Business Model Transformation - Venture Builder Concept & Incubation Space Qorus-Infosys Finacle Banking Innovation Awards 2024

Innovation for a large, established and successful bank is no longer just about what functionalities we offer our clients in the mobile application, or how we automate our processes. Naturally, this form of sustaining innovation has earned us a prime position on our market and a reputation of the most innovative bank not only in Slovakia but in the entire CEE region. However, to keep it that way, we need to look further afield – especially as fintech become increasingly competitive. Therefore, our major strategic objective is to deliver disruptive innovation to reignite the pioneering mindset in our organisation and, most importantly, to innovate not only our products and services, but also our business model.

This innovation is the Venture Builder Concept, which is now in its second year at our bank. The aim is to build fintech and beyond banking standalone solutions that will be owned (or co-owned) by the bank but will operate on the market as SPVs – special purpose vehicles. Our pilot project of the concept is Innovation Management AI Software called Ideapp, which will be mentioned in the “Results” paragraph.

One of the delivery options is the so-called Incubation Space. The long-term goal is to establish a focused, dedicated team with full ownership and commitment with operation management to enter new markets.

To ensure speed, future scalability, and commercialization of innovations, we are exploring the Venture operating model, which empowers innovations by establishing an environment, processes, and structure to accelerate the growth of new market innovations. Incubation Space is an initiative to incubate, build and scale selected innovations. The aim of Incubation Space is to transform ideas into successful, market-leading solutions - including solution stages after prototyping phase (scaling, business operations, sales, maintenance). Tatra banka aims to outsource product design capacities and engineering resources experienced in early-stage development to iterate fast with minimum legal architecture and process boundaries. The output of the Incubation Space projects can be a technology solution either internalized by relevant bank teams or operated by Incubation Space even after Go-to-market.