Partnership Fund for New York City (FinTech Innovation Lab)
The Partnership Fund for New York City, a nonprofit civic investment arm led by CEO Maria Gott, runs the FinTech Innovation Lab, a 12-week program that takes six to eight fintech companies per year. Financial institution partners select the cohorts and have grown from 10 banks at launch to 34 institutions, and graduates include Digital Reasoning, Centripetal Networks, Digital Asset Holdings, and ForwardLane. The program has 39 graduates in its seventh year, and the interview describes its focus on connecting startups with large institutions rather than on the startups' own revenue.
The Fintech Innovation Lab was created as a civic program to reduce the difficulty small emerging technology companies face in getting attention from large financial institutions, and to grow the New York City fintech ecosystem and jobs.
- •Because financial institutions select the cohorts, the program filters for technologies that already address a real pain point for a buyer, which raises the odds that graduates reach paying enterprise customers.
- •Limiting entry to six to eight companies per year and offering senior-level executive access creates a scarcity-driven, high-value network that institutions keep returning to.
- •Structuring the program as a nonprofit civic effort aligns incentives around job creation rather than equity returns, which earns buy-in from senior executives who would otherwise be hard to reach.
- •Requiring graduates to build teams in New York tied the program's success to local economic growth, and the growing number of institutions joining from outside the city suggests the network's reputation is compounding.
- 1.Identify a specific, expensive pain point that a set of large buyers (such as banks or enterprises) shares, and build an intake process around solving it.
- 2.Recruit the buyers themselves as gatekeepers who select participants, so every admitted company already has a qualified path to purchase.
- 3.Offer a short, intensive program with direct access to senior decision makers (CIOs and CTOs) rather than generic mentorship.
- 4.Keep the cohort small and competitive so the network stays valuable, and expand the partner base gradually as proof of results accumulates.
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