Our monthly meetup was held at Van Lanschot‘s Amsterdam office last Friday with approximately 120 attendees. Don Ginsel, CEO of Holland FinTech, kicked off the event while David Versteeg,Van Lanschot’s director of digital and innovation, officiated the event as the host speaker. A series of impressive pitches followed, with representatives from Surbubia, Yields, Investsuite, New10 of ABN Amro, Unchain.io, and Frosha presenting various tech-oriented solutions to current financial challenges.
Opening the meetup with a bang, Don gave the audience a rundown of Holland FinTech’s higher aims of connecting fintech stakeholders with each other and names of members that have joined the company over the years. David Versteeg of Van Lanschot started off with the first speech of the day, offering insights into the financial giant’s own unique challenges and initiatives in their digital transformation. The meetup then gave way to six tech-heavy pitches, which was met with much fanfare from the audience.
The pitches:
Drawing from his own experience at ING, Hamza Khan, founder and CEO of Suburbia, shared his startup’s radical approach to providing companies with data collected from alternative sources, such as points of payment. Suburbia adds value to the data collected by refining them into actionable insights for investment and marketing aims.
Jos Gheerardyn, CEO of Yields, introduced his company as offering economical, efficient and accurate model verification, with ‘C-level’ insights thrown into the bundle as well. He explains that banks currently outsource the manual verification of econometric and statistical models to consultign companies: a process that in itself is costly and time consuming.
Hederik Laloo, growth manager of Investsuite, introduced his company’s unique B2B proposition of providing banks with readymade robo-advisors instead of marketing them directly to consumers (B2c). He briefly spoke on the oversaturated and unprofitable B2C robo-advisor market, as well as Investsuite’s unique algorithm that assesses risk while prioritising steady over maximum returns.
Natalia Yushkova, marketing manager at New10, introduced the audience to the company, a new platform by ABN Amro which streamlines and simplifies the loan approval process for new businesses. The platform is fully digital, and requires less data from the applicant.
Berit Fuss, director of ecosystem development at Unchain.io, presented her company as a provider of blockchain gateways which allow an organisation to seamlessly connect internal applications and blockchain networks. The gateway facilitates the efficient management of multiple, individual point-to-point adapters.
Dougal Featherstone, CxO at Frosha, presented his company’s learning algorithm as a key solution to combining and reconciling incompatible data schemas– which in the process, cleans and structures similar datasets from multiple sources into a single point of access. He gave the example of multiple customer contact databases as a use case, pointing out that different abbreviations of the customers’ names renders it almost impossible for the data to be reconciled.
Don wrapped up the event by giving the audience a brief overview of fintech events, trade missions, and round tables that will be held later in the year, before commenting on the importance of solving data challenges that are part and parcel to financial innovation.
