London Cohort of the Barclays Accelerator Programme Concludes with Eight Deals

After fifteen weeks of development, mentoring and networking, the 11 companies in the fourth London cohort of the Barclays Accelerator programme today revealed their propositions at the newly opened Rise London in Shoreditch: the new home of FinTech.

The Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars, is an intensive startup programme designed to shape and scale the next generation of FinTech businesses.  It connects startups to mentors from across Barclays and the Techstars network.  It also gives them access to Barclays’ data and Application Programming Interface (APIs) to help create new products and services for customers and clients across financial services.

An audience of 250 industry leaders, venture capitalists, senior executives and corporate partners came to the event, and heard from the 11 teams, whose propositions are helping shape the future of financial services.

During the event, the companies highlighted the progress they have made, with eight of the 11 companies announcing more formal engagement with Barclays.  Some of these are:

1. a) Simudyne – They are working with our Risk teams on strategic use cases.  Simudyne’s Providence software can help us simulate and distribute complex use cases to help with risk decisions

1. b) Barac – Barac can help Barclays predict when fraudulent activity and outages will occur. They are working across Barclays UK and Barclays International

1. c) Flux – Flux is developing a pilot with over 10,000 Barclays customers working across Barclays UK and Barclaycard’s acquiring business.  This will let our customers get their receipts in their banking app, showing exactly what they have bought, thereby improving the customer transactional experience

1. d) Alyne – They are working with our control functions to understand how we can leverage our control data to enhance our standards and policies and react to new regulations even more effectively

The programme is not just for entrepreneurs.  For the first time, Barclays is spinning out an internal team as a separate company.  This is an example of our ‘intrapreneurs’ building momentum as a startup and creating a commercially viable business.  This company is Nivo, which offers secure mobile messaging for smarter customer service, and will pilot with Barclays Premier.

Michael Harte, Barclays Group Head of Innovation, said: “Financial Services is experiencing a period of major technological disruption. Rise, and specifically our Accelerator, has created a platform for experimentation, with new generation businesses and entrepreneurs, to build new products, services and platforms.  We’re committed to this customer-focused approach, so our businesses are able to innovate at scale.  By partnering with FinTech startups, and companies like Techstars through Rise, we have been able to deliver increased value to our customers and clients by developing products and services that best meet their changing needs.  We look forward to continuing to work with this talented cohort in order to drive new value and change both within Barclays, and the financial services industry as a whole.”

Chris Adelsbach, Managing Director of Techstars added: “The Barclays Accelerator, powered by Techstars, once again showed why our programme in London is the preeminent FinTech accelerator in the world.  This class will now join 1,024 other companies in the Techstars Accelerator portfolio that together have a market cap of $8 billion.  Techstars’ worldwide network helps entrepreneurs succeed.   Our network of 14,000 founders, mentors, investors, and corporate partners now spans 168 countries.  No matter the stage these entrepreneurs are at, Techstars helps them ‘Do More Faster’.   FinTech is an exciting vertical for us.  These companies are using technology to solve large real world problems that impact so many of us.  I’m excited by their prospects and look forward to supporting them on their journey.”

Barclays continues to work closely with Techstars as partners through our global Accelerator programme.  The Accelerator in Tel Aviv is now underway, and applications are open for New York.