That set of mortarboards you might have noticed sailing through the air this week may have come from the celebrations of startups graduating from the VC Fintech Accelerator Empowered by FIS this week. The occasion was marked by the accelerator’s Demo Days Event during which all ten companies – two international startups and eight U.S.-based firms – presented their technologies before an audience of more than 350 investors and financial services professionals.
“These companies have demonstrated their capacity to bring world class solutions to solving problem and challenges in the FinTech space,” accelerator managing director, Wayne Miller said. Miller credited the companies for their proven ability to execute, “clearly validating their value proposition to enable banks to better serve their customers in the digital world.”
Among the ten companies in this year’s cohort was Finovate alum, Alpharank, which won Best of Show in its Finovate debut this spring. The company leverages the kind of social graph technology successfully pioneered by Facebook – and effectively used by telecoms like Sprint to reduce customer churn – to help financial services get new customers and retain current ones. Alpharank was also among the companies earning special recognition from attendees. Quoted in Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, FIS VP Jack Novielli highlighted the company for its ability to provide key banks with key insights into their customers. “As banks become more pointed in their marketing who do they best market to,” he told the Democrat Gazette. How does the bank spend its marketing dollar wiser?”
Alpharank was founded in San Francisco, California. The company won Best of Show for its live demonstration of its Customer Influence Mapping technology, which enables banks and credit unions to turn their historic transaction data into predictive social graph data. The company includes 500 Startups, Malcolm CasSelle, Payment Ventures, Right Side Capital Management, and Tony VanBrackle among its investors. Brian Ley is CEO.
The ten companies selected this year were the top selections from an applicant pool of 295 applications from the U.S. and 39 other countries around the world.Making the cut along with Alpharank were:
- Alto IRA
- Bond.AI
- eGiftify
- Hedgehog
- Omnetrium
- Plinqit
- Quotanda
- WalletFi
- Xplanr Analytics
Sponsored by Little Rock, Arkansas’ The Venture Center, the VC FinTech Accelerator provides a 12-week accelerator program for startups developing innovative technologies for the financial services industry. The program includes mentoring and training from financial services professionals from FIS and The Venture Center, as well as exposure to the program’s 30 financial institution partners. The Venture Center notes its member companies have created more than 445 jobs, more than $28 million in revenue, and raised $39 million in equity funding in the three years since its inception.