Which are The Hottest #FinTech #VC's in Europe Backing the Next Big Breakthrough

These are the main #FinTech investors in Europe.  

The Hottest FinTech Investors in Europe to Back the Next Big Breakthrough in FinTech

Big breaks across industries don’t usually happen without VCs backing them. Success stories in most cases have co-authors and in 2016, VCs are the ones to provide a financial fuel to bright entrepreneurs and ideas with a high disruptive potential.

While some VCs are operating across regions, some have a particular geographical focus. Since Europe is one of the world’s hubs of innovation, the UK and other countries in Europe and in the Nordic region have their dedicated investors. The US is also rich on FinTech-focused VCs that have a keen interest in discovering the next big thing in FinTech. 

Aside from VCs, there are also FinTech accelerators accountable for success stories, both in the US and in Europe.

This time, let’s look at some of the hottest FinTech investors in Europe that also invest in other regions along with European venture allocations.

BBVA Ventures

Description: BBVA Ventures provides funding and expertise to promising technology companies disrupting financial services. The firm works with the entrepreneurs and co-investors in the US and EU, thereby becoming a long-term partner in their success.

Stage/size of investments: Early-stage venture to later-stage venture investments

Segments: FinTech, financial services

Portfolio of payments companies: Prosper, DocuSign, Simple, Radius, Coinbase, SumUp, Personal Capital, Ribbit Capital

Santander InnoVentures

Description: The company launched its $100-million fund in July 2014 to get closer to the wave of disruptive innovation in the FinTech space. Santander InnoVentures aims to support the digital revolution to make sure its customers around the world benefit from the latest know-how and innovations across the banking group’s geographies.

Stage/size of investments: Small companies and startups

Segments: FinTech exclusive

Portfolio: iZettle, MyCheck, Ripple, Kabbage, Cyanogen

Anthemis Group

Description: Anthemis Group is the venture investment and advisory firm at the center of a vibrant ecosystem of startups and financial institutions dedicated to reinventing financial services for the digital world. The firm boasts of being committed investors, thoughtful advisors, active conveners and dedicated problem solvers who share a passion for technology and a belief in the transformative power of digital financial services.

Stage/size of investments: Seed, early-stage ventures and later-stage venture investments

Segments: Retail banking & consumer finance, business & corporate banking, payments, wealth & asset management, capital markets & trading, insurance & risk management, data, technology & infrastructure

Portfolio of payments companies: Moven, Simple, Vericash, Fidor Bank

Index Ventures

Description: Index Ventures backs the best and most ambitious entrepreneurs and help them make their ideas real and lasting. The entrepreneurs it teams up with were born to build their businesses—it is their life’s mission. Working side-by-side with these visionaries makes Index Ventures incredibly optimistic about the future. The transformative companies they’re building, include Dropbox, Etsy, Sonos, SoundCloud, Flipboard, King, BlaBlaCar, Squarespace, Just Eat, Lookout, Hortonworks, Nasty Gal, Pure Storage, Supercell, Criteo, Funding Circle and many others.

Stage/size of investments: Index invests in various multiple stages including seed, early-stage venture, later-stage venture and private equity investments.

Segments: Information technology, life sciences

Portfolio of payment companies: iZettle, Clinkle, TransferWise, Funding Circle, Xapo, Swipely, BitPay, iZettle, CrowdRise, Funding Circle

AXA Strategic Ventures

Description: AXA Strategic Ventures’ commitment to founders and teams is to enhance value and maximize impact, therefore enabling you to engage individuals, customers and businesses. The firm maintains long-term, strategic focus. In other words, AXA Strategic Ventures want to help you become real players in the sharing economy—when you succeed, they succeed.

Stage/size of investments: All stages

Segments: Alternative business models, big data, climate change, financial inclusion and health

Portfolio: FundShop, WIDMEE, FLYR, Policy Genius

Will Artificial Intelligence have an Uber Effect on Finance? - bobsguide.com

Yea, but "On the other hand, the front office is an area where Sutton believed that human interaction is necessary as finance is an industry that is very relationship centric as people leverage financial advisors and wealth managers to provide customised advice."

This from Bobsguide.com 

Will Artificial Intelligence have an Uber Effect on Finance?

Following the recent breakthrough of artificial intelligence (AI), many have been wondering how this form of technology can be implemented in the financial services. As newer products emerge, it questions how popular the traditional legacy financial institutions will remain or perhaps, fintech startups will gain an increased number of customers, in a similar way to how Uber affected the taxi industry. bobsguide spoke to Josh Sutton, global head of artificial intelligence practice at technology company Sapient about how AI is set to transform business and finance, alongside how banks are already implementing a technology that has been around for 30+ years, but its true potential hasn't been seen until now.

According to CNBC, nearly $700 million has been invested in artificial intelligence over the past two years and Sutton explored how it is important to work with the C-suite of a company to give them a roadmap of the capabilities AI has as it provides a way to increase revenue, reduce cost and minimise risk. "Increased investment in AI has been over 30 years coming and technology has caught up to the conceptual promise of what could be done. If you look at all the products deployed by machine learning today, these are not new concepts by any means, but the processing power of the machines has finally reached a point where it is cost effective and time effective enough to generate real results from that information," Sutton highlighted.

Sutton continued to explain how AI has been extensively used by government and academic institutions, but banks have started to use it in order to monitor their risk related to illegal insider trading activities. A large global bank has already implemented AI instead of using the historical approach of having a team review trade information and police it in a human manner, Sutton revealed. "The platform that they built combined big data, machine learning and causal intelligence and that aggregates all the trade data and communication data from various traders and people they interact with across the various divisions."

Alongside this, artificial intelligence will benefit different parts of an organisation in different ways. Sutton said that leveraging AI would "systematically accelerate certain portions of the core middle and back offices to automate everything from trade processing through to KYC and AML." This ties into the long standing debate that has been occurring over the past year about whether human workers will be needed if technology becomes increasingly sophisticated. The stage that we are at the moment is that there needs to be a mixture of tasks completed by people and the rest by machine learning, but Sutton explored how the number of people required to fulfil the function of the middle and back office will eliminate the need for people.

"I think there will always be a need for people to identify and review the high priority activities but I do think that a substantial amount of work that is done today that is relatively trainable can be replaced via technology over the coming decade," Sutton said. On the other hand, the front office is an area where Sutton believed that human interaction is necessary as finance is an industry that is very relationship centric as people leverage financial advisors and wealth managers to provide customised advice. "I do believe that artificial intelligence will enable financial advisors to be much more effective in their interactions so, if you look at the job of a financial advisor, a significant portion of their time goes to understanding their individual customers, what is going on in their lives and what advice they can provide."

"What you'll see in the traditional wealth group, financial advisors will be able to take on a greater number of clients and the entire industry will expand as it becomes a cost effective tool that people can have that they haven't traditionally. If you look at a good disruptive example, like Uber, the model has changed the way that the industry works and it has dramatically increased the amount of money that gets spent." Sutton predicts that this "Uber Effect" will occur with artificial intelligence and the financial industry, especially in the retail banking industry where there will be a blur between retail banks and wealth managers.

"I think what you're starting to see is a lot of fintech players trying to nibble around the edges of that," Sutton highlighted as he went on to say that artificial intelligence will be ubiquitous in our day to day life, so much so that you are not even aware that you are using AI. However, to get to this point, there are many obstacles that must be overcome, one which concerns how the financial services industry are focusing on big data when it comes to implementing AI, rather than seeing it as a business tool.

"Artificial intelligence is not a technology solution, it is a business solution."

http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2016/Feb/1/will-artificial-intelligence-have-an-uber-effect-on-finance.html?utm_source=bobsguide+Members+List&utm_campaign=db3997906c-bobsguide_Weekly_Top_Reads&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_72e1ba23ef-db3997906c-175545561&mc_cid=db3997906c&mc_eid=51ddccc4a5

Wall St. Courts #StartUps It Once May Have Ignored #FinTech @NYTimes

Wall St. Courts Start-Ups It Once May Have Ignored

On the first day of a hackathon at the Manhattan headquarters of Goldman Sachs, participants from the Wall Street bank showed up in suits. The programmers from Kensho, a start-up that had recently gotten money from Goldman, were there in jeans and ripped shirts.

The next day, many of the Goldman employees took off their jackets and ties. And the day after that, many of the Goldman employees were wearing the gray hoodies and Beats headphones that had been made especially for the event. (This being Goldman Sachs, the headphones were custom engraved — “GS Kensho Hackathon 2015” — to commemorate the occasion.)

The evolution of the dress code during the hackathon was one indication of the changing relationship between Wall Street banks like Goldman and start-ups like Kensho, a data analytics company, which received a $15 million investment late last year in a financing round led by Goldman.

In the past, Goldman and its big competitors kept their distance from start-ups like Kensho that were trying to disrupt the Wall Street business model — especially start-ups as young as Kensho, which was founded in 2013. Goldman and many other Wall Street banks have historically done most of their significant technological developments in-house, viewing their business as the product of decades of experience.

Wall St. Courts Start-Ups It Once May Have Ignored - NYTimes.com

Is David Gurle’s #Symphony a Big Threat to #Bloomberg? #FinTech

In late April
the fledgling Palo Alto, California–based company launched the beta
version of a network that it hopes will unshackle Wall Street from its
terminal obsession.

...

Symphony
is designed to be its own messaging platform and plug into all the
other tools that a financial professional might communicate through —
e-mail, internal chat network, text messaging. Gurle says there are
roughly 50,000 Symphony users today; a general market release will
follow in July, with the goal of growing to 100,000 users by the end of
the year. Content and workflows — to manage and execute trades, for
instance — will be added to the network in 2016, and Gurle plans to
build what he calls an App Store–like ecosystem that he hopes will
become a hosting ground for small, innovative fintech companies.



Beyond
openness — a quality the closed-box Bloomberg terminal is often accused
of not exhibiting — price should also make Symphony’s offering
attractive. Gurle says the service will cost no more than $30 a person
per month, placing it well below the $20,000 needed for an annual
Bloomberg subscription.



Symphony is backed by some of global
capital’s heaviest hitters: 15 sell- and buy-side institutions,
including asset manager BlackRock, hedge fund firm Citadel and Goldman
Sachs Group, pooled funds to provide it with $66 million in venture
capital late last year.



Read the article on Institutional Investor here: Is David Gurle’s Symphony a Big Threat to Bloomberg? | Institutional Investor

#FinTech: Bloomberg launches integrated Treasury and Risk Management Solution – will it be a game changer?

The details of the solution are still sketchy, but apparently Bloomberg has acquired a web-based off-the-shelf TMS aimed at the mid-market corporate segment, which will then be integrated with their trading platform (FXGO), market data and risk management platform (MARS). The cash management module comes with SWIFT integration, which is "a must" for TMS today. Comparing Bloomberg TRM® with the specialist systems (i.e. Reval, SunGard, WallStreet/IT2, Kyriba etc.) you should be able to achieve more seamless integration of market data, pricing, and online trading, while at the other side of the market ERP-based systems - such as SAP TRM - gives you the integration towards your ERP. For the specialist TRMs integration will have to be built for both sides.

See the whole article here: 

http://www.bobsguide.com/guide/news/2015/Feb/10/bloomberg-launches-integrated-treasury-and-risk-management-solution-will-it-be-a-game-changer.html?utm_source=Members+List&utm_campaign=de4257ede9-bobsguide_Weekly_Top_Reads&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_72e1ba23ef-de4257ede9-175545561&mc_cid=de4257ede9&mc_eid=51ddccc4a5

Behind the #FinTech buzz

What is Fin Tech? Very broadly, Fin Tech is “an economic industry composed of companies that use technology to make financial systems more efficient.” Sectors where Fin Tech has started to emerge include the following:

• Peer-to-peer lending (e.g. the previously mentioned Lending Club)
• Crowdfunding (Kickstarter)
• Algorithmic asset management (Wealthfront)
• Thematic investing (Motif Investing)
• Payments (Xoom)
• Data collection (2iQ Research)
• Credit scoring (Zest Finance)
• Education lending (Common Bond)

Investment in Fin Tech has been growing, with more than $3 billion invested since 2008 and growth projected to reach as high as $8 billion by 2018 according to Accenture.

One word that is often used in conjunction with Fin Tech is “disruption”. Just as the emergence of the internet brought the rise of Amazon and iTunes at the expense of book and record stores, Fin Tech is an expression of the possibility that technological advances can lead to new ways of doing business that either damage or alter traditional business plans.

Read the whole article here: Behind the Fin Tech buzz | Resource Investor