Attracting more than 600 guests from across the financial sector, including leading investors from Southeast Asia, this year’s startups tackled FinTech areas from InsurTech and wealth management to personal finance management.

These 10 startups went through an intense 3-month accelerator program with access to extensive mentorship from 400+ entrepreneurs, investors and corporate partners, who helped guide them through the ‘Shape’, ‘Build’ and ‘Sell’ stages of their startups. Demo Day is designed to showcase the startups’ ventures on center stage with the objective of attracting strategic partnerships and investments.

Below are the 10 teams that showcased at Demo Day:

• Banhji (Cambodia): Taking the fear out of Accounting
• Boundlss (Australia): Helping insurers to engage and manage member health
• Cefy (India): Enabling access to credit in minutes
• Connaizen (India): We help you identify, incentivize and influence your customers
• CurrenSeek (Malaysia): Making currency exchange work for you
• Hektor (Singapore): Supercharge your piggy-bank
• hiHedge (Taiwan): Trading through machine learning
• PolicyPal (Singapore): Asia’s mobile insurance marketplace
• Setscope (Thailand): Find the hidden gems in the stock market
• SuperText (India): Enabling brands to engage with their consumers through chatbots

“2016 saw a diverse cohort of FinTech startups hailing from 7 different countries across APAC. This reflects the increasingly maturing FinTech ecosystems across the region. From entering the program, the teams have made impressive developments, transforming their products, building partnerships and getting terms sheets on the table. We are excited to see where these FinTech entrepreneurs will be 6 months from now.” Steven Tong, MD of Startupbootcamp FinTech Singapore said.

Partnerships

The 2016 cohort of startups have secured a total of 11 pilots and key partnerships, with 8 more in the pipeline. Connaizen, a startup that crunches transaction data to provide personalised card-linked offers, have partnered with ICICI bank and RuPay in India to run pilot programs for their 295 million card holders. These partnerships come alongside Startupbootcamp FinTech Singapore growing its corporate partners from 9 to 12 in the 2016 programme and further deepening its networkings across APAC.

“We are excited to support and partner with Startupbootcamp that continuously keeps us abreast of the latest cutting-edge products and solutions in the FinTech community in Asia. Congratulations to the 10 Fintech startups who have demonstrated a clear focus on executing their innovative solutions over the past 12 weeks. As mobile penetration continues to increase in Asia, and as part of CIMB's efforts to extend mobile financial solutions to our target customers including the unbanked population, these innovations become more critical to the financial services industry in Asia.” Shahrul Nazri bin Abdul Rahim, Senior Managing Director and Group Head of CIMB Group Corporate Development said. “CIMB, as a firm advocate of banking technology and financial innovation, are looking forward to collaborate with one or more of the FinTech startups featured here today. Ultimately, these FinTech solutions will transform how we service and interact with our customers and clients across the region, creating an ecosystem for 24/7 mobile and online banking products that are not only fast and efficient, but also safe and secure for our customers.”

Future of FinTech

In a PwC report released early this year, 75%* of surveyed industry respondents said that the most important challenge of FinTech will be in meeting the growing demand from increasingly digital native customers for exceptional user experience from their financial services providers. Today’s startups showcase how their solutions can close this gap by offering enhanced accessibility, convenience and tailored products.

“Disintermediation is FinTech’s most powerful weapon, though it is important to recognise that helping customers bypass traditional financial services processes is more often a byproduct than the primary goal of these startups. What we see within the financial services ecosystem is the coming together of traditional players and startups who share a common focus on the end-customer. FinTech startups play a crucial role in identifying service gaps and inefficiencies and coming up with innovative solutions to make the customer’s life better. The onus is on traditional players to harness the brainpower of these startups and collaborate to bring innovative solutions to market faster and rewrite the financial services rulebook together. Startupbootcamp offers a great platform to help facilitate this coming together of expertise and resources.” said Antony Eldridge, FinTech and Financial Services Leader, PwC Singapore