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Banks are increasingly developing FinTech-focused accelerator programs to combat the existential threat from startups. The draw for FinTech founders? Banks provide access to regulators and bank executives, as well as mentors, to help startups overcome challenges.
Beyond trying to expose its startups to power brokers in Washington, perhaps one of the most helpful days that FinLab arranges for its founders takes place on Wall Street at the offices of JPMorgan Chase. There, startups can talk with the team overseeing strategic investments, as well as other bank units, in back-to-back, 60- to 30-minute-long meetings. (CEO Jamie Dimon has also attended some of these meetings.) Indeed, it was this particular meeting that set Propel on a new course, says Propel founder Jimmy Chen, whose team joined the very first class FinLab organized more than two years ago. “We’d just been founded a year earlier and were trying to find out way. we didn’t have funding or connections or the know-how to expand, but we knew we wanted to make an impact at a larger scale.”
