The way forward for financial services is collaboration.
Collaboration plays to the strengths of incumbent financial institutions, tapping into a bank's institutional knowledge, experience, and know-how of managing customers.
It also plays to the strengths of fintech firms, unleashing the power of technology, creativity, and focus on achieving scale.
Bank / Fintech partnerships are happening
Just a few years ago, you could count on one hand the number of real partnerships between banks and fintech companies.
As Tearsheet's coverage continues to track the convergence of tech and finance, we're seeing real integrations that go way beyond just connecting APIs or doing a co-marketing direct mail campaign.
The Tearsheet Bank / Fintech Awards
To recognize these partnerships and celebrate the companies behind these creative and impactful tie-ups, we're launching the Tearsheet Bank/Fintech Awards.
We're looking to identify the best and most creative partnerships that create value beyond the sum of the parts, that move the needle beyond just PR releases and marketing pitches.
Does your financial institution or fintech have a great story to tell about partnerships? We'd like to hear it.
Submissions are open now.
A different type of award
A lot of media firms run awards programs. We want to do something different.
Open Awards: Many awards programs end in a typical self-congratulatory event that costs hundreds of dollars (at least) to attend. I don't know -- it feels kind of old boys, exclusive country clubish.
With the Tearsheet awards, we want to do something digital. Our awards programs will happen all online -- open to everyone. The award show -- if you want to call it that -- will happen via a webinar, freely open to everyone.
More content, more experience: Instead of doing a data dump of awards one time a year, we're going to do a surgical award program every month. And unlike awards programs that seem separated from our core mission, our awards programs will be integrated into the content that we're reporting on every single day.
Top judges
We've got a panel of amazing judges for our first program -- the Bank / Fintech Partnership Awards. We're adding more every day, too.
- Leslie Campisi, chief marketing officer, Anthemis
- Karl Mohan, head of strategic partnerships and growth, a large Australian bank
- Joe Schmidt, investor, Accel Partners
- David Citron, partner, Global Founders Capital
- Andy Behr, chief of staff, WEEL
- Josh Liggett, fintech lead and senior analyst, OurCrowd