The Lab
Every year since 2010, the Fintech Innovation Lab - a joint program between the Partnership Fund for New York City and Accenture - chooses just 10 emerging enterprise tech startups developing innovative solutions for financial institutions. This year, over 250 early- and growth-stage companies applied. Over 40 participating financial institutions and VC firms across the globe choose each class. Needless to say, we’re proud to have been selected alongside the rest of our 2020 class.
The Experience
The Lab provides access to top executives at the world’s leading financial institutions who, throughout our experience, routinely extended exceptionally generous and open feedback. The added exposure to Procurement and Security leadership for insight into their requirements and timelines is a priceless check on our enterprise-readiness. Passing these checks is crucial to success and reflects how thoroughly the Lab works to prepare us .
Arthur was born out of the pain points that our founders personally experienced within the financial industry. The opportunity to quickly and repeatedly validate our product and market fit directly with key decision makers and core users alike was invaluable. This is table stakes for producing a best-of-breed, turnkey observability platform.
Model performance, explainability, and fairness are board-level, company-wide concerns. We built Arthur to serve as a single pane of glass for the entire organization - serving data scientists and engineers as well as operations, risk teams, and business stakeholders. This made the Lab the perfect opportunity to refine our messaging across dozens of high-leverage use cases.
The Challenge - 2020 and Beyond
2020 has presented no shortage of tough challenges. For this reason we feel particularly privileged for the chance to join forces with leading financial institutions on the joint mission of not only triaging the immediate and ongoing impact of COVID-19, but also investing in proactive production AI monitoring fit for the advanced technologies driving their customers’ financial health.
The profound changes to our society immediately showed up in data and financial models. The impact proved to flow both ways. Model performance, explainability, and bias required a renewed urgency, with the pandemic underscoring how they are connected. We have been inspired by the cultures of care and innovation we witnessed in so many of our partners to address these needs.
The regulators and governance & compliance leaders were no different. At Arthur some of our relationships with regulators go back decades and we remain active in the policy space. While we regularly participate as advisors in this arena, we were nonetheless very motivated by the enthusiasm from FINRA, the NYS DFS, the OCC, and the CFTC for open dialogue as partners toward industry model fairness. We are excited by their interest to collaborate on solutions.
COVID-19 will certainly carry a lasting impact - it has been promising to engage with our peers on the financial and customer challenges at hand not only today, but ensuring they are also prepared for tomorrow.
Going Virtual
As a result of the ongoing pandemic, the Lab, like many, pivoted to a first-time-ever, entirely virtual experience - we’re happy to report that this came with its own advantages. Meeting with senior executives is typically a fairly formal event in a corporate office, but now we were entering each other’s homes - admiring background art, scoping home libraries, and grinning as a few kids made surprise appearances. It was a wonderfully leveling experience that enabled genuine relationships when it mattered most. We’ll see you over drinks in 2021.
The Figures
We mutually paired with 6 premier Financial Institutions
40+ meetings with executives and counting
7 meetings with regulatory bodies such as FINRA, NYS DFS, the OCC, and the CFTC
Dozens of meetings with Fintech VCs, Insurance leaders, entrepreneurs, and media and marketing advisors
What’s Next
Though the program has come to a formal close, the opportunities and support have not. Having tailored and proven our enterprise-grade, production model observability platform and its value with some of the most advanced financial technology providers, we are excited about the discussions of pilot programs and upcoming members of our select Customer Advisory Board. Stay tuned for more on that!
We know we have made lasting and ongoing partnerships with the institutions and organizers alike - for that alone we’d advise anyone to pursue a spot in the Lab.
Special thanks to Maria Gotsch, Sunny Parikh, and Jeff Kalski for their ever-present positivity and support!
Your Turn
Get in touch to see for yourself.
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