Contrary to what you might believe, the currency of a tech seed fund and incubator is not its technology — it’s its people.
Business founders, technical founders, developers, UX designers, etc., they are all far more important than some “great idea” or “disruptive new business model”.
Ideas are a dime a dozen, talent is precious — heck, isn’t that what acquihires are all about?
Being part of the StartTech family means that we believe in you and your potential — that’s why we were not very surprised (but still quite delighted) when our very own Elorus team delivered the goods at the recent i-bank #FinTech Crowdhackathon with their banking platform and API.
After all we have always banked on talent (pun intended).
The hackathon, organized by the National Bank and (crowdsourcing experts) Crowdpolicy, was focused on the creation of FinTech applications (especially related to Cashless and Εveryday banking) that leverage the National Bank’s new openly accessible data API.
The widely successful event had 16 teams competing for cash prizes, sponsor offerings, and professional collaboration of up to 20K euros with the National Bank, split between the first 3 winners.
The Elorus team, with its SynenosiS project, managed to go beyond the technical demands of the competition, and have a business plan, a sales pitch presentation, a fully working website, branding and logos, social channels, integration with external services like MailChimp and coverage on social media, plus a full blown technical platform. Oh, and all that in just 36 hours.
In fact the whole project went a little outside of the scope of the competition (as it extended beyond the National Bank’s API), but the work and execution were so good that the panel decided to give the team a winning spot anyway.
So what’s SynenosiS?
Put simply, it’s a service that allows users unified access to their accounts across different banks and financial platforms (the latter including PayPal, Viva Wallet, and more), combined with a streamlined programming API that allows developers to create all kinds of applications for Personal Finance Management (PFM), Cashflow analysis, Prediction, Accounting, Invoicing, etc.
(This is also the reason why the project goes beyond the more limited goals of the i-bank #FinTech hackathon: it works not just with National Bank’s API, but potentially across any bank, starting out with support for the 4 largest Greek banks).
With collaboration, information exchange, transparency and API-fication (sic) as key driving forces behind the modern economy, SynenosiS has the potential to disrupt the financial services industry, moving it from a fragmented and segregated access landscape towards an open and flexible Cloud-ready services model.
Not that the team behind the project is any stranger to modern Cloud-enabled services of course: with its Elorus startup (part of the StartTech portfolio) it has built a feature-full, industry leading, online invoice, billing and account management solution for small to medium enterprises and freelancers.
We should also give special kudos to the hard working teams behind BankBot, an application for offering customer service over Facebook Messenger (first place), RSK-Mind, a machine learning-based service for fraud detection (second place), and Smart Pay, a QR code-based payments app (shared third place).
For more information about SynenosiS, please visit the project’s website at https://www.synenosis.gr — and don’t forget to follow it on Twitter and Facebook for the latest developments.