HooYu

Fintech Merger and Acquisition Activity Starts Strong in Q1 2022

Fintech Merger and Acquisition Activity Starts Strong in Q1 2022
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alkami Technology, Azimo, BeSmartee, FIS, Fiserv, HooYu, Mergers & Acquisitions, Mitek, MoneyGram, Plaid, Revolut, SecureKey, Segmint, Sezzle, StreetShares, Taulia, Trulioo, Wealthfront

While 2021 was a record year for fintech merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, 2022 is off to a great start.

According to FT Partners, there were 1,485 M&A deals in the fintech space totaling $348.5 billion in 2021. As Square’s $29 billion takeover of Afterpay demonstrated, last year’s massive volume is partially thanks to multiple large deals.

This quarter, only eight of the 21 deals initiated disclosed financial details. Of those, the deal volume added up to almost $5 billion.

January

February

March

While experts predict that 2022 M&A activity will likely see momentum from 2021, there are two aspects to watch out for this year. First, we will not see as many SPACs as we saw last year. This may decrease the number of companies choosing to exit this year. Second, fintech valuations are deflating after experiencing huge rises over the course of the past two years. While the loss in value won’t directly impact the number of M&A deals, it will decrease the deal volume.

Photo by Martin Lopez

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Mitek Agrees to Acquire UK-Based KYC Technology Innovator HooYu

Mitek Agrees to Acquire UK-Based KYC Technology Innovator HooYu
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: HooYu, Mergers & Acquisitions, Mitek
  • Digital identity verification and fraud prevention innovator Mitek has agreed to acquire KYC technology company HooYu.
  • Mitek will pay $129 million (£98 million) for the U.K.-based company.
  • Both firms are Finovate alums. Mitek made its most recent appearance at FinovateFall 2017. HooYu demoed its technology on the Finovate stage most recently at FinovateEurope 2018.

Mitek’s agreement to acquire KYC technology specialist HooYu will help businesses verify their customer’s identity via a combination of biometric verification and real-time bureau and sanction database checks. Enabling institutions to leverage biometrics, ID document validation, geolocation, and identity confidence scoring with bureau checks and sanction list reviews will help them secure a more complete picture of their consumers.

HooYu’s ability to coordinate these features will not only enhance the identity verification process for Mitek’s customers, the technology will also enable them to optimize workflows and empower companies to deploy identity solutions across channels faster.

“Having a single platform that easily orchestrates and configures a KYC journey to manage identities and identify bad actors is becoming a prerequisite for any business transacting digitally,” HooYu CEO Keith Marsden said. “Bringing together Mitek’s lead in identity, liveness, and biometrics, with our orchestration, configuration, and journey services simplifies identity management for financial institutions.”

Mitek’s acquisition of HooYu comes in the context of a global digital identity solutions market that is expected to grow from $23.3 billion in 2021 to $49.5 billion by 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 16.2%. MarketsandMarkets, whose digital identity solutions report was cited by Mitek in this week’s acquisition announcement, credited the rise in both identity-related fraud and data breaches, as well as the need to keep pace with new regulations, for the growth in this market.

Additionally, the rise of the cryptocurrency and NFT (non-fungible token) markets – and the new regulatory regime that will accompany them – puts a further strain on the compliance requirements of businesses. For all the legitimate activity in crypto and NFTs, there is no doubt that these growing markets also represent new opportunities for illicit and criminal behavior.

“Our current geopolitical, commercial, and technological environment represents a perfect storm for bad actors,” Mitek CEO Max Carnecchia said. “Mitek is leading the fight against fraud by providing the technology that businesses need to stamp out digital money launderers and sanctioned individuals.”

In 2018, HooYu demoed its verification technology at FinovateEurope in London. The year before, Mitek demoed its Mobile Verify technology at FinovateFall in New York.

Photo by Ann H

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Virgin Money Partners with HooYu to Boost Success of Customer Onboarding Process

Virgin Money Partners with HooYu to Boost Success of Customer Onboarding Process
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, Daily news, HooYu

If making a great first impression is important, then Virgin Money’s decision to partner with customer onboarding and KYC technology specialist HooYu should make a pretty good impression of its own.

“Our smart digital tools put our customers in control and the HooYu journey helps our customers to successfully pass KYC where traditional name and address checks fail,” Virgin Money Head of Digital Customer Experience Linda Robertson said. “We chose to work with a regtech partner like HooYu because their platform enables us to easily build a range of digital onboarding journeys that are simple for our new customers to complete.”

A two-time FinovateEurope alum, HooYu combines a variety of KYC tools and technologies to ensure the success of the customer onboarding journey. This includes giving companies confidence that their customers are who they say they are. HooYu’s identity verification service leverages selfie capture, liveness detection, ID document capture and validation, facial biometrics, address proofing, and geolocation in a seamless process that reduces abandonment and increases conversions. Features such as dynamic customer prompts, white label customization, and flexible customer journeys help reduce friction and streamline the account opening experience.

Calling the emphasis on the digital customer experience an “obsession” with banks like Virgin Money,” HooYu Marketing Director David Pope said it was HooYu’s role to help these institutions “refine their new account journeys and achieve the origination goals.”

Virgin Money serves 6.5 million customers in the U.K. A full-service digital bank, the institution offers current, savings, and business accounts; credit cards and insurance; mortgages and personal loans; as well as pensions and investments. Originally launched as Virgin Direct in 1995, the company secured its banking license 2010 and rebranded as Virgin Money two years later.

“It’s our job to help banks like Virgin Money to orchestrate KYC services and easily configure and deploy with a great customer journey,” Pope said.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in London, U.K., HooYu began the year by leveraging open banking to support identity and affordability checks. The new offering, Bank Connect, enables users to establish their identity or affordability by logging into their bank account during the KYC process. With the user’s consent, Bank Connect provides identity, account overview, transaction, and card data. This information is analyzed, scored, and presented in a HooYu report. HooYu deletes all the user’s Bank Connect data once the client has reviewed the results of the report.

The technology is currently being rolled out to gaming operators, who benefit from the insights into customer affordability and use the information to make more accurate customer risk assessments. In fact, one month after announcing Bank Connect, HooYu introduced new partner MrQ, one of the U.K.’s growing number of online casinos.

Want to meet companies like FinovateEurope alum HooYu? Check out our FinovateEurope 2022 Sneak Peek series and learn more about the companies demoing their latest technologies next month at FinovateEurope in London, March 22 and 23.

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HooYu’s Investigate Platform Acquired in $5 Million Deal

HooYu’s Investigate Platform Acquired in $5 Million Deal
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, HooYu

HooYu announced on Monday that GB Group (GBG), an identification verification specialist based in the U.K., has agreed to acquire its Investigate subsidiary in an all-share deal valued at approximately $5.34 million (£4 million).

“The acquisition of HooYu Investigate by an outstanding company like GBG is a testament to the technological achievement of the HooYu development team,” HooYu CEO Keith Marsden said. “We are now very excited to focus all our energy on taking the award-winning HooYu Identity platform forward.”

HooYu launched HooYu Investigate in 2017. The platform automates the fraud investigation process, leveraging data visualization to enhance the ability of users in compliance, anti-fraud, and law enforcement to identify and prevent cybercrime. GBG will add the technology to its portfolio of anti-fraud solutions, and both Investigate client contracts and the platform’s developers will join GBG as part of the transaction. HooYu will continue to run its digital customer onboarding and KYC solution, HooYu Identify, which includes NatWest and Vanquis Bank among its customers.

GBG CEO Chris Clark praised HooYu Investigate as an “exceptional product” that will complement GBG’s current business. He also looked forward to a future in which both the GBG and HooYu development teams are working together to build new solutions. “By joining forces with HooYu Investigate, GBG will create a scalable platform for growth, providing customers with a critical service to fight ever more sophisticated financial crime and reduce organizational risk in the U.K.” Clark said.

Founded in 2015 – and making its Finovate debut two years later at FinovateEurope – HooYu offers businesses configurable tools to make the customer boarding process easy for customers while ensuring maximum KYC compliance. With just a selfie taken by a smartphone or webcam, HooYu applies both traditional verification methods such as database checks with ID document validation, digital footprint analysis, and facial biometrics to provide an identity confidence score that reveals how many of the customer’s identity attributes (name, address, birthdate, etc.) can be confirmed. This gives businesses the insight they need not just for customer onboarding and KYC, but for age verification, customer due diligence remediation, and fraud prevention, as well.

Photo by Maurício Mascaro from Pexels

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Finovate Alums Honored at PayTech Awards 2019

Finovate Alums Honored at PayTech Awards 2019
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, Award winners, Emailage, Fiserv, Green Dot, HooYu, Sberbank, Token

A handful of Finovate alums were among those earning top honors at the second annual PayTech Awards earlier this month. In categories ranging from e-commerce to real-time payments, four Finovate alums won commendations for their contributions to “excellence and innovation in the payments industry.” Another trio of alums took home “Highly Commended” runner’s up recognition.

We’ve listed those honored alums below along with the categories they competed in and a link to their most recent Finovate/FinDEVr conference demo video.

  • Token – Best Consumer Payments Initiative – video

And here are the alums that earned Highly Commended recognitions.

  • Fiserv – Real-Time Payments Solution Provider – video

The PayTech Awards consists of three categories: Judged Awards, Leadership Awards, and Ovum Payments Innovation Awards. In addition to those alums that won their categories – or earned Highly Commended honors – a few Finovate/FinDEVr alums were also short-listed ahead of the final votes. These companies – along with their category and most recent Finovate/FinDEVr video – are below:

To learn more about the awards – including a look at last year’s winners – visit the PayTech Awards homepage.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, FIS, FreeAgent, HooYu, InComm, iSignthis, Lendio, Personal Capital, Temenos, Xero, Yseop

On Finovate.com

  • InComm Makes Third Acquisition this Year with Purchase of Meridian Loyalty.
  • Email Security Specialist GreatHorn Locks in $13 Million Investment.

Around the web

  • Monzo partners with Xero and Free Agent.
  • Temenos to power digital transformation for Rwanda’s Bank of Kigali.
  • BuiltIn features HooYu in its look at how AI is changing the banking industry.
  • ACI Worldwide teams up with Egyptian Banks Company, which will leverage ACI’s UP Retail Payments solution.
  • Entrepreneur magazine names Lendio Franchising as a Top 100 Franchise for Less Than $50,000 in 2019 and as the Best Financial Services Franchise Brand for the second year in a row.
  • Yseop recognized as a representative vendor in Gartner’s first Market Guide for Natural Language Generation Platforms.
  • Saga selects FIS to deploy its Integrity SaaS solution.
  • iSignthis launches third European office in Gzira, Malta.
  • In June Personal Capital surpasses $10 billion in assets under management, an increase of more than $2 billion since Q4 2018.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

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HooYu and NatWest Collaborate to Offer Account Opening By Selfie

HooYu and NatWest Collaborate to Offer Account Opening By Selfie
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: HooYu

Courtesy of a partnership with identity verification specialist HooYu, NatWest has become the latest bank to enable new customers to open accounts with just a selfie. NatWest joins the ranks of HSBC and Lloyds who began offering “selfie banking” in 2016.

NatWest will use HooYu’s AI-enabled technology and real-time biometrics to compare the customer’s selfie picture with the image on their government-issued ID. The goal of the collaboration is to leverage faster, more convenient, and more secure identity verification to accelerate the account opening and onboarding process, overall. Today’s launch comes after a successful 60,000+ customer pilot that saw significant reductions in the number of fraudulent applications.

HooYu Marketing Director David Pope, who demonstrated the company’s verification technology at FinovateEurope last year, said it is critical that banks have faster, easier ways to onboard new customers. Rather than force them to visit a physical branch or to wait up to 48 hours to open an account, Pope said, the solution is an identity platform that “balances the twin demands of compliance and convenience” by streamlining and better securing the account opening process.

“We know customers want to be able to open accounts at a time and place that suits them and not have to worry about precious ID documents going missing in the post, or taking time out of their day to go to a branch,” NatWest Chief Digital Officer Frans Woelders said. “That’s why we’re making it easier, safer and faster to open and access accounts, allowing customers to get on with the things that matter.”

The partnership with NatWest is the latest – and most headline-grabbing – collaboration from a company that has teamed up with a variety of firms this year- from alternative banking solution provider Suits Me to esports wagering platform Luckbox. Other companies partnering with HooYu in recent months include gold-as-currency enabler Glint, online investment platform EasyMoney, and U.S.-based casino operator Bear Group.

Headquartered in London, U.K., and founded in 2016, HooYu made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2017. The company’s two signature solutions are its global identity platform, HooYu Identity, launched in 2017, and its data visualization tool, HooYu Investigate, introduced in 2018.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: CREALOGIX, Flywire, HooYu, Jack Henry, Roostify, SheerID

On Finovate.com

  • SheerID Launches Instant Student Verification in 190+ Countries.
  • HooYu and NatWest Collaborate to Offer Account Opening By Selfie.

Around the web

  • Flywire partners with Student Loan Company to provide additional payment options for SLC’s overseas customers.
  • CREALOGIX announces the departure of CFO Philippe Wirth, who has served in this capacity since April 2017.
  • Ascend FCU ($2.5 billion in assets) to deploy Jack Henry & Associates’ Symitar Episys platform.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

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Finovate Alumni News

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Adobe, HooYu, InComm, Insuritas, Ledger, Nutmeg, Overbond, Qover, SigFig, Signicat, Spreedly, Token, UBank, YellowDog

On Finovate.com

  • Overbond Launches COBI Matching in Pivot to Analytics.
  • YellowDog Raises $3.3 Million in Series A.
  • Nutmeg Says No to IPO, Opts for Crowdfunding Instead.

Around the web

  • Ledger integrates with Cardano’s ADA and Yoroi Wallets.
  • Insuritas partners with SouthEast Bank to launch bank-owned digital insurance agency platform.
  • Adobe unveils Commerce Cloud, a customizable and scalable platform to manage, personalize, and optimize the commerce experience.
  • SigFig unveils SigFig Atlas, a financial advice and software-guided sales platform.
  • InComm and WH Smith launch in-store, online hubs for game cards in the U.K.
  • UBank integrates Watson into its customer service offerings with RoboBrain, a Watson-enabled virtual assistant.
  • Token.io and Konsentus launch fast PSD2 compliance solution by combining a PSD2 API with automated TPP verification.
  • Verimi and Signicat partner to deliver verified digital identity solution for European enterprises.
  • HooYu to provide ID verification for esports betting platform, Luckbox.
  • Qover earns a spot on Programmable Web’s list of 13 Notable Insurance APIs.
  • WRAL Tech Wire features Spreedly in a look at local technology companies.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Biometric Signature ID, Envestnet, Finanteq, HooYu, IBM, PayPal, Temenos, wipro, WorldPay

On Finovate.com

  • IBM Debuts Blockchain Network for Cross-Border Payments.
  • Finovate Global: PayPal in Argentina; Temenos Backs African Challenger Bank.

Around the web

  • Envestnet to acquire PIEtech, maker of MoneyGuide, in $500 million deal.
  • HooYu partners with online lottery betting operator, Lottomart, to help the Gibraltar-based firm meet AML requirements.
  • Wipro launches its AI and machine learning-powered accounts payable, KYC, and other solutions on Amazon Web Services.
  • Polish neo bank Nest Bank unveils new lifestyle services module, Finanteq’s SuperWallet, to its mobile banking app.
  • FindBiometrics interviews Biometric Signature ID CEO, President, and founder, Jeff Maynard.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

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HooYu Brings Verification Services to Alt Banking Startup Suits Me

HooYu Brings Verification Services to Alt Banking Startup Suits Me
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: HooYu

Identity verification specialist HooYu is collaborating with alternative banking solution provider Suits Me to help un- and underbanked workers get better access to financial services.

“Suits Me is an innovative solution that gives temporary workers freedom and choice through financial inclusion,” HooYu Marketing Director David Pope explained. “HooYu Identify blends a range of identity verification techniques into one service. By choosing the services according to their needs, Suits Me has built their ideal customer onboarding process balancing the twin objectives of security and convenience.”

Suits Me offers a hassle-free alternative for many workers, including temporary and migrant workers who are often unable to open traditional bank accounts. With Suits Me, account holders can send wages directly to their account and get a VISA debit card that can be used anywhere VISA is accepted – online, in person, and over the phone.

Courtesy of the partnership with HooYu, new Suits Me customers will benefit from an online verification process that is both seamless and comprehensive. With HooYu’s Identify solution, new customers simply take a selfie, and provide social media or online account information, and a photo of their ID document.

HooYu then conducts a biometric facial verification and authenticates the ID documents. Identify cross-references all of the collected identity attributes and scores them to create an overall identity confirmation score and report that show the degree of confidence in the accuracy of the customer’s claimed identity.

“Our mission is to help workers get paid, ” Suits Me CEO Matthew Sanders said. Pointing out how Suits Me relieves workers of the hassles of checks and check cashing, Sanders added “Integrating HooYu Identity removes yet another hurdle – we can trust who the customer says they are and, this can happen even more quickly, without unnecessary complications or bureaucracy.”

HooYu demonstrated its identity verification technology at FinovateEurope 2018. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in London, U.K., the company earlier this month announced that it would provide online verification services for mobile e-gaming operator, Small Screen Casinos. In September, HooYu reported partnering with U.K. casino operator, Bear Group, as well as teaming up with EasyMoney, a firm that offers a variety of innovative finance ISAs.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: HooYu, Mambu, NDGIT, Nordigen, Qover

On Finovate.com

  • HooYu Brings Verification Services to Alt Banking Startup Suits Me.
  • Mambu Takes its SaaS Core Banking Solution to Orange Bank in Spain.

Around the web

  • API platform provider for banking and insurance NDGIT signs Banco BNI as a strategic customer.
  • EU Startups features Nordigen in its look at the top 10 Latvian startups to look out for in 2019.
  • Qover, an insurtech startup from Belgium, opens a new office in France.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

 

 

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