In 2008, two BBVA executives took the leap into entrepreneurship and set up www.comunitae.comthe first P2P lending platform in Spain. The idea arose from the observation of this business model in the USA and UK with the world's pioneers. www.zopa.com and www.prosper.com.
Since then the BBVA wants to stand out as a benchmark in financial innovation and the use of technology. Proof of this are the initiatives of the BBVA Innovation Centre and BBVA Open Talent & Red Innova which is an international programme aimed at entrepreneurs and start-ups to support the development of innovative technology-based projects.
But as always, the big news comes from outside the big organisations, as shown by the three initiatives discussed in this article:
UNIENCE The social network where individual investors, investment advisors, asset managers and financial companies share and connect their portfolios and information. The advantages an investor finds are:
- Practitioner tools for continuous monitoring of their own investments in different banks or real 'track records' of other investors (true history of an investor's operations)
- Rankings of investors by reputation, of portfolios by profitability or risk, of banks by level of fees charged,... and tools to find investors with similar interests.
- The ability to share information with trusted persons, such as a financial advisor, or to remain anonymous.
IMPOK with a similar but more up to date proposal, this start-up has been selected for incubation by the ubiquitous accelerator of Telefónica Wayra. It offers investment management tools for individuals, social networking tools for sharing and monitoring information, financial information on markets and securities, with multi-device access.
FINTONIC The most recent is the emergence of the personal account manager. Fintonic is a 100% Spanish-owned company whose business model is based on the one already being carried out by Mint has been operating for 6 years in the US and currently has more than ten million users. Both Mint and Fintonic aggregate users' bank accounts and categorise their transactions, allowing them to see and understand the evolution of their spending and income. Fintonic, which has nine employees, was launched with an investment of €1.2 million and is owned by a number of partners: Inception Capital, IDEON Financial Solutions and several private investors who contribute their strategic expertise. Fintonic's business model is based on attracting advertising, although its impact on users is non-invasive and always provides them with added value.
Large companies should be close to new initiatives in order to detect those that can be a source of growth in the years to come and entrepreneurs can make their longed-for "exit".
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