Barclays Opens New Fintech Innovation Site

Robbie Lawther

5 May 2017

has opened Rise London, an open innovation site, in Shoreditch, east London. The firm claims it is Europe’s largest co-working space dedicated to financial technology.This latest investment highlights the increasing interest made by banks to increase its spending on fintech to improve its efficiency.

Rise, created by Barclays, will gather a worldwide community of fintech start-ups, who will work with other experts to improve the bank’s business opportunities in the financial services sector through long-term solutions, the bank said in a statement earlier in the week.

The site will house more than 40 fintech companies, along with banking and technology teams from Barclays. Barclays said “Rise London will play host to more than 200 hours of learning, workshops, hack-a-thons and networking on a monthly basis”.

The development is part of a trend of banks and other financial services firms in supporting "incubators" and fintech "labs", either in-house or as part of team projects, to stay ahead of developments in areas such as AI, robotics and machine learning, so as to avoid being overtaken by outsider firms trying to enter the space.

The bank alongside its start-up partners will co-create new products, services and platforms. It will partner with investors and industry experts across seven cities internationally, including, New York, Manchester, Mumbai, Cape Town, Vilnius, London and Tel Aviv.

“We believe that technology must be a core competency of a global financial institution, and we intend to be a leader in the industry,” Jez Staley, Barclays Group chief executive, said during the official opening. “Last week we announced the creation of 750 new jobs in our UK technology centres. FinTech startups are at the front of the technology wave that is changing our industry.

”Through Rise, we glean important insights; we can actively experiment with emerging technologies, and we can spot early trends and new markets as they form. This allows our employees, customers and clients to do things faster, better and at lower cost."

WealthBriefing recently reported Barclays' figures for the first financial quarter of 2017, where it saw its profit before tax dramatically swell more than 100 per cent year-on-year in the first three months of this year.