Santander InnoVentures announced an open DL Challenge for fintech startups using Blockchain technology. The grand prize will be US$15,000 along with the promise of future angel investment.
The goal of the DL Challenge is to “inspire innovation and encourage entrepreneurship” for startups worldwide. The competition is focused on mortgage processing, trade finance and asset leasing. Participants will be selected by a panel of DL and blockchain technology experts during the Challenge event in January, 2015.
Mariano Belinky, managing partner of Santander InnoVentures, said:
“Distributed ledger technologies will create huge value for customers, banks and entrepreneurs who create new businesses around it. The Challenge will spark and accelerate that process for fintech startups.”
The competition is the result of a partnership with startup agency OneVest, an investment crowdfunding community and was recently announced as part of Santander InnoVentures participation in the tech industry WebSummit event in Dublin.
Alejandro Cremades, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman at OneVest said:
“The financial industry’s processes are ripe for improvement and our investor community has an appetite to help startups in that space. We look forward to fostering innovation in partnership with one of the most powerful players in the fintech space.”
The move demonstrates the bank’s increasing interest in distributed ledger technologies for the financial industry. The Spanish bank’s capital fund Santander InnoVentures raised US$100 tech investment fund in July 2014. Recently the fund has invested an estimated US$4 million in Ripple. The bank is also working on a "proof of concept" using Ripple's technology for international payments, according to BusinessInsider.