During the award ceremony „Fintech Startup of the Year 2014“
for the winner Kreditech a
true fintech summit took place at the Hamburg Sutor Bank. The expert jury, journalists and sponsors met to discuss the latest developments in the fintech area.
The competition “Fintech Startup of the Year 2014” was initiated by the industry blog http://paymentandbanking.com, that is published by fintech founder and expert André M. Bajorat. The election of the winner took place in December 2014 in two phases: by public election and a consecutive expert jury decision. (www.fintech-des-jahres.de).
The expert jury and Sebastian Diemer, the CEO of Kreditech, fintech startup of the year 2014
The winner of the public election was the mobile payment startup Cashcloud. Whereas the expert jury designated Kreditech as the overall winner out of the public’s top ten list. The company issues loans based on a proprietary scoring using big data methods. The jury was impressed by Kreditech’s international strategy, its data driven technology and its success amid international investors.
Voices and Quotes on the Fintech Startup of the Year
Robert Freitag, owner and managing director of the Sutor Bank, explained why Sutor Bank took over the hosting of the award ceremony: „Fintech startups are potential partners for us. We like to work together with startups because we see great opportunities in these cooperations. Therefore, we launched the Sutor Startup Platform. This platform provides new entrants with the technology and the services that only a fully regulated bank can offer. And this is why we promote initiatives to propel the change in the finance industry whenever we are able and it seems worthwhile.”
André M. Bajorat, managing director of the banking API provider Figo, explained his motivation in his introductory statement to initiate the competition: „The visibility of the German fintech community as a whole is not strong enough. With the competition „Fintech of the Year“ I wanted to kick off an action that gives the community a common stage. I am very happy that a lot of important fintech players are meeting here at the award ceremony for the first time.“
Sebastian Diemer, CEO of the winner Kreditech, thanked for the award and explained his vision: „We asked ourselves early, why big companies like Paypal, Google, Facebook etc. have been evolving in the US only and not in Europe or specially in Germany. We have the vision to build a data driven company that will be able to play in the world league – the award shows that we are on a good a way.“
Jochen Siegert, CEO of the fintech company builder Finleap, depicted the opportunities for next-finance-focused company builders: “In the finance industry there are many inefficiencies within the value chain as well as not satisfied customer needs. These can be eliminated or satisfied by startups. With the new companies that Finleap is founding, we are concentrated on exactly these issues.
Chris Berger, CEO of Bee One, the innovation lab of Austrian Erster Bank Group, introduced the banking app George that was recently launched with a huge success in his home country: „The whole development process of the app George, an autopilot for modern banking, showed, that also banks are able to develop innovations when they use agile methods – even though this is not easy within a big bank.“