Empowering Accelerated Innovation in the Investment Management Industry

Dassault Systèmes announced the winner of the 3D FinTech Challenge 2014, an immersive program designed to empower and accelerate technology innovation in financial services and specifically, this year, within the Investment Management industry.

Prophis, formerly known as Pontchartrain Advisors, was declared winner by the judges and audience. Their solution helps enterprise identify relationships and derive exceptional value and insights from their “medium data”. Prophis impressed the judging panel composed of leading figures from the FinTech, Investment Management and Venture Capital industries and they beat 5 other finalists including Closir, Data-Next, Heckyl, PensionMandate and PrairieSmarts.

Prophis will be taken by Dassault Systèmes to New York to connect them with the Challenge’s mentors’ US based colleagues. They will also leverage Fried Frank’s “Coming to America” programme.

Charles Pardue, Managing Partner and Founder of Prophis Technologies, said “The 3D FinTech Challenge provided the focus and environment for us to more rapidly build out our investment management solution.  With valuable input from Dassault Systèmes, mentors, partners and subject matter experts, we made terrific strides in productizing the powerful functionality embedded in our Proteus platform.”

The 3D FinTech Challenge 2014 identified, nurtured and accelerated high performance start-ups focused on delivering solutions that can potentially transform and shape the Investment Management Industry. The themes were set by senior industry executives. Over the 7-week period, the finalists benefited from an immersive programme of master classes and on-going commercial mentoring from leading industry figures and senior executives at Dassault Systèmes. They also received technical and legal support, and pitching guidance.

Throughout the Challenge, Dassault Systèmes has taken an innovative approach to running the program. This included encouraging collaboration between participating teams, interactive audience participation in the Finals Day voting, and ensuring that the teams have exposure to the buoyant FinTech communities of New York and London. Unusually for a FinTech challenge Dassault Systèmes does not take equity in the start-ups but may consider investing in them should there be a good business fit.

Kevin Pleiter, Vice President of Financial and Business Services Industry, Dassault Systèmes said, “We are proud to have collaborated with leading financial services industry experts and senior executives together with the FinTech community in running this year’s 3D FinTech Challenge. We were especially impressed by the high calibre of the start-ups selected for the final and are delighted that Prophis has won this year’s accelerator Challenge. We are confident they will be a driving force in revolutionizing the Investment Management Industry.”

Furio Pietribiasi, Managing Director at Mediolanum Asset Management Ltd. said, Dassault Systèmes’ 3D FinTech Challenge is an integral part of London’s FinTech ecosystem.  With its investment management focus, the Challenge has helped drive and deliver innovation and bring together interesting people with compelling skills and competencies to help shape the future of asset management. Prophis’ innovative technology was a good choice and with our own focus on client centric innovations, I look forward to following their progress.”

Nick Hungerford, CEO and co-founder of Nutmeg and one of the 3D FinTech Challenge judges said, “It’s rare that an innovation curriculum can give the teams involved enough freedom to be bold with their ideas and at the same time bring to the mix a stellar range of mentors and innovators who can inspire great thinking and hard work. Dassault Systèmes have made all this possible and their genuine enthusiasm and focus on giving all participants the best chance of success is both admirable and unique. The investment management industry badly needs more companies prepared to offer unequivocal transparency and the 3D FinTech Challenge participants are truly in that mix. I hope Dassault will continue the program next year and beyond.”

Descriptions of 3D FinTech Challenge 2014 finalists

Closir

Closir is a London and New York based online investor relations platform for companies and investors to discover, connect and engage with each other. The platform provides companies with a simple and beautifully designed template to tell their investment story, target and extend their reach with global institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, hedge funds, pension funds and family offices. For those investors, Closir provides a standardised way to track company disclosure and manage engagement with their current and prospective investments. Closir’s proprietary data and analytics provide the investment community and IR teams insights for better decision making. https://www.closir.com/

DATANEXT

DATANEXT is the B2B platform that allows asset managers to analyse financial data in the cloud. As SaaS, its offering ranges from portfolio management and risk management to client and regulatory reporting. Unlike its competitors, Zurich-based DATANEXT covers the entire investment process: from idea generation to trading. www.data-next.eu

Heckyl

Heckyl, based in London and India, processes millions of data nodes (social media, open data sources, exchange data) in real-time to bring the most intuitive, insightful graphs and clear visual indicators of dozens of factors that represent and influence stock market dynamics. It connects decision makers in finance, business and government to a broad and dynamic network of information, news, people and ideas enabling faster, more effective decisions. Enabled by a Big Data Platform that helps users understand the Past, analyse the Present and gain insights into the Future. Heckyl transforms unstructured data into actionable insights, identifying the most relevant information in real time, and delivering it to the user. www.heckyl.com

PensionMandate

PensionMandate, based in London, provides an independent platform powered by Instintell Institutional Investor Intelligence Limited in London. They offer an alternative service delivering real-time Information about institutional investor activity in Europe, Americas and Asia. Their data covers both main asset classes and alternatives. The data is sourced directly from the pension funds/institutional investors and their service provides intelligence and research services including relevant information about the process of preparation, reviewing, tendering investment mandates by institutional investors to asset managers and data about asset allocation, current investment mandates, in-house personnel, investment consultants and advisors.

http://www.pensionmandate.com

Prophis

Prophis, formerly known as Pontchartrain Advisors, is a London-based software and consulting company with the overarching goal of helping companies extract more value and insights from their data, particularly highly connected financial data. Prophis’ Proteus platform uses a unique approach to data, cutting edge analytics capabilities and flexible, bespoke visualisations to enable financial institutions to solve the risk data acquisition, analysis and communication challenges they face today. Complementary to existing systems, Proteus is an information and analytics platform designed with the entire enterprise in mind. http://www.prophis.com/

PrairieSmarts

U.S. based PrairieSmarts calculates, simplifies and explains financial risk at the individual security and portfolio levels, across assets and in real numbers. They provide asset managers, advisors, money managers, banks and broker-dealers with an advanced, heavy tail distribution model that far exceeds Value at Risk (VaR) and other models currently available. It provides superior estimates of downside risk, taking events into account, and with the capability to assess both points of ruin and tolerance – as well as analyzing asset concentration. Furthermore, risk is currently communicated in terms of colors (red, yellow, green) or financial jargon that advisors, investors and money managers may not understand. PrairieSmarts reports are number, not color or jargon, based and clients can run scenarios on-demand. Their solutions are easy to integrate and low cost, and provide clients with genuine and actionable insight www.prairiesmarts.com