Author: David Penn

Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: aixigo, AlphaPoint, Avoka, Cardlytics, FI.SPAN, Moxtra, NICE Systems, Symphony Software Foundation, Thomson Reuters

On Finovate.com

  • AlphaPoint Names New CEO, Plans for New Public Blockchain Network.
  • FI.SPAN Enables Banks to Maximize the Opportunity of Open Banking.

Around the web

  • Thomson Reuters enhances ESG data monitoring capabilities for its Eikon solution.
  • Symphony Software Foundation adds to its Open Developer Platform.
  • Turkiye Garanti Bank, Turkey’s second largest private bank, to deploy customer analytics technology from NICE.
  • Cardlytics taps Jed Murphy as new U.K. Head of Strategy and Innovation.
  • Avoka bolsters executive ranks with two new SVPs, Director of Sales.
  • Moxtra wins spot in Prudential PRU Fintegrate program.
  • Wealth management platform aixigo wins Banking IT-Innovation Award from Business Engineering Forum of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

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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Memento Partners with Islandsbanki to Add Money Pool Feature to Digital Wallet

Memento Partners with Islandsbanki to Add Money Pool Feature to Digital Wallet
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Memento

The Best of Show-winning mobile wallet platform from Memento has been successfully deployed by Iceland’s Islandsbanki. The Icelandic bank has added the technology to its digital wallet app, Kass, enabling users to create “money pools” that friends and family privately or publicly can contribute to.

The technology treats each contribution as a “dynamic payment event” without a preset number of potential contributors nor a predetermined total amount. This makes it easy for users to raise money and share the “campaign” via the social network of their choice. Now available to anyone with an Icelandic phone number and bank account, the technology can be used for everything from funding a team lunch or raising money for charitable causes. And because users have their payment details stored on the digital wallet, contributing to a money pool takes only a few seconds.

Arnar Jónsson, CEO of Memento, demonstrating the company’s Bank-to-Social Relationship Platform at FinovateEurope 2017.

Memento CEO Arnar Jónsson said the money pool feature “will not only increase the use cases of wallet platforms, but also drive traffic from many social media straight to these wallet services.” Pointing out that this value-add is a way for banks to differentiate themselves in an “enormously competitive” digital wallet marketplace, Jónsson added, “it is a smart move to provide tools to pool money as it will raise awareness and usability of your digital wallet.”

This news is the culmination of two years of collaboration between Memento and Islandsbanki, a partnership that included the development of the bank’s digital wallet, Kass, which won “App of the Year in Iceland 2016. “Islandsbanki has high ambitions to offer the best digital-wallet service and we value the strong partnership we’ve build with Memento,” Kass Product Manager at Islandsbanki Unnur Johnsen said. He added, “We truly share their vision to bridge the gap between social media and banking and to service a digital wallet that can handle any type of payment needs. The money pool feature is part of that vision.”

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Reykjavik, Iceland, Memento demonstrated its Bank-to-Social Relationship platform at FinovateEurope 2017, winning Best of Show. The company has more than $450,000 in capital courtesy of a grant in 2016 from the Technology Development Fund.

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BehavioSec Brings Behavioral Biometrics to Identity Management Specialist Crossmatch

BehavioSec Brings Behavioral Biometrics to Identity Management Specialist Crossmatch
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BehavioSec

Multiple Best of Show winner BehavioSec has partnered with identity management innovator Crossmatch in a deal that will add keystroke capture to Crossmatch’s composite authentication platform, DigitalPersona.

“We selected BehavioSec’s platform because they are singularly focused on behavioral biometrics and have well-established and proven technology that already serves more than 35 million end users,” Crossmatch director of identity and access management Jeff Carpenter said. The technology, which provides authentication based on a profile of the user’s keystroke/typing style, adds to DigitalPersona’s current authentication options of OTP, PIN, contact or contactless card, and fingerprint.

By leveraging a passive behavioral biometric solution like Behaviosec, Crossmatch provides an additional security option without burdening the user. This is key to ensuring a quality user experience and broadens the appeal of the technology. As BehavioSec CEO Neil Costigan put it: “with this partnership, Crossmatch expands the flexibility of its platform and BehavioSec expands the reach and pervasiveness of its behavioral analytics engine into a new commercial market.”

Founded in 2009, BehavioSec demonstrated BehavioSec on Demand at FinovateFall 2015. We profiled the company this fall as part of our look at FinovateAsia Best of Show winners, our review of Finovate alums that specialize in cybersecurity solutions, and our feature on Best of Show winning alums, Safe Spaces: The Beset of the Authenticators, Verifiers, and Fraud Fighters.

Named to the European Fintech 100 and selected to be part of FinTechCity’s Fintech 50, BehavioSec partnered with Gemalto in June and teamed up with fellow Finovate alum Kount in May. The Stockholm, Sweden-based company opened its U.S. office in Manhattan, New York, this spring. With more than $7 million in funding, BehavioSec includes Northzone and Octopus Ventures among its investors.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BehavioSec, Kantox, Memento, nCino, Pindrop Security, Ping Identity, Ripple, Urban FT, Zenmonics

On Finovate.com

  • East vs. East: A Comparison of Regional Fintech Trends.
  • BehavioSec Brings Behavioral Biometrics to Identity Management Specialist Crossmatch.
  • Memento Partners with Islandsbanki to Add Money Pool Feature to Digital Wallet.

Around the web

  • Quid looks at Salesforce Ignite’s implementation of its data visualization technology.
  • NBC News features Ping Identity chief information security officer Robb Reck with tips on being safe on Cyber Monday.
  • Zenmonics’ digital account opening technology wins endorsement from American Bankers Association.
  • BAI Banking Strategies podcast interviews nCino CMO Jonathan Rowe.
  • Business Insider features Pindrop and Ripple in roster of startups that will boom in 2018 – as selected by leading VCs.
  • PYMNTS.com interviews Urban FT co-founder Kasey Kaplan.
  • Kantox boosts currency portfolio from 35 to 92, adding markets in Latin America and Asia.

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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De Volksbank Migrates More than 120,000 Investment Accounts to Ohpen

De Volksbank Migrates More than 120,000 Investment Accounts to Ohpen
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Ohpen

De Volksbank, a retail and SME bank in the Netherlands, has migrated over 122,000 investment accounts to Ohpen’s core banking platform, reports Tanya Andreasyan of Banking Technology, Finovate’s sister publication.

Ohpen says the bank “has now completely and seamlessly integrated its investment services into its internet banking environments” using the vendor’s API.

“All investment processes – from the opening and maintenance of an investment account, to order execution and portfolio management – from the different internet banking environments of ASN Bank, BLG Wonen, RegioBank and SNS [de Volksbank’s brands] are managed in Ohpen’s core banking platform,” the vendor states.

Alexander Baas, COO at de Volksbank, describes the migration as “smooth”.

De Volksbank carries multiple brands with a single back office and IT organisation. The product range consists of three core product groups: payments, mortgages and savings. De Volksbank has a balance sheet total of €62 billion and about 3,500 employees.

Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Ohpen demonstrated its core banking platform at FinovateFall 2012. The company picked up an investment of $17 million earlier this year in a Series B round led by Amerborgh. Chris Zadeh is founder and CEO.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FICO, Revolut, Yoyo

Around the web

  • Revolut reaches one million customer milestone.
  • Starling Bank partners with Yoyo Wallet, enabling cardholders to earn loyalty points when paying with the challenger bank.
  • African Bank to deploy new technology from FICO to centralize credit decision management.

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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BankBazaar CEO Honored at India FinTech Awards 2017

BankBazaar CEO Honored at India FinTech Awards 2017
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BankBazaar

Adhil Shetty, CEO of BankBazaar, was recognized by the India FinTech Awards 2017 earlier this month. Shetty was named Fintech Leader of the Year at the event, which featured more than 200 attendees, more than 40 speakers, and 20 shortlisted startups from six countries.

“Today, paperless, presenceless transactions are becoming the face of digital finance,” Shetty said. “It is heartening to see our vision of paperless access to all financial products for every Indian being accepted and validated not just by our customers and partners but also by the industry experts at IFTA 2017.”

Sponsored by the India FinTech forum, which seeks to highlight the growing fintech community in India and ensure its role in driving fintech innovation worldwide, the India FinTech Awards is the largest, demo-based, fintech event in India. This year’s presentation included product demonstrations by 20 companies, with the winner earning a spot on stage at the Paris Fintech Forum in January 2018.

BankBazaar CEO Adhil Shetty receiving an award for Fintech Leader of the Year at the India FinTech Awards 2017.

This year’s top honors went to ZestMoney, which was awarded Fintech Startup of the Year, and its CEO and co-founder Lizzie Chapman, who was recognized as Woman Leader in Fintech. Chapman called the Startup of the Year award “recognition of the hard work we have put into building a product and platform that completely changes the way people access credit in this market.”

ZestMoney enables consumers to pay using digital EMI (equated monthly installment), avoiding the need for credit cards and credit scores. Headquartered in Bangalore, India and founded in 2015, the company has raised more than $8 million in funding and includes PayU and Omidyar Network among its investors.

Kickstart Accelerator and YES Fintech won the Accelerator of the Year award.  Also honored at the event was InstaReM, a cross-border remittance and money transfer startup founded in 2014, that participated in our FinovateAsia Startup Showcase earlier this month. InstaReM was recognized as a Fintech Rising Star at IFTA 2017, along with fellow contestants Niki.ai and Zeta. Finovate alum FixNix also participated in the competition.

The good news for BankBazaar comes at the same time the company announced a series of new upgrades to its mobile app. These enhancements include gold, silver, and fuel rate trackers, as well as personalized graphs and visualizations to better see and understand expenses. The app, which has garnered more than one million downloads, will also aggregate a number of features onto a single interface for easier use. “Our mission has been to help consumers access the right financial products and make their financial journey simpler,” Rati Shetty, Chief Product Officer for BankBazaar told DataQuest.

Last month, BankBazaar announced closing a $30 million funding round led by Experian. The two companies have partnered to develop a Credit Score Tracker that gives Indian consumers a secure free credit score as well as educational information on how to use financial planning to improve credit scores.

“There is a natural synergy between the world’s largest information management company and one of the fasted growing fintech companies,” Shetty said. “The funds from this round will be used to further strengthen our position as the leader in secure, paperless access to loans, cards, and mutual funds.” The investment brings BankBazaar’s total funding to $110 million.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Chennai, India, BankBazaar demonstrated its Real Time Credit Processing Platform at FinovateAsia 2012 in Singapore.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, BankBazaar, Fiserv, PayPal, ThreatMetrix, TickSmith

On Finovate.com

  • BankBazaar CEO Honored at India FinTech Awards 2017.

Around the web

  • ACI Worldwide inks licensing agreement with Payworks.
  • PayPal introduces new Invoicing Extension for with Facebook Messenger.
  • Commercial Bank of Ceylon embraces digital banking solution from Fiserv.
  • ThreatMetrix boosts speed, improves accuracy and reliability with Winter 2018 release of its digital identity network.

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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SumUp Partners with BancoEstado to Boost Mobile Card Acceptance in Chile

SumUp Partners with BancoEstado to Boost Mobile Card Acceptance in Chile
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: SumUp

SMEs in Chile have just won a new ally when it comes to making it easier to accept mobile card payments. The country’s largest national bank, BancoEstado de Chile, has partnered with SumUp to launch a joint venture that will give Chilean businesses the ability to offer “anytime, anywhere” mobile card acceptance without fees or contracts.

The joint venture, branded Compraqui, will be based in Santiago de Chile and leverages SumUp’s success in developing mobile Point of Sale (mPOS) solutions for more than 30 markets in Europe and the Americas. The companies believe that the combination of SumUp’s technology and BancoEstado’s history of providing financial services to Chile’s SME community will boost the number of card acceptance points to 1.5 million in the next three years.

“This is a milestone for the small business sector in Chile,” SumUp CEO Daniel Klein said. “We truly disrupt the existing market for card acceptance through Compraqui’s unique offering. It represents each company’s strong commitment to provide business owners with easy access to card payment technology to ultimately increase their revenue.”

According to Gerente General of BancoEstado Jessica López Saffie, the need for card acceptance solutions in Chile for small businesses is significant. “Together we address more than 600,000 SMEs and 1.2 million sole proprietors who currently cannot accept card payments,” she said, adding that the bank chose SumUp as a partner after a careful examination of the competition.

“We ran a comprehensive selection process, evaluating many card acceptance solutions,” López Saffie said. “With a proven business model and a market-leading end-to-end card acceptance solution providing highest security standards, SumUp came out at the top of this process.”

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in the U.K., SumUp demonstrated its mPOS technology at FinovateEurope 2013. The company unveiled its new online payments suite this summer, which added the ability to accept payments via SMS; a Virtual Terminal to enable online, CNP transactions; as well as a set of APIs and SDKs for additional payment integrations.

SumUp has more than $100 million in annual revenue, processes more than 100,000 card transactions daily, and 2,000 new businesses joining its service every day. With more than $44 million in total funding, SumUp includes Life.SREDA and BBVA Ventures among its investors.

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Sensory Partners with Fujitsu to Bring Biometrics to Mizuho’s Mobile Banking

Sensory Partners with Fujitsu to Bring Biometrics to Mizuho’s Mobile Banking
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Sensory

Fujitsu has teamed with Silicon Valley-based Sensory to provide face biometric authentication for Mizuho’s mobile banking, reports Antony Peyton of Banking Technology (Finovate’s sister publication).

Mizuho is the first customer of the Fujitsu and Sensory partnership and it will be using TrulySecure. This solution’s features include the option to fuse voice and face biometrics recognition together; and it works with Android, iOS, Linux and other platforms.

It also has convolutional neural net technology running on the device – so it does not store biometric info in the cloud. In addition, TrulySecure’s “anti-spoofing approach” prevents unauthorized users from gaining access with photos or videos of enrolled users.

Michihiko Ejiri, VP of front digital service business division at Fujitsu, says working with Sensory has “allowed us to help our customers around the world improve the user experience provided by their apps by integrating face biometric authentication technologies into them”.

Left to right: Sensory’s Jeff Rogers (Vice President) and Todd Mozer (CEO and President) demonstrating TrulySecure at FinovateFall 2017.

Sensory reckons digital commerce and banking apps have moved toward mobile payment and wallet applications. In turn, this demand has created a need for fraud and theft prevention technology that is “frictionless to the end user”.

It also cites research from Markets and Markets that the global facial recognition market is expected to grow from $4.05 billion in 2017 to $7.76 billion by 2022, with banking, financial services, insurance, retail and healthcare being major growth areas.

“Supported by the rapid growth in adoption that our TrulySecure face recognition technology is seeing among banking apps, mobile phones, and more,” Sensory CEO Todd Mozer said, “our research has found that consumers prefer the user authentication experience offered by face biometrics.”  Mozer highlighted speed, accuracy, and convenience among the top reasons why customers appreciate Sensory’s technology.

Founded in 1994 and headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Sensory demonstrated its TrulySecure bank teller chatbot with biometrics solution at FinovateFall 2017. The company announced last month that its TrulyHandsFree voice control technology would serve as an Alexa trigger for Garmin Speak. And in September, the company’s TrulySecure facial recognition technology was added to LG’s flagship V30 smartphone, as well as LG’s Q6 and G6 models.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, Diebold, Fenergo, SumUp

On Finovate.com

  • SumUp Partners with BancoEstado to Boost Mobile Card Acceptance in Chile.

Around the web

  • New software and cash recycling technology from Diebold Nixdorf to support an upgrade of 400 ATMs by Turkey’s VakifBank.
  • ACI Worldwide teams up with Zelle to bring real-time payments to FIs.
  • BNP Paribas to deploy Fenergo’s Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) solution.

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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Digital Experience Specialist Configo Launches Cloud Environment

Digital Experience Specialist Configo Launches Cloud Environment
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Configo

Less than one year after making its debut at FinovateEurope, digital sales and engagement specialist Configo is taking its technology to the cloud. The company is making its Live Experience Platform – which gives FIs the ability to create customer-centric, personalized digital experiences – available as a SaaS solution.

Until now, Configo’s platform was installed on-premise. The new cloud environment duplicates the on-premise platform, providing the same capture, tag, and trigger, code-free interface that allows FIs to add automated, contextual, personalized messages to their mobile banking apps to boost engagement and drive sales.

“It gives you total control of the whole mobile experience,” Configo CEO and co-founder Yosi Dahan said during his Finovate demo in February. “It makes your mobile application dynamic and allows you to provide different audiences with the right content in real-time.”

Left to right: Configo co-founders Natan Abramov (CTO) and Yosi Dahan (CEO) demonstrating Configo Live Experience at FinovateEurope 2017.

Configo’s Live Experience Platform enables FIs to launch in-app campaigns without the long R&D process. Dahan explained that having to write additional code and submit apps to the app stores every time an institution wants to add a task or make an update to an app can be time-consuming and costly. In contrast, Configo leverages their unique technology that enables the user to manipulate UI images themselves, making app updates easier and faster to complete.

The company has picked up some positive feedback from early adopters of the technology, including a pilot project with an online travel booking system that used the solution to support a campaign to up-sell customers to business class. E-commerce trials like these, Dahan suggested, were especially valuable during the development process. “You cannot get the same feedback when you work with financial institutions,” he said.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, Configo demonstrated its Live Mobile Experience at FinovateEurope 2017. The company introduced its Partner Program in July, and launched its Live App Editor in February. Check out our feature on Configo and find out how the company turns more than nine years of mobile app development experience into a platform that helps FIs get app changes to market faster.

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