RBI's Elevator Lab selects four fintechs to develop Proof of Concept

Elevator Lab aims at finding innovative fintech solutions and building mutually beneficial partnerships between RBI and fintechs. In 2020, RBI’s subsidiary banks played a more active role, setting the search topics, conducting the scouting, and choosing the most promising solutions to be tested locally, aligned with the head office in Vienna. On top of that, some subsidiary banks continued to organise Elevator Lab Challenges for later-stage fintechs and Elevator Lab Bootcamps for early-stage startups in their home markets, according to the official press release.

Three tracks of the global Elevator Lab Programs were organized in 2020, with four selected winners. These fintechs, together with mentors and experts from RBI’s subsidiary banks and head office, are working on developing Proofs of Concepts (PoC). In the second quarter of 2021, all of the fintech solutions tested in the PoC phase, will be presented at a Demo Day and subsequently evaluated for a potential partnership.

Co-hosted by Raiffeisen Bank in Romania and Raiffeisenbank in Bulgaria, the ‘Advanced Analytics and Loyalty Solutions’ track ended with two winners: 

• iFactor, a Romania-based fintech which is developing an engine used for monitoring abnormal behaviour and fraud detection during the factoring process. This technology will enable lenders to get a better understanding of both default and fraud credit risk of the applicant sellers and debtors and thus minimize risks in factoring;
• Synerise, which focuses on online customer experience and growth development in ecommerce. The aim of this cooperation will be to generate specific predictive sales signals for corporate customers and to analyse anonymous customer behaviour.

Within the ‘Value added Services for Large Corporates’ track, RBI´s head office searched for innovative fintech solutions to expand its offerings to business customers through new value added services in the fields of cash, treasury, expense, and risk management. The jury chose FinLync which strives to develop white-label applications for real-time cash management, trade finance reporting, and exchange rates integration, directly embedded in the corporate’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environment, thus enabling RBI to communicate end-to-end with corporate customers.

The goal of RBI’s Slovakia-based subsidiary Tatra Banka’s ‘Bank as a Platform’ track was to find a solution for building a digital platform that will connect Tatra Banka’s clients with third-party solutions. The selected fintech Zentity offers a platform and products which allow customers to use multiple services of third-party merchants without downloading separate apps, with the goal of creating a unified experience in one app.