The FinQuest by Alpha Bank Pitch-Event was a huge success!

The 7 finalists, BitRezus, Humanblock, Pragma IoT, Quadible, Quantflare, Squaredev and WhoRU, pitched to the judging committee at an event that took place on Monday, November 25. The three winners of the competition were selected based on criteria related to the successful handling of real life financial problems, the innovation degree of their proposals, the ease of implementation of the applications and their potential benefits for the banking sector.

The 1st prize went to Humanblock with GivingStreets, a financial inclusion platform that enables spontaneous cashless donations to everyone and facilitates the cashless redemption of the collected donations offers financial management to any unbanked individual by using state-of-the-art technologies to work (smartphone apps, QR-code).

The 2nd prize went to Quantflare that presented a solution utilizing NLP and machine learning models, in order to quantify investors’ sentiment in the market.

The 3rd prize went to Quadible, with an AI-solution that continuously authenticates the user, without the need for any user input, by learning the users’ behavioural patterns.

Alpha Bank’s Chief Executive Officer and Chief Digital Officer Damianos Charalambidis said: “Innovation is an essential and integral component of the Alpha Bank Digital Transformation Program. Through initiatives that highlight the importance of digital innovation, such as FinQuest by Alpha Bank, we aim to both attract new ideas and fully exploit the potential of new technologies to improve Customer Experience. The success of FinQuest by Alpha Bank confirms our constructive ‘dialogue’ with the potential fintech audience and reinforces our expectations for the digital future of the banking sector.”

Head of Innovation at Alpha Bank’s Digital Transformation and Innovation Division, Konstantinos Vaitsas, stressed: “FinQuest by Alpha Bank has achieved its goal with regards to creating direct links between the dynamic elements of the ecosystem, namely the Bank and the startups. FinQuest has contributed significantly to the identification of opportunities arising from the constant evolution of digital technology for the financial sector.”

A panel discussion on “Digital Transformation: Success Factors and the Role of Startups” was also held at the event, with representatives from Deloitte, Microsoft, Vodafone and IBM. More specifically the panel discussion consisted of Kostis Chlouverakis, Yanna Andronopoulou, Aris Georgopoulos and Nikos Maniatis respectively. Dimitri Stroggylopoulos from Alpha Bank welcomed the panelists on stage and facilitated the discussion.