Eight fintech companies begin FinTech Innovation Lab mentorship program

Eight leading fintech companies have entered the third annual Accenture’s FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific to begin a 12-week mentorship program comprising of series of workshops at Cyberport, panel discussions and coaching sessions on product and business development.

According to the release, the startups participating in this years’ Lab have developed a range of innovations from wealth management solutions that are oriented to customer investment intents, know your customer (KYC) services that uses blockchain technology and a fraud prevention platform using algorithms that are based in Chinese-characters in order to help financial institutions flag risk.

“Most financial institutions are grappling with how to become more efficient, cut costs, comply with regulators and simultaneously increase their interaction with customers,” Jon Allaway, senior managing director of financial services at Accenture said. “The startups in this year’s Lab offer innovative answers to these problems. With solutions like analytics that make wealth management advice available to more clients, we are seeing how fintech can help institutions deliver better services to their customers.”

The selected eight startups include HedgeSPA, a predictive investment analytics platform; Lattice that developed portfolio support software for investors, portfolio managers, risk managers and traders; ChartIQ, a software company that provides securities-specific financial chart and data visualization in HTML5; Privé Managers, an integrated and comprehensive wealth and asset management platform powered by a bionic advisory engine; KYC-Chain, a platform built on blockchain allowing banks and financial institutions to manage KYC data. The other startups are Seerene, a Berlin-based software company; SIORK, financial crime detection platform and TNG Wallet, a Hong Kong-based e-wallet.

These selected startups will receive senior-level mentoring in order to help them develop and commercialize their innovations and also connect with potential customers at top institutions. They will be mentored by leading financial services executives over 12 weeks. By the end of the program, five of the eight participants will be selected to present their concepts to potential investors and financial industry executives.

The FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific was launched by Accenture in June 2014 and is a result of collaboration between Accenture and leading 12 principle financial institutions including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Generali, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, among others. Along with the principle banks, supporting partners include China CITIC Bank International, China Construction Bank (Asia), Macquarie, Nomura, Standard Chartered, among others.

“Globally, the Labs’ alumni companies have raised more than US$370 million in financing after participating in the program. Four companies from the New York FinTech Innovation Lab have been acquired, two in 2015 alone, including Standard Treasury and BillGuard,” the announcement stated.