Vancouver's Voleo sole Canadian fintech firm chosen for Accenture's London FinTech Lab

Vancouver-based fintech company Voleo Inc. is one of 15 companies, and the sole Canadian one, selected to participate in Accenture’s FinTech Lab accelerator program at Level39 located at London’s Canary Wharf from January 6 until April 7.
Voleo CEO Thomas Beattie and VP Technology Anthony Tsui will be represent the company, joining participants from the UK, United States, Switzerland and Russia at the accelerator.
Each participant in the program will be paired with senior bank executives from HSBC, Barclays, Citi, Credit Suisse, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Santander, RBS Group, Lloyds Banking Group, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, Intesa Sanpaolo, Nationwide, Société Générale and JP Morgan, who will help the start-ups fine tune and develop both their technologies and business strategies.
“Voleo’s acceptance into the 2016 FinTech Innovation Lab is a tremendous honour, and testament not only to the potential of our intellectual property but to the advancements in the Canadian financial technology landscape,” Beattie explains. “Voleo’s participation represents major progression in investment technology. Global banks are identifying our platform as one that bridges the gap of investing through mobile-based user activity which is a meaningful step on the road to international partnerships.”
Applicants from 33 countries were whittled down to a final 15 applicants by senior executives from 16 financial institutions in collaboration with Accenture.
“The disruption of financial services by FinTech entrepreneurs continues at speed” said Richard Lumb, group chief executive of Financial Services at Accenture. “We’re incredibly excited about working with this year’s entrepreneurs to make banking better, cheaper and faster. They offer some exciting innovations and have demonstrated exceptional creativity in what has been a record breaking year for applications from more than 30 countries, confirming that London is very much the centre of Europe’s thriving FinTech community.”
Voleo’s equity trading mobile platform which encourages users to form investment clubs within their social network, with users proposing and then voting on executing trades in publicly traded companies.
Majority votes automatically trigger transactions, and both fund and user performance are rated over time.
“HSBC is already working with firms from last year’s programme and we are pleased to be supporting the Innovation Lab again,” says Stuart Gulliver, group chief executive of HSBC Holdings plc. “Matching our experience with the creativity of the selected entrepreneurs is a proven way of developing technologies that bring real benefits to customers.”
At the end of the program in April, six of the companies will be selected to present at an Investor Day to a panel composed of venture capitalists and financial executives.
“Adopting disruptive technology is a priority for the banking sector and collaborating with startups through initiatives such as the Fintech Innovation Labs is an important part of this process for Deutsche Bank,” said Kim Hammonds, chief operating officer and chief information officer, Deutsche Bank. “Better and faster platforms can drive productivity and enhance the customer experience.”
Accenture’s FinTech Innovation Lab London is modeled on a similar program in New York co-founded by Accenture and the Partnership Fund for New York City, a $115 million investment arm of the Partnership for New York City.
The 2016 FinTech Innovation Lab London participants are:

• AimBrain – which is developing a new mobile-focused biometric authentication platform that can be used with any mobile browser or data-sensitive application. By using behavioural, facial and voice biometrics, AimBrain enables banks and payment processors to know if their users really are who they say they are.
• Albert – is an incredibly simple mobile platform that helps self-employed combine bookkeeping (invoices, expenses, payments) with financial planning (bank info, cash flow forecasting).
• AlgoDynamix – an innovative portfolio risk analytics company focusing on financially disruptive events. It provides fund managers, wealth managers, investment banks and trading houses with insights and anticipates price movements days in advance of the event.
• ClauseMatch – whose collaborative document platform integrates with internal systems and helps to streamline documentation workflows by providing real time editing, approvals and tracking capabilities.
• Contego – which offers real-time identity and risk checks on both companies and individuals in the increasingly compliance driven financial services sector, helps businesses to stay safe from fraud, identity theft and compliance failures
• Crowdaura – uses blockchain technology and a crowdfunding interface to provide a turnkey platform solution for marketing, issuing, trading, settlement and administrating decentralised financial securities. This reduces costs and increases the security and transparency for securities lifecycle management.
• Cutover – reduces the risk and cost associated with live enterprise events such as IT system upgrades and business continuity events. It does this by replacing the excel-ware, emails and telephone calls that are typically used to coordinate activities in these critical periods. Cutover enables activity orchestration, provides real time visualisation of status during the event and captures an audit trail for review and learning after the event.
• PassFort – who has developed the first Compliance As A Service (CAAS) web application designed to improve the way regulated businesses collect, store and manage their customer compliance information at the point of onboarding. The technology delivers an automated and scalable back office system for financial services, online gambling, real estate and professional services firms, enabling processes that traditionally take weeks to be completed in a day.
• PayKey – is the world’s first payment keyboard. PayKey’s technology puts banks where their customers are, on all social networks including Facebook’s Messenger, Whatsapp, Twitter etc. With PayKey, customers enjoy the security of the trusted banks within their favourite applications, making everyday banking easier and more efficient than ever before.
• Quotip – offers a management tool for structured financial products that provides wealth managers with services in three key areas: product idea generation, request for quote and audit/life-cycle management. Quotip’s machine-learning-based algorithm, sell-side independency and full coverage of the value-chain help reducing product complexity whilst increasing workflow efficiency and adhering to upcoming regulatory frameworks.
• SBDA Group – delivers machine learning that allows banks to offer a personalised and automated financial advice service to its customers. This helps banks to scale personalised financial support and services using the power of artificial intelligence.
• Talent Rank – enables prospective candidates to exhibit their skills, interests and potential. The platform trains and tests fundamental competencies and uncovers talent that could otherwise be overlooked. Talent Rank is used to augment screening processes, provide skill-based learning and development and increase workforce diversity.
• Undo – offers specialised tools to improve software quality, robustness and security, by allowing coders to see exactly what a program has done. Two key products are UndoDB and Live Recorder. UndoDB is a debugger that allows developers to run code backwards as well as forwards, helping to rapidly identify bugs. Live Recorder allows developers to create an exact copy of a specific issue as it occurred in production or in test environments, for subsequent offline replay and analytics.
• Voleo – allows users to start a smart investment club via a mobile app where they can pool knowledge and funds and vote on trading decisions within their groups. Users can also follow others outside their own group, based on metrics like actual fund performance or individual decision performance, to help with their portfolios.
• ZeroDB – provides an end-to-end encrypted database protocol that helps companies to use cloud services without sacrificing control, security, or privacy. Users can run queries over encrypted databases without exposing any decrypted data to the server.