Barclays Bank is exploring opportunities to work with six of the eleven startups that showcased their fintech propositions at a Demo Day at London’s O2 Arena, as the third London cohort of the UK bank's accelerator programme concluded
After thirteen weeks of mentoring and development, an audience of more than 1000 industry participants, including venture capitalists, senior executives and corporate partners attended the Demo Day to check out the startups on show.
Graduates of the scheme now exploring opportunities with Barclays include Seldon, which is working with Barclaycard by using machine learning technology to help identify customers that default after receiving credit increases. Other partnerships underway reference consumer wearable outfit DigiSeq, biometric tech startup Zighra, retail business management platform AgentCASH, digital banking firm Wala, and blockchain-based invoice financing startup Tallysticks.
The Accelerator also included an internal Barclays team which produced a blockchain-inspired prototype that combines legal agreements with business logic to create financial trades that run as smart contracts. The “Smart Contract Templates” prototype was the first public demonstration of an application using the R3 consortium’s Corda distributed ledger platform.
Michael Harte, Barclays chief operations & technology officer, says: “Our Accelerator creates value from rapid experimentation and long term partnerships, designed to scale early prototypes and create new business models, products and services. We look forward to continuing to work with this talented cohort in order to drive new value and change both within Barclays, and the financial services industry as a whole.”