Besides companies already established in the country, this year’s edition also featured several innovative companies from abroad wanting to leverage Luxembourg’s role as a European FinTech hub. Interest from the national and international Fintech community was indeed very high: Having received 160 applications from 46 different countries, the jury selected seven finalists.
At the ceremony, which took place in the presence of Prime Minister Xavier Bettel and Minister of Finance Pierre Gramegna, four companies were awarded:
- FinTech start-up of the year award: AIFMaps, based in Cyprus, is active in the field of RegTech, digitalising the workflow and decision process of boards and executive teams in the alternative fund industry.
Two runner-ups:
- Click-Ins, based in Israel, is active in fraud detection for the insurance industry.
- Paykey, also from Israel, offers a white-label payment solution directly embedded in social media messaging.
The best female talent award went to Bernadette Wijnings, CFO of Blanco Services, a KYC client on-boarding platform for wealth and asset managers.
Awards for the top prizes included: €50,000 in startup money and hosting at the Technoport, free of charge, for four months and a one-year KPMG Hub for Entrepreneurship membership for the FinTech start-up of the year, sponsored by Technoport and Digital Lëtzeburg. The Runners-up, sponsored by KPMG, received the “ultimate entrepreneurial experience to spend a week in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley, meeting top companies, accelerators and investors”, and the second runner-up: a media campaign in Luxembourg to boost the company’s profile. The Women in Finch Awards, sponsored by the LHoFT included a free-of-charge LHoFT membership and six months of hosting at the LHoFT FinTech hub.
The range of companies awarded this year also reflects Luxembourg’s diverse financial services and FinTech ecosystem. Indeed, Luxembourg attracts an increasing number of international FinTech companies wishing to serve the international financial services community in Luxembourg, which ranges from asset management and wealth management to private equity and insurance companies, or that want to leverage Luxembourg as a base to offer their services and products across the EU.