Author: David Penn

Meniga Acquires Swedish Rewards Platform Wrapp

Meniga Acquires Swedish Rewards Platform Wrapp
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Meniga

Multiple-time Finovate Best of Show winner Meniga is starting off 2019 with an acquisition: purchasing Swedish rewards platform Wrapp for an undisclosed sum. Meniga CEO and co-founder Georg Ludviksson told Reuters that the acquisition would contributed directly to the company’s top line, “adding just over €3 million in annual recurring revenues from rewards,” as well as providing growth opportunities for Meniga in the Nordic region.

Both companies are active in the transaction-driven rewards space – Meniga in Iceland, Wrapp in Sweden and Finland. Together, they will offer a singular solution under the Meniga brand, and operate out of Stockholm, Sweden. Wrapp CEO Aage Reerslev will become Meniga’s VP of Rewards.

“We believe the merger brings us to a tipping point given the strong commitment we have from existing platform partners,” Reerslev said. “This is the right time to invest in transaction-driven marketing technology and create a more intelligent user-centric service which basically helps people buy better and smarter, not more.” Reerslev called it “a new standard for rewarding people and digitally bringing consumer brands closer to their customers – powered and distributed by the banks.”

Founded in 2011, Wrapp raised more than $36 million in funding from investors including Greylock Partners, Qualcomm Ventures, and Atomico. The transaction-driven marketing specialist has been live with six bank partners and has provided rewards and cashbacks for more than 350 brands.

Meniga most recently demonstrated its technology on the Finovate stage at FinovateFall 2018, winning Best of Show honors. During a busy fall season, the company announced a partnership with Singapore’s United Overseas Bank to provide data enrichment and categorization tools for the company’s recently-launched digital bank. Meniga also raised $3.4 million in funding last fall, courtesy of an investment from Íslandbanki, the company’s initial and longest-standing financial backer. The November financing was the second capital infusion for the company in 2018, having picked up $3.6 million in new funding from UniCredit in June.

Meniga has enriched more than 30 billion transactions for 65 million consumers in 30 countries on four continents. The firm processes 34 million transactions a day. The company was founded in 2009.

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Euro Exim Bank Joins RippleNet

Euro Exim Bank Joins RippleNet
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Ripple

Euro Exim Bank has signed up for Ripple’s payment network RippleNet – putting its digital currency XRP on a potential path to replace correspondent banking, reports Antony Peyton of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).

The bank was one of the 13 new financial institutions that have signed up for RippleNet. The others comprise SendFriend, JNFX, FTCS, Ahli Bank of Kuwait, Transpaygo, BFC Bahrain, ConnectPay, GMT, WorldCom Finance, Olympia Trust Company, Pontual/USEND and Rendimento. With these additions, there are now more than 200 customers signed up for RippleNet.

JNFX, SendFriend, Transpaygo, FTCS and Euro Exim Bank will use the XRP to source liquidity on-demand when sending payments on behalf of their customers.

For Euro Exim Bank, which operates in the worlds of trade finance, corporate banking and wire transfers, it offers some interesting prospects.

Kaushik Punjani, director, Euro Exim Bank, said: “Our customers – whether big corporates or individual remitters – have historically been restricted from obtaining suitable funds or settling transactions in a cost efficient and timely manner. Working collaboratively with Ripple and selected counterparts, we have designed, tested and are implementing both xCurrent [payments processing solution] and xRapid [on-demand liquidity solution] in record time.”

Let’s not the forget the views of the others as David Lighton, founder of paytech SendFriend, described the existing correspondent banking system as “slow, inefficient and costly”.

According to Ripple, using XRP for liquidity when sending a cross-border payment helps financial institutions avoid the hassle of pre-funding accounts in destination currencies.

Ripple is doing pretty well. In 2018, CEO Brad Garlinghouse said nearly 100 financial institutions joined RippleNet, and it also saw a 350% increase last year in customers sending live payments.

Meanwhile, its rival Swift has been thinking about correspondent banking as well.

Working alongside 34 banks, including Deutsche Bank, Swift completed a proof of concept (PoC) for nostro reconciliation using distributed ledger technology (DLT).

In an interview, Andreas Hauser (from Deutsche Bank) said the mandate for Swift to explore DLT usage in the correspondent banking space originated from the global payments innovation (gpi) community with the aim of fostering collaborative innovation.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Capsilon, Entrust Datacard, Featurespace, HackerOne, Meniga, TransferWise, Tyro

On Finovate.com

  • Meniga Acquires Swedish Rewards Platform Wrapp.

Around the web

  • Featurespace partners with everis to help the business consultancy’s bank clients fight payment and account fraud.
  • TransferWise opens office in Belgium and applies for money transfer license as insurance against a no-deal Brexit outcome.
  • Hyatt launches bug bounty program with ethical hacker platform HackerOne.
  • Australian business bank Tyro unveils latest Alipay integration with  Sydney Airport retailer Heinemann Australia.
  • Entrust Datacard announces a pair of new board members, Val Rahmani and Cheri McGuire.
  • Capsilon reports that its core technology, Capsilon IQ, helped its clients’ customers save more than five million people hours collectively in 2018.

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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Enveil, Unbound Tech Bring Data Security Triad to the Enterprise

Enveil, Unbound Tech Bring Data Security Triad to the Enterprise
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Enveil

Cybersecurity specialist Enveil has partnered with Unbound Tech to bring nation-state level data security to business customers. Together, by securing data-at-rest, data-in-transit, as well as data-in-use, the two companies will offer enterprise clients what it calls “the Data Security Triad” for cybersecurity protection.

“Partnering with innovative leaders like Unbound Tech allows us to push beyond current technology limitations to provide integrated solutions that truly represent the market-rattling, leading edge in data security,” said Ellison Anne Williams, founder and CEO of Enveil. “We recognize the importance of working seamlessly alongside other leading technologies to ensure sensitive data and encryption keys are secure at all times.”

The new solution secures sensitive data at all points in its lifecycle. Enveil’s technology leverages homomorphic encryption to close the data-in-use “exposure gap” that is created when sensitive data is decrypted for use or processing. Williams referred to this gap as the “point of least resistance” for cyberattacks.

Unbound Tech manages cryptographic keys, credentials, and other data to ensure that they never exist anywhere in their complete form. The combination of homomorphic data security and MPC-based encryption key protection, explained Unbound Tech CEO Avner Mor, relieves companies of the burden of needing multiple strategies to deal with data in different states. The solution also helps businesses save money, Mor said, calling the lower administrative and resource overhead an “added bonus.”

Unbound Tech is a Tel Aviv, Israel-based firm founded in 2013. Funded by investors including Citi Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and Goldman Sachs Principal Strategic Investments, the company won the Prime Minister’s Award for Israeli Innovation for its digital security technology in November.

Enveil demonstrated its data encryption platform at FinovateFall 2017. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., Enveil announced in December that its ZeroReveal Compute Fabric, introduced last summer, would be accessible in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. ZeroReveal Compute Fabric is a two-party platform that supports access to the company’s ZeroReveal solutions to protect data-in-use.

In September, Enveil won a spot on SINET’s 16 Innovators roster for 2018, the same month the company earned international Common Criteria security certification for its ZeroReveal solution. Enveil announced a technology integration with digital security firm Gemalto in August,

Learn more about the company and its founder in our profile from October 2017.

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Fiserv Welcomes A Trio of New Bank Partners

Fiserv Welcomes A Trio of New Bank Partners
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Fiserv

Fiserv is living the fintech dream as more than 80 of its bank clients have completed a migration to outsourced core processing in the past 24 months.

This heightened state of happiness is set to continue as the company says nearly 60 more are scheduled to make the move in 2019, reports Antony Peyton of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).

Three banks in the US have been wheeled out to offer some praise.

“After we moved to outsourced core processing, we asked ourselves what other services we should outsource to ensure customer information was held in a secure data centre. This led us to choose hosted infrastructure as a service and managed services from Fiserv,” said Yvette Hamm, vice-president, information security officer, First State Bank of Uvalde in Texas.

Robert Palmer, president and CEO of Missouri-based Bloomsdale Bank, is addicted to outsourcing love as the decision to move was due in part to the difficulty of finding qualified staff to manage technology in-house.

While for JD Bank in Louisiana, it considered doing it for more than two years before making the decision.

Bavo Gall, JD Bank’s EVP and chief information officer, said: “By outsourcing with Fiserv, we have maintained the flexibility to do what needs to get done.”

The bank moved its core processing, item processing and online banking systems to an outsourced environment over a single weekend in late 2017.

In other news, last week, Mi Bank in Michigan announced it was set to debut early this year. The new financial institution says it will use technology from Fiserv, including the DNA core banking system, to power its launch.

Headquartered in Brookfield, Wisconsin and founded in 1984, Fiserv demonstrated its Commercial Center: Security platform – in partnership with Samsung SDS – at FinovateFall 2017.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Accenture, BankBazaar, CardFlight, Compass Plus, Enveil

On Finovate.com

  • Enveil, Unbound Tech Bring Data Security Triad to the Enterprise.

Around the web

  • CardFlight teams up with JetPay to give U.S. SMEs broader payment acceptance options.
  • Bahrain-based third-party PSP, SINNAD, launches a new processing platform built on Compass Plus’ TranzWare and TranzAxis.
  • Accenture to acquire management consultancy and technology services provider, Orbium.
  • BankBazaar adds business cards to its online marketplace for financial products courtesy of a partnership with Yes Bank.

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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Braintri Drives Insurtech Innovation in Europe

Braintri Drives Insurtech Innovation in Europe
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Braintri

Braintri announced this week that its insurance subscription platform, hiPRO Connector, is going live as part of a new agreement with Benefia, a division of Vienna Insurance Group. The launch follows a successful deployment of the platform with Allianz, and builds on the Polish company’s recent partnerships with PKO Bank Polski and fellow Finovate alum, mBank.

The platform, developed in collaboration with Polish fintech hiPRO, enables customers to pay for their car insurance in monthly installments – a relatively new option in the industry. Customers provide information such as earnings, employment type, and number of dependents. The Connector randomly selects a participating bank which then reviews the customer’s credit in real-time.

The loans are financed by a bank, rather than the insurer – in this instance, Estonia’s Inbank and Poland’s Alior Bank. Braintri CEO Wojciech Zatorski pointed out that this means insurers are exposed to less risk, and gives banks the ability to sell micro loans. The platform launch will take place over several Benefia sales channels, including mobile.

Braintri’s announcement comes after a year of significant achievements, including the company’s merger with Finovate alum, iCompass, announced in November. Earlier in the year, the company was recognized for its contribution to PKO BP’s IKO mobile app.

“We entered 2019 with the feeling we achieved most of our goals,” Zatorski said in a statement. “Winning over new big brands proves that our efforts in providing the current customers with world-class IT services are noticed and appreciated.” With a nod toward the company’s yet-to-be completed merger, as well as planned expansion internationally, Zatorski added, “This will surely be the busiest year in Braintri’s six-year history.”

Braintri demonstrated its Jiffee payments solution at FinovateFall 2017, earning Best of Show honors. Based in Warsaw, Poland, and founded in 2013, the company returned to the Finovate stage in 2018 to demo its technology as part of FinovateEurope.

Interested in learning more about the latest fintech innovations from Europe? Join us for FinovateEurope 2019, February 12 through the 14, at London’s Tobacco Dock.

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CAN Capital Introduces New CEO Edward Siciliano

CAN Capital Introduces New CEO Edward Siciliano
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: CAN Capital, Capital Access Network

Alternative SME financing pioneer CAN Capital has a new captain: Edward Siciliano, a commercial financing veteran with more than 30 years experience, will join the company as its new Chief Executive Officer.

“CAN Capital’s experience, brand recognition, data, and partner relationships make it uniquely positioned to support the expansion of the small businesses that drive the U.S. economy,” Siciliano said. “I look forward to building a leadership team and working together to expand our offerings, invest in talent and technology, and help our customers grow.”

Siciliano comes to CAN Capital after serving as Chief Operating Officer, Interim CEO and EVP, and Chief Sales Officer for commercial financial and depository product provider Marlin Business Solutions. He previously worked at Xerox Corporation, AppliedTheory Corporation, and ALK Technologies. CAN Capital’s Executive Chairman praised Siciliano as a “proven leader” who has “served the needs of small businesses while building loyal teams that deliver innovative products and a great customer experience.”

The new CEO is the latest big headline for CAN Capital. Last fall, the company announced that it had boosted its capital capacity by up to $287 million courtesy of a transaction with Varadero Capital. Varadero played a key role in CAN Capital’s return to funding in the summer of 2017.

Siciliano’s arrival marks CAN Capital’s second C-level hire in a year; the company appointed financial services industry veteran Tom Davidson as Chief Financial Officer last spring. In December of 2017, CAN Capital added a trio of executives in technology, business development, and modeling and analytics.

CAN Capital demonstrated its Mobile Funder solution at FinovateFall 2013. Mobile Funder is a tablet-based tool that helps highly-mobile financial sales professionals sell alternative capital products to SMEs. With more than $7 billion in funds accessed and 81,000+ small businesses served, CAN Capital was founded in 1998 and is based in Kennesaw, Georgia.

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Plaid Acquires Quovo in $200 Million Deal

Plaid Acquires Quovo in $200 Million Deal
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Plaid, Quovo

San Francisco-based fintech app provider Plaid has made its first major acquisition with the purchase of competitor Quovo for $200 million, reports Antony Peyton of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).

Plaid hasn’t gone public on the price, but a source familiar with the deal spoke with CNBC to spill the financial beans. Plaid reckons the acquisition will make it easier for developers to build products that incorporate investment and brokerage data.

New York-based Quovo offers investment, insurance, and loan account coverage. Its platform is used by such firms as Betterment, Wealthfront and SoFi, as well as wealthtech companies like Stifel, Vanguard, Empower Retirement, and John Hancock.

Some of Plaid’s users include cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, robo-advisors Betterment and Wealthfront (same as Quovo), trading app Robinhood and PayPal’s digital wallet Venmo.

Plaid plans to build a single platform to let users “build any financial application – from payments to lending to wealth management.”

This deal follows on from last month when Plaid enjoyed a $250 million Series C funding round. With that investment, the start-up earned an impressive valuation of $2.65 billion.

Back in October 201, Plaid linked up with JP Morgan Chase to help the bank make a move toward open banking by enabling account holders to share their financial data with third-party fintech applications.

Prior to that, in May 2018, the company expanded to Canada as its first international market.

The firm was founded in 2013 and has got the backing of some big names. These include Goldman Sachs, Amex, Citi, and Google Ventures. About two years ago Plaid got a handy $44 million in funding led by Goldman Sachs.

Plaid CEO and co-founder Zach Perret presented API for Financial Infrastructure at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2014. Quovo is a two-time veteran of our developers conferences: sharing the stage with SoFi at FinDEVr New York 2017, and teaming up with Betterment at FinDEVr New York 2016.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Akamai, BBVA, Braintri, Cardlytics, FICO, Ondot, Plaid, Quovo, Salt Edge

On Finovate.com

  • Braintri Drives Insurtech Innovation in Europe.
  • Plaid Acquires Quovo in $200 Million Deal.

Around the web

  • Salt Edge joins Temenos Marketplace as the community’s first data aggregator.
  • BBVA leads $12 million Series A round for payments startup Grabango.
  • Cardlytics CEO Scott Grimes appointed board chair of FinTech Atlanta.
  • FICO awarded five new patents for fraud, AI, and advanced analytics technologies.
  • PYMNTS.com interviews Ondot CEO Bharghavan Vaduvur.
  • Akamai Technologies reveals plans to acquire customer identity access management firm, Janrain.

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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What’s in a Name? New Mastercard Logo Embraces Icon Era

What’s in a Name? New Mastercard Logo Embraces Icon Era
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: MasterCard

Who knew 2019 would be known as “The Year #Priceless Went Nameless”?

Consumers have been conditioned to recognize corporate icons like McDonald’s “Golden Arches” and Nike’s “Swoosh.” Now, with its decision to remove its name from its red and yellow brand mark, Mastercard is the latest major global brand to let a wordless logo do all the talking.

“Reinvention in the digital age calls for modern simplicity,” said Mastercard Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Raja Rajamannar in a press release explaining the change. “And with more than 80% of people spontaneously recognizing the Mastercard Symbol without the word ‘mastercard,’ we felt ready to take this step in our brand evolution. We are proud of our rich brand heritage and are excited to see the iconic circles standing on their own.”

The new logo – a pair of interlocking red and yellow circles – will be referred to as the Mastercard Symbol, and will be featured across cards, acceptance marks at online and off-line retail locations, as well as at major sponsorship properties.

The move is the second logo change for the company in recent years. The firm transitioned from “MasterCard” to “mastercard” in 2016, and added design changes that made the logo easier to display both horizontally and vertically. This latest logo redesign was developed by the same firm, Pentagram, that the company turned to in 2016.

“We live in a time where, increasingly, we communicate not through words but through icons and symbols,” Pentagram partner Michael Bierut said. “Now, by allowing (the Mastercard) symbol to shine on its own, Mastercard enters an elite cadre of brands that are represented not by name, but by symbol: an apple, a target, a swoosh.”

Founded in 1966 and headquartered in Purchase, New York, Mastercard most recently demonstrated its technology on the Finovate stage last year at FinovateEurope 2018. At the conference, the company partnered with Italian fintech Vipera to introduce a mobile payment solution, SME-Pay, geared toward small business owners.

The year before, at FinovateFall 2017, Mastercard demonstrated its Mastercard Cash Pick-Up solution. This technology enables disbursers ranging from P2P providers to NGOs and government agencies to deliver cash to consumers via enabled ATMs without the use of a card.

Mastercard trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker “MA” and has a market capitalization of $198 billion. The company connects consumers, FIs, businesses, and governments in more than 210 countries and territories, and reported revenue of more than $12 billion in 2017.

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LendingFront Locks in $4 Million in Series A

LendingFront Locks in $4 Million in Series A
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, LendingFront

In a round led by Information Venture Partners, Newark Venture Partners, Revel Partners, and Contour Venture Partners, SME lending solution provider LendingFront has raised $4 million in funding. The new capital will help the Newark, New Jersey-based company bring its white label underwriting and small business financing technology to more banks and FIs.

“Traditional financial institutions need new tools to serve the evolving needs and expectations of small business owners,” LendingFront co-founder and CEO Jorge Sun explained. “LendingFront allows banks to compete with technology-based lenders and keep up with the changing regulatory environment.”

Newark Venture Partners’ managing partner Dan Borok praised LendingFront’s “sleek” and “streamlined” platform as a significant improvement over the outdated legacy lending technology many banks continue to use. Calling demand for cloud-based lending solutions for SMEs “significant,” Borok pointed to LendingFront’s technology as a way for incumbent FIs to better serve small business clients.

Also participating in the round were existing investors Struck Capital, ValueStream Ventures, and Las Olas VC. The company noted that the new capital will be used to help grow the company’s sales, marketing, and engineering teams, as well.

LendingFront demonstrated its Small Business Platform at FinovateFall 2016. The solution automates lending operations by consolidating processes that are typically conducted by multiple disparate systems. The end-to-end solution provides application workflow for loan processing, a data engine to cull data for underwriting, a decision engine, offer screens, documentation and booking functionality, and servicing. LendingFront notes its solutions have enabled banks to boost loan approvals by 30%, reduce processing time from four weeks to one day, and lower operational costs by 80%.

LendingFront was founded in 2015 by Sun and CTO Dario Vergara, who met as members of OnDeck’s founding management team. The company includes Paynet and fellow Finovate alums Envestnet | Yodlee and Experian among its partners.

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