Female Founders in FinTech competition attracts 156 registrants from 38 countries.

The third competition in the Female Founders in Tech (FFiT) series, Female Founders in FinTech has seen the widest participation yet. Over 90 women fintech leaders from 38 countries submitted their startups—a 76 percent increase from the first fintech competition in 2017—for the chance to receive cash, mentorship, business and financial planning advice, and more.
The submissions for this year’s competition used technologies like APIs, mobile platforms, big data analytics, cloud, and machine learning to solve problems in five primary areas of finance—enterprise finance, lending, personal finance, small business, and commercial. See more data about the applicant pool.

Of the 76 qualifying submissions, only five could be chosen to pitch their solutions for the top prize. With the help of 117 judges from more than 80 companies, we have determined this year’s finalists.

Meet the 5 Finalists

IncomeConductor

Sheryl O’Connor

Co-Founder & CEO,
United States

IncomeConductor is a SaaS platform where financial advisors can create, track, and manage their clients’ retirement income plans. The platform provides time-tested income distribution strategies that are completely customized to the individual client’s needs and goals. Income Conductor supports the full planning cycle and automates management of the plan by providing daily plan-to-actual performance, analytics, and de-risk alerts.

Oval Money

Benedetta Arese Lucini

Co-Founder & CEO,
United Kingdom

A platform designed to allow young adults to find a simple solution for saving and investing for their future. Through machine learning, Oval Money learns users’ financial and lifestyle behaviors and uses the data to encourage them to accumulate capital for the purpose of investing. The app programs saving goals such as rounding up transactions or setting aside a certain percentage each month.

OZÉ

Meghan McCormick

Co-Founder & CEO,
Ghana

OZÉ is a mobile platform that equips small business owners in Africa to make data-driven decisions to improve their performance. The app aggregates transaction data and analyzes it to provide context-specific reports and recommendations. OZÉ also offers a portal for financial institutions that combines the app’s crowdsourced data with alternative data sources to assign a credit risk score to each user. Through the portal, banks can source and support a small business loan portfolio.

Symend

Tiffany Kaminsky

Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer,
Canada

Symend transforms the consumer experience of debt resolution for telcos, banks, and utilities by offering a white-labeled solution that combines AI and machine learning, data aggregation, predictive analytics, and strategic campaign services to better reach, engage, treat, and retain their delinquent customers. Symend combines workflow and campaign automation with outreach tactics that are proven to work, providing more productive and cost-efficient recoveries.

U-Nest

Ksenia Yudina

Founder & CEO,
United States

A mobile app that helps parents establish and manage tax-free 529 college savings plans in minutes. The process of establishing a 529 account used to be very confusing and required several hours and help of a financial advisor. With U-Nest, it takes only five minutes, the whole process is completely automated and paperless, and users get instant access to their balances and transactions.

Naming a winner

Over the next month, this group of finalists will be mentored by leading financial services executives in preparation for their final pitches. On Thursday, March 7, six judges from competition sponsors Wells Fargo, Discover Global Financial, Fidelity Investments, and strategic partner PayPal will watch these women leaders pitch live at the PayPal office in New York and determine the winners.

Prizes include a combined $75,000 for first, second, and third place, access to mentoring and legal advice for finalists as a part of Shearman & Sterling’s FinTech Advisory program, a complimentary delegate pass to the SALT Conference and a scholarship to IE Business School’s Venture Capital Program for the first place winner, and more. To see the full list of prizes, click here.