Financial Solutions Lab (FinLab), an initiative run by the US-based Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) in partnership with banking group JPMorgan Chase, has opened its second competition for fintech startups.
FinLab is a $30m, five-year accelerator program to support new ideas that will help US consumers improve their financial health and education.
This year’s topic is around financial shocks, in respect of the shortfall facing many US households between their optimum and actual emergency savings. FinLab has allocated $3m in funding for successful participants.
The launch event was held on February 12 at CFSI, a financial services network that aims to fund schemes that will improve consumer financial health in the US, and where attendees heard the nine FinLab first-year graduates explain their ideas.
The startups in question – Ascend Consumer Finance, Digit, Even, LendStreet, PayGoal by Neighborhood Trust, Prism, Propel, Puddle and SupportPay – were each provided with $250,000 in capital.
The nine also received design and social research advice from behavioural scince organisation Ideas42 and Ideo.org, an impact innovation subsidiary of innovation and design firm Ideo, as well as further guidance from FinLab’s advisory council, CFSI and JPMorgan Chase.
Applications will close on April 7, 2016. Finalists will be invited to pitch before a panel of judges at the Emerge Forum, held on June 15 to 17 in New Orleans.