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Innotribe Startup Challenge looks to Africa, Latin America for fintech innovation
Global provider of secure financial messaging, SWIFT has announced that its innovation arm, Innotribe Startup Challenge, will be expanding its focus to include emerging fintech ecosystems in Africa and Latin America.
Innotribe will partner with SWIFT African Regional Conference (ARC) for the second year in a row, and will host a similar SWIFT regional event for Latin America.
As part of the programme, Innotribe will organise business-specific challenges. They will also bring together SWIFT member institutions, internal teams, solution providers and hand-picked fintech startups. These teams will explore potential opportunities for select business areas and work on proof of concepts that may be tangible.
Read more: Innotribe Startup Challenge announces Africa’s 14 fintech semi-finalists
Chief marketing officer at SWIFT, Christian Sarafidis, says: “As an innovation incumbent, particularly in the areas of real-time payments, compliance and correspondent banking SWIFT has a leading role to play in driving innovation across the SWIFT ecosystem.”
He goes on to add, “By expanding the Innotribe programme, SWIFT is taking innovation to a new level, creating more opportunities for all of our customers to tap into the flourishing FinTech environment. These new Innotribe initiatives not only raise the innovation bar for SWIFT, but will help us all move forward together.”
The organisation will also launch a new initiative to challenge the SWIFT community to actively collaborate and develop utility-based solutions to benefit the global financial services industry.
“We need to worry less about disruption and recognise that innovation, in the meaning of adopting a new approach to an existing process or developing a new product, is positive for the industry,” says Fabian Vandenreydt, global head of securities, Innotribe and the SWIFT Institute at SWIFT.
Innotribe will build on its previous success at the Sibos conference and develop its programme for Sibos 2016 in Geneva.
