We have partnered with the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology to bring you a video series featuring one of our co-founding partner, Pascal Bouvier. The name of the video series is "Office Hours with Pascal Bouvier".
It goes without saying this video series will cover a wide range of fintech themes, thoughts and news, we find relevant for 2021. You can find the first episode here. We hope you will subscribe, watch and comment as we embark on this new fintech journey with you.
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That’s how it goes… in Fintech 2021
Everybody knows that the pandemic was loaded and accelerated change in financial services. What everyone knew was going to happen, is happening a lot sooner...like right now. The entire industry has redoubled efforts towards digitization across the business stack moving beyond the point of sale to the critical middle office and back office infrastructure. Everyone knows that this will significantly accelerate the pace of secular innovation across financial services. Everybody rolled with their fingers crossed, believing banks had won the wars and would rule over the fintech world, unperturbed and unchallenged by waves of innovation. The 2020 pandemic, as well as abnormal geopolitical events, smoothly hid that… Everybody knows the bank wars are over. Banks have lost ground, most of them relative to their leading peers and also to new entrants, some in absolute terms, and they still do not know how or why. Open banking will lead to Open Finance and the embedding of all financial services in the digital world. APIs will irremediably break the data silos residing within every bank. Mature fintech companies and big tech firms are claiming payment rails, building new networks, winning over the SME ecosystem. To wit the strategic moves of Stripe, Amazon, Square. The crypto and blockchain world is birthing the protocol elements of the future of capital markets and asset management as well as cash management and very few banks are paranoid enough to genuinely participate, beyond maybe innovation theater. Be that as it may, the few banks that are successfully reinventing themselves (we see you Goldman Sachs) will be powerhouses for many years to come (with cash to burn they will build internally and acquire when it better suits their goals). Everybody knows the fight is always fixed and the good guys of crypto v.1 lost. As if there was any doubt that cryptocurrencies and crypto assets would not end up being co-opted by the fiat world, leading to an explosive adoption curve in the making (see new centralizing agents like Coinbase or Binance vs truly libertarian independent individual participants). Everybody knows the fight is always fixed. See how Ant Financial’s IPO got pulled. See how Facebook’s Libra has been reduced to a poor man’s USD digital coupon. See how Wirecard exposed the entire payments industry. The poor stay poor, the rich get rich. Even in the crypto world, in DeFi. Hodl and prosper it seems. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows. As everyone knows, looking back is easy. As for what we should pay attention to in 2021... Not everybody knows that capital markets and asset management are leaking. So much so that the next evolution of digital assets – endogenous to a protocol, or tokenized and issued on a protocol, lightly or heavily embedded with lines of code ruling various corporate actions – will upend every workflow and every process, leading to drastically new market structures. The new capital markets and asset management industries will not resemble yesterday’s fiat worlds. They will borrow heavily from Omnifi (our term for all things crypto and blockchain). Watch these eco-systems for unprecedented change, albeit with an important caveat: as everyone knows, this sector has been especially slow to innovate given the confluence of capital, regulation and entrenched incumbents – but the signals of actual and impending change will be loud and real in 2021. Not everybody knows the captain lied. Thus, not everybody expects ESG to provide a sea change in how assets are rated, indexed, categorized, ranked and – perhaps most interestingly for the financial sector infrastructure of tomorrow – how broader assets (not just traditional ESG) are governed and invested. We shall see an explosion of activity in this space. Everybody is expecting performative ESG moves. Everybody is wrong. Business will not carry on as usual. This is a rare example where the hype understates the reality. This is fundamentally a nascent market with some early pioneers, but the lanes of opportunity are uncrowded, and the potential is immense. Not everybody got this broken feeling that the delivery of banking services is ailing. Everybody will be surprised by big moves at the application layer of open banking, or banking as a service. This is just the opening entree as more services will be co-opted. Many mature fintech startups in this space will become M&A targets. Many more fintech startups in this space will reach escape velocity. Banks will wake up licking their wounds. Not everybody is talking to SMEs. They should though, as SME banking will heat up as an early beneficiary of open banking and the application of targeted and complete solutions for previously smaller and bespoke (and thus uneconomical) consumers of financial services. Not everybody wants a box of crypto. Yet, there still will be willingness to experiment with self custody of long and short stem crypto and digital assets. The new custody infrastructure is being built. Much activity will ensue. We see the early beginnings of entirely new market structures around digital assets from asset management, both passive and active, to treasury and yield management, to indexing, to retail savings solutions, to white label custody solutions for institutions, to liquidity management and market making services, to crypto centric data analytics and feeds, to the entire industry adopting compliance and regtech solutions. A few more people know about the accelerating adoption of crypto as an asset class, at least when it comes to bitcoin, and this will continue in 2021. And everybody knows that you love my data. Everybody knows that you really do. Everybody knows all service providers and incumbents have been unfaithful. Ah, give or take a night or two, and… Not everybody knows that with antitrust and data privacy and anti big tech sentiments being reinvigorating, new privacy solutions around ethical and compliant data analytics will be in favor. A fascinating mix of asset (data) growth, demand for analytical tools by business, and concerns regarding privacy and security by consumer and government will provide increasing opportunities in this space. Not everybody knows that European fintech, discreet up to now, will see renewed investments and interest from many vc funds. Mark our words, from defi to self custody, across the ESG spectrum, with open banking morphing into open finance, with the beginnings of capital markets harmonization from primary issuance of digital assets to secondary trading platforms, to data analytics and governance platforms tailored to the financial services industry. And if you still doubt us on this last point, do realize that the freshly minted Brexit deal does not includes services in general and financial services in particular. Not everybody knows there will be further divergence between UK and EU financial markets structures, leading to a rebalancing of fintech activity to the EU, all else being constant (innovation follows market power and transactional activity, and both will, at the margin, rebalance towards the EU). And there are so many new startups we just have to meet Without a priori. And everybody knows. With special thanks to Leonard Cohen (for those who don’t know). A short summary
We recently doubled down on an earlier investment in Minna Technologies and participated in their series b. As a result, one of our partners, Pascal Bouvier, joined their board. We are proud to back the Minna team whom we originally met over two years ago. This shows that building long term business relationships pays in the end. We rate the Minna team highly. In a short period of time they have been able to achieve product/market fit sell and close large banks - never an easy proposition - and have demonstrated the power of bringing intelligence and connectivity to a retail checking account. Theirs is a sizable market to attack and we are excited to help the entire Minna team along their journey.
Pascal Bouvier, Managing Partner, MiddleGame Ventures said: “We are delighted to partner and invest in Minna Technologies. We strongly believe in a vision where banks develop their checking account offerings into “connected and intelligent” platforms and where retail clients are able to interact in many more ways than in the recent past. Minna delivers this future and allows banks to offer a rich subscription management offering for our digital lives.” You can find the press release here. FinData: A Central Ingredient in the New Ecosystem This blog, the fourth in a series, is focused on Financial Data, or what we call FinData. As we begin to put money to work in our latest fund at MiddleGame Ventures (“MGV”), we have completed a series of deep dive reviews of the FinTech startup landscape in B2B and B2B2C financial services to help structure how we prioritize our efforts across the broader fintech ecosystem. FinData is a core investment theme for MGV, encompassing both the collection and digitization of new data sources as well as the mechanisms and protocols to share and analyze data within and outside organizations. The accumulation of data and development of analytical tools is central to the new landscape. Accordingly, the availability of vast amounts of new data (whether from unstructured data, new asset classes, or current data spun out from a business) will drive increased functionality around data analysis, collaboration, and decisioning, including through the use of new technologies such as AI or quantum computing. Furthermore, the opening up of FinServ, is giving way to new entrants with fully digital architectures (think digital core systems, spatial biometric authentication) to provide an array of novel services on top of alternative data sources (IoT, satellites). Incumbents across financial services will thus no longer have the luxury of handling data solely within their four walls. Therefore, it will be essential to securely harness and share new data, which will inevitably create new opportunities (and new risks). We believe that all things data will quickly move to the top of strategic priorities and create an entirely new value chain. FinServ is quickly shifting from paper, people, and processes to digital, distributed, and data-driven (reflected in our term “3D Finance” explained further below). As significant (but largely inefficient) consumers of data, legacy players will have to upgrade their “spaghetti code” tech stacks to have a hope of remaining competitive in the new environment. We see a lot of activity and interest across three core areas:
Our work indicates that an army of nimble upstarts are enabling this data transformation. From frontier data ingestion (new pipelines, MLOps) to advanced data privacy/security technologies (ZKP, homomorphic encryption), new data capabilities are becoming increasingly available as computing costs decline and computing power increases. MGV has already invested in four companies that are championing trends across various subsectors in this space (Coinfirm, Minna Technologies, Wayflyer, and Next Gate Technologies). Our research has uncovered over 500 other early stage startups attacking the opportunity across the multiple vectors outlined below. Unsurprisingly, given the core building block nature of financial data to the ecosystem, there is a diverse and growing entrepreneurial energy being brought to the fore. Six MGV Focus Trends in FinData We have organized our research and investment efforts around six key trends that will transform a cross-section of functions within and beyond the FinData landscape:
3D Finance These focus trends in FinData tie into MGV’s “3D Finance” meta thesis, which encompasses the transformation of financial services around a core of Digital, Distributed, and Data-Driven processes. Within the 3D Finance construct, we have further developed investment themes that focus our attention on the transformation that is just beginning to unfold across the financial services industry, many of which were highlighted on MGV’s introductory blog. ![]() Conclusion
If you are a high-potential pioneering startup in the FinData ecosystem or if you are an incumbent seeking to identify opportunities within this ecosystem, please reach out to us. We are committed to supporting the transformation of financial services over the next decade and welcome any and all feedback and opportunities to engage constructively on a shared vision for the future of financial services. Stay tuned for follow up posts on additional verticals of interest to the investment team (also see our first three posts in this series on Open Banking, OmniFi, and Capital Markets & Asset Management). Acknowledgements In addition to the MGV team, underlying research credit goes to Clement Parramon and Inder Takhar, with support from Matt Lobel. The NadiFin FinTech Accelerator Program, powered by MiddleGame Ventures in partnership with Brown Brothers Harriman and Standard Chartered, announces that this year's cohort of 10 early stage companies has peer-selected Keyrock as the 2020 winner.
A special thanks to our sponsors and all participating companies for an engaging and energizing two-week program! Please reach out if interested in getting involved in next year's accelerator. Press release below: https://www.nadifin.com/press After 120+ applications from around the globe, the NadiFin FinTech Accelerator Program powered by MiddleGame Ventures in partnership with Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH) and Standard Chartered, announces its latest cohort of 10 early stage fintech companies (press release below).
https://www.nadifin.com/press As we begin to put money to work in our latest fund at MiddleGame Ventures (“MGV”), we have completed a series of deep dive reviews of the FinTech startup landscape in B2B and B2B2C financial services to help structure how we prioritize our efforts across the broader fintech ecosystem. This blog, the third in a series, is focused on Capital Markets & Asset Management (CM & AM). CM & AM includes the asset issuance, investing, trading, and post-trading life cycle of investable assets, as well as new marketplaces, tools, and infrastructure. Technology promises a revolutionary shift in the financial services sector, a departure from incremental, evolutionary product development that has largely defined CM & AM until now. CM & AM will undergo market structure transformations characterized by shifting data asymmetries between actors, the rise of new digital asset classes, and a reduced reliance on centralizing agents. We believe that these changes will create avenues for the emergence of new products, marketplaces, and platforms for engagement between providers and consumers of financial products, creating a virtuous cycle of innovation. For example, the automation of trade processing and post-trade clearing and settlement via DLT will provide significant capital savings and cost efficiencies to both the buy and sell side, while also decreasing friction, minimizing operational risk, and boosting transparency—key aims of regulators. Fundamentally, the emergence of a digitally-native infrastructure will quicken the pace of digitization. Just as liquidity begets more liquidity, digitization will drive more digitization. The joint application of cloud computing, APIs, SaaS models, advanced data analytics and DLT post-trade infrastructure will usher in an era of open capital markets and open asset management akin to the open banking trend. Similarly, friction and costs will be reduced, and markets will become more open and accessible which will exponentially increase liquidity and the velocity of transactions. While this dynamic is inherent to the growth of a cross-section of asset classes, we expect that the scale and scope of these changes driven by a fundamental rewiring of the CM infrastructure will be unprecedented. MGV has already invested in five companies that are championing trends across various subsectors in this space (Coinfirm, Keyrock, Nivaura and Next Gate Technologies). Our research has uncovered over 950 other early stage startups attacking the opportunity across the multiple vectors outlined below. Simply put, there is significant energy and resources be putting to work across the capital markets and asset management landscape. Seven MGV Focus Trends in Capital Markets & Asset Management We have organized our research and investment efforts around seven key trends that will transform a cross-section of functions within and beyond the financial services landscape:
3D Finance These focus trends in Capital Markets & Asset Management tie into MGV’s “3D Finance” meta thesis, which encompasses the transformation of financial services around a core of Digital, Distributed, and Data-Driven processes. Within the 3D Finance construct, we have further developed investment themes that focus our attention on the transformation that is just beginning to unfold across the financial services industry, many of which were highlighted on MGV’s introductory blog. Conclusion
If you are a high-potential pioneering startup in the CM & AM ecosystem or if you are an incumbent seeking to identify opportunities within this ecosystem, please reach out to us. We are committed to supporting the transformation of financial services over the next decade and welcome any and all feedback and opportunities to engage constructively on a shared vision for the future of financial services. Stay tuned for follow up posts on additional verticals of interest to the investment team, including FinData and ESG (also see our first two posts in this series on Open Banking and OmniFi). Acknowledgements In addition to the MGV team, underlying research credit goes to Antonin Gury-Coupier, with support from Inder Takhar and Matt Lobel. We are pleased to announce our newest investment in Keyrock, a liquidity management and market making service provider to the digital assets space. Here is a key quote from one of our Managing Partners, Pascal Bouvier, from the Keyrock press release: "One of our core themes at MGV is the rise of digital assets as the next evolutionary step for capital markets and asset management. For us, true rise of digital assets (crypto, endogenous to a protocol, tokenized representations of physical or financial assets) implies new market structures, new pre-issuance, issuance and post-issuance processes. That is why we firmly believe in Keyrock and are very excited to invest in them, as they are building the foundation for liquidity management and market making of these new assets going forward." You can find the Keyrock press release here: ![]()
We are pleased to announce our latest investment in Wayflyer as they scale their differentiated platform for ecommerce merchants. The company is at the forefront of innovative Open Banking technology solutions that bridge big data analytics with customized financial products to help clients grow faster and more economically.
View the company's announcement for further details. ![]() As we begin to put money to work in our latest fund at MiddleGame Ventures (“MGV”), we have completed a series of deep dive reviews of the FinTech startup landscape in B2B and B2B2C financial services to help structure how we prioritize our efforts across the broader fintech ecosystem. This blog, the second in a series, is focused on OmniFi. OmniFi is our term for the financial services spectrum spanning the current centralizing characteristics from Centralized Finance (CeFi) to the emerging power of Decentralized Finance (DeFi) while encompassing a host of applications (tokenization, fractionalization) that are being built on top of blockchain systems. OmniFi This next decade of OmniFi, and therefore FinServ, will usher in fundamental shifts in market structure and data asymmetries through increased decentralization (more open source, more disintermediation, more distribution) driven by leaps in infrastructure-layer innovation. However, we do not believe in extreme decentralization (where value may accrue incongruously) nor in status quo centralization (where value may accrue in a black box), but in a merging of the two into more efficient, more open financial systems – hence, our term OmniFi. To clarify, we do not believe that one system or governing structure (CeFi or DeFi) will “win” – hence, we are not “maximalists” or proponents of one system at the expense of the other. Rather, we believe the main ecosystems that comprise OmniFi will converge over time into something better. Further, we believe that many aspects of OmniFi will significantly impact Open Banking and similar movements in capital markets, asset management, and other verticals to create a true era of Open Finance. Better said, OmniFi is the transitional competitive milieu over the next decade that will lay the groundwork for Open Finance. For example, new ways to issue assets (tokenization, digitization, blockchain/DLT) will lead to new asset classes, driving a drastically different value chain in capital markets and asset management, helping pave the way for new frameworks to drive financial innovation outside legacy systems and infrastructure. MGV has already invested in two companies that are championing trends in this space (Coinfirm, Nivaura, and Keyrock). Our research has uncovered nearly 400 other early stage startups attacking the opportunity across multiple vectors employing a cross-section of technologies (DLT, Ai, RPA, Data Analytics). Simply put, there is enormous talent and energy focused on innovating the core infrastructure of the financial system. This is a natural evolution from the exponential rise of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, to NFTs, to the ICO craze, to now: a serious rebuild of infrastructure by fantastic teams attacking real opportunities. Seven MGV Focus Trends in OmniFi We have organized our research and investment efforts around seven key trends that will transform a cross-section of functions within and beyond the financial services landscape:
3D Finance These focus trends in OmniFi tie into MGV’s “3D Finance” meta thesis, which encompasses the transformation of financial services around a core of Digital, Distributed and Data-Driven processes. Within the 3D Finance construct, we have further developed investment themes that focus our attention on the transformation that is just beginning to unfold across the financial services industry, many of which were highlighted on MGV’s introductory blog. If you are a high-potential pioneering startup in the OmniFi ecosystem or if you are an incumbent seeking to identify opportunities within these emerging ecosystems, please reach out to us. We are committed to supporting the transformation of financial services over the next decade and welcome any and all feedback and opportunities to engage constructively on a shared vision for the future of financial services.
Stay tuned for follow up posts on additional verticals of interest to the investment team, including: Capital Markets & Asset Management, FinData, and ESG (also see our initial post in this series on Open Banking). Acknowledgements In addition to the MGV team, underlying research credit goes to Inder Takhar, with support from Matt Lobel. |
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