Recently there has been a lot of attention to the Baltic fintech scene, with a number of startups attracting major clients and significant amounts of funding. Lithuanian fintech scene is a big part of it, led by TransferGo’s (fast and cheap money transfers) recent $3.4 million funding round at a time of Brexit news from Britain.
The latest addition to Lithuania’s and whole Baltic region fintech scene is Barclays (a British multinational banking and financial services company headquartered in London) with its Rise Vilnius incubator.
Rise Vilnius is a purpose-built workspace for the fintech community, claiming to offer an inspiring environment for your creative ideas. Through the new incubator, Baltic startups get a better access to various Barclays innovation programmes and initiatives.
The official launch of Rise Vilnius took place on July 14, with a number of prominent politicians, IT and financial company representatives. The President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaitė and Vilnius Mayor Remigijus Šimašius were present and both of them promised support to the new initiatives in the fintech field. You can watch the whole launch event here.
Rise Vilnius is already almost fully booked. Among the first fintech startup tenants are mobile payment developer WoraPay, alternative investment designer Welltrado, blockchain solution architect Vectropay, loyalty card umbrella service provider Dealoyal and Feedback.chat, a stealth project from our TrackDuck startup team.
The next day after launch the incubator kicked off their first event – fintech hackathon Rise and Hack 2016 with around 60 participants and 13 teams pitched their products. You can see a video of all the pitches here and some photos from the event. Yours trully worked with an awesome team on a gamification challenge – we launched Bankomons, your personal banking monster which will help you learn and use banking products. In a nutshell, it’s a Facebook Messenger bot connected to Barclays Launchpad API – you can message Bankomon here.
