A startup known as Pich has been declared the winner of the Santander InnoVentures’ Fintech Venture Day, a contest organized by Santander InnoVentures, Accenture, and IE Business School. Santander InnoVentures is a fintech venture capital fund run by Santander, one of the largest banks in the world.
The competition, held in Spain, looked for startups which provided technology-based solutions for the finance sector. Some of the fields covered included payment methods, alternative funding, wealth management, and services which further includes investment, data and risk analysis, customer experience, and digitalization of financial services.
The winning startup Pich will receive prestigious mentoring from the sponsors and will have the option of accessing funding.
Capital Ahora, another participant, presented a collective funding platform whereby investors can lend money to previously analyzed solvent companies. Fire PCI is a company which provided B2B technology and a prototype for cloud-based services that offer protection for personal data; Wetech is a company collaborating with banks to develop wearables for payments subject to Dynamic Data Authentication processes.
As fintech continues to remain the buzzword, it is helping the startups to present their ideas as the number of fintech capital funds increases with each passing day. A key financial technology that has taken the world by storm is the blockchain – a public ledger technology – with a strong potential to completely alter the way the banks operate and optimize back-end process due to its low-cost functionality and high-speed verifications.
A majority of the analysts expect that the next wave of fintech revolution will first sweep off the banking sector. And therefore, a lot of startups over the globe are creating solutions which relate directly or indirectly to the banking sector.
Mariano Belinky, managing partner of Santander InnoVentures said,
“The world of fintech in Spain is rising fast and we are moving in lockstep. We firmly believe in collaboration among emerging businesses and banks. There are already major operations, such as Kabbage, working with Santander to fast-track credits for SMEs in the UK.”
Image: Forbes
