A recent industry report focused on Fintech adoption and partnerships, projected partnerships with Indian Fintech companies to rise to 95% this year from 42% in 2016. Accelerators, incubators and innovation labs partnerships have seen a remarkable rise in the past few years globally and in India.
Access to space to set-up, scale up guidance and the chance to test and validate ideas. Corporate partnerships with Fintech startups have also grown manifold, including bank and fintech partnerships, which have now moved beyond typical ‘off-the-shelf’ or plug-in solutions.
Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT and even distributed ledger technologies like blockchain have been used by Fintechs to bring in new solutions to drive financial services into the next era. While there is no denying that these technologies have always been around, it is the applications built on the technology layer that has made bank Fintech partnerships a success.
At the recently concluded Demo Day of YES FINTECH – a platform for YES Bank and Fintech startups to co-create innovative solutions for the bank's 2 million + customers, we got a glimpse of 10 such solutions addressing banking use cases across capital markets, cybersecurity, smart contracts, alternative credit scoring, facial recognition and social media payments.
6 of the Fintechs completed their PoC testing using the Bank’s digital banking infrastructure including access to 200+ APIs and will now integrate their solutions into the bank while 4 are now testing their PoCs in closed user groups.
The solutions included Numberz, a comprehensive cash flow management solution for small and medium businesses providing invoice discounting trade remittances and expense management solutions. The solution is also GST ready making it a great solution for small business owners. Numberz, which is going to start working with the bank and its clients, also recently raised a USD 3 million funding from Sequoia post completion of the cohort.
Another solution which caught the eye was Signzy which is working to digitize banking processes including the issuance of electronic bank guarantees and trade/CMS onboarding. The partnership will enable the bank to run a complete digital KYC up to the beneficial owner level check. Signzy will also use their AI to flag suspicious transactions.
Rupeeseed a capital markets solution is not only providing a robo advisory and analytics engine for capital market services but also enhance the functionalities of the YES Securities platform. The solutions being integrated by the bank include a very interesting seamless social media banking app being developed by Paykey from Israel who are completing their first integration in India with YES FINTECH. While there are several biometric solutions which have been launched in the past few years FRS Labs solution certainly takes it a notch higher.
This startup has created a face recognition technology to automate identity and fraud checks in the bank. A photo of the bearer in the Database will be matched with a selfie taken at the time of a transaction to verify the identity of the user. The face recognition technology will also be used during account opening for creating alternative KYC processes.
It was also heartening to see more than 100 corporate partners attend the presentations and quite a few corporates expressing interesting in adopting these solutions further outlining the success of the YES FINTECH program in particular and the accelerator format as a whole.
For fintechs and platform tech solutions around the world who missed out on cohort 1, the bank is inviting applications from fintechs around the world focusing on solutions across AI & ML, blockchain, cybersecurity, internet of things and S-a-a-S solutions for its second cohort from September 11, 2017
More details on www.yesfintech.com.
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