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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
“Moov is transforming the way fintechs enable account verification, money movement, and ACH payments through APIs,” MX cofounder and CTO Brandon Dewitt said. “We align with their mission to help fintechs and organizations focus on building amazing new experiences. Fintechs like Moov are a big reason why a massive digital shift is happening across the banking industry.”
Moov enables platforms, marketplaces, and software companies to embed payment functionality into their solutions, providing seamless money acceptance, storage, and disbursement. The combined, turnkey solution enhances the account verification process, providing a faster, more secure, and reliable experience for customers who are adding banking or payment functionality to their offerings.
“Whether you think of yourself as a fintech or not, every modern company is seeking a way to automate its process to accept, store, and disburse money,” Moov CEO Wade Arnold said. “Developers want the best user experience possible for their application. MX’s ability to provide fast IAV makes the payment experience swift and more seamless than it would have been without the joint solution.”
A multiple time Finovate Best of Show winner, MX provides connectivity and data enhancement for more than 16,000 financial institutions and fintechs – including 85% of digital banking providers. Among the Utah-based firm’s most recent collaborations is its partnership with AbbyBank. The $616 million asset community-owned bank launched its PFM solution – an embeddable digital money management tool powered by MX and offering budgeting, subscription tracking, debt management, and more – in March.
“With MX, AbbyBank is giving its customers across Wisconsin greater clarity into their personal finances,” MX Chief Customer Officer Nate Gardner said. “(It’s) exactly the kind of innovation, partnership and money experience that MX loves to enable through our powerful data platform.”
Founded in 2010, MX most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall 2019.
News of NYMBUS’$15 million fundraising this week – and the company’s recent appointment of three women to key leadership positions – serves as a fitting bookend to a first quarter that began with big investment and big C-suite hires, as well.
In January, the Miami, Florida-based banking technology provider expanded its leadership team with the addition of Chief Alliance Officer Sarah Howell and Chief Product Officer Larry McClanahan. A month later, Nymbus secured a Series C investment of $53 million in a round led by Insight Partners.
“As the pandemic has pushed digital to the forefront, more banks and credit unions have turned to Nymbus as their partner for growth,” Nymbus CEO and Chairman Jeffery Kendall said when the funding was announced in February. “This new and significant investment validates a confidence in Nymbus to continue transforming the financial services industry with a banking strategy that buys back decades of lost time to speed digital innovation.”
Little did we know how quickly further valuation would arrive. This week’s investment by European private equity firm Financial Services Capital doubles its investment in Nymbus to more than $31 million. The funding gives Nymbus a total capital raised of more than $98 million.
“We look forward to continue working with Nymbus as they build out a best-in-class, cloud-native offering that is well positioned to be a leader in the industry and will transform our portfolio companies,” Financial Services Capital Managing Partner Miroslav Boublik said. He and fellow Managing Partner Matthew Hansen will join the Nymbus Board of Directors as part of the investment.
Also joining “Team Nymbus” is Veeva Systems co-founder Matt Wallach, who will serve as a Strategic Advisor. Nymbus will benefit from Wallach’s experience in co-founding one of the leading cloud software companies in life sciences. Founded in 2007 and, 14 years later, the first publicly traded company to transition into a public benefit corporation, Veeva now has a market capitalization of more than $40 billion and 975+ customers in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as in emerging biotech.
As mentioned, Nymbus’ funding announcement comes on the heels of the company further bolstering its leadership ranks with a trio of new, C-suite hires. The women – Trish North as Chief Customer Officer, Michelle Prohaska as Chief Compliance Officer, and Crina Pupaza as Chief People Officer – bring years of customer success, risk management, and people-centered programming experience to a company that has seen significant growth as banks turn increasingly toward digital transformation of their outdated legacy systems.
“In order to help our partner institutions serve the unique financial needs of niche audiences, success begins with diversity in our own Nymbus leadership,” Kendall said last week when the appointments were announced. “I’m incredibly proud of the impactful effort we are making to recruit a balanced male to female representation into our C-suite, and beyond confident of the value that Trish, Michelle, and Crina will each uniquely provide to both our team and partner clients.”
“The shift to a more digital world requires real solutions to secure every transaction and instill trust in every interaction,” Mastercard president of cyber and intelligence solutions Ajay Bhalla said. “With the addition of Ekata, we will advance our identity capabilities and create a safer, seamless way for consumers to prove who they say they are in the new digital economy.”
Seattle, Washington-based Ekata offers global identity verification to enable businesses around the world to link digital transactions to the people who make them. Via APIs and a SaaS tool, Ekata leverages data science and machine learning to help businesses detect fake accounts, cross-verify consumer data, reduce payment risk, and fight transaction fraud. With more than 2,000 corporate partners ranging from global merchants and financial institutions to marketplaces and digital currency platforms, Ekata enables its businesses to gain unique and valuable insights that allow them to make better risk decisions about their customers.
“The acceleration of online transactions has thrust global digital identity verification to the forefront as one of the biggest opportunities to build digital trust and combat global fraud,” Ekata CEO Rob Eleveld said. “The right identity verification solutions enable inclusive and frictionless experiences while, at the same time, ensuring customer privacy, control and security. Becoming part of the Mastercard Identity family ensures a broader, collective approach to meeting the growing demands of the digital economy.”
Founded in 2019, Ekata unveiled its merchant onboarding solution earlier this month. Designed to meet the needs of PSPs, B2B lenders, and marketplaces working with smaller, micro-merchants and sole proprietors, Ekata’s new platform automates the onboarding process via API and provides for more efficient manual review with a SaaS solution.
“Merchants today have plenty of options and will quickly turn to another payment service provider if an organization adds too much friction at onboarding or takes too long on approvals,” Ekata VP of Global Marketing Beth Shulkin said in a statement. “This is much more than a customer experience issue for PSPs and lenders; losing the lifetime value of a merchant has real bottom-line impact.”
A new partnership between AbbyBank and FinovateFall Best of Show winner Sensibill will enable the Wisconsin-based community bank to give its customers the ability to de-clutter and digitize their financial lives.
“In today’s online world, customers expect more convenience to bank how they want,” AbbyBank AVP of Marketing Natalyn Jannene said. “Our partnership with Sensibill will help our customers and employees with digitizing the shoebox of receipts or overstuffed purses and wallets, making it easier for them to track receipts, exchanges, and warranties in one place.”
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Sensibill offers a receipt management solution that makes it easier to organize and track everything from Health Savings Account receipts to expenses from government relief programs like the Paycheck Protection Program. Sensibill’s everyday financial tools give financial institutions the ability to tap into – and act upon – SKU-level transaction data in order to provide their customers with the kind of personalized financial insights that can help them build better financial habits. More than 60 million individuals across North America and the U.K. use Sensibill’s AI-powered technology.
The company’s newest solution – Sensibill Platform – features a pair of new tools – Spend Manager and Spend Insights – that provide financial institutions with more ways to drive digital engagement with their customers and members. Spend Manager leverages predictive analytics to help customers track and manage their everyday spending, while providing personalized tips and custom advice based on their transactions. Spend Insights enables financial institutions to draw upon more than 150 unique points of data from purchases, and pair them with transaction data to anticipate customer needs and preferences in real-time.
“Sensibill is empowering institutions of all sizes to harness SKU-level data to offer personalized experiences and recommendations that help make customers’ hard-earned money go further,” Sensibill co-founder and CEO Corey Gross explained when the platform was unveiled in January. “The time to act is now – by better contextualizing the transaction-level data they already have with SKU-level insights, institutions can help their customers make smarter financial decisions. Those that do will retain loyalty and expand market share while making financial wellness more attainable for all.”
In addition to its newly-announced partnership with AbbyBank, Sensibill in recent months has also teamed up with Leaders Credit Union of Jacksonville, Tennessee ($520 million in assets) and Progress Bank, a $1.4 billion asset bank that serves customers in Alabama and in the Florida panhandle. Last month, Sensibill earned recognition as the winner of the “Personal Finance Innovation” category of the FinTech Breakthrough Awards.
A Finovate alum since 2017, Sensibill has raised more than $55 million in funding. The company’s investors include First Ascent Ventures, Information Ventures Partners, Impression Ventures, Mistral Venture Partners, and Radical Ventures. Sensibill also secured $5 million in debt financing from CIBC Innovation Banking a year ago.
This week’s partnership with Sensibill is only the latest instance of AbbyBank working with innovative fintechs in order to add to its own offerings. Last month, the Wisconsin-based community bank – with more than $616 million in assets – teamed up with another Best of Show-winning Finovate alum, MX, to power its new PFM solution.
“The goal is to help our customers improve their financial awareness,” Jannene said when the collaboration with MX was announced in March. “Knowing where money is spent allows you to manage your money more effectively. When our customers succeed, we succeed and that is truly what AbbyBank is here for.”
The fintech industry in Latin America is among the world’s most vibrant. From the initiatives in Mexico to provide a legal framework that will enable local fintechs to flourish, to the innovations in central bank digital currencies in the Caribbean, to the rising fintech giants like Nubank in Brazil, financial technology is making a major difference in the lives of a growing number of Latin Americans.
For this week’s Finovate Global: Voices, we caught up with Ximena Aleman, co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer of Prometeo, to discuss fintech in Latin America and the power of open banking to improve financial wellness and create opportunity in the region.
Please tell us a little about Prometeo and what drove you to co-launch the company.
Ximena Aleman: Prometeo is a fintech company striving to create an open and connected financial market in Latin America (LATAM). We are building a huge highway of financial information across financial institutions and countries in LATAM. Prometeo is the largest Open Banking API platform in the region disrupting the financial sector in México, Colombia, Brazil, and six more countries. We provide a single point of access to information, transactions, and payments across more than 30 financial institutions and 45 APIs in nine countries of LATAM.
As LATAM entrepreneurs, we are well aware of the tech gap in the financial sector between underdeveloped and developed countries. In particular, the lack of adequate tech infrastructure. So we decided to approach this as an opportunity to build not only a great solution but also a path towards financial access for the region.
What are the drivers of open banking in Latin America?
Aleman: Open Banking is a disruptive innovation that reframes the way banking is carried out. Transactions and communications between customers and institutions are going from taking place behind closed doors to transparent exchanges in the public square. It is no wonder that traditional financial institutions initially viewed the practice with a measure of bemusement or even suspicion.
However, there has been a marked shift in their thinking. Adoption has been slower in Latin America than in other parts of the world, but most of the open banking biggest names in the region have headquarters abroad. Open banking has been a hot topic globally; Latin American associates have taken note and ushered in the conversation.
Another factor that has changed the playbook is the COVID-19 pandemic. The restrictions on daily life and public interactions have forced even the most hard-rooted, traditional financial institutions to review their digital transformation strategies. If customers can’t visit branches, digital channels become the sole venue of exchange.
What do you think it will take to get more women in leadership and founding roles in fintech?
Aleman: I think that as we move forward to a more “gender-balanced” society we have to rethink our financial exchanges from a gender perspective, too. There’s little offered in the financial sector for women and little by little some female fintech entrepreneurs are developing solutions for this segment (for instance, Emma Sanchez’s neobank for women, Jefa). If the startup ecosystem understands that half of the world’s population has been historically financially underserved, and the huge opportunity this is, it won’t take long for women to start developing custom-made products for that segment.
You have said two of the biggest challenges to diversity in fintech are funding and technical training. What can and should be done about this?
Aleman: The gap between VC investments in startups led by women is significant versus those led by men. In the last 10 years, fintech companies led by women have raised 1% of the total investment in fintech. The disparity is really significant.
I believe this gap is multifactorial: historically, the financial and the technology worlds were dominated by men. Also, among VC funds, women in the decision-making process are just a few in number and, per my own experience, men really value having another man as their counterpart.
There’s a lot we can all do: all the stakeholders involved in the fintech sector should make their own changes and push to close the gap. As women, we have to create our support network on every front, talk to mentors, female start-up groups, and above all, be confident and trust your knowledge, your experience, and your ability to navigate through hostile environments. If you feel you are not strong enough in certain areas, seek training. Technical training and really knowing your business is key to build confidence and close this gap.
One of the biggest reasons why women receive less VC investment than men is that so few of them make up decision-makers in VC funds.
How has the pandemic impacted the work you do and the communities you serve?
Aleman: Open Banking has seen a rise in LATAM in the past year, so our business vertical – as everything related to digital transformation in the financial sector – has been benefited by how the pandemic reshaped human interactions. However, no one in LATAM can be a stranger to the economic challenges we are facing today and ahead. There have been huge increases in unemployment, debt, etc. In Uruguay, a year after the pandemic, surfing what might be the country’s second wave of COVID-19 cases, early in the morning in the small towns in the countryside, you will bump into people waiting in line just in one shop, in the local microfinance branch, to ask for credit or pay their debt.
There are many who do not know much about Uruguay. What do you think more people should know about the country?
Aleman: Of course. I’m very proud of my country. We are a small country down in South America, between Argentina and Brazil. We are popular for the quality of our meat and football players, but as noticeable as that is, we are a growing tech hub, in particular for financial services. Uruguay has a long history of providing high-tech software to the financial sector, for instance, we host four banking core software companies (Infocorp, Topsystems, Bantotal, and Mantentia – that was recently bought by Technisys). Most recently, we joined the fintech wave with great B2B solutions like Bankingly or our first local unicorn, dLocal. I think it is worth mentioning the government’s efforts to promote entrepreneurship through the Innovation Agency (ANII) and Development Agency (ANDE). We are well aware that Prometeo was possible thanks to their support and as a startup, we are a result of the whole ecosystem pushing us to grow.
What can we expect from Prometeo over the balance of 2021?
Aleman: We are pushing hard for Open Banking adoption in Brazil, México, and Colombia. For those countries, it’s a challenging shift so we want to provide the best possible solution. That’s why we are releasing a payment feature that allows automated payments across banks in those countries. At the same time, we are on a mission to provide full coverage across LATAM. So this year it’s all about expansion, coding, and growth!
Learn more about fintech in Latin America and the work of Prometeo.
Here’s an idea: a corporate card that incentivizes spending less rather than rewarding you for spending more.
Ramp, a New York-based fintech launched by Eric Glyman, Gene Lee, and Karim Atiyeh, has raised $115 million in Series B funding to power this approach to business expense management. Taking Ramp’s total capital to $320 million, the investment gives the company a valuation of $1.6 billion.
“Co-founding a fintech unicorn was never my plan,” Ramp CEO Glyman wrote on the company’s blog in a funding announcement, “and almost feels crazy given my job 12 years ago was selling t-shirts and jeans.”
The round was led by D1 Capital Partners and Stripe. Joining them were Founders Fund, Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, Redpoint, and Box Group. Ramp also announced that it had received a $150 million line of debt financing from Goldman Sachs. “During our next phase of growth,” Glyman added, “we plan to expand our efforts to bring the value of Ramp to more businesses in more places and to transform the way more companies do business.”
Ramp offers a corporate card with unlimited 1.5% cash back on every transaction, 10x to 20x higher limits and no fees, and both smart virtual and physical cards with built-in spend management controls. An integration with Slack makes it easy for managers to get alerts, approve expenses in real-time, and respond to issues from within the business communication platform.
Ramp says that it has identified more than $10,000,000 in annualized savings for 1,000+ customers, with the average Ramp customer saving in excess of $100,000. Companies using Ramp’s spend management platform range from startups to corporations, and include technology innovators in their own right such as Clubhouse and Finovate alum Marqeta. The technology is integrated with popular accounting platforms such as Netsuite, Sage Intacct, Xero, QuickBooks, and more than 100 others.
Onboarding its first company in 2019 and launching publicly one year later, Ramp has experienced 4x growth over the past six months. Glyman said the company is approaching annualized transaction volume of more than $1 billion.
Today brings news that Plaid has secured a massive $425 million investment in a round led by Altimeter Capital. The Series D round also features participation from Silver Lake, Ribbit Capital, and other current investors, and gives the firm a total capital amount of more than $734 million. Now sporting a valuation of $13.4 billion, Plaid said it will use the additional capital to “grow its platform, invest in infrastructure, payments capabilities and global expansion,” according to the company’s U.K. head, Keith Grose.
In a blog post titled “Digital finance is everywhere, but it’s just getting started,” Plaid CEO and co-founder Zach Perret described how, in some ways, the dream that led to the founding of Plaid “nearly a decade ago” is beginning to come true. “We dreamt of a financial system that was built to empower consumers and unlock financial freedom for everyone,” Perret said. “We are humbled to watch as fintech continues to expand and improve the financial lives of billions of people worldwide.”
More specifically, Perret’s post makes it clear that “scale” is the next big objective for the San Francisco, California-based fintech. In order to meet increasing global demand, as well as deliver on the growing expectations of ever-more-digitally-savvy consumers, Plaid will continue to invest in API technology as well as “tools and services to support enhanced privacy, personalization, decisioning, and automation.”
Founded in 2012, Plaid made its Finovate debut two years later at our developers conference, FinDEVr. The company has grown from an API-building technology infrastructure startup to now also offer key insights into the data access it provides via a suite of analytics solutions. Plaid’s technology enables users to access detailed transaction histories, setup direct debits and payouts, verify borrower assets, user identities, and real-time account balances; and make instant, in-app bank payments.
Since inception, Plaid has analyzed more than 10 billion transactions. Use cases for the company’s technology range from personal finance, lending, and wealth management, to consumer payments, banking, and business finance.
New York City-based Rho Technologies has inked a partnership with Sterling National Bank, the principal subsidiary of Sterling Bancorp that specializes in serving small-to-medium sized businesses as well as consumers. Sterling will leverage Rho’s digital Banking-as-a-Service platform, Rho Business Banking, to support its customer growth and expansion objectives.
Sterling National Bank’s Matthew Smith, Executive Managing Director for Direct Banking and BaaS, called the partnership “an important step” in expanding its portfolio of BaaS arrangements, as well as speeding up the bank’s “organization-wide digital transformation to offer customer-centric, digitally-enabled solutions to the marketplace.”
The Rho Business Banking platform combines collaborative finance software and commercial-grade banking in a single solution. Relying on a unified platform, team members can take advantage of integrated, intelligent solutions for A/P, budgeting, data automation, and accounting integrations. Rho offers no-fee global payments, up to 1.5% cash back on all spending, and access to its team of “world-class bankers.”
“Rho is thrilled to collaborate with Sterling National Bank,” Rho Technologies CEO and co-founder Everett Cook said. “We spent a lot of time seeking a partner that had the capabilities and scale that our current and future customers need. We look forward to working with Sterling in supporting our future product and service offerings.
With more than $30 billion in assets, Sterling National Bank made fintech headlines earlier this year when it announced a partnership with Google Pay to offer digital checking and savings accounts through the Google Pay platform. Headquartered in New York, Sterling National Bank also teamed up with Goalsetter during African American History Month to provide seed funding for a program to support financial inclusion and literacy among students in underserved communities.
“This critical initiative reinforces Sterling’s commitment to financial education and empowering young people to reach financial independence,” Smith said. “Black History Month provides an important opportunity to celebrate and promote Black achievement. We are excited to play a part in supporting these inspiring young men to become the next leaders, savers, and investors.”
Rho Technologies began the year with news of a $15 million investment courtesy of a Series A round led by M13 Ventures. The funding, which took the company’s total capital to $19.9 million according to Crunchbase, enabled Rho to launch an integrated accounts payable platform as part of an expansion of its flagship Business Banking offering.
“We’ve developed the modern commercial banking platform built around the way companies operate today: distributed, team-oriented, transparent, and built for scale,” Cook said when the funding was announced in January. “AP is the next step on our mission to help teams work better together with money.”
Spring is the time for newness and novelty. And with FinovateSpring a little over a month away, there’s no better time than the present to introduce a “Who’s New” of innovative fintech companies making their Finovate debut at our all-digital spring conference, May 10 through 13.
BaseCap Analytics: Specializes in analyzing data, diagnosing, and solving problems for banks, insurance companies, and other highly-regulated industries. Headquartered in New York. LinkedIn. @BaseCap_Inc
Coconut Software: Provides cloud-based, customer engagement software solutions that empower community banks and credit unions. Headquartered in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada. LinkedIn. @coconutsoftware
DigiShares: Offers a white-label platform for the issuance, management, and trading of tokenized securities. Headquartered in North Jutland, Denmark. LinkedIn. @digisharesdk
FINBOA: Offers back office automation solutions to help community and regional banks meet regulatory obligations. Headquartered in Houston, Texas. LinkedIn. @finboatweets
FinHealthCheck: Offers a measurement, benchmarking, and insights platform to help employers better understand the financial health of customers and employees. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
Foxit Software: Provides fast, affordable, and secure PDF solutions for businesses and consumers to enable them to “do more with documents.” Headquartered in Fremont, California. LinkedIn. @foxitsoftware
Loan Pro: Offers a SaaS loan servicing solution that leverages automation and data visibility to empower tech-forward lenders. Headquartered in Farmington, Utah. LinkedIn.
Secure: Offers an emergency savings solution to help employees automatically improve financial wellness and feel more financially secure. Headquartered in Kirkland, Washington. LinkedIn. @SecureSave1
Signal Intent: Builds next-generation financial calculators for banks, credit unions, mortgage companies, and insurance companies. Headquartered in New York. LinkedIn.
Urjanet: Leverages its cloud-based, data collection platform to make the world’s utility data easily accessible and usable. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. LinkedIn. @Urjanet
Check out the growing roster of companies that are already on-board for FinovateSpring next month. And be sure to visit our registration page to pick up your ticket and save your spot for our annual spring fintech event!
Looking for an opportunity to demo your latest fintech innovation?Reach out to our Events Team today and find out how to be a part of FinovateSpring in May.
When it comes to the competition for investment dollars, Finovate alums are off to their best start to date. Having raised more than $3.3 billion in funding in the first three months of 2021, companies that have demoed their innovations on the Finovate stage are attracting VC capital at the fastest rate in years.
In fact, Finovate alums in Q1 of 2021 raised more money than in the previous four first quarters combined.
This year’s powerful first quarter came courtesy of nearly a dozen, nine-plus figure investments. Global breadth was wide. Among the countries represented by the quarter’s top ten equity investments are Sweden, Brazil, Germany, and the U.K. And within the U.S., innovators from familiar locations in Silicon Valley share our top ten list with fintechs from Boston, New York, and Lehi, Utah.
Top Equity Investments
Klarna: $1 billion
Nubank: $400 million
Blend: $300 million
MX: $300 million
Feedzai: $200 million
Jumio: $150 million
OutSystems: $150 million
Mambu: $135 million
Stash: $125 million
Blockchain.com: $120 million
The top ten equity investments of the quarter represented $2.88 billion or 87% of the quarterly total. As large as these investments were, they represented a smaller share of the quarter’s overall total than we’ve seen in the past few years. In 2020, the top ten investments made up more than 99% of the Q1 total. In 2019, the top ten represented more than 91% of the total raised by Finovate alums for the first quarter.
Here is our detailed alum funding report for Q1 2021.
January: More than $1.3 billion raised by 10 alums
If you are a Finovate alum that raised money in the first quarter of 2021 and do not see your company listed, please drop us a note at [email protected]. We would love to share the good news! Funding received prior to becoming an alum not included.
Digital Onboarding, a company that offers solutions to enable banks and credit unions to better engage their customers, has announced a partnership with Small Business Resources (SBR). The company, which helps banks acquire small business deposits, and provides treasury management and lending services, will use Digital Onboarding’s platform to help its client banks boost engagement and increase revenue.
Specifically, the collaboration will enable Small Business Resources to offer a new branded solution, SBR FullWallet, to better serve the 42% of SMEs that, according to research from Accenture, believe that alternative providers can do a better job than traditional banks when it comes to serving small and medium-sized businesses.
“For banks, small businesses are significantly more profitable than consumers, but a large percentage of small business customers are unengaged and at risk,” Digital Onboarding CEO Ted Brown explained. “I am thrilled to partner with Small Business Resources to help regional and community banks deepen their business relationships and better compete in today’s marketplace.”
The challenge of new rivals was top of mind for Small Business Resources CEO Robert Boorin, as well. “Banks are facing stiff competition from fintechs and Neobank providers that are investing heavily to attract small and medium-sized business banking customers,” Boorin said. “Business banking relationship managers struggle to build deep relationships with all of the customers in their portfolios. SBR FullWallet will enable our Partner Banks to deliver timely and highly personalized communications that make it easier for small businesses to adopt additional products and digital banking services.”
Launched in 1998, SBR was founded to bring small business marketing solutions to institutions in financial services, insurance, and other strategic industries. With services ranging from customer acquisition and engagement to cross-selling and onboarding, SBR blends traditional and digital media services to ensure that financial institutions have multi-channel access to SMEs.
Digital Onboarding most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall in 2018. At the event, the company showed how its platform gives banks and credit unions the email and marketing automation resources to create personalized digital journeys that educate and engage their customers. More recently, Digital Onboarding has announced partnerships with a sizable number of regional banks and credit unions including American Bank of Commerce, New York University FCU, Pacific Service Credit Union, Spirit FCU, and Southwest Financial FCU – all in the first quarter of 2021.
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Digital Onboarding was founded in 2015. The company has raised more than four million dollars in funding from investors including FINTOP Capital, Detroit Venture Partners, and Jack Henry & Associates. Digital Onboarding’s most recent financing came in August of last year; the amount of the investment was not disclosed.
This week we learned that Norway-based Finovate alum Signicat has teamed up with a German software company Cryptshare to market a new B2B identity verification solution. The technology combines email encryption and secure file transfer with trusted sender and recipient identities to make business communications safer and more accountable.
In other fintech news from the Nordics, Santander Consumer Bank in Norway went live with a new PFM app that leverages open banking solutions from Nordic API Gateway. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, Nordic API Gateway made its Finovate debut last month at our all-digital fintech conference, FinovateEurope.
At the event, co-founder and CTO Gudmundur Hreidarsson demonstrated how the company’s platform simplified open banking payments and access to financial data, offering powerful account-to-account payment services through a single API. More than 40 financial institutions in Europe – including Lunar, Danske Bank, OP Financial Group, and Checkout Finland – rely on Nordic API Gateway’s open banking services.
“Current payment rails such as cards are very expensive for businesses and and increasingly inconvenient for consumers,” Hreidarsson said during his presentation last month. “Open banking changes that. It enables payments with low fixed fees per transaction rather than the high percentage fees of cards which can mean very significant cost savings for businesses – and is very convenient for consumers.”
“But getting into open banking and using open banking is hard,” he added. “It’s really hard. The APIs of the banks are slow to mature and there is still quite some way to go. Businesses are just starting to realize what kind of use cases can be solved with open banking. And consumers are only now discovering the convenience of paying with their accounts. That’s why we built Aiia, to offer an open banking platform that simply works.”
Companies from the Nordics (Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, and Greenland) have been well represented at FinovateEurope of late. This year alone featured – in addition to Nordic API Gateway – two companies from Sweden: Stockholm’s Dreams and Gothenburg’s Econans. Our most recent in-person FinovateEurope conference – held in Berlin, Germany – featured three companies from the region, as well: ReceiptHero and NordCheck of Finland, and Subaio of Denmark. Other Nordic fintechs that have demonstrated their technologies live on the FinovateEurope stage over the years include BehavioSec, Tink, and Klarna (Sweden); Encap Security, EVRY, Monobank, and Spiff (Norway); Meniga and Trustev (Iceland/U.K. and Iceland); and Mistral Mobile (Finland).
“It certainly seems that Schumpeterian destruction, where creating new markets is preceded by old ones being challenged or even destroyed, applies in the Nordics,” the team of Frida Jonsdottir, Olli Toivonen, Visa Jaatinen, Arttu Utti, and Richard Lindqvist wrote in the introduction to their FinTech in the Nordics: A Deloitte Review. “The Nordic FinTech market is rapidly growing and diversifying, with more companies and new technologies being created. This is happening regardless of the fact that the incumbent financial institutions are challenged by the lagging economic growth rates and ever changing regulatory burden, both of which afflict those who are looking to enter the market.”
Read the rest of the Deloitte report on fintech in the Nordics. For more about fintech in the region, check out:
Four Influential FinTech Companies Disrupting Norway’s Financial Space – IBS Intelligence
Top 5 FinTech Companies Leading the Swedish Market — IBS Intelligence
The Africa Report profiled Indicina, a Nigeria-based startup that offers automated tools to assess creditworthiness, as it nears completion of a million dollar investment.
