UBS celebrates its first Female Founder Award winner as part of the Future of Finance Challenge

For the first time since starting the Future of Finance Challenge in 2015, UBS has presented a Female Founder Award as part of its Future of Finance Challenge. Around one-third of the overall entries qualified for this award.

• Kimberley Abbott of Vested Impact won the Female Founder Award.

This year’s «UBS Future of Finance Challenge» was a huge success with 475 high-quality submissions, from which the four winners of the overall competition were chosen.

• Fairly AI won the tech and cyber security challenge,
•  bsurance took the prize in the app stores and platforms challenge,
• S Factor won in the sustainable banking challenge,
• BondEvalue came first in the reimagining investing challenge.

For each of the four challenges, ten start-ups were invited to pitch their solutions to a panel of UBS and external experts. The global competition included cash prizes of 10,000 USD per challenge and benefits including over 120 hours of dedicated coaching from UBS experts, mentors and partners.

“The quality of the pitches and submissions was remarkable. It underlined that great solutions can be found in cooperation with the ecosystem and that collaborating with fintechs benefits our clients” said Mike Dargan, Group Chief Digital and Information Officer. “I am particularly proud to present for the first time a Female Founder Award. At UBS we want to raise awareness of the funding gap for female entrepreneurs. We’ve long been focused on increasing the impact of women in technology at the firm, and the creation of this award takes our commitment further. Diversity of people, ideas, and perspectives is critical to any ecosystem’s ability to deliver for clients – and fintech is obviously no exception. Women remain underrepresented among founders and entrepreneurs in the industry, and I hope our award will help to increase their visibility and success.”

For the Female Founder finalists, UBS created a year-long program that includes support and mentorship, coaching for interactions with investors, and working closely with client advisors from our wealth management teams globally.

The competition was held in collaboration with Anthemis, Deloitte and Microsoft for Startups. This collaborative approach offered commercial and technical expertise to the start-ups and provided them with access to the innovation pipeline of a leading global financial services firm.

The top three startups of the tech and cyber security challenge were:

1. Fairly AI: Helps organizations rapidly and confidently deploy AI models at scale.
2. GK8: Enables financial institutions to offer services over digital assets with protection from cyber-attacks.
3. Duality: Empowers organizations to extract business value from sensitive data by enabling secure data collaborations.

The top three startups of the app stores and platforms challenge were:

1. bsurance: Helps businesses scale-up globally and grow their customer base by fully digitalizing and embedding insurance products directly at the point of sale.
2. Hatcher+: Uses AI, process automation and global partnerships to improve outcomes for investors.
3. Fundnel: Private investment technology platform that builds next-generation capital markets infrastructure to increase access and liquidity for entrepreneurs and investors in Southeast Asia.

The top three startups of the sustainable banking challenge were:

1. S Factor: Provides social impact information, company ratings and rankings and an index product which measure companies’ financial performance in relation to their social impact.
2. ValAi: Combines big data, artificial intelligence, and climate insights to inform business decisions.
3. Earthly: API-led marketplace that helps businesses discover and invest in the most effective nature-based solutions and showcases their investments and impact through engaging data.

The top three startups of the reimagining investing challenge were:

1. BondEvalue: A fractional bond exchange where all investors can trade bonds on-the-go.
2. Weave.ai: Client experience and analytics platform to help grow assets under management.
3. InterGen Data: Predicts Life Events so that clients can “Leverage the Moments that Matter”.

Winner of Female Founder Award:

1. Kimberley Abbott, Vested Impact: She impressed the jury with her track record as well as her demonstrated leadership both within Vested Impact and in the wider female entrepreneur community.

UBS Group AG

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