SixThirty, a financial services tech accelerator program launched by Jim McKelvey and headquartered in St. Louis, has announced their first class consisting of four startup FinTech companies.

Each company will receive $100,000 investments, as well as hands-on training, mentoring and networking opportunities with local powerhouse financial services companies like Edward Jones, Stifel Financial, Scottrade, Wells Fargo Advisors and many more. The next class will occur in the spring for a total of eight companies per year being brought into the program.

The companies will be housed in the T-REx startup co-working space in Downtown St. Louis. While SixThirty places no demands on the companies to remain in the city of St. Louis, Jim McKelvey says “they’d be stupid to leave.” Not only is SixThirty a remarkable program, it’s in an ideal location with a large number of major financial institutions.

“This is the best program in the world,” McKelvey said. “If you count access, money and curriculum, nobody’s going to beat this. We looked around the U.S. and around the world and did not see anything that competes. But that’s how you want it. There is essentially a competition among cities for the best companies, so you want the best offering. Let’s say another city wants to copy this. The first thing they’d need to do is move $14 billion dollars worth of publicly traded companies to their home town.”

The launch party is today at Bank of America’s office in Downtown St. Louis at 4pm. The program officially starts on Monday. The first class of SixThirty’s winning Fin Techs are:

Hedgeable, Matthew Kane and Michael Kane
Hedgeable is a next generation Vanguard, providing low-cost, risk managed investment products in response to the Financial Crisis.

MiiCard, James Varga
Through a patented process, miiCard leverages access to online financial accounts to verify an individual’s identity beyond a photo ID through a simple process that occurs completely online in five to ten minutes.

Upside, Tom Kimberly
Upside uses innovative financial science and beautiful user interface to provide goal-based investment management to mass affluent young professionals.

XYverify, Elliot Klein
XYverify enables consumers, merchants and financial institutions to reduce costs and prevent fraud via a mobile authentication platform.