It’s amazing how much the financial industries have evolved. The way we transact business has never been smoother.
Financial companies are known for not being particularly innovative. But fintech startups have forced the industry to catch up. And partnerships between financial companies and fintech startups open even more opportunities.
Read more »Behind the scenes, insurance providers use technology that customers don’t see. They have traditionally been conservative in their technology choices. But now, insurance companies openly invest in advanced insurtech. As well as the startups behind it. And it’s becoming their way to compete and give a better service.
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…And it’s a wrap! The European leg of Money 20/20 in Amsterdam was a wild success. The world’s largest marketplace for fintech ideas and innovations grew in maturity. Fintech scaleups seemed to outnumber startups. A sign that the fintech industry is growing and developing.
Read more »We talk with a lot of interesting people every day (definitely one of the best perks of the job!). We learn every day from these smart people and their experiences and thought why not share all that with you. Cue our new monthly webinar series.
The first six episodes focus on collaboration and specifically piloting. In each episode we have two guests from startups and one from banks, insurance companies or other corporations, who talk about the different parts of the collaboration journey from the first contact to life after the pilot.
While we are waiting for the next episode (live on the 5th of September), I thought I would gather together some of the learnings from the series. I have to emphasize the word ’some’ as it is impossible to fit everything into one post, and I highly recommend checking out the series here for all of the learnings.
The best innovations come from collaboration. Yet most attempts at collaboration fail. Most corporates blame the lack of strategic alignment or maturity. Most startups blame bureaucracy and internal politics.
And they’re both right: most of the time, there’s some building block missing. When you buy furniture, you wouldn’t leave half of the pieces “for later”. But with collaboration, that often happens. Neither startups nor corporations come with an Ikea-like manual.
That’s why we’ve decided to put together the elements of startup-corporation collaboration. After 25+ programs, we’ve seen a lot of what can go well, and a lot of what can go wrong. And many of the pitfalls are predictable, to some extent.
We have done 26 programs so far, but still, each new program makes us as excited as if it was the first one. And the same thing happened again with our latest program: startup accelerator with OTP Bank.
Now it has already been a month since the Demo Day and the end of the program itself. While the collaboration still continues, it’s a good time to look back and reflect on what happened.
Last summer when we started designing this accelerator, we mapped our partner’s OTP Bank’s needs with them – like we do with every collaboration program, be it for a bootcamp, a three-month accelerator, or continuous startup-innovation support. Read more »