While most of Germany was enjoying the day off on 1st May, three Germany-based startups were in London competing with fifteen semi-finalists for a place in the finals of the Innotribe Startup Challenge 2014:
- Berlin-based Bitbond (peer-to-peer Bitcoin lending)
- Köln-based moneymeets (financial decisions driven by life goals) which had also presented at FinTech Forum’s first event in Nov. 2013.
- Berlin-based Mambu (cloud banking platform)
FinTech Forum DACH – a partner of Innotribe and a judge of the 2014 Challenge – attended the EMEA Showcase on 1st May, as well as the Finextra Future Money conference at Level39, Europe’s largest FinTech accelerator space on 30th April and 1st May.
The Innotribe event kicked off in the afternoon of 1st May. Ten early-stage Startups had 10 minutes each to present and to take questions, followed by five growth-stage Innovators presenting at demo booths. Participants voted electronically to select 3 Startups based on “their importance to the future of the Financial industry” and placed their “chips” to decide the 2 Innovators that would get a ticket to the finals at SIBOS in Boston.
The three winners in the early-stage category were exchange rate comparison site CurrencyTransfer, OneScan-based mobile commerce service Ensygnia and international money transfer service TransferGo. The two growth-stage winners were cloud banking platform Mambu and digital wallet MatchMove.
Congratulations and all the best to the winners as well as the semi-finalists who did a great job at the challenge! Our congratulations and thanks also to Kevin Johnson and Ioana Guiman for all the grunt work that went behind making this a great Innotribe event.