In other FinTech news, Electra is adding an ‘NAV workspace’ to its reconciliation offering.
FinTech Innovation Lab to Help Eight Entrepreneurs
Eight financial technology vendors with a range of new offerings including a know your customer (KYC) combination with distributed ledger technology, have been accepted into a 12-week mentorship program in the third annual FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific, officials say.
Other startups participating in the lab are working on wealth management solutions, fraud prevention using algorithms based in Chinese-characters to flag risk and data visualization innovations.
The lab was launched by Accenture in Hong Kong in June 2014, is a collaboration between Accenture and 12 financial institutions: Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BNP Paribas, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Credit Suisse, Generali, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan, Maybank, Morgan Stanley, Sun Life Financial and UBS.
The lab also has the support of: China CITIC Bank International, China Construction Bank (Asia), Macquarie, Nomura, Standard Chartered, Siam Commercial Bank, Societe Generale, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group (SMFG).
The startups will receive senior-level mentoring via the top financial services institutions over 12 weeks through a series of workshops at Cyberport, panel discussions and coaching sessions on product and business-development, officials say. By the end of the program, five of the eight participants will be chosen to make presentations before potential investors and financial industry executives.
The 2016 FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific participants are:
KYC-Chain: The vendor uses “biometrics, emerging technologies and distributed ledger (blockchain) tech to streamline onboarding processes and provide consensus on identity,” according to the press release about the participants. “This enables front line sales and compliance officers to cost-effectively onboard and continuously interact with retail clients and other financial institutions in a secure, consumer-centric encrypted environment. The Singapore-based company’s platform is live and in production at several banks.”
Lattice: This vendor has developed portfolio support software for investors, portfolio managers, risk managers and traders. Based in Hong Kong, Lattice’s platform “contains a view-driven portfolio optimizer and flexible portfolio analytics to help clarify investors’ rationale for precise and quick decisions and implementation. It helps to discover and precisely manipulate intentional or unintentional exposures, to commodities, currencies, sectors or even countries,” according to officials.
ChartIQ: This startup offers “securities-specific financial chart and data visualization products in HTML5,” officials say. Based in Charlottesville, Va., the vendor has offices in New York, London, and Cyprus, and reports that it has more than 125 customers around the world. “Its time-series based charting solutions provide charting and data visualization that can help investment banks, brokerages, trading platforms, and financial portals move from legacy technologies to the future of HTML5,” officials add.
HedgeSPA: This startup offers a cloud-based investment analytics platform to help investment professionals “tap the Internet to improve their performance,” officials say. “With offices in Singapore and California, HedgeSPA applies big data techniques to asset selection. It combines forward-looking market scenarios to reduce portfolio drawdown by as much as 75% and automates day-to-day portfolio management tasks.”
Privé Managers: This startup is offering an integrated wealth and asset management platform “powered by a proprietary bionic advisory engine,” officials say. “The Hong Kong-based startup’s platform is already being used by several global financial institutions in Asia and Europe.”
Seerene: This vendor offers “insights, actionable analytics and transparency to improve efficiency and streamline costs,” officials say.
SIORK: Based in Tokyo, this startup helps financial institutions “evaluate customer data and detect criminal activities such as fraud and money laundering in both developed and emerging markets,” officials say. The vendor says that its offering “automatically learns customer behaviors, identifies suspicious events and provides a real-time transaction blocking mechanism to the customer for crime prevention.” It also uniquely offers a “comprehensive Chinese-character fuzzy matching algorithm with artificial intelligence learning ability that enables global financial institutions to analyze Chinese-character based raw data, such as customer names, and unstructured message information,” officials add.
TNG Wallet: This vendor offers an e-wallet for payment to merchants, person-to-person fund transfer, bank transfers and year-round cash withdrawal.
The FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific is modelled on the initial 2010 program via Accenture and the Partnership Fund for New York City. That effort has been replication in London and Dublin, Ireland.
Electra Reconciliation to Feature ‘NAV Workspace’
Reconciliation solutions vendor Electra Information Systems is introducing “an intuitive and highly efficient NAV (net asset value) reconciliation workspace” that will load NAV-related data from any electronic source, vendor officials say.
The enhancements to the Electra Reconciliation solution follow “an in-depth understanding of how investment managers address the NAV reconciliation process,” Electra officials say.
The new feature targets investment managers using spreadsheets to reconcile a portfolio’s NAV, “a critical component of fund pricing, client billing and reporting,” officials say. Generally, the NAV reconciliation process involves manually gathering and populating NAV data into “multiple spreadsheets that contain complex formulas that are maintained and understood by just a few individuals within an organization. Data entry errors, security and control risk, and the lack of an exception management workflow are inherent to this process.”
Electra says that it’s offering aggregates and normalizes “both external and internal NAV-related data based on user-defined rules … [allowing] firms to group together the various NAV buckets that include securities transactions, positions, receivables, liabilities and other cash balances to gain greater visibility into the makeup of a fund’s total net assets.”
The new Electra Reconciliation function “identifies the materiality of each bucket’s variance as it relates to the overall NAV of a fund, allowing users to focus immediately on those that hold the largest exposure,” officials say.
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