Worldwide innovation awards
Celebrating the leaders in financial technology
In 1494, a Franciscan friar named Luca Pacioli published a mathematics encyclopedia that would reshape the commercial world for the next five centuries. Buried within its pages was a systematic description of double-entry bookkeeping — the practice of recording every financial transaction as both a debit and a credit, maintaining a continuous account of assets, liabilities and equity that could be audited, reconciled and trusted. It was the operating system on which all subsequent commerce would run.
Pacioli’s closest intellectual collaborator at the time was Leonardo da Vinci, who had lived and worked alongside him in Milan throughout the 1490s and would later illustrate his next major work, De Divina Proportione. Leonardo was not a financier, but the financial system Pacioli described — a machine for recording, verifying and communicating the flow of value between parties — was precisely the kind of engineered system Leonardo spent his life thinking about.
The financial system has been rebuilt many times since 1494. What is happening now is something different in character: not a reform of the existing infrastructure but a wholesale reconstruction of it, built on software, data and connectivity rather than paper, ledgers and correspondent relationships that have remained essentially unchanged since the Renaissance. The organizations driving that reconstruction are the subject of The DaVinci Awards® FinTech category.
Worldwide innovation awards
how have you excelled?
Financial technology has moved well beyond its first wave. The initial disruptions, including mobile payments, peer-to-peer lending, neobank current accounts, and robo-advisory, have become established categories, and the innovation frontier has shifted accordingly. Embedded finance is dissolving the boundary between financial services and every other commercial vertical. AI is transforming underwriting, fraud detection, regulatory compliance, wealth management and customer service simultaneously. Open banking infrastructure is enabling data flows and integrations that were impossible under closed legacy architectures. Digital assets and programmable money are creating new forms of financial instrument, new settlement mechanisms and new models of ownership. Across all of it, the populations historically excluded from financial services — the unbanked, the underbanked, the small business without access to institutional credit — are being reached by platforms that the cost structures of traditional finance could never have served.
The DaVinci Awards® recognizes the full breadth of this innovation: from the infrastructure layer — payment rails, core banking platforms, clearing and settlement systems — to the consumer-facing applications built on it; from the AI systems transforming how financial risk is assessed to the regulatory technology enabling institutions to manage compliance at a scale and speed that manual processes cannot approach.
Entries are welcomed from fintech startups, established financial institutions deploying new technology, infrastructure providers, and the enterprise software companies building the platforms on which the financial system increasingly runs. The award is equally interested in innovations serving individual consumers, small businesses, institutional investors and the financial institutions themselves.
If your organization is rebuilding the infrastructure of money — faster, fairer, more efficient, more accessible or more secure — a DaVinci Award® could be yours.
Worldwide innovation awards
Areas of Interest
The DaVinci Awards® recognizes outstanding feats of human ingenuity and product innovation in financial technology. Entries are welcomed from individuals, teams, startups and established enterprises based anywhere in the world. Areas of interest include, but are certainly not limited to:
Impress the judges
Ingenuity of Approach
Financial technology operates at the intersection of software engineering, product design, regulatory compliance, data science and, increasingly, artificial intelligence. The DaVinci Awards® judges assess submissions across that full breadth. Show the thinking behind your innovation: what financial services challenge was addressed, why existing products or infrastructure were insufficient, and what technical or design decisions produced your solution. Entries demonstrating genuine originality — a credit assessment model extending creditworthiness determinations to populations that traditional scoring excludes, a payment infrastructure reducing settlement latency from days to seconds, a compliance platform enabling regulatory reporting that previously required teams of analysts to perform manually — will score strongly on this criterion. In a field where competitive differentiation is often claimed at the level of user interface and fee structure, the panel is particularly interested in submissions where the innovation runs deeper: into the underlying data architecture, the risk model, the regulatory design or the infrastructure engineering that makes the product possible. The DaVinci Awards® is not a measure of commercial scale but of engineering and design excellence; the most compelling submissions are those that demonstrate a distinctive and rigorous approach to the financial services problem they set out to solve.
Impress the judges
The Problem Solved
Financial technology innovations address the frictions, exclusions, inefficiencies and failures of the existing financial system. The DaVinci Awards® wants to understand precisely which friction your innovation removes. Clearly explain the financial services challenge you address, the population or institution you serve, and the measurable improvement your product delivers. Quantified outcomes strengthen a submission significantly: cost of transaction reduced, time to credit decision compressed, fraud loss rate lowered, previously unserved customers reached, regulatory reporting hours saved, or equivalent metrics appropriate to your product. For consumer-facing innovations, the quality of the financial outcome delivered to the end user, not merely the quality of the user experience, is a primary criterion for The DaVinci Awards®. For infrastructure and B2B products, demonstrate the downstream impact on the institutions or platforms built on your technology: the payment rails that process higher volumes at lower cost, the core banking platform that enables a neobank to launch in months rather than years, the compliance system that allows a financial institution to operate in a new market without hiring a compliance team of equivalent scale.
Impress the judges
Scalability & Legacy
The financial system is global, and the financial technology innovations with lasting significance are those capable of operating at global scale, or of establishing the standards and infrastructure on which global-scale systems are built. Describe your innovation’s current deployment scope: a single market, a regional footprint, or a multi-jurisdictional platform. Explain what is required to extend that scope: regulatory licensing across jurisdictions, partnership with local financial institutions, adaptation to market-specific payment methods or currency characteristics. Tell us what progress has already been made. For infrastructure and platform innovations, describe the ecosystem of products and services being built on your technology, since the multiplier effect of financial infrastructure — the transactions enabled, the populations served, the institutions interconnected — is itself a measure of legacy. For consumer and SME products, explain how the business model scales: the unit economics at volume, the customer acquisition cost relative to lifetime value, and the degree to which the product improves as its user base grows. The DaVinci Awards® is most interested in financial technology innovations whose influence on how the world manages, moves and accesses money will still be felt a generation from now: the payment standard that becomes ubiquitous infrastructure, the credit model that permanently expands access to capital, or the compliance platform that allows financial regulation to function at the speed the digital economy demands.
Winners’ rewards
Promoting your success
Winners may make full use of The DaVinci Awards® hallmark of excellence, linked to your level of accreditation, on all relevant materials.
All winners also receive a DaVinci Awards® trophy, and substantial press opportunities working in partnership with our editorial team. Find out more.
