Author: David Penn

Klarna Unveils Free P2P Payment Service, Wavy

Klarna Unveils Free P2P Payment Service, Wavy
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Klarna

Is there a fintech company having a more impressive summer than Klarna? The e-commerce innovator has forged strategic partnerships with and secured investments from Brightfolk, Visa, and Permira in the past two months. In June, the company added a full banking license to its assets, making Klarna “one of Europe’s largest banks” in the words of CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski.

By comparison, today’s unveiling of Wavy, a new, free P2P payments service is a relatively more modest move. Available in iOS and Android as well as online, the free app enables users in more than 30 European markets to transfer Euros between friends and family. Users connect their bank or credit card accounts to Wavy, and make transfers by generating a payment link which can be delivered over social media or to another Wavy account. That said, recipients can receive and redeem payments via their bank accounts without having to sign up for the Wavy service.  Users can pay requests for payment with EU-issued credit cards or SOFORT Überweisung.

Wavy is the product of Klarna’s collaboration with the developers of P2P payment app Cookies, who joined Klarna late last year in the wake of Cookies’ filing for bankruptcy. At the time, Klarna praised the app for its combination of social features and user-friendly interface, and credited Cookies for being both one of the first PFM apps to focus on younger users as well as the first to bring “near-realtime” money transfers to Germany. Lamine Cheloufi, Cookies co-founder and current Product Director at Klarna, called Wavy “the most accessible peer-to-peer payment service in Europe.”

To that end, and taking stock of the crowded market for P2P payment options, TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet suggested that Wavy might get an initial boost from Klarna’s popularity in its native Sweden. But listening to Siemiatkowski, it almost seems as if Europe is just a first stop. “There are no borders in an online context, why should there be in payments?” Siemiatkowski said. “Klarna was founded with the goal to make online payments safe, simple, and smooth. Wavy is another step on that journey.”

Providing single-click purchase experiences that enable direct payments, pay after delivery, installment plans and more, Klarna demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2012. The company was founded in 2005 in Sweden, and is currently headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Klarna’s solutions are used by more than 60 million consumers and more than 70,000 merchants in 18 markets globally.

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Alpharank Among Startups Graduating from VC Fintech Accelerator Empowered by FIS

Alpharank Among Startups Graduating from VC Fintech Accelerator Empowered by FIS
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alpharank

That set of mortarboards you might have noticed sailing through the air this week may have come from the celebrations of startups graduating from the VC Fintech Accelerator Empowered by FIS this week. The occasion was marked by the accelerator’s Demo Days Event during which all ten companies – two international startups and eight U.S.-based firms – presented their technologies before an audience of more than 350 investors and financial services professionals.

“These companies have demonstrated their capacity to bring world class solutions to solving problem and challenges in the FinTech space,” accelerator managing director, Wayne Miller said. Miller credited the companies for their proven ability to execute, “clearly validating their value proposition to enable banks to better serve their customers in the digital world.”

Among the ten companies in this year’s cohort was Finovate alum, Alpharank, which won Best of Show in its Finovate debut this spring. The company leverages the kind of social graph technology successfully pioneered by Facebook – and effectively used by telecoms like Sprint to reduce customer churn – to help financial services get new customers and retain current ones. Alpharank was also among the companies earning special recognition from attendees. Quoted in Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, FIS VP Jack Novielli highlighted the company for its ability to provide key banks with key insights into their customers. “As banks become more pointed in their marketing who do they best market to,” he told the Democrat Gazette.  How does the bank spend its marketing dollar wiser?”

Alpharank was founded in San Francisco, California. The company won Best of Show for its live demonstration of its Customer Influence Mapping technology, which enables banks and credit unions to turn their historic transaction data into predictive social graph data. The company includes 500 Startups, Malcolm CasSelle, Payment Ventures, Right Side Capital Management, and Tony VanBrackle among its investors. Brian Ley is CEO.

The ten companies selected this year were the top selections from an applicant pool of 295 applications from the U.S. and 39 other countries around the world.Making the cut along with Alpharank were:

  • Alto IRA
  • Bond.AI
  • eGiftify
  • Hedgehog
  • Omnetrium
  • Plinqit
  • Quotanda
  • WalletFi
  • Xplanr Analytics

Sponsored by Little Rock, Arkansas’ The Venture Center, the VC FinTech Accelerator provides a 12-week accelerator program for startups developing innovative technologies for the financial services industry. The program includes mentoring and training from financial services professionals from FIS and The Venture Center, as well as exposure to the program’s 30 financial institution partners. The Venture Center notes its member companies have created more than 445 jobs, more than $28 million in revenue, and raised $39 million in equity funding in the three years since its inception.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alpharank, Figo, FIS, Fiserv, Juvo, Klarna, Mambu, Trulioo

On Finovate.com

  • Alpharank Among Startups Graduating from VC Fintech Accelerator Empowered by FIS.
  • Juvo Raises $40 Million in Round Led by NEA, Wing Venture Capital.
  • Klarna Unveils Free P2P Payments Service, Wavy.

Around the web

  • Fiserv acquires mortgage tech solutions provider, PCLender.
  • Consorsbank picks technology from Germany’s figo to power its multibanking service.
  • PayU Colombia to deploy SaaS-based core banking technology from Mambu.
  • Trulioo’s GlobalGateway platform coverage extended to six Latin American countries.

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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Mexican Payment Processor Chooses Fraud Fighting Technology from Featurespace

Mexican Payment Processor Chooses Fraud Fighting Technology from Featurespace
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Featurespace

Cambridge, U.K.-based Featurespace will bring its adaptive behavioral analytic technology to Mercadotecnia Ideas y Tecnologia (Marketing, Ideas, and Technology) also known as MIT, a leading payments processing specialist based in Mexico. Featurespace’s technology will be used to provide real-time transaction monitoring for merchants to help stop fraud and reduce the number of chargebacks and false alerts.

“This is a great example of how our machine learning technology can be seamlessly integrated into systems across any geography,” Featurespace CEO Martina King said in a press release. MIT CEO Juan Carlos Viramontes added that Featurespace’s approach to fighting fraud using adaptive behavioral analytics was a major factor in choosing the company as a partner. “The growth in fraud, as well as the sophisticated forms that attacks take, forces payments ecosystem participants to seek innovative and disruptive solutions to reduce fraud and make manual process more efficient, without sacrificing customer experience” Viramontes said.

Pictured: Featurespace Commercial Director Matt Mills demonstrating the ARIC Fraud Manager at FinovateFall 2016.

MIT will leverage Featurespace’s ARIC platform to spot anomalous behavior in individual transactions, leading to better fraud detection, fewer false alerts, and higher transaction acceptance. The firm serves more than 17,000 merchants at more than 80,000 points of sale in Mexico. Founded in 2004, MIT has processed 500 million transactions since inception and currently facilitates 10 million transactions a month.

Discussing the origins of Featurespace during the company’s demo at last September at FinovateFall, Commercial Director Matt Mills highlighted a pair of two key breakthroughs in understanding human behavior and in anomaly detection at the cornerstone of the platform’s development. The combination of these two insights has led to a solution, he said, that is not only sensitive enough to spot credit card fraud, but is also able to identify patterns in behavior that distinguish a regular recreational slot machine player in a casino from the gambling addict two machines away. Mills added that the technology’s “deep understanding of behavior” enabled it to “spot subtle signals” that a response or behavior, for example, may have been given under duress.

Earlier this month, Featurespace and TSYS unveiled an anti-fraud solution, Foresight Score. A member of FinTechCity’s Fintech 50 for 2017, Featurespace teamed up with digital family banking solution goHenry in April, partnered with merchant payment solutions provider CashFlows in March, and in February began working with fellow Finovate alum Icon Solutions to bring greater fraud protection to Icon’s Instant Payment Framework. With customers including William Hill and fellow Finovate alum TSYS, Featurespace closed a successful venture round led by Nesta Ventures in June, bringing the company’s total capital to more than $22 million (£16.4 million).

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BBVA, DefenseStorm, Featurespace, Modo Payments, NICE Systems, Placecast, Revolut, Ripple, TIBCO Software, Vera, Vipera

On Finovate.com

  • Mexican Payment Processor Chooses Fraud Fighting Technology from Featurespace.
  • Ripple Unveils Expanded Suite of Offerings

Around the web

  • BBVA announces record product sales through digital channels in June.
  • Tennis star Andy Murray revealed to be among 40,000 Revolut users pre-registered for the company’s crowdfunding initiative.
  • DefenseStorm hires Bob Thibodeaux as Chief Information Security Officer.
  • Modo Payments goes dark in Monday “Unnouncement.” Affirms plans to refocus on payments after hiatus.
  • Mashreq deploys Vipera for mobile wallet.
  • NICE inContact introduces CXone cloud customer experience 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.

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Braintree Tops A Billion Transactions Per Quarter Mark

Braintree Tops A Billion Transactions Per Quarter Mark
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Braintree

Now, that’s brain power.

Payment platform Braintree announced this week that it now processes more than one billion payment transactions per quarter.

“This is another significant milestone in the Braintree story as we continue to prove how uniquely well-positioned we are – in partnership with the power and reach of PayPal’s global two-sided network – to drive the future of commerce forward,” Braintree GM Juan Benitez wrote at the company blog. In a footnote, Benitez added that the volume represents PayPal transactions as well as others that are ineligible for inclusion in Braintree’s “stated transaction count” and not included in calculations to determine total payment volume (TPV).

Merchants in more than 40 countries around the world accept, split, and support payments in more than 130 currencies using Braintree’s platform. Braintree helps merchants build seamless online and mobile checkout experiences for their customers and provides both white-glove support and advanced fraud protection. From e-commerce businesses that want to accept direct payments to marketplace businesses with multiple payment services requirements, Braintree provides scalable, easy-to-integrate solutions that enable processing of a wide variety of payment options including PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, Android Pay, Visa Checkout, Masterpass, Amex Express Checkout, and ACH Direct Debit, as well as credit and debit cards.

Founded in 2007 in Chicago, Illinois, Braintree demonstrated Venmo Touch at FinovateSpring 2013. Also a veteran of our developer’s conference, Braintree discussed developer resources for building a better checkout experience at FinDEVr New York last spring in a presentation titled, “A Credit Card Form Walks into a Bar … Making Beautiful Credit Card Forms.” The company, which acquired Venmo for more than $26 million in 2012, was acquired by PayPal the following year for $800 million. In May, Braintree announced a remodel of its mobile Drop-in payments acceptance UI, launched a few months earlier. Braintree hired John MacIlwaine as CTO in February, and unveiled its commerce infrastructure tools back in December.

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FutureVault Appoints John D. Orr as New CEO

FutureVault Appoints John D. Orr as New CEO
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FutureVault

FutureVault announced this week that the company has hired banking executive, attorney, and investment professional John D. Orr to serve as its new CEO. Orr takes the helm of the company from G. Scott Paterson, who will continue as Executive Chairman.

Paterson praised Orr’s “extensive experience” and “tremendous entrepreneurial and investment acumen.” Adding that FutureVault “set out to recruit a leader with the vision and management skills to guide the company to reach its incredible potential,” Paterson noted that the company’s relatively recent commercial launch made it an ideal time to bring Orr on board. With more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry, Orr (pictured) spent several years in a variety of senior leadership positions at CBIC including Head of Amicus Division, Head of International Retail Markets, and most recently, EVP for Strategy and Corporate Development. Orr is founder and managing director of Orr Capital Management, and serves as an advisor to G2 Investment Group, Applied Data Finance, and The Kessler Group.

Calling information “the next and ultimate asset class,” Orr explained the role FutureVault’s technology plays in helping people manage and protect it. “Everyone understands what current cloud-based document management platforms provide,” he said, “but when viewing information through the lens of an asset class, it is clear that these solutions were not designed to meet this need.” Orr added, “Fundamentally, our role is to provide the tools and intelligence to allow individuals and businesses to optimize the value of their information.”

FutureVault demonstrated its digital information management platform at FinovateFall 2016. Last month, the company partnered with BlueRock Wealth Management, giving the firm’s HNW (high net worth) clients access to the intelligent document management technology. FutureVault began the year with a trio of major, C-level additions, bringing on Kevin Whyte as president and COO, Tom Duane as CTO, and Rudy Sankovic as CFO.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Agreement Express, Banno, Blackhawk Network, Bluescape, Braintree, CrowdFlower, Featurespace, FutureVault, Handle Financial, Infosys, Jack Henry, Kony, PayNearMe, PayPal, Pendo Systems, Top Image Systems, Vipera, wipro

On Finovate.com

  • Vipera Acquires SoftTelecom for $1.5 Million
  • FutureVault Appoints John D. Orr as New CEO.
  • Handle Financial’s PayNearMe Partners with Blackhawk Network.

Around the web

  • CrowdFlower earns Gartner “Cool Vendor” status for Information Innovation and Governance.
  • Braintree surpasses one billion transactions per quarter milestone.
  • Infosys wins three out of seven Catalyst Awards at TM forum Live.
  • Baidu and PayPal announce strategic partnership.
  • International Air Transport Association chooses fraud prevention technology from Featurespace.
  • Top Image Systems announces eFlow AP 5.2 integration with SAP S/4HANA.
  • Wipro and Compuware partner to launch mainframe center of excellence.
  • Agreement Express ranked among top 100 technology companies in British Columbia by Business in Vancouver.
  • SearchUnifiedCommunications features Bluescape in its look at use cases for digital collaborative whiteboards.
  • Pendo Systems announces trio of new hires to support a “banner year” for the company.
  • Central Bankshares now uses Jack Henry’s Banno for online banking.
  • UN Migration Agency Selects Kony to Accelerate Digital Strategy to Reach More Migrants.

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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Symbiont Announces Strategic Investment from Medici Ventures

Symbiont Announces Strategic Investment from Medici Ventures
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Symbiont

Two months ago, Symbiont announced an undisclosed strategic investment from China’s Hundsun Technologies. At the time, Symbiont CEO Mark Smith called the investment “a clear vote of confidence” from a “strong partner in Asia.”

Last week we learned that the votes of confidence are still coming in. Blockchain technology investor Medici Ventures has teamed up with Symbiont, providing strategic investment to the company and announcing a collaboration involving both Medici and its parent company Overstock.com. The partnership will enable Medici Ventures to become the first company to register corporate ownership shares using the blockchain.

Pledging to deliver “best-in-class investor transparency,” Jonathan Johnson, President of Medici Ventures and Overstock.com Director, said, “We also anticipate using blockchain to administer Medici Ventures’ fund interests from inception, thereby providing our investors with end-to-end recordkeeping on a blockchain and administration of investor interests using smart contracts.”

Pictured: Adam Krellenstein, Symbiont CTO and co-founder, discussing “Distributed Ledgers and Smart Contracts,” during his presentation at FinDEVr New York 2016.

Symbiont’s Smith highlighted investor interests as a major use case for his company’s technology. “Management of fund interests is a logical extension of Symbiont’s Smart Securities capabilities,” he said, “and we welcome a partner that is equally committed to the principle of ensuring accuracy of shareholder records at all times during a company’s life cycle.”

The issue was explained in more detail by Overstock CEO and founder Patrick Byrne. He called the process of signing over personal ownership of shares received in the IPO process “a Faustian bargain” for entrepreneurs. He praised Delaware for pioneering registration of ownership shares using blockchain technology. “Delaware is giving entrepreneurs a path to retaining direct ownership of their shares after their IPOs, Byrne said. “Thanks to Delaware, accuracy in securities ownership records can be achieved.”

Symbiont’s blockchain-based technology enables easy-to-understand modeling of complex financial instruments and fully digitizing those instruments into a distributed ledger. The company’s Smart Security technology avoids error-prone manual processes and tampering while increasing transparency, reducing risks, and enabling participants to share ledger statuses and updates. The technology also helps companies save on back and middle office costs.

Founded in 2015, Symbiont is based in New York City. The company is an alum of our developer’s conference, having presented “Distributed Ledgers and Smart Contracts” at FinDEVr New York 2016.

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Layer’s New Messaging Design System Helps Create Perfect Conversational Experiences

Layer’s New Messaging Design System Helps Create Perfect Conversational Experiences
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Layer

Customer engagement has been a big theme on the Finovate blog this month. As our recent guest features from SaleMove (Enhancing the Customer Experience in Financial Services) and SuiteBox (Top Five Trends in Customer Engagement Technology) attest, technologies that enable better communication between businesses and customers are among the most promising areas of innovation in fintech.

So the news that FinovateSpring 2017 alum Layer has released a new customer engagement-enabling solution is the latest reminder of the trend toward more and better engagement options for businesses. The San Francisco-based company launched its Conversation Design System earlier this month, giving enterprises new tools to quickly build and customize conversational experiences for their customers “in just minutes.”

Pictured (left to right): John Montgomery (COO) and Bill Hu (VP Sales) demonstrating Layer’s customer conversation platform at FinovateSpring 2017.

Layer’s technology leverages chatbot technology and data analytics to provide a wide range of businesses with a customer conversation platform that makes it easier to engage with consumers over the channel of their choice – especially mobile. Through a combination of AI and human participation, Layer’s platform enables financial professionals to provide advice, counseling, and customer service in a unified experience that is more convenient and less intrusive for the contemporary client. “From (our) vantage point, we have seen a dramatic shift in the way people, consumers and businesses alike, want to do business,” Layer’s John Montgomery said during his FinovateSpring presentation earlier this year. Pointing out that both the phone and email were becoming less popular modes of communication, Montgomery added that transitioning to a platform like Layer also gave benefits to businesses. “(This platform can) accelerate the time it takes to do a sales cycle, help you be more scalable in the delivery of services and ultimately lead to greater lifetime value,” he said.

VP of Product at Nordstrom Trunk Club Justin Hughes praised the way the technology helped them improve customer engagement. Calling Layer’s messaging technology “central to the shopping experience and critical to our conversation effectiveness,” Hughes credited Layer for helping the company become and and remain better connected with its customers.

Layer also announced seven new integrations including integrations with Front, Salesforce, and Zendesk. These add to the company’s previously announced IBM Watson and Microsoft integrations. “Today’s announcements unlock boundless potential for brands across all industries,” Layer CEO Ron Palmeri said. “Unlike messaging platforms that simply move text messages from point A to point B, Layer gives brands everything they need to build truly amazing, delightful customer experiences on essentially any channel,” he said.

Founded in 2013, Layer demonstrated its customer conversation platform at FinovateSpring 2017. With more than 1,000 customers including nerdwallet, Qapital, and snapswap, the company has raised more than $42 million in funding, including a $15 million Series B led by Greycroft Partners in February.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Bill.com, GoodData, IBM, Layer, MaxMyInterest, MicroStrategy, Passport, TickSmith, Vantiv, Xero

On Finovate.com

  • IBM Launches Security Testing Services for IoT Developers.
  • TickSmith Lands $2 Million Investment from Illuminate Financial.
  • Layer’s New Messaging Design System Helps Create Perfect Conversational Experiences.

Around the web

  • Vantiv partners with Columbia Bank to provide new payment services to business customers.
  • Commerce Bank to offer AP and AR automated service, CashFlow Complete, powered by Bill.com.
  • Xero and Recurly team up in new integration that combines subscription management with cloud accounting.
  • Fintech Supercharger features an interview with Roman Stanek, Founder and CEO, GoodData.
  • BARC Score Data Discovery identifies MicroStrategy as a ‘Market Leader’ ranking #1 in “Platform Capabilities”
  • Chicago Tribune column on savvy saving highlights MaxMyInterest.
  • Village of Palos Park Introduces Passport’s Parking 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.

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Microblink’s Photopay Expands to New European Markets

Microblink’s Photopay Expands to New European Markets
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: microblink

Photopay, the payment receipt scanning solution from Best of Show winner Microblink, is now available in more countries including France, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. The news is the latest step in Microblink’s European expansion – begun four years ago – and brings the company’s data extraction technology to an even wider range of SME customers.

In a blog post discussing the news, Microblink pointed to the way Photopay improved the UX for banking app users. The company cited a case study with Erste Bank that realized a 100x increase in the number of mobile banking transactions and and 30x increase in mobile banking transactions as a share of all transactions. Erste Bank also reported an increase of 160% in the number of its mobile banking users. In addition, Microblink highlighted a European bank that credited Photopay for the high marks its mobile banking app received. “More than 40 renowned European banks have recognized the value photopay provides in terms of UX,” the blog authors wrote.

Pictured: Microblink Co-Founder and SMD Izet Ždralović demonstrating BlinkReceipt at FinovateSpring 2017.

Photopay leverages optical character recognition technology (OCR) to capture data from payment slips and receipts, removing manual data entry – and the potential for error – from the process. Photopay also offers an automatic field-by-field scanning feature that makes it easy to more accurately extract data from unstructured sources including small business invoices. The real-time technology operates locally on the user’s mobile device and does not require an internet connection to work. Photopay is available as an SDK that can be easily integrated into existing banking apps and fully customized into a white-label solution that’s virtually invisible to the user.

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in London, U.K., Microblink demonstrated its BlinkReceipt solution at FinovateSpring 2017, taking home Best of Show honors. Earlier this month, Zagrebačka banka, the largest bank in Croatia, announced that its mobile app would feature portrait and document scanning technology provided by Microblink. In addition to Photopay and BlinkReceipt, Microblink offers SDKs that add ID scanning (BlinkID), barcode scanning (pdf417), and general purpose data scanning (BlinkInput) to mobile apps. The company, which launched the popular, free Photo Math app in 2014, includes Cherubic Ventures among its investors. Damir Sabol is founder and CEO.

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