FinTech: Bringing Innovation to the Recovering Financial Services Industry

Kira M. Newman Jul 18, 2012 Tweet

Today, six New York startups are unveiling innovations that could make their way into the country’s largest banks.

The FinTech Innovation Lab, now in its second year, partners with banks and financial institutions like American Express, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs to put startups through a 12-week accelerator program. Each startup is mentored by three banks, whose executives provide feedback on their product.

The program’s goal is to help innovative startups break into an industry that is otherwise hard to penetrate and made up of huge, regulated entities. Banks and financial organizations have many different divisions and operations around the world, and the mentoring can help guide startups toward the best division to target.

The partner banks are attending today’s demo day, and if they like what they see, they may be interested in developing the startups’ innovations in-house. Here are the six companies:

True Office: Mobile games that make mandatory compliance and ethics training fun, like Workplace Harassment Prevention, founded by Adam Sodowick, the creator of 50 Lessons, a library of key business lessons from CEOs.
Visible Market: Creators of StockTouch, an iPhone and iPad app for visualizing financial markets, with over 25,000 users.
BillGuard: A bill monitoring tool that sends alerts for suspicious charges on your credit or debit card and works with over 5,000 banks. Founded by serial entrepreneur Yaron Samid and cybersecurity expert Raphael Ouzan.
Centrifuge: A data analytics tool to analyze risk in various industries, including financial services, national security, pharmaceutical testing, and fraud. Led by CEO Renee Lorton, a long-time finance professional.
Digital Reasoning: Creators of Synthesys, a tool for gleaning insights from big data and used by several US government agencies. Founder Tim Estes has been the company’s CEO for over 9 years.
EidoSearch: A tool for financial professionals to interpret data: it detects similar patterns from the past, like a stock price slightly falling then rising. Cofounded by PhD Steven Zhang and financial professional David Kedmey.