Next Bank Madrid reveals Spain’s strongest startups
Next Bank Madrid has chosen nine startups for the competition in June
Next Bank Madrid has chosen the finalists for a competition that seeks to find the best financial services startup companies from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world.
Held in Madrid on 25 June, the Innotribe Startup Disrupt competition is a partnership between Spanish start-up support organisation Finnovista, Nasdaq, and Swift’s Innotribe innovation wing.
The chosen firms include Bull4All, an online platform that offers investors financial advice and strategies; Captio, an app that helps companies manage expenses; Fintonic, a free online personal finance service; and Glownet, a cashless payment and event management tool.
Swift already hosted its own similar event, the Innotribe start up challenge, in New York, London and Singapore. However, it was decided that more needed to be done for the Spanish and Portuguese language countries around the world, due to their low levels of representation. Next Bank Madrid is a standalone event, and has received over 40 registrations, mostly from Spain and Portugal.
Finalists also include Kantox, a marketplace where companies can exchange foreign currencies without using a bank; Licous, a B2B platform for settling commercial debts; swaPay, a mobile payment method based on QR codes and NFC; Tradeslide, a gamified trading platforms that allows traders to have their skills independently validated, and TwitterTransfer, an application that allows money transfers between individuals via Twitter.
“The selection of the finalists was not easy as we have received more than 40 registrations with very high quality,” said Fermin Bueno, organiser of Next Bank Madrid. “Next Bank Madrid attendees can expect some great pitches and a lot of disruptive ideas. It is good to see that most of these startups have set-up their business from the beginning on a global scale. The industry should watch closely what happens in Spain as these disruptive companies are really capable to transform Financial Services globally.”
The event in Madrid is also part of a wider drive to reach out across the entire Latin world – especially Latin America, where Sao Paulo in Brazil, Santiago in Chile, Mexico City in Mexico and Bogota, Colombia have already been shortlisted for future events.
Expanding into Latin America would make sense on a number of levels; besides the fact that Spanish and Portuguese are spoken across the continent, Fontao at Next Bank Madrid estimates that one-third of the top banks in Latin America are Spanish. In addition, these countries have also seen innovative payment initiatives in recent months; in May, Telefónica formed a deal with MasterCard in Brazil to create a new service called Zuum, which will allows Brazilians to transfer money, buy credits for pre-paid mobile phones and pay bills with their mobile phone.
Next Bank Madrid is supported by Wayra, a Latin American and European start-up funding firm created by Telefónica, as well as the IE Business School in Madrid. After the presentations, a winner will be chosen and granted a demo slot at the Sibos conference in Dubai in September.
