Fintech might be a talking point in the Garden State innovation landscape today, but longtime finance professor George Calhoun can remember when the finance industry not only didn’t discuss a tech pairing — it was proud to avoid any conversation involving it.“About 20 years ago, they were a technology laggard in terms of other sectors of the economy, such as healthcare, which had long since gone full-bore into automation,” he said. “They were proud of doing things by hand and were enjoying the high transaction fees associated with that.”Calhoun is pleased to report that not only have the past two decades changed the financial sector’s relationship with tech, but also that New Jersey — and his own university home, Stevens Institute of Technology, with its new NJ FAST initiative — has become a focal point in that industry shift.Calhoun has seen enough recent arrivals from overseas markets and the country’s other tech startup hot-spots, including Silicon Valley, to say unequivocally that the Garden State is already a recognized leader in fintech entrepreneurship. Stevens has been capitalizing on that gravitational pull for several years with its CRAFT hub, or the Center for Research toward Advancing Financial Technologies. That pandemic-born initiative was the first fintech research center sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Calhoun, who serves as CRAFT’s managing director, said the model of bringing industry and academia together for fintech innovation served as inspiration when New Jersey officials were later looking to establish an initiative that could foster fintech ventures.“We had a center that wasn’t designed to create commercial entities … our innovation came up to a threshold and then hoped someone would take the hand-off,” he said. “The state wanted to take it and make it big enough to look at developing companies and funding new ventures.”This ended up being the impetus for the NJ FAST accelerator program, a public-private partnership (buoyed by the support of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority and finance and insurance giant Prudential Financial) that launched with an event in May featuring Gov. Phil Murphy and other leaders. Stevens Institute of Technology professor George Calhoun speaks at the graduation of the NJ FAST Cohort 1 at the NJ FAST Plug and Play Expo.After a six-month process that involved whittling hundreds of submissions from entrepreneurs down to 14 groups selected to participate in the inaugural program, NJ FAST’s first cohort graduated earlier this month. The graduates included local startups, but also entrepreneurs from Italy, Germany and Sweden.That global representation — all brought into the orbit of New Jersey business — is a product of the initiative’s connection to California-based Plug and Play Tech Center, which has been named one of the most active investors globally. Tyler Lange, the organization’s director of corporate partnerships, explained
Gio. Gen 9th, 2025
