On June 13 and 14 Belfasts pubs will be entertaining a slightly different audience to the usual onslaught of debauched hen parties and slurring stags. Believe it or not it is where SWIFT will gear its collaborative efforts towards marrying innovative business ideas with bank and venture capital funding via Innotribe, its shared utility for collaborative innovation. The +100 person event will start formally with a conference at the Belfast Titanic (symbolic of navigating the financial system through the proverbial icebergs), followed by groupings of entrepreneurs and funders at four pubs around the city to further collaborate on new business ideas.
Innotribe, whose role to foster innovation in business through a collaborative approach has perhaps been a long time coming (the initiative is only three-years old), serves as a shared utility leveraging the biggest member owned utility in the world, SWIFT.
Innotribe has been grouping people together at events like Sibos in collaborative ways in order to enlighten them about new trends such as those in the technology space. As ideas are shared and co-created, they are incubated and it is then determined whether they will receive funding. The lucky ones will be pushed forward as a pilot and some may be carried forward.
The Start Up challenges such as the one that will take place in Belfast have had a lot of success, says Matteo Rizzi, part of the innovation team at SWIFT. The first such challenge took place in Sibos in Toronto last year in order to bridge the gap between the start-up businesses and the financial industry. Banks may not be equipped to understand whats going on in the early stages of a start up industry which is usually more disruptive in terms of the impact it could have on the wider business activity or industry. We can incubate those ideas so that they are contained and their impact on the wider business is minimal. New business ideas are brought together across the Fintech area, including in payments, securities, standardization and infrastructure.
Prior to the events, which combines the conference and the start-up challenge, the Innotribe network of 100 judges finds and vets startups online. Using a 100 judges the utility brings the best 10 early stage start-ups and the five best grown ups or innovators to events like the one to be held Belfast. The banks and venture capital providers can direct these start ups to their own institutions. Following Sibos in Toronto, the initiative took the step of regionalizing the events New York, Singapore, Toronto and Belfast and the best of each will fly to Osaka to pitch in front of the financial audience. If their idea is interesting we will bring it into our incubator and help it to grow, says Rizzi. But one bank cannot just take an idea and run with it this is part of the collaborative innovation, where ideas are incubated.
The incubator includes a SWIFT product called mystandards. We launched it a couple of weeks ago in New York. Its nothing revolutionary but its still an innovative way to manage our standards collaboratively, says Kosta Peric, head of Innovation at SWIFT. There is another, more disruptive financial application – codenamed App 15, which is in the incubation phase and is geared towards providing information over multiple applications to various parts of the industry. Custodians are a good example of firms providing applications in the cloud and we are testing to see which business could be run on that Swift-run application, says Peric. In effect a digital asset grid will transform the role of banks from loan providers to safe-keepers of digital information that has a value held by a bank, which could then vet the reputation of the start-up or company in a similar way to how Ebay works.
Another product in the incubator phase is Dragonfly (codename), which provides notification of corporate actions as a partnership with a handful of technology start-ups in order to stamp the corporate actions flowing into the securities eco system and streamline the corporate actions flow from the processor to the different users. Innotribe has put some money there. This example is about helping with the new technology in business to make these businesses more efficient, says Rizzi.
Through an open collaborative model people can submit ideas through www.innotribe.com. Sponsors of the Belfast event include Cisco, Russias Sberbank and Invest Northern Ireland. The Belfast event will feature key Ignitors or lateral thinkers who will bring refreshing and different perspectives to business, says Peric. We have professionals in the team to collaborate in fun and engaging ways. We look at peoples opinions and find new ways to engage. Apart from the fun stuff in Belfast there will be a conference with themes such as innovation processes and new product management.
The last event was in Singapore in April and another was held New York in January. Each event produces two winners who will get tickets to Osaka to pitch in the finals where they get airtime and an audience with professionals, says Rizzi.
Now in its third year running Innotribe has turned revenue from mystandards and the potential for new products and new sources of revenue continues.
(JDC)