The programme, led by Dassault Systèmes, the 3DEXPERIENCE Company which itself has a strong track record in innovation, will commence on 17th September for 7 weeks to 31st October, 2014. It will be run from Level39, Europe's largest accelerator hub for FinTech. It will be based on investment industry challenges set by senior industry executives. The Challenge aims to identify, nurture and accelerate high performance start-ups, focused on delivering solutions that have the potential to transform and shape the Investment Management Industry. Unlike other accelerator programmes, Dassault Systèmes does not take equity in the start-ups but may consider investing in them, should there be a good business fit.

Kevin Pleiter, Vice President of Financial and Business Services, Dassault Systèmes said, "We are excited to host 3D FinTech Challenge for the 2nd year as part of our drive to bring innovation to the Investment Industry. The sector is undergoing profound change: there's an urgent need to redefine the investment experience, drive down costs and meet stringent regulations. The 3D FinTech Challenge is a show case to demonstrate how technology innovation has the revolutionary potential to increase operational efficiencies and transform the entire investment journey for all stakeholders."

The six finalists – chosen from a shortlist of high calibre applications from around the world by a panel of senior executives from leading global investment institutions are Closir, DATANEXT, Heckyl, PensionMandate Ponchartrain and PrairieSmarts.

The 3D FinTech Challenge finalists will be offered on-going mentoring from both Dassault Systèmes' senior executives and leading figures from the global asset management industry to help shape the products and technologies being developed. In addition, master classes will be provided by leading domain experts, covering topics such as UX and interface design, intellectual property rightights and licensing agreements.

The 6 finalists will gain full access to a dual–centre community of entrepreneurs, start-ups and high growth companies through Level39 in London's Canary Wharf and ValueStream Labs, in New York

Eric Van der Kleij, Head of Level39, Canary Wharf Group plc said "Smart fund managers and investment professionals now realise that technological innovation is required to conquer the sector's many challenges. The 3DFinTech Challenge will help drive the buy side forward, by facilitating the much needed dialogue between tech innovators and financial institutions."

Descriptions for Finalists for the 3D FinTech Challenge 2014

Closir
Closir is a London and New York based online investor relations platform for companies and investors to discover, connect and engage with each other.
The platform provides companies with a simple and beautifully designed template to tell their investment story, target and extend their reach with global institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, pension funds and family offices. For those investors, Closir provides a standardised way to track company disclosure and manage engagement with their current and prospective investments. Closir's proprietary data and analytics provide the investment community and IR teams insights for better decision making. 

DATANEXT
DATANEXT is the B2B platform that allows asset managers to analyse financial data in the cloud. As SaaS, its offering ranges from portfolio management and risk management to client and regulatory reporting. Unlike its competitors, Zurich-based DATANEXT covers the entire investment process: from idea generation to trading. 

Heckyl
Heckyl, based in London and India, process millions of data nodes (social media, open data sources, exchange data) in real-time to bring the most intuitive, insightful graphs and clear visual indicators of dozens of factors that represent and influence stock market dynamics. It connects decision makers in finance, business and government to a broad and dynamic network of information, news, people and ideas enabling faster, more effective decisions. Enabled by a Big Data Platform that helps users understand the Past, analyse the Present and gain insights into the Future. Heckyl transforms unstructured data into actionable insights, identifying the most relevant information in real time, and delivering it to the user. 

PensionMandate
PensionMandate, based in London, provides an independent platform powered by Instintell Institutional Investor Intelligence Limited in London. They offer an alternative service delivering real-time Information about institutional investor activity in Europe, Americas and Asia. Their data covers both main asset classes and alternatives. The data is sourced directly from the pension funds/institutional investors and their service provides intelligence and research services including relevant information about the process of preparation, reviewing, tendering investment mandates by institutional investors to asset managers and data about asset allocation, current investment mandates, in-house personnel, investment consultants and advisors. 

Pontchartrain
Pontchartrain Advisors is a London-based software and consulting company with the overarching goal of helping companies extract more value and insights from their data, particularly highly connected financial data. Pontchartrain's Proteus platform uses an unique approach to data, cutting edge analytics capabilities and flexible, bespoke visualisations to enable financial institutions to solve the risk data acquisition, analysis and communication challenges they face today. Complementary to existing systems, Proteus is an information and analytics platform designed with the entire enterprise in mind. www.pontchartrain.co.uk

PrairieSmarts

U.S. based PrairieSmarts calculates, simplifies and explains financial risk at the individual security and portfolio levels, across assets and in real numbers. They provide asset managers, advisors, money managers, banks and broker-dealers with an advanced, heavy tail distribution model that far exceeds Value at Risk (VaR) and other models currently available. It provides superior estimates of downside risk, taking events into account, and with the capability to assess both points of ruin and tolerance - as well as analyzing asset concentration. Furthermore, risk is currently communicated in terms of colors (red, yellow, green) or financial jargon that advisors, investors and money managers may not understand. PrairieSmarts reports are number, not color or jargon, based and clients can run scenarios on-demand. Their solutions are easy to integrate and low cost, and provide clients with genuine and actionable insight www.prairiesmarts.com