Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • “Shoeboxed Partners with ScanSnap Cloud for Receipt Scanning”
  • “Finovate Debuts: Race Data Helps Community Banks Turn Customer Data into Market Intelligence”
  • “Opentech Teams Up with MasterCard, Swiss Bankers to Launch Card Management App”
  • “HelloWallet Launches Savings and Debt Guidance Tool”
  • “Kasasa Reaches One Millionth Account”
  • Check out this week’s FinDEVr APIntelligence

Around the web

  • Fiserv announces its new biometric authentication solution, Verifast: Palm Authentication.
  • Markit to provide fixed income pricing data and liquidity metrics for the European Commission.
  • INETCO to power real-time transaction monitoring for Turkey’s Central Processor for Bank Payment Cards, Bankalararasi Kart Merkezi (BKM).
  • ThinkAdvisor looks at how Blackrock is taking on Schwab and Vanguard with FutureAdvisor.
  • ebankIT expands its headquarters facilities in Porto to grow R&D team.
  • Corezoid moves platform-as-a-service core banking engine to AWS.
  • Blackhawk Network Appoints Sachin Dhawan as CTO and SVP.
  • PCWorld votes Xero as its top-choice accounting software in 2016.

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.

 

Fidor Bank Opens its Doors in Dubai; Ge Drossaert Tapped as Managing Director

Fidor Bank Opens its Doors in Dubai; Ge Drossaert Tapped as Managing Director

Fidor_homepage_June2016

Munich-based Fidor Bank is expanding to Dubai. The move will enable the bank to better serve companies outside of Europe, and comes less than a year after the innovative FI opened offices in the U.K. Fidor CEO Matthias Kröner called the expansion “only a matter of time” given the growing number of inquiries he says his bank has received from companies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. “The Dubai Silicon Oasis is an ideal location for this project, because it’s one of the biggest free zones in Fidor_GeDrossaertthe Middle East, with more than 1,000 companies already installed,” he said.

To lead operations in Dubai, Fidor Bank has hired Gé Drossaert (pictured) to serve as managing director. Drossaert comes to Fidor with more than 20 years’ experience in finance and IT, having worked as CTO of banking and capital markets for Asia, Middle East, and Africa for Computer Sciences Corporation, and as head of transformation and change at Saudi Hollandi Bank.

Fidor Bank received its banking license in 2009 and demonstrated its FidorPay-Account at FinovateEurope 2011. One of the world’s more innovative banks when it comes to technology, Fidor Bank was the first bank to deploy the Ripple protocol back in 2014, and was a winner of the Bank Innovation Award in 2013. More recently, Fidor teamed up with Telefonica Germany to launch a mobile bank account, O2 Banking, and earned a spot in The FinTech50’s Inaugural Hall of Fame. Fidor Bank presented “No Stack Banking” at our developers conference, FinDEVr San Francisco 2015, and “How to Start Your Digital Bank—Mobile Apps and APIs Included,” at FinDEVr New York 2016 this spring.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • “Interactions Names New CFO”
  • “Fidor Bank Opens its Doors in Dubai; Ge Drossaert Tapped as Managing Director”

On FinDEVr

  • “BlockCypher to Developers: Your Ethereum Toolkit is Ready

Around the web

  • CU Times’ white paper features IDology.
  • Crowdfund Insider interviews Zopa CEO Jaidev Janardana.
  • Bank of Newington and Cleveland State Bank deploy Core Director platform from Jack Henry.
  • Narrative Science partners with client reporting and communications software company, Vermilion Software.
  • Pirean opens local support centre for the Australia and New Zealand markets.
  • Insuritas to power insurance agency for Community Resource Credit Union.
  • VoicePIN opens U.S. office.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You an also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

2016 CNBC Disruptor 50 Features Klarna, Kabbage, Twilio, and Motif Investing

2016 CNBC Disruptor 50 Features Klarna, Kabbage, Twilio, and Motif Investing

CNBC_Disruptor2016

What does it take to win a spot on the 2016 CNBC Disruptor 50? Ask alternative online broker Motif Investing. They’ve done it three times in a row.

“We’re very proud to be continuously recognized by CNBC for our hard work and commitment to making smart investing easy,” Motif founder and CEO Hardeep Walia said. “The CNBC Disruptor list is a well-respected industry benchmark and we’re honored to be ranked on the list for the past three years.”

Or ask cloud communications and authentication specialist Twilio, a FinDEVr alum (FinDEVr San Francisco 2015) enjoying its third consecutive year on CNBC’s Disruptors List of companies “whose innovations are revolutionizing the business landscape.”

Sponsored by Nasdaq, the CNBC Disruptor 50 for 2016 was released last week. And among some of the easy-to-call favorites like Uber and SpaceX and Snapchat, there are additional familiar faces, especially to fans of Finovate and financial technology. This year more than 750 companies competed for the 50 spots in CNBC’s Disruptor roster. Combined, the 50 companies in this year’s roster have raised more than $40 billion in venture capital and have an implied market valuation of $242 billion. Joining Motif Investing and Twilio in this year’s roster are alums Klarna at #8 and Kabbage at #35. This marks Klarna’s second year in a row on the list, and Kabbage’s first.

Klarna was featured earlier this month in PYMNTS.com in a look at the tech scene in Stockholm and, in May, the company’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski was interviewed in BankNxt. In April, Klarna announced a partnership with U.K. e-commerce provider EKM. CNBC Disruptor 50 newcomer Kabbage just reached $2 billion in loans underwritten last month. Also in May, Kabbage announced a partnership with fellow Finovate alums OnDeck and CAN Capital to launch a pair of new initiatives: the Innovative Lending Platform Association and Smart Box. Both projects are geared toward improving transparency among online lenders and borrowers. In April, Kabbage teamed up with Santander to bring same-day financing to small businesses in the U.K.

Here’s a quick look at Finovate alums that have made the CNBC Disruptor 50 in years past.

  • 2015 CNBC Disruptor 50 featured alums TransferWise, Personal Capital, Motif Investing, Zen Payroll, Coinbase, Klarna, Wealthfront, Betterment, Twilio, Narrative Science
  • 2014 CNBC Disruptor 50 featured alums Motif Investing, TransferWise, Personal Capital, Wealthfront, Lending Club, Coinbase, Bill.com, Nexmo, Betterment, Twilio
  • 2013 CNBC Disruptor 50 featured alums Boku, Lending Club, Twilio, Wealthfront

Motif Investing demoed its Advisor Platform at FinovateSpring 2014. At FinDEVr San Francisco 2014, Twilio discussed the challenges of multifactor authentication in its presentation, “Authy 2FA in 20 Minutes.” Klarna demonstrated its e-commerce solution at FinovateSpring 2012. And Kabbage demoed its small business line of credit, the Kabbage Card, at FinovateSpring 2015.

Ping Goes the Blockchain: Partnership Brings Consensus, Kill Switch with New Platform

Ping Goes the Blockchain: Partnership Brings Consensus, Kill Switch with New Platform

PingIdentity_homepage_June2016

Just days after being acquired by Vista Equity Partners, Ping Identity has introduced a new identity-management app that could pave the way for a seamless and secure user experience referred to as “continuous authentication.”

The announcement from Ping Identity came as part of the launch of distributed app platform designer Swirlds (as in “Shared Worlds”), which emerged from stealth last week and unveiled its hashgraph-distributed consensus platform. Swirlds enables developers to create distributed apps—permissioned and non-permissioned—with high throughput, fairness, and community consensus. The Swirlds platform differs further from the blockchain in that it has the ability to provide a timestamp of events as well as an evidentiary record. This functionality, which goes beyond what is available via the bitcoin blockchain, enables the platform to support a wide variety of transactional applications ranging from banking and trading markets to gaming and identity apps to cryptocurrencies and public ledgers.

Swirlds_homepage_June2016

Swirlds CEO Leemon Baird said, “Nobody is talking about building a stock market on Bitcoin blockchain, but you could do it on Swirlds.” Baird added that Swirlds could serve as a standard for distributed session management. Here is a detailed overview of Swirlds’ “fair, fast, provable, Byzantine, ACID compliant, efficient, inexpensive, timestapped, DoS resistant and optionally non-permissioned” technology.

What Ping Identity adds to the Swirlds platform is a way to manage identities across sessions and apps. Essentially, the technology keeps identity session databases synced to facilitate global session logout. The technology could be used, for example, to do away with the notion of “logging in” to a specific app or session. Instead, the user’s identity could follow them across apps and sessions, creating a better user experience while maintaining a high level of security. “The reason for application sessions is we don’t have continuous authentication,” Mance Harmon told ZDNet’s Identity Matters: “If the identity in the session goes away, you need a kill switch that works across client types.” Harmon is Ping’s senior director of architecture and labs.

In addition to the technical partnership, Ping Identity has invested capital in Swirlds, as well. “Swirlds represents a huge technological breakthrough that can change the way distributed-consensus communities function across a myriad of industries and use cases,” Patrick Harding, Ping’s Identity CTO, said. Calling it “the new identity standard,” Harding said the technology “solves the major challenges that identity professionals face in conducting and verifying session logout.”

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Ping Identity demonstrated PingFederate, Cloud Identity Connectors, and integration with third-party products at FinovateEurope 2012. The company announced new features to its PingFederate security solution in February, adding elastic scalability and contextual multifactor authentication. Named one of the top-100 tech companies in Colorado in 2015 by Built in Colorado, Ping Identity was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in June.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • “2016 CNBC Distruptor 50 Features Klarna, Kabbage, Twilio, and Motif Investing”
  • “Ping Goes the Blockchain: Partnership Brings Consensus, Kill Switch with New Platform”
  • “Ripple Receives BitLicense to Sell XRP”

Around the web

  • FICO launches its Academic Engagement Program, helping business students get hands-on experience with analytic software.
  • Mashable features Dashlane in its list of “7 can’t miss apps.”
  • Ping Identity partners with blockchain innovator, Swirlds.
  • Braintree announces new integrations with Demandware and Netsuite.
  • Top Image Systems earns spot in the Russell Microcap Index.
  • Bloomberg Businessweek profiles TransferWise, ‘London’s Lonely Unicorn.’
  • The economist looks at Strands and Entrepreneurial Finanace Lab’s roles for businesses in developing countries.
  • Unicredit launches Appathon powered by Open Bank Project.
  • Crowdtrader looks at C.K. Mack’s new take on crowd-sourced real estate investing.

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.

 

Bento for Business Banks $7 Million in New Investment

Bento for Business Banks $7 Million in New Investment

bentoforbusiness_homepage_June2016

In a round led by Comcast Ventures, Bento for Business has raised $7 million in new funding. The Series A also featured the participation of existing investors from Anthemis Group, Blumberg Capital, and Lionbird, as well as new investor Dan Henry, former CEO of NetSpend. The investment takes Bento’s total capital to $9.5 million.

The company, which has seen 170% quarter-over-quarter growth since launching 13 months ago, says the funds will be used to add management talent, develop new features, and pave the way for expansion into new verticals. Dave Zilberman, managing director at Comcast Ventures, will join Bento’s board of directors as part of the deal.

Bento_stage_FS2015

Pictured (left to right): Bento for Business co-founders Farhan Ahmad, CEO, and Sean Anderson, CPO, demonstrated their technology at FinovateSpring 2015.

Bento for Business provides small businesses with solutions to help them manage expenses better. The company’s first offering was the Bento MasterCard, a prepaid card that employers can give to their employees to make qualified purchases.  Business owners can easily set usage rules for the card based on spending amount and spending category, as well as set spending time limits. Owners also can turn the cards on or off with a single click. Bento provides a dashboard that enables the commercial card owner to see which cards are being used and how, as well as track expenses by location, employee, and type.

“Banks want to service small businesses, but it’s been profitable not to,” Ahman explained during a conversation at FinovateSpring last year. “We want to work with banks, with service providers … to curate and build beautiful, simple and most of all useful products that are built just for small businesses,” he said. Read more about the company in our Finovate Debut feature.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Bento for Business demonstrated its platform at FinovateSpring 2015. The company was profiled by Newsfactor Business Report in its look at prepaid debit cards for businesses back in December, the same month Bankless Times featured the company and its employee-spending controls solution. PYMNTS.con also took a look at Bento last fall.

 

 

FT Partners New Research Report on Digital Wealth Management Features a Dozen Finovate Alums

FT Partners New Research Report on Digital Wealth Management Features a Dozen Finovate Alums

FTPartners_logo_2The new research report on digital wealth management from Financial Technology Partners is a timely reminder of just how deep the firm’s dedication to, and insight into, the fintech world goes (that the report features a dozen Finovate and FinDEVr alums is pretty neat, too).

FT Partners’ report “Are the Robots Taking Over? The Emergence of Automated Digital Wealth Management Solutions” looks at the different platforms and business models used by digital wealth management companies, as well as the response by industry incumbents. The 140+ page report also features interviews with CEOs from leading major digital wealth-management companies such as Betterment, Nutmeg, and SigFig.

Writing about this FT Partners’ report on digital wealth management for Bloomberg View, columnist and money manager Barry Ritholtz noted:

“For those of you who may not have thought much about how technology might affect Wall Street, the work you do each day, and how you do it—not to mention what it means for your careers—this report is invaluable.”

Ritholtz outlined how his own experience as a money manager had been shaped by the rapidly changing technology landscape (“My office is small, but thanks to technology, and fintech in particular, we are able to be very productive with just 14 people,” he wrote). He also admits this productivity comes at a cost for some. “Those people who don’t adapt will find themselves with limited career options,” Ritholtz writes.

So who are the disruptors in the digital wealth management space of whom both FT Partners and Ritholtz speak?

Betterment_logo

 

dyme

 

 

 

futureadvisorlogo

 

 

HedgeableLogo

 

 

iQuantifiLogo_FF2014

 

 

Jemstep_Logo

 

 

  • Founded in 2008
  • Headquartered in Los Altos, California
  • Kevin Cimring and Michael Blumenthal are joint CEOs
  • Acquired by Invesco, January 2016
  • FinovateSpring 2013

LearnVest_logo

 

 

  • Founded in 2009
  • Headquartered in New York, New York
  • Alexa von Tobel is CEO and founder
  • Acquired by Northwestern Mutual, March 2015
  • FinovateFall 2013

MotifInvesting_logo_150x

 

 

NutmegLogo-thumb-200x56-5002-thumb-150x42-5003

 

 

Personal-Capital-Logo

 

SigFig_logo

 

 

tradeking_logo

 

 

 

  • Founded in 2005
  • Headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida
  • Donato Montanaro is CEO
  • Acquired by Ally Financial, April 2016
  • FinovateSpring 2008

 

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • “Bento for Business Banks $7 Million in New Investment”
  • “FT Partners New Research Report on Digital Wealth Management Features a Dozen Finovate Alums”

Around the web

  • Daily Fintech profiles Kreditech in a feature on the future of consumer banking.
  • CNN features Betterment, Wealthfront, and StockTwits in a list of the 10 best investing apps.
  • Spend Matters takes a look at the latest investment in Tradeshift and what it means for innovation in the procurement industry.
  • Oren Levy, Zooz CEO, writes in mobile payments today about the rising deployment of mobile wallets in developing markets.
  • Baseventure wins Red Herring Top 100 North America award.

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.

Dyme Unveils Prototype of Facebook Savings Chatbot

Dyme Unveils Prototype of Facebook Savings Chatbot

Dyme_homepage_June2016

With all due respect to the blockchain, 2016 may well be the year of the bot.

Bank Innovation reports that Finovate Best of Show winner Dyme has unveiled the first Facebook financial chatbot. The savings-related chatbot comes in a trio of tones (including the ever-popular “terrible parent” option) and while it is essentially the same as Dyme’s text-based savings solution, the company told Bank Innovation that the chatbot is part of the company’s plan to create a comprehensive set of messaging apps and services. Bank Innovation’s JJ Hornblass also praised the speed with which Dyme was able to put the chatbot app together, given that Facebook made specs available in April.

Dyme_stage_FF2015

Pictured: Dyme founder Joseph Prather demonstrated his company’s text-message-based savings solution at FinovateFall 2015 in New York.

What exactly is a chatbot? A chatbot is a software program that communicates in text form with human users; as machine learning and artificial intelligence play a greater role on the back end, many of these technologies are being deployed on the front end. With chatbots, businesses are able to perceptively receive queries and deliver information to busy consumers through popular, recognizable formats and channels. The technology has its detractors who decry the lack of human contact in commerce, and is still very much a work-in-progress when confronted with real-world externalities as Microsoft learned with its embarrassing Tay experiment this spring. But there’s no doubt that the convergence of technology and convenience will drive innovation in chatbot development as it has in mobile banking, biometric authentication, and other areas.

Writing about the relationship between chatbots and financial services in March, our own Jim Bruene noted that while the technology is very effective in self-service applications, chatbots are also capable of handling transactions in general and the “repetitive routine ones typical of online/mobile banking sessions” in particular. “If you think of online banking via a PC as digital banking 1.0, and mobile as digital banking 2.0, then the upcoming invisible UI … using chatbots, AI and machine learning could very well be version 3.0,” Bruene wrote.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, Dyme demoed its text-message-based savings technology at FinovateFall 2015. The company was featured in Benzinga’s “3 Ways Fintech Companies Can Help You Save” and is currently in the spring cohort of the fintech accelerator of Bank Innovation INV.

MyOrder, Wirecard Help Power Shared Spending Functionality for GRPPY PFM App

MyOrder, Wirecard Help Power Shared Spending Functionality for GRPPY PFM App

myorder_homepage_June2016

Splitting a check is often the least appealing part of an evening out with friends. The GRPPY app, which uses the platform of FinovateEurope alum MyOrdertakes the hassle out of the process with its share-expense feature. Individuals can pool their money in shared balances on the app and have one person act as the administrator to spend on the group’s behalf. All members can see when funds are deposited and spent. The platform leverages iDEAL, the most popular online payment system in the Netherlands, to enable users to add funds

“MyOrder wants to make life easier for people through mobile innovations, often with a financial component,” says Gertjan Rösken, MyOrder CTO. Susanne Steidl, EVP of Wirecard, described the partnership as part of Wirecard’s evolving relationship with fintechs like MyOrder. Steidl says Wirecard wants to “support new and innovative companies to bring new mobile payment products to market.”

MyOrder_stage_FEU2014

MyOrder CTO Gertjan Rösken and Tamar Klein, sales manager, demonstrated MyOrder and MyOrder Sidekick at FinovateEurope 2014 in London.

Other examples of joint ventures between MyOrder and Wirecard Group include the contactless mobile cards using host card emulation (HCE) technology the two issued last summer. Wirecard EVP for Telecommunications Christian von Hammel-Bonten called MyOrder a “strong and innovative partner” and praised the company’s technology as an example of how to “flexibly and easily” add cloud-based payments to any mobile app using their HCE SDK.

Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Groningen, Netherlands, MyOrder was acquired by Rabobank in 2012. The company demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2014, and that summer announced that it was teaming up with PayPal to support advanced order and payment for food and drinks at Dutch cafes and restaurants. In January, MyOrder was the first company to offer a parking app on the Apple Watch and this spring MyOrder became an option for Dutch motorists at 220 Tamoil gas stations who will be able to order and pay for their refueling in advance using their mobile device. The app also provides drivers with information about their fuel consumption and driving habits.

Backbase Announces New CFO Leonore Van Waaij

Backbase Announces New CFO Leonore Van Waaij

Backbase_homepage_June2016

After three years managing and overseeing financial operations for The Phone House, Leonore Van Waaij will take her talents to Backbase as the company’s new, and first, chief financial officer. Van Waaij brings experience from senior financial positions in both finance and retail, with a track record of maximizing profits and cash flow through effective financial management, cost reductions, and internal controls.

CEO Jouk Pleiter praised her professionalism and experience in back office operations in particular, saying Van Waaij would help the company as it embarks upon the next phase in its expansion. “Backbase has grown significantly in the last few years, and with our ambition for the future this is the right time to attract a CFO,” Pleiter said.

Backbase_stage_FEU2016

Pictured (left to right): Jelmer de Jong, global head of marketing, and CEO Jouk Pleiter demonstrated Backbase DBP for Wealth Management at FinovateEurope 2016.

Prior to her time as Finance Director and CFO for The Phone House, Van Waaij was the Finance and Logistics Manager for Backbase_LeonoreVanWaaijSchiphol Airport Retail B.V. She has several years experience in accounting with Deloitte and Arthur Andersen, and has degrees in business administration and financial auditing from Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam.

A leader in digital technologies for the financial industry, Backbase helped the oldest bank in the U.K., C. Hoare & Company, go digital earlier this month. In April, Backbase won first place in the Innovative Banking Software category of the 2016 European Fintech Awards, the same month the company announced that its technology was powering Altyn-i, a new digital bank based in Kazakhstan. In its 2015 metrics report, Backbase noted more than 60 large FI clients, serving more than 70 million end users in 25 countries. The company enjoyed year-over-year revenue growth of 35%.

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Backbase demonstrated its DBP for Wealth Management at FinovateEurope 2016.