A day of brilliant ideas: recap of the MKB Fintechlab Demo Day 2019
On the 28th of May, MKB Fintechlab organised its third Demo Day, which introduced the fintech startups of this year’s batch and their achievements throughout the program.
What is the MKB Fintechlab Demo Day?
The first-of-its-kind, Hungarian MKB Fintechlab was founded in 2016 with the mission of bringing innovative fintech startups and major players in the finance industry together. The organisation also supports the MKB Financial Group with innovation, knowledge and a professional network.
“Excellence, collaboration, value creation are the three fundamental principles of MKB Fintechlab. We are building a powerful community to make us and MKB Bank more future-proof.
Our startup program is a testament to our belief in the power of people and talents. We are taking the biggest problems customers and banks face today and have the best people from the startup community to solve them with us.”
— János Pereczes, the CEO of MKB Fintechlab explained.
The MKB Fintechlab Demo Day gathers makers and thinkers from the global banking ecosystem including startups, corporate professionals and top-tier investors. The event introduces the most talented early-stage startups, who have participated in MKB Fintechlab’s 12 weeks incubation program. The program starts with inspiring talks and keynote speakers, after which the founders pitch their ideas, and the audience can learn more about their insights on driving digital innovation in the financial sector.
Inclusion, collaboration, feedback
This year the event opened with a welcome speech by Ildikó Ginzer, the Deputy CEO of MKB Bank, and Hetényi Márk, Member of the MKB Bank Board and Digital Ambassador.
“It’s always very interesting to see the solutions these teams can bring to the table. It helps us to get a better understanding of the customer needs and provide better solutions to them.” — Ildikó Ginzer highlighted.
During her keynote speech, Melanie Seymour from BlackRock, focused on the fact that corporate innovation starts with the culture.
“The keys to building disruptive teams are inclusion, collaboration and effective feedback. In fact, the word ‘innovation’ is overused, and it’s actually easy to innate in the corporate culture. “ — she added.
For example, BlackRock has an open office structure in Budapest, which facilitates discussion between the teams and brings the coworkers closer together.
Melanie also highlighted that most of the conventional models for startups, such as the agile approach, rely on active feedback loops, which is the foundation of an innovative atmosphere. Once people are willing to give and receive construct feedback, they will be more keen to try new things and come up with groundbreaking ideas.
The fintech startups of this year’s batch
In 2019, eight startups participated in MKB Fintechlab’s program, who presented a minimum viable product. The startups had four minutes to explain their ideas to the listeners and introduce their achievements from the past months. (You can rewatch the pitches on our Facebook page.)
After their pitch, a jury of five asked tough questions to the teams.
The members of the jury were:
- Ildikó Ginzer, Deputy CEO of MKB Bank;
- Melanie Seymour, Head of Global Client Service at BlackRock;
- Benzon Aviv, Customer Business Executive at Amdocs;
- Lubomir Olach, Director of EFMA;
- Mohamed ElSayad, Chief Commercial Officer at Telenor Hungary.
The audience and the jury voted for the best performance based on three main criteria: content, timing and showmanship. The winning team was Coinrule who presented their solution for cryptocurrency traders.
“Our mission is to help level the playing field for Millennials to make sure they can compete with the professionals, not only in cryptocurrency markets but later on also across other investment asset classes.
In the past three months, we achieved remarkable milestones towards this goal. We launched our Alpha, listened to our users and released many new features to our now almost 1,000 active traders. It was an excellent opportunity for a cryptocurrency startup to work with a large bank and explore synergies.
We also love the CEE Startup Ecosystem as part of our 7 people team is already based in Pilsen, Czech Republic, while we are planning to grow, potentially in Budapest.”
Oleg Giberstein, COO of Coinrule shared with us.
The eight startups put a lot of effort into the program and improved their products and value propositions significantly over the past months. Here’s what they have been working on:
💳 Amon.tech is launching a unique product that pays weekly interest to users based on the cryptos they hold. The multi-product wallet also allows users to store, exchange, spend, invest and track digital and traditional currencies. Amon’s AI system suggests the best performing cryptocurrency to the user at the time of purchase to maximize profits.
🤖💡Coinrule is a smart assistant for cryptocurrency traders that helps you with building trading bots and strategies without the need to program a single line of code. Not a crypto guru yet? No problem because the platform also helps you to get started in the crypto trading world with guidance, template strategies and a private trader community.
📩 🗂 Cégjelző is offering subscription-based company information. Their database contains all the necessary details about companies, sole proprietors and civil organizations. You can implement the database to your software, or get information about other companies instantly via chat.
📱👣Digi.me has a solution for the customers and the businesses too. The technology enables banks and other institutions to deepen their relationships with clients by delivering safer and more personalised customer experiences.
🎨🎸Hobbiz is an online education platform for practical knowledge. Learn or teach new skills from the basics to advanced techniques.
You can also skip the exhausting ingredient and equipment hunting on websites and order everything you need for the course via the Hobbiz platform!
⛓🔑iconicchain The Finland-based, Hungarian startup invented a unique solution to help regulators, auditors and companies significantly reduce their costs of regulatory processes through automation and with the help of the blockchain technology.
📊💻PénTech is the award-winning solution for enabling SMEs to increase their liquidity at the ease of clicking a button, at low cost, full transparency and entirely online.
🖥💰Seitatech. is an established white-label payment technology provider, operating in Finland, Sweden and Denmark. They are developing a new product idea around Digital Payments.
You can find even more information about the startups by downloading the Demo Day Brochure on our website.
