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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Askari Bank selectsFinastra’s trade finance solution.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
A new partnership between youth financial literacy technology company EVERFIand Zelle parent Early Warning Services will provide 1,000+ high schools and 50,000 students with free financial education courses.
“Our partnership with Zelle is based on shared principles that we can do more together than alone, especially when it comes to inspiring social change,” EVERFI President of Financial Education Ray Martinez said. “In the past decade, we have seen how education can transform lives. We welcome Zelle to our community of organizations, institutions, and educators to revolutionize the way education is developed and delivered – using today’s technology to connect learning to the real world and equip communities with the skills they need for success in the 21st century.”
EVERFI’s technology enables FIs to offer personalized financial education to their customers, employees, as well as SME and commercial clients via a mobile-first, interactive platform. The on-demand financial education content is organized into short, “micro-learning” modules inside of major topic areas such as banking, retirement planning, homeownership, and investing. EVERFI said it may add topic areas such as student loans and small business information in the future.
This week’s announcement is the latest indication of Zelles’s commitment to financial literacy. The payments company partnered with Stacks House in March in an initiative to boost women’s financial empowerment and independence. Last month, the company introduced its Pay It Safe program to help educate consumers on how to defend themselves against fraud and scams.
“Banking is going through an unprecedented rate of change, improving our lives through speed and convenience, but also introducing a new set of risks for the uninformed,” Early Warning Chief Marketing Officer Rose Corvo said. “We’ve partnered with EVERFI to navigate this change and are committed to making sure the next generation has access to the knowledge to help them understand the impact of technology so they may thrive in this ever-changing landscape.”
EVERFI demonstrated its EVERFI Achieve financial wellness solution at FinovateSpring 2019. Founded in 2008, EVERFI drives social change in a variety of areas – from financial wellness to prescription drug safety to workplace conduct – using its interactive SaaS community engagement platform. With more than 30 million users of the technology to date, EVERFI has raised $251 million in funding from investors including The Rise Fund and TPG Growth, as well as support from Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt.
Named to Deloitte’s 2019 Technology Fast 500 earlier this month, EVERFI acquired U.K.-based social education firm EdComs and announced a digital education partnership with UBS – both in October. Tom Davidson is CEO and co-founder.
Intelligent business payments platform Bill.com aims to raise $100 million in an initial public offering (IPO), according to a recent filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), reports Ruby Hinchliffe of Fintech Futures, Finovate’s sister publication.
Underwriters listed for Bill.com’s IPO include Goldman Sachs, Bank of America (BofA) Securities, Jefferies and William Blair. Pricing terms have not yet been shared publicly.
The fintech provides cloud-based software that simplifies, digitizes, and automates back-office financial processes for small and mid-sized businesses (SMB). Bill.com has customers including company calling service Dialpad, benefits and human resource manager and fellow Finovate alum Gusto, and local professional search engine Thumbtack.
With $347.1 million already in the bank according to Crunchbase, the 2006-founded company has gathered investors such as MasterCard, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and BofA.
Talking about how the procure-to-pay landscape is converging, Mercator Advisory Group’s commercial and enterprise payments director Steve Murphy said: “That’s led technology companies such as Bill.com to add virtual cards to automate accounts payable for small businesses through partnerships with Amex and Mastercard.”
Set up by PayCycle’s co-founder René Lacerte, Bill.com now has more than three million members and processes $60 billion in yearly payments, according to its announcement in April 2019 following its most recent funding round of $80 million.
Bill.com demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2012. More recently, the company launched a new suite of solutions for midmarket companies to help them automate their AR/AP processes to boost efficiency. The Palo Alto, California-based company was founded in 2006.
Just under a year after launching its Experian Boost credit solution, the global information services company is back with another resource – this time to increase the predictive power of its creditworthiness assessment technology. Experian Lift, announced last week and available to lenders early next year, combines traditional and alternative credit data with trended data assets to build a more complete picture of the consumer’s ability to repay their debts.
Experian Lift was developed in partnership with Experian’s advanced analytic research and development group, Experian DataLabs. The suite of credit score products uses advanced analytics to provide insights into consumer behavior over the most recent 24-month period. The technology leverages alternative data – such as alternative financing information, rental data, and public record information – to provide lenders with a FCRA-regulated analysis of a customer’s creditworthiness. The company noted that Experian Lift improves predictive performance by 23% compared to other scores used to provide underwriting to what it called “credit invisibles.”
Experian Consumer Information Services EVP and Chief Product Officer Greg Wright put Experian Lift in the context of the company’s overall efforts to help creditworthy consumers get the financing they need. “Through Experian Boost, we’re empowering consumers to play an active role in building their credit histories. And, with Experian Lift, we’re empowering lenders to identify consumers who may otherwise be excluded from the traditional credit ecosystem.”
Experian Boost helps consumers increase their FICO scores by allowing Experian to include their positive telecom and utility payment history in its credit analysis. The company said the tool is especially helpful for consumers with thin credit files and credit scores between 580 and 670.
“We are committed to financial inclusion, and Experian Boost is the latest example of our efforts to increase consumer awareness of credit’s impact and value while giving them greater control,” Experian Global CEO Brian Cassin said when the solution was unveiled last December.
Experian demonstrated its cloud-based credit decisioning technology at FinovateFall 2018. The company, founded in 1996 and maintaining headquarters in Dublin, Ireland; Costa Mesa, California; and Nottingham, England, has been active on the international front of late in particular. Experian acquired leading Peruvian credit bureau Sentinel Peru, provided Open Banking solutions to U.K. fintech solution provider incuto, and announced a strategic investment in Indian smart data platform Vserv – all this month.
Experian has a workforce of more than 17,000 across 44 countries and reported fiscal 2019 revenues of $4.9 billion. A member of the FTSE Top 35, Experian is considered one of the top three credit reporting entities along with TransUnion and Equifax.
As Finovate goes increasingly global, so does our coverage of financial technology. Finovate Global is our weekly look at fintech innovation in developing economies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe.
Yes Bank launches India’s largest banking developer platform.
Pakistan-based digital lending platform Finja closes $3 million convertible note funding round.
India’s National Stock Exchange launches an open trading API sandbox.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Mastercardpartners with Mexico’s weex wallet to offer physical debit cards.
Colombian fintech Simetrik inks agreement to serve as payment gateway for Mercado Pago transactions.
Brazilian lender Banco Inter unveils new e-commerce app.
Asia-Pacific
MoneyGram and Wing partner to launch new mobile wallet in Cambodia.
Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) agree to locate the BIS Innovation Hub Centre in Singapore.
New Hong Kong license in hand, Tencent announces plans to build a blockchain-based digital bank.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Visaacquires minority stake in Nigerian digital payments company Interswitch Group, an investment that takes the African firm’s valuation to $1 billion.
South African P2P insurance provider Pineapple wins $1.5 million (R22.5 million) in taking home top prize in the Connecticut Innovations VentureClash 2019 competition.
Kenya institutes data protection law to support investment in its technology sector.
Central and Eastern Europe
Billon, a Polish-British blockchain company, joins initiative with Raiffeisen Bank International to digitize the euro.
Trusted identities innovator OneSpan partners with Poland’s Bank Millennium.
A new interest-free, credit service, Postpay, goes live in Dubai.
Executive Magazine looks at the fintech industry in Lebanon and the role of regulation in stimulating growth.
Tunisia announces the digitization of its national currency, the dinar, making the first country to convert a portion of its money supply to digital form.
Avaloqcompletes acquisition of Derivative Partners.
TransferWise to offer $150,000 in prize money to Singaporean bank customers to help them defray the cost of hidden fees charged by their banks.
DefenseStormcompletes (SOC)2 Type II Audit examination for its security data platform.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
Online and mobile payments enabler Spreedly has picked up a $75 million investment from Spectrum Equity. The growth funding will help the Durham, North Carolina-based company both accelerate product development and support its international expansion. Spreedly’s total funding now stands at just over $81 million.
“Our platform helps customers unlock their online and mobile revenue streams,” Spreedly CEO Justin Benson explained. “With this investment from Spectrum Equity, we are positioned to extend our leadership globally, in particular to leverage our momentum in Latin America. We’re excited to bring Spectrum’s experience working with other high growth FinTech and commerce platforms to bear as we execute on our growth plans.”
Spreedly provides a payments infrastructure that leverages a single API to enable businesses to grow their online and mobile revenues. The company’s PCI compliant vault securely stores card data for customers like Cabify and SeatGeek who use tokenized card data to optimize nearly $14 billion in transaction volume each year.
Managing Director at Spectrum Equity Adam Margolin praised Spreedly as “uniquely positioned” to help businesses meet the challenges of online and mobile payments. “With minimal prior funding, Spreedly has grown rapidly and today powers nearly one million transactions daily, 108% more than the year before, on behalf of its customers,” Margolin said.
Benson shared some additional thoughts on what the investment meant for the company at the Spreedly blog. And for those curious about Spreedly’s path from founding concept to contemporary success story, Benson’s reflections are especially worth reading. He concludes his remarks by saying:
“Ultimately, for you our customer, all this really means is that we’re more effectively resourced today to execute upon our ambitious product roadmap. We have more financial and intellectual capital at our disposal to build the best payment platform for merchants that we can. Thanks for your support and here’s to the next big chapter.”
Spreedly demonstrated its Networked Commerce solution at FinovateFall 2018. Networked Commerce enables businesses to connect payment systems to partners for superior scale, helps merchants process multiple-vendor transactions, and empowers consumers to make purchases through the same network – web, mobile, or voice – where they initially encounter a good or service.
This September, the company unveiledSpreedly 3DS2 to help execute 3DS2-compliant transactions across multi-gateway environments. The previous month, Spreedly – in partnership with Webio – won the 2019 Innovation Lab Award at the Payments Ed Forum. This spring, Spreedly was featured in WRAL Tech Wire’s look at local technology companies.
Cloud banking leader nCino is enlisting AI in the fight to help financial institutions make better, more informed decisions faster. The Wilmington, North Carolina-based company announced this week the release of nCino IQ (nIQ), a new expansion to its Bank Operating System that works across front, middle, and back office operations, to automate and connect. This not only reduces expensive and error-vulnerable manual data entry, the technology also enables financial institutions to leverage automation and analytics to make data-driven decisions that enhance the customer journey.
“Since its inception, nCino has championed the idea of the agile enterprise, where financial institutions can reduce loan cycle and account opening times by digitizing and automating their processes via our single end-to-end platform,” Chief Product Officer Trisha Price said. “Now, with nIQ, we’re evolving that concept further to the Intelligent Enterprise, where AI is injected into every stage of production and stands at the center of every business line we support.”
nIQ has three main components: nIQ Data Recognition, which automates data extraction; nIQ Insights, which uses predictive analytics to measure and monitor organization-wide performance and risk; and nIQ Digital Assistant, which gives bankers the real-time data they need in order to build personalized experiences. The solution can be used in commercial, small business, and retail banking, as well as for customer engagement.
“With nIQ supercharging their operations,” Price added, “financial institutions can achieve a competitive advantage that allows them to increase savings and, most importantly, make more informed decisions to more effectively and efficiently serve their customers.”
The product news from nCino follows company’s $80 million funding raising – its largest to date – announced last month. The funding, which took nCino’s total capital to more than $213 million, was led by a group investors advised by T. Rowe Price, and featured the participation of existing investor Salesforce Ventures. Also last month, nCino announced a partnership with CNB Bank, a $3.2 billion asset FI based in Pennsylvania, and added David Rudow to its C-suite, appointing the software and technology executive as Chief Financial Officer.
nCino demonstrated its Bank Operating System at FinovateEurope 2017. Founded in 2012, and named to the Forbes Cloud 100, the company partners with more than 250 financial institutions around the world. Pierre Naudé is CEO.
In a round co-led by Lakestar and Dawn Capital, natural language processing technology provider Eigen Technologies has raised $37 million (£29 million) in new capital. The investment, which also featured participation from Temasek and Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, takes the London-based company’s total funding to $55 million (£43 million).
Eigen plans to spend the funds to accelerate growth, including investments in technical and commercial talent. The company will also strengthen its transatlantic profile by basing additional senior management in New York.
“When we founded Eigen five years ago, I wanted to build a research-led transatlantic business,” Liu said in a statement. “Since the Series A, we have made great progress by massively scaling the company, expanding our client base, and integrating cutting-edge machine learning techniques into our NLP product.” Liu added that in this time Eigen has more than doubled the size of its workforce, grown recurring revenues by 6x, and expanded its customer base to now include more than 25% of the global systematically important banks (G-SIBs) in the world.
The funding announcement comes just a week after the release of Eigen 3.0. Eigen 3.0 extracts data 2x to 5x faster and features a new UI that accelerates the training process by 30%. The company noted that the platform will better enable it to serve both its traditional big bank customer base, as well as new customers among hedge funds and asset managers.
“Our customers asked us for three things in Eigen 3.0: a superuser workflow, improved performance for large teams working simultaneously, and easier document handling,” said Eigen Chief Product Officer Dr. Ashley Fidler, who joined the company in August. “Eigen 3.0 delivers all these improvements and more.”
Eigen Technologies demonstrated its platform at FinovateFall earlier this year. At the conference, Dr. Liu showed how Eigen’s flexible natural language processing solution automatically and accurately extracts data from a wide range of document types at scale. The technology can be integrated into customer workflows, and leverages machine learning algorithms to recognize patterns in text data.
Founded in 2014, Eigen’s clients include Goldman Sachs, Hiscox, Allen & Overy, and ING. The company won the Financial Times Intelligent Business Award for Repapering Technology in October and was named to the FinTech50 2019 in September. Eigen Technologies began the year earning recognition from CB Insights, which featured the company in its 2019 AI 100 roster of the Most Innovative Artificial Intelligence Startups.
FinovateMiddleEast begins next week, November 20-21, in Dubai, UAE. A few days ago, we introduced some of the themes that will dominate the discussion on Day One of our conference. Today we’ll take a look at what we’ve got in store for attendees on Day Two.
In addition to our live fintech demos (check out our FinovateMiddleEast Sneak Peek series for more information on our demoing companies), Day Two will feature a variety of conversations on topics ranging from challenger banks and digital disruption to small business banking and the future of work in an increasingly automated world.
With a wave of new digital banks entering the sector, how are these new challengers using digital and technology to improve the customer experience?
How, as an incumbent bank, can you take inspiration and reinvent your organization in the face of the threats challenger banks present?
What can we learn from exploring the different models of challenger bank that are emerging, their advantages, and how to harness elements of their model to tackle customer pain points better?
Juvo, a company that specializes in building financial identities for the underbanked, announced this week that it has forged a strategic partnership with global mobile commerce company DOCOMO Digital. The collaboration will marry Juvo’s financial-identity-as-a-service capabilities with DOCOMO Digital’s payments platform to give prepaid mobile users broader payment options when it comes to paying for digital services.
The partnership specifically helps address the challenge that many prepaid mobile users in emerging markets face when accessing digital services. Many users abandon purchases because of insufficient prepaid balances or lack of other payment options such as credit cards. Working together, Juvo and DOCOMO Digital will now offer micro-credits, in real-time, to allow the transactions to be completed without requiring the user to top-up their balance immediately.
Founder and CEO of Juvo Steve Polsky described the company’s mission as creating a “YES economy” that provides financial identities for the 68% of adults around the world who are unable to participate in the regular economy because they do not have a credit history. “By creating financial identities, Juvo empowers our partners with the data to say YES to more of their customers, opening up new revenue streams,” Polsky said.
The emerging markets are a particular focus for the initiative. In a statement, DOCOMO Digital CEO Jonathan Kriegel said the partnership will make it easier to provide financial services to the underbanked in these regions, where access to mobile and data services is on the rise. “Our partnership with Juvo aligns perfectly with our endeavor to make the mobile commerce experience seamless for consumers, while unlocking more value for mobile operators and digital merchants,” Kriegel said.
Juvo introduced its Financial Identity as a Service (FiDaaS) platform in September. The solution uses alternative, typically untapped data sources to establish creditworthiness and build financial identities for the underbanked that will help them access financial services. Juvo’s platform presently updates more than five billion data points daily for 200 million consumers on four continents.
Juvo demonstrated its Identity Scoring solution at FinovateFall 2016. At the conference, Polsky and VP of Product Jason Robinson showed how the technology leverages consumer internet “know-how,” data science and game mechanics to identify mobile users and encourage them to engage with their mobile operator. The cloud-based solution also offers intelligence and reporting tools to give mobile operators the analytics and insights they need to boost engagement.
Named to the Deloitte 2019 Technology Fast 500 earlier this month and honored by Frost & Sullivan for Strategic Excellence in Emerging Markets in July, Juvo was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company has raised $54 million in funding, and includes Samsung NEXT, Wing Venture Capital, and New Enterprise Associates among its investors.
Tradeshiftintegrates with fraud protection specialist SiS-id to reduce payments fraud.
XerolaunchesPay with TransferWise, a new domestic bill payment solution to help U.K. customers pay and manage bills.
Pendo Systemsteams with WSN to help customers navigate digital transformation.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
