The Secret is Out — Motive Labs
As many of you are aware I joined Motive Partners just over 12 months ago. In the interim, I have been working with a number of incredibly talented individuals to build Motive Labs to drive innovation across Financial Services for both FinTechs and incumbents alike.
Having helped to set up the Barclays Accelerator while at Techstars and numerous other corporate programmes, I am acutely aware of the issues that many legacy businesses are faced with, but equally, I understand the challenges that startups are faced with when selling to them.
While AI and Blockchain are grabbing all the headlines, I strongly believe that one of the largest emerging trends will be the re-invention of corporates. In this brave new world in which technology is pervasive, corporates are recognising that change is happening around them at an exponential rate and they need alternative models of innovation to survive. These are models of collaboration — with innovative startups and also each other — and that’s where Motive Labs comes in.
Motive Labs works with partners from across Financial Services — Banking & Payments, Capital Markets, Asset Management and Insurance — to identify new innovation and investment opportunities and solve common areas of challenge leveraging this innovation coalition/syndicate to identify industry solutions. We are proud to have Allied Irish Bank (“AIB”), Bradesco, Emirates NBD, Mastercard & Royal Bank of Scotland (“RBS”) as our launch partners for our innovation coalition, targeting Banking & Payments.
Many of the opportunities which we have identified might be addressed in a variety of ways — from collaborating with FinTech start-ups through to building new products and solutions with our in-house technical capability — led by the amazing technologist Etienne Castiaux, who was previously the CTO at FIS and co-founder of Clear2Pay. It is Motive’s experience, expertise, network and intense focus on implementation and delivering value to all the different stakeholders that differentiates us from other “innovation practices”.
The complexity of compliance and regulation in Financial Services, and working with legacy technology, is not trivial — and the real determinant of success, as Alberto Corvo (CEO of Motive Labs) would describe, is “innovation through implementation” — otherwise much of the noise around corporate innovation can and should be discounted as “innovation theatre”.
If you are interested in hearing more about Motive Labs, I would strongly recommend signing up for our new weekly podcast “The Future of Finance” and also our “Brainfood” newsletter.
