Tackling Financial Service Industry Challenges at Full Speed

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The Financial Revolutionist had hoped to be in Boston this week for MassChallenge FinTech Refuel, a halfway-point check-in for the cohort of fintech start-ups participating in this year’s accelerator program. Instead, we were in front of a computer screen (like many of you) for the fully virtual event.

The annual Refuel event provides enterprise-readiness programming for the start-ups. This year it focused on marketing, sales, hiring, and building company culture. It’s also an opportunity for the community to share updates about the 1:1 enterprise/start-up partnerships established through the MassChallenge FinTech program. Each partnership is tackling specific challenges facing the financial services industry, such as intelligent payment processing and personalized financial planning. 

And wow. These start-ups have been a-movin’. We were impressed to hear of the progress made in just three months, from pilot projects to proofs of concepts and revenue acceleration.

While several start-ups and partners spoke about how coronavirus has rapidly changed life for their companies, the immediate impact seems to be more a shift in priorities than a complete halt of business. 

We appreciated the updates from 11 of the 34 fintechs in the 2020 cohort:

  • Semantic Evolution - solves data extraction challenges across unstructured document types at scale, tackling problems of parsing, which is today manual effort

  • Overbond - AI that monitors fixed income market signals, algorithmic-all prices bonds, and identifies early signals for pre-trade market surveillance

  • CogniCor - Digital assistant platform for advisors                   

  • Automation Hero - Goes beyond traditional robotic process automation by natively integrating AI to form an enterprise-ready intelligent process automation platform

  • Zogo Finance - Helps financial institutions engage GenZ through a financial education app that pays kids to learn

  • Boss Insights - Empowers lenders with customer arbitrage, providing 360-degree insights on businesses, accelerating loans and the borrower journey from months to minutes

  • Trust & Will - Is modernizing the $180 billion+ estate planning industry with an easy, fast, and secure way to set up your estate plan online

  • addapptation - Redesigns Salesforce.com into a simple, beautiful tool that results in a more engaged, better performing, happier workforce

  • Fenris Digital - Enables insurers and financial institutions to identify their best future customers and smooth the quoting process

  • Stratyfy - Products allow financial institutions to combine insights from data with institutional knowledge to make informed and auditable decisions at scale

  • Inkit - Enables companies to automate and track their offline assets for compliance, billing, and notices via their CRM (SAP, Oracle, etc.)

And these MCFT partners: 

We’ll be on the edge of our seats (and not only because sitting in front of a laptop all day is taking a toll on our posture) as we look forward to the results from these partnerships when the MCFT 2020 program concludes in June.