050: Money in the Middle - Pascal Bouvier and MiddleGame Ventures

Pascal Bouvier, Managing Partner of MiddleGame Ventures sat down with Eoin Fitzgerald this week in front of a full house at a Nadifin Accelerator event.  We set up our mobile sound desk at the event in the brand new offices of the Banking & Payments Federation in Ireland on Molesworth Street in Dublin, which is also the home of the Fintech & Payments Association of Ireland, and recorded Pascal and Eoin's chat for our landmark 50th episode of MoneyNeverSleeps.

Prior to co-founding MiddleGame Ventures with Patrick Pinschmidt and Michael Meyer in Washington DC to invest in fintech startups (post seed, Series A, Series B in Europe and the US), Pascal also co-founded the RegTech Lab, was a Venture Partner with Santander InnoVentures and a co-founder of Route 66 Ventures.  Pascal's full bio can be found on his personal blog, FiniCulture, and you can follow him on Twitter @pascalbouvier.

See below for an excerpt from the MiddleGame Ventures website on their modus operandi:

Our Story
Middlegame Ventures is a venture capital firm focused exclusively on early-stage fintech startups. Over the past decade, our partners have invested approximately $300M in financial services firms. The next decade will be even better. Because the second wave of fintech innovation will be a tsunami compared to the first wave.

Financial services innovation is our obsession and 100% of our focus. We bring to bear an essential - and differentiated - mix of investment, operations, and regulatory expertise to our investment process and on behalf of our portfolio companies. ​We create win-wins across our network - spanning entrepreneurs, incumbents, and regulators.

Our Investment Focus
​We invest in late seed to Series B fintech companies based in North America or Europe that are developing and using advanced technologies to digitally transform and re-imagine the financial services landscape. Our investments range across five key sectors: banking, asset management, insurance, payments, and capital markets.

Our Investment Themes
​We believe that four key key secular trends are reshaping financial services:

• Data is King (powered by the explosion of data sources and advanced analytical tools)
• End of Systemic Asymmetric Knowledge (between buyers and sellers across markets)
• Intelligent Automation (powered by advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, robotics) 
• Hyper-connected Worlds (powered by networks, nodes and platforms everywhere)

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These trends, coupled with enabling technologies - AI/ML, AR/VR, big data, blockchain, and quantum computing - drive our five investment themes:

• Starting Over: digital upgrade cycle (core banking, insurance risk management, intelligent payments, user engagement) 
• Embryonic Asset Classes: finding the new data giants (identity, data, crypto, trust) 
• Innovating Oversight: regtech (regulatory and compliance) with digital tools
• Platforms are the New Silos: financial categories will morph into platforms (open, transparent, interoperable)
• Better is Best: doing well while doing good (financial wellness, literacy, inclusion, optimization, risk management, SME finance) ​

Our belief is that technology will completely reinvent financial services as we know it. Our hope is that you can join us on the way.