A Festival of FinTech
Written by FinTech Sandbox Advocate Jim Smith | Partner, Blue Dun
To help mark our one-year anniversary, FinTech Sandbox hosted a series of major events for the FinTech community, running from March 23rd through 25th in Boston. We featured a meet-up of Sandbox alumni, a Demo Day and startup showcase, and a panel on the current state of venture investing.
First up was the reception for startups that have graduated from FinTech Sandbox. Zac Sheffer, Co-founder and CEO of Elsen (one of the first startups accepted by the Sandbox), was recognized for his team’s efforts to help other startups in the Sandbox community, particularly through contributions to our GitHub repository.
Demo Day — the second we’ve held for Sandbox residents — also included an expanded startup showcase. It was the largest FinTech conference ever held in Boston, with more than 350 entrepreneurs, financial services executives, policymakers, journalists, and venture investors in attendance from around the globe. The presentation hall at the Fidelity Investments was packed.
Participating startups came from as far away as London and San Francisco:
Cognism — A web-based productivity suite for financial professionals that dissects financial research and news into unique, actionable knowledge blocks.
EverSafe — A financial safety net for seniors and their families that securely monitors financial accounts and credit reports around the clock.
ForwardLane — An online cognitive computing platform for wealth management.
Kyper — A cloud-based Data as a Service platform, providing instant access to the highest quality machine readable market data, financial data, and more. Newly accepted to Startupbootcamp FinTech NY.
Nutonian — A modeling application for deriving answers from data using sophisticated evolutionary algorithms.
Trigger — A trading platform that makes it easy to execute advanced investment ideas by reducing every complex order to an IF THIS THEN THAT statement, called a “Trigger.” A 2015 winner of a Cornell Tech Startup Award.
Volos Portfolio Solutions — A sophisticated tools for structuring and analyzing exotic derivative trades.
Open Invest — An investment management platform where strategies are developed transparently and with community input. A member of Y Combinator in 2015.
Companies each had five minutes to show the progress they’ve made in product development using datasets provided by FinTech Sandbox data partners. This cohort worked with data provided by AP, Benzinga, FactSet, Intrinio, Morningstar, Plaid, Quandl, Quovo, S&P Global Market Intelligence, Thomson Reuters, Tradier, Xignite, and Yodlee. A diverse array of B2C and B2B financial solutions were presented, but a consistent theme was deriving and presenting financial insights in new ways.
Following the presentations, everyone headed to the startup showcase, where the eight featured companies and many past Demo Day participants manned booths and mingled with the crowd. Networking opportunities like these are an important feature of Sandbox events, encouraging serendipitous “collisions” between people in the FinTech ecosystem who can help each other. Special thanks to Demo Day sponsors EY, MassMutual Ventures, S&P Global Market Intelligence, UKTI, and Xignite.
The final event was a VC panel that explored the current funding environment, featuring perspectives of both active venture investors and founders who have secured funding. The discussion was moderated by Bruce Wallace, Chief Digital Officer at Silicon Valley Bank. We heard an extended discussion of equity crowdfunding as well as of the pros and cons of strategic investors.
Stay tuned for an announcement of the next FinTech Sandbox Demo Day coming to a new city later this year. Interested startups can learn more about applying to FinTech Sandbox here.
Originally published at fintechsandbox.org.
