Ten startup companies -- with headquarters from North Little Rock to Nigeria and Switzerland -- have been chosen to participate in a 12-week program collaborating with the Venture Center and FIS Global, the Venture Center said Monday.
The FinTech Accelerator will give the 10 companies access to some of the top executives at Fidelity National Information Services Inc., better known as FIS Global. The program is designed to speed the growth of early stage financial-technology companies.
Jacksonville, Fla.-based FIS has about 1,300 employees in Little Rock and 55,000 worldwide. It has about 20,000 clients, more than $6 billion in revenue and about 35 million users of its mobile banking products.
Each entity has an opportunity to improve or change the financial industry, organizers said.
The 10 startup companies include:
Chicago-based Akouba, which has a small-business lending platform for regulated financial institutions.
Bleu, based in Los Angeles, which offers technology for mobile and merchant payments.
Dream Forward Financial 401(k) of New York, which has low-cost retirement payment plans with new technology for middle- and low-income employees.
Flutterwave, with headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria, and Mountain View, Calif., which has technology for securely processing payments.
FundSeeder of Westport, Conn., which allows traders to verify their track records.
LumoXchange of Atlanta and Geneva, Switzerland., which offers a low-cost payment process to compare exchange rates and send money online.
New York-based Hexanika, which has a regulatory compliance and report system for distinct systems in a bank.
Monotto of Charleston, S.C., which offers a personal financing solution for saving and investing.
Mortgage Peer Network of North Little Rock, which allows institutions to contribute anonymous data to measure performance against peers.
Public Funds Investment Tracking and Report of St. Louis, which offers bond and fixed-income pricing and compliance for public funds investing.
Executives from all 10 companies will live in Little Rock for the 12-week program.
At least two of the companies are only two months old -- Monotto and Flutterwave.
Monotto's customers include college students. The company teaches them how to begin saving, said Christian Ruppe, chief executive officer of Monotto.
"We figure out how they think and how they spend their money and we use that to create algorithms to figure out how much they could handle saving," Ruppe said.
Ruppe heard about the FinTech Accelerator from a mentor who is a friend of Gary Dowdy, managing director of the Venture Center.
Flutterwave was formed because of the difficulty its executives had paying employees of other companies they own, said Iyin Aboyeji, chief executive officer.
He and another top executive, Olugbenga Agboola, developed the online infrastructure for Flutterwave's payment system, said Aboyeji, who previously built a $100 million company.
The two heard of the FinTech Accelerator program while browsing a startup site in Africa. Both already were familiar with FIS.
Both are open to the possibility of bringing their company -- and their families -- to Little Rock.
"We've been thinking about it," Aboyeji said. "We could work here as well as anywhere else."
FIS is the world's largest financial technology company, and it works with more than half the world's banks.
Gary Norcross, FIS' chief executive officer, said in December that FIS would fund the program and fly executives for the 10 companies to Little Rock for the training program. Much of FIS' research and development is done in Little Rock. The program will conclude in August.
Included in the leadership for the training program are Dowdy; James Hendren, chairman of the Venture Center; Lee Watson, chief executive officer of the Venture Center; Brian Bauer, accelerator operations leader; and three FIS executives -- Tariq Bokhari, Chris Cline and Collins Andrews.
The Venture Center in downtown Little Rock will host the mentoring program for the 12 weeks.
About 150 companies applied to participate in the first year of the program.
Business on 05/17/2016