What Will I Learn?
Our immersion program will educate you in all of these trends and show you how to capitalize on them to make an established financial institution an innovator and worthy partner to the fintech ecosystem.

Front-office
This category covers customer-facing areas of the business including sales, trading, and research. Companies operating in this niche include Global Liquid Markets, an electronic securities financing trading platform, and Mercatus, a provider of alternative asset and investment management solutions. AlphaClone, meanwhile, uses a mix of human judgement and algorithmic number-crunching to generate and backtest investment strategies. Startups operating in this space typically take the form of marketplaces and platforms that create access to primary and secondary markets, or act as alternative exchanges for the purchase and sale of assets. Others, like Confluent, build general software to support sales and trading desks.

Middle-office
Startups disrupting middle office operations include investment risk, research and analytics platforms. A number of companies in this space provide investors with access to alternative or non-traditional data sets in an attempt to replace legacy data providers. Second Measure counts itself among this group, as it analyzes billions of anonymized purchases to answer real-time questions on consumer behavior and company health. Addepar and Rivos, meanwhile, as cloud-based investment management platforms, focus on providing insight and business intelligence to investors and advisors. Random Forest Capital uses machine-learning algorithms to help institutional investors make strategic decisions while AltX is an intelligence platform for firms investing in hedge funds.

Back-office
Post-trade settlement and clearance, regulatory compliance and risk mitigation are all traditional back-office tasks now experiencing disruption from a crop of early-stage companies leveraging the latest technologies. Where startups such as Cognito and IdentityMind offer digital identity verification to help financial institutions meet know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements, Avaamo and Carta are AI and cloud platforms, respectively, streamlining core administrative processes; both have raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital. Ripple is also tipped to do great things. With backing from some of the biggest names in venture investing, the company is looking to disrupt the clearance and settlement sector with its application of blockchain.