Revolutionizing the Financial Markets

18
Lead Story
The future
of FinTech
is happening
regardless
of other plans
Three years ago I was invited to a hackathon by a PR friend of mine.
“A hacka-what?” I asked. ‘A bunch of developers are going to spend
the weekend at Google Campus building payments apps…for fun,’
she responded.
“O-K…” I said. I had nothing else going on that Friday evening
anyway. You see, my PR friend invited me to the hackathon because
I was a FinTech journalist (or financial technology at the time). One
of her clients were sponsoring the event.
I wrote about how big banks used data, rolled out enterprise
technology and basically patched together old legacy systems
with chewing gum and duct tape (OK, I’m sorry…middleware). The
types of developers I interviewed wore suites and ties and oversaw
projects that took two years to complete before they jumped ship to
another bank and another two year project.
So I went down to Google Campus in London to watch the
launch of an event that would see people in t-shirts and jeans build
payment applications over a weekend…for fun.
When I walked in one of the sponsors were giving away bottles
of beer, in exchange for a tweet. “I’m down with Twitter,” I thought.
So I sent a tweet, was handed my beer and when I turned my head
I walked right into someone I knew – someone who worked in IT,
at a bank. He had just bought a beer with a tweet and there was no
suit and tie in sight. At that moment I thought, “This industry is
changing.”
My old faithful world of enterprise architecture and traditional
thinking in banking IT was giving way to a fresher, more agile and
leaner world of FinTech – and there were many people from that old
world who wanted to learn and grow with it.
This year I left journalism, after 20 plus years, and started work
as managing director of a startup accelerator aimed at the financial
services space – Startupbootcamp FinTech in London.
The FinTech programme is part of the Startupbootcamp family
of accelerators which run 14 programmes around the world in
various industries. FinTech was launched in London in 2014 and
has since expanded into Singapore and New York. London even
saw the launch of our new InsurTech programme which will see its
inaugural cohort of startups arrive in January 2016.
In 2015 the London FinTech programme saw 450 startup
companies from around the globe apply. We ended up choosing
nine, who spent 14 weeks growing and shaping their business in the
Startupbootcamp accelerator.
For the sake of a shameless plug – our 2015 class of FinTech
startups were:
1. BondIT – Bond allocation software using machine learning
2. Cybertonica – Online payment fraud prevention – also using
machine learning detect fraud
3. Delio – Wealth management platform that looks for private
investment opportunities for a bank’s wealth clients
4. MoneyFellows – Online interest-free credit and social savings
5. Obsidian Solutions – Cloud-based investor relations platform
6. StockViews – Crowdsourced equity research sold back to
institutions – small/mid-cap stocks and bespoke research
7. Tradle – Retail Banking KYC/Compliance on the blockchain
8. Walnut Algorithms – Artificial intelligence algorithms for
intraday trading
9. WoraPay – Mobile payments platform allowing any merchant to
take any mobile payments allowing consumers to order and pay
Now, one of the more unhelpful (and untrue) narratives of the