Eight financial technology (fintech) companies today begin a 12-week mentorship programme in the third annual FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific, Accenture reports. The selected startups will receive senior-level mentoring to help them
develop and commercialise their innovations and connect with potential
customers at top institutions.
Launched by Accenture in Hong Kong in June 2014, FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific is a collaboration between Accenture and major financial institutions. The twelve principal financial institutions are: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Generali, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JP Morgan, Maybank, Morgan Stanley, Sun Life Financial and UBS. In addition, supporting banks include: China CITIC Bank International, China Construction Bank (Asia), Macquarie, Nomura, Standard Chartered, Siam Commercial Bank, Societe Generale, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG).
“Most financial institutions are grappling with how to become more efficient, cut costs, comply with regulators and simultaneously increase their interaction with customers,” said Jon Allaway, senior managing director, Financial Services at Accenture. “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 startups participating in this year’s Lab have innovations from
wealth management solutions that are oriented to customers’ investment
intents, know your customer (KYC) services that leverage blockchain
technology and a fraud prevention programme using algorithms based on
Chinese characters to help financial institutions flag risk. The eight companies will be mentored by leading financial services executives over 12 weeks through a series of workshops at Cyberport, panel discussions and coaching sessions on product and business-development. At the end of this year’s programme, five of the eight participants will be selected to present their concepts to potential investors and financial industry executives.
The 2016 FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific participants are:
US-based ChartIQ – provides securities-specific financial chart and data visualisation products in HTML5.
HedgeSPA, which has offices in Singapore – has a predictive investment analytics platform that enables investment professionals to tap the Internet to improve their performance.
KYC-Chain – uses biometrics, emerging technologies and distributed ledger (Blockchain) technology to streamline onboarding processes and in a secure environment. The Singapore-based company’s platform is live and in production at several banks.
Hong Kong-based Lattice – has developed portfolio support software that helps to discover and precisely manipulate intentional or unintentional exposures, to commodities, currencies, sectors or even countries.
Privé Managers, also Hong Kong-based, has a wealth and asset management platform powered by a proprietary bionic advisory engine. The startup’s platform is already being used by several global financial institutions in Asia and Europe.
Seerene, which has an office in Hong Kong – offers 'x-ray vision' into existing company data that results in insights, actionable analytics and transparency to improve efficiency and streamline costs.
Tokyo-based SIORK – helps financial institutions evaluate customer data and detect criminal activities such as fraud and money laundering in both developed and emerging markets. A Chinese-character fuzzy matching algorithm with artificial intelligence learning ability enables global financial institutions to analyse Chinese-character based raw data, such as customer names, and unstructured message information.
TNG Wallet – offers an e-wallet for payment to merchants, person-to-person fund transfer, bank transfers and year-round cash withdrawal. It has more than 300,000 active registered users (about 5% of Hong Kong’s population) with extensive top-up points via convenience stores, ATM terminals, credit card and a variety of online banking platforms.
The FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific is modelled on a similar programme that Accenture co-founded in 2010 with the Partnership Fund for New York City, the US$115 million investment arm of the Partnership for New York City (www.pfnyc.org). In 2012, Accenture and a dozen major banks in London launched the FinTech Innovation Lab London, with support from the city’s mayor and other government bodies. In 2014, Accenture launched FinTech Innovation Labs in Asia-Pacific and Dublin, Ireland.
Globally, the Labs’ alumni companies have raised more than US$370 million in financing after participating in the programme. Four companies from the New York FinTech Innovation Lab have been acquired, two in 2015 alone, including Standard Treasury and BillGuard
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