What better way to measure current fintech trends than looking at the list of new startups at innovation accelerator labs? Recent class rosters from a Zurich and a London lab are heavy on payments, data and security – but also features digital assets upcomers.
At Zurich’s F10 FinTech Incubator & Accelerator, a second batch of 10 yearly startups are now joining their year of guaranteed warmth. Among them is DigiShares, provider of “a white-label platform for processes related to issuance, corporate management, and trading of tokenized securities”, according to the F10 press release. Another pupil of the new Zurich class is Crymbo, ”a unique SaaS-B2B-Network concept, tailor made for financial institutions allowing them to easily offer digital assets”.
FQX is to offer infrastructure for electronic promissory notes, in “a banking-grade DLT environment”, seeking to enable “liquidity crossing borders and markets without rule books”. (On this short description, the idea doesn’t sound all that different from that of Sweden’s Enigio, interviewed by us earlier.) Zurich’s F10 startups also include Norbloc, intending to enable “individuals, organizations and regulators to effectively manage and securely share verified Know Your Customer data via Blockchain”.
AI will collect data
Generally, a big topic among startups right now seems to be the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) for extracting various information from large and possibly unstructured amounts data. The 20 new picks for Accenture’s London Fintech Innovation Lab include Vested Impact, claiming to analyse “the true impact of your investments on society” (not mentioned here by which technologies). Other common areas currently are data security solutions, and various solutions around payments and retail banking. Among the latter, several could well have been enabled by the increasing competition, “open banking”, fostered under the revised EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2).