Finicity Announces Full Integration with BeSmartee

Finicity Announces Full Integration with BeSmartee

Digital mortgage marketplace provider BeSmartee has partnered with Finicity to make the digital loan origination process easier for lenders and borrowers alike. The agreement will integrate Finicity’s Verification of Assets (VoA) solution into BeSmartee’s point-of-sale mortgage origination platform.

“Finicity is improving the lending process through superior data access, quality, and insights,” Finicity CEO Steve Smith said. “We’re proud to be working alongside BeSmartee to accelerate the digital loan process, improving efficiency for lenders and transparency for borrowers. Finicity’s technology leverages consumer-permissioned data to improve accuracy, increase decisioning speed, and reduce fraud. This helps digitize and modernize the lending process for lenders and remove friction for prospective buyers.

Finicity’s Verification of Assets solution enables lenders to identify underwriting issues that could weigh on credit decisioning. The report includes data on multiple FIs and accounts, as well as information on account types, balances, and detailed transactions. VoA reports are delivered under the company’s Consumer Reporting Agency (CRA) framework to ensure consumer privacy and compliance with FCRA regulations.

Praising the company’s “great technology” and “great people,” BeSmartee co-founder Arvin Sahakian said the partnership was a major part of the company’s plan for growth. “Integrating with Finicity is a key step in helping us continue to provide exceptional services to our clients in the form of speed, accuracy and reliability within our best-of-breed mortgage origination point of sale platform.” Based in Huntington Beach, California and founded in 2008, BeSmartee uses big data and AI to provide a completely digital origination process. The company’s products include BeSmartee Mortgage (consumer loan POS), BeSmartee TPO (wholesale lending), and BeSmartee Solar (solar lending platform). BeSmartee demoed its technology at FinovateSpring 2017.

Finicity’s partnership with BeSmartee comes amid a flurry of news for the real-time data aggregation and insights specialist. Last week the company announced a partnership with Ellie Mae that will integrate its digital asset verification solution with Ellie Mae’s Encompass platform. Earlier this month, Finicity teamed up with MortgageHippo to streamline the company’s verification process in mortgage lending, and worked out a deal with Advanced Data to resell its verification reports as part of the company’s mortgage lending fraud prevention toolkit.

Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, Finicity demonstrated its Credit Decisioning reports, Verification of Income (VoI) and Verification of Assets (VoA), at FinovateFall 2017. The company has raised more than $50 million in funding and includes fellow Finovate alum, Experian, among its investors.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Finicity Announces Full Integration with BeSmartee.
  • $500 Million Secondary Investment Boosts Credit Karma’s Valuation to $4 Billion.

Around the web

  • Jack Henry’s banking division announces that seven banks will implement its Core Director core processing platform.
  • FlexTrade to integrate Kensho into its FlexTRADER EMS real-time event feed.
  • Finastra hires new Chief Product and Technology Officer, Eli Rosner.
  • iSignthis subsidiary, iSignthis eMoney, forges payment aggregation agreement with American Express Australia.
  • Best of Show winner Trusona joins ForgeRock’s identity management platform.
  • Gartner recognizes BRIDGEi2i with an Honorable Mention in the Magic Quadrant for Data and Analytics Service Providers, Worldwide.
  • Kabbage shows loan growth via the mobile channel, with 17% of all SMB loans and 15% of total dollars accessed via its platform coming through mobile.
  • Find Biometrics interviews Deepak Dutt, president and CEO of Zighra.
  • Payfone on track to authenticate 19 billion transactions for Fortune 100 clients in 2018.
  • Fort Dodge Family Credit Union to implement Larky Engagement 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.

Gro Solutions to Streamline Onboarding for Congressional FCU

Gro Solutions to Streamline Onboarding for Congressional FCU

With more than $900 million in assets, Congressional FCU has selected Gro Solutions’ Gro Checkout to streamline its digital onboarding process. A feature of the company’s Digital Sales Platform, Gro Checkout helps banks and credit unions better meet the expectations of mobile-first banking customers with a simple, intuitive, and friction-free application experience.

“Reducing friction in the application process lowers abandonment and leads to a better user experience, more potential members, and ultimately more sales growth,” Gro Solutions CEO David Eads said. “With Gro, Congressional Federal Credit Union can ensure a high quality of service via the digital channel, providing its members with a great experience every time, no matter their need.”

For Congressional FCU, the adoption of Gro Checkout will help the credit union better onboard customers in general and mobile-first customers in specific. By making it easier for customers to access specifically what they want, and only requiring the minimum necessary in terms of customer data, Gro Checkout can help the financial institution better serve and grow its 47,000-strong membership.

“When our members come to us through the digital channel, their needs can be varied, and we wanted a way to serve them that didn’t require them to wait or go through unnecessary steps,” Manager of eCommerce for Congressional FCU Devin Calef said. “With Gro, we can connect our members directly to the product they’re interested in, gathering only the necessary information along the way so it doesn’t slow down the application process, providing a smooth experience for our members from beginning to end.”

The partnership with Congressional FCU is the second major headline for Gro Solutions this month. The company announced earlier in March that it was bringing its Gro Checkout solution to 4Front CU, a Michigan-area credit union with more than $488 million in assets. “We sought a true, 100 percent digital process, and we’ve found it with Gro,” 4Front CU eServices manager Bryson Wilbert said in a statement when the deal was reported. In January, Gro announced that Surety Bank, a Florida FI with $106 million in assets, was implementing Gro Checkout in support of its digital transformation efforts.

Founded in 2015, Gro Solutions demonstrated an extension of the Gro Digital Sales Platform at FinovateFall 2017. The company has raised more than $4 million in funding and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

Peoples Trust Company Picks Finastra for Commercial and Consumer Lending

Peoples Trust Company Picks Finastra for Commercial and Consumer Lending

Peoples Trust Company of Saint Albans, Vermont has picked Finastra’s Total Lending solution to better manage its commercial and consumer lending processes. The solution includes Finastra’s Fusion LaserPro, Fusion DecisionPro, and Fusion CreditQuest products, and will help Peoples Trust Company increase efficiency and improve the customer experience from origination through booking. Integrated into the bank’s core system, Finastra’s technology will speed the lending process for borrowers and give the bank improved compliance and risk management.

“Finastra’s suite of integrated lending products provides a comprehensive and flexible platform that spans the entire lending workflow, from start to finish,” Finastra CEO Nadeem Syed explained. “By automating once manual processes and cutting out complexity, the Peoples Trust Company will be able to offer an improved experience to their borrowers and focus greater attention on what matters: building deeper customer relationships.”

Angela M. Poirier, CRCM SVP, Chief Loan Specialist for Peoples Trust Company emphasized customer engagement in her statement as well, noting that a service that kept customer needs front and center was key to the decision to choose Finastra. “When it came to replacing our current lending platform, we knew we needed a partner that could also deliver on that promise,” Poirier said.

Formed last year as the result of a merger between Misys and D+H, Finastra is one of the largest financial services technology companies in the world with more than 10,000 employees and more than 9,000 customers in 130 countries. With more than $2 billion in revenues, Finastra is headquartered in London, and is partnered with 48 of the top 50 global banks.

Earlier this month, Finastra announced that the Joint Stock Commercial Bank for Foreign Trade for Vietnam (Vietcombank) had selected its technology to drive its digital transformation. In February, the company unveiled its tailored Fusion Treasury solution for Russia and the CIS, and announced that South Africa’s Absa Bank would go live with its CLS platform, PAYplus. Finastra began 2018 with the acquisition of FX e-trading platform, Olfa Soft SA, and the launch of the Future of Banking Center of Excellence at Cyberport in Hong Kong.

Prior to forming Finastra, Misys demonstrated its FusionFabric.cloud development environment at FinovateEurope 2017. The company has since welcomed a number of early adopters to its open architecture ecosystem including APAC-based InfoTrie, HedgeSPA, and Paretix. The company’s FusionFabric.cloud received a technological boost from Microsoft earlier this month, when the Redmond, WA software company announced that its cloud platform, Microsoft Azure, will underpin Finastra’s solution.

Endor Raises $45 Million in ICO

Endor Raises $45 Million in ICO

Predictive analytics specialist Endor has raised $45 million in an initial coin offering that was launched just last month. This fast funding is a reminder that ICOs as a funding source for startups will be one of the big fintech stories of 2018.

“During the pre-sale we received a staggering amount of participation requests,” the company’s homepage reads. “Our motivation was to allow as many contributors as possible to participate, which was achieved by significantly limiting the individual contribution amounts, This torrent of support allowed us to reach our pre-defined cap of $45 million.”

More than a funding source, Endor’s ICO will also be the key to accessing the company’s predictive analytics platform. Known as “Google for predictive analytics,” Endor combines massive computing and MIT-developed proprietary social physics technology to create a predictive analytics platform that responds to questions asked in plain language with automated accurate predictions. This is accomplished without requiring coding experience or expertise in data science. And after the company’s successful ICO, all that businesses will need in order to take advantage of the new technology is a pocket full of EDR, the company’s cryptocurrency tokens.

Left to right: Endor Chairman Doron Alter and COO Inbal Tirosh demonstrating the company’s predictive analytics platform at FinovateFall 2017.

The company has developed the ENDOR.coin protocol to help “democratize data science,” specifically by making predictive analytics more accessible to SMEs. Endor issued 1.5 billion EDR tokens, with 20% of the total available as part of the ICO. The company says that 40% of the tokens generated will be used to finance R&D efforts. The tokens were initially priced at $0.27 USD. In his review of the offering at CryptoCompare, Ricardo Bago points out that companies will pay in tokens for prediction analysis of their data and are compensated with EDR token “when insights derived from their data are being used for predictions.” This, Bago suggests, helps “incentivize the contribution and maintenance of high-quality data streams.”

For a deep dive into the data science behind, social physics and the Endor protocol, check out the white paper from Altshuler and Pentland published earlier this year. The technology promises:

  • Constantly-expanding catalogue of predictions
  • Do-it-yourself API for advanced users
  • Automatic fusion of private and public data
  • Guaranteed data privacy
  • “Predictions by the people for the people”

Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, Endor demonstrated the company’s predictive analytics platform at FinovateFall 2017. Endor was named a Cool Vendor in 2017 by Gartner, and a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum. The company was featured earlier this month in a profile on UTB (Use the Bitcoin). Yaniv Altshuler is co-founder and CEO, having taken the helm from Doron Alter who transitioned to the position of company Chairman at the beginning of the year. Endor includes Coca-Cola, Twitter, and Mastercard among its clients and is partnered with fellow Finovate alum, Market Prophit.

TD Bank to Deploy nCino’s Bank Operating System

TD Bank to Deploy nCino’s Bank Operating System

Chalk up another big win for nCino. The Wilmington, North Carolina-based fintech has signed a deal with TD Bank that will put nCino’s Bank Operating System to work for the bank’s corporate and commercial lending divisions.

The technology, demonstrated at FinovateEurope 2017 last year, is already live with employees in TD Bank’s TD Equipment Finance department. nCino’s platform will give prospective business borrowers faster decisions on their loan requests, as well as add transparency to the loan process. The Bank Operating System will also enable the bank’s credit risk management, sales, and underwriting professionals to benefit from insights into TD Bank’s commercial lending portfolio and better collaborate on deals. Built on top of Salesforce.com, nCino’s Bank Operating system features CRM, loan origination, account opening, workflow, content management, business process management, customer engagement, and instant reporting all on a single platform.

“It’s great to see employees at TD Bank already experiencing many of the benefits of the nCino Bank Operating System – from greater efficiency to increased productivity to an elevated customer experience,” nCino CEO Pierre Naudé said. “We see this collaboration between our organizations as a natural fit and are very excited to continue strengthening and expanding our partnership with this innovative top 10 U.S. bank.”

Anthony Sasso, president of TD Equipment Finance, added, “As the bank continues to deliver on its vision to transform commercial lending, it’s essential that we have the best tools and technology to help our customers achieve their financial objectives.” TD Bank has more than nine million customers and 1,200+ locations in the American northeast and mid-Atlantic regions, as well as in metropolitan D.C., the Carolinas, and Florida. Headquartered in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, TD Bank is a member of TD Bank Group and is a subsidiary of The Toronto-Dominion Bank of Toronto, Canada.

News of nCino’s partnership with TD Bank is the company’s second major announcement in March. Earlier this month, the fintech partnered with the Yorkshire Building Society in the U.K., which will use nCino’s Bank Operating System to enhance its corporate lending efforts. Also this month, nCino announced that it was teaming up with consulting firm, Enforce, to help community-based FIs adopt cloud-based solutions. The company began 2018 with a pair of big headlines: an investment round led by Salesforce Ventures that took nCino’s total capital to more than $81 million, and a deal with the world’s largest credit union, Navy CU, with more than $87 billion in assets.

NetGuardians Bolsters Cybersecurity for Steward Bank

NetGuardians Bolsters Cybersecurity for Steward Bank

Swiss cybersecurity specialist NetGuardians will bring its fraud fighting solutions to Zimbabwe’s Steward Bank.

“By signing up with NetGuardians, Steward Bank will not only benefit from our real-time fraud mitigation solution, but will also become part of the NetGuardians’ global community, sharing fraud mitigation best practice(s),” NetGuardians CEO Joël Winteregg said. “Together, they put Steward Bank at the forefront of fraud prevention, helping to keep its customers’ balances safe and its reputation sound.”

With NetGuardians’ technology Steward Bank will be able to monitor all user behavior in real-time for both its ebanking and mobile banking channels. The platform blocks atypical and suspicious behavior and sends alerts to the appropriate monitoring personnel. NetGuardians says their technology reduces the number of false positives by 80% and reduces fraud management time by 93%.

Steward Bank CEO Lance Mambondini pointed to the integration of Netguardians’ technology as an example of the promise and challenge for banks undergoing digital transformation. “Digitization opened up new channels for the bank and helped us grow. We needed a more effective and proactive system to monitor the subsequent increase in transactions and complexiy of the bank to prevent fraud,” Steward Bank CEO Lance Mambondiani said. “We picked NetGuardians because it is a solution made specifically for banks and is proven to cut fraud across all channels.” Steward Bank will integrate NetGuardians’ platform into its core banking system, T24, from Temenos.

Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Yverdon-les-bains, Vaud, Switzerland, NetGuardians demonstrated its FraudGuardian solution at FinovateAsia 2016. FraudGuardian helps banks and FIs spot and identify fraudsters, and is especially effective in helping FIs limit the 70% of fraud that is internal. The solution monitors user activity across all channels, IT layers, and transactions and uses dynamic profiling, pattern-based intelligence, and predictive analytics to detect anomalous behavior and provide banks with the opportunity to take proactive steps.

Last month, NetGuardians announced an agreement with FirstOntario CU, integrating its anti-fraud solution with the credit union’s Temenos T24 core banking system. Back in December, NetGuardians kicked off a partnership with Masaref Business & Systems Consulting. This deal will make NetGuardian’s cybersecurity solutions more accessible to financial institutions in the Middle East.

Named to the Chartis RiskTech 100, NetGuardians has raised more than $14 million in funding (CHF 13.5 million) and includes Freemont Management, Swissom Ventures, Polytech Ecosystem Ventures, and MoneyTime Ventures among its investors.

Finovate Global: Fintech News from the Periphery

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

Asia

  • Singapore Business Review names Turnkey Lender and Bambu among Singapore’s hottest startups.
  • Citi introduces Facebook Messenger bot in Singapore as initial stage of wider worldwide rollout. (link)
  • Revolut founder and CEO Nikolay Storonsky discusses plans for APAC expansion with TechWireAsia.

Africa

  • Flywire and Flutterwave partner on cross-border payments & receivables in Nigeria.
  • Africa-based fintechs picked up almost one third of all Venture funding in Africa in 2017, according to a report from Disrupt Africa.
  • Village Capital Fintech Africa Cohort 2018 lists its incoming class of 12 startups.

MENA

  • Fintech Circle and Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) to launch fintech education courses.
  • Gulf News Banking takes a look at the digitization of the fintech sector in the Middle East.
  • Bahrain-based security startup, Eazy Financial Services, launches first biometric payment network in MENA.

LATAM

  • Neener Analytics Completes Proof-of-Concept with Jamaican Payday Lender.
  • Alipay partners with Openpay to connect Chinese consumers with merchants in Mexico. (link)
  • Amazon.com unveils first debit card in Mexico as part of e-commerce initiative.

CEE

  • Personetics Brings Cognitive Banking to Romania’s Banca Transilvania.
  • Sberbank to host the first International Cybersecurity Conference in July.
  • CEE Fintech Survey for 2017 cites Poland’s fintech industry as the region’s most vibrant.

Top image designed by Freepik

Basisbank to Deploy FICO’s Rules Management System, Blade Advisor

Basisbank to Deploy FICO’s Rules Management System, Blade Advisor

Denmark-based online lender Basisbank is implementing FICO’s Blade Advisor rules management system to “control credit risk and accelerate its digital transformation”, according to the vendor, reports Tanya Andreasyan of Banking Technology (Finovate’s sister publication).

“As a fintech, we need to be fast and responsive to customer demands, while maintaining strong risk management,” said Morten Larsen, head of business development at Basisbank. “We need to give our risk analysts the maximum flexibility to make changes quickly, not wait in a queue for IT to make changes. In our review of the market, FICO provided the most powerful and flexible solution, and also has the greatest expertise in financial services.”

Basisbank was founded in 2000. It offers simple banking and finance products consumers direct to market and at point of sale at retail partners and car dealers. Today, it has over 90,000 customers and partners with 700+ retail shops and automotive dealers. It says that more than 75% of its credit applications come from mobile devices.

FICO’s Shalini Raghavan (Senior Director, Product Management) and Tom Traughber (VP, Chief Architect, Product Development). presented “Rapidly Deliver Contextually-Powered Stream Processing” at our developers conference, FinDEVr New York 2016. The discussion focused on how FICO’s Decision Management Platform Streaming supports high volume, latency analytics for batch and stream sources.

Founded in 1956 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. FICO leverages predictive analytics and data science to improve operations ranging from risk management and fighting fraud to customer service. The company’s solutions are used by businesses in more than 100 countries.

eToro Raises $100 Million in Series E

eToro Raises $100 Million in Series E

In a round led by China Minsheng Financial, social trading network eToro has raised $100 million in new funding. The Series E, which featured participation from SBI Group, Korea Investment Partners, and World Wide Invest, as well, will help the company expand into new markets. The new capital will also help eToro build on its R&D efforts in blockchain technology and asset digitization. eToro’s total capital is now $162 million.

“This round of investment will be critical in helping us to further develop our technology infrastructure to support the rapid growth that we’ve recently experienced,” eToro founder and CEO Yoni Assia said. “It will also help us to enter new markets, enabling us to bring our social approach to investing to more people around the world, and providing more people with safe and secure access to the markets.”

Assia added that the funding would enable eToro to remain as innovative technically as it is in the field of social trading and investing. “As new technology continues to change finance,” he said, “we want to remain at the forefront of that change. So today’s announcement will help us to continue our market leading work in blockchain research and the development of digital assets.”

Digital assets and blockchain have proven to be significant opportunities for growth for eToro. In February, the company added XLM (Stellar Lumens) to its offerings. Back in December, eToro teamed up with CoinDash to build blockchain-based social trading products. The company enabled direct trading of five major cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, and Ripple – back in September, shortly after earning a spot on the European Fintech 100.

Named a company to watch by Disruptor Daily, eToro has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel, and New York City. The company demonstrated its CopyFunds for Partners solution at FinovateEurope 2017. With a trading and investing community of more than nine million users, eToro’s network gives users the opportunity to automatically copy the buying and selling of the network’s most successful traders and investors. Those traders and investors can earn income when their trades are copied by members of the community as part of eToro’s Popular Investor program. Stocks, exchange-traded funds, currency pairs, indices, and commodities, as well as cryptocurrencies can be traded on eToro’s platform.

Trusted Knight Unveils Financial Fraud Fighting Solution, Protector Air

Trusted Knight Unveils Financial Fraud Fighting Solution, Protector Air

Digital data security specialist Trusted Knight launched Protector Air this week. The cloud-based solution deploys in-stream between consumers and businesses to defend against cyberattacks and fraud. The solution is capable of protecting against a variety of fraudulent activity and malware including rootkits, man-in-the-middle browser attacks, session hijacking, and account takeovers.

“The conventional security approach has been to protect the endpoint and the web application separately using two distinct solutions,” Trusted Knight CEO and founder Joseph Patanella explained. “What we’ve enabled is the modern paradigm of accepting that there will be compromised endpoints as well as attacks on web servers, but secure business can still take place if each touch point of each transaction is protected,” Patanella said. “We are creating a new category of solutions with Protector Air – one that provides full transaction stack protection.”

Protector Air secures three cyberattack vectors: protecting websites from direct infrastructure, framework, and application logic attacks; protecting users from endpoint and browser-based malware such as keyloggers and Trojans; and protecting the communications itself from service disruption caused by distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. With an anti-fraud intelligence layer to protect transactions, Protector Air’s technology is unified, agentless, turnkey, cloud-based, and platform independent.

Headquartered in Annapolis, Maryland and founded in 2010, Trusted Knight demonstrated its Protector Anti-Crimeware Software at FinovateSpring 2013. Last fall, the company forged a strategic partnership with channel enablement specialist, eTECH Channel to help it better bring its full product suite of anti-fraud solutions to market faster and more efficiently. Last summer, Trusted Knight was named a finalist in the SC Awards 2017 Europe in the Best Fraud Prevention solution category. The company secured Series B funding in 2016 (the amount of the investment and the name of the investor were undisclosed) and has made one major acquisition, the purchase of Massachusetts-based cybersecurity firm, Sentrix.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate

  • Trusted Knight Unveils Financial Fraud Fighting Solution, Protector Air.
  • Currencycloud Helps Businesses Extend Global Reach.

Around the web

  • Beacon Community Bank to deploy Jack Henry’s SilverLake System for core processing.
  • Finastra welcomes APAC early adopters to its FusionFabric.cloud 0pen architecture ecosystem.
  • Roostify announces new VP for Business Development, Mark McLaughlin.
  • BioCatch voted “Best Innovation in Securing Transactions” at the European Payments Summit’s Florin Awards.
  • Payfone launches Instant Experiences for Retail platform.
  • Users can now add multiple credit and debit cards to their PayPal account directly from BofA’s mobile app.

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.