The greatest city on earth just happens to be the mecca of financial services. That’s right — the one and only New York City.

Our Bond team ventured east last week to attend Empire Startups New York Fintech Week. We fintech-ed quite hard and caught up with too many old friends to count. Elbow bumps in full effect, of course.

We started at the New York Fintech Kickoff Party hosted at Rise and sponsored by our friends at Alloy. We got to spend time chatting with New York’s fintech leaders and it got us buzzing for the rest of the week ahead.

Tuesday was the big day: Empire Startups Conference went down at New World Stages. We took in a number of demos, found corners to take meetings, and watched our own Zach Anderson Pettet interview Sheila Bair who was previously Chair of the FDIC.

We capped the day off co-sponsoring a happy hour and dinner for a couple hundred of our closest New York fintech friends. Big thanks to Codat, This Week in Fintech, and Empire Startups for teaming up to make it happen.

The week of fintech nerding was filled out by some fascinating conversations at the Banking Innovation Roundtable hosted at Rise by Empire Startups. I don’t think we’ve said “BNPL” so many times in two hours!

All in all, it was a week for the ages. After almost two years of virtual conferences, we finally got the team back together. Big thanks to Jon Zanoff at Empire Startups and everyone else that made New York Fintech Week what it was. See you next time!