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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Financial empowerment platform Fruition announced a partnership with transaction enrichment and insights and analytics company Bud Financial.
The collaboration will enable Fruition to provide its members with enriched transaction data to help them budget better and make more insightful financial decisions.
Bud Financial made its most recent Finovate appearance at FinovateFall 2024 in New York. The company is headquartered in London.
Financial empowerment platform Fruition has teamed up with transaction enrichment and insights and analytics company Bud Financial to bring enhanced, personalized financial experiences to customers.
“This collaboration brings Fruition’s members control over their financial futures by leveraging AI-driven insights, relevant education and expert guidance, all underpinned by Bud’s market-leading financial models,” Bud CEO and Co-Founder Edward Maslaveckas said. “Fruition’s commitment to providing smarter financial guidance makes them the perfect first client of our exciting Intelligent Search capability. We can’t wait to see how Intelligent Search helps Fruition’s members to take control of their financial data and smash their financial goals.”
Fruition will leverage a pair of Bud Financial solutions—Enrich and Engage—to provide its members with enriched transaction data and intelligent, personalized financial insights to support more informed financial decision-making. Enrich is Bud’s transaction enrichment platform that enables companies to convert difficult-to-understand customer transactional data into easier-to-recognize transactions with accurate categorization and identifiable merchant names.
Engage offers “next generation” personal financial management that puts transaction data to work in personalizing the digital banking experience. The solution features an AI-powered transaction search feature—Intelligent Search—that enables customers to interact with their bank using natural language. The feature is built on AI-powered transaction intelligence and helps reduce contact center queries about unclear or disputed transactions.
Fruition’s Folio offering will use enriched transaction data from Bud to help members secure a comprehensive overview of their finances in a single interface—making budgeting easier. The integration will also enable Folio to deliver customized, targeted notifications to members based on their transaction data. Fruition members will be able to share their data in mentoring sessions which will enable mentors to personalize financial education and ensure that the guidance is both actionable and appropriate for the member’s financial circumstances.
“On average, we’re seeing that 42.6% of all transactions are being enriched more accurately with Bud than with our previous enrichment provider,” Fruition VP of Engineering Elliott Beaty said. “Our partnership with Bud helps us deliver on our promise of financial understanding and actionable insights. Better data for our members means more accurate understanding of their financial situation.”
A personal finance management platform that uses financial data to provide actionable insights, educational resources, and mentorships for consumers and employees, Fruition rebranded from Mentoro in October 2024. Last month, the company launched its Debt Paydown tool, which lies within Folio. The solution allows members to include all of their debts in a personalized debt repayment plan, visualize future repayment strategies, and quantify the interest potentially saved via the paydown plan.
Headquartered in London and founded in 2015, Bud Financial made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023 and returned to the Finovate stage again last fall. At the conference, the company demoed its Drive solution which democratizes access to enriched data and actionable insights via AI-powered analysis and a Gen AI-based interface.
A holiday-shortened week begins with Independence Day in the US celebrated on Friday. Be sure to check with Finovate’s Fintech Rundown for the latest fintech news as the second half of 2025 gets underway in earnest!
Digital banking
Greece-based core banking vendor Natechraises $33 million in Series B funding.
This week’s edition of Finovate Global looks at recent fintech headlines from Nigeria and South Africa.
BAS Group acquired a majority stake in Nigeria’s Zuvy
Nigeria-based diversified financial services group BAS Group announced this week that it has acquired a minority stake in Zuvy, a local fintech that specializes in invoice financing. The move gives BAS Group more than 50% of the company, a stake that analysts estimate could be valued between $1.5 million and $3 million. The transaction will also place BAS Group Chief Operating Officer, Adnan Kayode, at the helm of Zuvy—although the firm will continue to operate independently.
“This acquisition of Zuvy goes beyond simply expanding our investment portfolio—it represents a strategic alignment with our core mission of developing a comprehensive, technology-enabled financial ecosystem for Africa,” BAS Group Founder and CEO Abdulateef Hussein said.
Co-founded in 2023 by Angel Onuoha and Ahmed Shehu, Zuvy provides invoice financing to businesses in the FMCG (“fast-moving consumer goods”) and healthcare sectors, as well as to companies in supply chain industries. Zuvy reports financing invoices worth more than ₦1 billion ($650,000) for 1,500 small businesses over the past two years. As part of the deal, Onuoha and Shehu will retain minority stakes in the company, but will no longer have operational roles. The two founders have moved on to focus on their new healthcare venture, Avelis Health.
“We take great pride in Zuvy’s accomplishments and the positive impact we’ve created for thousands of Nigerian enterprises,” Onuoha said. “BAS Group represents the perfect partner to advance Zuvy’s growth trajectory while we focus our efforts on addressing critical healthcare challenges in the American market.”
BAS Group’s deal for Zuvy comes after the firm launched a lending business that provides collateralized loans to small and medium-sized businesses. The majority stake in Zuvy will enable BAS Group to add uncollateralized lending to its offering.
South African fintech Lesaka acquired Bank Zero
Lesaka Technologies reported that its subsidiary, Lesaka Technologies Proprietary Ltd, has agreed to acquire Bank Zero Mutual Bank (Bank Zero). Subject to customary closing conditions, the acquisition will be settled via a combination of new share issuance and up to ZAR 91 million ($5.1 million) in cash. The total value of the transaction is estimated to be $61 million.
“The acquisition of Bank Zero is a transformative event in Lesaka’s journey, enabling us to better serve our consumers, merchants, and enterprise clients by embedding a trusted, well-engineered neobank capability into our fintech platform,” Lesaka Chairman Ali Mazanderani said. “I am delighted to welcome the Bank Zero team to Lesaka as partners.”
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa, Bank Zero is a modern “app-only” bank for both individuals and businesses. As of April 2025, the institution had a deposit base of more than ZAR 400 million ($22.4 million), and more than 40,000 funded accounts across South Africa. Co-launched by Michael Jordaan (Chairman) and Yatin Narsai (CEO), Bank Zero boasts 45% black- and 20% female-ownership. Post-acquisition, Jordaan will join the Lesaka Board of Directors while Narsai continues to serve as CEO.
“Bank Zero was built from the ground up to deliver a secure, digital-first banking experience that puts control back in the hands of customers,” Narsai said. “Our focus has always been on using technology to remove friction, lower costs, and challenge legacy banking norms. Joining forces with Lesaka allows us to accelerate that mission at scale—reaching more customers, faster—while staying true to the principles that define who we are.”
TransUnion invests, partners with Omnisient
Speaking of minority investments, TransUnion announced that it has secured a minority investment in—and a strategic partnership with—South Africa-based fintech Omnisient. Omnisient offers a data collaboration and advanced analytics platform that enables companies to securely access high-value consumer data ecosystems and integrate alternative data sets to support smart decision-making.
The strategic partnership will enhance TransUnion’s ability to bring more of the estimated 500 million un- and underbanked Africans into the formal financial system. By leveraging alternative data at scale, TransUnion’s partnership with Omnisient will enable more new-to-credit and credit-underserved consumers to begin building a credit profile and start the journey toward greater, long-term financial empowerment and opportunity.
“Traditional data models often fail to reflect the lived realities of African consumers, leaving millions without access to credit and the opportunities it enables,” TransUnion Africa Regional President/CEO Lee Naik said. “Financial inclusion is central to unlocking economic growth across the continent. That’s why we’re committed to leading with bold, Africa-born solutions designed to see the unseen and serve the credit-invisible by integrating alternative datasets alongside traditional credit data in ways that reflect uniquely African contexts and realities.”
Along with the investment (amount undisclosed) and strategic partnership, a member of TransUnion will join Omnisient’s board of directors.
TransUnion’s investment and strategic partnership comes at a time when demand is rising worldwide for access to alternative data and solutions that leverage this data while ensuring privacy, enhancing trust, and creating value for financial institutions. Omnisient’s technology uses tokenized keys to represent personal information in the data set, avoiding the transfer of raw data and providing privacy throughout the entire process. The company’s many-to-many data connectivity between banks and other financial services providers and third-parties helps promote innovation in the field of data collaboration.
“Our privacy-preserving data collaboration platform brings financial services and consumer brands together, allowing them to discover, validate, and commercialize new alternative sources of consumer behavioral and transactional data without having to exchange sensitive personal information,” Omnisient Co-Founder and Group CEO Jon Jacobson said.
Founded in 2019 in Cape Town, South Africa, Omnisient is currently headquartered in the UK. TransUnion most recently demoed its technology at FinovateSpring 2024, showing how its Enhanced BreachIQ solution provides modern, gamified consumer identity protection.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
UnaFinancial and JSCB Microcreditbank partnered to launch a digital credit service in Uzbekistan.
SEBI-registered Online Bond Platform Provider (OBPP) IndiaBonds.com raised $3.77 million in funding.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Open payments platform Belvo and digital bank Ualá teamed up to launch new digital credit-scoring model leveraging a large-scale integration of employment data.
This week’s Streamly Snapshot features an interview with Rob Thacher, Founder and CEO of BankShift, on the way embedded banking helps community banks, credit unions, and other financial institutions offer more services to their customers and initiate new revenue streams.
In this interview, recorded at FinovateSpring 2025 in San Diego, Thacher talks about the latest trends in the embedded banking space, current challenges and barriers faced by community banks and credit unions, and how technologies are emerging to help these institutions better serve their customers and members while competing effectively against their larger rivals.
The new demographic, we call them the Gen Zers, 28 years old and below, they are in a different space from where financial institutions are. Traditionally, with financial institution apps, you have to go there and do everything. But unfortunately, these large financial institutions and these neobanks are really impeding those Gen Zers from wanting to participate with the financial institution any more. Why? Because they don’t have a seamless interface; it’s not embedded where they are already at … They are not in the financial institutions that are $5 billion and below; they’re not looking for those apps.
The metrics show that you lose those folks when they come along with their family member to become a part of a credit union or community bank. And that’s how you (get) these users. And so, what’s happening? They’re losing them and they’re not coming back.
Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Portland, Oregon, BankShift offers an embedded banking loyalty platform that helps financial institutions partner with trusted brands in order to unlock new sources of revenue and enhance engagement with customers. BankShift provides banking and loyalty services via both direct embeds into brand-owned apps, portals, and digital ecosystems, as well as by a standalone option hosted by the financial institution and co-branded with the partner. BankShift made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2024 in New York and returned to the Finovate stage the following year for FinovateSpring 2025 in San Diego.
Rob Thacher is Founder and CEO of BankShift. He is a veteran technology executive with 25 years of experience, including co-developing CreditWise and leading innovative fintech initiatives. Thacher thrives on building large-scale products and platforms that solve real consumer challenges through cutting-edge technology.
Banking technology company Thought Machine has teamed up with technology services provider DXC Technology.
The two companies are offering a joint solution that combines DXC Technology’s industry expertise with Thought Machine’s core banking platform, Vault Core, and payments processing platform, Vault Payments.
London-based Thought Machine made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2018.
A newly available joint solution from banking technology company Thought Machine and technology services provider DXC Technology will help small and medium-sized banks initiate and complete their digital transformations faster. The solution combines DXC Technology’s industry expertise and full-service management with Thought Machine’s core banking technology platform, Vault Core, and its payments processing platform, Vault Payments.
“This collaboration underscores our dedication to leveraging next-generation technology to enable banks to modernize faster and deliver exceptional financial products,” Thought Machine Global Head of Partnerships Randy McFarlane said. “With modern core systems, banks are empowered to develop more innovative, customer-centric services with speed and ease. We are excited to work with DXC to accelerate banking transformation and build the future of financial services globally.”
Vault Core is Thought Machine’s cloud-native core banking platform. As a cloud-agnostic solution, Vault Core gives banks the flexibility they need to select their preferred hosting option and provider. Institutions can leverage the technology to replicate their current back book of products, as well as create new financial products such as savings accounts, credit cards, loans, and mortgages. Vault Payments is the firm’s cloud-native payments processing platform and enables banks to work with all payment types regardless of method, scheme, or region. The technology embeds new and existing financial products into the payments platform, and gives users control over the entire payment life cycle.
The joint solution is designed to help smaller and midsized banks and financial institutions compete with their larger, global rivals who are able to build innovative, proprietary platforms in-house. Given the obstacles of complex vendor ecosystems and legacy infrastructures, the new offering from Thought Machine and DXC provides smaller and midsized bank with a one-stop managed service offering the technology, tools, and human talent to help them modernize legacy core banking systems, get new digital products to market faster, and ensure operational efficiency and compliance.
“With more than 45 years of experience in banking operations, DXC is deeply committed to delivering best-in-class digital solutions to the world’s leading financial institutions,” DXC Technology President, Global Infrastructure Services, Chris Drumgoole said. “Our joint solution with Thought Machine provides a comprehensive, future-ready path to modernization—enabling banks to accelerate innovation, improve operational efficiency, and reduce risk.”
Virginia-based DXC Technology partners with companies around the world to help them modernize IT systems, optimize data architectures, and ensure both security and scalability across public, private, and hybrid clouds. With more than 200 technology partners, DXC was created in 2017 in the wake of the merger between Computer Sciences Corporation and Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Enterprise Services business.
Headquartered in London, UK, Thought Machine made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2018. In the years since then, the company has grown into a leading core banking and payments technology provider for banks and financial institutions around the world, including Intesa Sanpaolo, Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered, Lunar, Atom bank, and more.
Credit risk analytics company Carrington Labs has teamed up with decision platform Taktile to help lenders optimize their credit risk strategies.
Lenders will be able to access Carrington Labs’ custom models directly from Taktile’s platform, enabling them to gain a better, more complete financial picture of loan applicants.
Carrington Labs made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateFall 2024 in New York. The company is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
Credit risk analytics company Carrington Labsannounced a partnership with decision platform Taktile to help lenders optimize their credit risk strategies for both consumer and SMB loans. Carrington Labs offers custom models that analyze a wide variety of data types—including transaction data, credit bureau data, and behavioral insights—to give lenders a more comprehensive understanding of a would-be borrower’s financial status. This leads to more accurate credit risk scoring, more approvals, and fewer defaults.
“Every lender is looking to modernize their approach to decisioning, offer management, and monitoring. Taktile’s low-code decision platform enables our clients to deploy Carrington Labs models and tools quickly, while also giving lenders much better visibility and control over their process,” Carrington Labs CEO Jamie Twiss said.
Courtesy of the partnership, lenders will be able to access Carrington Labs’ models directly from Taktile’s platform. Firms will be able to combine the models with their own business rules to boost approval accuracy and quantify the probability of default. The models will also help them improve underwriting accuracy and launch faster without requiring major system overhauls or technical implementations. Via a single interface, lenders will have end-to-end control over the optimization of their credit risk strategy.
“I’ve seen how tough it can be for lenders to not only build strong risk models but also connect them to flexible, automated decision workflows,” Taktile CEO and Co-Founder Maik Taro Wehmeyer said. “That’s why I’m excited about our partnership with Carrington Labs. Lenders can now directly integrate their sophisticated credit risk models into the workflows they build on Taktile, making it easier to develop inclusive, data-driven underwriting strategies and continuously improve them at scale.”
Taktile’s technology helps lenders and other financial services companies better manage risk: from onboarding and underwriting to fraud detection, compliance, and collections. The company empowers risk teams to build, test, and update their risk strategies without requiring engineering talent. Companies working with Taktile have reported a 67% reduction in logic deployment time and a 95% reduction in decision time. Headquartered in New York, with offices in Berlin, Germany, and London, Taktile was founded in 2020.
Sydney, Australia-based Carrington Labs made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2024 in New York. At the conference, the company demonstrated its AI-powered, alternative credit risk scoring and loan limit recommendation technology. Carrington Labs leverages non-traditional data, credit expertise, and commercial acumen to provide lenders with a more complete picture of a loan applicant’s creditworthiness. This enables lenders to be more inclusive while at the same time boosting revenues, lowering default rates, and improving margins.
Carrington Labs’ partnership announcement comes just a month after the company reported that it was working with decisioning platform Oscilar to help shorten integration times for lenders and improve credit risk workflows for banks, credit unions, and other financial services providers.
Risk intelligence platform Supply Wisdom has secured $14 million in Series B funding in a round led by Jurassic Capital.
Supply Wisdom also announced that Chief Operating Officer Jenna Wells has been appointed as the company’s new CEO.
Supply Wisdom made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022 in New York. We interviewed Jenna Wells in March of this year on the subject of third-party risk in financial services.
“I’m honored to step into this new role during such a pivotal time for our company and the global business community as there is clearly an increased need for strong risk management,” Wells said in a statement announcing both the investment and her new status as Supply Wisdom CEO.
“As both a risk practitioner and leader at Supply Wisdom, I’ve seen firsthand how our AI-powered platform transforms how organizations manage risk across their entire supply chain ecosystem. I’m excited to support Supply Wisdom in continuing to provide comprehensive, predictive risk intelligence that enables businesses to act proactively and confidently in an increasingly complex risk landscape.”
Supply Wisdom offers a full-stack SaaS platform, powered by AI, that helps companies in financial services, insurance, technology and other industries turn open source data into risk intelligence on key third-party relationships. The company’s technology provides continuous monitoring, comprehensive intelligence reports, and alerts that cover all risk domains—financial, cyber, operational, ESG, compliance, Nth party, location—in real-time. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York, Supply Wisdom includes companies in the Fortune 100 and Global 2000 among its clients.
The Series B round was led by Jurassic Capital, which joins existing investors Fulcrum Equity Partners and Conductor Capital. Jurassic Capital General Partner Kevin Mosley praised Supply Wisdom as a “high-growth, capital-efficient and innovative company with a strong history of delivering exceptional value for third party risk management departments at leading global firms.” Mosley also expressed excitement at the appointment of Wells as CEO, noting that her “firsthand experience as a customer will continue to pay dividends across the organization.”
Tom Thimot, who led the company as CEO since 2023, will continue to serve the firm in a new role as Advisor to the CEO. In this capacity, Thimot will provide strategic advice to both Wells and Supply Wisdom’s leadership team.
Supply Wisdom’s funding and C-suite leadership news comes in the wake of the company earning a spot in the Inc. Regionals: Northeast list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US Northeast. An extension of the Inc. 5000 roster, the Inc. Regionals: Northeast listing includes firms in Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey.
There are still a few days left but, so far, in the second quarter of 2025, 17 Finovate alums have raised more than $1.2 billion in new funding. The sum is several times larger than last year’s Q2 investment haul, as we note below, and also featured twice as many alums securing fresh capital.
Previous quarterly comparisons
Q2 2024: More than $292 million raised by eight alums
Q2 2023: More than $209 million raised by ten alums
Q2 2022: More than $984 million raised by eight alums
Q2 2021: More than $2.8 billion raised by 14 alums
In fact, Finovate alums in the second quarter of this year raised more than they have in any Q2 since 2021. This quarter also featured three funding rounds in which the amount of the investment was undisclosed. This means that the true tally for alum funding for Q2 exceeds the $1.2 billion headline number—and perhaps by a significant margin.
Top equity investments
Plaid: $575 million
Scalable Capital: $176 million
Thunes: $150 million
Stash: $146 million
Zopa: $106 million
The $575 million raised by Plaid is far and away the biggest equity investment for Finovate alums in Q2 of 2025. The funding round was led by Franklin Templeton, a new investor to the company, and featured participation from existing investors NEA and Ribbit Capital. The investment was a venture round, in which Plaid sold new shares to address a variety of issues, including providing liquidity to members of the Plaid team, as explained by company CEO and Co-Founder Zach Perret.
Q2 also featured a handful of other significant investments of more than $100 million. Interestingly, the four companies to receive funding in this range in recent months come from either the world of payments (Thunes) or investing (Scalable Capital, Stash, and Zopa). As fintech funding begins to recover, it will be worthwhile to watch and see if these two subsectors of our industry play a major role in leading fintech funding back toward pre-pandemic levels.
Here is our detailed alum funding report for Q2 2025.
April: More than $795 million raised by five alums
If you are a Finovate alum that raised money in the second quarter of 2025 and do not see your company listed, please drop us a note at [email protected]. We would love to share the good news! Funding received prior to becoming an alum not included.
Payments company Icon Solutions has secured a new equity investment in a round led by UBS. Citi and NatWest, existing Icon Solutions investors, also participated.
The investment will help Icon Solutions bring its Icon Payments Framework (IPF) to more banks to enable them to develop and deploy new payment processing solutions faster.
Headquartered in the UK, Icon Solutions made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2017.
UK-based paytech Icon Solutionsannounced a new equity investment led by Swiss bank UBS. Citi and NatWest, current Icon Solutions investors, also contributed funding. The amount of the total investment was not disclosed.
“This investment round is further endorsement of our founding belief that banks should be empowered to lead their own payments transformation,” Icon Solutions Co-Founder and Director Tom Kelleher said. “With IPF now internationally proven and increasingly adopted by major financial institutions, we look forward to continuing our close partnerships with Citi, NatWest, and UBS to build on this global momentum and deliver truly innovative and ground-breaking payments solutions.”
Both Citi and NatWest have deployed Icon Solutions’ Icon Payments Framework (IPF) to enhance their respective payments programs. IPF offers banks a payments development framework that enables them to build, test, and deploy payment processing solutions faster, allowing them to accelerate the transformation of their own payments infrastructure.
“This investment reinforces our partnership with Icon and confirms our commitment to deliver faster to market, future-ready payment solutions for our clients,” UBS Head of Group Operations and Technology Office for Personal & Corporate Banking and GWM Switzerland & International Pieter Brouwer said. “The collaboration helps us drive innovation at scale and enhances our capabilities for seamless instant payments and advanced transaction processing.”
Founded in 2009, Icon Solutions demoed its technology at FinovateEurope 2017 in London. The company’s core solution—the Icon Payments Framework—is a payment development framework relied upon by tier 1 banks around the world including Citi, NatWest, BNP Paribas, and UBS. Built to integrate seamlessly with multiple payment schemes, IPF helps financial institutions accelerate transformation of their payment infrastructure, while maintaining control of both timeline and costs. Cloud and ISO 20022-native, IPF reduces cost of ownership by up to 50%, accelerates speed to market by up to 4x, and enables real-time payments adoption in six months.
This spring, Icon Solutions introduced new Director of People Hannah McKechnie. Formerly Head of HR for the company, McKechnie, in her new role, will oversee Icon’s ‘People and Purpose’ programs, including support for Icon’s partnerships with the Social Mobility Foundation and with purpose-led technology training and services company Digital Futures.
The new offering enables companies to analyze and review the performance of their AI agents as well as measure the adoption rates of the technology.
Pendo made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2022. The company is headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina.
How effective are your AI agents really? A new offering from software experience management platform Pendo is designed to answer that question.
Pendo Agent Analytics, introduced today, enables companies to measure the performance of their AI agents and to measure the adoption of their agentic AI technology as readily as they do for their SaaS applications.
“The shift to intelligent software is happening faster than we could ever imagine, and enterprises are faced with improving their SaaS applications, while accelerating agent and AI innovation,” Pendo CEO and Co-Founder Todd Olson said. “I’m proud that we are supporting customers wherever they are on their transformation journey.”
The new offering is designed to provide companies with systems to help them better understand and optimize the way AI agents have become a part of org charts, workflows, and product roadmaps. From IT teams that have compliance and productivity concerns, to R&D teams focused on business outcomes, achieving greater transparency in AI agent operations is a critical step in the road to broader and more effective adoption of the technology.
To this end, Pendo Agent Analytics provides metrics and reports that track both homegrown and third-party agent operations along with usage of traditional software. The technology also provides insight into how users act before and after they interact with an agent, analyzes conversations with agents to identify prompt trends, and maps agent usage to task completion to help measure ROI.
Headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, Pendo made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2022. At the conference, the company demonstrated how its platform helps firms analyze, assess, and act to enhance software investments across online, mobile, SaaS, AI, and agentic applications. With more than 14,000 companies in 163 countries around the world using Pendo’s technology, the company has collected a total of 23 trillion events, providing a wealth of insights for training conversational AI and agentic software systems.
Pendo’s new product offering comes as the company announced a raft of platform enhancements designed to meet the needs of the “agentic era” of AI. These included AI agent deployment tools, optimized user acquisition tools, enhanced support analysis and AI-powered bug reporting, and improved data cleanliness and insights integration.
“Nearly every week our teams are showing me new prototypes and ideas for the future of Pendo. Our summer release includes so much of that work, new features and products that will improve your SaaS foundation and set you up with a strong AI foundation,” Olson said.
Financial data network Plaid has been in the fintech headlines of late for its new partnership with data and technology company Experian, and for the launch of its Plaid Protect fraud prevention solution.
“Today we’re launching Plaid Protect: a real-time fraud intelligence system that helps detect and prevent fraud from the moment a user first interacts with your app or service,” Plaid Head of Fraud Alain Meier wrote on the company blog. “By drawing on fraud signals across a billion devices in the Plaid network, Protect goes beyond what any single company can see—surfacing fraud patterns that exist between linked bank accounts, connections to financial apps and services, and more.”
Plaid Protect is built on an adaptive, machine learning-powered risk engine that provides real-time risk scores and attributes that evolve as the user context changes—from initial contact during onboarding through account linking to ongoing user activity. Calling their fraud model Trust Index (Ti), Plaid’s first production model can access 10,000 high-signal attributes including cross-app patterns, device history, bank account risk signals, and more. The Trust Index leverages network intelligence, bank account risk, consortium feedback, and advanced identity intelligence, keying in on fraud signals that are difficult for criminals to manipulate or fake. Plaid reported that one of the solution’s early adopters found in testing that enhancing verification for just 5% of its users would have intercepted nearly 40% of first-party fraud.
Currently available in beta, Plaid Protect provides an intuitive dashboard that uses semantic search powered by natural language. This means that users can ask questions about the data in plain English (i.e., “all users who opened new accounts in the last 30 days”) instead of needing to use SQL or custom queries.
“With this new lens on fraud, companies can reduce fraud losses, dramatically improve conversion, and make smarter decisions from the very first user interaction and every step thereafter,” Meier wrote.
Plaid’s new product announcement comes days after the company reported that it had partnered with fellow Finovate alum, Experian. The two firms have entered into a strategic collaboration designed to help businesses access cashflow solutions and expand financial inclusion.
“This is just the beginning of what we believe will be a very powerful relationship with Plaid,” Group President Financial Services of Experian North America Scott Brown said. “Together, we’re helping to accelerate the adoption of cashflow insights to drive faster decisions, stronger portfolios, and new financial opportunities for consumers. We’re achieving this while delivering an experience that is transparent and provides consumers with control every step of the way.”
Courtesy of the collaboration, financial institutions can access Plaid’s secure connectivity capabilities—used by 50% of all US bank account holders—and Experian’s expertise in advanced credit analytics and decisioning from a single solution. Once a borrower agrees to share cashflow data from their bank account as part of the loan application process, Plaid’s consumer reporting agency generates a Consumer Report on their behalf. The report is delivered securely to Experian which analyzes the applicant’s data, produces a predictive Cashflow Score or set of Cashflow Attributes, and delivers it to the lender in near real time.
The report features up to two years of historical data and cashflow information from 12,000+ financial institutions. Experian reports that its Cashflow Score provides an increase of as much as 25% in predictive performance compared to scores that rely on more conventional credit data. The new offering will empower banks, credit unions, and consumer lenders to accelerate decision-making, make more accurate risk assessments, and improve borrower outcomes.
“Our work with Experian is about removing long-standing barriers, making it easier for lenders to access consumer-permissioned data and make better decisions,” Plaid Chief Operating Officer Eric Sager said. “Together, we’re building a more inclusive, intelligent, and competitive financial system.”
Founded in 2013 by Zach Perret and William Hockey and headquartered in San Francisco, Plaid introduced itself to Finovate audiences at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2014. In the years since, the company has grown into a major financial data network covering more than 12,000 financial institutions in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe. With partners including Venmo and fellow Finovate alums SoFi and Betterment, Plaid works with fintechs, Fortune 500 companies, and leading banks to enable their customers to connect their financial accounts to the apps and services they count on every day.
Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM) solutions provider SmartStream is entering the insurance business with the latest expansion of its reconciliation and data management platform, SmartStream Air.
SmartStream Air leverages AI and machine learning to automate the process of reconciling and managing large volumes of data.
Founded in 2000 and headquartered in London, SmartStream made its FinovateEurope debut in 2022.
London-based financial Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM) solutions provider SmartStream is bringing its technology to the insurance sector. The company announced an expansion of its AI-powered reconciliation and data management platform, SmartStream Air, that will help insurers deal with rising transaction volumes, data quality challenges, and an increasingly complex regulatory environment.
For companies that have front office systems that need to report to back office systems or are transitioning from legacy infrastructures to new technologies, SmartStream checks and assures data integrity throughout the process. SmartStream Air enables institutions to reconcile and manage large volumes of data, leveraging AI and machine learning to automate this process.
In the insurance business, this means identifying and resolving discrepancies in data such as payments, reimbursements, claims, policyholder transactions, or investment operations. SmartStream Air can serve numerous insurance-specific use cases including premium collection and processing, commission payments, claims management, financial reporting, reinsurance settlements, policyholder refunds, investment account reconciliation, data validation, risk and reserve management, expense tracking, and fraud detection.
SmartStream’s announcement comes as regulations like IFRS 17 and DORA create new challenges for insurance companies when it comes to accounting and operational resilience, respectively. These challenges—and others—have exposed both operational inefficiencies and compliance risks. And while analysts such as Celent’s Karlyn Carnahan expect this to be a “transformative year in insurance,” there is still a sense that “getting arms around AI from a compliance and use case perspective is difficult.” To this, SmartStream’s AI-powered solution serves as opportunity, in Carnahan’s words, to deploy “proven technologies from other industries” that will help insurers grow effectively and efficiently.
SmartStream Global Head of Reconciliations Robin Hasson highlighted this point. “Our heritage and experience in working with the world’s top 100 banks gives us a strong foundation to support the insurance sector as firms identify use cases for increased automation.” Hasson added, “We’re already partnering with leading insurers to implement AI-powered solutions that enable data-driven agility. In today’s environment, insurers must respond swiftly to market shifts and customer expectations, or risk falling behind due to inefficiencies and increased exposure.”
Founded in 2000, SmartStream made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2022. At the conference, the company demonstrated how SmartStream Air provides fast AI and machine learning data quality analysis without requiring training or an IT skillset. The company has more than 2,000 customers and analyzes more than one billion SaaS transactions monthly.
This spring, SmartStream launched its RegRegistry Service as part of its Reference Data Services (RDS) business. The company’s RegRegistry Service identifies counterparty and trading venues as required by regulatory authorities such as ESMA, FCA, GLEIF, CFTC, and ISO MIC. Also this year, SmartStream announced a partnership with fellow Finovate alum Finastra to extend collateral management workflows across treasury and capital markets.
