This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.
Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Natural language processing technology innovator Eigen Technologies has added $5 million (£4 million) to its Series B, taking the round’s total to $42 million and giving the firm more than $60 million in overall capital. The funding comes from ING Ventures and is part of a “broader strategic partnership” that blends Eigen’s NLP technology with ING’s experience in applying machine learning to financial services.
Eigen Technologies co-founder and CEO Dr. Lewis Z. Liu put the investment from ING in the context of the two firms’ years-long relationship. “(We) have found them to have some of the most advanced thinking in the market in the application of machine learning in financial services,” Liu said, “something that comes from their fantastic innovation culture.”
ING currently uses Eigen’s NLP technology in its LIBOR replacement and loan operations. Via the strategic partnership, the companies will accelerate deployment of Eigen’s technology in other areas, including trade finance and small business banking.
Eigen leverages machine learning to extract data from a diverse range of documents, and then integrate that data into the workflows of its customers. The company’s algorithms use pattern recognition to examine words, phrases, and sections of text to help businesses review documents for compliance purposes, automatically extract granular information from asset portfolios, and has applications in fraud identification, contract negotiation, and other activities.
ING Chief Innovation Officer and CEO of ING Ventures Benoît Legrand praised Eigen’s ability to deploy its technology in multiple use cases such as retail and wholesale banking. “This partnership will allow both companies to work closer together when implementing use cases through data and process analysis,” Legrand said, “so as to accelerate Eigen’s advantage in NLP as well as ING’s digital transformation.”
Eigen Technologies demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall 2019. The company has teamed up with more than 25% of the G-SIBs (globally systematically important banks), as well as major asset managers, insurers, hedge funds, and law firms. Eigen was founded in 2014 and has offices in London, U.K. and New York City.
We recently shared the news that restrictions on the ability of banks in India to work with cryptocurrency exchanges was overturned by the country’s Supreme Court.
With this in mind, and given the growing interest in India as a fintech power, we spoke with Neeraj Khandelwal, co-founder of CoinDCX, a cryptocurrency trading platform and liquidity aggregator in India. The company, founded in 2018 and based in Singapore, recently won the Excellence in Finance – Companies award by FiNext. Last month, CoinDCX launched its cryptocurrency derivative trading platform, DCXfutures. Bain Capital Ventures is among the firm’s investors.
Finovate: The biggest news in India in terms of the cryptocurrency market has to be the Supreme Court’s overturning of the Central Bank’s ban on cryptocurrencies. What can you tell us about the impact of the ban and the effect of the ruling striking it down?
Neeraj Khandelwal: The banking ban was related to the suspension of banking relationships with individuals or businesses dealing with cryptocurrencies, but crypto businesses were still free to operate on their own. In response, CoinDCX innovated and offered peer-to-peer services for the buying and selling crypto through INR.
After the verdict, banking relations have resumed once again. CoinDCX became the first cryptocurrency platform in India to integrate bank account transfers, just six hours after the Supreme Court’s ruling. Today, we are seeing 10x growth in signups on a day-to-day basis. Our product, Insta, which allows customers to buy crypto with INR, has also seen high hits. Overall, the market is in an upswing.
Finovate: What is the potential of the cryptocurrency market in India? How widespread are cryptocurrencies now and what factors are driving growth in adoption in India?
Khandelwal: Less than five million people currently hold cryptocurrencies in India today. However, listing websites like exchangewar.info have shown that the highest volumes are coming from India, so there is indeed great potential here. With a population of over one billion, India stands to contribute significantly to a large part of the global crypto volume and the industry as a whole.
In India, there is a growing number of cryptocurrency exchanges and startups that are constantly innovating to strengthen and expand the industry. In addition, India holds many favourable advantages for cryptocurrency adoption—for instance, with an average age of 27 years, India has a huge working population with disposable income on the rise.
Finovate: Many of us outside of India are fascinated by the country’s cashless experiment. At this time, what has been learned from that experience and what is the future of cashlessness in India?
Khandelwal: The writing on the wall is crystal clear that cashlessness is the way to go. This was first witnessed on an extremely large scale during the time of demonetization in late 2016. The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which is the umbrella body for retail payments and settlements in India, revealed that the value of UPI transactions for December 2019 was INR 2.02 Lakh Cr. This figure is expected to grow as cashlessness brings greater convenience and faster transactions.
As cryptocurrencies are entirely digital, it promotes greater benefits for cashlessness in comparison to fiat currencies. I believe that in the coming years, the Indian economy will be built on the foundation of a cashless society, with both digital fiat and cryptocurrencies working in parallel.
Finovate: You are part of the founding team of CoinDCX. Can you tell us a little about the company, the market it serves, and the role it plays in helping pave the way for broader adoption of cashless technologies?
Khandelwal: CoinDCX specializes in crypto-enabled fintech services. Sumit Gupta and I founded CoinDCX in 2018, with a mission to connect billions of people to global financial markets. Today, CoinDCX is reputed to be India’s most trustworthy cryptocurrency trading platform and remains one of the strongest products in our service offerings. CoinDCX has empowered its traders with a bouquet of industry-first crypto-based products to trade better using liquidity from the world’s leading exchanges like Binance, Huobi Global and OKEx.
By bringing all crypto-trading products under a single roof, our products are designed to cater to all types of traders, keeping their experience, risk tolerance, and frequency of trading into consideration.
Our users have found the platform to be simple and effortless. Anyone can trade in 500+ markets with DCXtrade, convert their INR to cryptocurrencies and vice versa on DCXInsta, earn by lending their holdings with DCXlend, and leverage their trades up to 6X in 250+ Altcoins using DCXmargin.
Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world.
Asia-Pacific
Alipay to encourage 40 million merchants and service providers to use its mini programs as competition with WeChat intensifies.
Hong Kong will soon have a new challenger bank as Standard Chartered’s Mox Bank opens for business later this year.
Southeast Asian ride-hailing firm turned super app company Grab to use Wirecard for payment processing.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Visa and Nigeria-based mobile money platform Paga forge strategic partnership to bring more security and convenience to mobile payments.
South African cloud platform builder Jini Guru teams up with product engineering firm Azilen Technologies to build fintech solutions for emerging markets.
Modern Ghana features WorldRemit Country Manager Gbenga Okejimi on the country’s fintech industry.
Central and Eastern Europe
Total Croatia News featuresMicroblink in its look at Croatian companies making the Financial Times’ 100 Fastest Growing Companies in Europe roster.
International Banker profiles Poland’s digital banking leader mBank.
Hamburg, Germany-based lender Kreditech rebrands as Monedo
Middle East and Northern Africa
Saudi Arabia Monetary Authority (SAMA) hires payments technology company HPS to provide a QR-based payments system.
Orange Money goes live in Morocco after receiving authorization from the Bank Al Maghrib.
Business Chief Middle East looks at the top 10 fintech startups in the Middle East and UAE.
Central and Southern Asia
FamPay, a Bengaluru, India-based fintech that is building a payments network for teens, picks up $4.7 million in seed funding.
Bloomberg Quint looks at the controversy over the Reserve Bank of India’s moratorium on Yes Bank and its impact on fintech companies in the country.
My Republica asks whether or not India’s cashless revolution can be extended to Nepal.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Mexican fintech Clip launches new “point of sale in the palm of your hand” solution, Clip Total.
Born2Invest look at how fintech platforms are supporting female entrepreneurs in Mexico.
Fintech-as-a-service company Rapyd partners with Brazilian payment providers Dock and Banco Rendimento.
For all the talk of challenger banks in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the U.K., the movement to bring alternative banking options to consumers and small businesses in the U.S. may deserve more attention than it tends to get. And this week’s news that SME-based challenger bank NorthOne has raised $21 in Series Afunding, is a reminder of why.
“We created NorthOne to serve businesses that are often underserved by big banks,” bank CEO Eytan Bensoussan explained. “Having grown up in a family of small business owners myself, I know first-hand what to expect when it comes to small business banking.”
The round was led by Battery Ventures’ Shiran Shalev, and featured participation from Redpoint Ventures and Tom Williams. The investment takes the bank’s total capital to more than $23 million.
“With this funding,” Bensoussan added, “NorthOne will be able to continue to develop solutions that simplify the most painful part of managing a small business, its finances.” The additional capital will also enable the challenger bank to add to its product and engineering teams, as well as spend more on marketing and customer acquisition.
NorthOne offers small and medium-sized businesses a digital, FDIC-insured, business checking account with mobile ACH, wires, check deposits, and access to 300,000 fee-free ATMs across the U.S. NorthOne’s mobile-first, API-enabled platform also offers overseas vendor payments, and software integration with expense management, accounting, and e-commerce systems. The company noted that, in the second half of last year, it has signed up 1% of all small businesses that applied for bank accounts in the U.S.
“Millions of dollars are spent using NorthOne debit cards every month,” Bensoussan wrote on the company’s blog today. “And we expect those numbers to keep rising as we open thousands upon thousands of new NorthOne bank accounts each month.”
Founded in 2016, NorthOne launched its small business banking account last fall, in partnership with Radius Bank.
One of the more consistently insightful observers of the fintech industry, author Chris Skinner, highlighted the rise of central bank digital currencies as one of the more surprising conversations at FinovateEurope this year.
“China’s about to launch one, there’s going to be a digital dollar from the Fed at some point probably,” Skinner said. “And the implications of that on cross border payments and infrastructure was one of the topics that was a little bit off track to me because it hadn’t come up before. So I enjoyed that immensely.”
That said, the man behind theFinanser.com and chair of the Financial Services Club spent the majority of our conversation in Berlin talking the discussions he’s had with leaders in the banking industry who are tackling the challenge of digital transformation head on – and succeeding. These insights are at the core of Skinner’s upcoming book, Doing Digital, to be published in April.
Skinner also shared some insights on banks and their role in digital identity management. He noted Head of OP Lab for Finland’s OP Financial Group Kristian Luoma who pointed out that even in a future in which banks aren’t involved in payments or authentication due to intermediaries like Square and Apple ID, for example, there is still a critical role for banks to play. But banks must be ready to share the ball.
“It’s one of the few times I’ve heard a bank actually stating that in such a clear way, because most banks still think they have to own and control everything,” Skinner observed. “The idea of being just a player in a system – that’s the way we have to think for the future.”
Here are some of the top takeaways from our conversation with Chris Skinner this year at FinovateEurope in Berlin.
On why a “bare-knuckle approach” to the challenge of successful digital transformation is appropriate – if not required
Skinner: Digital transformation is not easy, it’s really hard, it takes years, it involves balancing business-as-usual with business-as-unusual, and it’s something that had to be led by the chief executive and chairperson and cannot be delegated. I find too many banks think that digital (transformation) is a project or a function or a budget that can be delegated. But that’s absconding the reality. The reality is that you have to own it.
On the swim-or-sink approach companies that succeed in digital transformation have adopted to ensure a digital-positive culture
Skinner: The most difficult thing in any transformational project is getting the middle management to buy into the project and participate. And commit. Because often the middle management are the most worried about what’s happening. They think they are going to lose their job or they might lose their part of the organization or they might lose their power. They might lose their people. They might lose their promotion. So they fear change rather than embrace it. And it’s really a case of: how do you bring those people with you?
On the progress some innovative banks are making toward digital transformation.
Skinner: One of (the banks I interviewed for Doing Digital) had a head of ecosystems. It’s the first time I ever met anybody at a bank who’s called the “head of ecosystems.” His pure role was to go out and find appropriate partnerships – in the world of APIs and apps and analytics – on open platforms and bring them in to work with the bank. At the time, they had about ten partnerships, and I think today they’ve more than doubled that number. So there are some banks taking it very seriously.
African American comedian Richard Pryor joked after seeing the classic, 1976 movie Logan’s Run that the future didn’t look so bright to him. Why? Well, with no black people cast in the futuristic sci-fi flick, the legendary funny man surmised that, perhaps, “White folks ain’t planning on us being here.”
A similar thought comes to mind when anticipating the upcoming presentation by strategic futurist and TEDx Curator Nancy Giordano at FinovateSpring in May. In spite of the increasing evidence that the future belongs to women, the ranks of futurists – the people helping us understand, anticipate, and prepare for the world to come – tend to feature far fewer women than you might imagine.
This is just one of many reasons to look forward to Giordano’s keynote opening address “Navigating the Big Shift – How Exponential Technologies are Changing … Everything.”
A guest lecturer at Singularity University, and a ten-year TEDx curator, Giordano is recognized as one of the top female futurists in the world. A frequent panelist at South by Southwest, she has been on the board of the retail trade association, GMDC, and on the advisory council of both Retail Tomorrow and Future Frontiers, a fintech conference designed to help strengthen community banks. She also is a part of Austin, Texas-based, artificial intelligence services provider KUNGFU.AI.
And given her theme at FinovateSpring, of how big shifts change everything, it is easy to wonder how a shift in perspective on the future – from male-generated to female-generated – can fundamentally enhance our capacity to cope with technological change.
“You are also a human that is going through this. You are a parent, you are a son or daughter. You are part of a community that is wrestling with these questions,” she said in a compilation of remarks titled What Does the Future Expect from Us and How Do We Create that Future? “It’s hitting us personally, not just professionally.” She used the example of a group of women, all strangers, spontaneously consoling a young mother and her child at an airport as the model for the kind of take-action agency and humanistic focus she believes is required in order to build the future we need.
To this end, Giordano warns businesses to avoid the temptation to not make decisions. She uses the metaphor of training soldiers to act dynamically in the face of often existential uncertainty to explain why companies need to move beyond pining for “killer apps” or “the right time.” Often, she notes, by the time that’s happened, it’s often too late.”
Giordano’s futurism is a human-centered one. In response to an extended discourse from a cloud computing specialist who was extolling the virtues of the digital cloud during a conference panel, Giordano asked, “what is the equivalent of the human cloud? What allows us to level up in that same way? And are social technologies keeping up with digital technologies?”
Again and again, Giordano emphasizes less the new gadgets and gizmos to come from exponential technology development and instead reinforces how these technological changes will require new behavior on our part. “This is not just about understanding the Shift,” she says of the “permanent state of ambiguity” that characterizes our technological – and social – present and future. “It calls to a different kind of leadership, or ‘leadering’, or posture, or approach.”
To promote the gender goal of 50/50 diversity in financial services, women who register by this Friday, March 13, can purchase a ticket to any 2020 Finovate event at a 50% discount. Just enter the code EQUALITY on the booking form.
Small and medium-sized businesses working with Australian cross-border payments company Airwallex will be getting some help with their books. The company has announced a new partnership with New Zealand-based, cloud accounting company Xero.
Specifically, the newly-announced collaboration will enable Airwallex customers to reconcile their domestic and international payments by connecting their multi-currency financial transactions in Airwallex to Xero. Businesses will get daily updates of their transactions via their Xero bank feeds, accelerating and simplifying the reconciliation process, and saving companies both time and money.
“As more small businesses enter overseas markets, it’s important that their multi-currency payments flow seamlessly in Xero and are automatically reconciled,” Xero Financial Industry Director Ian Boyd said. “This integration with Airwallex will ensure our mutual customers spend less time on administrative tasks and more on what’s important to them – running their business.”
The integration is live in Australia and will be made available in both the U.K. and Hong Kong later in 2020.
Airwallex leverages its proprietary technology and infrastructure to facilitate low-cost, high-speed payments and collections around the world. The company allows SMEs to access interbank FX rates on international transactions, and enables them to open Airwallex accounts in the U.S., U.K., and European Union to conduct their international operations. Airwallex’s partnership with Xero comes on the heels of its teaming up with Visa for the launch of its Airwallex Borderless Card, which makes it easier for SMEs to do their banking business online.
Calling an integration with Xero, “one of the most requested integrations from our customers,” Airwallex Co-founder and CEO Jack Zhang said that the partnership was part of a “wider international rollout” the company will launch over the course of the year. “This is the start of a series of capabilities that we plan to introduce with Xero to improve the way small businesses manage their finances across platforms,” Zhang said.
With ten international offices, including locations in Hong Kong, London, Shanghai, San Francisco, and Bangalore, Airwallex has raised more than $200 million in funding from investors including DST Global, Sequoia Capital China, and Tencent. The company was founded in 2015.
Founded by former CEO Rod Drury and a Finovate alum since 2011, Xero has grown into one of the world’s major, cloud-based accounting software platforms. This year, the company announced a partnership with Square to power instant invoice payments in Australia, and collaborated with Macquarie Group on a new initiative to help support the financial advisory and planning industry in Australia.
Steve Vamos took the helm as Xero’s CEO in 2018. The following year, the company reached 1.8 million subscribers and positive free cash flow for the first time.
Courtesy of a partnership with a pair of current customers, card issuing platform Marqeta is open for business in Australia. The company announced today that its arrival in the Asia-Pacific market will also help support fellow Finovate alum Klarna and customer Doordash as they expand in the country.
“Card issuing is on its way to being an $80 trillion global opportunity by 2030, and Marqeta is perfectly positioned to take advantage of this over the coming years,” Marqeta founder and CEO Jason Gardner said. “The Australian market relies heavily on card spending and is digitizing rapidly. It is a market that was important to our customers and where we saw a lot of potential for Marqeta technology to help revolutionize customer experience in payments.”
Marqeta’s announcement comes in the wake of news that the company – in partnership with Visa – had earned certification to process payments in 10 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In Australia, the first market in the APAC where Marqeta’s services will be available, the company hopes to take advantage of both the high penetration of traditional bank accounts compared to the rest of the region, as well as a boom in digital payments.
With the first transactions facilitated by Marqeta in late January, partner Klarna is already appreciating the results. “Our close collaboration in bringing an entirely new product offering and shopping experience to the Australian market in record time has been a big success,” Koen Koppen, Klarna CTO, said. “The positive reaction of Australian consumers is evident in just how many are downloading and using the app and virtual card each day.”
An alum of our developers conference, Marqeta delivered a presentation on Democratizing Issuer Payment Processing with Just-in-Time Funding at FinDEVr Silicon Valley in 2016. The Oakland, California-based company was last valued at nearly $2 billion, following a May 2019 Series E round that added $260 million to Marqeta’s coffers.
When it comes to defending your data, Enveil’s speciality is helping prevent you from losing it while you’re using it. The company, which picked up $10 million in funding last month and made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in 2017, enables businesses to securely perform analysis on encrypted data at scale.
“Over the past three years, we’ve successfully created a market, solidified customer use cases, executed enterprise deployments, and expanded our capabilities, for protecting data in use where it is and as it is today,” company CEO and founder Ellison Anne Williams explained when the company’s Series A round was announced. She added that the funding will help the company market its ZeroReveal product suite on a “global scale” and, indeed, the company announced just a few days later that it was opening a new office in London.
Enveil VP of Sales Craig Trautman referred to the London opening as “an important first step toward expanding our footprint in the regions most directly affected by evolving global regulatory standards.”
Founded in 2016, Williams launched Enveil after years of working with institutions like the National Security Agency – where she was a Senior Researcher for more than ten years – and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. She has leveraged this experience – and advanced degrees in mathematics (algebraic combinatorics and set theoretic topology) and computer science (machine learning) – into building one of the more innovative companies in the secure data collaboration / privacy enhancing technologies industry.
In a commentary for Dark Reading last month, Williams explained how a focus on securing data itself is one of the best ways for companies to negotiate an ever-shifting regulatory environment. To avoid the “hamster wheel of compliance,” she argued, businesses should learn how to secure data rather than the “networks, applications, and endpoints” that data uses.
The biggest challenge with securing data is that one of its most critical states – the state of being used – is also the most challenging state to secure. Compared to data that is not being used – data either at rest or in transit – data in use, according to Williams, represents the “point of least resistance” for the latest generation of cybercriminals. This is in large part because many of the technologies to secure data in use have historically not been “practical enough for commercial use.”
And this is where Enveil comes in. By discovering a way to apply technologies like homomorphic encryption, that are effective defenses for data in use, in a commercial context, Enveil offers businesses in verticals ranging from financial services and supply chain finance to cloud security and healthcare a way to securely work with secure data without having to decrypt it.
Enveil’s flagship solution, its ZeroReveal Compute Fabric, is a two-party platform of a ZeroReveal Client application which resides within the enterprise, and the ZeroReveal Server application, which is located where the data is kept. Via standard APIs, the technology works alongside the business’s current protections to provide security during the data processing lifecycle. Within this solution, Enveil offers functionality to power searches of secure data (ZeroReveal Search), conduct analytic investigations on encrypted data (ZeroReveal Analytics), and support the use of secured enclaves like Intel’s SGX (ZeroReveal Enclave).
In addition to expanding geographically, Enveil is also looking to add to its team. The company is specifically looking to bring on engineering talent to support new products, as well as additional sales and marketing team members to help drive Enveil’s efforts overseas.
“Enveil is stepping up to solve a fundamental security challenge: preserve privacy while ensuring that data remains usable,” C5 Capital Managing Partner Zulfe Ali said. “By empowering organizations to secure data throughout its lifecycle, Enveil’s contributions go beyond adding business value and ensuring compliance.”
A new partnership between intelligence-driven security operations platform ThreatConnect and account takeover prevention solution provider SpyCloud will help individuals take action during the critical time between credential exposure and account breach.
Two of ThreatConnect’s solutions – its Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) and Threat Intelligence Platform (TIP) work jointly to help spot and respond to potential cyber threats. Adding Spycloud’s database of exposed credentials will enable ThreatConnect to more comprehensively scan for personally-identifiable information – email addresses, usernames, passwords, and more – that may be exposed and available for exploitation by cybercriminals and fraudsters shopping for credentials on the dark web.
“Our customers know that poor user password habits put accounts at risk,” ThreatConnect Integrations Product Manager Richard Cody said. “Having access to SpyCloud’s dataset through our platform means they can detect and remediate credential compromises before account takeover attacks begin.”
Austin, Texas-based SpyCloud earned a Best of Show award for its FinovateFall demonstration of its Exposed Credential Monitoring and Alert service. SpyCloud uses human intelligence-gathering strategies to identify and recover stolen assets from threat actors and private sources before they are traded on the dark web. As a result of this approach of going beyond automated solutions and webcrawlers, the company’s technology has resulted in the capture of 40 million exposed assets every week. In addition, SpyCloud also helps protect company employees from future account takeover attacks via its integration into their current authentication system.
“The data we provide to ThreatConnect customers through this partnership will not only allow them to prevent damaging account takeover attacks, but should also give them a better understanding of credential management habits among their employee and customer bases,” SpyCloud Chief Strategy Officer Chris LaConte explained. He added that making password remediation automatic and relying on NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) guidelines for strong, secure passwords are key components of robust cybersecurity and reducing the risk of data breaches.
Last fall, SpyCloud introduced a new suite of automated solutions to support password security maintenance in Microsoft Active Directory. The company has raised more than $28 million in funding, most recently securing $21 million in a round led by Microsoft venture fund, M12. Ted Ross is CEO and co-founder.
Kyndi, Featurespace, Onfido Recognized as AI Innovators in Fintech – A trio of Finovate alums are among the 100 companies highlighted by CB Insights in its newly-available report, AI 100: The Artificial Intelligence Startups Redefining Industries. The report, CB Insights’ 4th edition, focuses on companies that are innovating in the fields of “synthetic voice, quantum machine learning, protein modeling, and more.”
Top level takeaways from the report include the fact that 10% of the companies in the 2020 AI 100 are unicorns with a valuation of more than $1 billion. Most of the companies (65%) are U.S.-based, with Canada and the U.K. coming in second with eight startups each. China has six companies represented in CB Insights’ AI roster.
Kyndi demonstrated its Explainable AI platform at FinovateSpring 2018. The technology leverages machine learning to streamline regulated business operations and provide auditable AI systems. The company was founded in 2014, and is headquartered in San Mateo, California. An alum of FinovateFall, U.K.-based Featurespacedemonstrated its ARIC Fraud Manager at FinovateFall 2016. This solution uses machine learning and adaptive behavioral analytics to identify potential fraud based on anomalous behavior.
Demonstrating its Facial Check with Video solution at FinovateFall 2018, Onfido showed how its technology used machine learning to compare images on identity documents with facial biometric data and digitally verify people’s identities.
Agora Scores $2 Million in Funding – Digital platform banking solution provider Agora is in the process of securing $2 million in funding. News of the investment comes as the company announces opening a new headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
“We selected Atlanta because the region provides us the best combination of access to business development and talent, while also being a part of the growing fintech community,” Agora Services founder and CEO Arcady Lapiro said. Agora made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateSpring, demonstrating its mobile banking solution for teenagers.
Regional banks and credit unions leverage Agora’s technology to provide a digital experience for their customers without having to replace their core banking systems. Agora enables institutions to offer their customers popular digital banking and financial management solutions such as shared accounts, PFM, card controls, money pools, and children’s account management.
“In order for financial institutions to remain competitive,” Lapiro said, “they must have the latest and most robust digital offerings. Banks have to move beyond a website, a standard app, or mobile check deposit. They must compete with the latest fintech technology.”
Here is our weekly look at the latest news from our Finovate alums.
ECOMMPAY becomes the first PSP to integrate with the new PayPal commerce platform.
Singapore Exchange acceptsAyondo’s application to extend submission deadline for its proposal to resume trading.
MYHSM partners with ACI Worldwide to integrate its Hardware Service Module into ACI’s UP platform.
TransferWisegoes live in Portugal in partnership with Activo Bank.
Fiservacquires merchant services company MerchantPro Express.
Leading Vietnamese commercial bank, MSB, will deployMambu’s cloud-native banking platform by the end of this year.
Vantage Bank Texas to deploy digital banking technology from Backbase.
Forte Payment Systemslaunches its new BillPay solution.
TurnKey Lenderpartners with Cambodia-based Sambat to bring real-tie decisioning to their loan application processing.
DemystData to provide contextual data for SparkBeyond.
Roostifyexpands deal with TD Bank to include home equity loans and lines of credit.
HousingWire namesLoan Scorecard a 2020 HW Tech100 Mortgage Winner.
Larkyjoins Visa’s Fintech Fast Track program to integrate Larky’s nudge engagement platform with VisaNet’s global payment network.
New Hampshire Mutual Bancorp migrates to Jack Henry & AssociatesSilverLake System core platform
Finovate Alum Features and Profiles
PayPal Takes to the Google Cloud – Google Cloud has unveiled its latest data center and announced that PayPal will be among the first to move key components of its payments infrastructure to Google’s cloud region.
Conversational AI Innovator Clinc Inks Partnership with Visa – Courtesy of a newly-announced partnership between Visa and the conversational AI innovator, customers of participating banks and credit unions will be able conduct a wide variety of banking operations by communicating directly with their bank accounts using natural, conversational language.
How a Banking License Evolved Neo’s Vision – Neo was founded in 2017 with a vision, as described by CEO Laurent Descout, “to create a platform that can replace the old fashioned banking platform. A true ‘one-stop shop’ that offers all the financial products a corporate client needs to operate in a global environment.”
New Investment Gives Ant Financial a Minority Stake in Klarna – Chinese conglomerate Ant Financial has purchased a minority stake in Sweden’s e-commerce payments innovator Klarna. The terms of the investment were not disclosed, but the company said that the funding amounts to a 1% stake.
Equifax Adds Rental Payment History to Credit Insights – Consumer insights company Equifax is partnering with U.K.-based Credit Ladder, a rent reporting service. Under the partnership, Equifax will leverage data from Credit Ladder to help tenants who pay their rent on time access fairer credit rates.
Thought Machine Locks in $83 Million in Growth Funding – U.K.-based, cloud native, core banking technology provider Thought Machine has just secured Series B funding that will help the U.K.-based company expand into the Asia-Pacific.
The ruling is subject to appeal. But for now, advocates for cryptocurrency trading in India have won the day: the Supreme Court of India has overturned a ban on cryptocurrencies that was issued by the Reserve Bank of India in 2018.
Specifically, the Reserve Bank forbade Indian banks from working with cryptocurrency exchanges out of concerns ranging from “consumer protection” to “market integrity.” And while India’s participation in the worldwide cryptocurrency market is modest (less than 5% when the ban was instituted), the reaction to the ruling was strong, with a number of cryptocurrency exchanges challenging the Reserve Bank in court. This week, the court sided with the exchanges, observing that no bank regulated by the Reserve Bank had been negatively affected by cryptocurrency trading before the ban, and that a complete ban was thus a disproportionate response.
That said, the ban is not yet a settled matter. The RBI plans to file a review petition with the Supreme Court, again citing systemic risk concerns for the country’s banking system should trading in cryptocurrencies be permitted. As of now, however, cryptocurrency exchanges and platforms in the country are free to operate, legal experts say.
FinovateAsia alum TurnKey Lender will help leading Cambodian financial services institution Sambat improve its loan application processing courtesy of a newly-announced partnership. Sambat, which serves both retail customers as well as micro, small, and medium-sized businesses, will use TurnKey Lender’s Unified Lending Solution to accelerate loan decisioning, increase portfolio profitability, and boost customer lifetime value.
TurnKey Lender CEO Dmitry Voronenko praised Sambat as one of Cambodia’s “early adopters of the fully digital approach to banking.” Managing Director for Sambat Harvey Poh called the deployment a “major milestone” and “a testament to our commitment to deliver digital financial services to our customers.”
Founded in 2014, TurnKey Lender has a U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas, and maintains offices in Singapore; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and the Philippines. The company was recognized by Frost & Sullivan’s Asia-Pacific Best Practices Awards at the beginning of the year, taking home top honors in the Singapore Fintech Industry New Product Innovation category.
Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Brazilian challenger bank Nubank launches its Nu credit card in Mexico.
Chilean venture capital fund Magma Partners closes its $50 million fund, the largest ever raised by the firm.
Peruvian fintech Ayllu announces project to map out of all the fintech startups in the country.
Asia-Pacific
Turnkey Lenderforges partnership with leading Cambodian financial institution, Sambat Finance.
Mastercard to play leading role in Series B investment for Indonesian fintech Digiasia.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Cointelegraph takes a deep dive into the emerging fintech economies of Kenya, Ethiopia, and Ghana.
A new payment license requirement may complicate life for Nigerian fintechs.
FLASH International, based in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, announces an initiative to fund fintech startups in the country.
Central and Eastern Europe
Wirecard partners with Estonia-based Xolo to serve the gig economy.
Finovate’s sister publication, Fintech Futures, profiles Polish digital banking provider and Finovate alum Efigence.
Polish asset manager Skarbiec TFI teams up with fintech solution provider NeoXam to enhance its portfolio management.
Middle East and Northern Africa
The UAE’s National Bank of Fujairah to leverage the RippleNet network to provide real-time, cross-border fund transfers to India.
Dubai International Financial Center announces a tripling of the size of its Fintech Hive.
Monoco’s Privatam, which offers structured investment products, goes live in Dubai.
Central and Southern Asia
Indian SME lender SMEcorner raises $30 million in Series B funding.
Supreme Court of India overturns Central Bank’s ban on cryptocurrency trading.
Leap Financial, a fintech platform that specializes in providing financing to Indian students studying abroad, secures $5.5 million in round led by Sequoia India.
U.K.-based, cloud native, core banking technology provider Thought Machine has just secured Series B funding that will help the U.K.-based company expand into the Asia-Pacific. The $83 million raised this week, courtesy of a round featuring all of the company’s existing investors, takes the firm’s total capital to more than $106 million.
Valued at $143 million at the time of its Series A round in 2014, Thought Machine is currently believed to be worth between $220 million and $320 million.
Thought Machine founder and CEO Paul Taylor said that the funding had arrived at a “pivotal stage” in the company’s development, citing both “healthy” revenues and “huge” customer demand. “As well as international expansion we will put further investment into our core technology,” Taylor said, “ensuring that banks will always have the best possible cloud native platform, and allow them to keep up with technology breakthroughs in the future which bring agility, security, resilience, and good economics.”
An alum of European fintech conference, the company demonstrated its core banking solution, Vault, at FinovateEurope 2018 . With this technology, Thought Machine enables both incumbent and challenger banks to operate and compete with a cloud-based offering of their own. Vault offers institutions checking and savings accounts, well as credit cards, loans, and mortgage financing.
Last fall Thought Machine announced a partnership with Standard Chartered’s new digital bank in Hong Kong, and unveiled a new collaboration with Swedish financial group, SEB. Both deals will feature deployment of Thought Machine’s Vault platform.
After expansion to Australia and Japan, Thought Machine plans to go live in the United States later this year.
