Author: David Penn

Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Azimo, Baker Hill, CREALOGIX, EdgeLab, Lidya, payworks, Persado, Revolut, Ripple, ThetaRay, WorkFusion

On Finovate.com

  • Lidya Scores $6.9 Million in Series A Investment.
  • Azimo Raises $20 Million in New Funding.
  • WorkFusion Closes Add-On Funding Round.

Around the web

  • Baker Hill to provide loan origination technology for Old Point National Bank, a Virginia-based FI with $988 million in assets.
  • Multiple-time Best of Show winner CREALOGIX adds cryptocurrency and blockchain market data to its Digital Banking Hub.
  • EdgeLab honored as MarketPlace Provider of the Year at the Temenos Partner and Customer Awards.
  • MarTechSeries features Persado’s AI platform.
  • CryptoGlobe: Currencies Direct Completes Successful European Pilot of Ripple’s xRapid and Calls XRP ‘A Game Changer.’
  • Payworks teams with Visa to enable omnichannel payments for CyberSource’s merchants.
  • ThetaRay wins Asian Banker Risk Management Award for “Regulatory Technology Implementation of the Year.”
  • Revolut unveils its “App Store for Business Banking” solution, Revolut Connect.

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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nCino Partners with Tech Qualled to Help Veterans Get into Fintech

nCino Partners with Tech Qualled to Help Veterans Get into Fintech
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: nCino

While many Americans are firing up the grill to prepare for Memorial Day weekend, nCino is celebrating the holiday with a new partnership. The company is teaming up with U.S. military veteran training organization, Tech Qualled, to help qualified veterans land jobs at the Wilmington, North Carolina-based fintech.

“At nCino, we are committed to hiring people who embody our culture and core values, and who bring a unique set of knowledge, skills, and experience to the table,” nCino EVP Josh Glover said. A former Marine and combat veteran himself, Glover added, “We are extremely proud to work with Tech Qualled to ensure we continue to hire the right people, and are honored to expand opportunities and access for those who give so much to our country.”

With 80% of its graduates meeting employer expectations in their first year after being hired, Tech Qualled credits its industry-relevant curriculum for helping veterans succeed. This includes focus on topics ranging from data center solutions and basic networking to cloud computing and software applications. Co-founder and president Justin Ossola noted that the company’s selection process was also instrumental in guiding veterans to opportunities that were ideal fits. “We have selective and specific criteria for making sure we pick candidates with the right blend of soft skills and personality traits,” Ossola said. Since its founding in 2015, the company has helped more than 120 veterans secure jobs in the technology industry.

Founded in 2012, nCino demonstrated its Bank Operating System at FinovateEurope 2017. With more than 275 employees and more than 130 clients, nCino provides a solution that combines CRM, loan originations workflow, ECM, business intelligence and reporting in a single, secure, cloud-based environment. nCino’s client institutions have experienced a 19% increase in loan value, a 34% shortening in loan closing time, and a 54% reduction in policy exceptions thanks to nCino’s platform.

In a busy 2018, nCino has added a Retail Sales and Service solution to its Bank Operating System, and won deployments of its technology with Banesco USA, TD Bank, and Yorkshire Building Society. In March, nCino worked with Enforce to help FIs transition to cloud-based solutions, and in April the company partnered with fellow Finovate alum VASCO to integrate its eSignLive-developed e-signature technology into its platform for banks.

nCino has raised more than $133 million in funding and includes Salesforce Ventures and Insight Venture Partners among its investors. Pierre Naudé is CEO.

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BondIT Raises $4 Million in New Funding, Adding to Series B

BondIT Raises $4 Million in New Funding, Adding to Series B
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BondIT, Funding

With $4 million in new funding, BondIT has added to the Series B investment it announced last fall and taken the round’s total to $18.2 million. St. Louis Business Journal reported this week that the fixed income portfolio management platform provider plans to use the capital for product development among other initiatives.

The company’s Series B round has been led by major investor Fosun Group, a division of Fosun International Limited, a Hong Kong-based investment holding company. When the investment in BondIT was initially announced last fall, Fosun Chairman Guo Guangchang said that BondIT’s technology “compliments (its) own financial ecosystem” and will enable wealth managers to upgrade their solutions with disruptive technology. The Group also said the investment reflected a commitment to the Israeli market.

BondIT uses machine learning algorithms and data science to enable fixed income advisors to make superior recommendations, improve client engagement, manage risk better, speed trade execution and meet compliance regulations easier. The platform improves productivity by automating portfolio construction, optimizing returns tailored to the individual customer, and enhancing analytics, and risk monitoring.

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Herzliya, Israel, BondIT demonstrated its fixed income portfolio management platform at FinovateFall 2016. The company began the year leveraging its strategic partnership with Fosun Group and relationship with Chinese financial data provider Wind to expand its coverage of China’s $7+ trillion interbank bond market.

In January, BondIT partnered with IBM, choosing the company’s ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio to enhance its fixed income portfolio services. “By harnessing the ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio tool within our framework, our platform can find the optimal solution within the constraints,” BondIT Chief Scientist Dr. Hillel Raz said. “If a perfect solution is not feasible due to the combination of constraints and market conditions, it can relax constraints to provide the closest fit for any set of portfolio requirements.”

The fact that the technology is cloud-based is also a major plus enabling the company, in the words of BondIT CTO Amit Godel, to scale as required to meet customer needs, as well as to “provide platform enhancements immediately.”

“The main advantage of the IBM technology for us as a startup was fast time-to-market, as well as its ability to handle many different types of variables and objectives, control numerous parameters, and handle infeasible problems,” Godel said.

Etai Ravid is BondIT founder and CEO. Check out our profile of the company featuring a Q&A with Ravid.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Blend, BondIT, Currency Cloud, Ellie Mae, Fiserv, Google, Lending Club, OurCrowd, PayPal, Prosper, Revolut

On Finovate.com

  • BondIT Raises $4 Million in New Funding, Adding to Series B.
  • Mortgagetech Magnates Ellie Mae and Blend Team Up.

Around the web

  • Merchant Bank of Sri Lanka & Finance to deploy core account processing platform and front-end teller systems from Fiserv.
  • PayPal expands its relationship with Google Pay, enabling PayPal as a payment option across the Google ecosystem.
  • Revolut announces plans to open office in Edinburgh, Scotland later this year.
  • Prosper increases borrower lending cap to $40,000, matching Lending Club’s cap.
  • OurCrowd signs MOU with Intesa Sanpaolo to promote access to capital.
  • IDG Connect interviews CurrencyCloud CTO Ed Addario.

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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PaySend Adds KYC and Risk Management Tech from 4Stop

PaySend Adds KYC and Risk Management Tech from 4Stop
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: PaySend

Moving money with international money transfer platform PaySend just got a lot more secure. German KYC and anti-fraud technology solutions provider 4Stop has integrated its KYC, compliance and risk management technology with the company’s platform.

“We have always been focused on solving and removing the complexities for businesses’ KYC, regulatory obligations and fraud prevention obstacles in a manner that truly performed on a global scale,” 4Stop CEO Ingo Ernst said. “We are thrilled to see our technology integrated with PaySend and to further support their KYC, compliance and anti-fraud requirements with a fail-safe accuracy, and in the most streamlined and efficient manner possible.”

4Stop leverages hundreds of global KYC data sources, as well as a multi-faceted rules engine, real-time monitoring, rich database management, and data science to provide maximum, real-time KYC coverage. The company’s platform also enables businesses to future-proof their technology by activating any required KYC for compliance as regulations are updated.

Headquartered in Malta and founded in 2015, PaySend demonstrated its international payments and money remittance platform at FinovateEurope 2016. The company leverages a global banking network – as well as partnerships with Visa, MasterCard, and UnionPay – to enable FIs to participate in a network that simplifies remittances, tokenizes card data in demand for social-based transfers, and decreases the cost of sending money.

Earlier this month, PaySend was shortlisted in the Best Consumer Payments category of the PayTech 2018 awards. In 2018 alone, the company has launched its service in the UAE, Canada, Mexico, and Israel – with more than 50 countries now able to receive PaySend transfers. More than 100,000 people currently use its service.

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Finovate Alums Take Top Honors at FinTech Breakthrough Awards

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Apex Clearing Corporation, BizEquity, Cloud Lending Solutions, Dynamics, eMoney Advisor, Experian, Finicity, Fiserv, Green Dot, Klarna, Kofax, MasterCard, NuData Security, PayPal, Risk Ident, Stash, TD Ameritrade, ThreatMetrix, Tradeshift, TransUnion

Dedicated to recognizing “the top companies and products in the financial services and technology industry today,” FinTech Breakthrough has announced its FinTech Breakthrough Award Winners for 2018. This marks the second year the independent organization has sponsored the fintech awards event, recognizing fintech startups and veterans from a wide variety of categories including payments, lending, investing, and regtech.

“The FinTech Breakthrough Awards serve as a testament to the passion, skill and vision of individuals and teams that are truly setting the standard for innovation in the global FinTech industry,” Managing Director for FinTech Breakthrough James Johnson said in 2017 during the Awards’ inaugural year. “We are thrilled to recognize all of the FinTech Breakthrough Award winners for their well-deserved industry recognition as they drive the global FinTech market forward.”

This year featured 20 Finovate alums earning top honors from FinTech Breakthrough. The names and Finovate demo dates for each winning alum – as well as the category they won – are featured below. For a complete list of 2018 FinTech Breakthrough Award Winners, visit the company’s awards announcement page.

Leadership

Consumer Lending

  • Innovation Award for Consumer Lending – Text for Credit by Experian (FF17)

Business Lending

Wealth Management

Payments

Investments

Consumer Banking

Financial Research and Data

Fraud Prevention and Transaction Security

This marks the second time both eMoney Advisor and ThreatMetrix have been honored by the FinTech Breakthrough Awards. Among last year’s winners were a significant number of Finovate alums including: Sindeo, BizFi, DriveWealth, Quovo, Jumio, Trulioo, Qumram, and Xero.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Avaloq, ID.me, Klarna, Mitek, Moneyhub, PaySend, Revolut, Sberbank, Temenos, Tinkoff Credit Systems, WeInvest

On Finovate.com

  • Mitek Acquires A2iA for $49.7 Million.
  • WeInvest Raises $12.3 Million for its WealthTech Platform.
  • Finovate Alums Take Top Honors at FinTech Breakthrough Awards.
  • PaySend Adds KYC and Risk Management Technology from 4Stop..

Around the web

  • Deutsche Bank Luxembourg to deploy Avaloq Banking Suite.
  • Temenos unveils new digital onboarding and origination platform, Temenos Origination.
  • Revolut announces support for XRP and Bitcoin Cash.
  • Moneyhub integrates with Intelliflo to enable real-time, two-way sharing between financial advisors and clients.
  • Klarna acquires e-commerce shopping cart, Shop.co.
  • Sberbank to test ICO technology issued by Level One.
  • Tinkoff Bank to launch a new Development Hub in Sochi.
  • ID.me teams with LinkedIn to provide one year of LinkedIn Premium for free to U.S. service members and veterans.

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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identitii Forges New Partnership with Robot Automation Specialist Blue Prism

identitii Forges New Partnership with Robot Automation Specialist Blue Prism
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: identitii

Secure information sharing specialist identitii has joined forces with robotic process automation specialist Blue Prism. Together, the two will design technology to help FIs securely digitize and automate corporate payment and trade transaction processes – including a detailed audit trail – in an effort to better detect fraud.

identitii will integrate its verification engine, Integrity, and its permission data sharing capabilities into Blue Prism’s Digital Workforce, which is used by businesses to automate complex work processes. This will help businesses better organize and verify the data required in typically manual, time-consuming processes like cross-border corporate transactions, as well as provide for needed AML review and financial crimes sanctions checking.

“By combining our core strengths, we will enable our customers to achieve enhanced transparency and a complete audit trail of the provenance of information from Blue Prism’s digital workforce,” identitii CEO and co-founder Nick Armstrong said. “This will allow users to share information more securely, reduce the risk of information being tampered with and allow for detailed reporting.”

Blue Prism’s Digital Workforce enables businesses to automate tasks such as collection and management of documentation across multiple legacy systems. Businesses using the platform can leverage AI, machine learning, intelligent automation, and sentiment analysis to improve processes, share information more securely, and provide clearer, more detailed reporting for compliance purposes.

“Security, auditability and compliance can’t be an afterthought when thinking of automation,” David Moss, CTO and co-founder of Blue Prism said. “Working with identitii bolsters our ecosystem of security partners while providing our joint customers with the Digital Workforce they need to complete their digital transformation programs, which helps ensure that every transaction is safe and accounted for.”

Founded in 2014, identitii demonstrated its identitii Serra solution at FinovateFall 2017. identitii Serra is a permissioned, append-only, federated database designed for the financial industry. Using distributed ledger technology and relational and graph databases, identitii Serra enables FIs to exchange information in a way that is both secure and auditable.

identitii raised an undisclosed amount from The Lind Partners in January 2017. The company supports offices in Sydney, Australia, and in Singapore.

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Conversation.one Among U.S. Fintechs to Join Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud Platform

Conversation.one Among U.S. Fintechs to Join Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud Platform
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Conversation.one, Finastra

FinovateSpring Best of Show winner Conversation.one is among four U.S.-based fintechs that are joining Finastra’s FusionFabric.cloud open platform. Conversation.one, which offers a voice banking and chatbot building solution for banks and credit unions, will leverage FusionFabric.cloud’s developer environment to boost its technology’s deep learning capabilities.

“Accessing Finastra technology and APIs through the FusionFabric.cloud platform is extremely efficient. It brings additional value to our solutions and, importantly, to our clients,” Conversation.one CRO and co-founder Rachel Batish explained. “The platform gives us access to more than 9,000 financial institutions across the globe. Our goal over the next two years is to deliver the capability to build cross-channel conversational solutions in minutes to close to 30% of Finastra’s clients, so they become our customers as well.”

Also among FusionFabric.cloud’s latest round of early adopters this week were Tradle, a blockchain-based KYC solutions provider; Active Allocator, a digital asset allocation platform; and regtech solution provider for banks and insurance companies, GreenPoint Financial.

Chief Cloud Officer for Finastra Natalie Gammon pointed to the “broad financial service spectrum” available to fintechs via FusionFabric.cloud. “It means fintechs and developers can dramatically reduce build time for apps, bringing them to market faster. We see FusionFabric.cloud gathering significant pace, championing a collaborative ecosystem and changing the way the financial services industry develops and deploys software for the better,” Gammon said.

The news comes just days after Conversation.one announced that First Abilene Federal Credit Union, a Texas-based credit union with $71 million in assets and nearly 11,000 members, had leveraged Conversation.one’s technology to launch its Amazon Alexa Skills and Google Home Action offerings.

Conversation.one CEO Chen Levkovich credited First Abilene FCU with recognizing the potential of voice and chat technology to improve customer engagement. “First Abilene can now provide their members with a wider range of services, from multiple digital touch-points,” Levkovich said. “We are extremely excited to work with such an innovative team and we are looking forward to their expansion into additional channels.”

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Conversation.one demonstrated its build-once-deploy-anywhere platform for conversation apps at FinovateSpring 2018, winning Best of Show honors. Conversation.one’s solution enables banks and credit unions to build, deploy, and enhance Alexa Skills, Google Home Actions, FB Messenger Bots, as well as phone and texting intelligent assistants in a single process that takes as little as a few minutes.

Finastra, which formed via a merger between Misys (FinovateEurope 2017) and D+H last summer, has been gaining early adopters to its FusionFabric cloud open architecture since the fall and began 2018 with a trio of new platform users, as well as a partnership with Thomson Reuters as a data provider. A strategic alliance with Microsoft announced in March meant that the company’s enterprise-ready trusted cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, would underpin FusionFabric.cloud. Shortly afterward, Finastra announced another trio of APAC fintech companies that would leverage its solution to develop and deploy their apps.

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Finovate Global: Fintech News from Around the World

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Entersekt, Finovate Global, Revolut

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.

MENA

  • Dubai’s mobile-only, millennial-focused digital bank Liv celebrates acquiring more than 10,000 new customers every month in its first year of operation.
  • Islamic banking technology provider Path Solutions recognized as vendor of choice for Sharia-based core banking platforms by IBS Intelligence.
  • Dubai-based insurtech startup Aqeed raises $18 million in fuding one month after launch.

Africa

  • Africa-based digital payments solution company Cellulant has raised $47.5 million in Series C funding.
  • Hypepotamous profiles South African authentication specialist Entersekt.
  • Wala, which leverages blockchain technology to power its mobile money solution, goes live for Android users in Uganda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa.

LATAM

  • Kyriba announces plans to boost investment in Latin America and help CFOs and treasurers modernize cash, risk, payments, and working capital optimization.
  • Morgan Stanley to buy $14 million  (50 million reais) in bonds from Brazilian online lender Geru Tecnologia e Servicos.
  • Forbes.com looks at the future of financial technology in Mexico

CEE

  • Polish Credit Office, the largest credit bureau in Central and Eastern Europe, to use blockchain technology from Billon to store and access credit histories of more than one million businesses and 24 million people.
  • Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which CEE country has the most fintech companies of all? According to Unicredit, Bulgaria wins the top spot with 70 registered and working firms.
  • Revolut hires former Lead Marketing Manager of Uber Romania, Irina Scarlat, as its new Country Manager for Revolt Romania.

Asia

  • EY Asean markets managing partner Liew Nam Soon discusses the growth of Vietnam’s fintech industry.
  • Singapore Business Review looks at how blockchain technology could revive Thailand’s trade finance sector.
  • Hong Kong’s fintech unicorn WeLab plans to be among the first companies to apply for a virtual banking license from Hong Kong Monetary Authority.

Top image designed by Freepik

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Market EarlyBird Unveils Mobile App

Market EarlyBird Unveils Mobile App
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Market EarlyBird

Late last year, Market EarlyBird made its web app available as a desktop app in a secure wrapper on Windows. Less than six months later, the London-based fintech is unveiling a new mobile client for its “Safe, Smart Twitter for Finance” platform.

“More than 90% of our users run EarlyBird on their desktop,” Market EarlyBird CEO Danny Watkins explained. “However a recent industry survey has shown increasing numbers of traders are using their smartphones to conduct foreign exchange deals and we have also seen a significant demand from our customers, particularly some of the buy-side firms, for a mobile client.”

“So now users have access to their favorite features of EarlyBird such as extensive search, filtering, and alerting capabilities – wherever they are and with no compromise to any of the extensive compliance and privacy features,” Watkins said.

Market EarlyBird offers a read-only, anonymized Twitter service designed for financial markets professionals that enables them to spot trading opportunities and quickly identify potentially market-moving news before it makes the headlines. The platform helps satisfy compliance requirements by recording, logging, and timestamping Tweets as they appear – as well as including them in MiFiD II Transaction Reconstruction where appropriate. And by blocking users from tweeting and direct messaging, the platform satisfies one of the principal challenges for financial professionals using Twitter.

“We have heard anecdotally of traders using their mobile phones, or having an iPad alongside their trading terminal with public Twitter on it,” the company noted in a recent blog post titled, Why Twitter’s of little value to financial firms. “Almost certainly this breaches the bank’s rules,” the post read.

Available on both iOS and Android, Market EarlyBird’s mobile app maintains the same functionality as the desktop version, including Tweet curation tools, alerts for priority Tweets and Tweet monitoring for compliance purposes. The mobile app also readily syncs with the desktop version to provide a seamless customer experience wherever they are.

Founded in 2012, Market EarlyBird demonstrated its cloud-based Twitter platform at FinovateEurope 2017. The company’s platform is currently in use or being piloted by nearly half of the top 20 banks in the world, as well as several buy-side firms. Check out our profile of the company from last spring.

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CrowdFlower Rebrands as Figure Eight to Take Advantage of Booming Interest in AI

CrowdFlower Rebrands as Figure Eight to Take Advantage of Booming Interest in AI
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: CrowdFlower, Figure Eight

Here’s one that slipped under the radar as we were gearing up for FinovateSpring. Crowdsourcing platform provider for online staffing Crowdflower rebranded as Figure Eight in April. In a blog post previewing the change, CEO Robin Bordoli explained that changes in the evolution of artificial intelligence and the market for machine learning were opening up new opportunities for the firm.

“As the market has evolved, CrowdFlower has adapted to serve our customers and their changing needs. We’ve executed intentional changes to how we operate to meet the market requirements of scale, quality, complexity, and flexibility,” Bordoli wrote. These changes have included shifting the company from managed service to SaaS, abstracting sourcing human intelligence from the application of human intelligence, Human-in-the-loop and active learning, combining human intelligence and machine learning, and acting as a trusted AI guide for customers just beginning to take advantage of the technology. Bordoli took over as CEO of the company which was led by founder Lukas Biewald until early 2015.

The company said that it chose the name Figure Eight for a variety of reasons – and in consultation with “one of the top naming agencies in the valley.” These reasons varied from the continuous loop shape of the figure eight to the number eight as a reference to a byte, which is a building block of eight bits, to the numerical difference between the atomic numbers for Carbon (6) and Silicon (14). “Carbon is an essential component of human biology,” Bordoli wrote. “Silicon is an essential component of computing power. So the number eight represents the bridge between humans and machines.”

As part of the reorganization, Figure Eight has made a handful of executive and board of directors changes. Dale Brown was hired to work as VP of Business Development after previously serving in a similar capacity at Bitnami. Robert Munro was promoted from VP of Machine Learning to Chief Technology Officer. Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger was hired to work as VP of Product, having worked as director of project management at IBM Watson. Figure Eight also added Alta Vista search engine company founder Louis Monier to its board of directors.

Based in San Francisco and founded in 2009, Figure Eight (as CrowdFlower) demonstrated its platform that automates the management of online human workforces at FinovateFall 2014, earning Best of Show honors. With $58 million in funding, Figure Eight includes Industry Ventures, M12, Canvas Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Harmony Partners, and Bessemer Venture Partners among its investors. Earlier this month, the company introduced a suite of new solutions designed to help more businesses embrace AI: Figure Eight Datasets, Video Object Tracking, and Smart Bounding Box Annotation.

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