buy Lyrica from india I am back from a summer sabbatical, it feels good to write with a purpose again, and this time it’s about investing in challenger banks. This blog post has been planned right before my summer vacation, based on first-hand experience. My last one about the topic of challenger banks — it has been an almost […]
Tag: new technology
Why We (Sometimes) Invest
Our job at SBT Venture Capital is to invest in startups. To a novice, it sounds simple, until you realize there are thousands of startups, at various stages, and we need to narrow it down to a manageable list of teams that we can work with. I wrote recently about our filtering process, the “why […]
Why We Don’t Invest…
In our work at STB Venture Capital we see hundreds of financial technology (“fintech”) companies. We ask all companies to submit their startup profile through the Gust web site — our submission page is here. Most of the time, we have to reject a proposal because it does not fit our preferred profile – we […]
Innovation Teams and Innovation Culture
In a sense, life is simpler in a startup — you have an idea, you select a team, you get some money to start, build the product, launch, and try to make money from customers that love your product. If you fail at any of those steps, you learn and start over. The innovation culture […]
I Love Bureaucracy
I used to complain about “bureaucracy” all the time. I was trying to bring new technologies to Sberbank, and at every step I was slowed down by procedures that either did not apply or did not exist. And when they were applicable and had to be executed, another level of organisational resistance intervened, the “bureaucrats” […]
Software-defined Payments Infrastructure
Software-defined anything (SDx) is a new term, attempting to name a collection of standards for computing infrastructure programmability and data center interoperability. It started with software-defined networking (SDN), which enables the separation of the networking logic and policies into software, decoupled from the individual hardware device. Think functionality similar to Cisco or Juniper network devices […]
An interview for “Piata Financiara” Romania — on bank branches, cloud, 2008, 2014
On branches vs online services We see here the dynamics of a field being fundamentally disrupted by technology. The growth of broadband internet access, cloud computing and mobile devices/smartphones have made possible technology solutions that allow banks to deliver the same and better services to their customers without requiring a visit to the branch. Even […]
A Short Sibos Interview, Talking About Innotribe Startup Challenge
Mircea Mihaescu, head of innovation at Russia’s Sberbank describes the Innotribe Startup Challenge as providing a “very good snapshot of the state of financial innovation at an early stage”. “There is a clear alignment between what Sberbank considers the best way to discover and apply innovation to the financial industry and how Innotribe sees it,” […]
Trust in Collaborative Innovation
In my work at Sberbank Technology Research Center, we constantly interact with partners, as we have defined our innovation strategy in the spirit of open innovation. We mostly collaborate with others (as opposed to doing it all in–house) when designing and deploying innovative technologies that are useful to the bank’s business and aligned with its […]
Technology for 2011
I started investigating new technology directions for Sberbank, and have been talking to many partners and vendors about how we can work together on innovative technology projects. I found myself explaining the “horizon” concept several times, so I’ve decided to post it while it’s still fresh in my mind… We are going through a major […]