Thought Factory, the Bengaluru based innovation lab run by Axis Bank, is nurturing fin tech start ups and is helping them bring out disruptive banking solutions. The lab, which is a unique initiative by an Indian bank, has mentored around six start ups from across the country and has helped them connect with investors and companies. The bank is working with the OCBC Bank and the Visa Innovation Lab, Singapore and Amazon Web Services (AWS) India for co-innovating. There are also a number of mentors in the form of Sharad Sharma of iSpirit, Manish Chokhani of Enam, Vishal Gondal, the founder, of GoQii and Shankar Narayan, a Singapore based serial entrepreneur, along with some senior management members from Axis Bank who regularly guided these start ups.
“A lot is happening in the financial technology space and we engage with fin tech start ups and help them come up with disruptive technology ideas. A lot of stress on technologies such as Artifical Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning is happening at our innovation lab. We have a very eminent mentor board and each of these start ups worked with a business leader. Our aim is to create a financial technology ecosystem. Besides the accelerator financial technology start ups we are also working with some other start ups too,” said Rajiv Anand, executive director, Axis Bank.
For the first cohort of its Accelerator Program, the bank had selected six start-ups from a pool of 108 applicants.They represented different aspects of the financial technology space such as payments, investments, lending analytics and credit in rental space. The bank had facilitated a six month structured mentorship program and had given them access to office space, internal banking experts and a live test environment.
The six start ups which were part of the accelerator programme included S2Pay, which worked on enabling offline mobile payments, Pally, which worked on AI stack based Chatbot for investment advisory, Perpule, which worked on self checkout on mobile app, FintechLab, which worked in the field of analytics in lending, Paymatrix, which worked on trying to solve the problem of credit in rental space and Gieom that worked on technologies which enable operation excellence.
