RBS FinTech Accelerator goes national – but Edinburgh remains core location
RBS and fintechs?
After a successful trial at the Entrepreneurial Spark Hub in Edinburgh last year, RBS is expanding its FinTech Accelerator programme across three more locations in the UK - London, Manchester and Bristol – but attracting FinTechs to join the programme based out of their Gogarburn head office is still seen as vital.
We spoke to Steve Chown who leads the FinTech proposition for the Bank:
“Having the Entrepreneurial Hub in our head office in Gogarburn over the last few years has transformed the feel of the building. The layout has been designed to really encourage engagement between Bank staff and Entrepreneurs, with the Hub and our Innovation teams next door to each other and even sharing an event space. It’s a big building, with coffee shops and even a Tesco Express and you often see Entrepreneurs in the queue for their Latte next to Bank Execs!”
“We’ve got 6000 staff based in Gogarburn alone, from every function within Banking you can think of and that’s a key part of our offering for FinTech businesses - linking them up with staff who can add value to what they are building – for example if you are a payments business we’ll endeavour you a linked in to someone from our payments team who talks your language and can give you advice and feedback. Our staff are really keen to engage, I’ve even had our Analytics and Modelling team offering to help, hands on, with businesses struggling to manage their data or with large analytics problems”
“The Banks attitude to dealing with start-up businesses has really changed over the last few years – we now realise that sometimes we don’t know best, and there’s massive value in partnering with specialist businesses with ready made solutions”
So what does a FinTech Accelerator involve?
Steve explains more:
“At the core of our offering is the coaching and mentoring from Entrepreneurial Spark alongside office space in our Hub but we really wanted to ensure FinTechs got real value from joining our programme so asked them what their main challenges were. Based on what we were told we have arranged additional content around IP protection, regulation, partnering with Corporates and raising investment alongside technology and sales strategy reviews from our partners at Dell - plus of course connections into relevant Bank staff and will end the programme with a Demo day event to pitch their ideas. We are really looking forward to welcoming some more FinTechs in to our head office.”
If you're interesting in learning more about this or if you'd like to apply for this programme contact us below or via the contact us form.
