As of December 2019, there are more than 400 unicorns worldwide - that's according to the aptly named Global Unicorn Club report from CB Insights. A significant number of those, private companies valued at more than $1bn for the uninitiated, are firmly entrenched in the financial services sector. One such company is Lemonade. The New York-based business uses artificial intelligence, chatbots and other innovative technologies to disrupt the home and rental insurance sectors. It recently appeared in FinTech magazine's Top 10 Unicorns list, which provided a comprehensive snapshot of those most innovative companies to achieve this coveted status.

Accenture's Fintech Innovation Lab initiative is an accelerator programme designed to put the best fintech start ups in front of potential banking customers and investors - we interview those that made it to the final. Quotip: "We help to introduce investors into the financial product industry and help them find ideas in any product environment by using a machine learning based algorithm. "Traditional banks have a big trading desk for pricing products but for many it is not economical to do that in the same way. So we came up with an idea for machine learning to extract information from the exchange. "In Switzerland there are lots of products listed on an exchange, if you look at them there is something like 35,000 on the Swiss exchange. We will extract information from the prices that are fed from investment banks to the exchange and with this information we can incorporate pricing and feed that back to customers."