Taking place in New York City from Friday, December 7 until Sunday, December 9, 2012, the event is hosted by the Startup Weekend team and backed by Enterprise Tech Innovation Meetup, FinTech Innovation Lab and the NY FinTech Startups Meetup. It is also supported by API and platform providers such as Bloomberg, Dwolla, Estimize, E*Trade, Microsoft BizSpark, OpenFin and Stocktwits.

Scott Ignall the CTO at Lightspeed Financial will open the event as the keynote speaker on Friday at 7pm. From there developers, marketers, designers, product managers and startup enthusiasts attending will have 60 seconds each to pitch their concept. Those with diverse skills and similar interests will then form teams, and spend the rest of the weekend focusing on customer development, validating ideas, practising Lean startup methodologies and building an early version of their product.

Coaches and mentors with experience in the launch and management of fintech companies will also be available throughout the weekend to work with teams.

The weekend culminates in a demonstration of prototypes on Sunday evening, after which participants receive feedback from a panel of expert judges including Maria Gotsch, president and CEO at the Partnership for New York City Fund, Phil Pearlman, executive editor, investor at StockTwits, Mazy Dar, CEO of OpenFin and Omar Qari, payments partnerships & mobile distribution at foursquare.

Says Maria Gotsch. "Hopefully the ideas generated here will be the first steps to building new companies that will ultimately create jobs in New York City and strengthen our position as the financial capital of the world."