Nomura Services India, a part of Japanese investment bank Nomura, has launched an accelerator that will help Indian fintech startups to transform their business and achieve global scale. With this Nomura enters the growing fintech startup ecosystem in the country with its $100 million global fund that was set up early this month through its startup investment arm N-village.

Nikhil Mehta, executive director, Nomura Services India, told BusinessLine that a part of the $100 million fund would be used to invest in potential fintech startups in the country especially those in the Capital Market and Investment Banking (CMIB) space. Mehta further said that while a few investment banks and retail banks have set up their own accelerators in the fintech space, those are targeted more towards the payments business while Nomura is the first one to focus on CMIB. Lately banks such as Yes Bank, Barclays, HDFC Bank among others have started their own startups accelerator programmes to develop solutions in the retail banking space. Investment banking firms such as Edelweiss has also set up a venture to invest and collaborate with startups, especially Fintech.

For this Nomura has launched a global accelerator and co-creation platform called 'Voyager Nomura Fintech' where startups can build will build products and solutions in the CMIB space, Mehta said adding that Nomura also would help these startups to get access to global markets/countries where Nomura has a presence.

"We will be their first potential clients and also investors. The solutions developed by the startups can be exported globally," Mehta said. The accelerator will look and focus on technology such as artificial intelligence, data analysis among others that can help analyse macro trends in the industry and generate insights to help companies or consumers make better investment decisions or what kind of investment products to pitch to a particular client, and other sales/trade related solutions.

To start with Nomura has called for applications from early stage startups that have products to showcase and raised atleast one round of funding. About 5-10 startups will be selected for the first batch as a part of the 'Voyager Nomura Fintech' program, Mehta said. A Nomura Innovation Centre (NICe) has been set up at Powai in Mumbai in this regard that will enable entrepreneurs to access Nomura resources and test their concepts and solutions leveraging the firm’s people, processes and technology.

R K Rangan, President & CEO, Nomura Services India, said, "New technology, supported by an innovation-driven ecosystem, has resulted in an environment of increasing collaboration between new and traditional market players. Building on this momentum, Voyager is a program for start-ups to engage with Nomura to drive innovation through its global network.”

Nomura has partnered with PwC as a knowledge partner, and with Google, IBM and Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd. to bring together industry expertise to the Voyager program.

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