SOURCE
Institutional Investor
Jeffrey Kutler
There is seemingly no end to the phenomenon that is fintech. At $57.9 billion in the first half of 2018, global venture capital, private equity, and mergers and acquisitions investments in the financial technology sector exceeded the full-year 2017 total by more than $10 billion, according to KPMG.
Simply put, this spells opportunity for the financiers and other transaction facilitators in Institutional Investor’s fourth annual Fintech Finance 40 ranking.
#15 — Maria Gotsch, President and Chief Executive Officer, Partnership Fund for New York City (Previously ranked: 13)
There were no Silicon Valley–like support systems for financial technologies when New York’s FinTech Innovation Lab started up in 2010. The pioneering ecosystem of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and financial institutions sprang from a proposal by Robert Gach of consulting firm Accenture and Maria Gotsch, president and CEO of the Partnership Fund for New York City. The fund, founded in 1996 by KKR & Co.’s Henry Kravis and headed since 2000 by Gotsch, is the investment arm of the Partnership for New York City, which in an earlier incarnation was the chamber of commerce.
Investing to promote growth in the local economy, the $160 million Partnership Fund is only partially deployed in fintech. And Gotsch, 52, oversees other initiatives, including a health innovation accelerator and a high-tech seed financing vehicle. But as far as New York’s financial community is concerned, the FinTech Innovation Lab is her claim to fame. The lab’s 58 alumni start-ups have raised $790 million in capital, and Accenture has launched similar programs in London, Dublin, and Hong Kong.
Executives from 25 major financial firms — including, for the first time, eight insurance companies supporting the New York lab’s new insuretech track — selected 11 start-ups for the 12-week intensive program leading up to the June 2018 demo day, when the entrepreneurs presented their work to investors and others in the financial community. The start-ups included Habit (behavioral data aggregation) and Virtualitics (machine-learning-driven data analytics).