Bankia : Fintech by Innsomnia selects eight startups from four continents for its international program

• The companies will start working with Bankia's accelerator in early June
• Most of them specialise in promoting customer engagement or predicting risk for approving banking products

Bankia Fintech by Innsomnia, Spain's leading fintech incubator and accelerator launched by Bankia last November, has selected eight startups from the United Kingdom, France, USA, Israel and Australia to join its first international programme. Although the programme was initially seeking five companies, the quality of the applicants has led it to increase this number.

Of the eight startups chosen, five will join the accelerator immediately, while the remaining three will join in the coming months. The five that will begin working with Bankia and Innsomnia at the start of June are:

• Verumview. An Israeli company that has an API capable of analysing the emails of people that are not yet customers, providing the company with valuable information in order to reduce risk and increase revenues in future sales and agreements.
• Moven Enterprise. US engagement platform based in New York that is capable of transforming a bank's data into positive experiences for users and measurable business outcomes for the bank. It already has one million users.
• PayKey. This Israeli start-up enables payments that are integrated into social networks using a keyboard application for mobiles that connects to the bank to ensure secure and private transactions.
• CVX Europe. Australian company that specialises in compliance-related matters. It captures and structures all of the data related to activities such as loan approvals or mortgages in order to maximise efficiency.
• Sentimer. Spanish platform that uses chatbots and artificial intelligence in the banking and insurance sector. It helps to capture new customers and facilitates cross-selling, recommendations and customer service.

The three remaining start-ups that will join over the next few months are Nordigen (a French company specialising in risk analysis for approving loans and other banking services); James (a subsidiary of New York firm Crowdprocess, specialising in predictive analysis and risk models); and Friendly Score (a UK company that assigns a risk score to potential customers based on their social networks, transactions, etc.).

The acceleration and incubation process will last for 16 weeks, during which time companies will receive mentoring from Innsomnia and tutoring from Bankia professionals. The incubation and acceleration process is based on a collaborative system, which means that startups can join the program without relinquishing part of their capital. Instead, the intention is to subsequently offer these companies the option to provide their services to the bank under a client-supplier relationship.

The selected startups will be based at the Bankia Fintech headquarters in the Innsomnia building in Valencia Marina, formerly one of the bases for the America's Cup in the Port of Valencia and one of the leading innovation hubs in the Mediterranean. They will share the space with the fintechs from Bankia's first national program that began last November and for which the incubation phase runs until July.

A total of 37 fintech startups submitted applications to the programme, including a large number from the Americas that wanted to join the project.

Mexico leads the ranking (9), followed by Colombia (8), USA (3), Peru (2) and Brazil (2). In Europe applications were received from the United Kingdom (5), France (2), Italy (1), Ukraine (1) and Latvia (1), while the remainder came from Israel (2) and Australia (1). The program also received applications from nine Spanish companies, whose proposals have also been analysed.

All of these startups will be included in the Bankia Fintech Club by Innsomnia, a permanent communication platform for the international fintech ecosystem that will share online training and networking and facilitate exchanges between its members.

They will join the startups selected in the national programme, both the 14 that began their incubation phase in November that are currently working with Bankia in different phases, and those that submitted applications but were not successful.