Five FinTech Firms Advance to Sibos for SWIFT's Innotribe Challenge

At SWIFT’s Innotribe regional round in New York, five young financial technology firms advanced to the final round, which will be held at this year’s Sibos in Boston beginning September 29, for the chance to win $50,000.

Three winning companies—Epiphyte, LendingRobot and Standard Treasury—are characterized by SWIFT as early-stage startups, firms less than three years old or with less than $1 million in combined revenue and investments over the past 12 months, and two winning companies—Juntos Finanzas and Wallaby Financial—are characterized as growth-stage innovators, those who fall above the aforementioned criteria.

Epiphyte presented a product called cBridge, which bridges traditional finance with cryptofinance, allowing banks to integrate with cryptocurrencies over protocols such as SWIFT, and automatically generates sales contracts between buyers and sellers directly. LendingRobot’s eponymous product automates loan selection and investment in peer lending, allowing individual investors to compete with institutional investors in selecting new opportunities quickly. The product also continuously reinvests idle cash to increase returns. Standard Treasury presented a commercial banking API platform, which wraps internal bank information and payment systems around data, ACH, wire, FX and other liquidity management and payment tools. These systems are then offered to bank customers via APIs.

As for the growth-stage innovators, Juntos Finanzas offers an automated engagement service through text messaging to retail banking clients in markets where clients may not be used to banking, and thus the tool helps these clients become more comfortable with actually utilizing their newly-opened accounts. Lastly, Wallaby Financial’s Wallaby Wallet is a digital and proxy card wallet that helps consumers choose the right credit card at the right time to maximize rewards, and it provides financial institutions with a way to market to these customers at the point of transaction.