MiiCard wins out as start-ups vie for VC attention in Sibos' Dragon's Den

The start-up competition followed an earlier contest based on blue-sky ideas generated by conference delegates over the last four days as part of Swift's Innotribe sessions. Although the Dragon's Den style format was shared by both competitions, the latter session featured more seasoned ventures, even if many were at different stages of maturity.

The majority of the competing ventures provided either payments-based services or Web-based identity products. For example, Kinamik is a software company that aims to address security breaches in a "tamper-resistant audit log", while My Web of Trust provides a browser-based toolbar which is free to download that provides crowdsourced reputation ratings for Websites and has already attracted 15m downloads.

Another product, MiiCard is a digital passport that provides an online and real-time identity service. The company's COO James Varga ended his presentation with the news that MiiCard has entered into a strategic partnership with Yodlee, the US-based account aggregation provider.

The start-up contestants also featured Cumulate, another venture aiming to simplify the cross-border payments process through the use of cloud computing, which was borne out of an earlier Innotribe session at a Swift event in June 2010. The venture has been developed in partnership with Swift and was damned with faint praise by one of the venture capitalist judges as "a PayPal that the banks actually like".

The successful start-up is due to be announced at the Sibos closing plenary later today.

Update: Big day for digital ID start-up MiiCard - fresh from signing a deal with Yodlee, the company has also just been nominated as the most promising start-up by the judging panel, with the news imparted as Sibos draws to a close with the final plenary session. And, as forecast by Finextra earlier in the day, Moneyscope scoops the annual Innotribe award.