David Penn, Author at Finovate

Giving Kids the Gift of Goals; The New Rules of LendingClub

By David Penn Posted on October 12, 2020
Categories: Eigen Technologies, Fenergo, IBM, Lending Club, Revolut

Revolut has added a new feature to its Revolut Junior app for youth aged seven to seventeen that will help parents teach the value of saving to their children. Goals enables both parents and child users to set and track financial savings objectives, and leverages the app’s other main features – Allowances and Tasks – to provide a more comprehensive financial wellness solution that works for kids and their parents.

Available to Revolut’s Premium and Metal customers, the new option can be used by parents to create financial savings goals and monitor their child’s progress as savings accrue. Kids can set their own savings goals as well, which can be supervised via the parent’s app. Goals can be funded directly by parents or by child users via their Allowances or by completing assigned tasks and chores.

“Goals, along with payments, allowances, and tasks, was one of our customers’ top requested and valued features,” Revolut Head of Premium Product Felix Jamestin said in a statement. “(We’re) excited to be building a product that is making saving fun and easy for both kids and parents.”

Revolut launched its Revolut Junior app earlier this year, and now boasts more than 200,000 children signed up for the program. Currently available in the EEA and the U.S., Revolut plans to offer the solution in Singapore, Japan, and Australia “in the near future.”

Alumni News Updates

LendingClub sheds P2P lending en route to bank rebirth: You would be forgiven for thinking the first rule of a company called “LendingClub” is to lend money. But LendingClub’s pivot away from its origins as an innovator in the P2P space 14 years ago continues as it announces that it will shut down its retail P2P platform as of the end of the year. The move comes more than a year after LendingClub shuttered its small business lending arm, and is widely understood to be a path-clearing effort en route to LendingClub incarnation as a bank.

Fenergo, IBM partner to bring AI to customer onboarding: A new integration between IBM Watson, the IBM Cloud, and Fenergo’s client lifestyle management technology will improve the efficiency of the onboarding process for financial institutions. IBM Customer Lifecycle Management with Fenergo combines Fenergo’s leadership in customer journey and digital transformation with IBM’s AI-enabled, AML and KYC solutions to provide better personalization, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance.

Eigen Technologies hires its first CFO: London-based NLP technology innovator Eigen Technologies has selected Spyros Karageorgis as its first Chief Financial Officer. Karageorgis comes to Eigen after tenures as CFO and COO at image recognition company Cortexica Vision Systems, and as CFO at SaaS e-commerce platform Venda. Karageorgis is one of two new members of Eigen’s C-suite: the company also announced new Chief Revenue Officer Tony Ehrens.

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Square Buys Bitcoin; Coinbase and the Call for “Mission-Focus”

By David Penn Posted on October 9, 2020
Categories: Alumni News, Coinbase, Daily news, Square

When we asked a dozen-odd fintech founders and CEOs what they thought was a bigger deal: AI or Bitcoin, during our FinovateFall 25 in 5 Q&A series, the number of respondents more excited by the former than the latter was sizable. But bitcoin fans made their preference known, suggesting that the brightest days for cryptocurrencies were definitely still ahead of us.

We suspect those bitcoin bulls were buoyed by this week’s news that digital payments company Square has invested $50 million in bitcoin. The approximately 4,709 bitcoins purchased by the San Francisco, California-based company represent a fraction of Square’s total assets – around one percent, as of the end of Q2 2020 – but it is not the first time the company has expressed interest in the cryptocurrency. Via its Cash App, Square has offered bitcoin trading since 2018, and a year later, the company launched Square Crypto, a unit dedicated to supporting open source work on bitcoin. But this week’s investment marks the firm’s first financial investment in BTC.

Square CFO Amrita Ahuja explained the investment in part by expressing optimism about bitcoin’s adoption worldwide, saying that it has “the potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future.” Ahuja added that Square anticipated participating in the adoption of bitcoin “in a disciplined way.”

It is likely worth noting that Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is a big supporter of bitcoin. In 2018, Dorsey said he believed bitcoin – or a similar cryptocurrency – would become the world’s single currency at some point in the not-too-distant future. CNBC’s coverage of Square’s investment noted that other tech-savvy fintechs, such as Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital use cryptocurrencies like bitcoin as a hedge.

As the Black Lives Matter-inspired social justice movement swept through the Western world this summer, corporations went into overdrive with efforts to show their support for ending racial discrimination. Many of these initiatives were outwardly directed toward potential customers, potential future employees, investors, the media, the public at large … But many of these attempts to show support were more inwardly directed, with companies encouraging their own workers to make their concerns with regard to social justice issues known – even, if not especially, in the workplace.

Unique among this trend was Coinbase, whose CEO Brian Armstrong not only took a different tack to politics in the workplace, but also put the company’s money behind its Keep Your Politics to Yourself policy. Armstrong made headlines weeks ago when he wrote in a blog post that, because Coinbase was a “mission-focused” company, “We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.” Moreover, he added that if employees disagreed with Coinbase’s policy of leaving politics at the front door, he was happy to offer them a relatively generous severance (including up to six months of pay depending on tenure) if they decided to leave.

“Life’s too short to work at a company that you are not excited about,” Armstrong wrote, requesting his employees decide whether to stay or go by the end of September. And with Armstrong’s Wednesday deadline come and gone, it appears that 60 workers, approximately 5% of the Coinbase’s workforce, have taken the deal.

The move has been controversial, with others in the technology community – including Jack Dorsey of Square and Twitter – suggesting that a healthier environment could be achieved if companies like Coinbase embraced the challenge of these kind of conversations. But, at this point, Armstrong seems at a minimum happy that the policy did not result in what would have easily been the worst possible outcome. “I’ve heard a concern from some of your that this clarification would disproportionately impact our under-represented minority population at Coinbase,” Armstrong wrote in a follow-up blog post. “It was reassuring to see that people from under-represented groups at Coinbase have not taken the exit package in numbers disproportionate to the overall population.”

It will be worth watching to see if other companies – in or out of tech – take a similar strategy.

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Italy’s New Payments Goliath; Nigerian Fintech Funds SMEs in the CEE

By David Penn Posted on October 9, 2020
Categories: Finovate Global

Italy’s Nexi to Acquire Rival SIA in $5.4 Billion Deal

Italy has a new payments behemoth on the block courtesy of a big acquisition in its financial services industry. Nexi, the country’s biggest payments processor with more than $1.16 billion (€984 million) in revenue in 2019, has agreed to acquire banking and fintech solution provider SIA. The purchase price on the all-stock deal comes in at nearly $5.4 billion (€4.6 billion), and will create a new payments contender in the European market with a market capitalization estimated at $17.7 billion (€15 billion).

The acquisition will mark the second big deal in Europe’s payments space this year; Worldline agreed to acquire Ingenico Group earlier this year for $8.6 billion (€7.8 billion).

The combined company will be led by Nexi CEO Paulo Bertoluzzo, and will have two million merchants and 120 million cards. Analysts have suggested Nexi will be able to double its 2019 annual revenue to $2.13 billion (€1.8 billion) post acquisition, and enhance its business in Central and Eastern European markets in particular.

Curious about fintech in the EU’s third most populous member state? EY’s 2020 FinTech Waves report provides an in-depth overview of Italy’s fintech market, which grew from 16 fintech startups in 2011 to 345 fintech startups in 2019. The report notes that the country’s banking sector, though challenged by legacy systems in many instances, is focused on leveraging technology to improve efficiency and boost revenues. Five areas where Italian fintech startups have been especially active, based on EY’s research, are crowdfunding, machine learning/AI, smart payments and money transfers, lending, and insurtech.

“According to our analysis, the Italian FinTech ecosystem is heterogenous, small in size, but with high potential,” the report authors write. Read the full 100+ page report.

Nigerian Fintech Sees Opportunity in CEE SMEs

Lidya, which helps finance small businesses in its home country of Nigeria, has tuned its radar to opportunities far away: in Eastern Europe, to be specific. Earlier this week, the company announced that it had lent three million to small businesses based in the Czech Republic and Poland. Lidya went live in the Czech Republic in March and began offering its services in Poland one month later.

Lidya currently operates in 14 countries in Africa. The company’s expansion gives it the opportunity to lend not only to more small businesses, but to make larger loans, as well. Loans in Lidya’s native Nigeria average $1,500, and are available for as low as $150; Lidya co-founder Ercin Eksin said he anticipates that its operations in Europe could yield loan sizes 4x as big, given the GDP per capita difference between African markets and those in the CEE.

For more on Lidya and the technology scene in sub-Saharan Africa, check out this TechCrunch interview with Lidya CEO and co-founder Tunde Kehinde.

Here is our look at fintech around the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa

South African challenger bank Bettr readies for 2021 launch.
Ventureburn features PayCurve, an “ethical salary early access solution” provider based in South Africa.
Nigeria’s ImaliPay introduces new tailored financial products for gig economy workers.

Central and Eastern Europe

Four of Estonia’s biggest banks partner with AML startup Salv to launch pilot program AML Bridge.
Vienna, Austria-based Trality, which is developing a trading bot for cryptocurrencies, raises $1.95 million (£1.5 million) in new funding.
Estonia’s Sparq secures $517,800 (€440,000) in funding from Baltic International Bank.

Middle East and Northern Africa

Fintech Magazine features Commercial Bank of Dubai COO Stefan Kimmel on digitization in banking.
Dubai-based financial services platform Rise introduces its Xare app for expatriate workers to remit money back home.
Albawaba profiles five of the “biggest fintech startups” in the Middle East: PayTabs, Bayzat, Liwwa, Tribal Credit, Aqeed.

Central and Southern Asia

State Bank of India (SBI) launches the country’s first contactless payments wristwatch.
Uni, an Indian fintech startup that seeks to bring affordable financing options to the underserved, raises $18.5 million in seed funding.
A collaboration between Pakistan’s National Center for Cybersecurity and the National Clearing Company of Pakistan Limited has led to the creation of an AI-based cybersecurity system to help spot suspicious activity in financial transactions.

Latin America and the Caribbean

Financial Times looks at the role of Colombian fintechs in the overall landscape of banking in Latin America.
IBS Intelligence reviews the top five fintech funding rounds from September, highlighting Neon, dLocal, Marco Financial, Ideal, and Zoop.
In a world in which ride-sharing apps are getting into fintech, Costa Rican fintech Omni announced this week that it was launching a ride-sharing service.

Asia-Pacific

Bank of Thailand introduces the world’s first blockchain-based platform for government savings bonds.
Indonesian fintech BukuWarung, which provides financial services to small businesses, raises as much as $15 million in new funding.
MyMy, a digital payments startup based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, raises $2.8 million (RM 12 million) in the country’s largest fintech seed round to date.

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Feedzai Celebrates Growth Milestones, Welcomes New C-Suite Talent

By David Penn Posted on October 8, 2020
Categories: Feedzai

Above-target growth and a pair of C-suite appointments characterize the first half of 2020 for risk management platform Feedzai. The company announced this morning that it has recorded H1 growth of 44% and negotiated “multiple multi-year enterprise contracts” during the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic and related market uncertainty. This, along with new leadership in the CFO and CMO roles, enabled the company to have what co-founder and CEO Nuno Sebastiao described “one of the best quarters ever” despite the pandemic.

“This simultaneously shows that our technology is mission-critical, and our business is crisis resilient,” Sebastiao continued. “I’m confident that our next phase of growth will benefit from market conditions in which digital transformation will play a larger than ever role, and from a set of strategic decisions we’ve made in the last 9 months.”

SafetyPay, Credorax, and PayU are among the companies that have teamed up with the San Francisco, California-based risk management platform this year. And joining Feedzai’s executive ranks are Amaury Dauge, former Euronext CFO, who will take over as the company’s new Chief Financial Officer, and Varun Kohli, who has been appointed Chief Marketing Officer.

Founded in 2008 and a Finovate alum for six years, Feedzai leverages artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning to analyze 30 million transactions valued at $5 billion every day. The company’s technology is used by 10 of the world’s largest 25 banks, and has been recognized as “Best in Class” by Aite Group.

Financial crime has taken on new significance during the global health crisis. With more individuals working remotely, and more companies accessing new channels and agents in search of financial assistance, there has been a significant rise in the number of ways criminals can take advantage of the uncertainty of the current environment. Feedzai, in its statement, highlighted mule accounts, phishing attacks, and employer fraud, among the top three types of financial crime that have increased during the pandemic.

“Fraudsters thrive on periods of confusion and chaos,” Aite Group Research Director Julie Convoy said, “and this pandemic represents fertile breeding ground.”

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Google, 21st Century Branch Banking, and the Power of the Platform

By David Penn Posted on October 8, 2020
Categories: FinovateFall 2020, Google, Speaker series

This year, FinovateFall Digital brought representatives from some of technology’s biggest players to our all-digital stage. One of these individuals was Paul Rohan, Solutions Consultant with Google Cloud.

Rohan’s presentation on the future of banking showed a connection between the evolution of branch banking and the necessary changes banking will need to undergo in order to thrive in the 21st century. He also discussed the changing nature of competition in financial services brought on by trends like open banking.

Check out our interview with Rohan ahead of his FinovateFall Digital presentation last month.

On the current state of open banking and PSD2

This is a major change in mindset because you start to realize that you could have the very best banking product with superb features and brilliant pricing. But if it’s not a part of these connected digital experiences across multiple brands that customers are increasingly demanding, it could fail. And you could have a middle of the road, not the best financial product, with not the best prices and not the best features. But, boy, if it pops up with the right context, with the right personalization, and the right customization – in these connected digital experiences – it could be a tremendous success.

On open banking as 21st century branch banking

Why did unit banks fall away and then branch banking become the norm? Because it didn’t matter how superb the staff were in the one branch you had, or how wonderful the customer experience was once they came into the branch, or how fast the decision-making was because everyone in your bank was in that one location. But if your one branch was in the wrong town, or beside the wrong industries, as things changed, it didn’t matter how wonderful the user experience was … In essence, (branch banking) started to allow customers to begin their customer journey with the bank where they were living their lives or where they did business.

On the difference between pursuing an app strategy versus a platform strategy as a financial services provider.

The sociology is quite different. In a traditional enterprise that’s quite reliant on doing everything themselves, and there’s always a human desire to innovate and serve your customers, if you do something clever to serve your customers, there is a big round of applause: “This is exactly what we should be doing.”

Companies that are immersed in the connected experiences of digital ecosystems (are) all about trying to make your partners clever. Enable them to be clever because they’ll do the customization, they’ll do the personalization. So there’s a huge amount of thought that goes into taking friction and difficulty out of your partner’s ability to deal with you, and to extend your brand and your proposition into segments you don’t want to serve yourself directly or you couldn’t serve yourself directly.

Watch the rest of the conversation. And for more from our FinovateFall Digital speakers, check out our Finovate TV YouTube playlist.

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Instnt Partners with Identity Verification Platform Prove

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2020
Categories: Instnt

A new partnership will enable customer onboarding platform Instnt to leverage phone intelligence-based authentication to enable firms to “green light” more customers without having to resort to time-consuming, knowledge-based authentication protocols. The company announced that it has teamed up with Prove, whose technology is used by more than 1,000 businesses and 500 bank clients to provide frictionless, passive authentication to their customers.

“As mobile devices have become the de-facto second-factor authentication tool, Prove’s robust phone intelligence technology becomes a crucial component to enable frictionless digital acceptance and authentication of consumers on Instnt’s digital customer onboarding managed service,” Instnt CEO and founder Sunil Madhu explained. “Through this partnership, Instnt aims to bring digital inclusion and one-click federated sign-up to consumers across mobile apps and websites on the internet.”

Instnt enables retail financial institutions and e-commerce merchants to sign up more customers with less risk and fewer fraud losses. Using Instnt’s technology, companies follow a simple, three-step process to create their digital sign-up form and generate a single line of code. This code is added to their website or app to create the onboarding functionality. Instnt leverages AI-powered predictive analytics to validate the user and the device being used during the onboarding process, conducting device and cohort analysis, network analysis, and data validation and verification to provide high accuracy and “requirement levels of compliance.” Instnt goes so far as to indemnify users of its customer onboarding offering for up to $100 million in annual fraud losses.

Instnt’s partnership with Prove comes just weeks after the company announced that it was collaborating with ComplyAdvantage. The partnership will bring machine learning and natural language processing-powered financial crime detection capabilities to Instnt’s onboarding and verification platform. Instnt began the year raising $2.9 million in seed funding from Charge Ventures, Fantail Ventures, Third Prime, and Revel Partners.

Based in New York City, Instnt made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateFall. The company returns to Finovate’s all-digital stage in November for FinovateWest Digital. Find out more about our upcoming live and on-demand fintech event, November 23 through 25.

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See Me, Hear Me: Revation and the Revolution in Digital Customer Engagement

By David Penn Posted on October 6, 2020
Categories: Alumni profile, FinovateWest 2020, Revation

The big changes we are seeing in the realm of customer engagement have to do with inevitable trends becoming immediate demands. Whether the need is reaching customers over the digital channel for the first time or automating and streamlining processes to improve efficiency and maximize productivity, the global health pandemic has been the midwife – if not the mother – of the fast-changing technology landscape we live in today.

“Meeting customers where they are” has been a rallying cry for customer engagement specialists for years. And as the number of channels grows, more companies are offering new solutions that provide easy-to-use, secure, and compliant ways for businesses to more comprehensively engage with their customers and clients.

One company in this space is Revation Systems. A Minneapolis, Minnesota-based firm, founded in 2003, Revation recently partnered with fintech and regtech solution provider Computer Services Inc. (CSI), who will offer Revation’s LinkLive Banking platform to community banks. LinkLive Banking provides regional and community banks, as well as credit unions, with key capabilities such as digital messaging, AI-powered chatbots, voice and video communications, and the ability to move seamlessly between physical and digital channels.

“Given the remote work demands of COVID-19, LinkLive Banking empowers our banks to provide a world-class customer experience while taking precautions to protect the health and safety of their employees and customers,” CSI Group President of Enterprise Banking Giovanni Mastronardi said. “Together with Revation Systems, we’re providing the innovative technology necessary to increase customer satisfaction and reduce friction in the customer journey.”

In addition to its messaging, chatbot, voice, and video functionalities, the platform also provides secure desktop sharing and encrypted email. LinkLive Banking leverages AI to power service chatbots with keyword recognition and the ability provide fast, automated responses to common banking queries. The video banking capabilities, announced in August, are the most recent addition to the platform.

“We are extremely excited about utilizing LinkLive’s video banking features as we seek to improve our member experience,” United Educators Credit Union CTO Dennis Griesgraber said. He noted that the new feature integrated not only with the LinkLive contact center the credit union used, but also with the institution’s digital banking platform. John Eyre, Assistant VP of Information Technology at TAPCO Credit Union underscored the technology’s value for enhancing communications among employees, as well. “LinkLive’s video banking feature will not only enhance the interactions between our members and representatives, but will also help improve communication among our own staff internally,” Eyre said.

Active in the healthcare vertical as well as financial services, Revation has more than 400 customers using its LinkLive Banking platform, representing more than 100 million digital banking customers. Adding the video banking component, Revation notes, requires only a few configuration changes to the LinkLive platform, and does not require the customer to download an app or manage a separate communications account to participate in video banking.

Perry Price, Revation CEO, echoed the now-common wisdom that the pandemic has accelerated pre-existing, if not inevitable technology trends. He noted that while adoption of video banking before COVID-19 had been a “long-term goal,” the onset of the crisis had turned those goals into “urgent” priorities.

Featured in CIOReview’s Most Promising FinTech Solution Providers for 2020 this spring, Revation is scheduled to make its Finovate debut next month at FinovateWest Digital. To learn more about our upcoming, all-digital event and how to watch Revation’s technology in action, visit our FinovateWest Digital hub.

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Expensify Does Billpay

By David Penn Posted on October 6, 2020
Categories: Expensify

As of October, Expensify isn’t just for expense management anymore.

This week, the company announced that it has added a new service that will enable Expensify users to leverage the platform to pay their bills, as well. For free.

“A little known fact is that Expensify was never intended to be an expense reporting company: it was always intended to be a platform for all things accounts payable and receivable,” company founder and CEO Dave Barrett wrote. “Expenses, invoices, bills — they’re all slight variations on the same thing. But the variations are so slight, there’s really no reason to Frankenstein together a bunch of financial tools to cover all your needs: Expensify is a one-stop shop for everything you need to run your back office.”

All Expensify users need to do in order to take advantage of the new service is to have their vendors send their invoices to:

“yourdomain.com@expensify.cash.”

Expensify will SmartScan the invoices, present them to the payer, and then send payments to the vendors from the payer’s business bank account. Expensify will also ensure that the transaction is accurately and promptly noted in the company’s accounting system, as well.

The goal is to show how Expensify serves as a small business platform rather than just an expense management solution. After all, that’s how Expensify treats it. “We’ve got hundreds of employees split between several international subsidiaries,” Barrett wrote, “thousands of vendors scattered around the world in multiple currencies, a hundred thousand customers spanning dozens of countries — and we run the whole business on Expensify.”

A long time Finovate alum, San Francisco, California-based Expensify has demonstrated its technology and its solutions at both our developers conference, FinDEVr, as well as at our Finovate events. Over the summer, the company unveiled its Concierge Travel solution, a virtual travel assistant that helps travelers build their itineraries and plan their trips – free of charge.

Expensify has raised more than $38 million in funding from investors including OpenView, PJC, Redpoint. The company began the year with the launch of its corporate card, the Expensify Card, that offers a special reward called Karma Points. Cardholders can use these points to make charitable donations to one of five partnering philanthropic organizations. Expensify also will donate 10% of all revenue from the card to charity, During the COVID-19 health crisis, donations are being directed to the Expensify.org/hunger fund.

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NEC Acquires Avaloq in $2.2 Billion Deal

By David Penn Posted on October 5, 2020
Categories: Acquisition, Avaloq, Mergers & Acquisitions

After 35 years in operation, Swiss-based digital banking solution provider Avaloq has agreed to be acquired by Japan’s NEC Corporation. The deal, in which NEC will buy 100% of the company’s shares from existing shareholders, valued the Swiss firm at more than $2.2 billion (CHF 2.05 billion), is billed at enabling Avaloq to “accelerate” its “growth, global expansion, and value creation strategy.”

“With NEC, Avaloq found a perfect new home to continue our success story of serving our clients with solutions that make their lives simpler in an ever more complex world,” Avaloq CEO Jürg Hunziker said. Company founder and chairman Francisco Fernandez added that acquisition would help the company continue to “invest heavily in R&D,” and highlighted the two firms’ shared emphasis on the “caring about customers and people.”

The transaction is expected to be completed in April 2021. The company will continue to operate as its own entity, based in Zurich.

First introduced to our audiences at our developers conference, FinDEVr London, in 2017, Avaloq made its Finovate debut a year later at FinovateEurope with a demonstration of its goal-based, wealth management solution. The cloud-based microservice enables wealth managers to provide risk-optimized investment objectives for their clients, which helps ensure that the client and their investment preferences, concerns, and risk tolerance are at the center of the investment advisory experience.

With more than 150 clients in 30 countries and nearly $5 trillion (4.5 trillion CHF) in client assets managed using its software, Avaloq recently announced partnerships with Belgium’s Banque Degroof Petercam in October and integrated with Enterprise Bot, an conversational AI and automation solution provider, in September. Also that month, FintechNews Switzerland featured Avaloq Group Chief Product Officer Martin Greweldinger, author of a report on the need for wealth managers to “democratize” their offerings to a wider audience in order to survive and grow.

“This democratization requires wealth managers to deliver personalized advice at scale while addressing the specific needs of this new affluent clientele through a balance of industrialization, innovation, and individualization,” Greweldinger noted. Read more about Avaloq’s report.

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iCapital Closes Acquisition of Alternative Investment Platform Artivest

By David Penn Posted on October 5, 2020
Categories: Artivest, Mergers & Acquisitions

Here’s a bit of news that slipped beneath our radar: online investing platform Artivest, which made its Finovate debut six years ago at FinovateSpring, is now a part of the iCapital Network. iCapital announced its intention to acquire the New York-based firm this spring and in August, announced that the transaction has been completed.

The acquisition includes management of Artivest’s 28 proprietary alternative investment funds, as well as the company’s Open Network platform, which provides access to alternative financial products and investment strategies to 1,800 advisors and their investors. The deal will result in iCapital servicing more than $55 billion in client assets. Artivest’s 28 team members are expected to join iCapital.

Chairman and CEO of iCapital Network Lawrence Calcano praised Artivest’s “technical innovations and capabilities in registered funds and direct investments” when the deal was announced. He said that the two companies shared a goal of making alternative investments more broadly available to wealth and asset managers, and added that the integration of Artivest’s technology with iCapital’s platform would create a “powerful combination delivering a ‘best-in-breed’ technology experience.”

Founded in 2012, Artivest offers a curated investment experience that leverages expert insight and exclusive access to reduce the time and complexity involved in discovering, evaluating, and engaging in investment opportunities such as private investment funds. Ahead of its acquisition by iCapital, the company had forged partnerships with EJF Capital, WM Partners, KKR, Wellington Management, and MacKay Municipal Managers all in the second half of 2019.

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BioCatch Secures $20 Million to Drive Innovation in Behavioral Biometrics

By David Penn Posted on October 2, 2020
Categories: BioCatch, Funding

A new investment of $20 million takes the total capital raised by behavioral biometrics innovator BioCatch to more than $213 million. Participating in this week’s funding were a quartet of major global banks: Barclays, Citi, HSBC, and National Australia Bank (NAB). The funds add to BioCatch’s Series C round, which brought $145 million to the company’s coffers in April.

In addition to its funding announcement, BioCatch also unveiled a new BioCatch Client Innovation Board. The Board is a collaborative, invitation-only forum where members can discuss and develop new approaches to leveraging what the company called in a statement “the unique attributes of behavior.” BioCatch’s signature innovation in behavioral biometrics is a cognitive behavioral approach that focuses on the way a user interacts with their device, as well as online and mobile applications in order to combat fraud. The company’s Invisible Challenges mechanism operates without the user even being aware of it, enabling BioCatch to provide strong authentication with minimal friction for the user.

As part of the funding, each of this week’s investing banks, as will existing BioCatch investor, American Express Ventures, will have two seats on the Innovation Board.

“We have already seen the power of collaboration in solving difficult problems in other areas of the financial services industry, such as clearing corps, transaction networks, post-trade processing, margin calculation, and collateral management, when banks work together and share knowledge, workflow, and data in the common interest,” Edelstein said. “We are extremely excited that five of the largest and most important global financial institutions are working with BioCatch to jointly address today’s most pressing problems in the areas of online fraud, account authentication and digital identity.”

Founded in 2011 and based in both New York City and Israel, BioCatch was named to CB Insights’ Fintech 250 list of the fastest-growing fintechs earlier this month. Over the summer, the company announced that it had created anonymous behavioral profiles for more than 150 million individual online banking users, and now analyzes more than one billion digital sessions a month in real-time.

Learn more about BioCatch in our June profile, COVID-19 and the Fight Against Cyberfraud.

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Crypterium Makes Crypto Virtual; ndgit and Entersekt Partner on Open Banking

By David Penn Posted on October 2, 2020
Categories: Crypterium, Entersekt, Finovate Global, NDGIT

Crypterium Launches Virtual Card

Earlier this month at FinovateFall Digital, it was heartening to hear a number of fintech founders and CEOs highlight the blockchain and cryptocurrencies among the technologies they are most excited about in 2021. While a number of other enabling technologies such as AI and machine learning are in the spotlight right now and others, such as 5G and the IoT are waiting impatiently in the wings, innovations in digital assets and cryptocurrencies have seemed less common in 2020 compared to years past.

That makes the news of Crypterium’s new virtual card – and Apple Pay compatibility – all the more welcome for those who believe the best days for cryptocurrencies are still to come. The Estonia-based company, founded in 2017 and making its Finovate debut one year later, announced this week the availability of its new Crypterium Virtual Visa Card. The new free option gives users the ability to chose between a physical, plastic card, a virtual card, or both, and enables them to make all their contactless purchases with the convenience of a single virtual card on their mobile device. Cardholders can load their cards daily from €2 to €5,000, and have immediate access to their funds.

The company noted that it plans to enable users to integrate their virtual card with Google Pay as well. A timeline for this update was not specified.

Crypterium helps make cryptocurrencies practical by enabling users to load their digital wallets – and now their virtual cards as well – with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin, and use those cryptocurrencies to transact with more than 42 million retailers. The company has 500,000 users worldwide, operates in more than 180 countries, and has processed more than 50 million payments.

Entersekt and ndgit Partner to Boost Open Banking

A partnership between two Munich, Germany-based firms – identity verification innovator Entersekt and open banking platform provider ndgit – will make Entersekt’s authentication and smart messaging solutions available on ndgit’s Marketplace. The marketplace offers a curated environment for financial services companies to access a variety of fintech solutions.

Entersekt partners with banks and other enterprises around the world to fast-track their digital enablement journeys, helping them respond to changing consumer preferences while meeting their compliance obligations with confidence,” Central Europe country manager for Entersekt Uwe Hartel said. “We are proud to join forces with ndgit, which has a very similar outlook. Together, we can drive innovation in open banking, securely.”

More than 30 banks and businesses around the world use ndgit’s API platform to digitize their operations and take advantage of the opportunities in open banking. In 2017, the company implemented the first open banking system for Switzerland, earning the Euro Finance Tech Award that year for best fintech bank partnership. At ndgit’s most recent Finovate appearance at FinovateEurope last year, the company demonstrated how its platform powered a PSD2-enabled digital loan application with minimal data entry and a fully secure risk profile.

Here is our look at fintech around the world.