BNP Paribas Personal Finance has partnered with SuperTech and Bruntwood SciTech to create the SuperTech Serendip Incubator to fast-track innovative ideas that will revolutionise the banking and financial sector, improve financial processes, and provide economic opportunities for tech innovators.

BNP Paribas Personal Finance business has been based in the West Midlands for 50 years and the organisation places importance on the ability to work in an agile way and challenging traditional approaches. “As a leading provider of consumer finance and a major employer in the region, innovation is key to our growth ambitions,” says Stephen Hunt, CEO of BNP Paribas Personal Finance. “We believe that collaboration with the FinTech sector can really create opportunities and momentum and we welcome the SuperTech Serendip Incubator to spark new ideas to deliver digital solutions that put the customer experience at the heart of what we do.”

“We have been really impressed with the richness and strength of the FinTech and startup landscape here in the Midlands. FinTech talent is not only based in London. That’s why we were keen to give our support to the Serendip incubator,” adds Andrea Tittel, Director of Innovation at BNP Paribas Personal Finance.

The selection phase of the SuperTech Serendip Incubator was open to any UK-based SME business that has a digital tech solution, regardless of their current market, with a particular focus on those based within the West Midlands. This year, SuperTech was looking for businesses and entrepreneurs in the fields of underwriting automation, data visualisation and chatbots, in a bid to build partnerships between technology businesses and financial institutions.

“The challenges were chosen at the Executive level as they represented business challenges we are currently grappling with. The challenge around automated underwriting processes and decisions, for instance, was chosen because our organisation still has quite a number of manual processes in place. We wanted to challenge ourselves whether we really needed that manual check, or if we can work in a smarter way and automate the process. We want to make it part of our culture that we look outside our organisation for inspiration, in order to do things completely differently,” Tittel continued.

The successful applicants of this year’s 2022 include:

CHALLENGE 1: AUTOMATED UNDERWRITING PROCESSES AND DECISIONS
● Credicar: Provides an AI-driven, pre-approval credit decision engine for consumer and SME finance, creating efficiencies and enabling growth for lenders by automating manual underwriting.
● Dion.Money: A Birmingham-based start-up developing high technology electronic money and financial products & services using an innovative AI engine to provide hyper-personalised solutions to move away from todays ‘one-size-fits-all’ financial products and services.
● The Data Company: An experienced software development company assisting businesses with their digital transformation journey by unravelling complex data and rapidly building applications to reveal powerful insights and automate processes.
● NueHeights: A start-up led by experienced tech entrepreneurs with a machine learning system ready to be deployed and tested within a financial services setting.

CHALLENGE 2: DATA VISUALISATION
● Bellrock: Provides data solutions bringing together multiple different data sources via the automation of data sources and delivering a software solution without the need for large development teams.
● Site Lantern: Provides advanced data analytics services and impeccable business intelligence equip businesses to reap the countless possibilities of data-driven business execution.

CHALLENGE 3: CHATBOTS
● The Bot Forge: A UK-based conversational AI agency that designs, builds, launches or supports enterprise-grade chatbots, voice assistants, and conversational IVR solutions to help organisations benefit from conversational technologies.

The winners get 6 months of tailored business support from validation to commercialisation and full-time access to the coworking space at Innovation Birmingham. They can access the FinTech expert team and key stakeholders from BNP Paribas Personal Finance, and meet up with other programme participants to connect, collaborate and share problems and solutions.

"We are extremely excited at being accepted on the cohort; I believe that to be exposed to BNP Paribas Personal Finance at this early stage in our exciting journey, being able to share their customer experience, will push us to reach our dream to offer the best possible personalised financial products,” remarked Ian Clark, Co-founder @Dion.Money.

The incubator is part financed by the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership, with match funding from BNP Paribas Personal Finance and business support services from Bruntwood SciTech.

“In Serendip, we bring together early stage businesses with corporates and mature enterprises, enabling the corporate to access fresh approaches from entrepreneurs to solve their business challenges and for entrepreneurs to gain case studies and new routes to market. By co-locating various programmes within our campus at Innovation Birmingham, early stage businesses have the opportunity to collaborate and support each other,” Jamie Clyde, Southern Region Director, Bruntwood SciTech added.

Now the work really begins. Over the next six months, the winners will tackle the pressing digital challenges facing the financial services sector.