Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Concur Launches e-Fapiao Solution for China’s WeChat Platform.
  • Ephesoft Unveils Transact Mobile SDK 4.0, Leveraging Deep Learning to Create Clearer Images.

Around the web

  • Axis Bank leverages technology from Ripple to launch instant international payment service.
  • Temenos announces pair of new providers to its Marketplace: Callsign and Limitless.
  • NICE Adaptive Workforce Engagement (WFO) wins Frost & Sullivan award.
  • Infosys Finacle unveils blockchain-based trade finance solution for FIs: Finacle Trade Connect.
  • Privakey picks up patent for innovations in universal, password-free authentication.

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.

AlphaPoint Names New CEO, Plans for New Public Blockchain Network

AlphaPoint Names New CEO, Plans for New Public Blockchain Network

 

Blockchain innovator AlphaPoint has announced plans to build a new public blockchain network that will enable users to digitize real-world assets and monetize them across new markets.  The network, dubbed the AlphaPoint Public Network (APN), will be the first public blockchain built based on Intel SGX technology. AlphaPoint will fund the project via a pre-functional token sale to accredited investors in early 2018.

AlphaPoint’s goal with the APN is to create a “confidential, high-performance public blockchain” that supports tokenization of real-world assets. The company differentiates its planned solution in three ways: (1) the ability to provide hardware-enforced confidentiality of asset data and smart contracts, (2) the ability to migrate tokenized assets across supported public and private blockchains, and (3) the use of JavaScript and TypeScript to simplify blockchain development.

The news marks the second time in as many months that AlphaPoint has put Intel’s Software Guard Extensions technology in the headlines. In October, AlphaPoint launched its trusted virtual machine, AlphaPoint TrustedVM, which is enabled by Intel SGX technology. “Our collaboration with AlphaPoint aims to deliver enterprise-ready blockchain solutions to the financial services community,” Intel’s Rick Echevarria said. “AlphaPoint is expanding blockchain use cases to include illiquid assets, art, collectibles, and real estate, and use of Intel SGX will help increase the security and privacy of those transactions.”

AlphaPoint also named a new Chief Executive Officer, Salil Donde. Donde previously served as EVP of Global Information Services at Nasdaq, where he was instrumental in launching numerous machine learning-based products, data products, indexes, and sponsored exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Donde was CEO and board member of Lewtan Technologies before moving to the Nasdaq in 2015. Previous to his tenure at Lewtan, he was CEO and board member of proptech firm Marshall & Swift/Boeckh (now a part of CoreLogic).

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York City, AlphaPoint demonstrated its AlphaPoint Distributed Ledger Platform (ADLP) at FinovateFall 2017. Last month Capital Trust Group and W Ventures (Hong Kong) choose AlphaPoint to provide the blockchain financial technology infrastructure for Trust City, a world exhibition and fintech hub in Thailand that is scheduled to be finished in 2020. In May, AlphaPoint unveiled its solution for initial coin offerings (ICOs), and in March, the company completed a blockchain trial with Scotiabank.

FI.SPAN Enables Banks to Maximize the Opportunity of Open Banking

FI.SPAN Enables Banks to Maximize the Opportunity of Open Banking


Helping banks and other financial institutions manage the myriad third party fintech solutions available to them will only become more necessary as the open banking revolution takes hold. And that’s where companies like FI.SPAN come in. The firm, which made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateFall, provides a cloud-based, API services management platform for FIs that allows them to rapidly deploy a wide variety of business banking solutions to their corporate customers.

Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, FI.SPAN lowers the time and cost to innovation for banks, as well as increases transactional revenues. The solution helps banks open up a new business banking channel via accounting and ERP apps which, in the words of FI.SPAN CEO Lisa Shields, “embed(s) your brand and your products into your client’s daily workflow.” FI.SPAN also enables banks to leverage any third-party fintech “under your brand and under your control and with no IT projects required.”

FI.SPAN co-founder and CEO Lisa Shields demonstrating her company’s cloud-based bank API services management platform at FinovateFall 2017.

A full, API banking system in its own right, FI.SPAN gives banks the ability to automatically control and specify which products and services are delivered and which channel is used. The company curates and pre-integrates third party apps technologies that FIs can use alone or in combination with their own solutions, and provides pre-built connectivity to major mid-market and enterprise ERP platforms. FI.SPAN currently has plug-ins for QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP, and has many more under development.

“We believe banks can extend their brand into their customer sites,” Shields said. “(Banks) can as easily leverage fintechs as be leveraged by them, and have an opportunity to exchange rich data with their customers and become the trusted custodians of that data.”

Company facts

  • Founded in 2016
  • Headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
  • Has 15 employees

Recent headlines for FI.SPAN include earning recognition as a CIX Top 20 company, and being chosen to participate in the start-up pitch contest sponsored by the Canada FinTech Forum – both in October.

We met Lisa Shields (pictured) and company Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder Clayton Weir at FinovateFall 2017. We followed up with a few questions by email. Below are our questions and Ms. Shields’ responses.

Finovate: What problem does your technology solve?

Lisa Shields: FI.SPAN is reimagining the business banking experience. We provide banks the ability to deliver any service directly to its business customers via accounting and ERP applications.   

Finovate: Who are your primary customers?

Shields: FI.SPAN’s primary customers are regional and middle-market banks. These banks have outdated online banking interfaces and are struggling to provide the value-added services that their business customers are demanding. While fintech startups are well positioned to create compelling payment, lending, and analytic user experiences, banks are best positioned to deliver them. FI.SPAN enables banks to leverage any fintech service and deliver all of its services through the customer’s preferred application environment.

Finovate: How does FI.SPAN solve the problem better?

Shields: FI.SPAN powers true collaboration between banks and fintech companies. It’s an API marketplace for banks to select and offer the solutions their customers have come to expect, without requiring any IT projects since FI.SPAN pre-integrates all fintech components. Also, our platform centralizes all aspects of third-party service management, including transaction monitoring, limits and risk policy adherence and exception handling. 

A look at the FI.SPAN dashboard which features pre-integrated, best of breed fintechs for services such as lending and analytics.

Finovate: What in your background gave you the confidence to tackle this challenge?

Shields: Prior to starting FI.SPAN, I founded and built a global payouts company over 15 years. That experience provided me with an appreciation of what operating a regulated business entails and what treasurers and CFOs are looking for from their transactional services providers. As a veteran of the fintech industry, I was able to identify the opportunity emerging between fintech companies and banks. I also saw the hurdles banks were facing when it came to providing their customers with the services they needed, and I knew that FI.SPAN could be the solution.

Finovate: What are some upcoming initiatives from FI.SPAN that we can look forward to over the next few months?

Shields: We have gone live with our first customer this fall and are working on some very exciting bank pilots with both large and small financial institutions across the continent. Our product capability and partner catalog are both rapidly growing, and you will start to see announcements of multiple new product lines including lending, onboarding and accounts receivable.  

Finovate: Where do you see FI.SPAN a year or two from now?

Shields: Selling to banks has a long sales cycle, and we expect to reap the rewards of seeds we have been sowing with our bank partners over the last year. I expect that FI.SPAN will become a very important part of the banking API ecosystem as it continues to become more robust over time. 


CEO Lisa Shields and CSO Clayton Weir demonstrating FI.SPAN at FinovateFall 2017.

Finovate Alumni News

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.

 

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

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

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.

BehavioSec Brings Behavioral Biometrics to Identity Management Specialist Crossmatch

BehavioSec Brings Behavioral Biometrics to Identity Management Specialist Crossmatch

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.

Finovate Alumni News

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.

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

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

Finovate Alumni News

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.

BankBazaar CEO Honored at India FinTech Awards 2017

BankBazaar CEO Honored at India FinTech Awards 2017

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.

Finovate Alumni News

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.

SumUp Partners with BancoEstado to Boost Mobile Card Acceptance in Chile

SumUp Partners with BancoEstado to Boost Mobile Card Acceptance in Chile

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.