The 12 New Fintechs Joining Season 3 of the Visa Innovation Program
The Visa Innovation Program SEE is a fintech pilot-centered collaboration platform spanning across Southeast Europe. The Program is designed to help fintechs scale, supercharge their value proposition and engage with some of the leading financial institutions in Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey.
This week we held the Season 3 Selection Day of the Visa Innovation Program. The event was virtual (“surprise, surprise!”) and combined two of the Program’s hubs – Bulgaria and Greece, respectively operated by Eleven Ventures and Crowdpolicy. For this year’s edition of the Visa Innovation Program we received 99 applications by fintech companies coming from all over Europe.
The applying fintechs had to be addressing one of the four Program’s Challenges this year, which are:
Empowering SME's
Unlocking new payment flows
Designing next-gen payments experience
Building smarter cities
Among all of the applications we shortlisted 22 fintechs from 8 countries (Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus, Poland, Ukraine, Romania, Croatia, Hungary) which we invited to the Selection Day. Parallel to our online event our Program hub in Turkey lead by Hackquarters, is holding their selection on 3rd of May and are soon to announce their cohort of fintechs
The Selection Day
The selection event was behind closed doors and included our Advisory committee members from Fibank, United Bulgarian Bank, DSKBank, Unicredit Bulbank, Raiffeisen Bank, Postbank, Alpha Bank, Attica Bank, Eurobank, National Bank of Greece, Piraeus Bank. A big “Thank you!” to all bank executives who joined us, participated actively and helped us with the selection.
Each fintech team had 3 minutes to present their company in front of more than 90 selected guests and 6 minutes to answer questions of the Selection committee, who definitely took their task in a serious way and challenged the fintechs with hard questions.
The presentations of all 22 companies went very well and smoothly, despite some pretty standard technical hick-ups (it won’t be a real event otherwise). It was very inspiring to see how active the Southeast European fintech scene is and what an incredible fintech talent is working on the challenges of tomorrow.
The Selection Committee: Sevdalina Vassileva, General Manager Visa SEE, Andreana Pappas, Head of Visa Greece, Daniel Tomov, Founding Partner at Eleven Ventures, George Karamanolis, CTO/CIO Co-founder, Crowdpolicy
Fintech Pillars Presented
Payments
Digital Banking
Insurtech
Smart cities
Banking for Children
Open banking
Lending
Analytics
Wealth management & Personal finance
The Selection Day in Numbers
All of our participating guests and executives stayed connected during the whole virtual Selection Day, asking questions with a high spirit, participating in the discussion boards and joining different break-out sessions with the fintechs.
The 12 New Fintechs Joining Season 3
And the final participants to enter Season 3 of the Visa Innovation Program are… Drum roll, please!
Α diaspora BaaS Solution for Traditional Banks.
Payment platform for online businesses which gives full control on the sales from invoicing to payouts to your partners.
FinQware is a real time multi-banking cash management solution powered by open banking.
“Buy now, pay later” platform that helps merchants get more consumers at the point-of-sale, leveraging Open Banking.
Frisbo connects local fulfillers into one international fulfilment network and offers plug and play fulfilment as a service for every online shop.
Cloud-based, parking management software for small-medium car parks. It works on many devices (laptop, PC, mobile) including inside a POS.
Loyalty As A Service Platform where companies of all sizes can create any kind of loyalty scheme or loyalty marketplace without development.
Rilla is a mobile application for personal finance management, which aims to make the latest fintech achievements accessible to all.
Tap2Pay activates payments on all digital channels: websites, social networks, messengers.
Welcome Pickups is a global leader in travel mobility and ground transportation serving millions of travelers in more than 55 destinations.
Smart Money App for modern families that automates pocket money and helps children grow good money skills in a fun and secure way!
The first DIY wealth-building app for long-term investors.
What's Next?
The official Kickoff of the Program is planned for the 1st of June. After that, the companies will engage with their mentors and the banks in a series of design sessions to identify potential fit and start exploring PoC and pilot opportunities, incorporating Visa’s technology and latest APIs.
Stay tuned for further updates. Follow our Blog, Facebook and LinkedIn channels.