London Innovation Lab seeks second round of FinTech startups

The second annual FinTech Innovation Lab has opened its applications to attract early-stage entrepreneurs to the capital.

The 12-week programme, run by Accenture, aims to accelerate product development in the financial services sector by providing mentoring, workshops and networking for early-stage companies.

Accenture Lab with Alistair Grant.jpg
Accenture is keen for the programme to incorporate companies which are creating innovative products in the areas of mobile payments, big data and analytics, security, and social media.

The programme involves executives from financial institutions including Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Lloyds Banking Group, Morgan Stanley, RBS and UBS.

It also has support from the Mayor of London, City of London Corporation and UK Trade & Investment, along with independent advisors Euclid Opportunities, the Technology Strategy Board and UK Business Angels Association.

Technology officers and executives will select six startups to participate in the 12-week programme, through which they will be partnered with bank executives and successful technology entrepreneurs to develop their products and business strategies.

The programme will end with an Investor Day presentation in March 2014, where the six companies will pitch to venture capitalists and financial industry executives.

“[Being involved with a hub] plants both feet firmly inside the door, when previously you struggled to get a toenail in,” said Rich Newton from startup Calltrunk, which took part in the Accenture Innovation Lab 2012. “You then leverage that to build commercial relationships.”

This guide from Computer Weekly provides you with everything you need to know about startups in the UK, with news, business profiles and advice starting relationships with UK startups.

Alistair Grant, CIO for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Citi, was a mentor in last year's Innovation Lab. He told Computer Weekly that he’d happily repeat working with companies which were appropriate to Citi’s technology portfolio.

The bank is also still in conversations with a number of the startups about their offerings. “We met a number of startups through that initiative. From our perspective, it enables us to bring the outside in, and choose what to bring into Citi from a whole branch of different startups. Big data, cloud, agile computing – we’re really keen on all of those areas, and it was great to work with startups thinking in the same vein – just a little bit quicker than we are,” he said.

But Grant did not go into the mentorship with the specific aim of securing commercial contracts. “I put aside thoughts of commercial activity until the programme finished, as I felt the important thing was to do genuine end-to-end sponsoring – mentoring on how companies could be successful in a corporate environment, anywhere across the financial sector,” he said.

“I didn’t want them getting bogged down in how it worked specifically for Citi. Once the programme finished, if we wanted to talk to them further, there was a different way to approach it.”

Of the many technologies and threats emerging in financial services IT, Grant believes that Citi must keep working on intrusion detection. As a result, he mentored startup Digital Shadows, which develops technology for the “darker side” of the internet.

“There are a lot of very sophisticated groups who look to disrupt services for major banks, and it’s not limited just to banks these days,” he said. “As these attacks get more sophisticated, we have to be really on our game to make sure we have the best possible detection capability implemented in our systems, and at the very least be able to react very quickly if there is a new attack.”

Another successful startup from last year’s Innovation Lab is Growth Intelligence. The company tracks the performance activity of every registered company in the UK by analysing their online activity. This web behaviour information is collated in real time by searching and analysing vast amounts of publicly available data from the internet.

In recent research it found that there are nearly 270,000 active digital companies in the UK, compared with the government’s previous estimation of 167,000.

The closing date for applications to this year’s Innovation Lab is 8 September 2013.

cloud.IQ raises £250,000 through government innovation competition

Tech City start-up, cloudIQ, has received £250,000 from the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) after winning an SME innovation competition.

The one-year-old firm, which provides cloud based marketing applications, secured the money through the TSB’s Smart Programme for its idea of creating a web-based tool that allows non-technical people to build, publish and monetise web apps that can integrate email, voice, web, social and mobile technologies into innovative services.

The funding will be used for research and development of the tool, known as AppEditor.

James Critchley, CEO and co-founder of cloud.IQ said: “In just 12 months, we have launched a suite of apps for SMEs which have already delivered significant results in helping businesses convert more customers.

“The investment from the Technology Strategy Board provides us with a platform to bring to market a new solution which we believe will have an ever wider reach and impact on the businesses community.”

The government innovation agency launched the award with the aim of finding an innovative idea that that offers significant potential to help stimulate economic growth in the UK.

James Heydari, TSB programme manager, said: “Smart awards support SMEs with high growth ambition and potential. Successful applicants need to show that they have a really innovative idea, addressing a real market need and have the ability to deliver their idea to drive economic growth.”

In 2012, the start-up, which also has offices in Sydney, received £2m in funding from Bridges Ventures.

Over the past 12 months, cloud.IQ has launched a suite of conversion focused apps including callMe, cartRecovery and SmartSMS. The start-up says that its integrated applications help companies of all sizes acquire more customers and build brand loyalty.

Microsoft COO Turner says even more innovation is coming this year

Windows 8, Windows 8.1, the Xbox One, Office 365, Windows Server, and more—if you thought that was a lot for Microsoft to deliver, hold onto your hats. Microsoft COO Kevin Turner promised Wednesday that Microsoft’s fiscal 2014 would be its biggest year of innovation ever.

Turner, who took the stage at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in full cheerleader mode, presented a summary slide of what the company hoped to accomplish in its next fiscal year, which begins this month. Those innovations include large meetings and Office integration for Skype; updates to both the Surface RT and Surface Pro, plus new accessories; and quarterly Office 365 updates, among others.

It was Turner’s job to close out the WPC, which ran the past three days and gathered Microsoft's top partners in Houston, Texas, to encourage them to keep promoting Microsoft’s devices and services. The WPC tends to focus on the enterprise, and Microsoft on Wednesday announced a new program called CityNext, where Microsoft will work with large cities to design packages of hardware, software, and cloud services to make the city’s own services and data more accessible to its citizens.

”The reality is that this is about accelerating growth together,” Turner said.

MicrosoftMicrosoft’s accomplishments through July 2013.
’We get the best feedback bar none from our partner network, and I’m very very very appreciative of that,” Turner said. Windows 8.1, which the company recently released in preview mode and will hand to OEMs at the end of August, showed that “most importantly, we’re listening,” Turner said.

Interestingly, Turner said that in the enterprise, 73 percent of enterprise customers are “current” on Windows, and 62 percent are current on Office, implying that there’s been a wholesale switch to the current version of Windows, Windows 8. That could go a long way toward explaining Microsoft’s early success in Windows, when it reported higher revenue and licensing than most expected. Still, he said, the Windows app space is months and months behind where its competitors are—even though Turner, like others, now claims that Windows Phone is the third of the top three smartphone platforms, behind Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

Some of the slide's promises were vague—“killer hardware” for Windows Phone, for example—and some arguably had taken place, like ”music service updates” to the Xbox platform, which took place on July 1. Others, like integration of Skype into Outlook.com, have been rolled out in preview form.

Microsoft’s WPC is like its company’s New Year’s celebration, ringing out the old and ushering in the new. On Thursday, Microsoft is expected to reshuffle its organizational structure to help do just that. If nothing else, Microsoft is promising things won’t be boring in Redmond over the next few months.