Innotribe, SWIFT's initiative to enable collaborative innovation in financial services, selected five finalists from the Asia Pacific leg of its annual Startup Challenge to compete at Sibos 2013 in Dubai.
Three early-stage start-ups, PassportFX, Pocketbook and z-crd and two growth-stage innovators GIEOM and V-Key delivered compelling pitches to an audience of the financial industry's leading angels, VC's and decision makers, held at InnovFest 2013, on May 16, 2013.
The three early-stage start-up finalists are PassportFX, a regulated clearing service for central and commercial banks; Pocketbook with an application to manage personal finance providing a single view on spending; and z-crd with a secure and scalable cloud-based transaction system.
The two growth-stage innovator finalists are GIEOM which interconnects banking operations providing information on business processes, screen simulations of IT systems, e-books of regulations and business performance; and V-Key with a liquid defence micro-vm to protect mobile applications against cyber-attacks.
As the top five finalists for the APAC Showcase, PassportFX, z-crd, Pocketbook, V-Key and GIEOM will now advance to the Innotribe Startup Challenge final to be held at Sibos, SWIFT's annual conference, in Dubai in September, to compete against finalists from the London and New York Showcases.
The Innotribe Startup Challenge saw 14 of the most promising FinTech and Financial Services start-ups present their businesses to an audience of dozens of the financial industry's most influential innovation executives, early-stage investors and press.
"We are delighted to have the Innotribe Startup Challenge at InnovFest 2013. It brought great dynamism and diversity to the event, as entrepreneurs and innovators pitched their products and solutions to the financial community. I'm also pleased to see that one of today's semifinalists is also a company that has emerged from our NUS entrepreneurial environment," said Dr Lily Chan, CEO NUS Enterprise.
Matteo Rizzi, co-founder at Innotribe said: "InnovFest was a great host for the Singapore Startup Challenge bringing together top industuustry professionals from around the region. We have seen some great pitches and the finalists should be proud of their achievements. We wish them the best of luck at Sibos Dubai later this year! It's a compliment to the Challenge, which I hope will continue to give some great businesses the platform they need in the industry."
The Singapore Startup Challenge was the second of three regional challenges to be held in 2013 and was sponsored by Invest NI, HP, Level39 and Sberbank. The New York Startup Challenge will be held on 13th June.