Man in pinstripe suit has 13 weeks to get tech magic to Barclays
Senior manager looking to cut through the hype and find real business applications
Almost 200 entrepreneurs jammed an auditorium in London’s East End last weekwhere Barclays unveiled the 11 ventures chosen for its latest financial-technology boot camp.
The winners described their start-ups like contestants on a business version of the X Factor, drawing applause from the crowd. There was Cuvva, a firm that delivers car insurance through a smartphone app in less than a minute, and DigiSEq, which lets consumers make payments with wearable devices. Perhaps the biggest surprise was the one led by the guy in the dark pinstripe suit.
Lee Braine, a senior manager in Barclays’ investment bank, has been trying to figure out how to harness the blockchain, the software underpinning bitcoin, to handle securities transactions with greater speed and efficiency. This week, he and a few colleagues left the British bank’s glass and steel tower at Canary Wharf and pitched camp with the other start-ups for 13 weeks in an Edwardian-era building in scruffy Whitechapel, down the street from a kebab shop.
“There’s a lot of hype out there on this technology and our goal is to cut through that and look for the real business applications in the capital markets,“ Braine, 48, explained as fellow techies cracked beers and scooped up slices of pizza after the presentations. “To do that we have to be open. What we have to do is co-creation. That’s why we’re here.”
The stakes are big: online lending is growing 151 per cent a year, payment and cash-transfer apps like Apple Pay and Facebook Messenger are multiplying and some experts predict blockchain technology will rewire the financial industry’s infrastructure. Banks and insurers could lose as much as US$150 billion in revenue to start-ups by 2025, consulting firm Oliver Wyman estimated. This latest challenge comes as the biggest lenders are already reeling from the impact of tougher regulation and record-low interest rates.
We’re the sherpas that will take entrepreneurs up the mountain
It wasn’t long ago that banks kept their research and development in-house, and built their systems behind closed doors. Now Citigroup, UBS, Wells Fargo and Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria are among some two dozen financial giants hosting accelerators, hackathons and competitions to bring start-ups to their doors.