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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
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.
How many partners does it take to help drive a national effort to boost youth financial literacy?
According to news from Finovate Best of Show winner Zogo, eleven is a great place to start.
Zogo announced late last month that it has teamed up with 11 community banks and credit unions across 12 different states to offer its teen financial literacy app to customers and members as a branded offering. Each institution will get an access code specific to their bank or credit union that they provide to the users of the app. Once the code is entered, the Zogo app becomes branded with the institution’s logo, helping create a more unique, partner-specific experience for the customer.
“With Zogo, we wanted to create a financial education experience our peers would actually use,” Zogo co-founder and CEO Bolun Li said. “We are excited to partner with community-focused financial institutions to bring this vision to life.”
The app works by guiding users through more than 300 educational micro-modules that help them meet the national standards for financial literacy. These include topics such as using credit, saving, and financial investing. Successfully completing a module earns the user points that can be redeemed in the form of gift cards. Zogo won Best of Show honors at FinovateFall in September for its live demo of the app, which leverages behavioral economic research developed at Duke University in North Carolina to help foster literacy in younger adults.
The firms that will be using the app as early as this year are:
CommunityWide FCU (Indiana)
Diamond CU (Pennsylvania)
First Bank & Trust (Louisiana)
Magnolia FCU (Mississippi)
MassMutual FCU (Massachusetts)
North Star Community CU (North Dakota)
Pen Air FCU (Florida)
Pyramid FCU (Arizona)
RelyOn CU (Texas)
Southern Chautauqua FCU (New York)
West Town Bank & Trust (Illinois, North Carolina)
Founded in 2018, Zogo has raised $295,000 in pre-seed funding, and is backed by Techstars and MetLife. In addition to its Finovate Best of Show honors, Zogo was the winner of the National Association of Credit Union Service Organizations (NACUSO) 7th Annual Next Big Idea contest earlier this year.
“Zogo is such a timely application, built to connect with young adults as they are beginning to learn the value of money,” NACUSO President and former USAA Bank CEO Jack Antonini said. “Delivered through ubiquitous mobile phone, this app can help credit unions capture new members, while teaching and reinforcing responsible financial habits.”
Intelligent Automation software provider Kofax is the latest company to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance the capabilities of its solutions. The company announced this week that it is using AI and ML – along with natural language processing (NLP) – to add sentiment analysis and entity extraction to its intelligent automation offering. This improvement will make it easier for customers using Kofax’s technology to better understand and derive value from unstructured content.
“With new AI capabilities to process structured and unstructured data as well as understand intent and sentiment, Kofax is unrivalled in our ability to help enterprises glean greater insights from any type of content, react quicker to customer needs, and deliver a significantly better experience,” Kofax Chief Strategy Officer Chris Huff said.
Sentiment analysis enables organizations to discern the intent and emotion in the unstructured language of emails, legal documents, social media, and customer support queries. Entity extraction adds the ability to locate key elements in unstructured data and classify it into pre-defined categories. Kofax referred to it as the ability to easily locate “people, places, and things” from unstructured data.
The solution will enable organizations to manage the challenge of processing sizable amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data, alleviating the need for manual review of documents. With the ability to extract data in real-time, companies will see increases in productivity and efficiency while benefiting from deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences.
“Our investment in AI technologies to complement rules-based automation is paying off for our 25,000+ customers who’ve come to rely on our experience, dependability, and reliability for achieving true digital transformation at scale,” Huff added.
Founded in 1991 and acquired by Lexmark in 2015, Kofax launched its intelligent automation software platform and marketplace earlier this year. The technology automates end-to-end business operations at scale, and enables companies that have made a commitment to digital technology to further increase efficiency and productivity via automation.
“Kofax’s Intelligent Automation platform has driven excitement, and more energy around further adoption and expansion of the program,” Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group’s Yoshiaki Nishita said. “In addition, our employee mindset is changing as well. They’re no longer concerned automation will replace them. They see it as an extension of themselves. Ultimately it’s become a fundamental shift in their thinking.”
Kofax demonstrated the KYC Automation with RPA extension of its TotalAgility platform at FinovateSpring 2016. The technology uses existing API infrastructure – or its own Synthetic API capability if necessary – to help organizations meet KYC requirements and fight financial fraud.
Kick off your high-heeled sneakers – fintech’s got a brand new podcast.
The new program, the Finovate Podcast, was launched this fall by host Greg Palmer, Finovate VP of Strategy. New episodes of the show are released twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays.
We talked with Greg about what the Finovate Podcast brings to the fintech community, what topics the podcast will focus on, and what guests the podcast will feature in the weeks and months to come.
Finovate: You just posted your 14th Finovate podcast. What kind of reception has the podcast received from the fintech community so far?
Greg Palmer: So far the reception has been really positive! Certain episodes have been more popular than others, but listeners seem to be responding well to the format. Part of the reason I wanted to do this podcast in the first place was because I feel like I’m always talking to interesting people who know so much more than I do, and I wanted to share their insights with a broader audience.
I’m finding that a lot of people aren’t really aware that some of the things that they take for granted would surprise others in the space, and it’s always fun when we can uncover something like that. And on the other side, the folks I’m interviewing all seem to believe that I’m making them sound smart – they are smart, of course, but I’m glad I’m making them sound like it!
Finovate: How does the Finovate podcast differ from some of the other fintech or technology podcasts out there?
Palmer: A lot of podcasts in the space are longer-form, and require a lot more time and attention. I deliberately wanted to create a podcast that was shorter, punchier, and more efficient. Partly that’s because of how my brain has been wired after working at Finovate for so long, and partly it’s because I think that’s the show I would want to listen to. Our episodes top out at about 13 minutes, which makes them a lot more digestible. And just like with the content on stage at Finovate events, if an episode isn’t your cup of tea, no worries, the next one will have a completely different focus.
Finovate: Who are some of the guests you’ve already had on the program? If someone were to go back and only listen to one or two of your previous podcasts, which ones would you highlight and why?
Palmer: We’ve already had a number of great guests, including our Best of Show winners from FinovateSpring 2019, and some non-product folks like Ghela Boskovitch, Karen Mills, Wayne Miller, and Alissa Knight. If you were going to start with one, I’d take the Ghela one first, she’s such a fascinating person, and we were able to get into some really good stuff on our first chat. Karen Mills was great, and so was Alissa Knight. I’m not supposed to play favorites with the Best of Show winners, but I really enjoyed speaking with Jeff LoCastro of Neener Analytics. Kevin Gosschalk from Arkose Labs was another fun one.
Finovate: Podcasts are an increasingly popular media channel. What can podcasts do to help stimulate interest in, conversation about, and broader coverage of financial technology?
Palmer: For me it comes back to the difference between the way people converse vs. the way they communicate in writing or other channels. I think fintech as an industry has a lot of mystique around it, and some of the concepts can be really intimidating. That intimidation can put people off or keep them from engaging with solutions that they should. A conversational podcast can really help to make some of the basic concepts easy to understand, and it can humanize the people behind the tech, which really helps. The more open, honest conversations we can have about the tech that’s driving the space, the better it is for everybody, and that’s where a podcast can really be an important asset.
Finovate: How has the podcast experience been for you? You are typically either on the stage talking to large audiences or behind the scenes working with startups. What do you get to do differently as a podcast host that you enjoy the most?
Palmer: I have to say I love it, and not just because I got to go out and buy some cool new audio toys to play with! My role on stage at Finovate events is to put other people in a position to shine, and my work behind the scenes with presenters ahead of time has very much the same goal. I want the people who come across our stage to be able to reach the audience in a meaningful way and create a real connection with them, even if they only have seven minutes in which to do it.
In the podcast, though, I get to be a more visible part of the conversation, which I appreciate, and it lets me try out some of my own thoughts on the space in a way that I haven’t been able to before. I think the biggest change since I’ve been doing the podcast, though, is the way I look at the people I interact with. Now that I have an amplifying outlet for the insights that I discover, I’ve started to look at people through this lens of “What can you tell my audience? What do you know that other people don’t know?” It’s a really interesting way to talk to people, and in my limited experience so far, I’m finding that I’m learning a lot myself as I ask those questions in my own head.
Finovate: Where do you see the Finovate podcast a year or two from now? What are your goals for the program?
Palmer: I want to grow the show, obviously, and I want to keep bringing a variety of guests in from all across the fintech ecosystem. My ultimate goal, though, is to use this platform as a way to share knowledge, and push the ecosystem to be better. There are a lot of exciting aspects of fintech, but there is so much work to do, and I hope my podcast can help people move forward in a confident way. If the Finovate Podcast can get to a point where it’s helping to inspire people, excite people, or even scare them a little bit, then it’s a huge success in my book.
Find out more about the Finovate Podcast. Want to amplify your message? Get involved as a supporter of the show.
New York-based Apple Bank has selected FIS and its IBS system for its new core banking setup and will be moving to a hosted platform as part of a major transformation program, reports Alex Hamilton of Fintech Futures, Finovate’s sister publication.
According to FIS, the bank wanted to modernize its in-house technology with a new core platform. IBS will be deployed across the institution’s mobile banking, branch and ATM channels.
Apple Bank, which has 79 branches and assets of more than $15 billion, is the second-largest state-chartered savings bank in New York State.
“It’s all about the experience,” said Aditya Kishore, EVP and CTO of Apple Bank. “We chose the FIS IBS core banking platform because it enables us to deliver that consistent, seamless customer experience.”
Rob Lee, head of digital and banking at FIS, added that the vendor is confident that IBS will provide Apple Bank with a technology platform it needs “to support its growth well into the future.”
FIS demonstrated its Cardless Cash solution at FinovateFall 2016. Founded in 1968 and headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, the company acquired payments firm – and fellow Finovate alum – Worldpay in March for $34 billion.
“Scale matters in our rapidly changing industry,” FIS Chairman, President, and CEO Gary Norcross explained when the Worldpay deal was announced. “Upon closing later this year, our two powerhouse organizations will combine forces to offer a customer-driven combination of scale, global presence, and the industry’s broadest range of global financial solutions.”
