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
Three-time Finovate Best of Show winner iProov is bringing its innovations in biometric authentication to the web browser. The company announced the launch of iProov Web today, giving users of laptop, desktop, and tablet computers the same level of security enjoyed by users of iProov’s mobile app.
“iProov Web is a game changer for the digital identity industry,” company CEO Andrew Bud said. “Millions of people around the world have iProoved themselves on a mobile app, accessing online government, banking or travel services securely by proving that they are who they say they are, and that they are genuinely present during the authentication.”
The new offering is geared toward the significant number of people who prefer to use desktops or laptops, particularly for large online purchases and transactions, or when security is a top concern. In their product announcement, iProov cited data that indicated that while the web represented 37% of online traffic, it nevertheless delivered a disproportionate 56% of online revenue.
iProov’s patented Flashmark technology enables mobile apps to confirm genuine presence and provide seamless authentication, support digital onboarding, or assist in account or password recovery. The technology defends against presentation and replay attacks, as well as deepfakes, by ensuring both that there is a real person conducting the transaction and that the real person, is the right person.
London-based iProov most recently demonstrated its facial recognition-based biometric authentication solution at FinovateEurope in Berlin this February, picking up its third consecutive Best of Show award. Also that month, iProov opened a North American headquarters in Catonsville, Maryland at the Research and Technology Park at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
More recently, the company partnered with SK ID Solutions, bringing its technology to customers in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. iProov was founded in 2011.
Derivative Path will embed Currencycloud’s FX technology into its DerivativeEDGE platform, an end-to-end solution for interest rate derivative, FX, and hedge accounting. Together the offering will provide banks with a solution that enables counterparty/order management, electronic spot FX with integrated Request for Quote execution, third party international payments and receipts, and derivatives valuation, as well as compliance reporting.
Derivative Path co-founder and co-CEO Pradeep Bhatia said, “This joint effort will help us leverage our technology capabilities, global infrastructure, and subject matter expertise, to offer banks a platform to manage their FX and payments, a growing need in an underserved space.”
Based in the San Francisco Bay area, Derivative Path partners with financial institutions, buy-side, and commercial end-users to provide over-the-counter, interest rate derivative and FX trading execution and management solutions. Founded in 2013, the company has more than 100 clients and has facilitated thousands of trades with its interest rate, FX, and hedge accounting technology.
Long-time Finovate alum Currencycloud offers 85 APIs over four modules – collect, convert, manage, and pay – that represent the complete B2B cross-border payment workflow. The company has processed $50+ billion to more than 180 countries around the world.
Most recently demonstrating its technology at FinovateSpring 2018, Currencycloud has raised more than $160 million in funding. The company picked up nearly half that sum in a Series E round at the beginning of the year. In February, Currencycloud announced a partnership with U.K. travel money card, Currensea. Mike Laven is CEO.
Technology companies from every corner of the globe have been lending their talent, resources, and solutions to help deal with the health and economic implications of the COVID-19 crisis. While those firms in health technology have obviously played the lead role, innovators in virtually every field of technology are bringing their unique expertise to the challenge.
Here are three ways that companies specializing in digital identity and identity management are helping organizations, institutions, and individuals manage the global pandemic.
Know Your Carrier
One of the key ways that countries like South Korea have “flattened the curve” of the pandemic is through an approach called “test and trace.” This strategy relies on accurately identifying those who have the coronavirus and then tracking down all those individuals who have had contact with the infected individual so that they can be tested for the virus.
For example, In China, in addition to temperature checks outside of public places like restaurants, officials are leveraging smartphones and QR codes to identify those who are infected with the virus, and to track their recent movements to locate others who may have been in contact with the infected person. In the West, the news that Apple and Google are collaborating to develop a contact tracing solution that will help us meet this specific challenge is a positive sign. Yet as hopeful as this opportunity may be, it is not without caveats.
“It’s really important to get the cooperation of the public,” Recode Executive Director Kara Swisher told CNBCs Squawk Box Monday morning during a discussion on the Apple/Google initiative. She flashed her sleep and activity-tracking Oura ring, noting that wearables could be among the mobile technologies that could be used to make contact tracing as seamless as possible. “More power to the tech companies means more power to the tech companies,” she said. “The only question is will they give it back when this is over?”
Know Your Customer
Getting money into the hands of unemployed and furloughed workers is one challenge. Getting money into the bank accounts of businesses forced to close their doors during this period of quarantine and social distancing has proved, in some ways, to be an even steeper challenge. Many in the small business community were caught off guard, for example, when they learned that in order to access federal COVID-19 relief funds they would need to have a relationship with a participating financial institution.
The issue is that, even in an emergency, knowing your partner is paramount. And in order for banks to be financially responsible, they need to pursue the same measure of KYC diligence on applicants for emergency funding as they would for any other banking customer. To fail to do so would leave these institutions vulnerable, potentially, to massive fraud losses – turning an already challenging environment for banks even worse. Making it easier for financial institutions to engage needy SMEs by leveraging many of the innovations in Big Data and advanced machine learning – while remaining compliant and financially responsible – is a slam dunk opportunity for a sizable number of fintechs.
This is a reminder that regtech may not be appear to be the most important subsector within financial technology. But in the same way that the global pandemic is causing us to think as much about epidemiologists as we do about emergency room doctors, the current challenge in KYC also reminds us of how important innovations in regtech are not only within technology, but also for society as well.
Know Your Crew
While many are understandably eager to “re-open the country,” it remains likely that thousands of workers will continue to work remotely – at least in the near term. This phenomenon has been a boon for companies like Zoom that provide technology that enables online conferencing and makes it easier for workers who do not traditionally work from home to do so.
One major challenge for these newly-homebound employees is ensuring that they are logging into their company’s networks and platforms in a safe and secure manner. Beyond having the infrastructure to support remote work, having the capacity to authenticate legitimate remote workers, and to make sure that the data they are transmitting back and forth remains out of the hands of hackers and cybercriminals is critical.
Indeed, one of the discontents of the “Zoom Boom” is that many people using the platform have raised major privacy concerns, including reports that Zoom conferences have been infiltrated by hackers, interrupting live presentations with obscene images.
As with KYC, this is another area where fintech’s regtech calvary is coming to the rescue. Firms like Onfido and Jumio, among many others, have made their identity verification technologies available for free to organizations and institutions in the health and home care fields that are on the frontlines of the fight against the virus.
Payments giant Visa has teamed up with Atlanta, Georgia-based Fold to launch a co-branded debit card that offers rewards in the form of bitcoin. The partnership was announced late last week, and is the fruit of Fold’s participation in Visa’s Fintech Fast Track program.
The new debit cards are expected to be available in July. Users will get up to 10% of their cash purchases credited in Bitcoin. What’s unique about Fold’s approach with the new card is that it enables users to earn Bitcoin while spending in dollars. As Fold CEO and co-founder Will Reeves explained, by spending in dollars and accumulating Bitcoin rather than spending it, users avoid the potential tax implications of selling the digital asset.
This new initiative extends Fold’s business beyond enabling shoppers to buy dollar-denominated gift cards from popular brands like Amazon, Uber, and Starbucks with Bitcoin. Made available on an “early access” basis last fall, the Fold app also gives consumers 20% cashback in bitcoin on all purchases, fiat or crypto.
“We’re changing the fact that rewards points are issued in the form of restricted airline miles, arbitrary points, or depreciating fiat, instead of the best performing asset of the last decade: bitcoin,” Reeves wrote on the company blog back in September. “But unlike existing rewards that require users to give up their privacy for points, Fold’s new app rewards users for shopping privately.”
The partnership is a second bite at the bitcoin apple for Visa. A year ago Visa and cryptocurrency exchange Coinbaseintroduced a Visa debit card in the U.K. The contactless card syncs with the user’s Coinbase account and, for a fee of approximately 2.5%, enables users to make purchases in fiat currency and have the responding amount of the cryptocurrency debited from whichever cryptocurrency account the users selects.
Fold was founded in 2014. The company has raised $3.3 million in funding, and includes Craft Ventures, CoinShares, Slow Ventures, Goldcrest Capital, and Fulgur Ventures among its investors.
Market data distribution and management solutions provide Xignite has scored a patent for the technology behind its CloudAlerts REST API. The patent recognizes the company’s innovation in developing real-time alerts based on pre-defined stock market conditions. This technology can be added to website or mobile apps by developers to provide users with real-time, automatic notifications on everything from price breakouts to volume surges via SMS, email or onscreen.
What’s unique about Xignite’s approach is the way it is able to deliver market data-driven user alerts at scale, incorporating both the wide variety of user preferences as well as processing a sizable volume of exception conditions in real-time. Fellow Finovate alum SoFi leverages Xignite CloudAlerts in its SoFi Invest service, using the technology to warn investors when a portfolio holding drops below critical levels.
“SoFi saw record investing activity last week during the coronavirus outbreak and that really tested our alerts system,” SoFi Trading and Investment Manager Samuel Nofzinger said. “Our customers value the alerts because they help them invest and protect their money better, especially in today’s volatile market.”
Congratulations to eXate Technologies. The U.K.-based cybersecurity firm – and FinovateEurope 2018 alum – earned a spot in Tech Nation’s Cyber 2.0 growth program. This year’s class marks the second cohort for the program, which is geared toward early-stage cybersecurity startups. Companies participating in the six-month accelerator get peer-to-peer learning with program mentors, masterclasses led by expert scale coaches, as well as meetups and networking with peers, investors, and potential clients.
Add Onfido to the list of Finovate alums that are pitching in to help organizations manage the COVID-19 pandemic. The company announced late last week that it is offering six free months’ use of its biometric identity solution to nonprofit organizations that are fighting the coronavirus. Nonprofits in healthcare, home care, and education are among those to benefit from the program, including a company that uses Onfido’s technology to verify completion of COVID-19 testing.
The Finovate Podcast is on fire! If you’ve not been able to keep up, here are links to the latest conversations with host Greg Palmer.
SoFi Inks Agreement to Acquire Galileo Financial Technologies – In a cash and stock deal valued at $1.2 billion, online lender and personal finance innovator SoFi has agreed to acquire financial services API and payments platform, Galileo Financial Technologies.
Building a Financial Advisor for Main Street America – We recently chatted with SuperMoney founder and CEO Miron Lulic to give us an update on the company’s platform that helps consumers reach their financial goals.
BankBazaar Adds $3.8 Million to Series D – The capital comes from Amazon and Walden SKT Venture Fund, who have joined Sequoia, GUS Holdings, and Eight Roads Investments in the round.
What a week it’s been for the challenger bank business in the Land Down Under!
Australian small business challenger bank Judo just announced a major fundraising, securing an investment of $307 million (AUD 500 million) from a pair of Australian government agencies.
The Australian Office of Financial Management (AOFM) and the Australian Structured Finance Support Fund (SFSF) contributed equally. The investment makes Judo the first recipient of funding from Australia’s two-billion dollar small business funding program. The program was initially designed in 2018 to help promote competition between the country’s major banks and to provide more financing opportunities for the country’s small business.
“At a time when the availability of credit has never been more important to tens of thousands of Australian SMEs, Judo is delighted to be able to announce such a substantial investment by the AOFM,” Judo co-founder and co-CEO David Hornery said.
The country’s first SME-oriented challenger bank, Judo earned its full banking license just under a year ago. This spring, Judo announced securing a three-year, $350 million credit facility with Citi. The challenger bank has a deposit book of $860 million (AUD 1.4 billion).
An infusion of capital from the private sector has boosted the coffers of fellow Australian challenger bank 86 400. The firm announced this week that it has raised $20.8 million (AUD 34 million) in new funding in a round led by Morgan Stanley.
The Series A round takes 86 400’s total capital to $57 million (AUD 90 million). Also participating were an Australian superannuation fund, high net worth investors and family offices, as well as fund managers.
“At our current rate of growth, we should hit 500,000 accounts on the platform in the next 12 months,” 86 400 CEO Robert Bell said. “Of course, that will be balanced by growing the lending side of our business and we anticipate having a mortgage book of close to $2 billion by the end of 2021.”
86 400, which bills itself as “Australia’s first smartbank,” launched in September of last year and currently has more than 170,000 accounts on its platform. With more than 350,000 transactions and balance updates processed daily, and a mortgage book of $20 million, 86 400 currently offers two accounts – Pay and Save – that make spending convenient and incentivize savings.
Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world.
Middle East and Northern Africa
Mamo Pay, a Dubai-based fintech developing a P2P payments app, raises $1.5 million in seed funding.
Saudi Arabia’s Halalah attains e-money institution license after graduating ahead of schedule from its sandbox trial period.
UAE-based fintech Rise locks in growth funding believed to be in excess of $1 million.
Central and Southern Asia
Fintech News takes a look at the “10 Fastest Growing Fintechs in India.”
BusinessWorld India examines the role of fintech in driving the digitalization trend in India.
Pakistan Today features American fintech entrepreneur Brandon Timinsky and his efforts to launch SadaPay in Pakistan.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Cryptonews looks at the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on Mexican fintech.
Contexto sees more fintechs in Chile’s future, courtesy of a new global entrepreneur network, Endeavor.
Latin American on-demand delivery startup partners with Arcus to launch new payment app, RappiPay.
Asia-Pacific
Hong Kong fintech Neat raises $11 million in Series A featuring participation from Visa among other investors.
HSBC goes live with its Smart Mobile Onboading for customers in China.
Hong Kong-based online lender Credit Hero partners with Salt Edge.
Sub-Saharan Africa
South Africa’s Vodacom and Kenya’s Safaricom conclude acquisition of mobile money platform, M-Pesa.
Senegalese mobile network operator, Free, deploys Comviva’s mobiquity Money solution.
South Africa’s Intergovernmental Fintech Working Group (IFWG) unveils new innovation hub.
Central and Eastern Europe
Russian payments platform Qiwi picks up investment from Japan’s SBI.
Germany corporate pension and life insurance digitization company Xpension raises $27 million (EUR25 million) in Series C funding.
Fintechs innovating in ecommerce, payments, and real estate populate EU Startups’ look at top 10 Romanian startups for 2020.
Indian online financial products marketplace BankBazaar has boosted its current Series D round by $3.8 million. The capital comes from Amazon and Walden SKT Venture Fund, who have joined Sequoia, GUS Holdings, and Eight Roads Investments in the round. This week’s investment adds to the $30 million in Series D funds BankBazaar raised in 2017. Fellow Finovate alum Experian is the lead investor in the round.
The investment is also the second time Amazon has put capital in the company, having contributed $60 million to BankBazaar’s Series C round in 2015. The company’s total funding stands at north of $115 million.
BankBazaar offers consumers instant customized rate quotes on financial products like loans, mutual funds, and insurance. BankBazaar’s platform enables shoppers to compare offers and apply for products online as well as via its mobile app. More than 50 of India’s top financial companies and insurance firms are featured on BankBazaar’s platform, which also provides information on personal finance trends and tips on how consumers can manage their finances better.
Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Chennai, India, BankBazaar has been a Finovate alum since 2012 when the company demoed its real-time credit processing platform. Last year, the company announced a partnership with furniture and home products marketplace Pepperfry, teamed up with Ujjivan Small Finance Bank for Personal Loans, and added business cards to its offerings courtesy of a collaboration with Yes Bank.
Earlier this year, BankBazaar CEO Adhil Shetty told LiveMint that the company was “on track” to reach profitability in fiscal 2020 and that he was looking to take the company public “in the next few years.” He added that the company has more than 40 million registered customers and recently experienced an average 46% gain in monthly revenue. This was immediately before the challenge of the coronavirus pandemic became clear to many, a topic the company addressed in an open letter last month.
“Digital demand is only going to increase as consumers seek to minimize all physical interactions during and post COVID-19 and we are working on a war footing to ensure people get safe digital access to credit,” Shetty wrote along with co-founders Arjun (COO) and Rati (CPO) Shetty. “We are actively working with leading industry bodies and lenders to develop deeper digital access, something that will become the new normal in a post COVID-19 world.”
In a cash and stock deal valued at $1.2 billion, online lender and personal finance innovator SoFi has agreed to acquire financial services API and payments platform, Galileo Financial Technologies.
Galileo enables companies to build innovative consumer and B2B fintech services via its suite of open APIs. The company’s technology powers a variety of functions including:
account set-up
funding
direct deposit
ACH transfer
IVR
early paycheck deposit
billpay
transaction notifications
check balance
point of sale authorizations
Galileo processed $53+ billion in annualized payment volume in March of this year, more than doubling its September 2019 tally of $26 billion. Notably, SoFi and Galileo are already quite familiar with each other; SoFi’s Sofi Money solution is currently integrated with Galileo’s payments platform and leverages a number of the platform’s account and events functionalities.
Together, the two companies will further combine their efforts to create value for customers of both firms, who will benefit from a feature set that enables them to participate in the transition from “physical-only to a multi-channel digital and physical platform.”
“SoFi has established itself as a leader in the fintech sector, providing our more than one million members a full array of financial products to help them get their money right,” SoFi CEO Anthony Noto said. He credited SoFi’s members for motivating the company to continue innovating, and for encouraging “bigger, bolder, and more expansive” thinking. “Together with Galileo, we will partner to build on our companies’ strengths to drive even greater financial technology innovation, making those products and services available to both current and future partners.”
Galileo will operate as an independent subsidiary of SoFi, post-acquisition, with Galileo CEO Clay Wilkes remaining on board to continue leading the company. Praising SoFi’s suite of solutions for borrowing, saving, spending, and investing, Wilkes said, “these are products that many of our leading fintech clients are asking for. Distributing products through our enterprise class API is the vision behind this combination. I think it’s very powerful.”
SoFi made its Finovate debut in 2017, partnering with Quovo to presentHow Quovo and SoFi Perfected Bank Authentication at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley. The company, based in San Francisco, California and founded in 2011, has raised $2.5 billion in funding, earning a valuation of $4.3 billion as of May of last year.
What does it mean to be financially literate? Is it more important to be able to balance a checkbook or to understand the power of compound interest? Does a financially literate person pay down student debt or consumer debt first? And does a truly financially literate person even take on debt in the first place?
A growing number of fintechs – many of them Finovate alums you’ll meet below – have devised innovative ways to help young people in particular, become better earners, savers, spenders, and investors. The majority of these innovations leverage rewards and gamification to make the educational medicine go down easier. These strategies use everything from gift cards to actual cash to encourage users to successfully complete lessons on personal finance or watch videos on common sense money management.
As companies, these fintechs partner with financial institutions – community banks and credit unions in particular – to help make their financial literacy offerings available to their customers and members. In some instances, companies have successfully partnered with educational institutions which have used their solutions as part of their financial education curricula.
April is financial literacy month. And as the coronavirus-induced economic slowdown – and potential recession – has everyone reconsidering the stability of their financial circumstances, now seems like an especially good time to be reminded of the importance of a solid – contemporary – financial education.
As recently as last fall, Finovate audiences were ranking financial literacy among the top of fintech’s most important themes. Zogo Finance, a Durham, North Carolina-based fintech that made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall, took home a Best of Show award for its Teen Financial Literacy app. Zogo’s solution pays users cash rewards – in the form of gift cards from leading brands – for successfully completing lessons on topics such as budgeting, credit, and investing.
The platform’s more than 300 educational modules were designed by educators at Duke University and ensure that users meet national standards for financial literacy. Zogo has teamed up with more than 11 community banks and credit unions in 12 states since its inception in 2018. The company began this year announcing a new partnership with fellow Finovate alum Bankjoy.
EVERFI, a Washington, D.C.-based company founded ten years before Zogo Finance, is another recent Finovate alum that has made a commitment to promoting financial literacy. The company powers community-oriented financial education for more than 850 financial institutions and 3,500+ partners in all 50 states of the U.S., as well as in Canada and Puerto Rico.
EVERFI, which offers workplace training and other educational programs as well as financial literacy, demonstrated its Achieve solution at FinovateSpring last year. The financial wellness technology enables financial institutions to offer personalized financial education to customers, employees, as well as to small business and corporate banking clients. From savings for college to navigating the homebuying process, EVERFI’s Achieve platform offers financial education that is as relevant as it is comprehensive.
Last fall, EVERFI announced a partnership with Zelle parent Early Warning Services to provide free financial education coursework to more than 1,000 high schools and 50,000+ students. The company began this year working with the MassMutual Foundation and the Washington Wizards NBA team to host the FutureSmart Challenge – an interactive financial literacy event for middle school students. Named to Fast Company’s 2020 World’s Most Innovative Companies roster, EVERFI unveiled a new financial education website earlier this month dedicated specifically to the financial challenges of the coronavirus pandemic.
Plinqit is another platform that made its Finovate debut last year and combines being an actual savings app with financial literacy features. Developed by Ann Arbor, Michigan-based HT Mobile Apps (HTMA), Plinqit leverages its Build Skills feature to pay users for engaging with its educational content. Once users sync their Plinqit account with their bank or credit union checking account and set up as many as five savings goals, Plinqit will help the user set aside a pre-determined amount of money on a customized schedule. Users can earn Plinqit cashback rewards (of approximately 1%) by reaching savings goals, referring friends and family to Plinqit, or by viewing articles and videos on personal finance and financial wellness topics.
A partnership with Arkansas-based First Community Bank ($1.5 billion in assets) put Plinqit back in the fintech headlines at the beginning of the year. The 26-branch bank teamed up with Plinqit parent company HT Mobile Apps in order to provide HTMA’s savings and financial literacy solutions to its customers. More recently, HTMA brought its financial education solutions to ChoiceOne Bank and Marquette Savings Bank.
Provo, Utah-based Banzai is another fintech oriented around financial literacy that made a major splash in its FinovateFall debut in 2018. The company picked up a Best of Show award for a demonstration of its turn-key, Community Reinvestment Act-eligible solution to enable organizations to add personal finance-based educational content – including interactive online simulations – to their websites.
Partnerships with community banks and credit unions enable Banzai to offer its financial literacy solution free of charge. The company provides three tiered courses for youth – Junior, Teen, and Plus – to ensure that the information provided and real-world scenarios are age-relevant and appropriate. Banzai’s curriculum has been used by 60,000 teachers across the U.S. and can be accessed from desktops, tablets, and mobile devices, as well.
In launching a new financial education resource for adults last fall, Banzai Coach, the company made a significant addition to its financial literacy offerings. Banzai Coach provides adult users with financial advice and instruction on how to get out of debt, how to manage basic business finances, and how to maximize their tax-advantaged investments such as retirement accounts, health savings accounts (HSA), and flexible spending accounts (FSA).
“Kids in schools love knowing that their decisions in the game actually have an impact,” Banzai’s Bryce Peterson wrote on the company’s blog announcing the availability of Banzai Coach. “As adults, we have quite the opposite concern: just about every decision we make has some kind of impact we didn’t predict or control.”
One of the most immediate impacts of the worldwide effort to combat the COVID-19 virus is social distancing. And however effective social distancing is in limiting the ability of the coronavirus to spread, it is equally effective in crushing the revenues of businesses large and small.
To help small businesses in the retail sector cope with this challenge, small business cash flow solution provider Kabbage has partnered with Facebook. Together, the two companies will help merchants continue to generate revenue at a time when their customers – for sound reasons based on public health – are largely staying away.
Via the partnership, small businesses can sign up on a new website sponsored by Kabbage: www.helpsmallbusiness.com. This will enable them to sell online gift certificates through Kabbage’s KabbagePayments portal and automatically list them on Facebook. These offers will be visible to Facebook users through their Facebook mobile app; Facebook users can then purchase gift certificates from the www.helpsmallbusinss.com website.
The integration makes it easy for small businesses to sell online gift certificates and place them where they are most likely to be seen by consumers increasingly resorting to online shopping in lieu of traveling to brick and mortar stores. It’s also a way for consumers to support their favorite retailers.
“Now with the powerful reach of Facebook, small business owners have greater opportunity to share gift certificate offers to the community that rely upon them,” Kabbage CEO Rob Frohwein said. “Small businesses are the most impacted in this crisis and this is one way Kabbage is applying its technology and resources to save them.”
The initiative with Facebook is only a small part of Kabbage’s participation in the effort to help SMEs survive the economic consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. The company is one of many helping facilitate relief funding to SMEs via the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The PPP provides funding up to 2.5x average monthly payroll, and the SBA forgives the portion of the loan that is used for critical business operations such as payroll, rent, mortgage interest, or utilities if all employees are kept on staff. Kabbage reports that it has received more than 37,000 applications for the PPP, totaling more than $3.5 million.
“The smallest businesses in America are always the hardest hit, the most vulnerable, and the most in need when a crisis strikes, and together with our bank partner, we are working tirelessly to support them,” Frohwein said.
Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Kabbage has been a Finovate alum since 2010 when the company debuted its Kabbage Loan at FinovateSpring.
Open banking platform for Fortune 500 companies like IBM, Yapily has picked up $13 million (€12 million) in Series A funding. The round was led by Lakestar and takes the company’s total capital to $18 million. Also participating in the funding were existing investors HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and LocalGlobe, as well as angel investors including TransferWise’s Taavet Hinrikus and Twilio’s Ott Kaukve.
This week’s funding comes a year after the company’s last capital infusion – a seed investment of $5.4 million. Yapily will use the new funds to help support adoption of open banking by institutions across Europe.
Based in London and founded in 2017 by former Goldman Sachs executive Stefano Vaccino, Yapily helps drive open banking adoption by connecting banks to fintechs and other financial services providers. The company notes that its recurring revenues have grown by more than 5x over the past six months. Yapily also has increased the size of its London office to 45 employees, and expanded into Italy, Ireland, and France.
“We believe open banking is a force for good. Using our API and infrastructure, we’re not only providing our partners with strong and powerful connectivity to boost their user experiences,” Vaccino said. “But we’re also giving their customers, whether they be customers or businesses, greater control of their finances, through the creation of products and services which can fuel greater financial management and accessibility.”
Vaccino added that this flexibility for institutions and developers was especially valuable “during this period of uncertainy.” This point was echoed by Lakestar partner Stephen Nundy who cited the COVID-19 outbreak in crediting Yapily’s technology as being “best placed” to support financial innovation that drives business growth “across the financial ecosystem.”
In addition to IBM, Yapily includes GoCardless and Intuit Quickbooks among its customers.
With a global pandemic reshaping the way we live and work, Finovate VP Greg Palmer and his Finovate Podcast turned to two of our industry’s most insightful observers this week to help put the current challenges to fintech in context.
Ron Shevlin, Managing Director of Fintech Research at Cornerstone Advisors, is one of the world’s top fintech influencers. Author of the book Smarter Bank and a columnist for Forbes, he has provided keynotes and moderated panels at industry events including FinovateFall.
On the challenges facing business leaders during the COVID crisis
We’re wrestling, all of us, with three major concerns: our physical health, our mental health, and our financial health. And if you’re an executive at a fintech company, a bank, a credit union, whatever it might be, you’re wrestling with those things in multiple dimensions: your personal physical, financial, and mental health; your family’s physical, financial, and mental health, your employees’ three areas of health and your customers’. You add that up and it’s pretty daunting …
Alyson Clarke is a Principal Analyst with Forrester Research. Among our Analyst All-Stars at FinovateFall 2019 last year, she is a specialist in digital business transformation, creating digital and customer “obsessed” cultures, and digital strategy and innovation.
On how a likely post-COVID-19 recession will affect fintechs and financial services firms
I think we’re clearly going to see fintech funding slow – especially for new or less established startups. In fact, I think it will slow across the board from VCs to corporate funding. I think that will be some of the downside for the fintechs.
In terms of financial services and banks, they’re going to do what they naturally do and that’s focus on cost-cutting and making the operations more efficient. Sadly, some of that focus will be on automation and things like that for the sake of reducing headcount. The problem with that is that they really need to be focused on productivity, not just cost-cutting, because (managing) recessions is about preparing for the upturn.
IdentityMind Global Acquired by Acuant – The deal offers Acuant access to IdentityMind’s digital identity product, a SaaS platform that builds, maintains, and analyzes digital identities and helps companies perform risk-based authentication, regulatory identification, and detect and prevent synthetic and stolen identities.
Vymo Offers Work From Home for Sales Professionals – Vymo, the company whose intelligent sales assistant makes life easier for on-the-go sales pros, has unveiled a new enhancement to help sales teams at this time when customer engagement is even more challenging.
Azimo Partners with Siam Commercial Bank – SCB clients will benefit from Azimo’s digital money transfer program that uses RippleNet, a blockchain-based money transfer service. Using RippleNet, Azimo will be able to instantly deliver payments from Europe to SCB client accounts.
CRIF to Acquire Strands – The union will bring Strands’ personal financial management and business financial management solutions to CRIF’s client base that includes 6,300 banks, 55,000 businesses, and 310,000 consumers across 50 countries.
EVO Payments Raises $150 Million to Help Manage COVID-19 Crisis – Merchant acquirer EVO Payments, the parent company of EVO Snap, has secured $150 million in cash to help fortify the company’s balance sheet, retire debt, and provide funding for future investment opportunities during the COVID-19 crisis.
How Lending-as-a-Service Can Impact Small Businesses in Need – One of the brutal facts of the COVID-19 outbreak is that it will be difficult for small businesses to survive. The self-distancing and shelter-in-place orders, while temporary, are taxing for already cash-strapped merchants.
