Discover Perfect Pitch
The sixth edition of the Discover Perfect Pitch competition was hosted at Sibos 2025 in Frankfurt. This challenge with a twist gives fintechs from around the globe the opportunity to showcase their products and services to the Sibos community. Congratulations to Finteum, Gemsen and MetaCert, crowned winners at the live final.
The streams
In 2025 the fintechs competed across three streams:
- Ambitious Adventurer - Being an adventurer is about your attitude, ambition, and values. This category will highlight those who excel in culture, people and teams. You’ll be able to demonstrate concrete success of brilliance and that you’re going somewhere not yet mapped out, because these are hallmarks of adventurers. The exact stage, funding and implementation of your ideas, products and services is not the priority. Net zero to maximisation of profits, this is about the heights you want to reach.
- Community Pioneer - Together we are stronger, the best Community Pioneers might have a revolutionary payments infrastructure, be totally focused on sustainability or deeply-integrated collaboration. What’s clear is that others need and want to be with you as you forge change for a community. It’s not about being different, it is about doing it together.
- Established Trendsetter - You may have proved the doubters wrong and built something that will scale. It’s not been easy, but you’ve solved a financial inclusion dilemma or created a new and improved solution to a known problem. Everyone now sees what you saw as obvious five years ago, but they didn’t take the risk. You did.
Qualifying entrants selected the competition category best aligned to their business, values and principles, answered a series of questions and submitted a pitch video. Watch all seven finalists' pitch videos here.
Announcing the 2025 winners
Facing quick fire questions from the judges, every one of the seven finalists impressed, but only three category winners could prevail. They were:
Ambitious Adventurer – Brian Nolan and Finteum. Solving the intra-day liquidity optimisation problem that can cost over $100 million dollars per bank, per year.
Community Pioneer - Aoife Manley and Gemsen. Enabling bank collaboration on fraud detection through scaled, safe and secure data analytics.
Established Trendsetter - Paul Walsh and MetaCert. Applying zero trust principles to web-links – a verification flag that can protect every bank customer from the world biggest cyber-security threat: phishing.
Each of the winners will receive an exclusive Sibos package of access and promotional opportunities, designed to take their business to the next level.
Meet the finalists
Ambitious Adventurer
WINNER - Finteum
Finteum has created a global financial market for intraday transactions among banks, enabling interbank transactions that last for hours instead of days. The Finteum Platform’s functionality facilitates the execution of intraday FX swap transactions, and later intraday repo transactions, between bank participants. The Finteum Platform supports bank teams to coordinate with each other, pioneering the intraday FX swap market
Timble AI
Timble AI builds AI copilots enabling banks and insurance companies to stay ahead of both fraud and risk during onboarding, underwriting, and collections/claims processing. It works with banks, insurance firms and fintechs in India, and is now expanding to the US, UK, and UAE.
Community Pioneer
WINNER - Gemsen
Gemsen is the world’s first real-time, privacy-preserving analytics and machine learning (ML) platform. It enables financial institutions to collaboratively derive insight and train ML models from high-volume streaming data — across hundreds of organisations — as if operating on a single pooled dataset, without ever sharing raw data.
Elucidate
Elucidate, authorised by BaFin and registered with ESMA, powers AI-driven risk decisioning with compliance pre-validation that reduces friction and builds trust in cross-border payments and trade.
Established Trendsetter
WINNER - MetaCert
Cyber crime is projected to hit US$15 trillion annually by 2029 (Statista) because conventional security can't stop phishing, the entry point for 90% of online fraud and data breaches. MetaCert delivers a major upgrade to phishing protection: Zero trust for web links. Its mobile security invention makes it easy for people to confirm when links and payment requests in SMS, email and apps are verified as legitimate.
Exactpro
Exactpro is an independent provider of AI-enabled software testing services for financial organisations. With expertise in protocol-based testing of matching engines, market data, market surveillance, clearing and settlement systems, payments APIs, it helps clients decrease time to market, maintain regulatory compliance, improve scalability, latency and operational resiliency.
Neterium
Neterium is a RegTech company transforming global financial crime prevention with next-generation screening infrastructure. Specialising in cloud-native SaaS watchlist screening, it empowers clients to stay ahead of evolving compliance demands through innovative, future-proof technology built for today’s and tomorrow’s financial crime prevention challenges.
The Perfect Pitch 2025 partners are Plug and Play, TechQuartier and Swift.
Fantastic opportunities and access for fintechs
The final at Sibos 2025 featured jury and audience voting. The winner for each stream will be rewarded with an exclusive consultancy pack provided by our partners, introductions to contacts who can help transform their business, and promotion on Sibos TV, sibos.com and Sibos social media channels.
The prizes focus on boosting businesses by delivering access to people and markets. They’re designed to accelerate business development, with our partners providing access and introductions to the right people, valuable industry visibility and specialist business guidance.
Judges
Meet the judges who helped determine the winners.
Samantha Emery
Payments Executive and NED
Samantha is a senior financial services executive and NED with unique experience spanning tier-one banks, prominent fintechs and major regulators.
Her most recent role at Lloyds Banking Group saw her leading the strategic direction on payments - group-wide strategy, payments partnerships, industry engagement - and overseeing critical enterprise service delivery.
At the Financial Conduct Authority, Samantha led across both payments supervision and the regulator’s globally recognised fintech agenda. Prior to this, she held several senior positions in NatWest’s transaction services business.
Samantha has served a term as a Director of Swift SC, also serving as the Board’s Deputy Chair. Her wider fintech NED and advisory experience encompasses start up and scale, having worked with Fnality, Form3 and Pay.UK.
An active spokesperson on inclusion, diversity and allyship, she is committed to keeping conversations live, relevant and action-oriented.
Alice Rettig
Managing Director
TechQuartier
TechQuartier is one of Germany’s largest digital hubs and a key ecosystem builder in the Rhein-Main region. With a passion for driving transformation, Alice leads efforts to accelerate technological innovation and foster collaboration between 20 corporate partners and over 600 startups.
Her background includes six years in academia, where she focused on corporate innovation and startup acceleration, along with programme management for a Berlin-based accelerator.
ALEXANDER SCHWERDT
VENTURE ASSOCIATE
PLUG AND PLAY
Alexander is part of the Investment and Technology Scouting team for Plug and Play in Germany. Based in Stuttgart, he connects leading corporations with best in class startups to establish pilots and explores strategic investment opportunities.
Alexander is an alumnus of the Technical University Darmstadt, where he studied industrial engineering with a focus on entrepreneurship and innovation management.
Joyce Shen
Head of Diversified Growth Customers, North America
Swift
Joyce Shen is the Head of Diversified Growth Customers in Business Development North America at Swift. She leads a team that manages a diverse range of client segments, including banks, securities, fintechs and partners. She and her team are responsible for executing Swift’s company strategy and delivering holistic value to customers through the lens of Payments Innovation, ISO 20022, Post-trade Securities Settlement, Financial Crime & compliance, Trade, Cloud application.
Prior to Business Development, Joyce has extensive experience in payments strategy with a specific focus on low value payments, transaction banking product management and financial service advisory. She is a key player in the financial services industry, driving innovation and excellence in her field.