Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

Around the web

  • Crealogix selects Philippe Wirth as new CFO starting in May.
  • QIIB to deploy Sharia-compliant, core banking technology from Misys.
  • Wipro announces new partnership in and investment with Tradeshift.
  • Skipton International to upgrade its legacy platform with core banking technology from Temenos.
  • Avoka names former KPMG executive Matt Lewis as new CFO. Join Avoka in London for FinovateEurope in February.
  • Vantiv partners with CardFlight to Offer EMV Mobile POS Solution.
  • Equifax and Fiserv join forces to provide income and employment verification services to auto lenders.
  • Forbes features GainX founder Angelique Mohring. Come see GainX’s demo live at FinovateEurope next week.

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.

New Robo Fund from LendingRobot Leverages Automation and the Blockchain

New Robo Fund from LendingRobot Leverages Automation and the Blockchain

LendingRobotSeries_homepage_January2017

With the stock market rallying to new highs, the new robo fund from LendingRobot may have arrived just in time for people looking to diversify their portfolios with investments in the alternative lending market. LendingRobot Series makes it easy for peer lending investors to put money to work in different timeframes and risk exposures with returns ranging from 6.86% to more than 9%. The solution – part roboadvisory, part hedge fund – converts clients’ contributions into units which are invested across four leading lending marketplaces – Funding Circle, Lending Club, Lending Home, and Prosper. LendingRobot CEO Emmanuel Marot says that the new solution is designed to take advantage of the “excellent performance” of alternative lending investments and help investors avoid the problem of “fragmentation” that adds complexity to the process.

“That’s why we’ve created LendingRobot Series: to provide investors that understand the value of investing in alternative lending with the confidence that comes from intelligent automation, easy liquidity, and complete transparency,” Marot explained.

LendingRobot_stage_January2017

Pictured: LendingRobot CEO Emmanuel Marot demonstrating his platform’s dashboard at FinovateSpring 2016.

That “complete transparency” comes courtesy of LendingRobot’s decision to leverage blockchain technology to create a detailed, weekly ledger of the fund’s holdings. LendingRobot Series uses a hash code signature and notarization by Ethereum’s blockchain, to prevent data tampering, and assets are held in a bankruptcy protection vehicle with no liabilities other than its investors. The service charges a flat 1% a year management fee and caps fund expenses at 0.59% with no performance fees.. These compare favorably with the notorious “2% and 20%” demanded by most hedge funds.

LendingRobot supports four “Series” investors can choose from based on their investment preferences: short term aggressive and conservative, and long term aggressive and conservative. Average performance ranges from 6.86% for short-term conservative to 9.66% for long-term aggressive. Average maturity for short term series is 18 months. Long-term series maturities are 30-31 months.

Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, LendingRobot demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2016, where it won Best of Show. The company has raised $3 million in funding, and includes Runa Capital and Club Italia Investimenti among its investors. TechCrunch profiled the company last summer, quoting Marot’s optimism toward the “insane growth in the peer lending market.” LendingRobot launched its P2P investment tracking mobile app – dubbed “Mint for P2P Lending Accounts” – last spring.

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Aqubix

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Aqubix

Aqubix_homepage_January2017

Screen Shot 2017-01-23 at 4.27.53 PMA look at the companies demoing live at FinovateEurope on the 7 and 8 of February 2017 in London. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

Aqubix is a complete, centralized, management tool for all your customer due diligence (CDD), compliance, and anti-money laundering (AML) procedures.

Features

  • Embedded, secure, recordable, face-to-face video interviews
  • Automated risk factoring including market changes with notifications
  • Instant organigram generation with real-time transaction monitoring

Why it’s great
Dubbed as the “Rolls Royce of Compliance,” KYC Portal is the most concise portal on the market allowing organizations to manage the burden of due-diligence whilst reducing its impact on customers.

Presenters

Aqubix_KristoffZammitCiantarKristoff Zammit Ciantar, CEO
Working in IT for over 15 years and a business analyst consultant by profession, Ciantar has years of experience bridging the gap between the business requirements and technical deliverables.
LinkedIn

 

Stefan Camilleri, Director
Camilleri is a proven professional with a long history in large companies as well as small start-ups. He has hands-on Aqubix_StefanCamilleriexperience in all areas of IT, including as a developer, consultant, and trainer in many industries.
LinkedIn

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: modeFinance

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: modeFinance

modeFinance_homepage_January2017

Screen Shot 2017-01-23 at 4.27.53 PMA look at the companies demoing live at FinovateEurope on the 7 and 8 of February 2017 in London. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

modeFinance is the first fintech credit rating agency. The company evaluates more than 200 million companies and more than 25,000 banks worldwide.

Features

  • S-peek: The democratization of the credit rating
  • Starting today, everyone can access the rating of every company in Europe, from Portugal to Russia, from Turkey to Iceland.

Why it’s great
Thanks to our Big Data technology, we can issue the credit rating of more than 200 million companies worldwide, even without financials. Transparency. Independence. Technology.

Presenter

modeFinance_ValentinoPedirodaValentino Pediroda, CEO
Founder and CEO of modeFinance, Pediroda has a Ph.D in Numerical Methods and is a Big Data and machine learning specialist.
LinkedIn

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: i-exceed Technologies

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: i-exceed Technologies

i-exceed_homepage_January2017

Screen Shot 2017-01-23 at 4.27.53 PMA look at the companies demoing live at FinovateEurope on the 7 and 8 of February 2017 in London. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

Appzillon Digital Banking from i-exceed provides pre-built, omni-channel solutions for all stakeholders of banks and helps around 50 banks worldwide in their digital transformation journey.

Features

  • Omni-channel solutions with superior user experience
  • Low-code platform enables automated development and facilitates DevOps
  • Post-app features like built-in chatbots and social media banking

Why it’s great
Going digital is not about targeting retail customers alone. Appzillon enables banks to provide digital experience to all stakeholders including corporate customers and internal staff.

Presenters

Karthik Sivaprakasam, VP Solution Engineering and Partnerships
Sivaprakasam is responsible for Appzillon’s architecture and solutions strategy and leads new SDK initiatives for the platform. He has worked extensively with global banks on their digital transformations.
LinkedIn

Rahul Khanna, Manager, Marketing
Khanna heads product marketing for Appzillon. He has worked widely on digital banking and app development and is addicted to bringing innovative products to global markets.
LinkedIn

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Avoka

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Avoka

Avoka_homepage_January2017

Screen Shot 2017-01-23 at 4.27.53 PMA look at the companies demoing live at FinovateEurope on the 7 and 8 of February 2017 in London. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

With Avoka Transact, increase your loan book by 40% using frictionless digital customer acquisition.

Features

  • Complete lending applications in three minutes
  • Identify exact entries causing abandonment
  • Offers agile changes and instant measured improvement

Why it’s great
Avoka has increased digital loan application approvals by 40% by making it easy for customers to succeed.

Presenter

Avoka_HaliKhanHali Khan, Director of Business Development, Avoka EMEA
Khan is a director responsible for digital transformation initiatives across financial services customers in Avoka’s EMEA region.
LinkedIn

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Engage Insight

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Engage Insight

EngageInsight_ModelOffice_homepage_January2017

Screen Shot 2017-01-23 at 4.27.53 PMA look at the companies demoing live at FinovateEurope on the 7 and 8 of February 2017 in London. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

Model Office by Engage Insight is a first of its kind fintech and regtech platform that benchmarks financial service firms’ professional practice against five years of research and industry regulations.

Features

  • Benchmarks professional development against five performance keys
  • Uses algorithms to produce radar charts and dynamic steers to improve scores
  • Provides strategic plans and CPD certificate via scoreboard

Why it’s great
Model Office assesses your regulatory, business, and people professional development all in one place and uses gamification to improve compliance and business development performance.

Presenter

EngageInsight_ChrisDaviesChris Davies, Managing Director
Davies has over 25 years of U.K. and international experience in retail financial services, working within private client wealth management, and developing innovative technology to improve performance.
LinkedIn

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: ITSector

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: ITSector

ITSector_homepage_January2017

Screen Shot 2017-01-23 at 4.27.53 PMA look at the companies demoing live at FinovateEurope on the 7 and 8 of February 2017 in London. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.

ITSector, a software development company specialized in the digital transformation in financial sector, presents a new IM customer service with autonomous “bots” for its credit solutions.

Features

  • Mobile app that allows clients to get to know in-store purchase loan conditions (using AR)
  • A text contact center solution (using IM platforms)
  • An automatic answering system (using “bots”)

Why it’s great
ITSector will demonstrate a real-time and non-traditional way of accessing banking solutions and customer services through every day instant messaging bots.

Presenters

ITSector_JoaoPinto2João Pinto, CEO
LinkedIn

 

 

 

Patrícia Soares, Business DeveloperITSector_Patrícia Soares

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • WorkFusion Closes $35 Million in Funding

Around the web

  • Klarna teams up with ASOS Partners to bring “pay after delivery” to Nordics.
  • Luxembourg’s Rakuten Europe Bank goes live with core and digital banking technology from Temenos.
  • Wipro to acquire Brazilian IT banking services provider, InfoSERVER.
  • Let’s Talk Payments interviews Kontomatik CEO Marcin Truszel.
  • Financial transactions optimized using Nomis Solutions technology exceeds $1.5 trillion in 2016.
  • Finextra: Worldpay partners UnionPay for bumper Chinese New Year.
  • Truphone launches Global SMS recording solving the Blackberry migration challenge.
  • Sberbank launches a new corporate online banking platform designed together with IBM iX.
  • WISeKey partners with Stratumn to use Blockchain for real-time accountability and traceability.

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.

Ripple Releases XRP Metrics in New Report

Ripple Releases XRP Metrics in New Report

Ripple_homepage_January2017

In the midst of all the attention over Ripple’s work helping banks make cross-border money transfers less expensive and more efficient, Ripple has released the first of its quarterly XRP Market Reports. The reports are designed to “improve the health of XRP markets globally” according to a statement and will feature “sales, commentary on price movement, and news of newly-available third party wallets, exchanges, validators, and liquidity providers.

“XRP is core to Ripple’s strategy,” the statement at the Ripple website read, “and the time is right for us to feature XRP more prominently.” The highlights include news that market participants bought $4.6 million of XRP directly from Ripple’s money service business, XRP II. And that XRP enjoyed a quarter-over-quarter average daily volume growth of 121%.

Ripple_XRP_homepage_January2017

With regard to price action in XRP, the report cited a number of factors including the uncertainty of the U.S. presidential election, India’s move to limit its cash economy, and growing demand from China as key drivers. And while XRP slightly underperformed other digital currencies toward the end of 2016, the report attributes this to both availability issues on digital exchanges and in China, as well as “XRP’s reputation as a more institutional asset” as opposed to a speculative trading instrument.

The report also noted that one of the biggest digital asset exchanges in the world, Bitstamp, has begun listing XRP/EUR and XRP/USD trading pairs, and that Ripple will launch a plan to enable “qualified market participants” to borrow XRP. This was described as “a crucial step” toward bringing XRP into the capital markets industry en route to becoming “the institutional standard bearer for international value transfer.”

Headquartered in San Francisco and founded in 2012 (as OpenCoin), Ripple demonstrated its distributed ledger technology at FinovateSpring 2013. Recent headlines for Ripple include the company’s work with India’s Axis Bank, which will use Ripple technology for cross-border payments, and the addition of a number of new members of its global network in September. The company appointed a new CEO, Brad Garlinghouse, in November, who had previous served Ripple as COO. Of the top 50 banks in the world, 15 work with Ripple, and there are nine countries with banks currently implementing Ripple technology. The company has raised more than $93 million in total funding, and includes SBI Investment, Santander InnoVentures, IDG Capital Partners, and Core Innovation Capital among its investors.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Ripple Releases XRP Metrics in New Report.
  • SocietyOne Appoints Former Westpac Exec as Chief Investment Officer.
  • Check out this week’s FinDEVr APIntelligence

Around the web

  • Fenergo announces new rules-based solution to better enable FIs to meet margin requirement obligations.
  • NCR unveils redesigned tablet point-of-sale app.
  • New development and support center for Monitise supported by $664,000 in business financing from Welsh government.
  • Let’s Talk Payments interviews Marcin Truszel, Founder & CEO of Kontomatik.
  • Overbond Ltd is launching a service that will allow companies to issue bonds digitally.
  • Kony powers KMC Connect Lite mobile app for KMC Controls.
  • Irish Tech News interviews BancVue’s John Waupsh on his book, Bankruption.

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.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • StockTwits Partners with TradeIt to Expand Beyond Robinhood’s Brokerage.

On FinDEVr.com

  • SimplyTapp Launches New Payments and E-Commerce App, Gane.

Around the web

  • TransferTo partners with Wirecard to enable mobile money operators to offer mobile-to-mobile remittance services.
  • Ayondo announces deadline for 2017 social trading championship.
  • Hellenic Bank of Cyprus to deploy new digital banking platform from Backbase. Join Backbase at FinovateEurope in London next month.
  • StockTwits teams up with TradeIt to give community members ability to execute trades with major brokerages via new iOS app.
  • Xignite adds senior sales, business development talent; unveils new offices in New York financial district.
  • Bambu wins Best Early Startup award at Next Money in Hong Kong.
  • Wealthfront revamps Selling Plan to help users sell and diversify their company stock.
  • Arxan Technologies partners with Cisco as to protect connected medical devices.
  • South by Southwest (SXSW) selects Hip Pocket to showcase Hip Money at SXSW Accelerator Pitch Event in March

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.