Major Brazilian bank sets up fintech lab in Silicon Valley

Banco do Brasil (BB), a state-controlled bank in Brazil, has announced the opening up of a lab in Silicon Valley to compliment its efforts to build connections with U.S.-based fintech companies.

Finextra reported that the Banco do Brasil Advanced Laboratory (Labb) is based at Plug And Play, one of the best known fintech accelerator of the world, sharing space with several startups from different countries. The bank said that this will provide an opportunity to its employees to live a kind of “cultural immersion”.

According to the official announcement, the Labb aims to strengthen BB's innovation position to assimilate and disseminate digital culture, identify opportunities to discover startups at an early stage of operation, and explore solutions.

"Labb is part of BB's intra-entrepreneurship project and is also intended to make advanced incubation of internal projects of a strategic nature for Banco do Brasil, in addition to being a way for Banco do Brasil employees to experience the daily life of the Valley, interact with established entrepreneurs and companies and, on their return to Brazil, disseminate in their teams the digital culture and the success model of that region”, Marco Mastroeni, director, digital business, BB, said (quoted by Finextra).

For the development of intra-entrepreneurship, the bank’s proposed a model consists of four steps: think-track digital business, pre-incubation, incubation and acceleration. Banco do Brasil said that a project is currently under incubation in Silicon Valley and another is in acceleration, which it anticipated to be released to customers next year.

In addition, the bank expects that 16 more projects will be incubated in 2017, with four of these to be in Silicon Valley.

“New locations in Brazil are under study for new incubators and accelerators. In fact, partnerships with universities are under negotiation,” Mastroeni added (loosely translated).