The demo day of Open Banking Lab, an incubation program for startups developing open data based solutions for banks and financial organizations, was held on 21 March 2018.
The initiative has been launched by OTP Bank (one of the largest foreign banks in Ukraine) and 1991 Open Data Incubator (a non-profit incubator for open public data based IT projects) with the support of the National Bank of Ukraine. Asters acted as a legal partner of the initiative, while Asters Partner Alexey Khomyakov became one of the mentors for the incubation program participants.
According to the program results, YouScore has been recognized as the best startup. By collecting and analyzing open data YouScore helps banks to check their clients' trustworthiness. Thanks to this solution companies that violate the law will have no access to financial instruments. YouScore team received a USD 10.000 award, as well as OTP Bank's support for the future scoring system development. Three more teams (Future Agro Finance, CoinyPay and bNesis) are eligible to launch their products' pilot versions in the partnership with OTP Bank.
"Launching the incubation program, an innovative open data based project, we realized that we were the first to create a test environment for ideas, solutions and interactions. Within the project we defined both the strengths and weaknesses of the represented IT startups. Such cooperation has helped us to better understand our possibilities and priorities. In general, very soon we will witness the open data movement fully deployed in Ukraine", – Tamas Hak-Kovacs, CEO of OTP Bank, points out.
"The Open Banking Lab program is, above all, a signal to the market. And a lot of banks understood this signal correctly starting to develop the cooperation mechanisms with startups. The banks' openness to startups will enable Ukraine to create a brand new division of fintech-market soon", – says Denys Gursky, cofounder of 1991 Open Data Incubator.
"Innovations are the engine of economic growth in the modern world. As one of the leading Ukrainian law firms we were glad to support the incubation program for Open Banking Lab, as it is aimed at increasing the quality for banking customers, establishing the future backbone for new online financial infrastructure with enormous added value. Nevertheless, the new market participants of the financial infrastructure still have to find uneasy solutions to many controversial legal issues. However, the principal ideas behind this project are inspiring, and transparent policy of the National Bank of Ukraine towards the European open banking data standards encourages us with optimism for the future", – Alexey Khomyakov, Asters' Partner, comments.