Meet 2021’s ThinkTECH Accelerator finalists

The third year of ICBA’s ThinkTECH Accelerator didn’t look like any other.

In true pandemic-era fashion, the fintech startup incubator program was mostly held through Zoom meetings—many, many Zoom meetings, in fact. Some 500 community bankers and more than 200 other industry professionals participated in more than 1,000 pitches and other meetings this year, tripling the accelerator’s previous attendance record.

Having more people at the table led to the accelerator’s most successful year yet, organizers say. As Charles Potts, ICBA’s senior vice president and chief innovation officer, says, the program’s “secret sauce” is the group of community bankers who are eager to create relationships with these companies.

“I would defy anybody to find [an accelerator] as unique and as successful as this,” Potts says. “The bankers are the ones who are sculpting, refining and helping shape [the fintechs and their market strategies], so that they feel comfortable buying the product. That just doesn’t exist in a lot of other accelerator and incubator programs.”

Creating a win for all

Over the past three years, the ICBA ThinkTECH Accelerator has fostered 26 fintechs looking to work with community bank leaders on solutions or services that solve their problems, improve their bottom line and help them stay relevant in a highly dynamic industry. The program, which is organized by The Venture Center, a Little Rock, Ark.-based nonprofit, has evolved over time to attract increasingly mature companies and promote emerging types of financial technology. It also gives more time for collaboration, with roughly 16 weeks of boot camp development.

It’s designed to foster the long-term success of all parties, says Wayne Miller, executive director of The Venture Center. Community bankers help solve fintechs’ pain points, fintechs work directly with potential customers, and ICBA develops partnerships throughout the industry.

“We’ve done a good job together in creating an environment where the banker and the fintech have the opportunity to collaborate effectively to create a win on all sides,” Miller says, adding that 80% to 90% of ThinkTECH participants have successfully made deals with community banks.

Those wins extend to regulators, too. This year, for example, more than five dozen officials representing nearly every regulatory body participated in the boot camp to learn about the finalists and share ideas. “[The regulators] have gone from being the department of ‘no,’ many of them, to the department of ‘how can we help?’” Miller says.

It’s hard to overestimate the value of the community bank perspective in this equation, Potts says. One of the hardest challenges for a fintech is taking a product idea and making it realistic and practical for the customer, in this case a community bank, says Jesse Honigberg, senior vice president and technology chief of staff at $3.5 billion-asset Cross River Bank in Fort Lee, N.J. Honigberg was one of 24 community bankers and ICBA experts who selected this year’s finalists.

The accelerator helps fintechs do more than just describe how they’ve solved a banker’s problem, Honigberg says. It allows them to better define the challenges that community banks are facing in the bank’s own words.

“By having conversations with the actual decision makers and deciding what will or won’t work,” he says, “it creates a sense of reality for their business development process, which ultimately makes them better and faster.”

ICBA’s ThinkTECH initiative continues to expand. First, ICBA is planning to host two more years of the accelerator, Potts says, likely with a hybrid in-person and virtual approach. Second, along with The Venture Center, ICBA has developed educational ThinkTECH webinars on emerging technologies, such as a three-part series focused on demystifying cryptocurrency released earlier this year. Future topics will include banking-as-a-service (BaaS) and digital transformation.

Stay tuned at icba.org/thinktech ;for updates.

Meet the 2021 ThinkTECH Accelerator finalists

We asked this year’s cohort, a diverse group of financial technology experts, about their thoughts on the accelerator, how to best work with companies like them and what’s coming up in the world of fintech.

Agent IQ

Based: San Francisco
Founders: Slaven Bilac, CEO; and Soren Bested, chief revenue officer

Agent IQ offers a digital customer engagement platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help banks automate tasks and communicate.

How has the company changed since the boot camp?
Slaven Bilac: Agent IQ has enjoyed great success with midsized community banks. Engaging with the ThinkTECH Accelerator participants gave us the opportunity to better understand how to price and deploy the Agent IQ platform in a flexible and configurable manner suitable for smaller organizations. The impact is that the Agent IQ platform is now within the reach of even the smallest banks, providing a pragmatic approach to delivering on both current needs and longer-term strategic initiatives.

What’s a trend you’re seeing in fintech?
Bilac: Banking is reverting to be focused on personal relationships and trust that have to be delivered in a digital channel. Customers—including Gen Z—are looking for guidance and advice in an increasingly complex world, and they are looking to their trusted financial advisor, not social media. Consumers do not want their personal bankers to be replaced with chatbots and AI, but they love when AI is used to improve both their and their banker’s experience through communication channels that are convenient for them.

Artis Technologies

Based: Atlanta
Founders: Barclay Keith, CEO; Brian Lanehart, president and chief technology officer; and Lena McDearmid, chief operating officer

The company’s white-label digital consumer lending platform automates the lending process.

How can community banks prepare to partner with fintechs?
Chris Johnson, head of lender relations: We find that the community banks that have embraced fintechs have several things in common. First and foremost, they have someone in a leadership role who has a decent grasp of the technology that is currently out in the marketplace and how their customers can benefit from it. Secondarily, that person is capable of working with the fintech to communicate the opportunities effectively to other stakeholders within the bank.

What’s next in fintech?
Johnson: In the next few years, we’ll see more private-label digital banking platforms offered to banks looking to re-energize their brand and focus on the user experience. Additionally, real-time biometrics for identity verification will start to be the norm, as well as additional growth in investments around [artificial intelligence] and [machine learning] for credit underwriting, risk analysis and mitigation, and portfolio performance analysis and forecasting. We are also seeing high demand for cost-effective, real-time digital payments and growth in demand for cross-border and cross currency financial services.

Beauceron Security

Based: Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada
Founders: David Shipley, CEO; Benjamin Steeves, chief security officer; Sean McDougall, chief technology officer; Bob Corson, business advisor; and Ian MacMillan, chief product officer

The Beauceron Security platform allows community banks to run their own phishing simulations, give customized cybersecurity training that helps individuals better understand and act on their cyber risk.

What did you learn about community banks?
David Shipley: The more that I’ve learned about community banks, the more I’ve become convinced that being entrepreneurial is in their DNA. New ideas are the oxygen that fuels and sustains entrepreneurial businesses, and I encourage every community bank to engage to learn about the tremendous innovations happening in fintech and cybersecurity. A meeting doesn’t mean you’re committed to buying a product or service, just to learning more about potential opportunities.

How have your products changed since going through the boot camp?
Shipley: Since the program, we’ve launched our newest product, which automatically evaluates real email threats submitted by employees and can automatically reward them for catching cyber risks. We’ve also launched a new platform integration with Microsoft Teams to make it even easier and faster for employees to learn about cyber safety.

Finosec

Based: Alpharetta, Ga.
Founder: Zach Duke, CEO

Finosec’s cybersecurity governance solutions aim to help community banks reduce the time required to validate cybersecurity oversight.

What’s one thing you took away from the ThinkTECH Accelerator?
Zach Duke: My biggest takeaway has been the power and impact of the accelerator. This has been, by far, the best process I have been involved with in my 20 years working with community banks. Having the ability to meet with 100-plus banks—not bankers, but banks—to get direct feedback and to expand the number of customers and prospects blew my expectations away.

What fintech trend should community bankers know about?
Duke: Integration and APIs [application programming interfaces] have been and will continue to be all the buzz. Understanding how the communication rails or integration works—and how it is secured—with your banking systems is important. There is significant movement in this area, and keeping up to speed on your core processor and fintech innovation around banking-as-a-service (BaaS) should be upfront in your organization.

Harness

Based: Tampa, Fla.
Founders: Miraj Patel, CEO; and Andrew Scarborough, chief financial officer

Harness connects community banks and their customers to fundraising campaigns of nonprofits in their area to create long-term funding vehicles.

Why should community banks be interested in partnering with fintechs?
Miraj Patel: Take a look around. Change is no longer coming; it has arrived. Fintechs should be viewed as well-funded innovation circles that are pumping millions into solving point solutions to help each bank reach its goals. Bankers should explore new opportunities with an open mind, as many fintechs looking to provide services can directly move the needle on business goals.

What did you learn about community banks during the accelerator?
Patel: Community banks serve as the backbone of America’s financial system and overall economy. Whereas most attention, interest and innovation dollars are pointed toward the big four and up-and-coming neobanks, it’s important that fintechs continue driving products and innovation to community banks and the hyperlocal communities they serve.

Shastic

Based: Berkeley, Calif.
Founder: Joseariel Gomez, CEO

Shastic offers Elle, an artificial intelligence-assisted automation platform that connects a community bank’s internal systems.

How did the accelerator affect your product?
Joseariel Gomez: It helped us realize that what we considered a small piece of our solution at the start of the program in fact can unleash tremendous value for banks. It does this by helping to connect their internal disparate systems without relying on vendors or API access to streamline their entire operation.

What fintech trend should community bankers know about?
Gomez: We believe that open banking will be the most important change in how financial services are provided and embedded into every aspect of our daily lives moving forward.

UpSWOT

Based: Charlotte, N.C.
Founders: Dmitry Norenko, CEO; Andrey Davydchuk, chief technology officer; and Dmitry Syvolap, chief operations officer

UpSWOT pulls data about small and medium-sized businesses from more than 120 sources, including business software tools, to give community bankers business and risk insights they can use.

What fintech trend should community bankers know about?
Dmitry Norenko: Everything is moving online, and though I don’t believe that personal relationships between the banker and the client will disappear, they will and should definitely change. The world is becoming more and more connected, making data-sharing more and more of an opportunity, and it’s a power that community banks should use. Nowadays, fintechs like Plaid cost billions of dollars, because businesses are ready to share their data. Community banks should lead these changes to get the most out of it. Data will help [community banks] perform better. Data will help their clients perform better. UpSWOT knows how to make this happen, and we already do this with dozens of banks.

Zogo

Based: Durham, N.C.
Founders: Bolun Li, CEO; Simran Singh, president; and Simon Komlos, chief design officer

Zogo has gamified financial literacy education for young people through phone games that can earn users gift cards and checking account bonuses through financial institutions.

How’d you recommend a community bank to begin leveraging fintech solutions?
Bolun Li: Look for solutions that quickly add value to your community bank and do not require significant internal resources from your team to launch. That is a great way to test the waters and understand how leveraging fintechs can advance your initiatives.

What’s a growing type of financial technology?
Li: Financial education. Younger generations have continually expressed their interest in learning about personal finance, and community banks are well-suited to provide this education. It will help gain the trust of this younger generation and ultimately attract—and retain—young adults to your bank.

ZSuite Technologies

Based: Burlington, Mass.
Founders: Jay Tuli, founder (Tuli is also president of Leader Bank); and Nathan Baumeister, CEO

The company’s commercial escrow products digitize manual, often resource-intensive escrow and sub-accounting services.

What did you take away from the ThinkTECH Accelerator?
Nathan Baumeister: The most important thing we learned through this process is that community bankers across America are heavily interested in and invested in making serious changes in their digital offerings. They are hungry to know what they can do to have an immediate impact for the benefit of their clients.

What would you tell a community bank that’s new to fintech?
Baumeister: I would tell them not to look at all fintech companies as the same. Many community bankers have been fearful of partnering with fintechs because they see fintechs as a competitive threat. While it is true that some fintech companies out there are creating products that will make them direct competitors with community banks, there are a lot of fintechs in the marketplace that were organized to directly help community banks. It’s crucial to know which type of fintech they’re talking to. The best way to do so is to dig deep into how the fintech company makes money and would like to make money.