India FinTech Awards: The Winners

India is at the beginning of a FinTech revolution with significant rewiring of financial services happening with Aadhar, mobile, UPI among others. The India FinTech Awards (IFTA) 2016 platform, organized by the India Fintech Forum, provided a great opportunity for FinTech firms to showcase their products to a curated audience comprising of investors, bankers, entrepreneurs, media and corporate leaders. After a month of deliberation, LTP as a knowledge partner had whittled down over 80+ startups that applied to the 18 finalists who would present their product demo. LTP, as a FinTech thought leader, made sure that the very best innovations were recognized to showcase at this event. The IFTA had finally come to its culmination on November 26. The event, which took place at the Rise Mumbai office, saw a turnout of 16 startups in various categories like Digital Identity, Security and Cryptocurrency, Wealth Management, InsurTech, Alternative Lending, Payments and others. The startups who had presented their demo wereDigio, MeReal Biometrics, Signzy, Coverfox, Extravelmoney, TradingView, Vphrase, Capital Float, Faircent, LoanXpress,Monexo, Rubique, ftcash, Happay, Tonetag and Tapits Technologies.

Let’s have a look at the winners and competition at the event:

FinTech Startup of the Year: Capital Float

The winner of the coveted FinTech Startup of the Year was awarded to Capital Float. The startup was also adjudged the winner of the alternate lending category which included other startups like Monexo, Rubique and Faircent. The presentation demo was done by Mr. Rohan Angrish, CTO for Capital Float. Capital Float is an online platform that provides working capital finance to SMEs in India. The company offer short-term loans that can be used to purchase inventory, service new orders or optimize cash cycles. The company is a dominant player in the e-commerce lending space that includes partnerships with Snapdeal, Paytm, Shopclues, eBay, Alibaba, UBER and Via. The company is headquartered in Bangalore with offices in Delhi, Chennai and Mumbai.

The winners of other categories were awarded The FinTech Rising Star awards.

For the Payments category, the winner was ToneTag. The other competitors in this category were Happay, ftcash and Tapits Technologies. ToneTag enables contactless payments through sound. The patent-pending software algorithm (SDK) encodes data into sound waves. The only requirement for mobile payments through ToneTag is the integration of the ToneTag proprietary SDK on the merchant (EDC, POS, Phone) and customer (mobile banking, wallet, payment apps) side.

The Digital Identity, Security and Cryptocurrency segment had startups like MeReal Biometrics, Digio and Signzy vying for the top spot. The winner of this segment was MeReal Biometrics and the presentation demo was done by Mr. Philippe Blot, Co-founder of MeReal Biometrics. It is the only patented smart card for payments and access with a fingerprint sensor, an acoustic one-time password and a rechargeable battery on the card that can be used anywhere, anytime, anyplace, with any device.

For the Wealth Management, InsurTech and Other category, the winner was Coverfox. This segment also comprised of other startups like Extravelmoney, TradingView and Vphrase. The presentation demo was undertaken by Mr. Jaimit Doshi, Sales and Marketing Head of Coverfox. Coverfox currently offers health, car, bike, travel and home insurance policies. Using its proprietary technology and algorithm-based platform, users can compare and choose from a range of plans across top insurance companies, understand key features and buy policies instantly and safely.

The IFTA event also featured a corporate event which comprised of BankBazaar, CustomerXPs, EZMCOM and FreeCharge. The winner of this segment was BankBazaar. The demo was undertaken by Mr. Navaneetha Krishnan, Head Process Transformation. The company offers the largest number of financial products in the market, such as credit cards, home loans, personal loans, car loans, fixed deposits, saving accounts, etc., from more than 50 partner organizations over a highly secure, user-friendly and intuitive platform. The company is working on paperless disbursement of loans in less than 30 minutes.

All startup winners received a startup kit from 10,000 Start-ups program along with a chance to apply for NASSCOM India FinTech Day, 2017 (and get an opportunity to pitch for Enterprise Connect and Product Showcase). Additionally, the top four startups will receive credits worth $1000/month for a year on IBM Bluemix. The FinTech Startup of the Year, Capital Float was also awarded a Rs. 5 lakh check from YOTI, one of the event sponsors. LTP was proud to be associated as the knowledge partner for this event and we definitely envision bigger iterations of IFTA in the coming years.

First appeared at LTP