Last Thursday I had the great privilege of having been invited by the remarkable Laurent Haug to present a snapshot of our vision of the new emerging universe of “digitally native finance” at the wonderful Lift12 conference in Geneva. Twenty minutes is not a long time (and thank goodness Laurent indulged me with a couple minutes more) to convey both the context and the substance of what we believe to be a fundamental shift in the paradigm of the financial services industry, but I hope I was able to give at least a good high-level overview. Most importantly, I hope I was able to convey the excitement we feel at the vastness of the opportunity and the win/win/win (for the customers/companies/economies) available to those who embrace the opportunity for technology-enabled disruption in financial services by introducing them – however superficially I’ll admit – to just a handful of companies who are at the vanguard of this wave of change.
For those that are interested, my presentation and video (updated!) is below:
For those that are interested, here are links to all the companies mentioned in the presentation, those in which Anthemis is invested are marked with an asterisk. Clearly this is just the tip of the iceberg and there are many, many more companies and entrepreneurs and venture stage companies now focusing on creating the future of financial services – a veritable Cambrian explosion of innovation: (note: this selection is somewhat random and driven by a desire to show an interesting / representative cross-section rather than trying to pick out the most important or most successful companies in the space)
(in no particular order)
Personal finance
Simple* – Worry-free alternative to traditional banking
Fidor Bank* – Banking with friends
Movenbank – Spend, save and live smarter
Zopa – A marketplace for money
Wonga – Payday loans alternative
Billguard – People-powered antivirus for bills
Holvi – Smart Banking for Group Activities
ArchiveMe – Invoices and expenses in a minute
Payoff.com* – Money made simple, social and fun
Markets and trading
eToro – Your investment network
StockTwits – The financial communications network
AlphaClone – Follow the smart money
Trefis – What’s driving the stock
Estimize – Uncover the real consensus
Risk management / insurance
The Climate Corporation* – Total weather insurance
OpenGamma – Unified financial analytics
Wealth management
Betterment* – A better investment
Blueleaf* – Simple, personal financial tracking
Covestor – Find and follow investing leaders
Nutmeg – Smarter saving and investing
Business banking
FeeFighters – Comparison shopping for SMB finance
Kabbage – Green to help you grow
FundingCircle – Online lending marketplace
AxialMarket – Online network for M&A professionals
Bilbus – Locate your liquidity
Payments
Square – Mobile payments system
Stripe – Payments for developers
The Currency Cloud* – FX payments automation service
Dwolla – The cash inspired payment network
Ixaris – Open payments solutions
Leetchi – Group payment application
And just in case you are interested/curious, here are the other companies currently in the Anthemis ecosystem:
FinanceACar – World’s first car finance comparison site
MileSense – Turning data into intelligent risk analysis
Metamarkets – Fast insight for big data
BluFin – Look at finance in a new way
MoBank – Cutting edge mCommerce solutions
PayPerks – Powering innovative solutions for the financially underserved
PeerIndex – Understand your social capital
Hooplo – Social games publishing platform
Visual.ly – Data visualization platform for big data
As I said in my presentation at Lift12, it is an incredibly exciting time in this space, and it is tremendously satisfying to see all the work we’ve done to position Anthemis at the heart of this opportunity space starting to bear fruit. Working with the amazing entrepreneurs and companies in our portfolio is a privilege and we are constantly impressed by their vision, focus and energy which is infectious. And beyond our existing portfolio, we have an incredibly strong and varied pipeline of new companies we hope to bring into our ecosystem over the next year or so.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. – Buckminster Fuller
Related articles
- Introducing Anthemis (parkparadigm.com)
- A Kodak Moment (parkparadigm.com)
- Spilling dirty secrets. (parkparadigm.com)
- Blueleaf: a trillion dollar market opportunity (parkparadigm.com)
- Are (traditional) financial markets broken? (parkparadigm.com)
