Apply: Asia-Pacific

Applications for the FinTech Innovation Lab Asia Pacific 2021 are now closed. Sign up to receive email notifications when applications open in 2022 and learn more about what to expect from our program below.

FinTech Innovation Lab Asia - Pacific 2021 | Applications Open until 17 May 2021

Key Program Dates

April 19th, 2021 Applications Open

May 17th, 2021 Applications Closed

June 2021 Interview Day

August 2021 Program Begins

The 2021 Program

The FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific is a highly competitive 12-week challenge-based accelerator program that helps early to growth stage start-ups refine and test their value proposition with the support of the world’s leading financial institutions.

Selected companies receive:

  • Problem statements provided from the principal financial institutions, as well as coaching from senior executives in the financial sector – offering product feedback and potential deployment of proofs-of-concept
  • Mentoring from Accenture, leading financial institutions and VCs, as well as the Lab’s Entrepreneurs Network and Industry Advisors
  • Speed networking activities with our principal financial institution partners and Accenture senior executives across the APAC region
  • Week-long workshops and panel discussions on broad-ranging topics from industry trends and technology architecture to bank regulation and presentation skills

The program culminates in Demo Day, where companies showcase their technology and achieved progress in the program to financial institution executives, investors and journalists

Who Should Apply

The FinTech Innovation Lab Asia-Pacific is open to all companies, regardless of size, provided you can tick the following boxes:

  • You have a minimum alpha or beta product to demonstrate and are prepared to share access to program partners under NDA (and where reasonable, for no additional cost)
  • Your senior leadership (Founders/C-level) can commit to participate 80% of the 12-week program activities
  • You can demonstrate that access to senior-level executives in financial institutions will have a meaningful impact on your growth prospects

The program will be held virtually, or in person in Hong Kong should the COVID situation allows.

*The health and safety of all stakeholders, including participating start-ups, are our highest priority. We will follow directions from international health organizations, local governments as well as Accenture’s own safety and security protocols to ensure that the program will continue in the format and manner that safeguard the best interest of our stakeholders.

Why Should You Apply

- Access to key decision-makers within top tier regional financial institutions (20 of them in this program) in one go

- The potential to obtain POC with top tier financial institutions in the APAC region

- The opportunity to become one of Accenture’s FinTech Go-To-Market partners

- The opportunity to partner with Accenture Interactive to help speed up your innovation and software development cycles through an open environment

- The opportunity to engage with Cyberport’s ecosystem comprising of the Cyberport Enterprise Network, Cyberport Investor Network, Cyberport Technology Network and Cyberport Professional Services Network to facilitate FinTech solution adoption in the market

- Increased exposure and visibility to senior executives at Accenture: Present your business to Accenture’s leadership to showcase your technology to the team who lead our priority accounts

- Access to regional regulators for regulatory insights

- Access to 3-6 months complimentary co-working space in Cyberport Hong Kong beyond the Lab (directly negotiated with Cyberport Hong Kong)

- Be featured in primary regional and global financial services and technology events organized or co-organized by Cyberport as keynote or panel speaker

- Mentorship and Go-To-Market Access to Cyberport’s networks across Asia: introductions to Cyberport’s representative offices and extensive partner networks in mainland China and across Asia

- Access to Cyberport Startup Alumni Association: a platform for Cyberport Incubation Program FinTech alumni to meet and collaborate

- This program is free to join

- No equity taken

- Access to Accenture Ventures, with the potential to receive Accenture Ventures’ investment

- Access to Cyberport Incubation Program: the opportunity to fast track to the vetting and presentation session of Cyberport Incubation Program, a 24-month incubation program providing a range of business, professional and mentorship services to continue the acceleration of your business, as well as offering funding support to assist overseas / mainland market expansion total valued at over US$100,000

- Access to Cyberport’s Marco Fund: a co-investment fund initiative which targets to co-invest with Cyberport Investor Network to support high-potential start-ups in the Cyberport Incubation Program on seed to Series A stage funding

- Access to InvestHK’s Global Fast Track Program: the opportunity to pitch to a panel of investors, as well as potential Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government support from US$111,000 up to US$2.6 million

- A dedicated professionally produced video featuring your company to be posted on the FinTech Innovation Lab APAC website and the FinTech Innovation Lab official social channels (including LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook)

Problem Statements: You will have the potential to work towards a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) with one or more of the 20 participating FI’s. They are seeking innovations that to solve the following 6 business challenges:

Financial institutions collect massive amount of unstructured textual data from both internal and external communications, e.g. emails, chats, calls, reports, meeting notes and news channels. The content contains valuable information about client preferences, market analysis, seasonality analysis and internal business that can be used to improve products, services and efficiency. However, those data are typically difficult to process: data size is extremely large, data are generally not labelled, different permissions to access across business units.

- How can we overcome those challenges and retrieve useful information from those untapped datasets?

- How can data internally be better managed with the purpose of monetization?

- How can we complete and enrich Client Data, simplifying IS and storing all relevant data about our Customers for all CIB activities, fed by internal golden sources & external value-added data?

- How can we provide easy-to-access data and support the Bankers and Sales to improve operational efficiency, time to market & enable new business use cases?

COVID-19 is transforming ways of working and client expectations and accelerating the adoption of technology. In such digitalizing banking environment, we would like to develop an all-in-one wealth management platform/app/system for the sake of better customer experience. We aim to solve the problems like customers are not able to fully grasp their investment portfolios and are not able to fully visualise the recommendations that the bank presents to them. We hope to target young generations and let customers to have their own personalize wealth management experience that could easily access our service and enter the market with a single click. For example, customers can experience a ready-made investment portfolio that is based on human expertise and powered by robo-technology. Views on the market could be easily translated into trading instructions and leverage/financing tools could be available based on the market value of the portfolio.

We are also looking at capabilities that enable International relationships and KYC.

- The market of Health insurance is always competitive. On top of allowing customers to buy, self-service and submit claims on digital channels, insurers are offering more values like e-doctor, health tracker& reward program… etc. What kind of health solution is relevant and unique to our customers, yet easy to implement and integrate with existing systems?

- How to increase and optimize digital engagement with clients and distributors, for instance, claim AI, product distribution?

- New forms of money are emerging, be it from private institutions (i.e. diem) or central banks (i.e. CBDC’s)… How can digital money be used in the wholesale context and how can it be implemented with existing payment rails?

- Digital assets/tokenization: what are the players that allow distributions/ originations?

Global Pandemic has created a new wave of work from home norm which has resulted in Financial Institution adjusting to the new norm at a microscopic level.

- There will be more and more remote working in future – how can productivity be maximized and how can those productivity gains be measured?

- Due to the tectonic shift to new norm, the Risk associated with accessing legal entity data remains high . A re-evaluation of risk  strategy needs to be done to manage risk arising due to the new norm, which might be prevalent for years.

- Global banks belong to a highly regulated industry subjected to a lot of laws, rules, regulations (LRRs). Due to a global bank’s size and geographical dispersion, laws, rules and regulations deemed applicable to one geography, function or line of business may not be fully socialized to another group who also needs to comply to said LRRs. This results in regulatory non-compliance subjecting the bank to fines and other penalties.

- Using RegTech-related solutions, is there a way to come up with a comprehensive regulatory compliance solution that provides the entire global bank access to all applicable LRRs across many different jurisdictions and banking functions (e.g. asset management, securities, banking, etc.). The solution interface must be able to help global banks perform compliance checks as well as the regulators determine compliance levels of a financial institution. This will automate the very manual process of researching regulations (regulations are in email, excels, etc. and compared manually to its previous versions or other countries) and reviewing the status of compliance (currently multiple teams are involved in the review process via emails), enabling both financial institutions and regulators to refocus their resources to more important functions.

- Besides, from KYC perspective, the solution interface allows integration of various Bank’s systems or data from control and monitoring systems such as Anti-Money Laundering system, Screening System and Risk Assessment to ensure operation teams will get the singular view of the Legal Entity.

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