< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

“Fintech entrepreneurs all want access to the industry,” says Nektarios Liolios. “All the talk of disruption from the outside is rubbish.” Liolios worked to promote such access from 2011 to 2014 as manager of SWIFT’s Innotribe Startup Challenge (see Fabian Vandenreydt, No. 26). Now he channels funding and mentoring from leading financial institutions to participants in Startupbootcamp FinTech, a London offshoot, launched last year, of the five-year-old Startupbootcamp accelerator network. The boot camp itself lasts three months; the 2015 edition has its climactic demo day on November 12. The program was extended to Singapore this year, and there are plans to expand to New York and beyond. Liolios, 48, notes that the average age of Startupbootcamp FinTech entrants is 38 — they are more mature and industry-savvy than typical 20-somethings. “These are people who have been in the industry and experienced its problems themselves,” Liolios says, adding that there is no end in sight to the demand for creative solutions in such areas as back-office processing and data management. Five of the nine teams in the London boot camp are working on ideas relevant to wealth and asset management, he says, heralding a shift away from fintech’s earlier focus on payments and alternative lending. A quarter of the 400 applications to the London program were blockchain-related, and “most were not very good,” Liolios says. “Geeks get excited about the tech but don’t understand the industry problem.” The idea behind Startupbootcamp FinTech is to connect the two worlds, he explains, as “banks increasingly recognize they can’t build everything themselves.”

 
The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

1. James Robinson III & James Robinson IV RRE Ventures 2. Jane Gladstone Evercore Partners 3. Matthew Harris Bain Capital Ventures Finding, Applying for, and Winning Grant Funding: Tips for Nonprofits Sponsored by Fidelity Investments April 29, 2025 4. Steven McLaughlin Financial Technology Partners 5. Jonathan Korngold General Atlantic

6. Richard Garman & Brad Bernstein FTV Capital 7. Amy Nauiokas & Sean Park Anthemis Group 8. Thomas Jessop Goldman Sachs Group 9. Meyer (Micky) Malka Ribbit Capital 10. Hans Morris Nyca Partners

11. Maria Gotsch Partnership Fund for New York City 12. Marc Andreessen Andreessen Horowitz 13. Barry Silbert Digital Currency Group 14. Jay Reinemann Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria 15. Mariano Belinky Santander InnoVentures

16. François Robinet AXA Strategic Ventures 17. Vanessa Colella Citi Ventures 18. Alan Freudenstein & Gregory Grimaldi Credit Suisse NEXT Fund 19. Justin Brownhill & Neil DeSena SenaHill Partners 20. Rodger Voorhies Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

21. Michael Schlein Accion International 22. Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates 23. Rumi Morales CME Ventures 24. Mark Beeston Illuminate Financial Management 25. Vladislav Solodkiy Life.SREDA

26. Fabian Vandenreydt Innotribe SWIFT 27. Derek White Barclays 28. Alex Batlin UBS 29. Jeffrey Greenberg & Vincenzo La Ruffa Aquiline Capital Partners 30. P. Howard Edelstein REDI Holdings

31. Nektarios Liolios Startupbootcamp FinTech 32. Roy Bahat Bloomberg Beta 33. Andrew McCormack Valar Ventures 34. Lawrence Wintermeyer Innovate Finance 35. Janos Barberis FinTech Hong Kong