Switzerland-based accelerator Kickstart’s corporate partners of are developing five proof of concepts (PoCs) with participants in the initiative which are developing technologies involving fintech and smart machines.
Telecom network Swisscom and financial services firms Credit Suisse and UBS have teamed up with Latvia-based cybersecurity startup Notakey, which provides secure methods for users to notarise digital transactions and electronic documents, to test Notakey’s functionality as a cross-industry platform.
Swisscom is also working with US-based data recovery company Lenditapp to develop a new technology that will combine machine learning, data aggregation and underwriting models in order to reduce the risk in lending to small and medium-sized enterprises.
Banking group Raiffeisen will test how Lenditapp works in the automated digital processing of balance sheets used in the credit process, and will also experiment with chatbots provided by UK-based artificial intelligence company LastMile to see how they perform in Swiss national languages and dialects.
Professional services firm PricewaterhouseCooper’s Swiss branch is partnering Switzerland-based data exploration platform Veezoo to examine how Veezoo’s conversational artificial intelligence technology performs when used to search PwC’s company data, to determine its viability for corporate deployment.
Founded in 2015, Kickstart Accelerator runs an 11-week program that brings early-stage startups to Switzerland. It is operated by Impact Hub Zurich, part of a network of entrepreneurship and innovation centres across the globe.