You gotta ask yourself, “What’s up with BNP Paribas Bank?”
This giant Paris-based bank – third-largest in the world ranked by assets – is on a mission to capture the best fintech startups in Europe, then incorporate them into its operations.
PNB Paribas has opened registration for its second international hackathon. The hackathons (plural) will be held the weekend of June 17, 18 and 19 in eight cities: San Francisco, London, Paris, Brussels, Warsaw, Istanbul, Rome and Berlin. (Warsaw, but not fintech hubs Amsterdam and Stockholm? Ouch .…)
Back in December, PNB Paribas executives announced they’d choose eight startups out of hundreds of applicants, and they did. At the time, Dispatches didn’t even have its beta site live, but our post on LinkedIn got traffic. Once we got the website built, we reposted it. Since then, it’s gotten more than a 1,000 page views from dozens of countries in Europe. Which tells us a LOT of people are interested in what this bank with a 134-year history is up to, and what opportunities they’re creating for Dispatches’ techpats.
The June events will be the first step toward the big BNP Paribas International Hackathon, which leads to three more steps: a digital bootcamp from July to November for the startups selected the first weekend; a Demo Day in Paris on December 2, and finally, the design of a prototype in 2017.
To be sure, this is BNP Paribas executives’ way of staying ahead of the curve as Number26 and other borderless virtual banks are reinventing banking. But publicly traded BNP Paribas does have a 65 billion euro market cap. So, clearly, they have the resources and motivation to devote serious resources to innovation, which could be great for you if you have fintech startup in Europe or The Valley.
From the “Why You Should Participate” section:
• The Hackathon weekend is just the beginning of a close collaborative partnership between talented startups and BNP Paribas. BNP Paribas is committed to working side by side with today’s savviest tech entrepreneurs to unlock creativity, and apply breakthrough solutions to real-life situations in order to make life easier for our customers.
• An international competition: 4 business lines and 10 entities from across BNP Paribas’ global footprint engaged with startups in a truly international event, as the International Hackathon will take place simultaneously across 8 cities. You’ll have the opportunity to access to our international network of experts and mentors.
• A long-term commitment with BNP Paribas through 4 exciting stages: a hothouse of innovation at the Hackathon weekend, then a Digital Bootcamp followed by Demo day live in Paris. Together, with the winners, we’ll work to take your prototype and turn it into a real solution that can change the face of banking by making life easier for our customers.
Last month the French bank picked eight fintech startups to take part in a four-month accelerator programme that will see each firm work on developing products and services for specific areas of BNP Paribas’ business groups.
Here are the eight chosen last March from 124 candidates just so you know what bank executives are looking for:
Amalfi, pairing with BNP Paribas Cardif: Amalfi is France’s first peer-to-peer insurance broker, which uses data-driven behavioural analysis and community management to enable customers to drastically reduce their overall cost of insurance.
Fortia, pairing with BNP Paribas Securities Services: Fortia Financial Solutions is a French RegTech company that brings disruptive technologies to the field of regulatory practice. Based on artificial intelligence, machine learning and collaborative intelligence, Fortia Financial Solutions is set to bring about substantial changes in the way compliance is managed.
Heuritech, pairing with BNP Paribas Personal Finance: Heuritech is developing an easy-to-use platform of artificial intelligence (AI) solutions designed to automatically turn all content (both multilingual texts and images) into actionable data.
KYC3 (Know Your Customer, Counterparty and Competition), pairing with BNP Paribas Wealth Management: KYC operates in many dimensions – helping to master regulatory and reputational risk end-to-end from business development through to compliance; obtaining actionable intelligence from machine learning on unstructured Big Data.
LogMote, pairing with the BNP Paribas Retail Banking Division in France (FRB): LogMote is a unique, unified authentication service which manages both legacy and cloud applications. The user’s smartphone becomes the contactless key to unlock, simplify and accelerate his/her user access.
PayCar, pairing with BNP Paribas Cardif: PayCar is a payment method designed to facilitate used car transactions. PayCar offers simplicity and security to both buyers and sellers.
TwinPeek, pairing with BNP Paribas Wealth Management: TwinPeek is the first Personal Data Protection & Monetisation solution that allows everyone to take full control of their online data and only share the information they want to share anonymously and securely via a Digital Alter Ego, or ‘Twin’, while transacting, interacting or browsing on the internet.
CommonAccord, L’Atelier BNP Paribas special choice partner: CommonAccord.org brings the benefits of open source collaboration to legal documents. It enables a world of peer-based relationships and facilitates continuous improvements to legal texts. The incubator is helping grow the CommonAccord solution into a Centre for Collaborative Law.
