San Francisco headquartered financial services group Wells Fargo has selected two Singaporean startups for its highly rated accelerator program. Is this a sign that the city state's fintech industry is now gaining global recognition?
Wells Fargo has announced that it has selected two early stage payments companies, Alpha Payments Cloud and Jewel Paymentech, for investments of up to $500,000 for the spring 2016 class of the Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator.
The program is a non-exclusive, six-month, semi-annual program where Wells Fargo mentors and helps startups refine their potential breakthrough technologies for financial services and other applications.
Singapore Fintech Expansion
«We’re excited to invest in Alpha Payments Cloud and Jewel Paymentech through our Startup Accelerator. Their solutions are particularly interesting for merchants in terms of facilitating international payments and minimizing transaction fraud risk,» said Steve Ellis, Head of Wells Fargo’s Innovation Group.
Singapore based Alpha Payments Cloud consolidates the broad payments spectrum onto one payments-as-a-service platform called the AlphaHub that enables banks, merchants, payment service providers (PSPs), and independent sales organizations (ISOs) to access any payment type and any solution provider from anywhere in the world through application program interfaces (APIs).
Jewel Paymentech, a financial risk technology company, develops intelligent risk solutions for the banking and electronic payments industry. Jewel’s solutions help banks and payment facilitators conduct research and analysis on merchants and manage transaction fraud risks by using predictive analytics. Jewel also offers automated real-time solutions to large merchants, such as online marketplaces, to identify illegal and counterfeit goods.
Commercial Success
An example of a Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator success story is EyeVerify, one of the three companies chosen in August 2014 to participate in the inaugural class of the program. Wells Fargo is launching a biometric authentication technology provided by EyeVerify for its corporate customers. EyeVerify’s Eyeprint ID captures an image of the veins and micro features in and around the eye of users’ eyes to verify their identity using the front-facing camera on their mobile device.
