As part of Sibos in Singapore, the world's premier financial services event organised by SWIFT, the Innotribe Startup Challenge Finale took place on Wednesday 14 October.

The 12 early-stage finalists selected during the regional showcases competed live in front of an audience of industry experts, VCs, leading financial institutions and bank decision-makers to convince the banking sector at large to take on their innovative products and services.

Hyperledger won the 2015 Innotribe Startup Challenge, which includes a cash prize of USD 50,000. Hyperledger is a distributed ledger platform tailored for regulated financial institutions to eliminate reconciliation costs, prevent trade breaks and reduce settlement times and risk.

Daniel O'Prey, Founder, Hyperledger, said, "The Innotribe experience and team have been fantastic from start to finish. Progressing from the New York regional showcase was extremely valuable in our acquisition by Digital Asset Holdings. We have had amazing exposure to our target market and look forward to following-up on all the leads it has generated as well as having a closer relationship with SWIFT".

For the first time this year, the eight growth-stage finalists hosted individual exhibition booths on the Innotribe stand, at the heart of the Sibos exhibition, as a way to gain recognition and interest from the wider financial community via live product demos. They were joined by EssDOCS, AMP Credit Technologies and Matchmove, all three Startup Challenge alumni from 2014.

Over 370 companies from around the world applied to the Innotribe Startup Challenge this year. A panel of over 500 senior innovation executives at global financial institutions, VCs and angel investors selected 60 companies to participate in the regional showcases in London, Cape Town, Singapore and New York earlier this year. The judges evaluated the companies based on which ones were most likely to be an important innovation in the future of the financial industry.

Fabian Vandenreydt, Head of Markets Management, Innotribe and the SWIFT Institute at SWIFT says: "Allowing us to engage with the financial industry at large, Sibos is the perfect place to run the Startup Challenge Finale. Banks and financial institutions benefit from the direct insights on new technologies and business models and gain great access to the startup ecosystem. Innotribe was one of the initial facilitators that helped to spread innovation within the financial industry. We will continue to play a central role in this process in 2016."

Commenting on the Singapore landscape, Vandenreydt added, "FinTech has changed beyond recognition over the last few years. With a collaborative business environment, Singapore is well positioned to becoming a focal point of innovation in Asia and it was a pleasure for us to welcome our finalists to such environment."

The Innotribe Startup Finale was sponsored by Deutsche Bank, HP, IBM, Invest NI, Level39, Luxembourg for Finance, and Wells Fargo.