Capgemini charts out plan to engage with fintech start-ups

When it comes to financial technologies, smaller IT firms and start-ups are coming out with solutions that are phenomenally changing the way people carrying out their financial transactions. The big IT firms have long released this.

Capgemini, the French multi-national IT consulting firm, has drawn an extensive programme to tag along the small firms and start-ups in the fintech ecosystem. The firm, which has huge presence in India that has only gone bigger after the acquisition of iGate two years ago, has begun to engage with tech incubators such as T-Hub, universities and fintech start-ups.

The engagement with fintechs happen on a variety of ways.

After identifying the right fintechs with a proven solution, Capgemini would mentor it to help it fine-tune the product or service.

“We will even offer joint go-to-marketing opportunity to those fintechs that can complement our services,” Sudhir Pai, who is Executive Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer (Financial Services) of Capgemini, told BusinessLine .

Sudhir Pai, who was here to take part in Capgemini’s Tech Fiesta, a multi-city programme that the company organises in different cities to showcase its capabilities in fintech space. It also presented some prospective solutions by some start-ups.

The firm might even invest in some of the start-ups. “Investment is there in the radar. I think that is one of the pillars of our fintech programme. It is evolving. It will be on case by case basis,” he said.

As it plans for a long-term engagement with the fintech start-ups, the firm is in the process of preparing guidelines on how to engage with them uniformally across geographies.

“There is ongoing training programmes on disruption, block chain, IoT and other areas. There is also training areas on various fintech-related definitions, how to work with them,” he said.

“We are working on guidelines on how we should engage the start-ups, because we would like to make it very consistent in different locations,” he said.

He said the firm was trying to accelerate the process of connecting and curating fintech firms to open up new channels of revenue through newer business models. The firm was planning to leverage its global network of over 10 AIE (Applied Innovation Exchange) centres to curate some start-ups and incubate some others.

These AIE centres, along with the ecosystem parters such as T-Hub, it would help organise bootcamps, hackathons, and joint innovation days with clients.

This year, a few of curated fintechs from across the globe, and in India would join a 12-week Capgemini incubation programme.

Clients, partners and external advisory groups would be roped in to help mentor the incubation process.

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