Pioneers Discover drove and managed the applications phase for the program, which saw entries pour in from 56 countries. Accelerator Lab was officially launched on June 1 at Pioneers’17 by Johann Strobl, CEO of RBI.
The hopeful start-ups were applying for the opportunity for a potential long-term cooperation with RBI Group and RBI’s 16.6 million customers in Austria and the CEE region. 13.4 per cent of all applications were submitted by Austrian fintechs and 27.1 per cent by fintechs from the CEE region, with a comparatively high number of applications from Hungary, Romania and Slovakia reflecting the well-developed fintech communities in these countries.
The remaining applications were mainly submitted by Western European, Asian and North American fintechs, which in turn shows that Elevator Lab attracts great international interest. Most submissions were related to Payment & Transaction services, followed by the fields of Investing & Trading, SME Banking, Big Data Analytics, RegTech and Branch of the Future.
“We are excited that we were able to close the application phase for Elevator Lab that successfully and that we have applications from all our 14 CEE markets. The high number and overall quality of applications exceeded our expectations. Until the end of August, we will be intensively reviewing the documents in order to identify those 30 start-ups, which will have the chance to convince our high-ranking jury of their concepts during the pitching sessions,”
explains Michael Hoellerer, plenipotentiary of RBI, who is, amongst other things, in charge of RBI Group’s digitalization strategy.
The five start-ups that will eventually participate in the accelerator program will be selected in mid-September in Vienna.
For further open call opportunities with Pioneers Discover please visit https://pioneers.io/discover/open-calls#/
