At Salesforce World Tour in London earlier this year Simon Mulcahy, Global Chief Marketing Officer announced that Salesforce Accelerate was coming to Europe. Just over three months later the selection process is complete and Salesforce has announced the 14 startups that will begin their four month program.
The program has replaced the Salesforce Incubator program and this year was targeted and fintech and insurtech startups. Each participant will attend three in-person workshops in either London, Dublin or Paris. The first workshop will begin on September 3rd at London’s Salesforce Tower.
- InvestGlass [Switzerland]: Investment platform for asset managers, wealth managers, and investors.
- Streamdata.io [France]: Helps businesses increase efficiency by turning any existing web API into a streaming API.
- RELAYTO [United Kingdom]: Turns complex financial information and files into persuasive customer experiences.
- Glassbox [Israel]: Offers compliance confidence on an Enterprise level with the ability to record, store and retrieve every single session on a website/mobile/app.
- Eposly [United Kingdom]: Point of sale system built on the Salesforce Platform that lets users create orders directly against Salesforce contacts.
- Asperato [United Kingdom]: Multi-merchant, bespoke payment processing service for Salesforce.
- Digital Fineprint [United Kingdom]: End-to-end solution that generates actionable customer insights for insurance partners.
- Subaio [Denmark]: “Antivirus for your bank account,” providing banks with a white-label solution that helps their customers managing their subscriptions.
- ID-Pal [Ireland]: Provides a simple, secure and convenient identity verification solution that allows businesses to onboard customers quickly and easily.
- ume [Luxembourg]: Automated due-diligence of fund distributors for the asset management industry.
- Singlify [United Kingdom]: Investment management and impact reporting tool on Salesforce for the Social Investment world.(Note the weblink appears to be a temporary domain)
- Electronic Identification [Spain]: Face to machine user identification solution—based on video, fully compliant with Financial Regulations EIDAS, AML2, and PSD2.
- Octo Telematics [Italy]: IoT Platform that blends the benefits of a horizontal IOT platform with dedicated vertical use cases built for the insurance industry value chain.
- Venturelytic [Netherlands]: Salesforce Platform native analytics platform for next generation investment managers.
Accelerate to where
Salesforce made the decision to focus on startups in the Financial Services sector. This is an area of huge growth, though recent concerns over Brexit has dampened enthusiasm in the UK a little.
Part of the program will assist the startups with their engagements through the AppExchange. Since its revamp last year the intelligent AppExchange now delivers greater success to its active participants. Anne DelSanto, EVP and GM, Platform explained: “Over 87% of Salesforce customers use AppExchange solutions to extend their success with their customers. A strong partner ecosystem is the number one differentiator in today’s digital world and that’s why we couldn’t be happier to welcome these 14 companies into the program. Let’s win big together.”
Salesforce believes that startups in this sector share many common challenges that it can help them overcome. There are common compliance hurdles and companies need to deliver their service with transparency and build trust with their clients.
Joaquin de Valenzuela, Head of Financial Services, EMEA commented: “We are dedicated to helping our financial services customers delight their customers by letting them focus on the experience rather than the product. And, as the industry continues to be disrupted, that’s never been more important for our customers. The solutions these fourteen companies are examples of the amazing fintech and insurtech solutions being developed across Europe and Israel, reinforcing this region’s position as an innovation hub.”
What does this mean
AS Salesforce kicks off its first four month program with these European companies it is with an intent to succeed. Salesforce continues to be successful partly because its products and culture helps it to be so. It also relies on its ecosystem to help drive new business towards it. Salesforce has been critical in the past that its partners do not bring customers on board through the strength of their applications alone, but rather the customers choose Salesforce first and the apps second.
Through the Accelerate program Salesforce will hope that these firms attract business to them first and because they happen to run on the Salesforce platform and Salesforce second. The revenues may be the same but the cost of sale for Salesforce is significantly lower. It has seen in fintech and insuretech an opportunity to nurture small and exciting firms that have a chance of rapid growth. The proof is calculated in about a year when these firms have completed the program and spent 8 months growing their businesses.
