David K.A. Mordecai Participated in FinTech Innovation Lab 2015 Demo Day
David K.A. Mordecai participated in FinTech Innovation Lab’s 2015 Demo Day as Scientist-in-Residence. FinTech Innovation Lab (FTIL) is an accelerator platform for early and growth stage technology firms, organized by The Partnership Fund for New York City, in conjunction with Accenture and a consortium of venture capital firms and global financial institutions.
As Scientist-in-Residence for FTIL, Dr. David K.A. Mordecai is one of three distinguished senior advisors who are members of the FTIL Mentors Network comprised of seasoned entrepreneurs that have successfully launched and scaled a financial technology company to acquisition or IPO. Members of the Network serve as mentors and informal advisors for companies accepted into FTIL, providing guidance on the broad range of issues faced by senior management of fintech companies. The other two senior advisors that serve in a similar capacity for the FTIL portfolio companies as Dr. Mordecai are CTO-in-Residence Andy Brown, former group chief technology officer at UBS, and Executive-in-Residence Cristobal Conde, former CEO of Sungard.
David K.A. Mordecai is Co-Managing Member of Numerati® Partners, and advises research activities at RiskEcon® Lab @ Courant Institute.
FinTech Innovation Lab 2015 Demo Day
Applicants to FTIL must have at least a working beta version of their technology that is ready for testing in either the institutional or retail market. The Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) from the 15 supporting financial firms selected the current set of seven participants for the 2015 cycle:
- Digital Asset Holdings: which is building next-generation, cryptographically secure distributed settlement and ledger services. The company will provide safe and efficient settlement of conventional and digital assets that eliminate counterparty risk and can reduce trade- processing time from T+3 to same-day settlement.
- Eversafe: which is a technology service focused on protecting older adults from financial abuse and identity theft. The online service analyzes bank and investment accounts, credit card activity, and credit reports for suspicious activity, and enables seniors to designate trusted advocates as “an extra set of eyes” to assist in monitoring.
- MaxMyInterest: which offers an intelligent cash-management solution that maximizes the interest that individuals can earn on the cash in their bank accounts. Max employs a novel cash sweep technology that monitors interest rates daily and automatically reallocates funds among a client’s own bank accounts to secure the highest yield while maximizing FDIC-insurance coverage.
- PierceMatrix: which offers a cyber-security solution that addresses third-party risk from partners connecting into a company’s network. PierceMatrix creates a unified defense by sharing threats, learning hacker locations, and making security recommendations. It uses a distributed architecture to scale and military level artificial intelligence to automate, allowing security personnel to reduce third-party risk by processing more alerts in less time.
- Pay Your Tuition (PYT FUNDS INC): which leverages its propriety technology platform to help low and moderate income students increase their prospects for private funding and to help address the growing funding gap for college tuition due to rising higher education costs. Through a combination of crowdfunding and philanthropy, PYT matches high-performing students with traditional financial institutions, helping students meet their education funding goals and helping banks expand their consumer loan portfolio by funding lower risk private education loans.
- Social Alpha: which provides actionable insights for traders, analysts and investment managers. Social Alpha applies large-scale machine learning and natural language processing to online news and social media sources to deliver real-time analysis of social media activity that is likely to affect financial markets.
- Ufora: which leverages sophisticated algorithms and vast hardware infrastructure to automate the expensive engineering required to work with large datasets, enabling analysts to address real-world complexity and answer a firm’s most important questions in seconds instead of months
Numerati® Partners LLC coordinates a data analytics and technology development ecosystem, with the mission of advancing and fostering the next generation of scalable data-intensive risk and liability management enterprises. The firm provides resources fundamental to advancing the development of nascent leading-edge inferential surveillance, monitoring, and predictive analytics technologies for deployment within the RiskTech domain: risk technologies associated with adaptive distributed, networked and embedded systems such as remote sensing, agent-oriented data analytics, computing and control systems. Numerati Partners curates integrated RiskTech solutions as well as forensic and use-case applications in RiskTech sub-domains such as LitTech, RegTech, FinTech and InsurTech (litigation technology, regulation technology, financial technology and insurance technology).
About RiskEcon® Lab @ Courant Institute
The mission of RiskEcon® Lab for Decision Metrics @ Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences NYU is to enable, facilitate and coordinate academic research focusing on these patterns and trends, via the development of commercially-viable, analytic applications employing computational statistical tools in conjunction with innovative and non-traditional data structures. In addition, the lab’s activities involve the advancement of applied mathematical statistics and computational economics, through interdisciplinary post-doctoral, postgraduate, graduate research and education in data science and social computing.
RiskEcon® Lab for Decision Metrics was established in 2011 at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, an independent division of New York University (NYU). Courant is considered to be one of the world’s leading mathematics educational and scientific research centers, and has been ranked first in research in applied mathematics.
About FinTech Innovation LabFTIL’s 24 alumni companies have raised a total of $176 million in financing after participating in the program, and one alumni company was acquired last year for $175 million. Financial services firms supporting FTIL are: Ally Financial; American Express; Bank of America; Barclays; Capital One; Citigroup; Credit Suisse; Deutsche Bank; Goldman Sachs; The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America; JPMorgan Chase Co; Morgan Stanley; New York Life; UBS; and Wells Fargo. Supporting venture-capital firms include Bain Capital Ventures, Canaan Partners, Contour Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Nyca Partners, Rho Ventures, RRE Ventures and Warburg Pincus.
About Partnership Fund for New York CityPFNYC was founded by Henry R. Kravis, and is led by PFNYC CEO and President Maria Gotsch, and capitalized by leaders of global business and finance. The mission is to mobilize investor resources in order to create a more diversified local economy. PFNYC has established a network of leading experts from the investment and corporate spheres, in order to provide assistance in identifying and supporting New York City’s most promising entrepreneurs, in both the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors. For more information, visit https://www.fintechinnovationlab.com/.
June 25, 2015 | New York, NY
