Last week I attended the Fintech Awards Wales awards, along with my clients, Fintech Wales (not related to the awards). We won the Best Accelerator award.

Credit: Hwyl Ventures

For such an incredibly lightly resourced programme, with hardly any budget, we were proud to have won.

As the Consultant Programme Director, with the brilliant support of local entrepreneur and investor, Eamon Tuhami, we really focused on making sure that it was a Founder-focused programme. It was built on the premise that all founders should be regularly challenged about whether they’re truly solving a problem that is their market needs them to. We knew that if we did everything we could to challenge the startups AND support them to be investment ready, and therefore be in a great position to scale, everything else would follow from that.

Following the win, creator of the FinTech Awards Wales, Matt Hyde, said

“For this particular category we were delighted to welcome Welsh entrepreneur and investor, and founder of GoCompare, Hayley Parsons as Chair of the judging panel, which demonstrates the high accolade of these awards and the sheer innovative talent we have here in Wales.

“FinTech Wales’ Accelerator programme is highly regarded for delivering world-class mentorship and support to help incubate, accelerate and scale startup organisations within the Welsh ecosystem.  The success from The Foundry cohorts has been phenomenal, and the programme truly makes a significant impact to the Welsh Fintech ecosystem. Hayley was particularly impressed by the results driven leadership shown by the Foundry.”

It’s nice to have all the hard work recognised, and also to bump into some of the startups from the previous cohorts who were there to collect individual awards. Some of them also bearing huge news that will hit the press in coming weeks. I’m glad to have paid a tiny, tiny part in their future success.