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A September survey of European venture capital firms published by the European Investment Fund suggests that many of the same themes – such as artificial intelligence and machine learning – that have animated venture capitalists in recent years continue to dominate investment preferences. The queried firms also said that exit environment and fundraising “remain the biggest challenges for (the) VC business” – although “high investee company valuations” and “competition from other investors” were becoming concerns.
How does this square with venture capitalists on the American side of the Atlantic? According to Datatrek, the value of fintech deals in the first half of this year was up year-over-year by 60% in the U.S., even as the number of transactions remained constant. For these analysts, this is a sign of maturation in the U.S. market, writing “as we get further into the economic expansion, VCs may be more comfortable contributing capital towards established fintech companies rather than riskier, newer startups.”
Next week at FinovateFall, we’ll have the opportunity to put all of this analysis to the test. One of the afternoon highlights of our Discussion Day on Wednesday, September 25th, our FinovateFall Venture Capital Panel, will provide attendees with the latest insights from venture capitalists who are investigating new opportunities in fintech every day.
What are investors looking for, and what impact is venture capital having on the fintech industry? What does the future look like, and what does that mean as we embark on an unprecedented period of change in our industry? Join us next week as our panel of experts addresses these questions and helps us understand where and why the smart money in the market is headed.
Chairing our VC Panel is Reza Chowdhury, founder and CEO of AlleyWatch
Recognized as a global thought leader in the startup ecosystem, Chowdhury offers more than 15 years experience in emerging technology, which he brings to AlleyWatch as CEO and Founder. Through the course of his career, Chowdhury has had the privilege of working to drive businesses from conception to eventual exit. His latest professional endeavors have allowed him to work very closely with thriving global technology and startup ecosystems.
Now meet the members of our VC panel
Jennifer Lee, Vice President, Edison Partners – Lee is a Vice President at Edison Partners focusing on the firm’s fintech investments, most recently including MoneyLion, Bento for Business and Giant Oak. Prior to joining Edison, she was a financial analyst at Commerzbank evaluating select European equities and long/short investments for hedge fund clients. Before Commerzbank, she was an associate at the Associated Press overseeing VC investment prospects and strategic business development opportunities.
Luis Valdich, Managing Director and Venture Investing Lead, Citi Ventures – Valdich joined Citi Ventures in 2015 as a Managing Director and Venture Invest Lead in its NYC office. He is responsible for fintech investing in both the U.S. and Europe. Valdich embraces Citi Ventures’ “best of both worlds” corporate venturing model of combining value-added strategic investing with venture capital best practices by investing in high-potential startups and driving engagement with Citi executives and clients. His investments include Clarity Money (acquired by Goldman Sachs), HighRadius, PPRO, ScaleFactor, Contguard, and SmartAsset.
Mori Oshima, Senior Manager, NTT Finance – Oshima has been a venture capitalist for 16 years. His strategy is to discuss with prominent VCs in the U.S. by leveraging NTT’s market presence in Japan. His successful exits include DocuSign and Quantenna Communications. Currently, Oshima is focusing on fintech startups in the U.S. that are interested in the Japanese market. He has an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley (Haas School of Business) and is a CFA Charter holder.
Maria Gotsch, President and CEO, Partnership Fund for New York City – Gotsch is President and Chief Executive Officer of the Partnership Fund for New York City, which is the investment arm of the Partnership for New York City. The Fund, which has invested over $150 million, has built a network of top experts from the investment and corporate communities who help identify and support New York City’s most promising entrepreneurs in both the for-profit and non-for profit sectors.
Matt Beecher, CEO, Vault and VC Innovator – Beecher is CEO of Vault, a leading student loan benefits platform, equipping employers to make it achievable for employees to more quickly eliminate student loans and attain financial freedom. He is also the co-founder of Redstar Ventures, where he was President and Managing Director from 2010 to 2016. Redstar is a company that creates companies, taking them from the earliest stages of ideation and growing them through their first institutional funding rounds and beyond.
A new partnership between fraud prevention specialist Featurespace and payments provider Elavon will improve the company’s ability to combat fraud in real-time and make the payment experience simpler and safer for consumers. Elavon will deploy Featurespace’s ARIC platform, which leverages behavioral analytics and machine learning to provide a higher degree of fraud protection and risk management.
“Elavon is delighted to work with Featurespace to bring top fraud prevention solutions to market to protect merchants and consumers,” Elavon Merchant Services General Manager and EVP Hannah Fitzsimons said. “We are committed to developing the most innovative fraud and security solutions in the payments industry.”
The combination of Featurespace’s ARIC solution and Elavon’s 3Ds service, which detects fraud incidents to help limit the need for further security checks, will give merchants an “advanced, layered approach” when it comes to fighting fraud. Elavon is bolstering its anti-fraud technology in line with the second Payments Services Directive (PSD2), which mandates strong customer authentication (SCA) and directs processors, merchants, and FIs to do more to combat card-not-present fraud by improving security involving online payments.
Featurespace CEO Martina King said that the partnership would help Elavon “stay one step ahead of criminals at all times” and enable the company to better serve the 1.3 million customers around the world who rely on Elavon “to safeguard their businesses.”
Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Elavon is a global payments provider, processing more than three billion transactions a year. This summer, the company was recognized in The Strawhecker Group’s annual Real Transaction Metrics Awards for its Fusebox solution, which was named “Best Performing Gateway” as well as picking up a first place in the “Fastest Transactions” category and earning a runners-up mention for “Highest Authorization Rate.” Backed by U.S. Bank, and active in 10 countries, Elavon was founded in 1991, and was acquired by Brazil’s Stone Pagamentos in the spring of 2016. Jamie Walker is CEO.
Featurespace demonstrated its ARIC Fraud Manager at FinovateFall 2016. The technology leverages machine learning to identify anomalous behavior in real-time, enabling institutions to stop new fraud attacks as they take place. The solution also measures its own accuracy against the rate of change to ensure that legitimate customer activity is not hindered and the number of false positives is kept at a minimum. The technology, developed out of the University of Cambridge, has been deployed in more than 180 countries.
Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., Featurespace was named to the European Business Awards’ Ones to Watch list last month. Also in August, Featurespace announced a partnership with fellow Finovate alum, Emailage, to help the email risk assessment company better fight online application fraud.
Other partnerships from Featurespace announced recently include a pact with processing solution provider Contis in July, and an agreement to provide transaction monitoring for Irish financial services company, Permanent TSB, in June.
Recognized as “Best in Class” by Aite Group in its report on fraud and advanced machine learning platform vendors this spring, Featurespace began the year with news that it was going live in Singapore. “Our financial services customer base is growing fast,” Featurespace’s King said when the launch was announced in February. “We are now working with 17 banks across continental Europe, the U.K., the U.S., and Latin America.”
With more than $72 million in funding, Featurespace includes MissionOG, Insight Partners, Highland Europe, TTV Capital, and Imperial Innovations among its investors.
North Carolina is the location of the first U.S. sales office for mobile banking and payments solution provider Neontri. The company, which demoed its technology at FinovateFall 2017 as Braintri, added that its new business strategy will focus on proprietary B2B solutions developed by its internal R&D team. These solutions include the company’s mobile banking development platform, its core banking system offload engine, Biffee; and its white-label, Best of Show-winning, mobile payments and authorization solution, Jiffee.
Calling the U.S. expansion and rebranding, “the beginning of a new stage” in the company’s growth, Neontri CEO and co-founder Maciej Stepien elaborated on the fintech’s next steps. “After six years of dynamic business growth on our home market and the acquisition of iCompass, we now seek to gain a strong foothold abroad,” he said. “Our American Office is the first bridgehead on the road to realizing this goal. In the long term, we plan to expand to the U.K. and the Middle East.”
In locating their office in Raleigh, North Carolina, the company is seeking to leverage the city’s status as home to one of the largest and fastest growing technology and research hubs in the U.S. The proximity of Charlotte, a major financial center that is also experiencing significant growth, is another plus for the Warsaw, Poland-based company.
Founded in 2013, Neontri (as Braintri) announced earlier this year that IKO, the mobile app it co-developed for PKO Bank Polski, had won first place in a global ranking of mobile apps from British Retail Banker International. It was the second consecutive year the app had won the recognition. The company began the year with news that its insurance subscription platform, hiPRO Connector, was going live with Benefia, a division of Vienna Insurance Group.
Our sister publication Fintech Futures profiled Braintri over the summer, discussing how banks are exploring ways to leverage real-time data.
Spain’s Grupo Caja Rural has incorporated Strands’ financial management applications into its banking platform, reports Sharon Kimathi of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
With the integration of Strands’ personal finance management (PFM) and business finance management (BFM) solutions, Grupo Caja Rural’s savings banks will make these applications available to their customers.
“The alliance with Strands responds to our pledge to make life easier for our clients, connecting with their needs and making leading technologies available to each customer segment. Without a doubt, it is one more step in our commitment to putting technological innovation at the service of our clients,” said Manuel Pan, organization director of Grupo Caja Rural and RSI.
Erik Brieva, CEO of Strands, added: “Due to its structure, Grupo Caja Rural enjoys a differential role in Spanish banking. We are delighted that such a solid, historical bank relies on our technology to attract new customers and establish an even closer and more strategic relationship with the existing ones.”
Both Strands’ tools will incorporate an artificial intelligence engine, the exclusive engager component, which will enable savings banks to recommend to each of their customers those products and services that best suit their circumstances, offering them a personalized and enriching digital experience.
With offices in Barcelona, Spain; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; and Miami, Florida, Strands made its most recent Finovate appearance earlier this year at FinovateSpring 2019. At the conference, the company, in partnership with Mastercard, demonstrated its Strands SME Cash Flow Manager enhanced by Mastercard Technology solution. Strands was founded in 2004
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One of Poland’s leading private banks, BNP Paribas Bank Polska, will deploy a new digital portfolio management solution from FinovateEurope Best of Show winner Dorsum. The bank will implement the Hungarian software company’s Wealth Management Platform to help give its advisors and wealth management relationship managers comprehensive wealth reporting, MiFID II compliant advisory workflows, as well as investment portfolio advisory.
Director of Brokerage House at BNP Paribas Bank Polska Emilia Jakubiak emphasized that the wave of digitization that is transforming the financial sector is as critical for financial services professionals as it is for customers. “It is not enough to focus only on the client facing platforms,” she said. “It is also important to give bank relationship managers a highly advanced and ergonomic digital platform for their everyday work. Dorsum’s solution will assist us in further improvement of our services and customer experience. ”
Jakubiak noted that the enhanced portfolio overview and MiFID 2 alignment in particular would enable advisors to “dedicate more attention to each customer which will additionally support the growth of the business in the investment segment.”
BNP Paribas Bank Polska is a member of the international BNP Paribas banking group. The institution, founded in 2015 and known previously as Bank BGZ BNP Paribas, offers savings, investment, and financing products to individual clients, and participates in the financing SMEs and corporate enterprises need in order to operate both in the Polish and international markets. The universal bank is listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.
“We are very proud that we have been chosen by another very prominent player in the European market,” Dorsum CEO Róbert Kő said. “BNP Paribas Bank Polska has positioned itself as potential market leader in the Polish private banking sector by embracing growth and innovation.”
At FinovateEurope earlier this year, Dorsum demonstrated its My Wealth app, which combines traditional and digital advisory processes to provide clients with a broader, more comprehensive view of their investments. The app features a self-learning chatbot, automatic portfolio notifications, and news, and supports the ability to reach out to the client’s financial advisor via a variety of channels.
Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Budapest, Dorsum works with more than 80 financial institutions, serving clients in 10+ countries and more than 8,000 individual users. A leading software company in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) market, Dorsum announced successfully implementing the new integrated securities account management system for Takarék Group in April. In March, the company won the SME Top 100 Silver Award in the Service Providers category at the Best Engines of the Economy conference series.
The new TSYS Authentication Platform, launched late last week, is the product of a collaboration between TSYS and four other companies – Featurespace, Emailage, InAuth, and Payfone – three of them Finovate alums. The solution leverages consumer experience data culled directly from cardholder touchpoints to deliver real-time verification on all kinds of remote customer interactions ranging from account origination and purchases to profile and password updating.
The platform, which integrates into TSYS client’s existing authentication systems, is available in Europe and will be launched in North America next year.
“At TSYS, we understand how various transactions are connected because we work with a global network of card issuers representing millions of individual accounts,” explained TSYS Issuer Solutions SVP of Product Strategy and Commercialization Justin Griggs. “If a device has been compromised in Ireland, for example, we can use that information to flag a remote login attempt in North America. We have real-time knowledge of potential fraud issues, and now we’re using that information to help our clients authenticate their customers and transactions across any use case.”
Although the partnership that helped bring the TSYS Authentication Platform to life brought in some new partners for TSYS, the company has a history with at least one of its collaborators: Featurespace. Two years ago, the two firms teamed up to launch TSYS Foresight Score with Featurespace, a fraud prevention solution that leverages machine learning to improve its effectiveness and accuracy over time without requiring human reprogramming.
“Our ARIC platform was specifically designed to help manage complex problems like transactional card fraud,” Featurespace CEO Martina King said when the partnership was announced. “Combined with TSYS’ industry experience, and robust client base, this product has tremendous potential in the fight against fraud.”
TSYS demonstrated its Authorization Controls solution at FinovateAsia 2013. The technology enables users to set default spending limits, category permissions, and other authorization rules and parameters on their accounts. The technology also supports user defined authorizations such as Alert, Decline, and Pre-Authorize, to provide increased visibility into and control over what happens during a transaction attempt.
Founded in 1983 and based in Columbus, Georgia, TSYS announced a mega merger earlier this year. The company agreed to be purchased by merchant acquirer Global Payments in a deal valued at $21.5 billion. Combined, the new entity will provide payment technology solutions to more than 3.5 million SMEs and 1,300+ financial institutions around the world.
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Join us in October as our annual Asia-Pacific fintech conference returns to Singapore! FinovateAsia is one of the best ways for fintech startups and innovative industry veterans from the region and around the world to showcase their latest technologies before an audience of C-level decision-makers, venture capitalists, all-star analysts, and more.
For information on how to participate in FinovateAsia as a demoing company, partner, or sponsor, send us an e-mail and we’ll tell you everything you need to know.
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FinovateAsia isn’t the only big deal coming to Singapore this fall. Courtesy of a partnership with conversational AI innovator Clinc, Singapore’s OCBC Bank will offer its customers a new voice-enabled mobile banking assistant – the first of its kind in Singapore.
The solution is called the OCBC Banking Assistant and was developed via OCBC’s Innovation Lab, where it was trained both to handle specific banking use cases as well as the intricacies of local Singaporean vernacular and context.
“We are always open to forging new partnerships that allow us to reimagine banking for our digital customers,” OCBC Bank’s Head of Digital Business for Singapore & Malaysia Aditya Gupta said. “We choose to work with Clinc because of their superior conversational AI platform and their next-generation natural language processing capabilities.”
Gupta called the collaboration “the next step towards making our customers’ mobile-first interactions more seamless and natural.”
The new mobile app will enable OCBC Bank customers to pay bills, transfer funds between accounts, check spending history and transactions, locate the nearest ATM, and receive spending advice – all just by using their voice. Clinc’s natural language technology means that users do not need to memorize special keywords or specific phrases in order to access many of the most commonly-used banking services.
The deployment also marks the first time that Clinc’s billpay competency is being used in its entirety, a point highlighted by company CEO Jason Mars.
“This is the first full production roll out of its kind,” Mars said, calling the launch “a milestone” for his company, OCBC Bank, and the financial industry writ large. “It’s not a chatbot or virtual assistant-type experience that people are familiar with,” he said. “Rather, it’s Clinc’s signature voice-first, human-like AI experience used to create a mobile bank assistant that enables OCBC Bank customers to get spending insights, account and transaction details, and pay bills, all by using unscripted, everyday, messy language.”
OCBC Bank – which stands for Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation – is a multinational banking and financial services entity, founded in 1932 and based in Singapore. With more than $340 billion (S$467.5 billion) in assets, OCBC Bank is the second biggest bank in Southeast Asia by assets and one of the larger banks in the APAC region.
The partnership with OCBC Bank is the latest collaboration that Clinc has been involved in. In June, the company reported that it was bringing its conversational AI technology to the healthcare industry, courtesy of a partnership with digital workforce solution provider Olive. And in January, Clinc announced that it was working with Ford to bring voice recognition to the automaker’s vehicles.
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Clinc demonstrated its conversational AI-based solution at FinovateFall 2016, winning Best of Show. Named Frost & Sullivan’s 2019 Technology Leader for Artificial Intelligence, Clinc announced a major investment this spring, pulling in $52 million in new funding in a round led by Insight Partners.
Rekyvik-founded software company Meniga has announced its partnership with Portuguese national financial group Grupo Crédito Agrícola to launch its new banking app, moey! – reports Ruby Hinchliffe of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
The free app will give Crédito Agrícola customers “a better understanding of their spending and finances”, as well as providing “seamless payments through services like Apple Pay and MB WAY”, said inovação e digital director Ricardo Madeira.
The financial advice app, which will also integrate with Android Wallet and Group expenses, inflicts no costs for account opening or maintenance.
“Through the moey! app’s intuitive interface and features, users will enjoy a seamless mobile experience which will significantly improve their everyday banking and personal finances,” said Madeira.
moey! will rely on Meniga’s technology as an engine, and will offer various services including an activity feed for personalised messages and targeted rewards, insights and expense reports which can be filtered, as well as budget and financial planning advice which will automatically generate your budgets and manage them for you.
Meniga’s CEO and co-founder Georg Ludviksson is “very proud” to be working with one of Portugal’s “most reputable banking groups.”
He said the bank’s team has “unrivaled insight” about the needs of its local banking customers, feeling confident that the new app “will excite users right across the region”.
The century-old Portuguese bank has more than one million clients and is one of the larger, more financially stable groups in the country.
Founded in 2009, Meniga demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall 2018, winning Best of Show for its white-label, digital banking solutions that help banks boost customer engagement.