On April 22^nd, the Chief Penguin of IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator & Student Experience at IBM, Melissa Sassi, along with Aaron Ralls, Chief Technical Penguin at IBM, joined the Fintech Summit organized by Centare with the great host, Ryan Pearl, to talk about Data Stewardship & Fintech Innovation with startup founders and technology professionals. The event welcomed ~260 registrants from across the financial sector and the startup ecosystem.

IBM team highlighted during the session that the accelerator program seeks to assist early-stage businesses that deal with sensitive data to enhance their data protection, privacy, and security, in a time with increasing cybersecurity risks and government regulations. The core of the program consists of working with startups and connecting early-stage companies with IBM mentors and like-minded investors to build an impactful ecosystem.

Cheron Bruce and Bryan Young from Home Lending Pal joined the session and provided rich examples of how the IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator program helped them grow their business and interact with peers and others across the IBM network.

IBM team also touched upon the diversity of start-up owners in the current portfolio and how they are working to diversify it even more by welcoming more startups with female founders, founders of color, and geographic diversity.

The IBM Hyper Protect Accelerator is looking to extend and reach 100 start-ups from its current portfolio of 45 startups.

For early-stage fintech, healthtech, insurtech & digital assets startups, with less than $1M in revenue, less than 5 years old, and handling personally identifiable information, several benefits are offered including up to $120K in cloud credits, 2-years of technical mentorship from IBM and investment readiness support from Village Capital.

The call of application is now open, don’t forget to apply and visit http://ibm.biz/hpa-apply.

Join our accelerator hub today at http://ibm.biz/accelerator-hub to submit your guest blog and tell us about your startup. What should you cover in your blog? What is your problem statement? What’s your solution? Who is your target market? What countries are you focusing on? Why do data protection, privacy, and security matter to your company?

Register for Start-ups with Sassi & Ralls’ weekly series on http://ibm.biz/sassi-and-ralls.

See you at the Accelerator Hub http://ibm.biz/accelerator-fintech-summit!