UK innovation agency Nesta has doled out £1 million to ten firms who participated in a contest to inspire the creation of new products and services using Open Banking APIs.
Nesta announced the Open Up Challenge in February in a global search for organisations who would use new open banking APIs to transform the way small businesses discover, access and use financial services.
Ten teams, selected by an independent judging panel, each receive a £100,000 cash award for developing products assessed as most likely to have a positive impact on UK small businesses in 2018 and beyond.
In addition, 20 teams who participated in the first phase, each received a £50,000 development grant and exclusive access to the Open Up Data Sandbox. This contains millions of anonymised transaction data sets in line with the recent release of UK government-approved API specifications for account and transaction information and payments initiation, which will go live in January 2018.
Chris Gorst, challenge prize lead at Nesta, comments: “The ten teams awarded a prize in Stage 1 demonstrated to the judging panel that they are using new technologies to solve real small business problems and have the potential to achieve impact at scale in 2018 and beyond."
Applications for Stage 2 of the challenge will open in early 2018.
List of 10 winners
- Bud
- Capitalise
- Coconut
- Credit Data Research
- Fluidly
- Fractal Labs
- Funding Options
- Handle (by Bizfitech)
- iwoca
- Teller