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

Pascal Bouvier of MiddleGame Ventures joins Eoin Fitzgerald on stage at a Nadifin Accelerator event in Ireland to talk about fintech today, the future and how results of upcoming elections can drive Transatlantic moves!

Show Notes
Guest Profile

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)

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.