YES BANK’s Business Accelerator receives phenomenal response with more than 750 applications

The applications for the first cohort of YES FINTECH has received impressive response from the global community of Fintechs, with 750+ applicants from around the world. The media outreach combined with the interactive sessions held across the key startup hubs in the country, helped to drive the momentum for the accelerator programme that is being organised exclusively for the Fintech sector.

At Hyderabad, T-Hub, hosted the YES FINTECH meet on January 17, 2017 which was followed by a session hosted at IIT Bombay, on January 29. The third session was held at the Silicon Valley of the East – Bangalore on January 31 and finally the last session concluded at New Delhi on

February 3. The strategic locations were chosen keeping in view the Fintech clusters in the country.

These interactive events helped facilitate engagement in the fintech startup ecosystem with participation from over 500 fintech startups. The startups included those who are working on bringing in innovations in domains like payments, blockchain, trade finance, among other areas. Also present at the events were established fintech industry experts, who shared their take on the opportunities for startups to revolutionise the Indian financial ecosystem. The events saw attendance from leaders like Ritesh Pai, Senior President & Country Head, Digital Banking, YES BANK, Jay Krishnan, CEO, T-Hub; Prasad Vanga, CEO- Anthill and Amit Goel, CEO- LetsTalkPayments (LTP).

YES BANK's A.R.T. approach – Alliances, Relationships and Technology (A.R.T.) involves the bank partnering with some of the best fintech firms to deliver unique, innovative banking and financial solutions to its customers. The event also had participation from YES BANK's A.R.T. partners – Sameer Nigam, CEO- Crownit; Lizzie Chapman, Co-founder & CEO, ZestMoney, Bala Parthasarthy, Co-founder Money Tap; Vinay Bagra, Co-founder & CEO, Niyo solutions; Mohit Lalvani, Co-founder, QwikWallet; Co-founders, Benow, Trupay and many others.

At the multi-city YES FINTECH events, the experts and entrepreneurs shared an account of the recent developments in the Fintech industry, their views on topics such as value of partnerships and how to foster innovation through meaningful partnerships. The interactive sessions also saw the entrepreneurs engaging with the panel about YES BANK’s vision of collaborating with Fintech startups, in addition to the specifics related to the accelerator programme.

The application phase concluded on February 11. The 750+ companies which have applied for the YES FINTECH accelerator programme represent domains like payments, lending, treasury and forex, Governance risk and compliance, wealth management etc., cutting across technology areas such as Baas/PaaS/SaaS, Big Data and analytics, BlockChain, AI -Bots, etc.

10 start-ups will be selected for the first cohort of the 15-week programme commencing on March 20, 2017. YES FINTECH Accelerator – a joint initiative of YES BANK, T-Hub, Anthill and Let’s Talk Payments will involve three week onsite interactions at Mumbai and Hyderabad and 12 weeks offsite interactions, wherein the selected startups can continue to work on their business from their home locations.

Read more about how India’s fifth-largest private bank, YES BANK, is building strategic alliances with Fintech companies, the partnerships with smaller and larger Fintech players, and how this has enabled a digital banking experience that is innovative, simple, contextual, and cross-channel.

Also watch this space to know which 10 startups will finally be selected to take part in the immersive YES FINTECH accelerator programme.