Irish start-up SBDA Group selected to participate in Accenture’s 2016 FinTech Innovation Lab London

SBDA group, an Irish start-up that uses raw banking data to generate customer insights and create personalised marketing campaigns, has been selected as the only Irish participant in the 2016 FinTech Innovation Lab London. The fintech company turns raw banking data – such as transactional histories – into targeted marketing and customer relationship management campaigns.

The London Lab, launched by Accenture in 2012 and now in its fourth year, is a collaboration between Accenture and 16 leading financial institutions. The 12-week mentoring program helps fintech entrepreneurs accelerate product development while giving the participating banks exposure to the technologies they need to stay ahead. Accenture will return to Canary Wharf’s Level39 to host the FinTech Innovation Lab for the fourth consecutive year. Level39 continues to be a leading hub for fintech innovation, providing access to a curated fintech ecosystem and proximity to many of the participating financial institutions.

The 15 selected startups will be partnered with senior-level bank executives who will help them fine-tune and develop their technologies and business strategies. Six of these startups will ultimately be selected to present at an Investor Day in April 2016 in front of venture capitalists and senior financial-industry executives.

Those taking part in this year’s program are: AimBrain, Albert, AlgoDynamix, Clausematch, Contego, Crowdaura, Cutover, PassFort, PayKey, Quotip, SBDA Group, Talent Rank, Undo, Voleo, and ZeroDB. Their innovations include blockchain technology for securities issuance, cognitive computing and real-time risk detection.

“The disruption of financial services by FinTech entrepreneurs continues at speed” said Richard Lumb, group chief executive of Financial Services at Accenture.  “We’re incredibly excited about working with this year’s entrepreneurs to make banking better, cheaper and faster. They offer some exciting innovations and have demonstrated exceptional creativity in what has been a record breaking year for applications from more than 30 countries, confirming that London is very much the centre of Europe’s thriving FinTech community.”

Support for the program is industry-wide, with the senior teams involved drawn from the world’s most recognizable financial institutions, including Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Intesa Sanpaolo, JPMorgan, Lloyds Banking Group, Morgan Stanley, Nationwide, RBS, Santander, Societe Generale and UBS.

The other 2016 FinTech Innovation Lab London participants are:

• AimBrain —By using behavioural, facial and voice biometrics, AimBrain enables banks and payment processors to know if their users really are who they say they are.

• Albert —an incredibly simple mobile platform that helps self-employed combine bookkeeping (invoices, expenses, payments) with financial planning (bank info, cash flow forecasting).

• AlgoDynamix — an innovative portfolio risk analytics company focusing on financially disruptive events..

• ClauseMatch —collaborative document platform integrates with internal systems and helps to streamline documentation workflows by providing real time editing, approvals and tracking capabilities.

• Contego —offers real-time identity and risk checks on both companies and individuals in the increasingly compliance driven financial services sector, helps businesses to stay safe from fraud, identity theft and compliance failures

• Crowdaura — uses blockchain technology and a crowdfunding interface to provide a turnkey platform solution for marketing, issuing, trading, settlement and administrating decentralised financial securities. This reduces costs and increases the security and transparency for securities lifecycle management.

• Cutover — reduces the risk and cost associated with live enterprise events such as IT system upgrades and business continuity events. It does this by replacing the excel-ware, emails and telephone calls that are typically used to coordinate activities in these critical periods. Cutover enables activity orchestration, provides real time visualisation of status during the event and captures an audit trail for review and learning after the event.

• PassFort — who has developed the first Compliance As A Service (CAAS) web application designed to improve the way regulated businesses collect, store and manage their customer compliance information at the point of onboarding. The technology delivers an automated and scalable back office system for financial services, online gambling, real estate and professional services firms, enabling processes that traditionally take weeks to be completed in a day.

• PayKey — is the world’s first payment keyboard. PayKey’s technology puts banks where their customers are, on all social networks including Facebook’s Messenger, Whatsapp, Twitter etc. With PayKey, customers enjoy the security of the trusted banks within their favourite applications, making everyday banking easier and more efficient than ever before.

• Quotip — offers a management tool for structured financial products that provides wealth managers with services in three key areas: product idea generation, request for quote and audit/life-cycle management. Quotip’s machine-learning-based algorithm, sell-side independency and full coverage of the value-chain help reducing product complexity whilst increasing workflow efficiency and adhering to upcoming regulatory frameworks.

• Talent Rank — enables prospective candidates to exhibit their skills, interests and potential. The platform trains and tests fundamental competencies and uncovers talent that could otherwise be overlooked. Talent Rank is used to augment screening processes, provide skill-based learning and development and increase workforce diversity.

• Undo — offers specialised tools to improve software quality, robustness and security, by allowing coders to see exactly what a program has done. Two key products are UndoDB and Live Recorder. UndoDB is a debugger that allows developers to run code backwards as well as forwards, helping to rapidly identify bugs. Live Recorder allows developers to create an exact copy of a specific issue as it occurred in production or in test environments, for subsequent offline replay and analytics.

• Voleo — allows users to start a smart investment club via a mobile app where they can pool knowledge and funds and vote on trading decisions within their groups. Users can also follow others outside their own group, based on metrics like actual fund performance or individual decision performance, to help with their portfolios.

• ZeroDB — provides an end-to-end encrypted database protocol that helps companies to use cloud services without sacrificing control, security, or privacy. Users can run queries over encrypted databases without exposing any decrypted data to the server.

The FinTech Innovation Lab London is modelled on a similar program that was co-founded by Accenture and the Partnership Fund for New York City, the US$115 million investment arm of the Partnership for New York City. Accenture launched two other Labs in 2014: the FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific in Hong Kong and the FinTech Innovation Lab Dublin in Ireland. Globally, the Labs’ alumni companies have raised more than US$260 million in venture financing after participating in the program. Four participants from the New York FinTech Innovation Lab have been acquired, two in 2015 alone, including Standard Treasury and BillGuard. The 21 companies that have passed through the London program have signed more than 50 contracts to do business with banks and on average have increased revenues by 170 percent since participating in the Lab.