Innovation is an integral part of the ING Group’s values. It therefore comes as no surprise to see ING Belgium en Netherland presenting the fourth edition of the ING FinTech Village today.
This is a start-up accelerator programme intended to bring innovative solutions to the market .
This year, no fewer than 121 start-ups operating in the financial sector applied for a place on the accelerator programme, now being run by ING for the fourth year in succession. The seven selected will have the opportunity to work for 4 months with their sponsor on testing their products in a banking environment. Next to this collaboration between the business stakeholders from ING and the start up, ING offers a range of masterclasses and access to a mentorpool to support the start ups in scaling their business.
The collaboration may likewise result in a commercial partnership with ING, as it has happened in the past to several participating start-ups.
The conditions for start-ups to participate were a little different this year; ING wanted to address businesses that were more mature (“scale-ups”), more likely to offer innovations that could be used quickly on a large scale.
The four themes highlighted this year by the FinTech Village are
The Instant Bank: Instant advice, instant everything. Looking for personal experiences that are driven by data analysis, the internet of things and AI;
The Open Bank: Going beyond the traditional. Helping us to push the boundaries of today's financial services;
The Secure Bank: The future of safe & secure. Looking for groundbreaking solutions in the field of biometrics, cybersecurity, regtech and risk modelling;
The SME Bank: Rethinking the business bank. Looking for (non-) financial services for SMEs with the emphasis on data insight, risk modeling and financial business management
A win-win situation for everyone
David Rasson, Centre of Expertise Lead Innovation for Belgium and The Netherlands: “With the launch of this fourth edition of the ING FinTech Village, ING is maintaining the dynamic initiated between fintechs and banks in a context where the two parties demonstrate the will to undertake a sustained collaboration”. Partnering with a bank like ING enables fintechs to reap concrete expertise, quite apart from the fact that the bank offers them a platform from which they can reach a large number of real of clients and therefore grow more rapidly. Establishing such partnerships with fintechs is also very much to ING’s advantage: as Erik Van Den Eynden, CEO of ING in Belgium, emphasises, “the combination of their creativity and their technical skills with our knowledge and our customer network can really make a difference”.
Start-ups selected for the fourth edition of the FinTech Village
Exate / UK- Exate is a B2B RegTech firm specialising in data protection and data privacy. They offer a data privacy and data protection solution that provides an automated “passport control” check as data enters an application. This allows for the safe use of Cloud-based and third-party applications, as well as compliance with privacy regulations (including GDPR).
Finux / Germany- By linking and interpreting business accounts and accounting in combination with publicly available information, FINUX provides a holistic overview of one’s company.
Minna Technologies / Sweden - Minna Technologies has developed a platform to manage all your subscriptions. It gives the user a clear overview of all ongoing subscriptions by analysing the banking transactions of the user. Minna also allows customers to cancel existing subscriptions as well as enhance them by finding better alternatives for energy, mobile, broadband, insurance, banking products & many more products.
SPIN Analytics / UK - SPIN Analytics brings digital transformation in Credit Risk Management by leveraging predictive analytics, AI and ML techniques on Big Data. It aims to make it extremely simple for Financial Institutions and Corporations to significantly upgrade and fully automate their Credit Risk Management.
Stride ai / USA - Stride.ai leverages AI and NLP to provide a platform that enables development and deployment of enterprise-scale intelligent applications to automate redundant complex tasks within financial institutions (intelligent extraction of information from documents, or specific problems in financial services industry, such as KYC and regulatory risk modelling, e.g.).
Tookitaki/ Singapore - Tookitaki is providing enterprise software solutions that create sustainable compliance programs for the financial services industry. Their mission is to provide machine learning-powered regulatory compliance solutions that are auditable, scalable and actionable.
Zonefox/ UK - ZoneFox helps organizations around the globe protect their business-critical data against the insider threat. Their technology provides 360 visibility of activities around data - the who, what, where and when - by monitoring user behavior and data flow, instantly alerting to any anomalous or malicious activity.
The partners of the ING FinTech Village - with Deloitte and Innotribe as the principal partners and B-Hive, IBM, Smartfin Capital and Scaleups.eu as others - renewed their engagement in the ING FinTech Village with great enthusiasm.
The selected start-ups will have the opportunity to present their proof of concept during the Demo Day on 27 June 2019.