FreightWaves has been selected as one of 15 start-up companies featured in the Futures Industry Association (FIA) Innovators Pavilion during the annual FIA Futures and Options Expo in Chicago in mid-October. Moreover, FreightWaves was also invited as one of only five companies to present on-stage in the ‘Meet the Innovators’ challenge for an opportunity to earn the title FIA Expo ‘Innovator of the Year 2018’ by a panel of industry judges.
The challenge takes place on Wednesday, October 17th, and is a classic five-minute “quick pitch” to FIA”s panel of judges and the audiences. No demonstrations or formal slide presentations are allowed – just a verbal pitch by each start-up to describe the main features of their products and explain the relevance of those products to the derivatives markets.The pitches will be followed up by eight minutes of questions from the judges for each presenter.
“FreightWaves is excited to be part of this competition alongside other technology innovators in the futures industry,” stated Craig Fuller, FreightWaves’ chief executive officer. “In just over two years, FreightWaves has become a leading force in the freight industry as an innovator, disruptor and trusted source for ground-breaking market news, data and analytics. At the Innovators Pavilion, we’ll showcase how we’re working to empower freight, and financial, market participants with data transparency and risk management tools, and what’s up next in the form of our Trucking Freight Futures contracts, which will debut early in 2019. As a freight data and technology provider, being selected to showcase our company at the FIA Expo is a incredible honor for us.”
The Innovators Pavilion has been part of FIA’s Expo since 2015 and has featured 57 fintech startups to date. Now in its 34th year, the Expo draws more than 4,500 people to the largest gathering of derivatives industry professionals in the world. The FIA Innovators Pavilion is a special feature of the FIA Expo dedicated to showcasing emerging technology companies displaying innovation and entrepreneurship for the derivatives industry. They were selected through a competitive application process.
“The FIA Innovators Pavilion is essentially a showcase for fintech startups that are offering products and services that might be relevant for companies in the derivatives industry,” Will Acworth, senior vice president of FIA. “The pace of technological change is very rapid. Even though banks and brokers have lots of financial resources, they are not as nimble as these startups.”
Acworth sees the showcase as a way for innovators and entrepreneurs to interact with others in the industry and develop both productive partnerships and customer relationships, ultimately leading to improved efficiency across the industry.
“One of the ironic things about this show is that even though the technology of trading has advanced enormously over the last several decades, and now is almost completely electronic and automated, people still find a tremendous amount of value in face-to-face interactions,” Acworth said. “These companies are coming to our show with ideas about how to use blockchain or artificial intelligence or cloud computing or machine learning, and even though the subject is very technical, they find a lot of value in the unstructured and spontaneous interaction you get when you put several thousand people together in one room.”
The following startups, in addition to FreightWaves, will have a TechPod on the Expo floor to display their products:
Adroit Trading Technologies
Chainalysis
Datavore Labs Inc.
DrawBridge Lending
Genesis Global
iComply Investor Services Inc.
iPushPull
Kaizen Reporting
MSR Indices, LLC
Primal Quant Inc.
Radar Relay
Sudrania LLC
Tookitaki Holding Pte. Ltd.
Waymark Tech
The Expo will take place in Chicago Oct. 16-18, and the ‘Meet the Innovator’ Challenge will take place on Wednesday, October 17th. The winner of the FIA Innovator of the Year 2018 will be announced during the event.