How Accenture is identifying and nurturing promising financial services start-ups

How does the innovation lab plan to help start-ups?

The FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific is an accelerator program that brings together financial technology start-ups and world leading financial institutions. Through a competitive application process, the 10 financial institutions will select approximately seven start-ups to participate in the program, which begins in August. The entrepreneurs will be mentored for 12 weeks by leading financial services industry executives, who will help them, fine-tune and develop their technologies and business strategies through a series of workshops, panel discussions, user-group sessions, networking opportunities, one-on-one meetings and presentations.

The program culminates in November with an Investor Day presentation by participants in front of an audience of potential investors. The objective is to create an opportunity for high-level conversations with C-suite executives at multinational banks with an endeavour to break their conventional mind-sets when it comes to technology disrupting their existing procedures. This would help financial technology start-ups crystalize their business plan for providing advanced technology, thereby, lending innovation.

Can you cite some Indian examples from the recent past that have benefited from this program?

Indian start-ups have the opportunity to apply and participate in the labs across our three locations. One of the participating start-ups in the last year’s Asia-Pacific lab was Jocata Financial Advisory & Technology Services (Jocata), which operates in Hyderabad and Pune and was selected after a rigorous selection procedure. They provide sophisticated Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) software that not only meets regulatory expectations and reduces the cost of compliance, but also aims to drive business growth by creating a high-quality, standardized, and reusable data asset.

Another start-up from India also participated in the UK edition of the program couple of years back. Chandigarh-based start-up, uTrade Solutions, specializing in trading technologies which provides technologies such as trading platforms, algorithmic trading, risk management, and portfolio handling solution has also benefited from the FinTech lab.

What kind of technology innovations are usually showcased as a part of the program? 

The participating start-ups showcase complex technology innovations across various areas. In our 2014 edition, the Indian start-up, Jacota, focused on complex ecosystems like Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) software, which is indispensable specifically because it is essentially for banks to be compliant with the regulators.

Another participant, Advanced Merchant Payments (AMP), with offices in Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and the Philippines enabled banks and other financial institutions to profitably offer short-term unsecured loans to under-served small businesses in both developed and emerging markets. There were also numerous start-ups that focused on cyber security, such as AtCipher.com and Beijing Wecash Wonder Technology.

Does Accenture plan to do similar technology programs for verticals other than financial services? 

Fintech as a concept is expanding because the financial sector is connected to so many industries. Last year, the focus was heavily on KYC and AML; but our research shows an increasing interest in wearable and insurance, so the possibilities of what FinTech means are broadening and as a result these accelerator programs will inevitably include participants who maybe initially didn’t consider themselves FinTech. There are certainly other industries where that potential is there – technology and medicine for example – but at the moment, we’re focused on FinTech accelerator programs.