Partners in innovation

Ireland is one of the best countries in the world to set up and scale a business in the exciting new area of fintech, the application of the latest computing and data-analytics technologies to traditional financial services, according to the Government's IFS 2020 strategy.

Launched in 2015, the strategy sets out an action plan for the international financial services industry in Ireland, with an ambitious target to create 10,000 additional jobs in the sector by 2020. It singles out fintech and innovation in financial services generally as particular areas for growth and states that “Ireland is uniquely positioned to become a leading global centre for fintech investment – where global multinationals can develop and implement their innovation strategies, while Irish-owned start-ups continue to scale up and succeed in global markets”.

The strategy also envisages the development of a fintech ecosystem in Ireland, with a strong emphasis on collaboration between the established banking and financial services sector and fintech start-ups. That partnership between the major players and the new entrants is now a reality with Citi, MasterCard, State Street, Bank of Ireland, Ulster Bank, Accenture and a host of other leading names involved in a variety of initiatives with their younger counterparts.

One such initiative is Ulster Bank's partnership with Dogpatch Labs, the Dublin based co-working space for tech and fintech start-ups. Ulster Bank assisted Dogpatch with a significant expansion two years ago and has sited its own innovation hub there. The bank's innovation solutions team is also located in the Dogpatch space in the heart of Dublin's IFSC.

The collaboration is in line with the bank's own commitment to innovation, according to Ulster Bank chief administrative officer Ciarán Coyle. "We are determined to ensure that innovation at Ulster Bank is customer-focused and is not just innovation for the sake of it," he says. "We introduced Apple Pay and Android Pay to make our customers' lives easier. We have introduced video-conferencing services for customers to make things like mortgage applications easier, for example. There is a lot going on both here in Ireland and internationally in our parent RBS Group."

Win-win relationship

The partnership with Dogpatch is very much a win-win relationship. “We are a proud partner of Dogpatch Labs,” says Coyle. “We are delighted to help Dogpatch with its expansion but Ulster Bank is also gaining from the deal. It exposes us to a very different environment. Our innovation solutions team is working shoulder-to-shoulder with start-ups in fintech and other related areas. Earlier this year, we held a hackathon on innovations in banking there where we had people from 34 different countries participating.”

Another international firm making a major contribution to Ireland’s fintech ecosystem is Accenture. The firm’s FinTech Innovation Lab is a three-month accelerator programme, based at the Guinness Enterprise Centre in Dublin, that provides start-up and early-stage fintech enterprises with direct access to senior executives in Ireland’s leading financial services and technology companies.

The aim, according to Accenture, is not just to assist the fintech companies in the development of their innovations, it is also to give them a foot in the door to the financial services community. It also provides introductions to participating companies, which include AIB, Bank of Ireland, Credit Suisse, Citi, FEXCO, Google, Realex Payments, and State Street.

Jamie Woodhouse, Accenture Finance & Risk managing director, heads up the firm's Finance & Risk Analytics Centres in the UK and Ireland. The centres help organisations deploy the newest, as well as the tried-and-tested, data and analytics solutions across the financial enterprise. Clients get access to next-generation data and analytics tools, powered by big data, cloud and artificial intelligence to help them improve data quality and capitalise on their information assets.

“One of the things we are seeing is that a lot of problems and opportunities in the market come back to data,” he says. “Data is the root cause of a lot of problems. We put companies together with expert people along with the data analytics tools and software to solve these problems. We develop some of these tools ourselves and we use open-source software as well. The centre offers a space where a client can explain their problems and work with experts to develop solutions.”

In some cases, this might involve helping a banking client respond to new regulations such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) while in others it can involve using datasets to tackle fraud by identifying the areas of highest risk. "We are able to bring global expertise to bear on these issues," says Woodhouse. "Clients in Ireland get access to our network of centres in New York, London, Milan, Newcastle, India, and Poland. "