David Burt, the Premier, met in New York this week with representatives of banks that may be interested in providing services to Bermuda’s budding fintech sector.

The island’s banks have shied away from fintech start-ups, prompting the Government to enact legislation to offer a new type of banking licence to institutions that will fill the gap.

In an interview with Nasdaq, Mr Burt said: “One of the things that we’re doing in New York is to meet with a number of banks that we’re looking to entice into the Bermuda market, who might have an appetite for this type of assets.”

He said several significant fintech players had already started up on the island.

“We’ve seen over 30 companies that have already started up and more companies are in the process of starting up their operations in Bermuda and so we’re looking forward to what the future holds.”

He also said distributed ledger, or blockchain, technologies could help businesses become more efficient and cited the planned blockchain-based national e-ID system as an example.

“One of the things we’re rolling out next year is a national identity system and we will extend that system to persons who want to transact business from Bermuda to make sure that we know who’s transacting the business and to reduce the burdens of compliance where you have to fill out multiple forms and submit multiple copies of documents to multiple different people,” Mr Burt said.

“We want to streamline that process and we believe it will be a competitive advantage for Bermuda when that project is rolled out.”

Mr Burt said that one challenge of trying to develop a fintech industry in Bermuda was the expectation for rapid results.

“Our people want to see activity very quickly, but this is a very nascent industry and we’re building it from the ground up so it’s going to take time,” Mr Burt said.

He also talked about changes to immigration rules to allow start-ups to bring in five employees as long as they are also hiring and developing Bermudian staff, as well as the importance of providing the education that would equip locals to participate in the industry.