David Penn, Author at Finovate

TradeIt To Be Acquired by TradingView

By David Penn Posted on April 2, 2019
Categories: Mergers & Acquisitions, TradeIt

Trading API and app developer TradeIt has agreed to be acquired by long-time partner TradingView. The company will leverage TradeIt’s technology to bring mobile trading to the more than 10 million monthly active retail users in 150+ countries who use its social trading platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition is the latest evolution in a relationship that extends back “several years,” according to TradeIt CEO and founder Nathan Richardson. “TradingView’s vision aligns strongly with our view of the distributed financial networks of the future,” he said. “(We’ve) always felt our complimentary products and shared retail investing users makes us stronger together.”

TradeIt’s API infrastructure connects to more than $70 billion in actively traded assets at top U.S. brokerages. Its technology enables financial publishers and app developers to link users’ brokerage and investment accounts, and provides support for transactions in most asset classes, including stocks, ETFs, options, and currencies. TradeIt’s solutions include Trading Ticket, an order management tool; PortfolioView, which links and provides access to account balances and positions; and Account Opening, which enables customers to open new brokerage accounts in less than two minutes.

TradeIt noted in its statement that brokers have seen a 10x increase in activity among active traders and a 5x gain in account funding when linked to TradeIt’s platform. The company’s partners include Bloomberg, Business Insider, as well as fellow Finovate alums TipRanks and Divy.

In the announcement, TradeIt and TradingView quoted Insight Venture Partners’ Paul Szurek who express optimism about the new, combined entity. “The product pipeline of account opening and messaging services being delivered by TradeIt makes TradingView an essential retail investors service,” he said. Insight Venture Partners led a Series B round for TradingView last year.

TradingView CEO and founder Denis Globa added the combination will help make his company “part of the backbone of the investing ecosystem.” He said that TradingView also will add to TradeIt’s ecosystem with new account opening and messaging solutions. TradeIt users will gain access to TradingView’s charting and quoting functionality.

TradeIt demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall 2015. Founded in 2014, the company is headquartered in New York City.

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Finn AI Brings Conversational Banking to South Africa’s TymeBank

By David Penn Posted on April 1, 2019
Categories: Finn.ai

Conversational banking technology innovator, Finn AI, will bring the benefits of AI-powered financial assistance to South Africa’s TymeBank. The partnership, announced this week, will help South Africa’s first digital bank develop Max, a virtual assistant dedicated to improving financial literacy.

“Emerging markets are frontrunners in the digital banking race,” Finn AI CEO Jake Tyler said. “TymeBank is one example of a new challenger bank that is changing the face of banking.”

A digital, mobile-first financial institution, TymeBank has no branches and charges lower fees than its brick and mortar rivals. Customers can set up accounts with TymeBank at any one of nearly 700 automated kiosks at Pick n Pay and Boxer supermarkets. More than 100,000 South Africans have opened accounts with the bank since it opened for business in February.

Coenraad Jonker, TymeBank CEO, called the partnership with Finn AI “absolutely instrumental” to the neobank’s early success. “By partnering with Finn AI, TymeBank can offer highly personalized services to our customers,” Jonker said. “We’re working closely on integrating their technology in new ways, such as using AI to simplify account creation.”

With Max, TymeBank seeks to meet consumer expectations for more customized, self-service, digital engagement. The conversational assistant will help bank customers improve their financial lives through better understanding of their credit scores, and provides goal-based savings strategies to help users meet their financial objectives. Max will be available from within the bank’s TymeCoach app.

“We broke the banking mold because it didn’t fit our market – so we built our own,” Jonker said. “It’s customer-centric, intelligent, and it’s helping South Africans enhance their financial well-being.”

Finn demonstrated its virtual banking assistant at FinovateFall 2017, winning Best of Show honors for the second time. Earlier this year, the company announced a partnership with IDaaS specialist, Auth0, that will help banks more readily adopt conversational AI technology. Finn.ai also teamed up with fellow Finovate alum Fidor Bank to help the innovative digital banking group deploy its AI-powered chatbot.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, Finn AI has raised $13.7 million in funding. The company’s investors include Flying Fish Partners, Yaletown Partners, and angel investor John Livingston.

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Virtual Banks Launch in Hong Kong; Can Bitcoin Save Argentina?

By David Penn Posted on March 29, 2019
Categories: Finovate Global, Temenos

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.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Nigerian payments company Amplify has been acquired by OneFinance (OneFi). Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Tech in Africa profiles Kenyan fintech Branch.
Compelo features insurtechs and savings platforms in its presentation of African tech startups “looking to go global.”

Central and Eastern Europe

Bank 131, Russia’s first new bank in four years, to specialize in serving online businesses.
Estonian cryptocurrency exchange Jubiter launches debit card.
Business Review looks at opportunities for Romanian entrepreneurs in the fintech market in the CEE region.

Middle East and Northern Africa

Etihad Credit Insurance teams up with First Abu Dhabi Bank to help UAE companies manage trade finance.
Egyptian cloud-based payroll service Dopay picks up €1 million line of credit from the Massif Fund.
Emirates NBD and Fintech Hive announced launch of API sandbox.

Central and South Asia

Pakistan’s first microfinance bank, Khushhali Bank, goes live with Temenos’ T24 core banking system.
Google Play to launch gold-backed investment plans in India.
Indian core banking system provider Nelito Systems inks deal with Myanmar’s Alliance for Microfinance.

Latin America and the Caribbean

Mexico-based lender Credijuto announces $100 million credit facility courtesy of Goldman Sachs.
Investor Tim Draper makes the case for Argentina to embrace bitcoin.
T13 considers the slow progress of fintech regulation in Chile. In Spanish.

Asia-Pacific

ZhongAn earns virtual banking license from Hong Kong Monetary Authority.
ING and Bank of Beijing invest $447 million in a new digital bank in China.
Standard Chartered partners with Ctrip Finance to launch virtual bank in Hong Kong.

Top image designed by Freepik

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Klarna Launches Open Banking Platform

By David Penn Posted on March 29, 2019
Categories: Klarna

Klarna is the latest fintech to embrace the open banking revolution. The payments company has announced the launch of its own Open Banking Platform, which will enable access to more than 4,300 banks in 14 different markets across Europe via a single Access to Account (XS2A) API – all in accordance with PSD2 guidelines.

Klarna’s offering will feature both account information services (AIS) for consolidated data on payment accounts, and payment initiation services (PIS) to support PSD2-licensed, account-to-account direct bank transfers. In a statement, the company noted that its XS2A PIS technology transferred more than €10 billion in volume and completed more than 100 million transactions last year alone.

“Our technology allows us to offer an ecosystem of services not only to consumers but also to businesses – whether that’s in retail, financial services, or technology,” Klarna CTO Koen Koppen explained. “We look forward to seeing all (the) new solutions and products that will grow out of this, creating a consumer centric financial services industry in Europe.”

Klarna’s Open Banking Platform also gives developers the tools they need to handle the compliance and user experience of credentials management. At the same time, the platform helps them get new products – from payment initiation and credit solutions to roboadvisory and PFM – to market faster and with less cost.

“We can offer the leading technology, quality, knowledge and market presence to help other players develop even better services and products for their consumers,” Klarna Open Banking Platform Manager George Parks Davie said. “Klarna’s XS2A API opens up a range of opportunities and through developer-friendly infrastructure it also empowers innovators.”

Klarna demonstrated its flagship platform at FinovateSpring 2012. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, the company announced a partnership with Canadian e-commerce and in-store point-of-sale financing specialist PayBright earlier this month. In February, Klarna extended its Pay Later service to Gymshark customers in the U.K. and the Nordics. At the beginning of the year, the company announced collaborations with both rapper Snoop Dogg and watchmaker Daniel Wellington.

Founded in 2005, Klarna has raised more than $681 million in funding. The company includes Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic, Creandum, Visa, and Permira among its investors.

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FICO and Equifax Forge Strategic Partnership

By David Penn Posted on March 28, 2019
Categories: Equifax, FICO

A new strategic partnership between FICO and Equifax will help financial institutions better manage risk, marketing, and fraud. The two companies have introduced the Data Decisions Cloud: an end-to-end data and analytics suite that integrates Equifax Ignite, a data and analytics management solution, with FICO Cloud applications and Decision Management Suite, FICO’s digital decisioning platform.

“Our common mission is to empower financial institutions to leverage data-driven decisioning in all their customer interactions,” FICO CEO William J. Lansing said. “With this strategic partnership, FICO and Equifax will help organizations operationalize the best data with unparalleled predictive analytics and applied AI, and do so in a streamlined and cost-effective way.”

The Data Decisions Cloud will enable institutions to better navigate differentiated data to find insights and build highly-predictive models that add greater personalization and protection to the customer experience. For FIs in particular, the solution aims to accelerate the pace of innovation around data and decisioning by helping them take advantage of technologies like explainable AI and neural networks.

Via the partnership, the two companies plan to launch additional joint initiatives later in 2019. Among the upcoming products are a connected system that promotes data science collaboration by providing real-time access to raw and trended data, and an AML/KYC compliance-as-a-service solution. FICO and Equifax also plan to introduce an integrated, pre-screen marketing automation solution that creates FCRA-compliant, customer acquisition and retention campaigns.

“We are energized about this broad partnership between Equifax and FICO,” Equifax CEO Mark W. Begor said. “Two industry leaders are joining forces to help financial institutions better meet the needs of consumers and improve business agility.”

FICO (which stands for Fair Isaac Corporation) participated in our developers conference, FinDEVr NewYork in 2016, with a presentation called Rapidly Deliver Contextually-Powered Stream Processing. Members of the company’s product management and product engineering teams discussed how its Decision Management Platform transformed data “from raw to decision-ready” to help companies better manage risk, fraud, marketing, and customer service.

The company began the year with news of a partnership with electronics payments specialist Conductor to fight payment card fraud in Brazil. Also this year, FICO announced winning five new patents for fraud prevention, AI, and advanced analytics technologies. Founded in 1956 and headquartered in San Jose, California, FICO trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker FICO, and has a market capitalization of $7 billion.

Atlanta, Georgia-based Equifax demonstrated its mobile app at FinovateFall 2011. More recently, the company introduced its Ignite solution in the U.K., and teamed up with fellow Finovate alum Experian to provide free credit monitoring via its TrustedID Premier service.

The global data analytics and technology company is active in 24 countries in the Americas, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region, and employs 11,000 workers around the world. With a market capitalization of $14 billion, Equifax trades on the NYSE under the ticker EFX.

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YellowDog Raises $3.3 Million in Series A

By David Penn Posted on March 27, 2019
Categories: Funding, YellowDog

In a round led by Bloc Ventures, cloud computing scheduling and orchestration management platform YellowDog announced securing an additional $3.3 million (£2.5 million) in Series A funding. The investment brings the total raised for the company’s Series A to more than $5.5 million (the company raised $2.2 million – £1.7 million – in March of last year.)

The financing also featured participation from Vodafone and ARM Holdings. YellowDog said that it will use the additional capital to scale its business and continue its successful expansion into financial services.

The company also announced that Reid Downey, an executive with 10 years’ experience leading software and cloud enterprise sales of Microsoft Azure and Office365 to Fortune 500 firms, will join YellowDog’s board of directors.

Left to right: CEO and founder Gareth Williams and CTO Simon Ponsford demonstrating YellowDog for Financial Services at FinovateEurope 2019.

“We are excited to welcome Reid to the Board and to secure this further funding given our tremendous year of growth ahead,” YellowDog CEO Gareth Williams said. “With our recent wins in the financial services market and more in the pipeline this year, we are only at the tip of the iceberg in this market.”

“The funding will enable us to support our global customer base and extend our technology into new markets such as aerospace,” he added.

YellowDog demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2019. With more than 1,500 customers in 42 countries around the world, YellowDog leverages high performance cloud compute orchestration technology to enable businesses to accurately anticipate the computing resources required to complete complex computational workloads.

With customers in a wide variety of verticals – from entertainment studios to financial services, YellowDog helps companies not only use computing resources more efficiently, they also save significantly on the cost of connectivity – which can be significant when it comes to cloud-based high performance computing.

And in addition to providing intelligent, optimized orchestration, YellowDog’s technology also functions across multi-vendor cloud fabric, providing the high level of compute resilience that some firms, especially those in financial services, require.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Bristol, U.K., the company was shortlisted for the Tech Company of the Year award at the U.K. Business Tech Awards in 2018. Also last year, YellowDog won the Business Innovation Award at the inaugural Best New Business Awards. U.K.-based Business Leader magazine identified the company among its 32 South West Tech Businesses That Are Shaping the Future profile.

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Overbond Launches COBI Matching in Pivot to Analytics

By David Penn Posted on March 27, 2019
Categories: Overbond

When the going gets good, the good go analytic.

That’s one takeaway from the pivot – more than a year in the making – bond market analytics platform Overbond announced today. With the launch of its COBI-Matching solution, the company is reintroducing itself not just as a specialist in new bond issuance, but as a source for real world trading opportunity and liquidity in both traditional and non-traditional fixed income markets.

“We are excited to offer enhanced liquidity sourcing to our buy-side clients as well as global issuers and dealer underwriters,” Overbond CEO Vuk Magdelinic said. “Issuers (and) dealer underwriters now can systematically identify non-traditional liquidity pools and investors can benchmark their portfolio rebalancing decisions.”

COBI-Matching (COBI stands for Corporate and Government Bond Intelligence) is an advanced AI algorithm family which monitors investor behavior, buying patterns, and rebalancing events; identifies traditional and non-traditional bond buyers; and generates best-fit bond buyer recommendations.

The algorithms focus on factors like sector concentration, cross-currency classifications, and credit rating profile. They analyze 2,900+ investor portfolios, and rank investor interest based on both existing holdings and quarterly rebalancing. Trade ideas, pricing tension, and buyer preferences are among the new recommendations available via the new algorithm-based solution.

Solutions like COBI-Matching will enable fixed market income participants to take advantage of growing markets including the Chinese renminbi (RMB) fixed income market (also known as Panda bonds), the market for Asian infrastructure bonds, and the Green Bond market. Issuers can use COBI-Matching for the technology’s pre-issuance analytics, which offer insights into international pricing demand.

Overbond demonstrated its platform at FinovateFall 2017. Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the company won Most Innovative Third Party Technology Vendor (Front Office) at the American Financial Technology awards at the beginning of the year. Overbond’s customers include buy-side institutions with more than $2 trillion in assets under management, as well as global corporate and government bond issuers with $20+ billion in bonds outstanding.

Founded in 2015, Overbond has raised $3.3 million in funding (CAD $4.5 million), and includes Gaingels and Morrison Financial Services Limited among its investors.

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Tandem Chooses Token as Open Banking, PSD2 Partner

By David Penn Posted on March 26, 2019
Categories: Token

Digital U.K. challenger bank Tandem is working with open banking platform provider Token.io to ensure PSD2 compliance and take advantage of the opportunities of open banking. Tandem will integrate a variety of solutions from Token, ranging from PSD2 compliant APIs to direct payment options like Token BankPay, into its core platform in order to better serve its more than 500,000 customers.

Tandem CEO Ricky Knox differentiated his bank’s approach to open banking, saying that Tandem goes “much further” than simple account aggregation and basic PSD2 compliance – especially thanks to the partnership with Token. “This means we can focus our efforts on differentiating ourselves with an improved user experience,” Knox said, “leveraging both AISP and PISP use cases to provide smarter, more personalized banking products that solve real people’s problems with money.”

“Our turnkey, cost-effective PSD2 compliance and open banking solutions will enable Tandem to accelerate growth through new and better products,” Token founder and CEO Steve Kirsch said. “Token offers the industry’s simplest and most secure transaction-based open banking API, which, being cloud-based, gives Tandem both flexibility and scalability when initiating and managing transactions.”

Tandem offers consumers a money management app, credit card, and fixed-rate savings accounts. Founded in 2011, the challenger bank launched its Autosavings account earlier this month. The new feature automatically sets aside user-determined amounts using “round ups” from transactions and “save to save” calculations based on the user’s income and anticipated spending. Autosavings also pays 0.5% interest, and users can add to their Autosavings account whenever they choose.

Token demonstrated its PSD2 compliant, open banking platform at FinovateEurope 2017. The company began the year with the hiring of new Chief Technology Officer, Gaurav Kohli. Back in December, Token announced a partnership with MENA-based infrastructure development company Almoayed Technologies to help drive open banking on the Arabian Peninsula. Also that month, the company partnered with thinkmoney to support PSD2 compliance and open banking for the U.K.-based current account provider.

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Capsilon and Blue Sage Drive Automation in MortgageTech

By David Penn Posted on March 26, 2019
Categories: Capsilon

Blue Sage’s lending clients are about to get some help when it comes to managing loan originations. The company has announced a partnership with Capsilon that integrates document recognition and data extraction technology into its digital lending platform.

“Capsilon IQ perfectly and seamlessly complements our robust workflow tools and enhances our ability to deliver a truly unique, digital mortgage experience,” Blue Sage CEO Joe Langner said. “Not only will Capsilon’s technologies help save our lending clients time and money, but they will also improve quality and efficiency at every stage of the mortgage lifecycle.”

Blue Sage offers a browser-based Digital Lending Platform that can be deployed over a variety of mortgage channels, including retail, wholesale, and correspondent lending. Capsilon IQ, Capsilon’s flagship digital mortgage solution, will be integrated into the platform via Blue Sage’s APIs to capture mortgage data from relevant documents and reduce the amount of manual labor involved in the process.

Capsilon CEO Sanjeev Malaney praised Blue Sage’s solutions as “(the) cutting edge of today’s mortgage origination technology, and noted that the two companies both aim to “help drive down origination costs while helping our mutual customers take on more volume, scale appropriately, and create key competitive advantages that drive their business growth.”

A pioneer in end-to-end web-based loan origination system development, and a multiple-time recipient of HousingWire’s HW Tech100 Awards, Blue Sage is based in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. The company’s technology was developed by the core team of Palisades Technology Partners in 2011, and has since expanded to include support for consumer direct and mobile lending.

Capsilon demonstrated its Mortgage Velocity Platform at FinovateSpring 2017. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Capsilon announced the beta launch of its digital underwriter solution earlier this month. At the beginning of the year, the company announced that Capsilon IQ enabled companies to save more than five million people hours in 2018. Capsilon has raised $21.4 million in funding and includes Francisco Partners among its investors.

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BioCatch Teams Up with Entersekt

By David Penn Posted on March 25, 2019
Categories: BioCatch, Entersekt

A new partnership between behavioral biometrics innovator BioCatch and fintech solution provider Entersekt will help financial services companies offer more secure digital banking and payment experiences for their customers. With options like passwordless login and enhanced remote user registration, the collaboration will give clients a “one-stop-shop” for continuous and multi-factor authentication.

Entersekt SVP for North America Sherif Samy called BioCatch’s technology “an exciting alternative” to the biometric-based security solutions already provided on its platform. “It will add value for our customers, especially in usability, by helping to determine when step-up authentication is really required and when we can safely leave the user to go about their business uninterrupted,” Samy said.

BioCatch analyzes the interactions between users and their devices to reduce fraud and provide online identity verification. The partnership means that when BioCatch’s biometric behavioral technology identifies anomalous behavior, it sends an alert to Entersekt’s security platform for an out-of-band, multi-factor authentication (MFA) via device validation.

“Our combined approach with Entersekt answers the call,” Avi Turgeman, BioCatch founder and CTO said of the challenge of simultaneously providing a seamless customer experience and strong online security.” The collaboration, he said, joins “(b)ehavioral biometrics as ‘who you are,’ the mobile device as ‘what you have,’ and the additional elements required to step up a transaction in real time if there is a problem.”

BioCatch demonstrated its Passive Biometrics technology at FinovateFall 2014. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Israel, the company announced earlier this month that it was adding touchscreen pressure to its set of behavioral biometrics. At the beginning of the year, BioCatch unveiled a new solution designed to help fight “vishing,” a form of automated push payment fraud.

With investors including Blumberg Capital, OurCrowd, and Maverick Ventures Israel, BioCatch has raised $41.6 million in funding.

South Africa-based Entersekt presented Securing Mobile Applications Through Transport Layer Diversity at our developers conference, FinDEVr SiliconValley in 2014. The company’s technology is deployed in 45 countries around the world, and defends 150 million transactions a month from cyberfraud.

Last month, Samy was recognized by One World Identity (OWI) as a top influencer in the field of digital identity. Entersekt began 2019 with a number of major hires, bringing on digital identity and business development specialist Jennifer Singh, as well as adding a country manager for South Africa and a VP of engineering services.

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Instarem Raises Capital; TurnKey Lender Goes Live in Malaysia

By David Penn Posted on March 22, 2019
Categories: CustomerXPs, Finovate Global, Tinkoff Bank, Turnkey Lender, wipro

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.