Four Fintech Projects Lead Their Authors to Israel

A coupon system that forces young people to invest money; a wristband that works as a contactless credit card, facilitating payments for the blind; a platform that provides crop insurance to small farmers in Southern Italy; a platform through which students can invest their savings and invest in startup companies. These are the four student projects awarded yesterday in the final act of Fintech 4 Financial Inclusion, that earned their authors a travel in mid-November to Tel Aviv, one of the startup capitals of the world, to visit the Citi Innovation Lab.

Fintech 4 Financial Inclusion is an innovative academic activity that has involved around 400 Bocconi students, challenged to develop novel, digital solutions to improve financial inclusion, as a part of their Private Equity and Venture Capital course. The initiative, a spin-off of Bocconi StartupDay, was jointly organized with Citi Foundation as part of their #Pathways2Progress program.

Students, explained the course Director, Stefano Caselli, were divided into 87 teams competing in four categories and assigned to four tutors according to their area (Anna Omarini for Payment Systems, Gimede Gigante for Financing, Giulia Negri for Investment and Francesca Casalini for Impact Investing) and attended a specific training program.

Yesterday, before the prize-giving ceremony, a committee of scholars and practitioners selected the winners among three finalists for each category.

"The quality of the projects has been considered very high by the venture capitalists in the Committee", Prof. Caselli says, "and many of them are worth pursuing".