London’s L Marks acting as a catalyst for innovation in Jax

London’s L Marks acting as a catalyst for innovation in Jax (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — International corporate innovation firm L Marks has a bold vision for Jacksonville’s economic growth.

The London company debuted its partnership with the city this week, JAX Hub, intended to fuel the region’s financial technology engine and solidify the North Florida region as a rising global center for such innovation.

Jacksonville is the London company’s first venture in Florida and an expansion that CEO Daniel Saunders sees as an initial foothold for growing additional operations state-wide.

“It’s not just about making the local financial firms better by implementing innovation,” he said in an interview with the Business Journal Thursday. “It’s not just about bringing these innovators in, but it’s also about the firms and the financial companies themselves — they’re going to become more innovative in and of themselves.”

The company was born in 2014 off of the realization that large, traditional organizations need help with innovation. Today, it runs programs like JAX Hub across the globe, helping regions with economic development. It made the jump from the U.K. to the U.S. in 2018, establishing an operations center in Columbus, Ohio, and debuted a partnership with Maryland last year.

While the Jacksonville partnership is a big win for the city’s fintech goals, Saunders emphasized how L Marks is “sector agnostic.” Rather than calling the hub’s focus “financial technology,” he prefers “financial innovation” to be inclusive of companies that may be attracted by JAX Hub but don’t directly fit beneath that first umbrella term.

How it works

Though L Marks is still in the beginning stages of debuting operations in Jacksonville — Saunders mentioned he plans to hire locally and is still deciding where to physically set up shop — he said the partnership has already begun.

The company is already working with local financial firms (whose names Saunders couldn’t reveal yet) to understand each of their pain points and opportunities within the financial sector. Once that’s in place, L Marks goes out and scouts for innovators from its network across 80 countries.

“I’m able to find these different innovators at different stages, different variations of the solutions to these opportunity areas, and I can triage them down to the best ones that really directly address them I think will make that difference,” Saunders said. “We invite the best ones to come to Jacksonville.”

That’s who ultimately participates in JAX Hub, validating each company solution against the challenges clients have set.

At the end of that 10-week process, Saunders said, L Marks goes back to the corporate partner and discusses how much the solution will cost to implement with an expected return on investment from the pilot solution.

Seventy-eight percent of the companies that participate in L Marks’ labs go into commercialization and implementation, according to Saunders.

An international business corridor

Jacksonville has been attuned with the business sector of England’s capital, especially as various London-based companies have established portions of their businesses to the North Florida city in recent years — think Paysafe and Dun & Bradstreet, for example.

L Marks had a slightly different journey.

Florida signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the U.K government, a move to deepen bilateral trade and economic cooperation.

As a leader of the U.K.’s corporate innovation arm, L Marks was invited to Florida to explore ways to potentially develop an international link.

“One of the outputs of this MOU was to create a U.K.-Florida fintech corridor,” Saunders said. “It is a development of that relationship.”

Logo courtesy of PR Wire