Finovate Alumni News

Around the web

  • Ephesoft forges partnership with RPA leader Automation Anywhere.
  • Visa launches its Visa Partner Portal to give fintechs greater access to its payments technologies and solutions.
  • Feedzai announces availability of its AI-powered Case Manager solution.
  • Collaboration between Q2 and Socure brings digital identity verification and fraud protection to Q2 Open’s CorePro cloud-based core processor.

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.

Identity Verification Specialist Socure Raises $30 Million

Identity Verification Specialist Socure Raises $30 Million

Socure is the latest identity verification and fraud prevention innovator to attract the interest of – and big investment from – fintech’s venture capital community. The New York City-based company, which demonstrated its digital-to-physical identity verification platform at FinovateFall 2017, has scored $30 million in new funding in a round led by Scale Venture Partners.

“This funding will enable us to grow our footprint in new strategic U.S. market sectors that are in need of accurate, automated identity verification technology, including healthcare and the public sector,” Socure CEO Tom Thimot said. “We will invest in the talent required to continue innovating and expanding our machine learning-based predictive analytics platform.”

The round also featured participation from Commerce Ventures, Flint Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, Synchrony, and Sorenson Capital. The Series C round takes the company’s total funding to $57.5 million.

Socure’s platform leverages AI and machine learning techniques to analyze trusted on- and offline data from email, phone, IP, physical address, social media and the Internet, and provide real-time authentication. The technology helps drive financial inclusion, boosting acceptance rates for millennials and other thin-file applicants by as much as 40%. Socure’s platform also supports CIP/KYC programs and AML compliance, lowering fraud by up to 80% and cutting manual review costs by up to 90%.

“Companies from banks to insurance carriers to healthcare providers struggle with just how slow, expensive, and inaccurate today’s identity verification services can be,” Scale Venture Partners’ Rory O’Driscoll said. “Socure offers them better accuracy and fraud detection, delivered through an easy-to-implement API connection.”

O’Driscoll, who will join the company’s board of directors as part of the investment, called Socure’s technology “a compelling proposition (that) explains why this company has been so successful so fast.”

Socure finished 2018 with 3x gains in annual revenue and more than 100 deployments with leading banks, lenders, and payment providers. In a statement on the year’s accomplishments, the company highlighted the introduction of its Socure Sigma Fraud Scores risk metrics, the launch of its integrated document verification service, and the release of  version 3.0 of its ID+ platform.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • NDGIT Credits License Revenue, New Bank Clients for Growth.
  • ACI Worldwide Buys Speedway in $750 Million Deal.
  • Identity Verification Specialist Socure Raises $30 Million.
  • Finastra Brings its Total Payments Solution to Silvergate Bank.

Around the web

  • D3 Banking Technology joins Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN).
  • Tradeshift introduces new app integration from Transfermate Global Payments.
  • HackerOne opens official APAC headquarters in Singapore.
  • Healthcare information technology services provider Allscripts partners with ID.me.

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.

Identity Risk Scoring from Socure Helps Radius Bank Reduce Online Fraud

Identity Risk Scoring from Socure Helps Radius Bank Reduce Online Fraud

A partnership between AI-powered identity risk scoring innovator Socure and workflow management specialist Alloy has enabled Radius Bank to decrease online fraud by 50%, increase new account conversions by 30%, and make manual review nearly a process of the past – reducing it by 95%.

The joint solution marries Socure’s predictive analytics with Alloy’s decisioning engine, and adds a variety of on- and offline data sources, predictive fraud tools, and a flexible rules engine to enable real-time decisioning and onboarding for new account openings.

Socure co-founder and SVP Johnny Ayers explained: “Given the extreme difficulty in fighting fraud while onboarding consumers digitally at scale, providing our customers with an end-to-end suite of predictive analytics, decisioning and case management capabilities means speed to market, unparalleled accuracy and technical flexibility that can’t be found when trying (to) work with legacy ‘identity proofing’ platforms.”

“Balancing fraud risk and customer friction are the two leading challenges facing financial institutions when it comes to digital account opening,” co-founder and CEO of Alloy Tommy Nicholas added. “The data and intelligence provided by Socure combined with Alloy’s decision engine and reporting tools make digital onboarding infinitely scalable for the first time.”

Radius Bank is a digitally-focused, community bank based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1987, Radius Bank offers check deposit, billpay, P2P payments, and card management for its personal clients, and provides advanced treasury management and loan payment solutions for business customers. In addition to Socure and Alloy, the bank has partnered with fintechs like LevelUp and Prosper to provide additional innovative services to its customers. Radius Bank has assets of more than $1 billion.

Headquartered in New York City, Socure demonstrated its Socure ID+ solution at FinovateFall 2017. The company’s digital-to-physical identity verification technology features an integrated document authentication service to determine the authenticity of government-issued identification and ensure a match with the PII provided. Socure’s platform provides best-of-breed email, phone, and address risk scores, overall identity risk prediction, KYC and physical document verification on a single, integrated solution.

Socure has raised $31.9 million in funding, and includes ff Venture Capital, Commerce Venture Partners, and Flint Capital among its investors. Sunil Madhu is CEO and President of the company, which was founded in 2012.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Identity Risk Scoring from Socure Helps Radius Bank Reduce Online Fraud.
  • Lending Club and Wealthfront Score Intuit Consumer Data.

Around the web

  • American Express and PayPal announced expanded strategic partnership to enhanced experience for U.S. Amex card members using PayPal and Venmo.
  • NCR to test age detection technology to improve efficiency in self-service checkouts.
  • Sberbank unveils its new Payment Schedules solution, enabling users to configure the interface of Sberbank Business Online into an event feed format.
  • Tinkoff Bank launches Tinkoff Junior mobile app for children and teenagers.

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.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

Around the web

  • iSignthis announces its Tier 1 JCB card acquiring service is now live in the EU/EEA.
  • CallVU to provide advanced biometric authentication technology to international credit card provider.
  • Jumio reports sales growth of 130% year over year for the first three quarters of 2018.
  • Capsilon teams up with Home Point Financial to streamline loan process.
  • The latest upgrade of SecureSafe features desktop encryption. In German.
  • NICE Actimize launches X-Sight, a financial crime risk management platform-as-a-service solution.
  • Alloy and Socure partner to automate digital identity verification and onboarding for financial institutions.
  • PayStand expands operations to Mexico, forms regional partnership with StartupGDL.
  • Tinkoff Bank adds 26 new currencies for its Black Card customers.
  • Identitii launches Overlay+ to enable Know Your Transaction. 
  • Jack Henry & Associates acquires BOLTS Technologies for its digital account opening solution.

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.

Socure Unveils Digital Identity Bot Aida

Socure Unveils Digital Identity Bot Aida

 

Socure, a New York-based company that provides predictive analytics for digital identity verification, has launched a new solution this week. Aida (Authentic Identity Agent) is a new identity verification bot that can be deployed to validate authenticity in online transactions. Aida is named after the world’s first computer scientist, Ada Lovelace, and leverages AI to process billions of on- and offline datapoints to provide real-time digital identification.

“Socure is solving the single most difficult problem in identity verification,” Socure’s founder and chief strategy officer Sunil Madhu said, “validating a person that’s never done business with an organization before.” Criticizing traditional methods of verifying identity in the digital world as “a miserable failure,” Madhu praised both Aida’s speed and accuracy.

“Aida can assess in real-time and with unprecedented levels of reliability, whether a digital identity is authentic, synthetic, or has been stolen by performing beyond-human analysis at machine speed,” he explained. “Aida essentially lives every minute of every day to verify identities and fight fraud.”

Socure founder and Chief Strategy Officer Sunil Madhu demonstrating the Socure ID+ platform at FinovateFall 2017.

Part of the company Socure ID+ identity verification platform, Aida combines AI, unsupervised machine learning, and clustering algorithms to provide a continuous loop of data ingestion, normalization, and evaluation from sources such as credit bureaus, social networks, and email history. Aida automatically builds explainable, transparent machine learning models in hours, and conducts predictive analytics on real-time transactions to determine which should be accepted automatically and which should be flagged for manual review by a human fraud analyst.

Named to Red Herring’s Top 100 in North America earlier this month, Socure announced in June that two of the top five U.S. banks (and three of the top ten) are using its technology. This spring, the company appointed Tom Thimot as its new CEO, with Socure founder and former CEO Madhu transitioning to the Chief Strategy Officer role.

Founded in 2012, Socure demonstrated its verification platform at FinovateFall 2017 last year. The company has raised nearly $32 million in funding, and includes Commerce Ventures, Flint Capital, and ff Venture Capital among its investors.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Socure Unveils Digital Identity Bot Aida.

Around the world

  • PayStand teams up with Silicon Valley Bank and First Data in fintech accelerator, Commerce, Innovated.
  • Hydrogen launches Hydro mobile app, a security and identity management app that leverages the public blockchain.
  • India’s self-driving mobility platform Zoomcar partners with identity verification specialist Onfido.

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.

Finovate Alumni News

Around the web

  • New partnership makes Venmo a payment option for Uber and Uber Eats.
  • Hedgeable announces plan to end management of accounts by mid-August.
  • IdentityMind Global to provide KYC for Ontology Trust Ecosystem.
  • Socure named to Red Herring Top 100 in North America for 2018.
  • Mortgage Cadence integrates compliance auditing and monitoring into its loan origination platform.
  • Bluefin and Verifone team up to boost payment security with PCI-validated Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE).
  • Twisto payment platform goes live in Poland this week.

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.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Signicat and Mitek Team Up to Improve Digital Onboarding.
  • Meniga Scoops Up $3.6 Million in New Funding Courtesy of UniCredit Investment.
  • OutSystems’ $360 Million Funding Round Boosts Valuation Above $1 Billion.
  • Credit Karma Hires Colleen McCreary as First Chief People Officer.

Around the web

  • Oman’s Bank Sohar to deploy core banking platform from Infosys Finacle.
  • IdentityMind Global announces update of its trusted digital identities platform.
  • Revolut CEO Nikolay Storonsky tells Reuters his company will seek a banking license in the U.S.
  • i-Sight to deploy ACI Worldwide’s Case Management solution to fight bank fraud.
  • D3 Banking Technology unveils new account opening service.
  • collectAI improves Hanseatic Bank’s receivables management with a 24 percent higher collection rate.
  • SMArtX adds 18 new strategies.
  • Kony unveils new digital banking solution – Kony DBX
  • Edwards Federal Credit Union signs with Bankjoy to enhance home and mobile banking functionality.
  • Two of the top 5 US banks (and three of the Top 10) are now using Socure’s ID+ 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.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

Around the web

  • Business-only Australian bank Tyro forges partnerships to improve connectivity between POS, apps, and merchants.
  • Finastra appoints Elona Ruka-Wright as its new Chief Risk Officer.
  • Australian FinTech Study Loans partners with Cloud Lending Solutions to build new student loan offering.
  • LendingTree to acquire Ovation Credit Services for total consideration of $20.75 million.
  • Socure secures three new ISO certifications for privacy and security controls.
  • Spreedly to integrate Worldpay’s international payment processing API courtesy of new partnership.
  • Hypepotamous profiles South African authentication specialist Entersekt.

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.

Socure Appoints New CEO Tom Thimot

Socure Appoints New CEO Tom Thimot

Socure, a provider of predictive analytics for digital identity verification has appointed Tom Thimot as its new CEO. Thimot takes the helm from company founder and original CEO Sunil Madhu.

Madhu, who will take a new role as Chief Strategy Officer focused on platform innovation and exploring new market opportunities, pointed to his experience working with Thimot in the past and expressed his excitement at teaming up again. “Tom and I worked together at Netegrity to grow the identity and access management business many years ago,” he said. “I’m thrilled to work with him again at Socure and glad to pass the baton so he can help us accelerate the next phase of our growth as a pioneer of trust in digital identity.”

Thimot (pictured) comes to Socure from Clarity Insights, a big data consultancy. Before this, Thimot was COO of Kazeon, which was acquired by EMC, CEO of GoRemote (acquired by IPass), an EVP at Netegrity (acquired by Computer Associates) and CEO of CaseCentral (acquired by Guidance Software). He has a BSME in Mechanical Engineering from Marquette University and also attended Harvard Business School.

“The market opportunity and applications for Socure’s technology span a wide range of industries,” Thimot said. “We are in the right place at the right time. I look forward to further accelerating our expansion, while maintaining Socure’s focus on customer satisfaction and innovation.”

Socure demonstrated the first-ever digital-to-physical identity verification platform at FinovateFall 2017. The company extended its digital identity verification solution to include an integrated document authentication feature that enables authentication of government-issued IDs and cross-checks with personally-identifiable information. Socure’s ID+ platform reduces fraud by up to 90 percent, according to the company, lowers manual review and knowledge-based authentication rates by up to 80 percent, and automates Customer Identification Program (CIP), KYC, and AML compliance activity.

PYMNTS.com sat down with Madhu earlier this month to discuss Facebook’s issues with user data. The company was named one of the Top AI Companies in the world by CB Insights last December and was highlighted last August as one of the Finovate alums that has been a top investment target for European banks. Founded in 2012, Socure is based in New York City.