Holt Fintech Accelerator is bringing the future of fintech together

13 selected fintech companies from around the world to gather in Montreal

MONTREAL, Sept. 17, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Innovation knows no bounds. Today, Holt Fintech Accelerator is proud to welcome the 13 teams that will participate in their 12-week program. Announced earlier this year in Montreal, the project serves to continue Sir Herbert Holt's entrepreneurship legacy. Holt was Canada's technology pioneer, in the transportation, energy and banking sectors, even creating one of the largest privately-owned utilities in the world.

The Holt Accelerator offers participants the unique opportunity of benefiting from hands-on help through committed financial institutions, venture capital firms, partners, training sessions, world-class mentors, immersion in the fintech environment, financial investments and more.

"Everything has been thought out to get the best out of the program and unleash the selected startups' full potential," says Brendan Holt Dunn, Founder and Managing Partner of the Holt Fintech Accelerator Program. Jan Christopher Arp, fellow Managing Partner, adds: "There is a rich diversity of selected fintechs, in which cross pollination of ideas and networks, will certainly contribute to creating a better society." 

Coming from vastly different backgrounds in terms of geography, industry and technology, the chosen startups will have to push the envelope of what has already been achieved in the field of disruptive technologies, especially AI.

Learn more about the 13 finalists

1. Commercial Passport provides global digital KYC solutions, helping financial institutions reduce the time to on-board clients by automating beneficial ownership analysis and client document maintenance. Based in Toronto, Canada, Commercial Passport's Universal KYC Solution is a paradigm shift in KYC collection, providing senders and receivers a clear chain of custody for KYC documents through blockchain technology.
2. Consilium Crypto provides funds, family offices and exchanges with Actionable Insights for cryptoasset markets using custom indices, market data, news and alternative data. Headquartered in Toronto, ON, with an office in Montreal, QC, Canada, Consilium Crypto provides companies with a data-driven edge from billions of data points, covering over 90% of global trade volume in cryptoassets.
3. CreditSCRIPT is based in London, U.K. and provides an investment platform that combines a proprietary streaming technology to bring together digital lending opportunities in consumer, SME and real estate into a single dashboard and exchange. CreditSCRIPT's solution is fully regulated and provides secure, integrated order management, portfolio management, valuation and custody solutions for professional investors.
4. Curu has as a mission to redefine finance and credit from being a crippling and abusive system to one that empowers individuals. Based in Charlotte, NC, USA, Curu automates credit improvement by analyzing users' finances and making actionable suggestions on factors such as payments, balance increases and credit report errors. The program gamifies the experience and rewards users with badges and Curu Credits for good credit practices. 
5. FundSeeder is a marketplace for new money managers. It finds the world's top undiscovered trading talent and connects them with investors directly or via a packaged fund/index product. Headquartered in Boca Raton, FL, United States, this platform makes it possible to create and share new active management products to institutional investors through FundSeeder investments.
6. Ivy Lender is an online lending marketplace connecting small, medium and large corporate businesses with lenders based on their credit profiles and lending needs.  Ivy Lender is unique to the fintech space because it also offers payment processing and foreign currency solutions to their clients in the United States and Canada.  Ivy Lender is located in Plantation, FL, U.S.A.
7. KapitalWise helps customers better their financial health with different tools. From financial wellness scoring to cash flow forecasting and smart goal setting, this AI platform helps personal bankers to engage with their clients by helping them to achieve financial success. Based in New York, NY, U.S.A., KapitalWise uses existing customer data, external sources and its own proprietary platform to deepen relationships with each unique customer.
8. Liquidity Marketplace LTD (LMX) is transforming liquidity markets for Fortune 1000 companies and banks around the world by providing a venue in which they can borrow and lend directly with each other with no intermediation. Based in Vancouver, BC, Canada, LMX, also white labels, its technology both to banks and other peer-to-peer markets earning brokerage fees on its marketplace and subscription fees for its SaaS.
9. LoanConnect was launched in 2016 and is Canada's leading personal loan search platform through which consumers can search over 20 lenders for the best rates and terms. The company wants to provide game-changing, on-the-spot financing through a choice of lenders for all consumers, regardless of their credit rating, whenever and wherever they need it.
10. Owl.co offers compliant virtual agents that deal with sensitive data to complete sales and improve customer service for various products of banks and insurers. Owl provides a proprietary zero-knowledge platform with unique customer profiling capabilities allowing highly regulated institutions to offer personalized solutions to their customers without compromising security or integrity of data. From Vancouver, BC, Canada, Owl went live less than 6 months ago and has already generated over $1 million in revenue with some of the world's largest enterprise as clients.
11. PrestaGente, a company from Bogota, Colombia, solves the issue of safeguarding debt contracts by taking charge of physical and digital processes using Blockchain. When a debt transaction is done, the unity of digital data and physical presence is lost, generating information and trust gap for the entire financial system. PrestaGente offers a Blockchain service that solves the credibility and information problem, and improves upon the current custodian system.
12. QuantumSense is an artificial intelligence company founded in Canada and successful graduate of the machine learning track of the CDL program in Toronto. It provides a top semantic search that works on the sentence level to give a more accurate and faster search for ideas or text passages in documents or archives of any business smoothing the workflow. Together with the sentiment analysis this can also be used for fundamental analysis in finance and social media to analyze unstructured data and to make better predictions in real-time.  
13. Smart Pay presents itself as the missing link between banks and retailers for "card present" Mobile Instant Checkout. Created in Montreal in 2013, Smart Pay helps retailers and banks deploy a checkout solution within their own app and website to make it possible for customers to pay using their smartphones' biometric ID, without needing to register or provide any information with secured "card present" transactions. Through their service, they directly addresses the new European payment regulation - PSD2 - through the Open Banking directive.

About Holt Accelerator
Holt Accelerator offers participants the unique opportunity of benefiting from hands-on help through committed partners, training sessions, world-class mentors, immersion in the fintech environment, board meetings, financial investments and more. In addition, the Holt Accelerator program is the only accelerator offering one of Canada's largest applied AI solution providers, Stradigi AI, a proven resource for all fintechs that want to get ahead. Everything is thought out to get the best out of the program and unleash the selected startups' full potential.

About Holdun
The Holt-Dunn family is the direct legacy of Sir Herbert Holt and one of Montreal's finest. Their ancestor immigrated to Canada in 1873 and built the Montreal Light, Heat & Power Company, which would later be nationalized into Hydro-Québec. Business people at heart, members of the family have founded or owned over 300 companies locally and internationally. At one time, the family held assets of about $3 billion (equivalent to $40 billion in today's currency). That amount was 10 times larger than the Canadian government's circulating currency. Sir Herbert Holt was inducted into the Canadian Business Hall of Fame in 1979 and holds the record as the longest-serving chairman and president of RBC (from 1908 to 1934). His participation was crucial in turning RBC into the country's largest bank and the third largest in North America.

SOURCE Holt Fintech Accelerator