Inside the hot new startup accelerator 'changing the DNA' of a huge bank

Welcome to Rise, in Manhattan's Flatiron District.

It doesn't feel much like Barclays' Midtown Manhattan banking offices.

Rise rents desks in its coworking space. White said the mere fact of being near other innovative companies can help the flow of ideas — not to mention the opportunities for networking. "This space is all about creating ecosystems — it's about creating community," he said.

When we visited Rise in the fall, there were about 60 startups working in the coworking space.

Rise also offers private office space to fintech startups. All of the private offices were rented within the first 30 days of the center opening this year.

Barclays initially launched an accelerator and coworking space in London two years ago. When it was a success, they decided to launch a second in New York. The entire Rise space in New York is about 22,000 square feet and spread over two floors.

Some of the companies in the coworking space have partnerships with Barclays. One company based there, Market IQ, went through Barclays' accelerator program in London. It takes structured and unstructured social-media data and uses it to predict events. Barclays now uses that technology in its command center in Manchester. It can predict, for example, if the bank's ATMs are not working just by monitoring social media.

Rise has a very startup-y feel. Cucumber water, anyone?

The second "experiment" within Rise is a curated event space. When we visited in the fall, White told us that they had had 37 events there in their first 30 days of opening.

Then there is the accelerator, run in partnership with Techstars. About 520 companies applied to be in the first program in New York. They chose 10.

Julien Denaes, CEO of Logrr, a company that provides password-less identification for big enterprises to connect to cloud services, spoke with Pete Rung, cofounder of LiveOak Technologies, a customer-engagement platform that combines video conferencing with document collaboration and e-signatures. When we spoke with Denaes, he said Barclays was interested in using his ID technology for its research analysts and clients. The bank's security team had spent 2 1/2 weeks trying to hack his technology — unsuccessfully.

The accelerator program lasts 110 days. Together, Barclays and Techstars support companies with everything from proof of concepts and accessing data to networking advice and mentorship.

Cisco and Thomson Reuters are announced partners.

Barclays does not directly take stakes in the accelerator companies. The bank helps them to fundraise by unlocking some of its network in the same way that Techstars does. Both mentor the companies and help them work their own networks.

When we visited the accelerator, the 10 companies there were approaching their demo day, where investors would be able to come in and meet with companies. "I spend a lot of time trying to keep them out" before the demo day, said Techstars' Fielding. Selectively, though, she does bring in investors to meet with particular startups.

Mentoring is a big part of the accelerator program. There are about 300 mentors working with the companies in New York. "The first cohort that we did [in London], it was like begging people at Barclays to come along because everyone was kind of skeptical," White said. "The second cohort, we were overly flooded with too many people wanting to be involved."

That mentor pool includes everyone from the CEO of automated-investing service Betterment, headquartered next door, to venture capitalist Fred Wilson to "the Foursquare guys," according to Fielding.

Andy Ambrose, the other cofounder of Texas-based LiveOak, practiced his business pitch on stage. "We feel like we were a year ahead when we were two months into this," Ambrose told Business Insider. "So there's relationships that come to the table, introductions are made to prospective clients, to prospective investors, to mentors who are all seasoned entrepreneurs."

Other participants in the accelerator program watched Ambrose rehearse his pitch in the Rise event space and provide feedback. They would all pitch their businesses in the coming weeks to investors during the demo day.

Barclays are ahead of the curve," said Fielding of Techstars. How she knows it: "All the recruiters call me for jobs at other banks that are just starting to think about this.