain."
"This will rub up against government's approach which is based around a centralised structure for decision-making at least," he warned.
The basic problem that blockchain is trying to solve is the problem of fraud - where someone is trying to rewrite history. Any context where people have the need to rewrite history is suitable for application of blockchain - that is, to prevent that happening.
Tracking financial transactions is just one niche area among several. Asset management is another. But the first big fee earner for banks to fall is likely to be remittances, with several major