London has a reputation for being a hotbed of technology-based innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship. The city and the tech community as a whole celebrated this in June, with all three areas featuring prominently during the unique London Technology Week.

What is London Technology Week?

London Technology Week 2015 was a weeklong set of face-to-face events covering a huge spectrum of technology, including big data, gaming, IT wearables, education and much more.

The value of events like London Technology Week is much more than the formal events alone. Having an event of this nature and running it for a week helps share ideas and build the sense of a shared community within a huge, diverse, expanding industry.

The events that were put on were designed to reflect this aim, and to attract the world’s attention to London, the United Kingdom, and beyond, to make a wider audience aware of the incredible things being achieved by London based technology companies and thinkers.

Here are three things we learnt

Lesson 1 – Unicorns Are Real

To the uninitiated a Unicorn is a fictional animal that just so happens to be the national of animal of Scotland. A start up unicorn is a company that builds to a valuation of over $1bn. These kinds of companies are a small but ever-growing force in the UK economy.

Lesson 2 – Robots Are Taking Over (Your Banking)

Reducing costs and overheads by utilising automation technology is nothing new. However, Barclays is looking for ways to take it to the next level with robots.

“We’re very soon going to be entering a world where we may not have to be physically touching a device in order to execute transactions or to be able to engage with computers”, says Derek White, chief design and digital officer at Barclays.

Lesson 3 – London is the global capital in FinTech

Those in the industry will have known this for a while, but research revealed during the week reinforced the fact that London is at the heart of the fintech boom.

Founder of StartupBootCamp Fintech Nektarious Liolios said that

 “London continues to combine the perfect conditions for fintech start-ups to thrive: early-stage investors, an ‘understanding’ regulator and supportive government.”