EXCLUSIVE – The two fundamental keys to most challenges retail banks and payment companies face on the innovation front are personalization and efficiency, according to Alberto Corvo, a founding partner at fintech focused investment firm Motive Partners.

To help banks find these solutions, Corvo’s Motive Partners, along with Allied Irish Bank, Bradesco, Emirates NBD,  Royal Bank of Scotland and Mastercard, launched a members-only innovation lab called Motive Lab yesterday, designed to assist banks build innovative technologies as well as find new investment opportunities.

“For banking and payments, particularly on the retail side, the challenge is how does the bank get closer to the client and make them the focus of what they do,” Corvo told Bank Innovation.

“One way to look at that, is having banks create products and services that cater to a client’s different life stages, to evolve and personalize its offerings to cater to that need,” he said.

That’s something fintechs do very well, whether the user is recent college graduate or preparing for retirement. Chances are there is a fintech startup created to cater to that specific life stage.

Corvo, who was a partner at consulting firm PWC, is hoping to help banks do the same at Motive Labs.

Here, he will lead a team to help banks solve that challenge by sourcing partnership deals with fintechs or finding a company that can provide the required service or even “stitch together various fintechs in Motive Capital’s portfolio,” to form a larger entity that could provide that solution.

“We are also looking to source proprietary deals in the form of carve-outs,” he said. “We know from the success of entities like Visa, Mastercard and Bloomberg for instance what type of value carve-out deals unlock.”

The lab will be divided into four categories, Corvo explained. These categories are banking and payments, insurance, capital markets and asset management.

“The goal is not to create a consulting service,” he said. “We want to keep this lab small, limiting each vertical to ten members or less. We are not looking to invent things, we want to use our knowledge and resources to create value for the banks.”

The banks are admitted into the lab after a vetting process by Corvo and his team. Additionally, each member is required to pay a fee: Corvo declined to reveal the price of this membership.

“We gathered like-minded banks and talked with them individually to outline major challenges and pain points, then we categorized them into themes and started looking for a solution,” Corvo said.

The lab will have offices in New York and London.

The first phase of lab, unveiled yesterday, will focus on banking and payments. Motive intends to roll out members from the other categories in the coming weeks.

While Corvo declined to reveal any particular solution that the lab is currently working on, he did mention IoT being an area of interest, particularly in relation to preparing banks to manage the growing volume of payments due to IoT and device to device payments.

To learn more about investing in fintech companies, join us on March 5-6, 2018 at the Parc 55 in San Francisco for Bank Innovation 2018. Click here to request an invitation.