HDB – Hellenic Development Bank: HDB’s partnerships upgrade the potentials of innovative businesses
The greek innovation ecosystem has shown many signs of maturation in recent years and the Hellenic Development Bank – HDB, wanting to support this course even more, has recently taken two important initiatives.
The first concerns a collaboration with Elevate Greece for an original competition exclusively for the startups of the registry under the name “ESG Innovation Challenge”.
HDB seeks through this initiative to develop a FinTech business evaluation solution and / or business plans incorporating environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) criteria as well as the degree of innovation of enterprises, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, with the aim of broadening the perimeter of the criteria of enterprises considered to be bankable.
These platforms will help to integrate and in a way educate the country’s small and medium-sized enterprises in this direction, something that is largely lacking even at European level.
The response that has been significant and shows that there are very remarkable startups that can come into contact with large organizations and companies to meet real needs.
This interconnection is a field that is of great interest to the Hellenic Development Bank and for this reason it proceeds to such collaborations with those companies that excel through the stage of PoC (Proof of Concept).
The second initiative is a digital community called “InnoAgora” powered by HDB, hosted on the internationally renowned EuroQuity platform of the French Development Bank Bpifrance.
The purpose here is to contribute to the international development of greek businesses and to provide real networking opportunities, creating communication channels with investors and other partners.
InnoAgora brings together three different categories of participants to make investment agreements and commercial partnerships with a strong character of extroversion.Firstly, businesses that may be startups, small or mid-caps.Second, investors such as Venture Capital Funds, Business Angels, large corporations, family offices and banks, and finally, supporting mechanisms, such as incubators and accelerators. Through InnoAgora, webinars, e-pitching and match-making events are organized, while so far internationally approximately 500 million euros have been invested. euro.
HDB is the first and only greek institution to participate in this ecosystem by creating such an e-community as InnoAgora.
Thus, the greek ecosystem is given the opportunity to reach a global network with more than 16,000 companies, 2,400 investors and 1,800 support mechanisms.
Within the first month, the members of InnoAgora have exceeded fifty (50) with the prospect of increasing significantly through partnerships with collective bodies and investment schemes.
By Konstantinos Kalogerakis, FinTech Innovation Manager, HDB and Panagiotis Papageorgiou, Business Innovation Manager, HDB.
