prooV Partners With Isracard to Redefine the Search for FinTech Innovation at First-Ever prooVday

TEL AVIV, Israel and SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 3, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Isracard, one of the largest financial service providers in Israel, recently announced the winners of the first-ever Isracard prooVday, a Proof-of-Concept competition that ran on the prooV platform.

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prooV's unique platform provides an all-encompassing PoC ecosystem that facilitates the discovery and testing of software solutions for problems plaguing enterprises. Using the platform, enterprises can run multiple PoCs simultaneously on dedicated testing environments that simulate the production environments of the enterprises. prooV also provides sophisticated insights and analytics about the behavior of each solution being tested.

Isracard initially joined prooV in May 2016, opening a single PoC opportunity. This partnership rapidly flourished into a strong collaboration, yielding many more PoC opportunities as Isracard learned the simplicity of the platform and recognized the value it brought to its innovation and coopetition efforts. Taking it even further, in September 2016 Isracard officially launched Isracard prooVday – a competition consisting of 12 PoCs in categories ranging from e-commerce to geo-based analytics.

"At Isracard our chief competitors are no longer other corporate financial firms, but rather the many small startups who have carved out niches in specific services that are part of our offering, executing them in a way that is better, easier, and often less expensive than we and other institutions can," noted Ron Wexler, CEO of Isracard. "Once we started working with prooV, we quickly realized the acceleration potential the platform could provide in our efforts to collaborate with startups, and we decided to take it to the next level in the form of a competition."

Of the 200+ startups that applied to participate in the competition, 40 were selected and given access to dedicated cloud-based testing environments generated by prooV. In order to accurately simulate Isracard's internal environments, prooV created over 20 APIs and databases based on datasets and internal logic provided by Isracard. The entire process of initiating the competition, setting up the environments, running the PoCs, and deciding the winners took a fraction of the time traditional methods would have required – shortening the time Isracard would have needed to achieve the same results by over 90% percent.

Seegnature, which allows consumer-facing enterprises to verify and facilitate clients' digital signatures in real-time, took home first place and a cash prize of 100K NIS. Rewire, which facilitates digital money transfers, took second place, while EZSave, a startup that renegotiates utility bills for lower prices, came in third.

"Financial institutions of all shapes and sizes are facing an uncertain future, with new technological processes upending the traditional way banking and finance operations have been handled in the past," said Toby Olshanetsky, CEO and co-founder of prooV. "Established financial firms and banks are increasingly looking to evolve, but are stymied in their search for innovation by regulation, complex logistics, and security concerns. prooV's platform solves these issues by creating secure and remote cloud-based testing environments, through which startups and vendors can participate in PoCs without impacting the enterprise's assets."