Slaughter and May reveals second Fintech Fast Forward cohort

11 businesses join fintech entrepreneurs programme

Slaughter and May, the leading international law firm, today announces that 11 tech businesses in total have now joined its Fintech Fast Forward programme. In March, the first cohort of five businesses joined its fintech entrepreneurs programme, and now a further six businesses have been selected.

The six further businesses, operating in the insurtech, big data, artificial intelligence and open banking sectors, make up the second cohort.

Since formally launching in October 2016, over 50 businesses have applied to join the Fintech Fast Forward programme, in which Slaughter and May offers successful applicants up to £30,000 of value add services, as well as access to the firms network and contacts.

A consultative panel of leading legal and industry professionals supports Slaughter and May’s programme. The panel includes Mike Lynch, CEO of Invoke Capital; Trevor Callaghan, General Counsel of DeepMind Technologies; Suzanne Ashman, Partner and Fintech lead at LocalGlobe, Sigga Sigurdardottir, Chief Customer and Innovation Officer UK at Santander and Peter Cullum, CBE, founder of the Peter Cullum Centre for Entrepreneurship at Cass Business School.

In addition to the first cohort; By Miles, Enforcd, Tide, Garrison and WorldRemit, the six new businesses selected to join the programme are:

  • Digital Fineprint (https://www.digitalfineprint.com/) – Digital Fineprint help insurance companies use social media data to find customer and risk insights. Their end-to-end solutions enable their clients to link a social media identity to an insurance identity, using social media data analytics to help improve customer targeting, conversion, sales, cross-selling and retention.
  • Flock (http://flockcover.com/) – Flock is a London-based insurtech building a big data-driven risk intelligence platform for drones. Flock recently announced a global partnership with Allianz, the world's largest aviation insurer, to launch their first product: a pay-as-you-fly insurance and safety application for commercial and recreational drone pilots.
  • Multiply (http://www.multiply.ai/) – Multiply has created a machine-learning platform that provides interactive, adaptive personalised financial plans with specific product recommendations across their clients’ entire financial world: savings, investments, protection and mortgages.
  • TAB (https://www.insidetab.io/home/) – TAB are using big data engineering to capture data points from thousands of crowdfunding and p2p lending marketplaces to help their clients identify trends and market signals and to monitor opportunity and risk. They capture and aggregate billions of data points on individual fundraises and add machine intelligence to deliver insight to their clients.
  • TrueLayer (https://truelayer.com) – TrueLayer is building an API tool to enable fintechs and other service providers to capitalise on the open banking initiative by breaking down points of friction and providing secure, clear and simple access to banking infrastructure.
  • Valsys (http://valsys.io/) – Valsys believe the science of company valuations currently relies on imperfect and outdated methods. Using Vectr their machine learning and artificial intelligence platform, they are facilitating private company valuations with improved accuracy and performance. Valsys also offers insight into peer group selection, buyer profiling and discounting.

“We are absolutely delighted to welcome another six leading edge businesses to the Fintech Fast Forward programme,” said Rob Sumroy, partner at Slaughter and May. “Over the course of the last year, the quality and quantity of applications we have received has surpassed our expectations. We have met a significant number and variety of businesses and had exceptionally positive feedback to the initiative. We would like to thank everyone who has applied to join the programme and welcome Digital Fineprint, Flock, Multiply, TAB, TrueLayer and Valsys to Fintech Fast Forward.”

Ben Kingsley, partner at Slaughter and May, said: “We created Fintech Fast Forward because we recognised the depth of talent which exists amongst the UK’s tech entrepreneurs. After our first full year running the programme we are delighted that our experience has fully validated our thesis, and even more so than we had hoped it would. With an uncertain economic environment and challenging headwinds facing many young and growing tech businesses in the UK, we hope the programme will help our new cohort navigate many of the challenges they face, grow their businesses and fulfil their undoubted potential. We are really excited to be working with all of the firms in this cohort.”

Rob Sumroy, partner at Slaughter and May, added: “The success of Fintech Fast Forward has also helped to highlight our commitment as a firm to investing in innovation. Our recent legaltech collaboration with Luminance is already delivering benefits to our lawyers and to our clients and we are continuing to explore a range of other innovative approaches to our working practices.”