Ashurst's dedicated business accelerator programme covers the key areas of law relevant to FinTech businesses, and offers opportunities to get answers to specific legal questions as well as connecting cohort members to a wide array of legal and business experts and thought leaders operating in the FinTech space. Set over three days, the 2022 programme will take place from May 10-12 2022.

This year, the 16 businesses were selected from some 100 applications and includes three sustainability-focused and two female-led companies.

The programme, co-led by partner and Head of Ashurst Advance Digital Tara Waters and Global ESG / Sustainability partner Anna-Marie Slot includes for the first time a dedicated sustainability stream, in partnership with Hitachi Vantara.

The full cohort comprises:

• Alter5: a specialised lender for the green economy.
• Collective Benefits: a business providing insurance, benefits programmes and protections for independent workers across the globe.
• ECU: a platform for a new type of a digital green bond, a redeemable, perpetual bond that replaces traditional bonds for electricity producers.
• Fasset: a regulated digital asset gateway that is exclusively focused on serving populations in the Frontier Markets.
• Finclude: a pan-European credit scoring system that allows businesses to assess consumers in a universal way.
• Koia Global Limited: making alternative assets accessible to anyone, via fractional ownership, and allow users to invest in assets they understand and are truly passionate about.
• LedgerComm: an end-to-end system that takes trades from execution to settlement.
• Liberis: a global embedded finance platform with a mission to provide small businesses with accessible and responsible finance, based on the belief that funding should always be a positive force for small businesses.
• Liquidity: a working capital marketplace that helps SME suppliers get paid and helps corporates optimise cash and inject liquidity into their supply chains via its SaaS-base.
• Nu Credits: a trade finance marketplace connecting SMEs with global lenders, backed by blockchain and semantic web technology.
• Purl: a digital application designed to digitise, streamline and automate child maintenance payments, to address inequalities in payment management and social/financial issues faced by the paying parent.
• Rackle (API Network Global Ltd): a technology company that enables banks, e-money companies, and financial technology companies based outside of Europe without a banking license to provide banking services in Europe with the Single API offered by Rackle.
• StepEx: making professional development affordable and accessible to all by pioneering outcome-based qualification pricing.
• Strabo: a cross-border personal finance platform.
• Vested Impact: an automated impact assessment platform that assesses the impact of companies products and services on their contribution to addressing societies greatest challenges; the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to share with asset managers and investors exactly how and where their investments contribute.
• ZeroPA Madad (UK) Ltd: offers financial education and tools, and crucially interest-free loans to the financially disadvantaged and vulnerable whilst at the same time achieving a commercial return to lenders and investors.

Tara Waters said that Ashurst was looking forward to welcoming the cohort to the Labs.

"We are absolutely delighted to be announcing the new 2022 cohort who will be joining us in May for the programme - we have a really interesting mix of businesses, and we're excited to assist them in reaching the next stage of their business journey. FinTech Legal Labs is an important programme which arms its participants with critical tools by helping them access a broad range of FinTech industry expertise, and the opportunity to connect up-and-coming innovators and existing leading institutions is hugely beneficial for all involved."

"With focuses ranging from alternative investments, social finance, lending, savings, payments, digital assets and financial infrastructure, the diverse combination of businesses in this year's Labs programme shows the critical and increasing role FinTechs play in the future economy," Anna-Marie Slot added.

"We are really pleased to be partnering with Hitachi Vantara through our new sustainability stream, to ensure that we actively place focus on ESG, and having a number of dedicated sustainability FinTechs is very exciting."