Author: David Penn

CallVU Boosts Mobile Banking in Romania; Fintech Adoption in Colombia Surges

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: CallVU, Finovate Global, Sberbank

As Finovate goes increasingly global, so does our coverage of financial technology. Finovate Global: Fintech News from Around the World is our weekly look at fintech innovation in developing economies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Asia-Pacific

  • CIMB Niaga and Liquid Group forge strategic partnership to drive cross-border QR payments between Singapore and Indonesia.
  • Active.Ai, developers of a conversational AI platform for financial services companies, raises $3 million in Series A funding.
  • Dianrong, a Chinese P2P lender, completes its latest funding round. The amount raised was not disclosed.

Sub-Saharan Africa

  • Nigerian lender Kudimoney rebrands as Kuda; picks up banking license from the country’s central bank.
  • Virgin Money South Africa to launch zero monthly fee bank account and low-cost cross border payments via its app.
  • Sixteen companies, fully one-third, in the Inclusive Fintech 50 of early-stage startups working on solutions to advance financial inclusion, hail from sub-Saharan Africa.

Central and Eastern Europe

  • CallVU teams up with Banca Transilvania to boost mobile banking.
  • Romanian consumer app Beez picks up more than $284,000 (€250,000) in new funding.
  • Russia’s Sberbank acquires stake in Islamic charity platform, PayZakat.

Middle East and Northern Africa

  • Egyptian fintech startup Paynas wins Visa’s FinTech pitch-off competition at the Seamless North Africa 2019 conference, taking home a prize of $50,000.
  • Libya’s Yaqeen Bank partners with Oracle FSS to deploy its core platform and digital banking experience.
  • What is the future of the bank branch in MENA? Khaleej Times takes a look.

Central and Southern Asia

  • National Bank of Pakistan partners with financial systems supplier Autosoft Dynamics to automate the branch’s operations in Bahrain.
  • India’s central bank to revisit regulations on the storage of payments data.
  • Could the success of Kenya’s M-Pesa show the way to higher fintech adoption in India?

Latin America and the Caribbean

  • Brazil launches regulatory sandbox for fintech and blockchain-related projects.
  • Colombian consumers are adopting fintech solutions at a faster rate than consumers in any other Latin American country according to the latest survey from EY Global.
  • Celcoin, a Brazilizian fintech that enables users to their smartphone into a hub for reselling mobile phone recharges, earns a spot in the Inclusive 50 list.

Top image designed by Freepik

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Finicity and LendingQB Partner to Accelerate Mortgage Origination Process

Finicity and LendingQB Partner to Accelerate Mortgage Origination Process
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finicity

Faster loan processing and a better experience for mortgage borrowers is the goal of the new partnership between Finicity and SaaS loan origination technology solution provider LendingQB, which has integrated Finicity’s digital Verification of Assets (VoA) solution into its platform.

Demonstrated at Finovate two springs ago as part of Finicity’s growing inventory of credit decisioning solutions, Verification of Assets leverages consumer-permissioned transaction data to help lenders spot underwriting factors that can shave as many as six days off the typical mortgage origination timeline. The solution delivers reports in 30 seconds or less, and can be refreshed during the origination process.

“Digitizing the loan origination process is the key to the future of lending,” Finicity CEO Steve Smith said. “We’re proud to be one of the tech providers behind this movement and are glad to work with leading digital loan originators like LendingQB to help the industry evolve and improve the experiences for lenders and borrowers alike.”

Tim Nguyen, CEO of LendingQB’s parent company, MeridianLink, put the partnership in the context of the company’s determination to remain at technology’s cutting edge for the sake of all parties in the mortgage journey. “At LendingQB, we pride ourselves on our ability to seek out the best technology and partnerships to combine with our solution,” Nguyen said. “This creates a competitive advantage for lenders that delivers a more meaningful experience to the people that really matter: borrowers.”

Founded in 2011, LendingQB helps companies build digital mortgage solutions with its browser-based loan origination system and open API integrations to 300+ vendors and services. The company, which is headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, inked a deal with CoreLogic in June and, in April, was named to the HousingWire Tech100 for a second consecutive year.

In addition to Verification of Assets, Finicity also offers Verification of Income (VoI) as part of its suite of credit decisioning solutions. VoI provides confirmation on up to 24 months of historical income, and features confidence scores on income streams to help anticipate future income. Detailed information from both VoA and VoI is available via the company’s Finicity Reports.

Finicity most recently made fintech headlines when it announced its partnership with Pulte Mortgage this spring. Named one of the Best Fintechs to Work For by PaymentsSource at the beginning of the year, the Salt Lake City, Utah-based fintech has raised $79.9 million in funding and counts Experian Ventures and Bridge Bank among its investors.

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ABN Amro Teams Up with Temenos

ABN Amro Teams Up with Temenos
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Temenos

ABN Amro has gone live with Temenos’ WealthSuite in a first site as it seeks to roll out the digital platform for its international wealth and corporate banking, reports Martin Whybrow of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).

The project marks a shift by the Dutch bank to a single platform, with the aim of reducing IT operational costs and achieving an improved cost/income ratio.

The first international branch to go live with the system will be in Belgium, with another two countries lined up for implementation in the next multi-year phase. Temenos’ long-standing partner, Cognizant, is providing consulting and system integration services for the project.

ABN Amro is a long-term customer of Temenos. The T24 core banking platform was taken for its corporate banking activities in 2009 and is now live in nine countries. The bank was also a pioneer for Temenos’ Payments solution. It also selected the Temenos Continuous Deployment product to speed up its software delivery and rapidly launch new innovations.

Friso Westra, head of IT development core banking international at ABN Amro, said: “We selected Temenos as our technology partner to future-proof the ongoing growth of our private bank”.

Westra has been working closely with Temenos and their implementation partner, Cognizant. “We experienced a smooth go-live with Temenos WealthSuite [and] we are confident of achieving our ambition in offering the most innovative wealth management products and services in the industry,” added Westra.

Temenos WealthSuite provides multi-channel, 24/7 real-time capability to support wealth managers in delivering client services, while automating compliance and back office functions. Temenos claims WealthSuite currently helps advisors manage $12 trillion assets under management.

Temenos demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2015, presenting its Connect Mobile Banking solution. The company also participated in our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, later that year, discussing its B2B Financial Apps Marketplace. Founded in 1993, Temenos is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: CurrencyFair, Equifax, PayPal, Plaid

Around the web

  • Plaid launches Investments to give developers and financial institutions the ability to build holistic views of customer investment accounts.
  • Equifax forges strategic alliance with GIACT Systems.
  • PayPal COO Bill Ready to leave company at the end of the year to “pursue entrepreneurial interests” beyond PayPal.
  • CurrencyFair announces its Come Home campaign offering Irish nationals living abroad the opportunity to win a €30,000 relocation package to return to Ireland.

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.

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HooYu and NatWest Collaborate to Offer Account Opening By Selfie

HooYu and NatWest Collaborate to Offer Account Opening By Selfie
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: HooYu

Courtesy of a partnership with identity verification specialist HooYu, NatWest has become the latest bank to enable new customers to open accounts with just a selfie. NatWest joins the ranks of HSBC and Lloyds who began offering “selfie banking” in 2016.

NatWest will use HooYu’s AI-enabled technology and real-time biometrics to compare the customer’s selfie picture with the image on their government-issued ID. The goal of the collaboration is to leverage faster, more convenient, and more secure identity verification to accelerate the account opening and onboarding process, overall. Today’s launch comes after a successful 60,000+ customer pilot that saw significant reductions in the number of fraudulent applications.

HooYu Marketing Director David Pope, who demonstrated the company’s verification technology at FinovateEurope last year, said it is critical that banks have faster, easier ways to onboard new customers. Rather than force them to visit a physical branch or to wait up to 48 hours to open an account, Pope said, the solution is an identity platform that “balances the twin demands of compliance and convenience” by streamlining and better securing the account opening process.

“We know customers want to be able to open accounts at a time and place that suits them and not have to worry about precious ID documents going missing in the post, or taking time out of their day to go to a branch,” NatWest Chief Digital Officer Frans Woelders said. “That’s why we’re making it easier, safer and faster to open and access accounts, allowing customers to get on with the things that matter.”

The partnership with NatWest is the latest – and most headline-grabbing – collaboration from a company that has teamed up with a variety of firms this year- from alternative banking solution provider Suits Me to esports wagering platform Luckbox. Other companies partnering with HooYu in recent months include gold-as-currency enabler Glint, online investment platform EasyMoney, and U.S.-based casino operator Bear Group.

Headquartered in London, U.K., and founded in 2016, HooYu made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2017. The company’s two signature solutions are its global identity platform, HooYu Identity, launched in 2017, and its data visualization tool, HooYu Investigate, introduced in 2018.

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Roostify Teams Up with HSBC Bank USA

Roostify Teams Up with HSBC Bank USA
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Roostify

The new digital home lending experience from HSBC Bank USA, a division of HSBC Group, will be powered by mortgagetech innovator, Roostify. The new offering is designed to provide borrowers with a mortgage loan transaction journey that has less stress and friction and more ease of use.

HSBC Bank’s solution will provide borrowers with a streamlined application and fulfillment process for both new home buyers and those looking to refinance. Mortgage customers will be able to submit loan requests online and securely share documents digitally. The platform gives borrowers transparency into the entire process, enabling them to track their loan status in real time from application through closing. The technology is integrated into HSBC’s loan origination system to make it easier for lenders and borrowers to communicate and exchange information.

“HSBC has been a great partner in driving innovation to improve their customer experience,” Roostify co-founder and CEO Rajesh Bhat said. “Information exchange is a vital part of the home buying experience, and it can be a game-changer when done right. This solution provides HSBC’s customers with a modern, improved way of applying for and closing a mortgage, and delivers transparency to both the customer and lending team from start to finish, for an optimal experience.”

Head of Mortgage, Retail Banking and Wealth Management for HSBC Bank Raman Muralidharan underscored the role of digital in helping the firm pursue what he called “customer experience-led growth.” He pointed out that mortgage customer increasingly want a lending experience that mirrors the other digitally-oriented financial experiences in their lives. Muralidharan credited Roostify for delivering a solution that “provides a superior experience to our customers and to our mortgage consultants.”

Roostify demonstrated its digital lending platform at FinovateSpring 2018. The company began the year teaming up with Glacier Bancorp, a $11.9 billion regional bank serving customers in the Mountain West and Pacific Northwest. This spring, Roostify partnered with mortgagetech solutions provider Mortech, combing its platform with Mortech’s product and pricing engine (PPE). Last month, the company announced that it had completed its integration with e-document signature and print fulfillment company, Docutech.

Founded in 2012, Roostify has raised $33 million in funding from investors including Cota Capital and USAA. We featured the San Francisco, California-based company in our Earth Day look at fintechs whose technology helps support a greener environment.

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SheerID Launches Instant Student Verification in 190+ Countries

SheerID Launches Instant Student Verification in 190+ Countries
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: SheerID

SheerID, the Oregon-based firm that leverages its digital verification identity technology to support gated, exclusive offer campaigns, unveiled its Instant Student Verification solution today. Available in 191 countries, the first-of-its-kind technology enables brands from Amazon to Spotify to more effectively make gated offers to university students worldwide.

Using SheerID is straightforward. Students provide some basic information – name, university, and date of birth – and SheerID verifies their eligibility for student offers from a wide and growing variety of top brands. This gated offer approach not only provides for more relevant rewards and offers, it also respects the privacy preferences of Gen Z consumers who SheerID said are anticipated to make up 40% of consumer spending by 2020.

“(This) announcement marks another major milestone for SheerID and a major milestone for the industry,” SheerID CEO Jake Weatherly said. “Building authentic, trust-based relationships with students around the world is an imperative for every brand as students are literally the next-generation consumer.” Weatherly said that the ability to instantly verify a student’s status, anywhere in the world, “ushers in a tsunami of opportunity” for brands marketing to Gen Z consumers in what he called a “privacy-friendly context.”

The concept, as Weatherley explained in a blog post this week titled Why SheerID Launched the First Worldwide Student Verification Platform, puts exclusivity as the center. Discussing the critical opt-in nature of gated offers, he wrote: “By recognizing the person on the other side of the purchase – and respecting their rights to control their data – exclusivity marketing goes beyond the transaction to infuse more meaning into the exchange. It creates an authentic customer relationship.”

In addition to the instant student verification announcement, SheerID also introduced its enhanced fraud prevention. This additional layer of protection features cross-checking of specific identity attributes with third party sources, as well as leveraging advanced algorithms to detect suspicious activity consistent with fraud.

SheerID made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateSpring in San Francisco, where the company demonstrated multiple use cases of its Verification Platform. The company counts more than one billion consumer attributes across nearly 9,000 authoritative data sources in its Verified Identity Network.

SheerID has raised $32.1 million in funding, and includes Centana Growth Partners and Voyager Capital among its investors.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: CREALOGIX, Flywire, HooYu, Jack Henry, Roostify, SheerID

On Finovate.com

  • SheerID Launches Instant Student Verification in 190+ Countries.
  • HooYu and NatWest Collaborate to Offer Account Opening By Selfie.

Around the web

  • Flywire partners with Student Loan Company to provide additional payment options for SLC’s overseas customers.
  • CREALOGIX announces the departure of CFO Philippe Wirth, who has served in this capacity since April 2017.
  • Ascend FCU ($2.5 billion in assets) to deploy Jack Henry & Associates’ Symitar Episys 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.

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CUNA Partners with Switch to Offer Card Updating App

CUNA Partners with Switch to Offer Card Updating App
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: SWITCH

CUNA Strategic Services has partnered with Seattle-based fintech Switch to bring instant card updating to credit unions across the country. The two firms have announced a market feasibility pilot involving Switch’s CardUpdatr app which updates merchant websites with credit union cards in real time to get new cards into circulation faster, boost transaction volumes, and increase customer loyalty.

An issuer-branded solution, CardUpdatr supports activation, reissuance, and card use promotion marketing programs. The app can be deployed and used without requiring the involvement of in-house development teams to make the card updating process easier and smoother for issuers and cardholders alike. The technology is powered by Switch’s CardSavr platform, a scalable, cloud-based solution that uses advanced autonomous broswer technology fueled by machine learning and AI-powered algorithms to place new or reissued cards on any online account.

“CSS recognizes that tech-sophisticated financial organizations who apply easily integrated solutions to directly address member experience problems are in a better position to win on member loyalty and long-term growth,” Switch co-founder and CEO Chris Hopen explained. He warned that because many cardholders do not update their online accounts when they receive newly-issued cards, issuers often do not see the ROI that they should. “Switch looks forward to witnessing the positive impact CardUpdatr will have on credit unions and their members.”

Switch issued its CardUpdatr app this spring. The app leverages the power of the company’s payment provisioning platform to keep cards-on-file updated where cardholders shop and make online payments. Cardholders simply enter their card and billing information, choose the websites of the online merchants where cards-on-file need to be updated, and provide login details for those selected sites. The updating process takes seconds and does not involve reading, pulling, or scraping personally identifiable information (PII).

“The CardUpdatr solution is uniquely positioned to propel credit unions to the frontline of innovation to increase cardholder satisfaction and differentiate themselves from other financial institutions,” CUNA Strategic Services (CSS) President Eric Gelly said. “(Switch) offers a powerful solution that is in complete alignment with our organization’s mission of helping credit unions improve their bottom line and enhance their relationships. CSS is thrilled to bring the breakthrough capabilities of the Switch technology to our credit unions.”

Founded in 2014, Switch demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2016. The company picked up $2 million in funding late last year, bringing its total capital to more than $2.3 million.

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Expensify Teams Up with Bookkeeping Franchise Supporting Strategies

Expensify Teams Up with Bookkeeping Franchise Supporting Strategies
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Expensify

Expense management solution provider Expensify announced today that it is teaming up with Supporting Strategies, one of the biggest bookkeeping franchises in the U.S. The partnership will make Expensify the expense reporting app for thousands of Supporting Strategies’ small business clients across the country.

With this announcement, Supporting Strategies is the latest company to join the ExpensifyApproved! Partner Program. The program, which features companies such as CLA, Wipfli, and BPM among its members, provides discounts, co-marketing, and access to client onboarding resources, as well as opportunities to participate in networking events such as Expensify’s ExpensiCon.

“Expensify has greatly increased our ability to provide great customer service to our clients,” Supporting Strategies CEO and founder Leslie Jorgensen said. “With Expensify, we have a one stop shop for all company expenses that syncs directly to QuickBooks.” Jorgensen praised the platform’s one-click ability to approve and pay expense reports, as well as code company credit card transactions – all in the same app.

Founded in 2004, Supporting Strategies offers outsourced bookkeeping services and operational support to small businesses. The company leverages “best-of-breed” technology to offer a range of services including accounts payable and receivable, bookkeeping, financial reporting, and payroll administration. The company has been in a growth phase of late, announcing expansions in Florida and New Jersey in June; in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May; and Charlotte, North Carolina in March. Earlier this year, Supporting Strategies was named Top 50 Franchise Based on Franchisee Satisfaction by Franchise Business Review for the fourth consecutive year.

Expensify presented Bedrock: Expensify’s Open Sourced Infrastructure Secret Weapon at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley in 2016. Company founder and CEO David Barrett discussed how the company leveraged Bedrock, its geo-redundant database technology, to help it maintain its position as the fastest growing ERP software in the world. Expensify is also an alum of our demo-only event, having demonstrated its Expensify Invoices solution at FinovateSpring in 2013.

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, and founded in 2008, Expensify has raised $38.2 million in funding from investors including OpenView Venture Partners, CIBC, PJC, and Redpoint. The company made international fintech headlines this spring with the news of its partnership with Southeast Asia ridesharing company Grab.

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ABBYY Unveils New SDK for Mobile Web Capture

ABBYY Unveils New SDK for Mobile Web Capture
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ABBYY

Content IQ technology solution provider ABBYY has launched a new SDK that gives developers the ability to add real-time image and data capture to their mobile onboarding process. ABBYY Mobile Web Capture, available on both iOS and Android, makes it easier for institutions to leverage the popularity of the mobile channel while eliminating one of its main pain points – manual data entry.

Once integrated, the technology enables a faster, smoother onboarding process by letting new customers photograph required documents for account opening. The SDK leverages the web browser on the mobile device to capture high-quality, text recognition ready, images in real time. Mobile Web Capture helps lower error rates while making the data delivery process less of a hassle for the user.

SVP for Product Marketing at ABBYY Bruce Orcutt added a streamlined customer journey, greater profitability, and market differentiation as further reasons why companies can benefit from the new SDK. “The new devkit closes the gap in mobile onboarding for enterprises, providing the same experience as a native app, without the need to install one,” Orcutt explained.

ABBYY provides a wide range of AI-based solutions that help businesses better understand, manage, and act on enterprise data. The company is a specialist in Content IQ, a new kind of enabling technology that helps businesses maximize their digital transformation by empowering digital workers to transform unstructured content into actionable information. This technology has been deployed to complement intelligent automation platforms like robotic process automation (RPA) and business process management (BPM). In fact, the company notes that more than one-third of the Forbes 100 companies that are engaged in RPA for intelligent automation use ABBYY’s solutions and services.

ABBYY participated in our developers conference FinDEVr SiliconValley 2016, presenting How Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence are Creating New Revenue with Mobile Solutions. The company showed how new technologies like machine learning and AI are being used to provide real-time mobile data recognition and capture.

A global corporation with offices in 11 countries including Germany, Russia, and the United States, ABBYY was founded in 1989 by David Yang and Dean Tang. Last month, the company announced that it had strengthened its technology partnership with intelligent information management firm, M-Files. Also in May, ABBYY unveiled its FineScanner AI, an AI-enabled mobile scanner that leverages neural networks to sort and find text recognition worthy images.

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Terafina to Boost Small Business Onboarding at PlainsCapital Bank

Terafina to Boost Small Business Onboarding at PlainsCapital Bank
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Terafina

PlainsCapital Bank is the latest FI to take advantage of the omnichannel sales technology from Terafina. The company, whose platform is specifically designed for community banks and credit unions, announced that the bank has leveraged its small business onboarding solution to streamline the process of acquiring its SME customers.

President and COO of Terafina Ashwin Goyal praised PlainsCapital Bank as having made “all the right strategic moves” in distinguishing their product offering in the market. “They are designing a compelling small business banking strategy,” he said, “that helps them stand out from others, while taking advantage of the overlap with their existing retail capabilities and leveraging their trusted community footprint throughout Texas.”

PlainsCapital Bank sought to improve its small business customer onboarding to better serve its rapidly growing client base. In choosing Terafina, the institution is also trying to take advantage of small businesses’ willingness to choose a community bank or credit union as its bank partner (51% in a 2017 Raddon study) as well as the ability to market new products and services to SMEs more directly.

“We have been able to significantly improve the onboarding experience while penetrating the retail segment with small business products,” said Chief of Retail Banking for PlainsCapital Bank Matt Adkins. “This unique capability has added great value to our customers’ experience.”

PlainsCapital Bank is the fifth-largest bank in Texas based on deposit market share. Founded in 1988, the bank offers commercial, private, and consumer banking services, as well as treasury and wealth management. The Dallas-based institution has $9.7 billion in total assets, and operates more than 60 branches in cities such as Austin, Houston, and San Antonio.

Fremont, California-based Terafina demonstrated its Digital Sales Platform at FinovateSpring 2019. The technology enables community banks and credit unions to leverage the onboarding process to build deeper, lifecycle relationships with their clients. This helps FIs better tailor their product offerings, increase conversions, and drive growth.

It has been a busy first half of 2019 for Terafina. In April, the company announced that Gesa Credit Union, one of the largest credit unions in Washington state, with more than $2 billion in assets and 150,000+ members, would deploy its platform to provide real time sales and service offerings to its members. In March, the company reported that KeyPoint Credit Union, based in Silicon Valley and boasting $1.32 billion in assets, was going live with its omni-sales platform, as well.

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