Author: David Penn

Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: authenticID, Expensify, GMC Software Technology, IBM, Insuritas, Jumio, Markit, Misys, NuCypher, Signicat, Trizic, TSYS, Twilio, Vera, Xero

On Finovate.com

  • Signicat Launches Mobile Authentication.
  • 3 Steps to Take During the Countdown to GDPR and PSD2.

On FinDEVr.com

Around the web

  • NuCypher earns finalist spot in BBVA Open Talent 2017. Join NuCypher at FinDEVr London, Jun 12 & 13.
  • TSYS enables tokenization across its North American commercial card platforms.
  • Catholic Vantage Financial ($98M) hires Insuritas to deploy and manage their insurance agency solution.
  • AuthenticID enhances CatfishAIR Identity Platform to support real-time identity authorization for CNP transactions.
  • Vera announces support for multi-factor authentication solutions from Duo Security, RSA SecureID, and fellow Finovate alum, Twilio.
  • Amsterdam Trade Bank (ATB) to streamline banking, treasury, and finance operations in partnership with Misys.
  • Cisco and IBM team up on security.
  • Glenmede taps IHS Markit for data management.
  • GMC Software launches Business Partner Track for Partner Advantage Program
  • Expensify exceeds 35,000 global customers, adding Xero, HappyFresh, GoCardless, and Adroll as clients
  • Jumio announces expansion into new Shoreditch U.K. headquarters.
  • Steve Lewczyk joins Trizic as new Chief Revenue Officer.

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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NetGuardians Raises More than $8 Million in Series C

NetGuardians Raises More than $8 Million in Series C
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, NetGuardians

With an infusion of $8.7 (CHF 8.5) million in new capital, Swiss anti-fraud specialist NetGuardians now has more than $14 million in total funding. The Series C round was led by Swisscom Ventures and Freemont Management, and the company says the financing will help fuel the company’s “continued global expansion,” support additional investment in its anti-fraud platform, and add talent to the NetGuardians team.

“This collaboration with Swisscom represents recognition from a leader in this Swiss market,” NetGuardians’ Chief Operating Officer Raffael Maio said. “We are thrilled that they are recognizing our success and our potential. The investment will help us double the headcount in the coming 18 months.” Andreas Pages of Swisscom’s Business Unit Fintech highlighted NetGuardians’ technology as the kind of “agile and compelling software” that will improve risk mitigation for FIs. “Their highly innovative technology is changing the way to fight financial crime,” Pages said.

Pictured (left to right): NetGuardians Digital Marketing Manager Mine Fornerod and Regional Director for Asia, Eric Margaryan demonstrating FraudGuardian at FinovateAsia 2016.

Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, NetGuardians made its Finovate debut at FinovateAsia in Hong Kong last fall.  At the conference, Digital Marketing Manager Mine Fornerod and Regional Director for Asia Eric Margaryan demonstrated FraudGuardian, a solution that leverages dynamic profiling, pattern-based intelligence, and predictive analytics to provide real-time fraud detection. For the demonstration, Fornerod and Margaryan set the scene of a risk manager who had received a violation alert from FraudGuardian via SMS, and then showed how the technology was able to track down the source of a series of fraudulent transactions. “Thanks to our ground-breaking, unique, holistic approach, you can actually correlate all these user behaviors and really identify the fraudsters with 100% reliability and prevent fraud in real-time,” Fornerod said.

Named to Planet Compliance’s inaugural RegTech Top 100 Power list this spring, NetGuardians partnered with Swiss academic institution, HEIG-VD to use machine learning and AI to build new, fraud-fighting technologies in February and, in January, announced that Keystone Bank in Nigeria would deploy its FraudGuardian technology. With FIs in more than 14 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, NetGuardians has gained 20 new clients and opened offices in Singapore and Kenya in the past year and a half.

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SuperMoney Brings a Kayak-Like UX to the Online Borrowing Process

SuperMoney Brings a Kayak-Like UX to the Online Borrowing Process
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Debuts, SuperMoney

What is SuperMoney? CEO Miron Lulic urges you to think of the “serendipity” of real-time offers provided on platforms like airline fare aggregator Kayak, and imagine the same user experience in financial services. “SuperMoney guides our users to loan offers that are in their best interest,” Lulic said at the beginning of the company’s FinovateSpring demo earlier this year.

And “best interest” is key. As the company’s Managing Partner Harry Langenberg pointed out, SuperMoney is taking the same approach to loan comparison that “won Google the search engine wars.” He explained, “rather than ranking results based on payout, Google’s algorithms presented results based on relevance. Similarly, we believe that by representing the best fiduciary interests of our borrowers, that SuperMoney will become the number one site that consumers trust when searching for a personal loan.”

Pictured: SuperMoney Managing Partner Harry Langenberg demonstrating the Supermoney loan offer comparison tool at FinovateSpring 2017.

Langenberg demonstrated how prospective borrowers enter some basic personal information (type of loan desired, the loan amount, credit score estimate, education level, employment status, home type and location, military status if any) at the SuperMoney website. “All of this data that we are collecting is matched against a database of attributes that we have for every one of our lenders,” Langenberg said. “That way we’re able to filter out any of the results that don’t necessarily match to their underwriting interests.”

Lenders on the platform do a “soft pull” so as not to impact the borrower’s credit score and in moments the borrower is presented with a set of prequalified and/or preapproved loan offers. “Users can easily compare their APRs, loan amounts, payments, even their total repayment costs, origination fees, and other details for the loan,” Lulic said. The platform enables borrowers to search from among the offers using a wide variety of criteria – such as payment-for-payment affordability – and each loan offer also features user reviews which Lulic said “provides a qualitative dimension that users can consider in their loan search.”

SuperMoney also hosts a wealth of personal financial information on topics ranging from auto insurance and business credit cards to tax planning and wealth management. The website features more than 11,000 expert and consumer advice columns and reviews. Expansion into other verticals beyond personal loans is also in the plans for the company. “We will soon be launching our auto loan offer engine, followed by our mortgage offer engine, and eventually our insurance offer engines,” Langenberg said. For now, the company is partnering with lenders to help them better serve customers they are not able to work with (“turn-downs”) by sending them to SuperMoney.

Company facts

  • Founded in 2013
  • Headquartered in Santa Ana, California
  • Published more than 2,000 expert reviews and more than 9,000 consumer reviews
  • Generated more than one million clicks for its partners

We caught up with the SuperMoney team briefly at FinovateSpring during rehearsals and followed up with a few questions for company CEO Miron Lulic. Here are his responses.

Finovate: What problem does your technology solve? 

Miron Lulic: Within the personal loan industry alone, there are literally hundreds of lenders to choose from and all of them are different.  You can go from lender to lender to lender, filling out applications to try and find your best option, but that’s a ton of effort. Lending aggregators popped up to solve this problem by ‘matching’ borrowers with lenders. But the dirty little secret behind most loan aggregation websites is that they run on a ping tree model.

Ping trees chuck borrowers down a lead delivery waterfall that attempts to sell the lead to the highest bidder. If the highest bidding buyer rejects the lead, the system attempts to sell to the next buyer with the borrower ultimately being sold to whoever will pay the most for that lead. This ping tree model works quite well for the aggregating site, as it’s rigged to produce the highest payouts. But as you could probably surmise, the “matches” produced by ping trees seldom connect consumers with the loans that are most financially beneficial to the borrowers themselves.

Finovate: How does your solution solve the problem better? 

Lulic: When consumers shop for an airline ticket they expect real offers in real-time.  Well, we’ve brought that great Kayak-like comparison shopping experience to financial services. Our Loan Offer Engine transparently allows consumers to submit a single, soft-pull loan application to all the leading online lenders and returns real loan offers back. SuperMoney users can transparently discover the best option based on their needs and that serve their best interest.

Finovate: Who are your primary customers? 

Lulic: SuperMoney is a two-sided marketplace platform with consumers looking for financial services on one end and financial service providers on the other. On the financial services side, we have a wide array of financial verticals represented in our publicly accessible reviews website. Within the personal loan offer engine, we are currently partnered with leading marketplace lenders, direct lenders, and banks. We aim to extend the platform to integrate credit unions and other players in the ecosystem not currently represented. 

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

Lulic: Our founding team is the same founding team that launched Optima Tax Relief in 2011 and grew it from nothing to the #3 Fastest Growing Company In America according to Inc. Magazine’s 2015 ranking. We also co-founded another Finovate alum named LoanNow which is a direct lending business. Our experience there opened our eyes up to many of the challenges consumers and businesses face related to financial services online. 

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

Lulic: We are soon launching the same great loan offer engine experience in the auto lending vertical and aiming to follow that up soon after with a mortgage version. Our goal is to extend the framework we developed into all lending-related verticals initially, and then to other financial services where consumers can benefit from apples-to-apples comparisons and transparency. 

Finovate: Where do you see SuperMoney a year or two from now?

Lulic: Our goal is simple. To build the brand consumers think of first whenever they need a financial service. We aim to get there within two years. 

Miron Lulic (CEO) and Harry Langenberg (Managing Partner) demonstrating the Supermoney Loan Comparison Tool at FinovateSpring 2017.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Backbase, eWise, Fiserv, NetGuardians, NF Innova, NIIT Technologies, Proactive Budget, Signicat, SuperMoney, TickSmith

On Finovate.com

  • NetGuardians Raises More than $8 Million in Series C.
  • SuperMoney Brings a Kayak-like UX to the Online Borrowing Experience.

On FinDEVr.com

  • Check out previews of upcoming FinDEVr London presentations:

Around the web

  • eWise integrates its Aegis data aggregation platform into Backbase’s Open Banking Marketplace.
  • TickSmith introduces new performance-tracking module, Marketplace Advanced Insights.
  • Bank of Sydney replaces its digital banking platform with DigitalAccess from Fiserv.
  • ProActive Budget launches Android app.
  • NF Innova named Market Leader in IDC MarketScape 2017 with iBanking Solution
  • NIIT Technologies appoints Sudhir Singh as CEO Designate
  • Signicat Launches MobileID to Satisfy PSD2 Requirements.

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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Fenergo Brings its Client Lifecycle Management Innovations to ABN AMRO

Fenergo Brings its Client Lifecycle Management Innovations to ABN AMRO
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Fenergo

ABN AMRO is the latest bank to choose Client Lifecycle Management solutions from Fenergo. ABN AMRO is the third-largest bank in the Netherlands and will use the technology to support its CDD/KYC processes in specific, and the bank’s broader “business transformation strategy” in general.

ABN AMRO’s Helène Erftemeijer elaborated on the role Fenergo’s technology will play in helping the bank improve the user experience for its clients. “A core part of our business transformation program will involve creating an internal, centralized KYC target operating model that will help us to simultaneously improve the client experience and reduce the cost impact of the regulator KYC activities,” Erftemeijer said. “Fenergo is the technology platform that will underpin this initiative.”

Pictured: Fenergo CEO Mark Murphy demonstrating Deal Manager at FinovateEurope 2012.

The deal with ABN AMRO is the latest in a string of wins for the Dublin-based compliance specialist. Earlier this month Fenergo announced a deal to deploy its Client Lifecycle Management technology with HSBC Group. And in March, the company partnered with BBVA, Spain’s second largest bank and a widely-known, eager adopter of innovative financial technologies. Speaking of the company’s recent successes, Fenergo CEO Mark Murphy explained, “The reason is simple: banks are looking for a trusted technology partner to help them transform their business processes to create a superior client experience, whilst delivering key time, cost, and headcount efficiencies across their data, compliance, and front office operations.”

Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, Fenergo demonstrated its Deal Manager solution at FinovateEurope 2012. Deal Manager systemizes a number of complex compliance processes, giving financial institutions a greater degree of control, transparency, and efficiency when it comes to onboarding, account opening, KYC, due diligence and related operations. Fenergo’s technology is used by leading investment, corporate, and capital markets FIs such as UBS and BMO Capital Markets.

Fenergo was recognized for the third year in a row in the Chartis RiskTech100, a comprehensive, independent review of the top compliance and risk technology companies in the world. And this spring, the company was named to Planet Compliance’s RegTech Top 100 Power list. Fenergo has raised more than $80 million in total capital, including a $75 million investment in the summer of 2015 from Aquiline Capital Partners and Insight Venture Partners.

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banqUP Previews its Bank-as-a-Platform Solution for European SMEs

banqUP Previews its Bank-as-a-Platform Solution for European SMEs
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: banqUP, Finovate Debuts

Note: Demoing as bankUP at FinovateEurope, the company has since rebranded as banqUp.

There may or may not be a special place in heaven for those entrepreneurs and developers burning the midnight oil in a quest to build a better banking solution for small businesses. But there will always be a spot on the Finovate stage. This year at FinovateEurope, Antwerp, Belgium-based banqUP tossed its hat into the ring with a preview of its small business banking platform.

Calling itself a bank for people who live on their smartphones, banqUP is a digital neo-bank for small business that offers a business current account, credit and debit cards, and a hub of integrated financial solutions in a single, unified platform.  As Dimitri Leemans, a partner at Hedera Consulting explained during an introduction to the company’s demo, banqUP is designed to be the kind of bank young entrepreneurs in Europe have been longing for, one that prioritizes personalization, customer insight, and openness.

bankUP_stage_FEU2017

Pictured (left to right): banqUP’s Lukasz Chmielewski (CTO), Dimitri Leemans (Partner, Hedera Consulting), and Krzysztof Pulkiewicz (CEO) demonstrating the banqUP small business banking platform at FinovateEurope 2017.

banqUP CEO Krzysztof Pulkiewicz and CTO Lukasz Chmieleswki launched into the demo, showing how the platform provided dashboards with configurable widgets to help business owners track cash flow, budgets, contacts, payables, transactions, and other critical information. banqUP’s smart tagging feature scans transactions and groups them into budgets to keep expenses organized. Create a hashtag for a given expense category, select it, and all of the widgets on the various dashboards will update with information relevant to that category. “This is just the beginning of our smart business bank,” Pulkiewicz said. The platform also enables ready integration for outside parties such as external accounting software or even a real live human accountant, who can be set up on the platform’s accounting dashboard on banqUP and review the details of all transactions, including the original documents, and even leave notes right on the document image.

With its technology still in beta, banqUP is eagerly anticipating its official launch in the coming months. “We are still finalizing the development of our solution to provide our future users with the best possible digital banking solution,” Pulikiewicz said, adding “We have come a long way in a short time already and we are tremendously motivated to go even faster and keep ourselves continuously (focused) toward customer success.”

Company facts

  • Headquartered in Antwerp, Belgium
  • Founded in 2016
  • Partnered with German solarisBank AG
  • Launched as a PSD2-ready smart bank in Q1 2017

bankUP_KrzysztofPulkiewicz_newWe met with the banqUP team at FinovateEurope 2017 and followed up with a few additional questions by e-mail. Here are the responses from CEO Krzysztof Pulkiewicz.

What problem does your small business banking platform solve?

Krzysztof Pulkiewicz: banqUP is a digital fintech bank for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We are offering core banking products including business current account and MasterCard, combined with a hub of integrated fintech services and functionalities that over a web and mobile business platform. We use mobile and web together with smart data analytics to solve the day-to-day problems of SMEs. By using banqUP, entrepreneurs can control all the aspects of their business via just one platform. Some of our features include personalized dashboards, the organization of your incoming and outgoing payments by simply tagging them (and yes, we have automated this as much as possible for you), the possibility to connect your account with all your team members including your accountant to delegate financial tasks easily … These are just a few of banqUP’s innovative features.

The SME segment is significantly underserved by the banks and as a team of entrepreneurs we aim to change this situation. We offer a tailor-made, unique digital banking experience for SMEs, providing a one-stop shop combination of core banking products and integrated fintech services. Business owners of SMEs are focused on driving their businesses and expect more from banks than just selling traditional banking products and processing transactions. It is all about partnering, insights, relevance, predictions, and integrating more into the business itself.

Dashboard

banqUP’s dashboard consists of configurable modules for managing everything from budgets and transactions to contacts and accounts.

Finovate: How does your technology solve the problem better?

Pulkiewicz: We provide the standard banking services seamlessly integrated with fintech services and business apps of the users’ choice. We do not believe in a “one fits all” approach. Based on your business type, industry and stage in the SME life cycle, we build a personalized user experience with features that are most relevant for your business. At the core of the personalized experience, we have advanced data analytics, and we learn from your historical data how we can help you now and in the future. In addition, we use machine learning and data tagging in order to organize your budgets, provide cashflow estimations, and setup the proactive business notifications you expect from the smart banking solution.

banqUP is open. We give you a free choice to work with your favorite accounting software (you can connect to it with a few clicks) or to work with your accountant. banqUP helps you to collaborate better and fully digitalizes this process (starting from uploads, OCR to online document sharing and one-click payments).

RevenueIQ

A look at banqUP’s RevenueIQ dashboard, which features a set of widgets that provide ongoing insight into the company’s revenue stream.

Finovate: Who are your primary customers?

Pulkiewicz: banqUP has a double commercial model:

1. A direct, go-to-market model where banqUP focuses on “millennipreneurs” – a young generation of business owners and freelancers. Millennials experience life, work, and business through technology and they expect seamless interactions between their bank and the different tools for running the day-to-day activities of their business. We are determined to meet the needs of young entrepreneurs and bring them the tools they desire the most. But, of course, all digitally-minded and savvy business owners will see the digital added value of banqUP and form the target client group for banqUP.

2. An indirect, go-to-market model where banqUP offers its platform. This option redesigns business banking from the ground up by leveraging BaaS (Bank as a platform) to deliver SME banking services in the EU and to banks across Europe. Our platform is an enabler for banks; we are working to customize digital banking to a selected group of customers and provide them with fully personalized and relevant services. We are PSD2 ready!

Finovate: Tell us about your favorite implementation of your technology.

Pulkiewicz: We are extremely proud of our own banking brand – banqUP and SME banking service – and we will start offering to small and medium businesses in the EU this year. This is a great example how our platform allowed us to enter the market and build a competitive value proposition in a very short marketing time and in an extremely agile way.

cashflow

banqUp’s Cashflow planner provides a visualization of past cash flow to give business owners a sense of what future cash flow may look like.

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

Pulkiewicz: We are a group of entrepreneurs on a mission to solve the day-to-day problems of SMEs and we started banqUP to design the bank we, and many other business owners, desperately need. We know and acknowledge that every small business is different and operates in different contexts so we want to create better banks, which can be customized to the needs of specific industries, business models, and personal needs of entrepreneurs.

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

Pulkiewicz: Our main goal for the upcoming months is to finally officially launch our banking service. We are still finalizing the development of our solution to provide our future users with the best possible digital banking experience. We will attend some international conferences in order to present our idea to experts from the banking and fintech industry. We have come a long way in a short time already, and we are tremendously motivated to go even faster and keep ourselves continuously sharp towards customer success.

Finovate: Where do you see your company a year or two from now?

Pulkiewicz: There are many important steps on our planned roadmap where we want to launch banqUP and make it available on the market throughout Europe. We will quickly extend our operations and service availability to EU countries as well as connect with new, global and local partners that offer financial services that truly add value for business owners and entrepreneurs.

Lukasz Chmielewski (CTO), Dimitri Leemans (Partner), and Krzysztof Pulkiewicz (CEO) demonstrating the banqUP small business banking platform at FinovateEurope 2017.

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Xero Partners with Expensify for In-House Expense Management

Xero Partners with Expensify for In-House Expense Management
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Expensify, Xero

Xero’s decision to use Expensify’s software for in-house receipt and expense management is the latest product of the strategic partnership the two fintechs announced last year. Expensify’s solution will provide SmartScan OCR receipt scanning, next-day reimbursement, and company card reconciliation to Xero employees at all 21 of the company’s offices worldwide.

“From one product-driven technology company to another, we’re committed to improving an already world-class user experience and process,” Expensify Director of Sales and Success Jason Mills said. Xero’s Chief Accounting Officer Kirsty Godfrey-Billy added that the partnership “will create efficiencies within our own business, allowing us to continue to focus on delivering beautiful cloud-based accounting software around the globe.”

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, Expensify demonstrated Expensify Invoices at FinovateSpring 2013. More recently, Expensify made its FinDEVr debut at FinDEVr 2016 Silicon Valley where CEO and founder David Barrett presented Bedrock – Expensify’s Open-Sourced Infrastructure Secret Weapon. Barrett credited the open-source technology for enabling Expensify to become the “fastest growing ERP software in the world.”

In May, Expensify launched its ScanSnap Integration in the U.K. and in April, the company teamed up with TravelPerk to make business travel easier for busy professionals. Completing a $17 million Series C in 2015, Expensify has raised more than $27 million in total funding, and includes Barracuda Networks, OpenView, and Redpoint among its investors. CPA.com, the business wing of global leading accounting body, AICPA, has named Expensify its preferred partner for receipt and expense management.

Xero demonstrated its Business Identification technology at FinovateSpring 2011 and, like Expensify, the company is also a veteran of our FinDEVr developer conferences. Xero Head of U.S. Partnerships David Pollock presented Building an API-driven Ecosystem for Small Business at FinDEVr 2014 Silicon Valley, discussing the company’s open API, developer partner program, and how it grew its marketplace to more than 300 integrated apps.

Xero partnered with Capital One earlier this month, enabling small businesses to connect their Capital One financial data with their Xero cloud accounting software. The company also announced that it was working with Equifax to provide SMEs access to credit risk evaluation tools typically used by big businesses and lenders. Awarded Best Overall Fintech Platform by the Fintech Breakthrough Awards, the Wellington, New Zealand-based company was founded in 2006, and went public in 2007, trading on the New Zealand stock exchange under the ticker XRO. Xero picked up more than $26 million in new funding in April, courtesy of Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV), bringing its total, post-equity funding to more than $381 million. Rod Drury is CEO.

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Caxton Leverages the Blockchain to Provide Faster, Safer, API-Free Connectivity

Caxton Leverages the Blockchain to Provide Faster, Safer, API-Free Connectivity
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: CaxtonFX, Finovate Debuts

Just when you thought it was safe to enlist yourself in the API revolution, along comes Caxton with what founder and CEO Rupert Lee-Browne described as “the next generation of connectivity using the blockchain.”

“We believe the future of the API is dead,” Lee-Browne said, kicking off Caxton’s live demo at FinovateEurope 2017 in London earlier this year. Calling blockchain, “faster, more secure, and cheaper than API connectivity,” Lee-Browne explained how Caxton had used APIs to connect with its partner companies for years, but ultimately sought a better solution. “Any CTO will tell you: APIs frankly have really quite significant limitations, particularly when it comes down to implementation,” Lee-Browne said. “So our vision is to be the choice of millions who wish to send or spend overseas – either using our brand or other people’s – and blockchain connectivity is the way we’re going to be doing that.”

Pictured: Caxton CEO and founder Rupert Lee-Browne demonstrating the Firebird Payment Engine at FinovateEurope 2017.

Lee-Browne introduced Caxton’s new payment platform, Firebird, and explained how his team built a private blockchain overlay to Firebird and is using that blockchain to connect with third party services. For the company’s live on-stage demo, Caxton presented a partner-developed, Firebird-connected payment app and showed the behind-the-blockchain look at a hypothetical transaction between a motorcycle buyer and a seller.

Caxton CTO Russell Stather emphasized both the security inherent in Caxton’s blockchain-based approach to connectivity and the high degree of control achieved. “(With blockchain) every transaction is digitally signed by all parties involved using a private key stored on each device,” Stather said. “Blockchain itself is immutable,” he continued, “that means it is impossible to change any transactions after the fact.” And there are other benefits to the API-free route, according to Stather: “Having no API means everything is under your control. It’s on your infrastructure, so it’s your specifications,” he said.

From e-commerce merchants looking to multi-currency prices delivered and settled instantly and securely, to app developers with payment apps looking for regulated partners, Caxton is at heart a cross-border payments company looking to leverage its own success with the blockchain into better opportunities for its partners. “It is here today,” Lee-Browne said. “It’s not theory. It’s practice.”

Company Facts

  • Headquartered in London, U.K.
  • Founded in 2003
  • Processed more than 7 million transactions in 2016
  • Serves more than 400,000 customers with annual turnover of more than €1 billion
  • Named a 2016 Customer Service Awards Prepaid Currency Card Trusted Provider

We met with Caxton CEO and founder Rupert Lee-Browne and his team at FinovateEurope to learn more about the company’s technology. We followed up with a few questions by e-mail. Below are his responses.

Finovate: What problem does your technology solve and how does it solve the problem better?

Rupert Lee-Browne: APIs often create problems: security risks and require a lot of maintenance. Blockchain is a revolutionary new technology that makes it safer and easier to send money than ever before. Our blockchain technology removes this risk while making it cheaper and faster for companies to process payments. It also provides a quick and easy white label payments solution for businesses looking for a fully regulated multicurrency banking platform.

Finovate: Who are your primary customers?

Lee-Browne: Businesses looking for a fully-regulated, white label payments provider.

Finovate: Tell us about your favorite implementation of your technology.

Lee-Browne: We’ve partnered with a motorcycle app called Motopay. They have developed an app for buying and selling vehicles securely. They aren’t regulated with the FCA, so they need a backend provider for client take-on, AML, anti-fraud, payment in, transaction processing, and pay out. We’re able to do all of this using our new blockchain technology.

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

Lee-Browne: Caxton is a payment and cards company founded 15 years ago with £25k, a phone, and an advert on Google. We now serve hundreds of thousands of customers and have a projected turnover of over £1bn.  We’ve also been profitable since day one.

We have a penchant for innovation – we were the first company to offer genuine straight through online currency payments back in 2006. Then we created a proper market for prepaid currency cards. And now we are using blockchain technology to offer real fast, safe and lower cost.

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

Lee-Browne: We have a long list of exciting enhancements to our core banking platform planned. Sadly you’ll have to wait and see on those, though.

Finovate: Where do you see Caxton a year or two from now?

Lee-Browne: We are hoping to rapidly scale our blockchain offering to businesses across the U.K., and potentially further afield. 

Caxton CEO and founder Rupert Lee-Browne and CTO Russell Stather demonstrating the Firebird Payment Engine at FinovateEurope 2017 in London.

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Trulioo and the Regtech Revolution: How Smaller Teams Tackle the Compliance Challenge

Trulioo and the Regtech Revolution: How Smaller Teams Tackle the Compliance Challenge
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinDEVr 2017 London, FinDEVr London 2017 Roundtable

Highlighting the fact that regulation is a key barrier to growth for banks, a post at the Trulioo blog earlier this month underscored how important it was for FIs to leverage technology to meet these challenges. “To help grow their role and create effective change, compliance needs to embrace the process and tools of change, innovation, and technology,” the blog authors wrote. They added, “The future of AML compliance will need to consider Robotics, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, AI, and even Business Process Management solutions.”

The authors also noted that improving the user experience for the customer can also have the benefit of improving the experience for the compliance officer, as well. Further, they pointed out that even senior executives gain from the improvements technology can bring to the compliance challenge. “With the ease of digital onboarding processes,” the authors wrote, “companies can acquire new customers faster and easier than before.” The possibility of smaller, more effective compliance teams is another advantage that cannot be overlooked. “Instead of increasing head-count, companies can invest in scalable processes that save money and allow compliance to focus on sophisticated fraud cases,” the post concludes.

Pictured: Anatoly Kvitnitsky of Trulioo during his presentation, “Trulioo’s Global Gateway,” at FinDEVr 2014 Silicon Valley.

Do the solutions to the compliance challenges faced by financial institutions lie in smaller teams and a better user experience? Join Trulioo VP of Growth Anatoly Kvitnitsky and Mike Kim, Strategic Accounts Manager as they host our FinDEVr London roundtable discussion, “AML, KYC, OMG: How to manage compliance with a smaller team and a better UX. Trulioo’s roundtable takes place on Monday, 12 June on Day One of our developer’s conference.

A specialist in online ID verification, Trulioo leverages more than 200 data sources to provide AML compliance assistance, age verification for online gambling and liquor sales, KYC and trusted entities validation for account opening and maintenance, as well as reduce transaction risk for e-commerce merchants. Named to CNBC’s fifth annual Disruptor 50 earlier this month,  Trulioo also announced a partnership with fellow Finovate alum Mitek that would add a second level of biometric authentication to the ID Document Verification feature of its GlobalGateway platform. “This new partnership with Mitek ensures our clients continue to have instant access to powerful tools for their fraud prevention and compliance systems,” Trulioo CEO Stephen Ufford said.

Don’t miss Trulioo’s lunchtime roundtable, “AML, KYC, OMG: How to manage compliance with a smaller team and a better UX” on the first day of FinDEVr London, Monday, 12 June. Visit our registration page to save your spot today.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Actiance, AutoGravity, BBVA, CaxtonFX, Fiserv, Markit, Symphony Software Foundation, Trulioo, Trustly

On Finovate.com

  • Caxton Leverages the Blockchain to Provide Faster, Safer, API-Free Connectivity.
  • Trulioo and the RegTech Revolution: How Smaller Teams Tackle the Compliance Challenge.
  • CUneXus’ cplXpress to Power One-Click Loans for MeridianLink.

Around the web

  • Symphony Software Foundation announces its latest Gold Member, Ipreo.
  • BBVA unveils open API marketplace.
  • Fiserv launches cybersecurity for digital banking solution, SecureNow.
  • Trustly partners with Nordic online fashion retailer, Boozt.com.
  • AutoGravity wins 2017 North American Frost & Sullivan Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award.
  • Fonetic and Actiance partner for trade reconstruction.
  • IHS Markit launches Outreach360 platform on Counterparty Manager.

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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FinDEVr Preview: ISARA

FinDEVr Preview: ISARA
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinDEVr London 2017 Preview, ISARA

FinDEVr Previews highlight companies presenting new developer tools, platforms, and integrations at FinDEVr London 2017, 12  & 13 June. Tickets are on sale now. Visit our registration page and save your spot today.

The emerging quantum threat to cybersecurity affects global financial institutions. Next-generation security options can provide resistance to quantum computer attacks. ISARA will present a demo of those options for securing an online banking connection against current and future attacks, and give expert recommendations for quantum safe security transition strategies.

Why it’s a must-see:

Fintech developers must respond to the needs of an industry making long-term strategic bets on emerging technologies while also protecting against emerging cybersecurity threats, including quantum computers. The quantum threat requires careful risk analysis, and quantum safe implementations can and must begin today to avoid future liability.

Check out more previews of upcoming FinDEVr London 2017 presentations. Visit our registration page to save your spot today.

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FinDEVr Preview: eSignLive by VASCO

FinDEVr Preview: eSignLive by VASCO
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: eSignLive, FinDEVr London 2017 Preview

FinDEVr Previews highlight companies presenting new developer tools, platforms, and integrations at FinDEVr London 2017, 12 & 13 June. Tickets are on sale now. Visit our registration page and save your spot today.

With E-Signatures for Mobile Account Opening & Customer Behaviour Insights, eSignLive by VASCO will demonstrate how to add e-sign features to your apps and enable a secure yet frictionless mobile account opening process. The presentation will also show you how to pinpoint areas of drop-off or confusion, and then use those insights to further optimize the overall customer experience.

Why it’s a must-see:

Integration should happen faster than pizza delivery. With native mobile e-signature SDKs, developers can turbocharge their mobile apps with e-signing capabilities in less than 30 minutes. Extensive options to customize the appearance of the UI and strong authentication (e.g. biometrics) enable a secure yet frictionless mobile account opening experience.

Check out more previews of upcoming FinDEVr London 2017 presentations. Visit our registration page to save your spot today.

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