The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Nektarios Liolios, Startupbootcamp FinTech

“Fintech entrepreneurs all want access to the industry,” saysNektarios Liolios. “All the talk of disruption from the outside is rubbish.” Liolios worked to promote such access from 2011 to 2014 as manager of SWIFT’s Innotribe Startup Challenge (seeFabian Vandenreydt, No. 26). Now he channels funding and mentoring from leading financial institutions to participants in Startupbootcamp FinTech, a London offshoot, launched last year, of the five-year-old Startupbootcamp accelerator network. The boot camp itself lasts three months; the 2015 edition has its climactic demo day on November 12. The program was extended to Singapore this year, and there are plans to expand to New York and beyond. Liolios, 48, notes that the average age of Startupbootcamp FinTech entrants is 38 — they are more mature and industry-savvy than typical 20-somethings. “These are people who have been in the industry and experienced its problems themselves,” Liolios says, adding that there is no end in sight to the demand for creative solutions in such areas as back-office processing and data management. Five of the nine teams in the London boot camp are working on ideas relevant to wealth and asset management, he says, heralding a shift away from fintech’s earlier focus on payments and alternative lending. A quarter of the 400 applications to the London program were blockchain-related, and “most were not very good,” Liolios says. “Geeks get excited about the tech but don’t understand the industry problem.” The idea behind Startupbootcamp FinTech is to connect the two worlds, he explains, as “banks increasingly recognize they can’t build everything themselves.”