When corporate venture capital investments hit their mark, they have a direct strategic impact on the parent’s business. Santander InnoVentures, the London-based strategic investing unit of Spain’s Banco Santander, showed how it’s done after participating in a $135 million Series E financing for Atlanta-based Kabbage in November 2015. Santander UK began working with the online lender in January to create an automated underwriting platform that delivers almost immediate decisions on small- and medium-size-business loan applications. “If you’re a small business in the U.K., it takes up to four weeks to get an answer from a bank,” says InnoVentures managing partner Mariano Belinky. “We’ve taken that to minutes. In ten minutes you have an answer.” Also in the U.K., Santander in May released a pilot app for international payments, using the blockchain technology of San Francisco–based Ripple, in which InnoVentures made a $4 million Series A investment in October 2015. “We’re making good progress with our portfolio companies in terms of adding value to them and them adding value to Santander and our clients,” says Belinky, 41, a former McKinsey & Co. principal who took charge of the venture fund five months after it was launched in July 2014 with $100 million. Some 70 percent of that original amount has been placed in 12 portfolio companies. In July of this year, Banco Santander put an additional $100 million into InnoVentures, in part to focus more on Latin America — exploring applications for financial inclusion, such as microlending and micropayments — and to make “a big push toward artificial intelligence,” says Belinky, who completed five years of doctoral studies in AI at Barcelona’s Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 2009. In March, InnoVentures took part in a $5 million Series A round for London-based Elliptic, which applies machine learning in blockchain monitoring and compliance, and in June it bought an undisclosed stake in Socure, a New York company that uses pattern recognition in verifying digital identities. The latter is an example of what Belinky calls a “by-the-way business model. I like when an entrepreneur comes to me and says, ‘We’ve solved X and, by the way, we are using AI.’”
 1. Jonathan Korngold General Atlantic  2. Matthew Harris Bain Capital Ventures  3. Jane Gladstone Evercore Partners  4. James Robinson III & James Robinson IV RRE Ventures  5. Steven McLaughlin Financial Technology Partners  6. Amy Nauiokas & Sean Park Anthemis Group |
 7. Richard Garman & Brad Bernstein FTV Capital  8. Gerard von Dohlen Broadhaven Capital Partners  9. Darren Cohen Goldman Sachs Group  10. Hans Morris Nyca Partners  11. Meyer (Micky) Malka Ribbit Capital  12. Maria Gotsch Partnership Fund for New York City |
 13. Barry Silbert Digital Currency Group  14. Jay Reinemann Propel Venture Partners  15. Mariano Belinky Santander InnoVentures  16. Justin Brownhill & Neil DeSena SenaHill Partners  17. François Robinet AXA Strategic Ventures  18. Vanessa Colella Citi Ventures |
 19. Michael Schlein Accion International  20. Kenneth Marlin Marlin & Associates  21. Rumi Morales CME Ventures  22. Alastair (Alex) Rampell Andreessen Horowitz  23. Steve Gibson Euclid Opportunities  24. Fabian Vandenreydt SWIFT |
 25. Vladislav Solodkiy Life.SREDA  26. Gardiner Garrard III TTV Capital  27. Nektarios Liolios Startupbootcamp Fintech  28. Lawrence Wintermeyer Innovate Finance  29. Bina Kalola Bank of America Merrill Lynch  30. Hyder Jaffrey Fintech Innovation |
 31. Calvin Choi AMTD Group  32. Janos Barberis FinTech Hong Kong  33. Jalak Jobanputra Future Perfect Ventures  34. Sopnendu Mohanty Monetary Authority of Singapore  35. Oskar Mielczarek de la Miel Rakuten FinTech Fund |