Digital Financial Services Innovation Lab (DFS Lab) - a seed stage accelerator for financial technology startups targeting low-income customers in developing markets - is inviting early-stage fintech entrepreneurs to join them from December 3-9, 2017 to work on the next generation of innovative digital financial products for Africa and South Asia.
The Bootcamp is a week-long Design Sprint, a process of structured ideation and prototyping to answer critical business questions. It runs for 5 days and includes flights, meals, and accommodation. The location for the Bootcamp is yet to be determined.
Entrepreneurs will go through a workshop to design and test new fintech ideas where rapid prototyping and UI/UX mockup support will be available on site.
Participating teams will create quick prototypes for representative customers and get actual feedback to see if there’s real potential for their solutions.
The program will provide participants with hands-on support and guidance from mentors to help bring their ideas to life. The best ideas will receive funding of up to USD $50K and an additional six months of support from DFS Lab as a member of their accelerator.
This will include weekly advisory calls, connections to a network of fintech experts, and further fundraising support.
DFS Lab is looking for small and nimble teams of entrepreneurs, engineers, product managers, or other brilliant people who want to build digital services for millions of users.
If you have deep expertise in fintech, payments, or retail finance and a strong desire to work in developing countries, then you're the kind of person the program is looking for.
For this boot camp, DFS Lab is particularly interested in working with teams creating solutions rooted in conversational interfaces and/or those that function on feature phones (non-smartphones).
Examples may include, but not limited to, innovative: Chat and messaging-based finance innovations, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Audio-based payment or data transfer products and Products that work over feature-phones
Special interest will be given to new approaches that help solve the gender divide and looking to bring financial services innovations to greater numbers of women. Though this doesn't imply that the program is limited to these areas.
Deadline for application is 3rd November 2017. If you are passionate about changing the landscape of mass market fintech and believe you have what it takes, apply now here.