Meet The Top 12 Finalists Of IBM SmartCamp For FinTech

IBM has announced the winners of its startup challenge, IBM Smartcamp for Fintech. The finals were held in Mumbai last week in association with Edelweiss Group.

Over 100 fintech startups had applied for the competition. The jury included Pranav Parikh, Head of Private Equity, Edelweiss; Sanjay Mehta, Arihant Patni, Founder, Ideaspring Capital and Hive India; Anil Joshi, Founder, Unicorn Ventures; Chetan Naik, IBM India, Head of Sales; Seema Kumar, Country Head, Startups and Developer Ecosystem; Kalpana Maniar, Group CIO, Edelweiss; Anshu Kapoor, Head of Private Wealth Management, Edelweiss; Smita Aggarwal, Director, Omidyar Advisors; TCM Sundaram, co-founder, IDG Ventures India and Harish Mehta, Chairman Onward Technologies, Founding member of Nasscom and Indian Angel Network.

Here Are  The 12 FinTech Startups Who Won The Challenge:

DSYH: Based in Ahmedabad, Don’t Scratch Your Head (DSYH) was launched in November 2015 by Suraj Vazirani. It aims to serve as a central pillar for reconciliation between marketplaces, logistics, payment gateways and sellers. It provides a single window SaaS platform running on smart algorithms and rule boxes showing live pre-shipping profitability to sellers and also giving a master reconciliation report for all the transactions happening in the ecommerce space.

Ftcash: Vaibhav Lodha launched ftcash in June 2015 with an aim to make transactions easier for smaller merchants and generate alternatives to accepting cash. The platform converts cash to digital payments and also provide pre-approved advances/loans which can be uniquely paid back from their daily transactions, something like a daily EMI. The startup is based out f Mumbai.

Stelae Technologies: Based out of Chennai and Bengaluru, Aruna Schwarz came up with Stelae Technologies in 2002. It aims at transforming unstructured financial content (company accounts, directors reports, equity research, regulatory) to structured, searchable and reusable information. With its software Khemeia, which is a fully automated extraction, semantic tagging, and conversion solution, it can create content injectable into analytics platforms thereby getting a full set of company accounts processed in 30 minutes, vs four hours for a manual operation.

Signzy Technologies Private Limited: Signzy aims to make digital regulatory processes simpler, secure and more compliant. The products include Digital Know Your Customer (KYC) APIs and Digital Contracting. Signzy’s APIs assist companies to comply with RBIs KYC norms and AML/CFT guidelines in an automated and hassle free way using artificial intelligence.

Rubique: Launched by Manavjeet Singh in 2014, Rubique is an online marketplace for financial products offering a wide range of loan products and end- to-end loan fulfillment to individuals and MSMEs. It has introduced a tech-led lending solution whose model is focused on disbursement rather than mere lead generation allowing the customer to get the best deal in the quickest possible time while lowering the cost of customer acquisition for the financial institution.

ORO Wealth: Based in Mumbai, ORO Wealth was founded in 2015 by Swati Aggarwal, Nitin Agrawal and Yogesh Powar. It  is a provider of automated wealth management tools which enable retail investors and financial intermediaries to easily access high-quality, unbiased advice, and investment support. The platform works on zero commission investment products and is focussed on the $270 Bn Indian financial assets industry which is expected to grow at 31% Y-o-Y.

UnoPay: It was founded in October 2015 by Amit Rana and Shyamal Mehta with an aim  to make the in-store payment experience 100x better. It provides a mobile-first platform for consumers to use any payment instruments to pay from their phone. Their solution aggregates credit cards, debit cards, wallets, IMPS, UPI, gift cards, food vouchers etc. – for merchants, it also provides business tools to grow their business such as loyalty, cashbacks, analytics, customer profiling and more.

WhizDM Innovations private limited: It was founded by Puneet Agarwal, to help young Indians become financially disciplined and fit by keeping track of their finances (keep spend within budget, pay bills on time, track account balances, etc.) through their smartphone. It offers a smartphone app, Money View, that uses machine learning technology to extract financial transactional data from the SMS sent by the banks, and automatically organise the financial information, without any user input.

Avenues Payments India Private Limited: It offers a digital cross-border money transfer platform for both B2C and B2B segment. Its B2C solution RemitGuru.com is a 24x7x365 mobile and internet based option to send money from any bank account in the world to any other person’s bank account in another country. The B2B option offers platform as a white labelled solution for banks across the world. It was founded by Naushad Contractor.

Lendbox: It was founded by Bhuvan Rastogi in October 2015 and is based in New Delhi. Lendbox provides a P2P lending platform and a credit marketplace which allows users to transact short to medium-term unsecured personal loans ranging from Rs 25,000 to Rs 5,00,000 or higher in some circumstances. It has also created a proprietary data analytics engine which takes into account over 200 data points of each borrower before giving the final go-ahead.

Finwizard Technology Pvt Ltd (fisdom): Based in Bangalore, it is a personal finance startup, launched by Subramanya S.V, Ramganesh Iyer, and Anand Dalmia. It aims to solve difficulty and complexity of investing in financial assets for a financially non-savvy person. It is a mobile and web-based “guided choice” platform that simplifies financial investing for the masses and mass affluent population and makes financial advice more accessible, understandable and quick.

Musk Technologies: Musk is a cloud-based platform that aims to solve the massive SME credit gap (~$ 200 BN) that exists in India. It manages the entire life-cycle of supply chain finance program on an end-to-end basis with the help of an invoice discounting programme where banks partner with corporates to fund their SME suppliers. It automates the entire discounting process, through corporate / bank ERP integration and digital supplier onboarding, to significantly cut down the cost of operations.

This programme was a prelude to the mega challenge IBM India Smartcamp. The selected finalists will get an opportunity to engage with Edelweiss as a client, and as a potential investor through its private equity and venture capital arm. Also, they will have an opportunity to be nominated for the IBM Smartcamp as well.

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