Cloud 10 Pitch Day boosts Bahrain role as FinTech hub

Manama : C5 Accelerate held its fourth ‘Cloud10 Scalerator programme’ Pitch Day, under the patronage of Shaikh Mohammed Bin Essa Al Khalifa, Chairman of Tamkeen during the annual EPay Summit, (Electronic Payments and Online Banking Conference) yesterday.

The Cloud10 Pitch Day marked the completion of the fourth intake of the programme, focused specifically on fintech to align with and support Bahrain’s aspirations of becoming a regional fintech hub and industry leader.

The cohort included five local and international innovative tech-enabled financial services startups that are using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to scale their technologies in Middleware Vendor management, e-payments, and WealthTech. The founders of the companies who come from Bahrain, UAE, Azerbaijan, UK, US, Singapore and Hong Kong, presented their growth plans to local, regional, and international potential partners and investors.

The eight-week programme provided extensive support across a variety of business areas such as commercialisation, venture funding, and operations, equipping the businesses with the competence to innovate and scale through a robust international mentorship network. The fintech programme included an operative layer of mentorship explicitly focused on the financial space in Bahrain and the region; it also included a series of high-level introductions to banks across the country to help further accelerate client acquisition for the startups.

“We are proud to be part of the set-up of this great Bahraini accelerator. It gives Tamkeen great satisfaction to see this cohort graduating from the program and ready to pitch their ideas,” Qusay Alarayedh, Chief Operating Officer at Tamkeen said.

Hadyah Fathalla, Executive Director of C5 Accelerate in Bahrain told DT News, “Fintech holds great promise for Bahrain, whose financial sector has traditionally been a cornerstone of its economy. Cloud10 has been successful in attracting international innovative talent into Bahrain, helping them both incorporate and transfer and retain talent and expertise in the Kingdom. This can be key to creating a fintech industry in Bahrain where talent and expertise in such new fields is a real challenge. Collaborating with the CBB, EDB, and our partnership with Bahrain FinTech Bay is a great opportunity to combine our experience and expertise and multiply our efforts to make Bahrain an attractive destination for innovative fintech companies”

Ulrike Eder, Chief Commercial Officer, drie.co also one of the graduates from the Cloud10 Scalerator program cohort2 told DT News, “Our company helps an organisation on their cloud journey and helping them scale their business in their later stage. From a financial perspective conference and programmes like these are absolutely important because financial services are changing rapidly, now there are digital banks, crypto-currencies, blockchains which are changing the industry and we believe that Cloud is a big part of that and we want to make sure that people get educated about that.”

The Cloud10 Scalerator, which launched in Bahrain in 2016, is a partnership between C5 Accelerate, AWS, the Bahrain Economic Development Board (EDB), and the Labour Fund (Tamkeen). It provides participants with bespoke business coaching, in addition to a bundle of resources for start-ups, including AWS credits and professional services, training, in-person technical support, and a community forum. It facilitates the adoption of cloud technology’s unique improvements beyond traditional IT infrastructure to provide the scale and agility at a low-cost to help them grow.

C5 further partnered with Bahrain FinTech Bay last year to cooperate on programming and projects that will support the Bahrain’s fintech ecosystem and provide Cloud10 startups with the opportunity to validate their proof of concept.