Written by Maria Gotsch, President & CEO of the Partnership Fund for New York City and Co-founder of the FinTech Innovation Lab.
Each year before we open applications for our FinTech Innovation Lab, we survey senior technology executives at our 43 partner financial institutions. We ask them to identify areas where they are actively looking for technology solutions from outside their firms. Then we publish that list because we want to attract the best emerging tech companies to the Lab. Especially those that are providing solutions that our financial institution partners are highly motivated to pay attention to.
Here are a few highlights from the full list which is provided below:
- Predict the future. Now that many large financial institutions have or are creating data lakes, tools that help predict customer—both retail and institutional-behavior are high on the list. Delivering the right product at the right time is the goal.
- Tech to enhance relationships. Investment banking is looking for new tools to incorporate into its workflow—better data and faster insights to enhance the value they deliver to their clients.
- Life insurance. These firms are looking for innovations related to behavioral change (which new data sources and wearables could provide), as well as improving customer on-boarding. Some of you digital health companies looking to expand beyond the provider community should consider redirecting your product to insurance and apply to the Lab to give yourself an edge.
- Regulatory & compliance. Meeting the new data and privacy regulatory requirements (such as MiFIDII, GDPR) is resource intensive, so there is high interest in technologies that can automate the process of tracking and reporting on these and other regulations.
- Connect the dots on their consumers. Tools are needed to integrate the various data (including behavioral data) on an individual consumer so that financial institutions can offer solutions tied to life cycle planning rather than one off products.
- Blockchain and distributed ledger are back. After two years of these technologies being a lower priority, there is renewed interest in seeing pragmatic solutions that could be implemented today rather than a tool for a large multi-party consortium.
- Don’t forget the extent of legacy systems. Most financial institutions are still running large legacy systems. Any technology that can simplify, automate and reduce the complexity of this installed base will get a serious look.
- Security. Significant investments have already been made in security so current focus is more on point solutions that can replace older tools rather than wholesale replacement of a core security system.
- Reduce the pain and improve the customer experience of claims processing. Insurance companies are very focused on tools that can transform this crucial part of their business. Goal is to reduce cost and complexity while improving the experience for their customers.
- “What we didn’t think of”. Recognizing that no one has all answers, our financial institution partners are also interested in innovation that they haven’t thought of. What’s totally new?