Kochi’s Startup Village is offering selected engineering students in Kerala a new scheme called FinTech Studio that provides them new devices and tools for transforming their innovative ideas into reality.

The scheme, in partnership with Federal Bank, will select 40 teams of 5 students each from engineering colleges. Every team will receive a ‘Startup Box’ that will have an iPhone 6, iPad mini, Macbook Air, Nexus 5, Kindle, 1 TB Hard disk and Arduino Starter Kit.

Kerala Startup Mission, also known as the Technopark-TBI, in Thiruvananthapuram, will be the nodal agency for the scheme while the Startup Village will be the implementing agency. The startups will get full incubation support from Startup Village and financial expertise from Federal Bank.

The first batch of the selected teams will have to work on the theme ‘FinTech’, which will focus on developing real-time technology solutions for the banking and financial industries. Each team will have to develop a prototype of their ideas in six months. The team members should be skilled in programming, designing, operations and governance.

The selected teams are to be integrated with FinTech Accelerator Programme of Startup Village. The Village has also partnered with Tracxn Labs to identify potential FinTech ideas that the student teams can work on.

The State Government’s startup policy aims to create an entrepreneur-friendly ecosystem. “The Startup Box is one of the entrepreneurship-oriented initiatives for the financial year 2015-16,” a Startup Village statement quoted P H Kurian, principal secretary, Industries and IT, as saying.

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