Ten startups that can disrupt the financial services industry

Accenture has announced the ten FinTechs which have been selected for the firm’s Asia-Pacific FinTech Innovation Lab. According to the global professional services giant, the selected startups have the potential to disrupt the financial services industry. 

The global consulting firm received applications from over 160 companies based in more than 30 countries, across the competition’s five categories: data & analytics; digital bank solutions; emerging technologies; health insurance ecosystem; and intelligent automation.

The 10 selected startups – which hail from seven markets – have been selected on the back of a number of criteria, including innovation, market potential, breakthrough technology, and contribution to real-world challenges in the financial services industry. 

“The pandemic has not stopped the demand for more innovation in financial services, and this has resulted in an extremely strong class for the 2020 program,” said Ravinder Chhabra, a managing director at Accenture and the executive sponsor of the FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific program in Hong Kong.

The 2020 FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific participants are:

Fano Labs (Hong Kong) – Specialising in speech recognition and natural language processing technologies across a wide variety of languages and dialects, Fano Labs helps enterprises with customer service, compliance and other lines of business, enabling them to accurately identify potential compliance risks, reduce costs, and uncover potential sales opportunities. 

KADA (Australia) – KADA’s AI-based platform, known as K, enables financial institutions to scale data knowledge across the organisation. By analysing millions of event logs, K helps companies identify hidden context of data, understand how its people use data, and create networks between data stored in data warehouses, data lakes and analytical tools — giving people the knowledge they need to deliver faster and better data outcomes. 

Flybits (Canada) – Flybits is a customer experience platform for the financial services sector, delivering personalisation at scale. With an extensive collection of customisable modules that preserve consumer privacy, Flybits enables banks to increase speed to market, and maximise return on investment through its digital channels. Flybits enables institutions to elevate their mobile apps, creating a ‘human-touch’ experience and advancing the customer experience beyond transactions. 

SPIN Analytics (United Kingdom) – SPIN Analytics helps banks improve credit risk management with its explainable AI-based platform, RiskRobot. The platform provides acceleration of model development, validation, documentation and deployment, which reduces maintenance time by at least 90% and total costs by 70%. The solution covers all types of credit risk models for regulatory, risk management, and business purposes.

Capitalise.ai (Israel) – An Israeli-based startup offering non-technical traders the ability to automate their trades, using free-style text with no coding needed. Capitalise.ai’s trading platform turns text into complex algorithmic trading strategies, using natural language processing technology. Capitalise.ai’s platform is already being used by leading brokers around the globe, amplifying their performance by offering their traders a unique trading experience. 

Knight FinTech (India) – A Singapore- and India-based firm, Knight FinTech provides an AI-powered, SaaS-based treasury management and credit assessment platform to help financial services firms increase returns and decrease risk. Its interest rate and credit risk models analyse millions of data points to provide actionable insights to treasury managers or dealers taking a position on yield curve or taking a corporate credit risk exposure.

UVAS (Singapore) – UVAS is a securities exchange offering primary issuance of shares and debentures, secondary trading and optimised post-trade process, with automatic clearing, settlement and custody, all at 90% to 95% cost savings compared to other exchanges. UVAS strives to remedy the situation of illiquidity and opaqueness in capital markets and serves as a turnkey solution for the alternative asset space. 

Fedo (India) – Fedo’s algorithm quantifies an individual's risk for various diseases and his/her propensity to file a claim over the next few years, based on a photograph, enabling insurers to onboard and underwrite customers digitally with little to no manual intervention. The solution has helped Fedo’s retail health insurance clients reduce underwriting costs by 50% and turnaround times by more than 70%. 

Symbo (Singapore) – Symbo uses its proprietary digital insurance platforms to digitise insurance distribution in partnership with insurance companies. Its mobile app helps insurers digitally engage with intermediaries, tied agents and financial advisors by simplifying insurance transactions.

Staple (Singapore) – Staple’s cognitive AI-based solution helps reduce the costs of back-office operations, such as compliance and onboarding checks. By combining computer vision, natural language processing, optical character recognition and machine learning, the solution can read, interpret and extract data from documents at scale, regardless of layout, format or language.

Formally kicking off this week, the FinTech Innovation Lab will enable startup founders and employees to connect with senior executives from Accenture and financial services institutions, with the aim of further developing their solutions and business strategies. The Lab culminates in December, when the startups will present their solutions at a virtual Demo Day to an audience of venture capitalists and industry executives. 

About the FinTech Innovation Lab

The FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific is a collaboration between Accenture and several leading financial services institutions in the region, including AIA International; Bank of America; BlackRock; China Construction Bank; Credit Suisse; Dah Sing Bank; Generali; Industrial and Commercial Bank of China; J.P. Morgan; Macquarie Group; Maybank; Morgan Stanley; Natixis; Saxo Markets; Société Générale; SC Ventures by Standard Chartered; Sun Life; ZA International; and Zurich Insurance.

Launched in Hong Kong in 2014, the competition has received more than 1,000 applications since its inception, and the programme’s alumni companies have raised over $500 million in venture capital.