Hong Kong FinTech Week: Featurespace wins fast track programme

By Sunniva Kolostyak

Financial crime prevention provider Featurespace has been named the winner of innovation contest Global Fast Track Programme at Hong Kong FinTech Week.

The inaugural contest was created to help local and global enterprises grow and accelerate innovation, utilising Hong Kong’s FinTech ecosystem.

Featurespace was announced as the overall winner for its ARIC Risk Hub a platform which allows financial institutions to automatically identify risk, catch new fraud attacks and identify suspicious activity in real-time.

The ARIC hub uses advanced self-learning models and explainable anomaly detection and is used by more than than 30 major global financial institutions, including HSBC, TSYS, Worldpay, NatWest Group, Contis, Danske Bank, ClearBank and Permanent TSB.

The Global Fast Track Programme, held in conjunction with Hong Kong FinTech Week, 68 solution providers from nine FinTech verticals pitched their technologies to more than 30 Hong Kong and Asian executives and investors.

King Leung, Head of FinTech at InvestHK, said: “The Global Fast Track Programme, which is a business-driven platform of the Hong Kong FinTech Week, attracted over 550 company applications from 44 global economies.

“The high-quality FinTechHK Global Final competition showcased some of the finest FinTech solutions worldwide and their plan to scale their business in Hong Kong. Congratulations to the champion Featurespace and we look forward to working with you to fast-track your next success in Hong Kong,” Leung said.

Featurespace has had a successful year, completing a £30 million funding round in May, which the company is using to drive growth in the Asia Pacific region, and it expanded its services to Australia in June.

Featurespace, which specialises in anti-money laundering and preventing financial crime, invented Adaptive Behavioural Analytics and created the machine learning ARIC platform to risk score events in more than 180 countries to prevent fraud.