Swiss FinTech Awards 2022 winners are…

Yesterday’s Swiss Fintech Award ceremony welcomed around 180 invited guests; including many CEOs and leaders from traditional financial institutions as well as start-ups from the industry and numerous other key players in the Swiss fintech ecosystem like investors or accelerators. The highlight of the event was the awarding of the most outstanding startup in the fintech sector. While the start-ups go through a multi-stage application process to convince the jury, the "FinTech Influencer of the Year" is directly nominated and chosen by the jury. The jury of the Swiss FinTech Awards consists of 20 renowned fintech experts and industry thought leaders.

The winners for each category are:

Stableton Financial – "Growth Stage Start-up of the Year"
The Zug-based startup developed a marketplace enabling private and professional investors to access alternative investments. More than 2000 companies in Switzerland rely on it. The jury was particularly impressed by the fast development of the company. 

DeepJudge – "Early Stage Start-up of the Year"
As the winner in this category, the young company received prize money of CHF 48,000. DeepJudge offers a next-generation AI-powered context-sensitive legal document-processing platform for law firms, courts and legal departments. The technology also has the potential to achieve considerable efficiency gains in the legal and compliance area of financial institutions by means of artificial intelligence. DeepJudge, launched by four ETH Zürich Alumni has already paid pilot projects running with several leading law firms in Switzerland. 

Federal Councillor Ueli Maurer receives the "FinTech Influencer of the Year" Award.
As a prominent figure who has been strongly committed to an innovative and well-positioned financial center in recent years, Federal Councillor Ueli Maurer receives the "FinTech Influencer of the Year" Award. The Swiss FinTech Awards recognize, among other things, the promotion of open dialogue among all relevant stakeholders and his efforts to strengthen the international positioning of the Swiss fintech and financial center, as well as the numerous initiatives such as the fintech sandbox and fintech licence or the strategic forum for open finance. All these efforts by Federal Councillor Ueli Maurer and more are central to a vibrant fintech scene in Switzerland.

Urs Hölzle reccomends to celebrate failure 

This year's guest of honour, Urs Hölzle, was on stage for a fireside chat, offering plenty of inspiration for the young and established innovators in the room. Hölzle was Google's eighth employee and has since been responsible for the tech company's technical infrastructure. Hölzle spoke in detail about his time at Google, starting with the reasons for his decision to join the young garage start-up until today. One of the most important lessons for start-ups that he shared with the audience was the importance of an error culture. Google has the ambition to never make the same mistake twice. But in order to avoid this, it must be clear in each case how exactly the error arose, which people were involved and how. This requires complete openness on the part of those involved, which can only be achieved through a blameless culture. Building this culture is anything but easy, Hölzle admitted. In his experience, mistakes have to be celebrated in order to build this culture. Specifically, management should emphasise that the person who is open about their mistakes makes an important contribution to the success of the company.

(Press release/RAN)