Banks' moves into Fintech

Santader launches Innoventures

Santander Bank launched in July of last year Innoventuresa $100M fund based in London, to invest in startups in the fintech sector.

Among the startups in which it has invested we find: Kabbage and  iZette

Kabbage is a US lending platform that in 2015 alone has received two rounds of funding worth $300M, adding to the $320M the startup had raised in 9 rounds previously. The company is currently planning to enter the European market.

In addition to Santander Innoventures, another bank Scotiabank, the insurer ING and Reverence Capital Partners, which led the round, also participated in the latest round.

iZettle is a mobile payments company based in Stockholm, Sweden, that markets a business solution consisting of a card reader and an app. The company has raised $175.82M in 9 rounds of funding, most recently in October this year.

"We also learned a few days ago that Santander Innoventures and Onevest have launched a competition to support early-stage startups around the world in applying distributed ledger and blockchain technologies to financial services," says Diego Gutierrez of Santander Innoventures.and Abra-invest.

BBVA creates the BBVA innovation centre and invests in fintech

BBVA I believe the centre of BBVA innovation as an open and collaborative model to foster interaction with the innovation ecosystem, especially with entrepreneurs, startups and developers. Contact with new ideas and talent is the source from which BBVA draws to continue advancing in the face of the challenges facing the financial industry.

Yesterday we also learned that BBVA has invested €64m in Atom, the UK's first mobile bank.

BBVA also has financial stakes in important Silicon Valley startups such as the Prosper platform, the asset management tool Personal Capital and the bitcoin firm Coinbase, operations carried out through its BBVA Ventures fund, based in the US and with a capital of $100M.

La Caixa organises FinappsParty

FinAppsParty is one of the annual events of international reference for developers of mobile applications for financial services, held annually in Barcelona, organised by CaixaBank with the support of Eurecat.

The event, which this year took place from 6 to 7 November in Barcelona, was attended by 27 teams and 110 participants from seven different countries.

The winner was "PayBamboo", a tool that simplifies the process of shared payments via app. The device presents the amount to be paid and each user pays their share from their mobile application, while the app displays the outstanding amount until the payment is completed.

In addition, through Caixa Innvierte Industria, a venture capital company created by La Caixa in collaboration with the CDTI, this year it has invested €4.3M in Peertransfer, an online system that facilitates the transfer of money for the payment of tuition and fees at more than 600 international schools and universities.

Bankinter invests in Fintech Startups

Last year Bankinter I enter Cofaine, a company that has developed a pioneering software platform that allows people to exchange currencies and bitcoins in a decentralised, secure and anonymous way, without users having to hand over the management of their money to a trusted third party. The company's software manages to eliminate the middleman in the exchange of bitcoins thanks to a mathematical model based on game theory that eliminates the incentive for one party to defraud the other.

This year 2015, through the Bankinter Foundation of Innovation, it has joined Captio. Captio is the first Spanish platform for managing business expenses. It offers a solution based on the digitalisation of expense receipts and the extraction of their data, via smartphones, to automate the process of creating and supervising expense receipts made by mobile workers.

If you are looking for financing in the fintech sector, contact us. Abra-Invest has a team of experts in alternative financing with many years of experience. Call us on +34 946424142 or fill in the contact form. 

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