Every year a clutch of new firms fight over marketspace in financial services. As this year's battle heats up, meet the 15 firms tipped to make a difference...
A robo-adviser and mobile financial planner are among the businesses working in a collaborative initiative with consultancy Accenture and 16 big banks.
The deal, called FinTech Innovation Lab London, will offer 15 selected fintech start-ups a place in a mentoring programme designed to develop and fine tune their ideas.
After 12 weeks mentoring from senior-level bank executives the firms will compete over six available places at an investor day in April, where they will be able to present in front of venture capitalists and senior financial-industry executives.
FinTech Innovation Lab London is part of a global initiative and has been held annually since 2012 at Canary Wharf's Level39.
Accenture financial services group chief executive Richard Lumb said this year's entrepreneurs "offer some exciting innovations and have demonstrated exceptional creativity in what has been a record breaking year for applications from more than 30 countries, confirming that London is very much the centre of Europe's thriving FinTech community".
Meet this year's firebrands
AimBrain - a developer of a mobile authentication process. Using behavioural, facial and voice measures, AimBrain enables banks and payment processors to know if their users really are who they say they are.
Albert - a mobile platform that helps self-employed people combine book-keeping (invoices, expenses, payments) with financial planning (bank info, cash flow forecasting).
AlgoDynamix - a portfolio risk analytics company focusing on 'financially disruptive' events. It provides fund managers, wealth managers, investment banks and trading houses with insights while anticipating price movements in advance of the event.
ClauseMatch - a developer of a platform, which helps streamline the workflow of documentation. The platform provides real-time editing, approvals and tracking.
Contego - a firm offering real-time identity and risk checks on companies and individuals. The firm aims to help businesses stay safe from fraud, identity theft and compliance failures.
Crowdaura - a solution for marketing, issuing, trading, settlement and administration of decentralised financial securities. It promises to reduce costs and increase the security and transparency.
Cutover - a firm aiming to cut the risk and cost of live events such as a business' IT system upgrade. It does this by replacing the excel-ware, emails and telephone calls that are typically used to coordinate activities among those affected. The service orchestrates activities and provides real-time information of the progress.
PassFort - a firm which claims to have developed the first compliance-as-a-service web application designed to improve the way regulated businesses collect, store and manage their customer compliance information at the point of taking on the client.
PayKey - this is apparently the world's first payment keyboard. PayKey's technology allows a bank's client to bank securely on social networks including Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp and Twitter.
Quotip - a firm which has created a management tool for structured financial products that provides wealth managers with various services around generating product ideas, quote requesting and audit/life-cycle management.
SBDA Group - a robo-adviser. The company delivers machine learning that allows banks to offer a personalised and automated financial advice service to its customers. This helps banks to scale personalised financial support and services using the power of artificial intelligence.
Talent Rank - a platform that enables prospective job candidates to exhibit their skills, interests and potential. The platform trains and tests candidates' competencies and promises to uncover talent that could otherwise be overlooked.
Undo - a firm offering specialised tools to improve software quality, robustness and security, by allowing coders to see exactly what a program has done. Two key products are UndoDB and Live Recorder.
Voleo - a mobile app that allows users to start a smart investment club where they can pool knowledge and funds and vote on trading decisions within their groups. Users can also follow others outside their own group to help with their portfolios.
ZeroDB - a firm that encrypts data to help companies use cloud services without sacrificing control, security, or privacy. Users can run queries over encrypted databases without exposing any decrypted data to the server.
