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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
One of the great things about the return of FinDEVr was the opportunity to showcase the men and women behind the technology innovations that are driving fintech today. From veteran CTOs to up-n-coming developers, FinDEVr was a great opportunity to learn from – and celebrate – the talent behind the technology.
At FinDEVR this year, I had the opportunity to chat with Trevor Marshall, Chief Technology Officer with New York-based fintech Current. Starting out as a financial wellness solution for young people and their families, Current has grown into a neobank challenger that offers mobile payments, online banking, and other financial services. The company secured $220 million in Series D funding in April and, this month, announced a partnership with decentralized finance platform Acala. This first-of-its-kind alliance establishes a new category of finance, hybrid finance (HyFi), that leverages applications from both traditional and decentralized sources.
“We created Current because we could see how money was being re-networked through new technologies,” Marshall said. “Our initiative with Acala allows us to flex this muscle we have been developing for the past six years.”
Marshall’s interest in alternative payments was on display in 2015, when he built a Ripple payments prototype for Current. After gaming out the prototype’s flaws, he tried an Ethereum-based process – which he also found insufficient for Current’s needs. With this week’s partnership with Acala, Marshall believes that the ability to introduce in-app decentralized finance solutions into the Current platform may now be soon at hand.
“In some ways, this partnership is really just the beginning of the actual rollout of what we’ve been building toward this whole time,” Marshall said.
At FinDEVr, Marshall talked about recent innovations in payments, specifically how technology is enabling new types of payment transmission options. He also explained how fintechs and other companies are working to integrate alternative payments, including cryptocurrencies and API-based processing into their offerings.
Here’s a sample from our conversation. The full interview with Trevor Marshall will be available On Demand in the days to come.
A pair of identity solution providers – Ping Identity and ProofID – have partnered to enhance identity security for U.K.-based Tesco Bank.
The banking division of Tesco, the largest supermarket retailer in the U.K., Tesco Bank deployed both Ping Identity’s PingAccess and PingFederate to secure key applications. With ProofID as the bank’s implementation partner, the integration – which involved creating a single-factor login process deployed across a private AWS cloud – took only 12 weeks. Importantly, the solution “allow(ed) us to consolidate disparate identity data,” said Tesco Bank security architect David McConchie, “laying the foundation for a common customer identity.”
PingAccess is PingIdentity’s centralized cloud identity and access security solution for apps and APIs. The technology provides secure access down to the URL level and can secure APIs by applying policies to disallow specific HTTP transactions to users in untrusted contexts. PingFederate is an enterprise federation server that enables user authentication and single sign-on. The solution functions as a global authentication authority to enable authorized entities to securely access applications from any device.
“We saw how we could use PingAccess and PingFederate to work across web, mobile and API. The ease with which we could deploy across channels was a critical factor, along with the data governance capabilities,” McConchie said. “Ping Identity gives us the flexible authorization capabilities we need to minimize friction and deliver a customer-centric experience.”
A Finovate alum for nearly 10 years, Ping Identity was founded in 2003 and is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Named a Top Workplace by The Denver Post earlier this month, Ping Identity partnered with global logistics provider DB Schenker in April, and launched its new, cloud-based identity verification service, PingOne Verify, in February.
Ping is publicly-traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PING. With a $1.2 billion valuation upon its IPO in September 2019, the company currently has a market capitalization of $1.9 billion. Andre Durand is founder and CEO.
Earlier this year in our conversation on diversity in fintech and financial services, we looked at a partnership between Paybby, a challenger bank focused on Black and Brown communities; Carver Federal Savings Bank, an African-American owned bank; and Finovate alum Boss Insights.
Today, we pick up that conversation from the fintech’s perspective, talking with Boss Insights founder and CEO Keren Moynihan about her company’s innovations in the field of business-data-as-a-service, its participation in the Paycheck Protection Program, and the importance of impact and meaning when it comes to providing financial services.
Boss Insights specializes in Business Data as a Service. What does this mean?
Moynihan: We work with fintechs and private lenders, banks, and credit unions. We work with their business lending groups; it could be small and medium business lending, SBA, invoice factoring, commercial, all sorts of business lending types. And what we are giving the lenders is access to their business customers’ financial data in minutes. It sounds impossible, but actually only takes the lenders one hour of their time to set up.
What we’re enabling is for them to be able to pull real-time accounting information, banking, or commerce information on demand.
When you look back on 2020, what are your biggest takeways?
Moynihan: In March 2020 I was speaking with (a reporter) at a conference and she asked for a direct quote responding to “how are fintechs and entrepreneurial companies going to be responding to COVID?” And I’ll never forget it because I said, “Look, fintechs thrive on challenges and this is an unprecedented challenge but we will be looking at ways to respond to it.” Two hours later, we all got an order that the economy was going to shut down, that we were all going to isolate. I don’t think anyone knew what was happening. I called the reporter and said “I know what I said, but …” I knew I was going to eat my words, because this was on another level. She laughed and said, of course, and she appreciated my call.
That was more than a year ago. The next two weeks were an onslaught. This was before PPP. This was before any kind of government funding and people really did not know what was happening. And unless you were in it, it’s really hard to describe it. What we did as a company was that we saw in all the news articles there wasn’t enough personal protection equipment, we started to get reports out of Italy, it was a really scary time. Now people at Boss Insights could not create masks. But we did see that if you stopped a company from being able to make sales, they are not going to be able to say alive and to be able to grow.
I asked myself, how do you support the economy? Right away we said we will offer part of our technology for free for any lenders who will support new businesses. And by new businesses, I meant new business relationships with the lender. That is a harder uplift. And as a result of that, everything started to grow for us. Technology companies reached out. Banking companies reached out. We were covered in an industry journal and, as a result of just that one piece, we had so many people call us. And we learned so much just by being able to say we can help.
How much of what you’ve learned will you be able to translate into new initiatives and future growth?
Moyinhan: There are a lot of things that I see changing, and then there’s an even bigger category of things I wish would change and hope will change. And time will tell. One word, very overused, is digitization. That’s going to endure. CB Insights reported that banks were losing about 1% market share each year, so give or take 9% or 10% over a nine year period. In 2020, 9% was lost in one year. A couple more years like that and we’re looking at a very different economy.
That really made the industry stand up and take notice. Back in March 2020, the same lenders that were telling me that they had everything under control and were ready to go, were the same ones that admitted to me on private calls that they were placing orders for laptops at Costco. They literally could not get laptops from regular commercial suppliers and were ordering them from Costco because they couldn’t get them anywhere else.
This points to one trend: people were a lot more honest about where they were (in terms of digital transformation) because you couldn’t just say you had digitized, it was actually being tested. I believe that trend is going to endure because the expectations of people, of businesses, have changed. We all ordered groceries online for awhile. I don’t think that was true before 2020. We are all expecting that these documents and forms that you have to go into branches for will be available online.
That is the biggest thing I can say that has changed. The one thing that I hope will change is the collaboration. We put out something in the American Banking Association saying that social distancing led to social collaboration. What I mean by that is that people stopped talking and they started listening. This includes Boss Insights. We stopped talking about what we’re selling and we started just asking “what do you need?” And I do hope that trend continues. It’s mirrored in other areas outside of financial services. We think these things were long overdue. It’s not a trend that is continuing in the way that I would have hoped. But I do see a lot of changes and this issue surfaced in the second round of PPP. People were open to having conversations. They brought decision-makers in the room. People didn’t want to have high-level discussions. They wanted to clearly tell you “I need this. Can you get it for me?” Then it’s our turn to talk about what we can do.
That amount of collaboration is unprecedented before COVID, and we just hope that it continues.
Tell us about the importance of working with small business owners who struggled to access support from relief programs like PPP.
Moyinhan: In the middle of PPP I was on a podcast called The Powerful Ladies podcast and it was with Kara Duffy. All of this got arranged because of Sharifah Hardie, who also runs a podcast and we had been on her podcast also. There was a woman there named Ronda Brunson. She has a consulting practice where she works with people to educate them on financial health, people who would not necessarily have had that training. We learn a lot of things in school, but financial health is not one of them, and if you have not had that education elsewhere where are you going to get it? She empowers people.
As I’m listening to all of these incredibly accomplished women and what they do in their business lives, she heard what I was doing. I was a little bit the oddball out because I was working with businesses and everyone else was working with individuals. She said, “I hear what you do, but the first round of PPP got a little bit of social notice because it’s supporting large businesses.” The second round of PPP did correct for this. But at that time we didn’t know that was going to happen. She said “how are you actually working to get capital into the hands of people who wouldn’t get access to it?”
I knew exactly what she meant. I knew that she meant people who were either female-run companies or visible minority-run companies. She didn’t say it explicitly, but that was exactly what she meant because those were the people that she was working with on a daily basis.
The way the lending industry works is that it’s based on a percentage of the amount of the loan. Everything is based on that. The costs are the same whether the loan is two million dollars or $200,000 – so who’s going to get more resources? It’s not that banks and credit unions and private lenders are trying to do it this way, it’s that the costs don’t scale down but the revenue does. What I saw from banks at that time is they were working until two or three in the morning. What I’ve heard from the CEO of Carver Bancorp, Michael Pugh, is that he’s been on the phone with clients to get their documents in – which people couldn’t believe, but this is the dedication. And what (Brunson) was asking me was: “what exactly are you doing to ensure your technology gets in the hands of people who will make sure that the disenfranchised will get access?”
And I never forgot it and I started looking immediately. Because for the people at Boss Insights, it is about accelerating business lending from months to minutes. But it’s also about impact and meaning and making sure businesses are evaluated on their merit. It is because of Paybby that we got connected to Carver. And it is because of Paybby and Carver that we are in a position to answer her and say, Ronda, now I can tell you we are doing something.
In some ways, we just started listening. We listened for when the SBA announced that there was going to be a week in advance for lenders focused in this area. And we listened when Paybby said “we have a lender who is ready to do this uplift.” And the collaboration that Paybby and Carver and Boss Insights have is a daily investment to make sure that things are running smoothly so businesses can apply.
Read more about the partnership between Paybby, Carver Federal Savings Bank, and Boss Insights.
In a round featuring new investors Saints Fund and Eric Benhamou of Benhamou Global Ventures, cross-border transaction monitoring solution provider ThetaRay has raised $31 million in new funding. Led by JVP and BGV Funds, the investment round also featured participation from current investors OurCrowd, Bank Hapoalim, SBT, and others. The funding takes the Israel-based company’s total capital to more than $90 million and will be used to help ThetaRay bring its cloud-based, transaction monitoring solution to new markets.
“We are on the verge of a real revolution in securing the global financial system,” ThetaRay CEO Mark Gazit said. “During this period, when the cross-border payment network has become the lifeblood of the world trade infrastructure, ThetaRay is here to instill certainty and reduce risks in secure, cross-border payments.”
ThetaRay’s announcement comes as the governments of both Nigeria and the Ukraine have implemented ThetaRay’s technology to protect cross-border payments from financial crime. The cross-border payments market, estimated at $25 trillion a year, increasingly has been targeted by financial criminals in the post-COVID environment. Unfortunately, the response to this threat has involved tightened controls and enforcement that have resulted in challenges – from slow service to outright blockages – for many of those businesses and banks that need to make legitimate cross-border payments.
To this end, ThetaRay’s SaaS offering analyzes SWIFT traffic, risk indicators, and data from clients, payers, and payees to spot patterns and anomalies that are indicative of suspicious activity – including money laundering and terrorist financing. The technology leverages a proprietary approach to machine learning called “artificial intuition” which simulates the decision-making aptitude of human instinct and subjectivity. Referred to as the “fourth generation of AI,” artificial intuition is being applied to help financial institutions spot large-scale, more sophisticated cybercrime strategies by analyzing the various parameters of the massive number of individual transactions that may make up a given fraud attempt.
“This revolution will enable many organizations and people around the world to transfer money faster, more securely, and with far fewer fees and stops along the way,” JVP founder and chairman Erel Margalit said. “What Swift did to the banking world 25 years ago, ThetaRay will do to the banking world in the next ten years.”
Founded in 2013 and making its Finovate debut two years later at FinovateFall, ThetaRay launched its cloud-based, anti-money laundering (AML) solution for cross-border payments last month. Also in April, the company appointed former Fundtech/Finastra Payments executive Dagan Osovlansky as its new Chief Product Officer. ThetaRay also won the Transaction Security Innovation Award this spring from the FinTech Breakthrough Awards program.
Finovate Global extends a special thanks to the demoing companies, keynote speakers, and attendees that joined us for FinovateSpring this week via our digital platform. On Demand video from the conference will be available soon.
And for Finovate Global readers with an interest in innovators from outside of the U.S., here are some of the companies to look out for when the On Demand video is made available in the coming days.
Aisot Technologies (Switzerland) with its technology that provides next-generation, real-time analytics and forecasts, allowing financial services to enhance returns, reduce risks, and increase efficiency.
Coconut Software (Canada) with its customer engagement platform for financial institutions that want to improve their digital and physical engagements.
DigiShares (Denmark) with its white-label platform for tokenization of real estate to provide automation and liquidity to the real estate markets.
Dreams (Sweden) with its technology that leverages cognitive and behavioral science to help banks increase their end users’ financial wellbeing and engagement, and attract new audiences. Best of Show winner.
Flybits (Canada) with its customer experience platform for the financial services sector, delivering personalization at scale.
FormHero (Canada) with its SaaS solution that enables rapid creation of digital front-end experiences to solve for complex data collection needs.
In a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, online fraud and abuse prevention specialist Arkose Labs has raised $70 million in Series C funding. The San Francisco, California-based company will use the additional capital to support platform development, hire new talent, and fuel global expansion.
This week’s investment takes Arkose Labs’ total capital to $114 million. Also participating in the financing were Wells Fargo Strategic Capital and existing investors M12 and PayPal Ventures.
“With Masa and the team at Softbank, we have a partner who matches our ambition for eradicating fraud online by means of disrupting the economic ROI for bad actors,” Arkose Labs founder and CEO Kevin Gosschalk said. “At Arkose Labs, we are building a portfolio of capabilities that can adapt and respond based on the fraudsters’ techniques to ensure we are maximizing the impact to them whilst minimizing any form of friction to good users.”
A Best of Show winner in its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring in 2019, Arkose Labs specializes in defending neobanks, ecommerce companies, payment firms, insurers, and other businesses against a range of cybercrimes including account takeover and both payment and new account fraud. Founded in 2015, Arkose Labs offers an authentication platform that invisibly identifies the context, behavior, and past reputation of a each request, classifying it as Authentic or Inauthentic. Authentic requests are passed on to the enterprise, while Inauthentic requests are remediated by dynamic defenses that generate continuous losses.
This is part of the company’s strategy, articulated by Gosschalk at FinovateSpring, to “break hacker economics by making it more expensive for the bad guys to get in than the data they are getting out.” He added “if you do that, they give up and move on.”
In its funding announcement, Arkose Labs highlighted a number of key milestones the company has met since its last funding – a $22 million Series B round – in March of 2020. These accomplishments include analyzing more than 15 billion online sessions last year, stopping more than four billion attacks; the opening of regional EMEA headquarters in London and a doubling of the company’s workforce. Arkose Labs also announced a number of C-suite hires over the past year, including a new Chief Operating and Financial Officer, a new Chief Product Officer, and a new Chief Security Officer and VP of Information Technology. The company also pledged to make additional hires this year to lead operations in North America, Australia, and Europe.
“With Arkose Labs’ successful expansion in the financial services industry, this signifies a continued digital shift in banking,” Gosschalk said. “(It) requires a customer-centric approach that kicks the bad guys out of online operations, while maintaining the highest levels of convenience and usability that financial services operations require.”
In a round led by Group 11, banking app Lili has secured $55 million in Series B funding. The capital will help the New York-based fintech grow its product range over the next few months. This will include the addition of new features for invoice and payment management and a new loans product.
“We’ve created the tools you need to spend more time building your venture and less time on things that historically your employer would handle: sorting expenses, managing financials, and filing taxes,” Lili CEO and co-founder Lilac Bar David explained.
The Series B took the two-year old company’s total capital to $80 million. Also participating in the investment were Target Global and AltaIR.
Having doubled its account base over the past six months and currently boasting 200,000 users, Lili offers real-time expense management, tax preparation, and no-fee accounts designed for freelancers and gig economy workers. Lili also provides direct deposit and a Visa business debit card with free ATM withdrawals at more than 32,000 locations.
Named to the Forbes Next 1000 list for 2021, Bar David co-founded Lili having spent three years as CEO of Israeli challenger bank, Pepper. Along with current Lili CTO and co-founder Liran Zelkha, Bar David’s goal was to build a solution for workers in the freelance economy that combined banking and business management services into a single platform. She estimated that Lili has saved its users 60 hours on administrative tasks and $1,700 a year in fees, costs, and tax savings.
The 60 million freelancers in the U.S. – more than a third of the workforce – often struggle to secure timely payment for services rendered, accurately meet tax obligations, and manage their overall financial work/life balance. With the expectation that this relatively young cohort will only grow in size over time, investors like Group 11 see Lili as well-positioned to take advantage of this evolution in the “future of work.”
“Lilac and Liran’s forward-looking vision is changing how modern workers manage their finances, while saving them valuable time and money,” Group 11 founding partner Dovi Frances said during the company’s seed funding round announcement just under a year ago. “Lili is redefining banking for freelancers and we’re thrilled to be partnering with the team.”
The people have spoken and the votes for Best of Show for the second, all-digital FinovateSpring have been counted. After two days of innovative fintech demos, here are the companies that have been awarded Finovate’s top prize.
Dreams for its financial wellbeing platform that helps banks attract the new generation and create superior digital engagement by leveraging the latest insights from cognitive and behavioral science. Video.
Glia for its digital customer service platform that connects financial institutions to their customers using chat, voice, video, co-browsing, and AI. Video.
Signal Intent for its financial calculators for the digital age – built to win you more customers, capture better customer data, and help you move fast in the era of digital transformation. Video.
Thank you to all of our demoing companies, our speakers and presenters, our sponsors and partners and, of course, our wonderful audience and digital attendees.
Stay connected to the Finovate blog for more from our FinovateSpring companies and presenters, as well as updates about our upcoming events in July for FinovateAsia and our return to in-person conferencing in September for FinovateFall.
Notes on methodology:
1. Only audience members NOT associated with demoing companies were eligible to vote. Finovate employees did not vote.
2. Attendees were encouraged to note their favorites during each day. At the end of the last demo, they chose their three favorites.
3. The exact written instructions given to attendees: “Please rate (the companies) on the basis of demo quality and potential impact of the innovation demoed.”
4. The three companies appearing on the highest percentage of submitted ballots were named “Best of Show.”
5. Go here for a list of previous Best of Show winners through 2014. Best of Show winners from our 2015 through 2020 conferences are below:
The firms are Fort Community Credit Union, headquartered in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin; Alltrust Credit Union (formerly Southern Mass Credit Union) based in Fairhaven, Massachusetts; and Statewide Federal Credit Union, headquartered in Starkville, Mississippi.
“We couldn’t ask for a better way to start 2021, signing these three progressive credit unions,” Bankjoy CEO Michael Duncan said. “Since we are now officially in the digital age thanks to the pandemic, these credit unions are now poised to hit the ground running with our most advanced online, mobile, and voice banking technologies. We are excited to see how they will perform and how their members will take advantage of these new offerings.”
Founded in 2015 and making its Finovate debut a year later at FinovateFall in New York, Bankjoy provides financial institutions with a variety of digital banking solutions ranging from mobile / online banking, and e-statements to online account opening and loan origination, as well as access to conversational AI-based products. From flagship banks to credit unions, Bankjoy offers an out-of-the-box alternative to outmoded legacy systems that prevent banks and credit unions from being able to meet the rising digital expectations of their customers and members.
“Bankjoy will improve our credit union’s digital banking solution and offer an experience that is in line with our members expectations,” Alltrust Credit Union Vice President of Operations Stephanie Medeiros said. “Our partnership with Bankjoy will allow us to maintain our commitment to our members while delivering the latest digital technology.”
“The Bankjoy solution will allow our members to access and manage their account from anywhere,” Statewide Federal Credit Union CEO Casey Bacon added. “They will have access to all of the conveniences of modern banking at their fingertips.”
Headquartered in Troy, Michigan, Bankjoy has raised $1.8 million in funding from investors including SixThirty and CheckAlt. The company is an alum of the Y Combinator incubator program.
Railz, an API developer that helps connect financial institutions and fintechs with their customers’ accounting information in real-time, has secured an investment of $12 million. The Series A round, led by Nyca Partners, takes the Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based company’s total funding to more than $15 million.
“While there are many players who focus on collecting data across various accounting packages, the challenge of understanding what the data actually means, and how to categorize it, continues to be a major hurdle for the users of this information,” Railz CEO Sohaib Zahid said. “Railz’s data normalization solution, coupled with our insights and analytics engine, is the secret sauce that can address this challenge – and tackle it more accurately and quickly than any other service offering in market.”
Also participating in the Series A were Vestigo Ventures, Susa Ventures, Plug and Play, N49P, Hack VC, Global Founders Capital, and Entrée Capital. The company plans to use the new capital to add more talent to its sales and engineering teams.
Railz offers a single API that integrates with all major, SME-oriented accounting platforms to enable on-demand access to financial transactions, analytics, and insights. The fast, low-cost, accounting-data-as-a-service solution gives small businesses the ability to be better served by financial institutions by giving them an easier, less cumbersome way to share their critical financial information.
“Businesses use accounting software as a single source of truth to record the financial health of their company,” Nyca Partner Jeremy Solomon said. “Sharing this data with another party is currently a manual process that is slow, expensive, and error-prone.”
With just a few lines of code, Railz claims that it can get customers up and running with its technology in less than a day. The company’s real-time financial analytics and insights offer risk scoring and fraud identification, in addition to standardized accounting entries that use a universal format for easier modeling and reporting. Founded in the summer of 2020, Railz says its customers have benefitted from up to a 53% reduction in costs and a 75% reduction in fraud.
How have financial services companies coped with the rising challenge of cybercrime in the Work From Anywhere era? We caught up with Tamas Kadar, co-founder and CEO of SEON, a cybersecurity startup based in Hungary, to learn how the company – featured in Forbes’ Hottest Young Startups in Europe – helps firms meet regulatory obligations and better defend themselves against fraud.
Tell us about SEON. When was the company founded and what problem was the company founded to solve?
Tamas Kadar: Founded in 2017, SEON was born out of necessity. Prior to its launch, co-founder Bence Jendruszak and I owned a budding crypto exchange, which was repeatedly hit by instances of fraud. We urgently needed a solution that would help us resolve the problem, but found that there were none on the market suitable for our business structure.
The problem was that most anti-fraud solutions in the industry had long integration times, lengthy contracts, and different packages for different sized businesses. We needed a solution that was more flexible and could be integrated and functional almost immediately. So we took matters into our own hands and developed a solution that would meet these needs. This later became SEON.
SEON’s services remove the barriers to fraud prevention that many companies face today. The solution can be integrated into business structures in minutes – a far cry from the usual weeks it takes for many mainstream solutions. It is suitable for businesses of any size, has a free trial period, and works on a rolling monthly contract, meaning that businesses can cancel and take up our services without being bound by long contracts – much like a Netflix for fraud prevention.
What in your background gave you the confidence to tackle this challenge?
Kadar: Having studied Deep Info Comms at the elite Corvinus University, where Bence studied General Management, we both had the knowledge needed to get SEON off the ground. It was there that I learned about the fraud tactics being used to get around the latest fraud prevention strategies. Having this insight, along with my technical know-how and Bence’s managerial skills, we had the confidence to move forwards with SEON.
It was clear that there were some pain points in the fraud prevention industry that needed addressing. We felt that we were the right people to do so.
Who are your primary customers in financial services and how do their needs differ from those of your customers in other industries?
Kadar: Neo banks, traditional banks, PSPs, buy now pay later (BNPL) and other fraud tech companies, account for about 25% SEON’s portfolio. The rest is made up of a whole range of different industries, including some of the most high-risk. Other sectors we serve include iGaming, eSports, cryptocurrencies and online trading, and travel.
The services we provide to financial institutions differ from others as they focus more on regulatory compliance, reducing cost when it comes to Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, and preventing money laundering. We also protect account openings, reduce customer acquisition costs, decrease bonus abuse, and flag fraudulent merchants using stolen credit cards.
By contrast, other industries use us to protect themselves against fraudulent activity such as account takeover, while we mitigate chargebacks for ecommerce merchants. We also prevent fraud surrounding ticketing in the airline industry.
Tell us a little bit about the technology behind your solution. What are the most effective tools for combating cybercrime?
Kadar: SEON has a number of solutions that are highly beneficial for helping businesses prevent fraud, including the SEON Sense Platform and Intelligence Tool. We draw on data from across the internet to establish customers’ digital footprints, weaning out false accounts and actively preventing fraudulent transactions from taking place.
Driven by transactional data, the SEON Sense Platform provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for fraud managers that can be tailored to the individual needs of a company.
Meanwhile, our Intelligence Tool increases fraud detection accuracy with just one click. Users can simply enter an email address, IP address, phone number or location into the browser extension to get background information, which then enables fraud managers to see complete user profiles and flag suspected fraudulent ones. As a result, companies can detect fake accounts with ease.
These solutions address a number of problems in the fraud prevention industry. They can be integrated via a Google Chrome link or API within minutes, and as they work in entirely in the back-end, there are no added layers of friction for consumers.
In addition, our solution acts as a marker for the move away from the industries overreliance on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) alone. AI and ML are often seen as a magic pill that will solve all of a business’ fraud woes and are left to resolve issues without the proper supervision. This impacts reportability because it isn’t always easy to establish the reason for certain decisions that a solution has made. Instead, our solutions are based on a supervised learning approach, giving fraud managers the information needed to make effective decisions.
How has COVID-19 impacted your company and its customers? What are your biggest takeaways from the experience?
Kadar: The flexibility of our solution has meant that we have been able to easily adapt to changes imposed by the pandemic. One of the largest changes we’ve seen in terms of fraud is the amount that is taking place. Many businesses moved into the online space in order to survive lockdowns and social distancing measures. The problem is that online fraud grows in line with online activity, so the amount of fraud that is taking place there has rapidly grown. As a result, our main focus has been on industries that have felt these changes the most – especially high-risk industries such as iGaming and eSports.
The solutions developed by SEON have made an enormous impact on the way our customers can manage, monitor, and mitigate fraudulent activity. Key to our ability to provide such solutions has been our open lines of communication with our customers. It’s important that newly digitised businesses understand that fraud prevention is an evolving practice and their feedback is vital to its success.
For example, our customers know they are encouraged to contact us whenever something changes within their business, be that a release of a new software update or simply a realisation that their customers often use other social registries that we haven’t been monitoring. With this knowledge, we can quickly begin developing new lines of defence.
What is the most important thing about the technology scene in Hungary that many people outside of the area might be surprised to learn?
Kadar: Setting up SEON wasn’t all plain sailing. Bias can often hamper the growth of startups outside of traditional European hubs such as London and Munich, meaning it’s difficult for businesses to secure the investment needed in order to scale.
This is especially true for Central Europe. Bence and I found this out the hard way. When getting SEON off the ground, we found that many European investors were skeptical when it came to startups from Central and Eastern Europe.
Still, we see launching SEON in Hungary as not only a blessing, but an advantage when it came to creating a unique product that the fraud prevention industry was desperately in need of. Being outside a typical startup hub has resulted in the company being more creative, more agile and, contrary to many seed level businesses, more resilient.
Establishing SEON in Hungary also greatly reduced our outgoings, allowing us to use the initial investment we secured to grow. This is because the talent pool in Eastern Europe met the needs of the business. It’s naturally abundant in people with mathematics, computer science, and AI-based skills, which has provided us with the human capital necessary to develop and maintain our fraud solution, without initially having to set up offices elsewhere.
You recently received a major investment – the biggest Series A round in Hungarian history. How important was this funding and what will it enable SEON to do?
Kadar: As part of the funding round, which was led by leading European early-stage investor Creandum, we secured €10 million (USD 12 million) in series A investment. This is a pivotal point in our company’s growth and will drive us in our mission to democratize fraud prevention by removing the barriers that many companies face.
With the investment, we plan to expand our presence in the U.S. and U.K., with the aim of having our London headquarters account for more than 30% of our revenue. We will also be shortly announcing the launch of our new U.S. office, along with our plans for the region.
In all, this investment will take our company to the next level, enabling us to not only better serve our existing customers but also provide our services to even more businesses across the globe.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
FinDEVr, our conference series dedicated to developers in fintech and financial services, is back. We’re saving the final day of FinovateSpring this year to shine a light on the role that developers continue to play in building and applying the technologies that keep fintech at the cutting edge.
Some of Finovate’s most illustrious alums have, in fact, been alums of FinDEVr. Among those at the top of the list are innovators like Plaid. The company, nearly acquired by Visa for more than $5 billion last year, was a big part of one of our earliest FinDEVr events in 2014 where it introduced its “API for Financial Infrastructure” to fintech audiences.
FinDEVr has also served as a platform for innovative fintechs not just from outside of Silicon Valley, but from outside the U.S., as well. An excellent example of this kind of FinDEVr alum is Nubank. Making its FinDEVr debut at our first developers conference on the east coast, FinDEVr New York, in 2016, the Brazilian financial services startup has grown into a major regional neobank and the biggest fintech in Latin America with more than 34 million customers.
For this year’s return, FinDEVr will feature a quintet (or more!) of innovative companies that are busying building tomorrow’s fintech today. Each company will provide both a TECHTalk and an informative workshop to dive deeper into the enabling technologies being discussed. Take a look at our current line-up below, as well as the topics we’ll be talking about.
Connecting Siloed Financial Data: Open Banking’s Impact on the Financial Experience
Join Finicity as they explore the implications of an open financial ecosystem, shifting control to consumers, what the impact is for technologists and developers, and how open banking is being leveraged to improve financial literacy and inclusion. Finicity will follow this with a workshop on how to leverage the power of open banking with a hands-on introduction to their platform. Learn more.
The Tango: Operationalizing Predictive Models, an Engineering and Data Science Collaboration
Instnt will examine the different workflows followed by data science and engineering and discuss why they must come together in the deployment and maintenance of application models. The conversation will be followed by a workshop on rapid feature development and analysis in the identity verification space. Learn more.
Simplifying the complex with an innovative tech stack
LoanPro’s TECHTalk will discuss the importance of a modern and secure technology stack that is cloud-based, uses a configuration first approach, and maintains security throughout the process. LoanPro will follow up with a workshop on how to connect with and build loans via LoanPro’s API in less than 90 minutes. Learn more.
Data for sustainability
What is the relationship between data, sustainability, and financial services? In their TECHTalk Ecolytiq will discuss how their Sustainability-as-a-Service model helps ensure that financial institutions have access to relevant, contextual information at the right time. After the presentation, Ecolytiq will lead a conversation on how to ethically manage different data assets, and how to integrate them into the decision-making process. Learn more.
Scalable fintech product development
How can product development teams keep up with the rapid pace of fintech product adoption while remaining efficient and keeping costs down? Praxent’s TECHTalk will examine this challenge in greater detail and highlight ways to resolve productivity challenges. The workshop afterward will feature best practices for identifying bottlenecks in the development process and how to accurately benchmark your team’s progress. Learn more.
