Author: David Penn

Innovation Acceleration: Incubators and Innovation Labs Driving Development in Fintech

Innovation Acceleration: Incubators and Innovation Labs Driving Development in Fintech
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateFall 2017

 

Post updated to present Showcase sponsor, Fintech71 and latest Showcase addition, FinTech Innovation Lab.

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To prepare for our expanded FinovateFall conference in September, we’re taking a look at some of the new additions during Discussion Days September 13 and 14. Today, we’re previewing our Showcase of Accelerators, Incubators, and Innovation Labs on the 14th.

FinovateFall 2017’s showcase on accelerators, incubators, and innovation labs features demos from startups representing each of our accelerators, with the audience selecting the most innovative startup based on “biggest impact in startup ecosystem.” Here is a sampling of the accelerators and incubators whose startups will be represented during our showcase.

Fintech71

We lead off with our Showcase sponsor, Fintech71. One of the newest fintech accelerators to emerge on the scene, Fintech71’s goal is to attract fintech startups to Ohio and grow the innovation pipeline for the state’s private sector stakeholders. Backed by companies such as KeyBank, Progressive, and Fifth Third, Fintech 71 provides innovative entrepreneurs with a $100,000 investment for up to 6% equity, daily 1-on-1 mentor support, as well as access to participating companies and  “millennial talent” thanks to nearby Ohio State University.

 

Fintech71 will begin its inaugural class on September 10. Up to 12 startups will participate in the 10-week program, which will be based in Columbus, Ohio. “Ohio’s ranking as a Top 5 Fortune 500 and Top 5 Fortune 1000 headquarter destination is not without reason,” Fintech71 executive director Matt Armstead said, adding, “We aim to leverage Ohio’s tech-savvy talent, attractive cost of doing business, and established industry strength to make Ohio a global hotspot for fintech innovation and growth.

Citi Ventures

Citi Ventures is the “innovation engine” of Citi. The division invests in startups, supports new technologies, and tests new products and services in its Innovation Labs and businesses. Citi Ventures made its first investment in July 2010, and saw its first portfolio company exit (Silver Tail acquired by EMC) two years later. Citi Ventures launched its first fintech accelerator in Tel Aviv in 2013.

  • Founded in 2010 by Debby Hopkins
  • Headquartered in Palo Alto, California
  • Notable Startups: Linkable Networks (FF12), Ayasdi (FF14), Feedzai (FE14), Betterment (FF11), Chain (FD15), BlueVine (FF14), Plaid (FD14), Pindrop Security (FF12)

In 2017, Citi Ventures began the year appointing a new chief, Vanessa Colella, who was also named Chief Innovation Officer of Citi. Citi Ventures launched its Citi University Partnerships in Discovery program in February and in May, the venture capital arm of Citi leveraged the technology from portfolio company (and Finovate alum) Chain, to launch Citi Connect for Blockchain integrated with Nasdaq Linq.

FinTech Innovation Lab

Fintech Innovation Lab specializes in early and growth-stage fintech companies, helping these startups get access to some of the biggest financial services companies in the world. With programs in New York, Hong Kong; Dublin, Ireland; and London, the Lab’s alums have raised $530 million in VC funding since graduating from the accelerator program – more than $460 million from the New York lab alone. FinTech Innovation Lab is sponsored by Partnership Fund for New York City and Accenture.

  • Founded in 2012 by Maria Gotsch and Robert Gach
  • Headquartered in New York City, New York
  • Notable Startups: AlphaPoint (FE15), Atsora (FE14), BehavioSec (FF15), Big Data Scoring (FF15), BillGuard (FS12), bondIT (FF16), Dashlane (FE13), DeMystData (FA12), EverSafe (FF14), ForwardLane (FS16), Logical Glue (FE16), MaxMyInterest (FF14), Modelshop (FD17), Narrative Science (FF13), PhotoPay (FE15), RevolutionCredit (FF13), True Office (FE13), Uniken (FF16)

Last month, FinTech Innovation Lab celebrated its seventh anniversary, as a new class of startups – including Finovate/FinDEVr alums BehavioSec, DemystData, and Modelshop – demonstrated their technologies at the Lab’s annual Demo Days event. The occasion encouraged FinTech Innovation Lab co-founder Robert Gach to note that many of the technologies that have been seen at the Lab have anticipated trends ranging from big data analytics to the blockchain. “We expect this year’s innovations will experience a similar trajectory,” Gach said.

Omidyar Network RegTech Accelerator

Omidyar Network is an active impact investor that provides both financial and human capital to entrepreneurs in five main focus areas: education, emerging technology, governance and citizen engagement, property rights, and financial inclusion. The firm, launched by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, has a special interest in “entrepreneurs who share our commitment to advancing social good at the pace and scale the world needs today.”

  • Founded in 2004 by Pierre and Pam Omidyar
  • Headquartered in Redwood City, California
  • Notable Startups: Digi.me, Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (FA12), Lenddo, Prosper (FS09), RevolutionCredit (FF13), Tandem Bank

Earlier this year, Omidyar Network teamed up with Finovate alum Twilio as the firm launched its Impact Fund to support social impact programs. In February, Omidyar Network invested $2.9 million in an initiative to support the development of civic technology platforms in Latin America. In total, Omidyar Network has committed more than $900 million in for-profit investments and non-profit grants since inception.

Startupbootcamp NY

With partners including Mastercard, Santander, and Route 66 Ventures, Startupbootcamp NY provides fintech startups with seed funding, professional mentorship, New York City office space, and access to a worldwide network of fintech investors and businesses. The program’s areas of focus includes advanced analytics, blockchain technology, financial inclusion, identity & authentication, investments & personal finance, mobile security, P2P lending, and payments.

  • Founded in 2o1o by Alex Farcet, Carsten Kolbeck, Patrick de Zeeuw, and Ruud Hendriks
  • Headquartered in London, U.K.
  • Notable Startups: BankGuard (FE17), bondIT (FF16), Dragon Wealth Asia (FA13), investUP (FE16), InvoiceSharing (FE17), iproov (FE17)

An accelerator network with a global reach, Startupbootcamp sponsors events in more than 100 cities every year. It has more than 460 startups in its portfolio, more than 70% of which received funding. Startupbootcamp was named Best Accelerator 2014 in the European Tech Startup Awards. In addition to its fintech accelerators in New York, London, Singapore, and Mumbai, Startupbootcamp also provides programs in e-commerce (Amsterdam), insurance (London), and IoT (Barcelona).

Techstars

Since its inception, Techstars has accelerated more than 1,000 companies, with an active or acquired rate of 90%. The firm has provided $3.7 billion in total funding to startups with a total market capitalization of more than $9 billion. “We fund technology oriented companies, typically web-based or other software companies,” Techstars explains in an FAQ, “but we’ve funded companies that don’t quite fit that mold as well.”

  • Founded in 2006 by David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Brown, and Jared Polis
  • Headquartered in Boulder, Colorado
  • Notable Alums: Remitly, DigitalOcean, ImpulseSave (FF12), Realty Mogul, Good April (FS13), Market IQ (FF13), Bitfusion, Zighra (FF13), Robinhood,

Techstars just celebrated the 10th anniversary of its Techstars Startup Weekend. Also this month, Techstars announced the addition of more than 100 companies to its Worldwide Network. In June, Techstars teamed up with GINCO to launch the Techstars Dubai Accelerator, which opens this month and will begin its first class in January. Techstars introduced a new accelerator in Paris in March, partnering with venture capital firm, Partech Ventures.

The upcoming Showcase of Accelerators, Incubators, and Innovation Labs at FinovateFall will feature demos from each of our featured accelerators. To be a part of our Discussion Days audience at FinovateFall, be sure to register and save your spot at the show today.

Image Designed by Freepik

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Expensify Announces Five New ReceiptBurner Partners

Expensify Announces Five New ReceiptBurner Partners
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Expensify

Expensify unveiled a quintet of new partners for its automation-first ReceiptBurner platform this week. The new integrations will make it easy for qualified business expenses such as corporate travel bookings, on-demand parking payments, “and even private jet airfare” to be tracked and recorded into Expensify.

Calling his company’s technology a “full-time travel companion,” David Barrett highlighted the importance of removing the hassle from business travel. “We aim to make business travel smoother every step of the way,” Barnett said in a statement. “That means easing the burden of expense management for everyone involved, from the admin coordinating the travel to the employee out in the field.”

The five new partners are: The Parking Spot, ParkWhiz, Pana, TRAVO, and Jettly. The Parking Spot and ParkWhiz are on-demand parking reservation platforms; The Parking Spot is actually the largest owner/operator of airport parking properties near airports. Pana and TRAVO are trip booking and planning resources. Jettly is a private jet chartering marketplace.

Users of Expensify’s ReceiptBurner no longer have to smartscan or email their receipts to the company for tracking. Instead, when a transaction with one of the company’s growing number of partners occurs, ReceiptBurner automatically creates a receipt and sends it directly to Expensify where it is added to the user’s expense report. “ReceiptBurner eliminates one more step in the expense reporting process,” Expensify Marketing Generalist Gabi Horowitz announced on the company blog a year ago this month when the new solution was introduced. “(ReceiptBurner brings) us even closer to a utopian world in which business travelers can focus on business rather than the logistics of travel.”

Headquartered in San Francisco, Expensify demonstrated its Invoices solution at FinovateSpring 2013. Earlier this month, the company announced a new partnership with Lyft that will make it easier for business travelers using the ride-sharing service to manage their Lyft-related expenses using Expensify. And last month, Expensify reported exceeding the 35,000 customer milestone, reached in part by 15,000 new U.S. customers this year alone. In May, the company teamed up with fellow Finovate and FinDEVr alum, Xero, to power in-house expense management for the New Zealand-based cloud accounting innovator’s 21 offices around the world.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Expensify, Flybits, Jumio, NYMBUS, PayPal, ThreatMetrix, TransferWise, Urban FT

On Finovate.com

  • Expensify Announces Five New Receiptburner Partners.
  • Flybits Raises $6.5 Million to Help Banks Put Data to Work

Around the web

  • Jumio introduces eyeball tracking to the “liveness” check of its biometric authentication solution, Netverify.
  • NYMBUS adds executive talent, opens center of strategic excellence in Glastonbury, Connecticut.
  • Co-founder Kristo Käärmann takes the helm at TransferWise.
  • PayPal announces strategic partnership with Samsung Pay.
  • ThreatMetrix named the Leader in The Forrester Wave: Risk-Based Authentication, Q3 2017.

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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NCR Software at Center of Swiss ATM Harmonization Initiative

NCR Software at Center of Swiss ATM Harmonization Initiative
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: NCR Corporation

Technology from NCR will help drive a new initiative to modernize and upgrade ATMs used by Swiss banks. The project, ATMfutura, is being led by Switzerland’s SIX Group, and will standardize UI and user guidance on all ATMs in the country. The pilot begins this summer and continues through the balance of the year, with the new software from NCR, based on the company’s NCR APTRA Top Client Server, made available to all Swiss ATMs in 2018.

The goal of the ATMfutura project is to bring a common standard to Swiss ATMs – replacing more than 20 different solutions currently in use – making ATMs easier to use for customers and more cost efficient for FIs to run and manage. Among the features to be added as part of the “harmonization” of Swiss ATMs are mobile cash withdrawals using QR codes, the ability to choose cash denominations, and a voice-guided interface for customers with visual impairments. Many of these features are offered by certain Swiss banks; the ATMfutura project aims to bring these features to all Swiss ATMs.

Pictured: Digital Insight Labs Product Management Co-Lead Suzan Szollar demonstrating NCR’s VR Collaboration for ATMs at FinovateSpring 2017.

“We are proud of the trust that SIX placed in us with this project,” NCR Switzerland Country Manager Paul Thuer said. “The configuration and modernization of existing components for a new, standardized ATM software platform is a complex task that requires a trusting cooperation between both parties,” Thuer explained, adding that he felt the ATMfutura project would have a positive “lighthouse effect on other countries.”

Six Payment Services Division CEO Juerg Weber called the ATM software standardization “only the first step in the ATMfutura project.” Weber sees the project eventually providing Swiss banks solutions that help them further lower costs and boost usability of their ATMs “through standardization, volume purchasing options, and optimized processes.” Weber credited NCR for having the “long term experience, flexibility, and know-how” to manage a project of ATMfutura’s scale.

Founded in 1884 and headquartered in Duluth, Georgia, NCR demonstrated Virtual Reality Collaboration for ATMs at FinovateSpring 2017. Earlier this year, NCR introduced its SelfServ 80 Series ATMs, which feature 19-inch touch display drives and a tablet-like user interface. In February, the company announced that Bottomline Technologies had integrated NCR’s intelligent transaction processing platform, Authentic, into its Direct Faster Payment Service solution.

The largest provider of multivendor ATM software in the world, NCR is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “NCR.” The company has a market capitalization of $5 billion, and includes Finovate alum, Digital Insight, among its subsidiaries. Each day, NCR’s software, hardware, and services enable nearly 700 million transactions in verticals ranging from retail and hospitality to financial services and technology. William Nuti is CEO and Chairman.

 

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defiSOLUTIONS Hires Keven Sticher as Chief Information Officer

defiSOLUTIONS Hires Keven Sticher as Chief Information Officer
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: defi Solutions

defiSOLUTIONS has appointed Keven Sticher as its new Chief Information Officer. Sticher comes to the company after stints as SVP of Technology and Security for Monogram Residential Trust and VP of IT for Exeter Finance Corporation. At defiSOLUTIONS, Sticher will be responsible for “business alignment, vision, strategy, and execution of information technology and security.”

Chief Operating Officer Georgine Muntz praised Sticher’s “solid track record of deploying scalable technology.” In addition to his work with Monogram Residential Trust and Exeter Financial, Sticher is a board member of computer and network security consultancy, Fox Three, and an official member of the Forbes Technology Council. “His leadership will strengthen the defi core as we continue to expand and provide even greater value to our lenders,” Muntz said.

“I love this company,” Sticher (pictured) said. “I believe in it and what the defi team has been accomplishing. And I look forward to making certain we successfully get to the next level.”

defiSOLUTIONS made a name for itself by delivering the auto lending industry’s first fully-configurable Loan Origination Solution (LOS). Demonstrated at FinovateSpring 2014, the technology has enabled the company’s clients – ranging from established auto finance companies to startup lenders –  to process up to 30,000 applications and fund up to 1,500 deals a month. Now the company provides a wide range of services including loan management and servicing, analytics and reporting, digital loan document handling, direct loan application services, and an auto loan portfolio marketplace, defiEXCHANGE introduced in May.

defiSOLUTIONS was founded in 2012 and is based in Grapevine, Texas. Stephanie Alsbrooks is founder and CEO. Earlier this month, she was named the Southwest Region EY Entrepreneur of the Year in Emerging Technology .

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Cloud Lending Solutions, CREALOGIX, defi Solutions, eMoney Advisor, Global Debt Registry, M1 Finance, NCR Corporation, TSYS

On Finovate.com

  • defiSOLUTIONS Hires Keven Sticher as Chief Information Officer.
  • NCR at Center of Swiss ATM Harmonization Initiative

Around the web

  • CREALOGIX wins The Goodacre Systems in the City Award for 2017.
  • Business Insider profiles Brian Barnes, founder of M1 Finance.
  • Fujitsu begins selling SaaS lending and leasing technology developed by Cloud Lending Solutions.
  • TSYS extends commercial payments agreement with Germany’s Degussa Bank.
  • The Entrust Group announces new integration with eMoney Advisor.
  • Global Debt Registry finishes trial of secure, permissioned blockchain proof of concept.

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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New Partnership Turns PayPal into Apple App Store Payment Option

New Partnership Turns PayPal into Apple App Store Payment Option
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: PayPal

One small step for consumer choice in e-commerce. One giant leap in PayPal’s quest to be the payment option of choice for shoppers online.

This week the company announced a partnership with Apple to allow shoppers to pay for their purchases at the App Store using PayPal. The feature will be available for users of a variety of Apple devices including iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, Apple Watch, and iPod. In addition to the App Store, PayPal will be a payment option for a variety of Apple services including Apple Music, iTunes, and iBooks. The new partnership is a major coup for PayPal insofar as the App Store previously limited payment options to debit and credit cards. Accepting PayPal also lowers the potential threat the company faced from Apple’s own payment technology, Apple Pay. This week’s deal follows a similar arrangement PayPal forged with Google that launched in April.

“PayPal’s availability across Apple’s services further expands our vision of providing customers a variety of ways to easily make mobile purchases,” PayPal EVP and COO Bill Ready wrote at the company blog. He noted that consumers will be able to ask Apple’s Siri to make a payment via the PayPal app. The agreement between Apple and PayPal is also seen a a big win for consumer choice. MarketWatch quoted industry analyst James Cakmak who noted that the trend toward giving consumers more payment options was strong among the major payment networks and card issuers.

Founded in 1998 and acquired by eBay in 2002, San Jose-based PayPal demonstrated its Instant Account Creation functionality at FinovateEurope 2012. The company is also an alum of our developers conference, teaming up with Braintree to present “The Future of Payment Identity” and host a workshop “Making Payments Fun” at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2014. PayPal made headlines last month when it made an undisclosed investment in online lender and fellow Finovate alum, LendUp. Also in June, PayPal partnered with Flywire – also a Finovate alum – to facilitate international money transfers. The company began the year with a major acquisition, picking up TIO Networks for $230 million in February.

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Enhancing the Customer Experience in Financial Services

Enhancing the Customer Experience in Financial Services
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Guest Post, SaleMove

Guest post by Sean Daly, Director of Partnerships, SaleMove

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Over the last decade, financial technology, or “fintech”, has completely changed the financial services industry. While fintech innovations provide companies with convenience and outreach potential from the perspective of the financial institution, they are only useful if the customer feels comfortable interfacing with its framework (i.e. customer experience). Fintech has felt the challenges of customer experience, and here we’ll quickly go through a couple of those challenges along with some ways you can solve them.

The Differentiation Challenge

In order to understand the differentiation challenge in financial services, let’s point to the auto industry as an example. In the early days of modern manufacturing, the focus was put on mass production. Over the years with more competition, the priority began to shift from mass production to mass customization.

A good example is the Ford Model T; More than 15 million of them were built from 1908-1927. Apart from a few design modifications, Ford produced the same exact car 15 million times. As more and more competitors entered the market, the car became commoditized, which made differentiation extremely difficult. In reaction, automakers began providing a more personalized and customized auto experience. Flash forward to today and think about how many customizations are available on any new automobile. You can even design your own car online and have it delivered to your door. The focus switched from mass production to mass customization and personalization.

With a physical product like a car, the buying experience ends when the physical product is in the customer’s hands and they drive it away. In financial services, where there is no physical product, the customer will reflect back on the buying itself as the product. In financial services, the experience is the product.

The Touchpoint Challenge

Customers place a particularly high priority on trust and convenience. According to a recent survey sponsored by Zendesk, 62% of customers buy more when they have a good buying experience, but even more (64%) stopped buying when they had a bad customer experience. This is even more so in financial services because they are handling your money!

Today’s customer has infinite touch points, and they react badly and quickly to poor experiences. With social media, people can share their negative thoughts about a bad interaction with their circles within minutes (remember the United Airlines incident?), and it’s no secret that customers are much more likely to share bad experiences than good ones.

Let’s look at some ways you can solve these customer experience challenges:

● Map the customer journey to provide a consistent and relevant experience. If you haven’t mapped the customer journey on your website yet, read this HBR article to get started.

● Build personalized online experiences around customer segments to improve relevance. For example, Caribou coffee does this by remembering the customer’s preferences and then displays targeted flavors and products according to past activity. Netflix also serves as a good example with their profile personalization, which allows different profiles to share the same account. Financial services companies can do the same by personalizing experiences with Guided Selling products like SmartAssistant.

● Connect online with offline to build a comprehensive view of your customer. There are two ways financial services businesses can do this, either by heavily tracking their customer through analytics software on and offline, or connecting the two seamlessly. With new technologies like chat, video chat, and CoBrowsing, online interactions can be made to feel personal and authentic, similar to face-to-face experiences. We call this “creating the in-person customer experience online.

If you’re interested in learning more about CoBrowsing or considering to purchase a technology solution like it, check out this article:

Questions to Ask When Choosing a CoBrowsing Solution

Sean Daly is Director of Partnerships at SaleMove. A four-time Finovate Best of Show winner, SaleMove was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in New York City. The company most recently demonstrated its Engagement Platform and OmniBrowse solution at FinovateSpring 2017. Dan Michaeli is CEO.

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Turnkey Lender Raises $2 Million in Series A

Turnkey Lender Raises $2 Million in Series A
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Turnkey Lender

In a round led by Vertex Ventures, the venture capital wing of Temasek Holdings, Turnkey Lender has picked up $2 million in funding. The Singapore-based company specializes in loan management technology, delivered over the cloud, that automates all stages of the lending life cycle – from application processing to collections and reporting. Turnkey Lender will use the funds for product development, adding staff, and growing its business in the Asia-Pacific region – especially Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand.

Quoted in DealStreetAsia, Turnkey Lender co-founder Dmitry Voronenko emphasized the “enormous” opportunity to provide machine-learning and data analysis-enabled solutions to small and medium-sized lenders.  He added that the partnership with Vertex Ventures would help Turnkey Lender enter new markets as well as continue to grow in existing ones.  The company currently has more than 40 customers in 25 countries including the United States, Turnkey Lender’s biggest market.

Pictured: Turnkey Lender’s Arthur Timothy Timchenko demonstrating the company’s SaaS solution at FinovateSring 2017.

Founded in 2014, Turnkey Lender demonstrated its SaaS solution at FinovateSpring 2017. The company’s platform leverages machine learning to tackle many of the challenges of credit scoring in growth markets, such as the lack of borrower data. As Elena Ionenko, Turnkey Lender co-founder explained, the technology enables small and medium-sized lenders to begin with a generic scoring template that will adapt and evolve to the needs of the borrowing customers. This, in combination with accessing other alternative credit scoring methods via API, creates an automated, enterprise-grade lending solution that is flexible and scalable.

“We continue to disrupt the lending industry by providing the same great technology used by large retail banks to nonbank lenders,” Turnkey Lender Business Development Manager Arthur Timothy Timchenko said from the Finovate stage earlier this year. “It is our mission to fill in the gaps in the underserved markets making sure that even the smallest lenders can assess their credit risk properly, make good decisions, and offer (the) best rates to good borrowers,” he said.

A winner of a MAS FinTech Award at the inaugural Singapore FinTech Festival last fall, Turnkey Lender is also a veteran of FinovateAsia 2016. For more information about Finovate’s upcoming return to Hong Kong for FinovateAsia this November, visit our FinovateAsia 2017 page.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: IBM, Passport, PayPal, Segmint, Signifyd, Turnkey Lender

On Finovate.com

  • Turnkey Lender Raises $2 Million in Series A.
  • Enhancing the Customer Experience in Financial Services.
  • New Partnership Turns PayPal into Apple App Store Payment Option

Around the web

  • Signifyd brings its Guaranteed Fraud Protection solution to Authorize.Net’s U.S.-based e-commerce merchants.
  • Passport launches parking payment app, Passport Canada, for students at Simon Fraser University.
  • Strategic partnership will integrate Key Lifestyle Indicator technology from Segmint with financial services solutions from IBM.

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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Finicity Inks Data Exchange Deal with JPMorgan Chase

Finicity Inks Data Exchange Deal with JPMorgan Chase
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finicity

A new agreement between Finicity and JPMorgan Chase will give bank customers the ability to take advantage of a wide range of third-party financial apps without having to disclose their bank login credentials. APIs will enable secure information sharing between Finicity-supported apps and services, with tokenization supporting a frictionless experience for the consumer whose login data remains with the bank.

Head of Chase Digital Banking Bill Wallace echoed this point in a statement accompanying the announcement, saying, “Working with Finicity, we will enable our customers to make informed decisions while protecting their Chase banking credentials.” Locating customer financial data “at the center of a superior experience with financial apps and services,” Finicity CEO Steve Smith added praise for JPMorgan’s “commitment to helping customers better manage their finances through data access, quality, and intelligence.”

Pictured (left to right): Co-founder and President Nick Thomas and Director of Engineering Jessie Morris demonstrating Finicity’s Verification of Income/Verification of Assets solutions at FinovateSpring 2017.

The news from Finicity is a Big Fintech Deal in the world of data aggregation and data sharing, and shows how Finicity’s unique relationships with FIs and service providers enable the company to provide data aggregation for a range of PFM, digital asset and income verification solutions. The agreement follows on the heels of Finicity’s data sharing deal with Wells Fargo announced earlier this year. In addition to Wells Fargo and now JPMorgan Chase, Finicity has also teamed up with Intuit and fellow Finovate alum, Experian. The later partner is also an investor; Finicity closed a $42 million Series B round led by Experian late last year.

Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, Finicity demonstrated its Verification of Income (VoI)/Verification of Assets (VoA) solutions at FinovateSpring 2017. VoI and VoA are part of a suite of tools the company has developed designed to leverage consumer-permissioned data to improve the credit decisioning process. The company is also a veteran of our developers conference, having presented “The Frictionless Aggregation Experience” at FinDEVr New York 2017.

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Fintech 71 Accelerator Application Deadline Less Than One Week Away

Fintech 71 Accelerator Application Deadline Less Than One Week Away
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: accelerator

If you’re a startup with a ready-for-market solution that can be used by large FIs or scaled to millions of customers, then Columbus, Ohio’s newest fintech accelerator, Fintech 71, may be just what you’re looking for.

But don’t just look. The application deadline for Fintech 71 is less than one week away on July 17th. For more information – and to apply today – check out Fintech71’s registration page .

All of the companies selected will receive a $100,000 stipend in exchange for participation within Fintech71’s Accelerator. Fintech71 is a non-profit organization and will take a small percentage of equity, from 0-6%, that will be stage-appropriate. The accelerator will bring on up to 12 fintech startups for its first class that starts September 10, 2017.

Fintech71’s ideal fintech startup will have a product that is ready for the market and to be utilized by a large financial service company or scaled to millions of consumers—allowing the corporate sponsor, partner, mentor network of Fintech71 to bring tremendous value to the startups selected. Fintech71 is focused on startups across the spectrum of fintech verticals including:

  • Digital banking
  • Insurtech
  • Payments
  • Personal finance and investing
  • Institutional finance and investing
  • Lending
  • Regtech

Fintech 71 is also interested in startups using technologies like data analytics, artificial intelligence/machine learning, and security authentication to build financial services solutions.

Fintech71 continues to build momentum with more and more corporate financial services companies jumping on board to support this statewide initiative. The alignment of the public sector, private sector, and fintech entrepreneurs within Ohio has created a world class fintech hub that is sourcing fintech startups globally to join their inaugural accelerator class. The current corporate Sponsor/Partner list includes a host of companies with a presence in Ohio such as Visa, Key Bank, JPMorganChase, Grange Insurance, Huntington Bank, Silicon Valley Bank, and a host of other corporations.

What is unique about Ohio is that it is the home of one of the largest financial service ecosystems, combined with an incredible millennial talent base and a ton of great universities, centered around Ohio State University. In addition, Ohio enjoys an extremely attractive cost of living and “cost of doing business” environment which is ideal for startups during their early growth years. The state’s attractive business and living environment combined with access to some of the top financial service brands in the world is a recipe for success.

Check out fintech71.com to apply. And remember the deadline to get applications in for consideration is July 17.

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