Paavo Beckman, Founder & Chief Executive Catapulter at Startup Catapult, discusses the partnership between banks and Fintech startups ahead of our Member Event in Paris.
- What are the biggest benefits for banks in partnering with fintech startups?
Banks can speed up their R&D and launch new services much faster with startups. Startups also have often capabilities to create services and user experience that engage customers very strongly by utilizing new algorithms and AI technologies.
- What are the biggest challenges banks face when they try to identify startups to partner with?
Really often banks try to find good startups by arranging accelerator programs even though the best startups DON’T apply or participate in those programs. It’s very difficult to get results with really early-stage startups. That’s why we are headhunting more mature startups with great proof already for our clients.
- What are the areas (blockchain, AI, payments…) where fintechstartups are growing fastest?
We at Catapult are scanning continuously more than 100.000 startups Europe-wide and it’s really easy to see from the data that AI is growing very fast in startups field. It’s also difficult to find nowadays a great service that is not using machine learning algorithms somehow. Because data is a key part of services nowadays, also machine learning is an important part of those new
services.
