value of being able to hobnob with banking executives. “Each company got access to two or three banks as mentors,” Gotsch says. “Everybody understood this was about giving feedback to the startups. It was the [financial services] customers helping shape the products that the industry needs.”
Here are the members of the inaugural FinTech Innovation Lab:
Zipmark: An app that allows users to pay everything from their rent to their grocery bills via an electronic checking system that the startup says is faster than PayPal and costs less for payees than accepting credit or debit cards.
CB Insights: A provider of private-company data that’s used by lenders, private equity players, media outlets (including Xconomy), and more. CB has developed a technology called Mosaic, which assesses the health of private companies based on tweets and Facebook entries from employees, press articles, financing rounds, and other events.
Syphr: Developer of RateMatch, a Web-based system to help consumers determine their credit-worthiness, and CreditMart, a suite of back-office tools for lenders.
Lenddo: A social-media platform that borrowers in developing countries can use to manage their financial profiles and connect with institutional lenders.
Hanweck Associates: Risk-management tools that can squeeze the time it takes to complete complex financial analyses from days to hours.
Aqumin: Turns dense, mind-numbing spreadsheets into 3D visual depictions that allow portfolio managers, traders, and risk analysts to easily spot trends in their proprietary data.
