New FinSec Lab facility inaugurated in Israel

The FinSec Innovation Lab is a joint venture between Enel X and  MasterCard, supported by the Israeli government. Its goal is to advance innovation in fintech and cybersecurity by attracting startups with disruptive ideas and helping turn them into commercial products and services for the payments and energy ecosystems.

Fintech and cybersecurity are two crucial sectors in an increasingly digitalized world, in which more and more essential services and infrastructure are going smart. These include renewable energy grids, transportation systems, buildings and public lighting as well as online banking and smart payment circuits.

In turn, the rapid growth of digitalization is driving demand for powerful data protection systems that can keep those services and that infrastructure private and safe.

At the FinSec Lab, solvers and innovators are busy producing next generation technologies in a range of sectors: from digital security and authentication to biometrics, identity management and fraud detection, from digital wallets to financial inclusion products for the unbanked.

The Lab's first call for applications in February 2021 attracted more than 100 Israel-based startups. Five were selected for development, and three are in the launch phase: Connected Insurance and its tailored digital insurance services for SMEs, Mirovia, an early stage startup that is refining its solution for detecting 0-day phishing sites, and Imvision, which developed a solution to detect security threats to the Application Programming Interface (API) data exchange protocol, which is used nowadays in most websites and applications.

The future lies in smart homes and smart cities that run on renewable energy distributed by intelligent power grids, in which people will be able to pay their bills, shop, and recharge their electric cars at the touch of an app: the thinkers at the FinSec Lab are inventing the solutions that will make that interconnected world safe, convenient, productive, and easy to navigate for us all.