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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
College Aid Pro (CAP) is an innovative, college planning technology for, and supported by, an engaged community of financial advisors. CAP is changing the way America shops for college.
Features
Demystifies financial aid, providing accurate net cost projections at thousands of schools
Provides a process for guiding families to better college outcomes
Supported by a community of professionals
Why it’s great There is currently no such thing as a financial advocate for Gen-X families with college bound teens. CAP is growing a movement of professionals with the tools and resources to provide that service.
Presenters
Joe Messinger, Co-Founder Messinger has helped hundreds of Gen X families navigate the college funding maze through his RIA Capstone Wealth Partners, while training thousands of advisors to replicate his process. LinkedIn
Matt Carpenter, Co-Founder Carpenter is a leading expert in the opaque process of higher education funding and financial aid. His firm, College Funding Services, has helped thousands of families cut the cost of college. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
Founded by recognized university leaders, Edmit’s award-winning software provides personalized insights and advice to help families make smarter college financial decisions, leading to less debt.
Features
Build brand trust and provide insights and expertise in a high anxiety major investment
Become a “one stop shop” for holistic financial wellness
Introduce a differentiated college-related product
Why it’s great Families that use Edmit make smarter college financial choices leading to less debt and better life outcomes.
Presenters
Nick Ducoff, Co-Founder and CEO Ducoff was previously Northeastern University’s VP for New Ventures. He previously co-founded Infochimps, acquired by DXC, and was a VP at Boundless, acquired by Follett. He started his career in law. LinkedIn
Sabrina Manville, Co-Founder Manville was previously AVP at Southern New Hampshire University and previously worked at Pearson and Coursera. She has an MBA from Stanford and a BA in Religious Studies from Yale. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
Insuritas is debuting the world’s first end-to-end quote and buy platform for business insurance to be fully integrated via API within a digital banking ecosystem.
Features
Revenue from digital banking
Seamless insurance for small businesses
Fully integrated solution allowing the bank to own the customer journey
Why it’s great iInsure for Businesses empowers banks to transform their digital banking platforms and investments into platforms that drive non-interest income, customer wallet share, and retention.
Presenter
Matt Chesky, President Chesky was recognized by Hartford Business Journal and Connecticut Magazine in 2018 as a “40 Under 40” recipient. He graduated from Yale University in 2012 with a degree in Economics. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
Founded by an award-winning fintech veteran, Andes Wealth Technologies offers the “Google Maps for Financial Advisors,” a set of unique, modern tools to transform the wealth management experience.
Features
Risk Tolerance Test: The best ever.
Real-Time Risk Monitor: 360° risk visualization for markets and portfolios.
Practical Behavioral Finance, including a special tool for baby boomers.
Why it’s great Unique ideas and visualizations. Beautiful yet practical tools backed by rigorous research and robust data analytics. It will indeed revolutionize the advisor and client experience.
Presenter
Helen Yang, Founder and CEO A winner of the prestigious Harry Markowitz Award in 2011, Yang has 20+ years of leadership in Fintech and holds an MBA from MIT. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
Trulioo presents EmbedID, a fast and simple way for startups and developers to verify customers across borders while supporting AML/KYC compliance requirements.
Features
Integrate and test Trulioo’s identity verification API in minutes
Fully customize onboarding fields and forms
Verify customers in real time
Why it’s great With only a snippet of code embedded into any website, Trulioo’s EmbedID enables organizations to verify over 5 billion identities worldwide.
Presenters
Anatoly Kvitnitsky Kvitnitsky has a wealth of experience working in fintech and identity markets, and is committed to helping solve identity challenges that organizations face in scaling their products for global use. LinkedIn
Marat Asadurian A software engineering manager at Trulioo, Asadurian enjoys building new products as well as new teams. In his current role, he is managing a team that generates new business lines for GlobalGateway. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
JSOL Corporation provides IT consulting and digital transformation related services to clients from various industries by leveraging its technology and know-how developed over the years.
Features
Predict growth/deterioration of business partners
Visualize transactional networks of businesses and assess spillover effects
Monitor/analyze up-to-date financial conditions of business partners
Why it’s great Use JSOL Corporation’s tool to gain insight into your business partners’ projected financial performance and to make informed financing decisions.
Presenters
Kimitaka Honma, Deputy Unit Director Honma is a Deputy Unit Director of the Digital Innovation Business Unit and has ample experience assisting financial institutions with their digital transformation efforts.
Andrew Ogata, Sales and Strategic Partnerships Ogata is a sales specialist in the Digital Innovation Business Unit and focuses on domestic/overseas sales and strategic partnerships.
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
The StreetShares platform provides “Lending-as-a-Service” technology to community banks and credit unions, empowering them to offer fully-digital small business loans… up and running in 30 days.
Features
Ability to grow and retain small business customers
Fully-digital borrower onboarding and management with no core software integration
Precision, 100% digital underwriting at the industry’s leading loss rates
Why it’s great Community banks and credit unions struggle to make small business loans due to costly underwriting and core software integration. StreetShares Lending-as-a-Service technology solves this problem.
Presenters
Mark Rockefeller, CEO Rockefeller leads the StreetShares team in its mission to help community banks and credit unions offer fully-digital small business loans to America’s main street businesses. LinkedIn
Sanjay Bhaskar, Vice President, Development and Partnerships Bhaskar focuses on identifying opportunities for community banks and credit unions to use StreetShares Lending-as-a-Service technology to offer fully digital small business loans. LinkedIn
One month after digital core banking provider Five Degreesannounced its collaboration with fellow Finovate alum W.UP, the company is back in the fintech headlines with another round of partnership news: digital security platform Entersektwill join its Open Banking Marketplace.
“Partnering with Entersekt is testament to our vision for the future of banking and finance so we are delighted to welcome the company as part of our Open Banking Marketplace,” Five Degrees EVP Peter-Jan van de Venn said. “Our marketplace is championing a culture of collaboration throughout the industry, enabling us to provide a better customer experience via interconnected APIs.”
In their statement, the companies indicate that the partnership between the two companies will help financial service providers perform better both at home in Europe as well as in their global banking and finance operations. Five Degrees Open Banking Marketplace is designed to encourage financial services companies and fintechs to work together to build engaging digital customer experiences, increase their own efficiencies, and make regulatory compliance easier.
“(We) help tens of millions of end users across the globe, securing 150 million digital transactions every month in 45 countries,” Entersekt CEO Schalk Nolte said. “We look forward to being part of five degrees’ Open Banking Marketplace and are confident that our partnership will drive further innovation in (digital services) and help our mutual customers differentiate themselves from the competition.”
Entersekt’s Chief Technology Officer presented “Securing Mobile Applications through Transport Layer Diversity” at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, in 2014. The South African company, which was founded in 2008, opened its second office in Cape Town in April, and that same month was named to the Wealthtech 100. Entersekt teamed up with fellow Finovate alum BioCatch in March to offer financial services companies a “one-stop-shop” for security solutions such as continuous and multi-factor authentication, passwordless login, and enhanced remote user registration.
In its most recent Finovate appearance at FinovateEurope 2018, Five Degrees demonstrated its digital wealth management solution, Prospery. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the company was selected last month to join the Kickstarter Innovation Program. In June, Five Degrees announced a partnership with Bankingblocks to assist challenger banks and payment companies as they offer new solutions to their customers.
With $11 million (€10 million) in funding, Five Degrees includes Karmijn Kapitaal and Velocity Capital Private Equity among its investors.
Financial and blockchain API provider Hydrogen is the latest technology to achieve “Powered by Oracle Cloud” status, making the app building platform available to Oracle Cloud customers via the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.
“Hydrogen’s participation in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace further extends our commitment to the Oracle community and enables customers to easily reap the benefits of our APIs,” Hydrogen co-founder and CEO Mike Kane said. “We look forward to leveraging the power of the Oracle Cloud to help us achieve our business goals.”
Described as the global financial operating system by its founders, Hydrogen offers a wealth of fintech and blockchain APIs – known as atom and molecule respectively – to power a wide range of financial services from banking and investing to savings, financial wellness, and insurance.
The Oracle Cloud provides enterprise-quality services at all levels of the technology stack including both platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And by joining the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, the Hydrogen platform will be readily accessible by Oracle Cloud customers. The marketplace has an intuitive user interface to make it easy for developers to browse and discover not only applications and services, but also solution ratings and reviews from users to help customers find the optimal resource for their needs. The Marketplace recently has unveiled its automated application installation tools to enable customers to deploy provider business apps from a centralized, cloud-based UI.
“Hydrogen’s commitment to innovation with the Oracle Cloud and quality execution helps our mutual customers receive cloud-enabled fintech solutions ready to meet critical business needs,” Oracle VP for Worldwide ISV Cloud Business Development David Hicks said.
At FinovateEurope 2018, Hydrogen made its Finovate debut, demonstrating how its technology enables developers to build sophisticated financial apps – such as a European savings platform with UI/UX, onboarding, simulations, backend connectivity, and business intelligence – in a matter of minutes.
Hydrogen has seen its share of plaudits this year. The company was named to the Wealthtech 100 in April, the same month it was listed in Fast Company’s “World Changing Ideas” compilation in the Developing World Technology category. Hydrogen joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) in May and, the following month, was named a finalist in WealthManagement.com’s 2019 Industry Awards in the Blockchain/Cryptocurrency category.
More recently, the company earned recognition from Bank Director’s FinxTech Awards, winning a finalist spot in the Best of FinXTech Connect category. Hydrogen was named a finalist in the Financial Inclusion category of the Finnosummit Challenge and was shortlisted for three awards – Top Emerging Tech Company, Best Use of Blockchain, and Innovator of the Year – at Finovate’s inaugural awards series (check out more information on the Finovate Awards, or FinovateFall, which will take place the same week in New York this month).
Founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York City, Hydrogen includes Canadian bank and wealth manager TD Bank, global insurer Principal, and investment manager CI Investments among its clients.
Low-code platform OutSystems has formed a deal with Nationwide to develop a new digital business savings service, reports Ruby Hinchliffe of FinTech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
By “dumbing down the back-end” so it becomes “a system of record only,” OutSystems will take on all the business logic and process for Nationwide, giving it a more agile front-end with less reliance on its legacy back-end.
OutSystem’s regional financial services and insurance director, Garry Larner, told FinTech Futures: “There’s a lot of legacy technology out there. It’s difficult and expensive to find talented developers, especially when it comes to native mobile. It’s becoming too costly to innovate, so that’s where we come in.”
He added: “In an ideal world you’d want to rip everything out and start from the beginning. But from a practical view, that’s not possible unless you’re prepared to spend hundreds of millions.”
The software platform can offer a traditional bank like Nationwide access to accelerators, such as templates, patterns and multi-factor authentication plugins which all speed up the UX development process.
It’s newest partnership with Nationwide is all about “creating the digital channel for business saving customers. Banking at the drop of a fingertip.”
Speaking more broadly on low-code, Larner recognized the “enormous” market opportunity, excited the industry is “finally catching up with the concept challenging the status quo – that traditional development is not the only option.”
OutSystems has had a 54% yearly growth rate globally and enjoyed a $360 million investment from Goldman Sachs and KKR last year.
Larner said: “There’s going to be a series of very large enterprise customers which we’ll be announcing over the next three or four months, because it’s almost caught up with the mainstream.”
Currently OutSystems works with British councils to digitize taxes, insurance companies to build broker portals, and, most recently, it is working on a new credit comparison market with a fintech to be announced soon.
Founded in 2001, OutSystems presented “Low-Code: The Next Evolution in App Dev Platforms” at our developers conference, FinDEVr New York 2017. The company is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and has raised more than $422 million in total funding from investors including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Goldman Sachs, and North Bridge Venture Partners & Growth Equity.
Small business financing company Kabbage has made a purchase that will help it get to know the world of SMEs all the better. In a deal announced today, Kabbage will acquire small business intelligence firm, and fellow Finovate alum, Radius, adding insights from more than 20 million U.S. small businesses to its platform.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Upon the successful closing of the acquisition, Kabbage said in a statement that it will add “nearly 20 team members” from Radius to its offices in San Francisco, including Radius CEO Joel Carusone, to help support the integration of the two platforms and the two companies.
“Data has always been our competitive advantage, and Radius strengthens it by adding millions of new and verified small business insights to our platform,” Kabbage CEO Rob Frohwein said. “These new technology and data-analysis capabilities further differentiate us from other SMB-focused fintech companies as we dramatically expand our product set and service platform to address the unique cash flow needs of small businesses.”
Expressing a “deep respect for Kabbage’s data-driven technology and focus,” Radius’ Carusone highlighted similarities between the two firms. “Our companies have complementary technical architectures and domain experience for decision making,” he said. “With Kabbage, we can build a more sophisticated analytics solution to identify, reach, and serve small businesses.”
San Francisco, California-based Radius was founded in 2009. The company demonstrated its platform at FinovateSpring 2014, showing how it leverages big data to gain insights into more than 27 million small and medium-sized businesses. This information helps FIs find the best customer segments, build efficient and accurate targeted lead lists, and measure the success of marketing campaigns.
Radius began 2019 with the launch of its Data for Good campaign to help the company’s employees and customers give back to their communities. This included credit-backs to the accounts of for-profit companies for any data used to support philanthropic causes. The campaign also featured service donations to nonprofits to enable them to use the Radius’ enterprise customer data platform to reach out to and potentially partner with small businesses.
In May, Radius unveiled a new data stewardship app designed to fix bad, siloed Salesforce data. The new solution enables enterprises to manage data across any Salesforce field based on unified, trusted data. “Existing tools enrich some external data,” Radius CEO Joel Carusone explained, “but what’s missing is an easy-to-use application coupled with a powerful platform that gives users access to data unified across all third-parties and their internal data sets.”
Atlanta, Georgia-based Kabbage made its first appearance on the Finovate stage in 2010, demoing its Kabbage Loan offering at FinovateSpring that year. The company most recently demoed its Kabbage Card, a part of the company’s Kabbage Everywhere product expansion, at FinovateSpring 2015.
Featured in June by CEO World in its look at fintechs that are helping fight for fair lending, Kabbage announced a partnership with online banking platform Azlo in May that would create a new entity, Mission Street Capital, to help small businesses get the financing they need to grow. Kabbage also announced in May that it was teaming up with the BTEA (Building Trades Employers’ Association) in a strategic alliance to help women and minority-owned business enterprise contractors to secure funding for their projects.
With $2.5 billion in funding, Kabbage includes SoftBank Capital, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and BlueRun Ventures among its investors. The company was founded in 2009.
Volkswagen Bank, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Volkswagen AG, will leverage technology from OneSpan to secure its transactions and ensure PSD2 compliance. The bank announced today that it will protect its standalone mobile authentication app, PhotoTAN app, with OneSpan’s mobile SDK, Mobile Security Suite.
The SDK also enables the app to take advantage of OneSpan’s Cronto technology, which ensures banks comply with PSD2 requirements with regard to authentication and dynamic linking. Cronto offers a patented visual transaction signing solution that uses a graphical cryptogram of colored dots to encrypt transaction data. The technology provides banks with a strong defense against a variety of cyberthreats, including account takeover and man-in-the-browser Trojan attacks.
“Cronto is a unique technology available in the market in that it combines security and support for regulatory compliance with a seamless customer experience,” OneSpan SVP of Global Sales Dan Dica said. “This combination is important because it enables our customers to advance their digital transformation easily and securely.”
Citing customer demand and new regulation as key drivers of change in the financial industry, Volkswagen Bank Project Manager Mario Bandau praised OneSpan as a company that has “proven to be knowledgeable in all areas.” Bandau credited the firm for “providing us with all the necessary advice and the solutions we need to deliver the kind of experience customers request while ensuring PSD2 compliance.”
With more than €83 billion in assets and deposits of more than €32 billion, Volkswagen Bank is one of the leading direct banks in Germany. Founded in 1949, the bank provides new and used vehicle financing for Volkswagen brands, as well as direct banking and dealer financing. The firm’s PhotoTAN app, available on both iOS and Android, uses facial biometrics to authenticate and sign transactions whether those transactions are started online or on the mobile device.
OneSpan made its most recent Finovate appearance (as VASCO) at FinovateEurope 2017, demonstrating its Smile & Sign mobile onboarding solution. The technology provides institutions with a secure, easy-to-use, compliant way to onboard customers via their mobile devices using biometrics, push notifications, visual cryptograms, and e-signatures.
OneSpan has been in the fintech headlines frequently of late. In June, the company won the SIIA CODiE Award for Best Fintech Solution for its Intelligent Adaptive Authentication technology. That same month, OneSpan announced a partnership with Belgian online lender Buy Way, and launched its Secure Agreement Automation cloud solution for digital account opening.
With a market capitalization of $542 million, OneSpan trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker OSPN.
