Eight fintech companies are beginning a 12-week mentorship program in the third annual FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific. The start-ups have developed a range of innovations – from wealth management solutions, know your customer services and fraud prevention. The selected start-ups will receive mentoring to help them develop and commercialize their innovations and connect with potential customers. At the end of this year’s program, five of the eight participants will be selected to present their concepts to potential investors and financial industry executives.
Launched by Accenture in Hong Kong in June 2014, the FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific is a collaboration between Accenture and twelve financial institutions: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Generali, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, J.P. 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).
Jon Allaway, senior managing director of Financial Services at Accenture, commented: “Most financial institutions are grappling with how to become more efficient, cut costs, comply with regulators and simultaneously increase their interaction with customers. The start-ups 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 start-ups taking part are:
ChartIQ provides securities-specific financial chart and data visualisation products in HTML5. Its time-series based charting solutions provide charting and data visualization that can help investment banks, brokerages, trading platforms, and financial portals move from legacy technologies to the future of HTML5.
HedgeSPA is a predictive investment analytics platform that enables investment professionals to tap the internet to improve their performance. HedgeSPA applies big data techniques to asset selection, combining forward-looking market scenarios to reduce portfolio drawdown and automating day-to-day portfolio management tasks.
KYC-Chain uses biometrics, emerging technologies and blockchain tech to streamline onboarding processes and provide consensus on identity. This enables front line sales and compliance officers to cost-effectively onboard and continuously interact with retail clients and other financial institutions in a secure, consumer-centric encrypted environment.
Lattice has developed portfolio support software for investors, portfolio managers, risk managers and traders. The platform contains a view-driven portfolio optimiser and flexible portfolio analytics to help clarify investors’ rationale for precise and quick decisions and implementation.
Privé Managers is an integrated wealth and asset management platform powered by a proprietary bionic advisory engine. Its modular-based approach allows financial intermediaries and advisors to more efficiently grow their assets, while reducing costs through technology solutions.
Seerene provides insights, actionable analytics and transparency to improve efficiency and streamline costs. Seerene connects to existing data sources within an enterprise, aggregates the information and offers what it calls “an x-ray vision,” viewable on a dashboard, monitoring various dollar-effects of technical debt, digital transformation as well as change across all software stacks, teams and technologies.
SIORK helps financial institutions evaluate customer data and detect criminal activities such as fraud and money laundering in both developed and emerging markets. It automatically learns customer behaviours, identifies suspicious events and provides a real-time transaction blocking mechanism to the customer for crime prevention.
TNG Wallet offers an e-wallet for payment to merchants, person-to-person fund transfer, bank transfers and year-round cash withdrawal, giving merchants access to an affordable non-cash payment option with low handling fees, improvement in their cash flow through TNG’s settlement of transactions with merchants, and a customer relationship management tool that allows merchants to further engage with customers.
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, including Standard Treasury and BillGuard.
