Nomura aims to reshape India’s financial sector with innovative solutions from Voyager programme for fintech startups

In another example of the growing collaboration between fintech startups and established financial institutions, Asian investment major Nomura’s Voyager – Nomura FinTech Partnership’ programme was launched in India in April. As part of the programme a Demo Day was recently held, where select startups showcased their innovative solutions for capital markets and investment banking.

With PwC as a strategic partner, and Google, IBM, Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd. and Let’s Talk Payments bringing in industry expertise, the programme received over 150 applications from all across the world. Of these, eight startups were selected to collaborate with the financial giant over a 10-week period, and develop Proof of Concepts (POCs).

These finalists showcased a wide range of banking solutions across functions, including client on-boarding, business intelligence, and market insights, enhanced risk and control, and human resources management. The solutions were built on technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), anomaly detection, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Generation (NLG), and chatbots.

According to Nikhil Mehta, Nomura’s Executive Director and Head of Strategy (India), "For Nomura, the Voyager initiative is a global strategic play on co-creating products with startups having strong technologies and driven teams, who will then be given access to deploy and pilot their solutions in live markets. The on-boarded startups are given access to facilities at the Nomura Innovation Center (NICe) based in Mumbai, and are expected to be very dynamic in terms of evolving their technology, products and business models in the course of the programme."

Speaking at the Demo Day event, Yo Akatsuka, Senior Managing Director, Innovations, Nomura Holdings, said, “Rapidly evolving technologies are transforming the way we operate, and this wave of technological disruption is poised to reshape the industry. Nomura is focused on nurturing innovation across the value-chain using new technologies to redesign and re-imagine our operating model. The Voyager initiative in India is a further sign of our commitment to drive financial innovation globally.”

“We have been extremely pleased with the overwhelming number of applications as well as the quality of startups under the CMIB-focused Voyager initiative. Our deep engagement and partnership with startups has yielded highly promising solutions to address a number of banking industry pain points as well as create new opportunities. This is a strong testament of successful collaboration with the broader FinTech ecosystem,” said R.K. Rangan, President and CEO, Nomura Services India.

The eight startups who showcased their solutions to Nomura executives and clients, as well as senior representatives from the fintech community are:

Datum Solutions specialises in enterprise content management, business process management and intelligent process automation, leveraging AI, ML, and NLP.

Recommender Labs employs ML algorithms with AI-based analytics, chatbots, and games to generate personalised recommendations for fintech, customer experience, and human resources.

Senseforth is a conversation platform built on AI and NLP. Senseforth mimics human cognitive abilities in reading, comprehending, interpreting, and actionising user intent.

Simility helps banks, wallets, acquirers, and issuers fight fraud by combining ML models with rules and behavioural analytics to provide a high efficacy solutions.

Stride.ai mimics human intelligence at scale and applies its proprietary AI and NLP platform on textual data to intelligently automate enterprise processes.

Surukam is among India’s first AI-based legal startups, and provides a solution to assist legal teams in contract extraction, knowledge management, and collaboration.

Tookitaki provides financial institutions an ML platform to build and optimise workflows, primarily in operational risk and compliance.

vPhrase's AI product Phrazor summarises data and offers key insights in a few bullet points, ensuring that companies spend less time in analysis and more time in making decisions.

Know more about the Voyager – Nomura FinTech Partnership here.