The event was held in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Friday 14 July, during the International Financial Congress (IFC). Hosted by the Bank of Russia, our general partner, the IFC is Russia's largest international financial forum.
All based in Moscow, the three winners are:
• Oz Forensics Oz Forensics helps financial institutions to reduce digital fraud risks and costs by automating KYC processes with image, video and biometric analysis.

• SCORISTA provides risk management assistance for non-bank lenders

• talkbank enables banking via messengers


The winning startups receive a 10,000 USD cash prize and invitations to attend Sibos, SWIFT’s annual global financial services conference, taking place from 16-19 October in Toronto. At the event, the startups will share the stage with FinTech experts, banks and financial institutions from across the globe, providing great insights on innovation happening in Russia.

“It was a pleasure for us to organise our first Startup Challenge in Russia,” says Kevin Johnson, Head of Innotribe Innovation Programmes at SWIFT. “It always great to see how keen the SWIFT community is to better understand FinTech innovation, no matter the location and whether we refer to its latest developments, benefits or the opportunities it can unlock. It was a real pleasure for us to provide expert mentoring and in-depth industry feedback to the 10 participating startups and we wish them all a lot of success in the future”.

“The FinTech ecosystem in Russia has been very active for the past few years”, adds Matthieu de Heering, Head of Russia, CIS and Mongolia at SWIFT. “I am very pleased that we were able to respond to the Russian banking community’s request to raise the profile of the startup community in Russia and provide additional global exposure to the three winners at Sibos Toronto. This was a great week and was most successful thanks to the support of the Bank of Russia, of Alfa-Bank, NSD and Sberbank, and of the Rosswift executive.”

Ms Olga N. Skorobogatova, deputy governor, Bank of Russia, said: “I congratulate all ten start-ups! The solutions I saw were very interesting, and we will be reaching out to many to explore further possible collaboration. I would like to thank Rosswift, its Innotribe task force (Alfa-Bank, NSD and Sberbank), and SWIFT, for such a successful first event!”

The Russian showcase was the second and last regional event to be held in 2017. Innotribe would like to take this opportunity to thank the ROSSWIFT (Russian National SWIFT Member and User Group), particularly the Rosswift Innotribe Task Force: the Bank of Russia, the National Settlement Depository, Sberbank, and Alfa-Bank which helped us organising this first Startup Challenge in the region. Special thanks to our sponsor Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and to Numa, Rusbase and Skolkovo for their support around the event.