David Penn, Author at Finovate

Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on October 9, 2015
Categories: CardFlight, Emida, MasterCard, Nymi, Ripple, TransferWise

On Finovate.com

“Ripple Labs Makes Waves: Raises $4 Million, Rebrands as Ripple, Launches Interledger”

“CardFlight Scores $4 Million in Series A Funding”

Around the web

MasterCard unveils Identity Check, a suite of solutions that includes biometric and SMS-based, one-time passwords to improve security for online consumers.

KPMG introduces KPMG Fintech 100 to recognize the world’s most disruptive and fast-emerging innovation companies in financial services. Nominations end 31 October 2015.

Santander invests in Ripple as startup expands services.

ThreatMetrix to scale global data center capacity to 200 million+ daily transactions.

Nymi recruits CEO John Haggard; Karl Martin will now serve as CTO.

Emida acquires giftcard-platform specialist Quippi Corporation for an undisclosed amount.

Kristo Kaarmann, co-founder of TransferWise, confirms via Twitter that former Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit participated in the company’s $58 million funding round this year.

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

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FinDEVr Live: Build Blockchain 2.0 Apps with Technology from Blockstack.io

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: Blockstack, Blockstack.io, FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco

Blockstack.io | @blockstackio

Blockstack.io is an enterprise software company that sells infrastructure for financial services and other enterprises to create blockchain 2.0 applications quickly and easily. The San Francisco-based company has taken the underlying technology of Bitcoin and sells a hosted, private sandbox to accelerate application development and prototyping. Here is the company’s perspective on blockchain technology for financial services:

Our company’s perspective on blockchain technology for financial services

Blockchain technology for financial services is at the bleeding edge. The enormous potential has increased interest in the technology and created many questions, as well. There are many factors to consider: the technical foundation, the application, the participants, the legal and regulatory frameworks, etc. Blockstack.io shares some thoughts on which areas are important to understand this new and exciting field of blockchain infrastructure.

Key takeaways:

Blockchain is infrastructure technology.
Infrastructure must be flexible and rigid in the right places.
Ecosystems win, not technology alone.

Presenters:

Peter Shiau, CEO, Co-founder
LinkedIn | @petershiau | peter@blockstack.io

Lior Saar, CPO, Co-founder
LinkedIn

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FinDEVr Live: OpenTok from TokBox Enables Developers to Add Live Video, Voice, and Messaging to Apps

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco, TokBox

tokbox.com | tokbox.com/blog | @tokbox

TokBox, a Telefonica company, develops and operates OpenTok, the leading cloud platform for embedding real-time video, voice, messaging, and screen sharing into websites and mobile applications. Our comprehensive API offers a suite of advanced capabilities, including interoperable mobile and web SDKs, archiving, security, 1:1 and multiparty calls, and more.

The first platform to incorporate support for WebRTC, OpenTok caters to enterprises, entrepreneurs, and developers with powerful APIs. OpenTok has been used to add real-time communications by companies including Mozilla, Royal Bank of Scotland, Valspar, MLB, Ford, Doritos, Bridgestone Gold & Double Robotics.

How to use WebRTC to build engaging fintech applications
For all the efficiency and convenience that technologies have brought to financial services, a key challenge continues to be their impact on customer satisfaction rates. How can organizations provide topnotch service when most customers, especially millennials, experience services through a website or mobile application and have never set foot in a branch?

Enter WebRTC, the HTML5 standard making it possible to embed secure live video, voice, and text communications directly into the context of your website or application. Learn about the development challenges, best practices, and how fintech companies are already integrating WebRTC into OTT services today.

Key takeaways:

What WebRTC is and how it can transform fintech applications
How financial service companies can leverage WebRTC to bring the same high-quality customer service from brick-and-mortar stores online
The development challenges and best practices for building with WebRTC

Presenter:
Badri Rajasekar, CTO
@baddn

Rajasekar is the CTO and SVP of engineering at TokBox, the provider of OpenTok, the leading real-time communications platform. He leads the core engineering and operations teams and is responsible for end-to-end service delivery, including product development, quality engineering, and customer solutions.

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FinDEVr Live: Checkbook Introduces API for Digital Checks

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: Checkbook.io, FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco

checkbook.io | @checkbookio

Businesses and individuals are still writing paper checks. Checkbook is solving the problem of paper checks by introducing digital checks. The company has built a way for individuals/businesses to send and receive digital checks without the need for signing up.

Checkbook’s API provides merchants with a way to accept digital checks on their websites with a couple lines of code. Digital checks can do real-time balance verification, thus minimizing NSF risk present in ACH. We charge a flat fee of $1 per check or less for businesses, and it’s free for individuals.

API for digital checks
Our presentation will show both a business and an individual sending a digital check using a browser. It will be an end-to-end experience with the beneficiary receiving and depositing the check.

Additionally, we will demo a site using our API to receive digital checks and go over the API integration.

Key takeaways:

Digital checks
API for digital checks
UI/UX for digital checks

Presenters:

PJ Gupta, Founder
LinkedIn | pjupta@checkbook.io

Gupta is a techie with an entrepreneurial spirit who lives and breathes payments. He is the former chief network architect at VISA.

Tim Kay, Technical Staff
LinkedIn | support@checkbook.io

Kay built—all by himself, before it was easy—a check-printing system to solve the problem of paper checks. He holds a doctorate in computer science from Caltech.

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FinDEVr Live: Temenos Introduces its B2B Financial Apps Marketplace

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco, Temenos

temenos.com | @Temenos

Temenos Group AG is the market-leading provider of mission-critical software applications to more than 1,650 financial institutions in 150 countries worldwide.

B2B financial apps marketplace
Join us to discover Temenos’ B2B financial services marketplace and become a world-leading fintech solution provider. We will walk you through the benefits of this route to market and show you how to spin up your own cloud-core-banking system for use in development and discovery of products online. There are millions of product opportunities on the Temenos core banking platform (T24) and user experience platform (edgeConnect), and we’ll help you get started by giving you code and putting your product in front of 700 banks and financial institutions.

Key takeaways:

How to develop the most successful and disruptive FinTech ideas
How development on a core banking system really works
How to market your product to more than 700 banks and financial institutions

Presenter:
Aaron Phethean, MarketPlace Director
LinkedIn |@aphethean | aphethean@temenos.com

Phethean has met with hundreds of banks over the last decade and been through dozens of product launches, core banking renovation projects, and digital channel initiatives. Originally from New Zealand, now based in London, he is a keen innovator and regularly contributes to open-source projects.

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FinDEVr Live: Entrust Datacard Secures the Omnichannel Experience with a Trusted Identity

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: Entrust Datacard, FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco

entrustdatacard.com | entrust.com/blog | @EntrustDatacard

Consumers, citizens, and employees increasingly expect anytime-anywhere experiences, whether they are making purchases, crossing borders, accessing e-gov services or logging onto corporate networks. Entrust Datacard offers the trusted identity and secure transaction technologies that make those experiences reliable and secure. Solutions range from the physical world of financial cards, passports, and ID cards to the digital realm of authentication, certificates, and secure communications.

Securing the omnichannel experience with a trusted identity
Mobile and cloud are transforming the digital marketplace, providing unprecedented opportunity for financial institutions to differentiate with “friction free,” customer-led interactions. At the core of the omnichannel experience, trusted identities can be leveraged not only to secure access, but also to assist in the fight against fraud and transform processes that will lead to higher opt-in rates and increased customer stickiness.

Key takeaways:

Take away a use-case for trusted identities in next-generation digital banking
Explore innovative services that will ultimately help redefine the consumer banking experience
Discover how to leverage trusted identities to secure access and prevent fraud at the core of the omnichannel experience.

Presenters:

Chris Taylor, Senior Product Manager
LinkedIn | @CTaylor_Entrust

Taylor owns and manages Entrust IdentityGuard, the company’s flagship, identity-based software-authentication platform. He specializes in identity-based security, cybersecurity, mobile security, smartcard technology, and digital certificates.

Brad Cochran, Sales Engineer

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FinDEVr Live: Apex Clearing Helps Consumers Fund, Trade, and Invest in an Instant

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: Apex Clearing Corporation, FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco

apexclearing.com

Apex Clearing is an innovator in securities clearing, custody, execution, and technology. We specialize in supporting a variety of financial institutions, including broker dealers, proprietary trading firms, online registered investment advisers, and financial technology startups. Our technology powers the most cutting-edge financial firms in the world, and our innovative approach to back-office solutions enables businesses to grow and succeed. Apex prides itself on thinking differently by tirelessly pushing the boundaries of financial services. Apex Clearing Corporation is registered with the SEC, a member of FINRA and participant in SIPC.

Fund, trade, invest … instantaneously
Traditionally, the time required to open a brokerage account is measured in hours or days. Apex will demonstrate how a customer can instantaneously open and fund a brokerage account and place trades the same day. We illustrate how a company can leverage Apex’s RESTful APIs to create the fastest and simplest user experience for their customers. In an age when attention spans barely the length of a 20-minute presentation, we will show you how our technology captures the customer and gets them invested before they can consider abandoning the process. Apex’s effective automation and transparency sets a new standard for costs in a conventionally hi-touch industry.

Key takeaways:

How Apex enables fintech companies.
How you can use Apex’s APIs to change the way your customers interact with financial service companies.
How Apex simplifies the brokerage account-opening and -funding process to get your customer to market as fast as possible

Presenters:

Sam McIngvale, VP Engineering
smcingvale@apexclearing.com

Emily Auer, Business Development
eauer@apexclearing.com

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FinDEVr Live: CenturyLink Enables Developers to Build Applications with Docker and Containerization

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: CenturyLink, FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco

centurylink.com/business/enterprise | labs.ctl.io & ctl.io | ctl.io/blog & thinkgig.com | @CenturyLinkENT & @CenturyLinkCLD

CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) is a global communications, hosting, cloud, and IT services company enabling millions of customers to transform their businesses and their lives through innovative technology solutions. CenturyLink offers network and data systems management, Big Data analytics, and IT consulting, and operates more than 55 data centers in North America, Europe, and Asia. The company provides broadband, voice, video, data, and managed services over a robust 250,000-route-mile U.S. fiber network and a 300,000-route-mile international transport network.

CenturyLink presents: architecting your applications with Docker and Containerization
The CenturyLink Labs team is focused on creating open-source software and helping developers leverage the benefits of Docker and containers. We provide technical content and tools to help developers start using Docker. Learn how Docker and containerized applications are disrupting the software life cycle, accelerating business agility and facilitating microservice-oriented architectures.

Key takeaways:

Docker
Containerized applications
CenturyLink’s open-source projects

Presenter: David Gardner, Senior Program Manager, CenturyLink Cloud
LinkedIn

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FinDEVr Live: Markit’s Technology Shows Modernization and Modularity as Keys to Rich UX

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco, Markit

Markit is a leading global provider of financial information services. We provide products that enhance transparency, reduce risk, and improve operational efficiency. Our customers include banks, hedge funds, asset managers, central banks, regulators, auditors, fund administrators, and insurance companies. Founded in 2003, Markit employs 4,000 people in 11 countries. Markit shares are listed on Nasdaq under the symbol MRKT.

Markit perspective on our products

Using browser-based technologies and a capabilities-oriented modular approach, we can create anticipatory, personalized experiences that make desktop and terminal replacements a thing of the present. We will cover F2 (openf2.org), an open source foundation and web integration framework, as well as several key Markit capabilities (charting, smart text, personalization) as key building blocks for multi-party, integrated experiences.

Key takeaways:

What F2 is, and how it can solve brokerage, wealth management, and banking-related problems
The ease with which Amazon-like, personalized experiences for financial services can be created
Markit’s capabilities and deep experience with key technologies for financial services, such as charting and super text

Presenter: Tim Burcham, Head of Labs
LinkedIn | tim.burcham@markit.com

For the past 16 years, Burcham has worked with Markit (formerly Wall Street On Demand) architecting, coding, managing, mentoring, and leading teams to deliver high-quality websites and rich user experiences under incredibly high-traffic volumes and tight timeframes.

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FinDEVr Live: Modo Payments Shows Developers How Digital is the New Mobile

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco, Modo Payments, modoPAYMENTS

modopayments | @getmodo

Modo is connecting commerce to the new digital economy. Modo’s platform operates like a shipping container for intermodal payments. Value can be loaded into the container from a variety of systems, delivered across one or more channels, and arrive at a wide variety of destinations. Modo connects different types of value as well, including cards and accounts, and currencies such as digital, loyalty, offers, gifts, and cryptocurrencies. Modo also connects directly to mobile phones, with an innovative Connected Beacon that makes beacons two-way, instead of one-way, interactions.

Mobile payments are dead … long live digital payments
Mobile payments are the solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. Modo’s CEO will describe his voyage of discovery from mobile to digital and demonstrate why connecting containers is the next big wave in payments.

Key takeaways:

Why digital is the new mobile
How connecting commerce breaks the logjam
Get a tour of Modo, an awesome solution for connecting commerce to the digital economy

Presenters:

Bruce Parker, CEO, Founder
LinkedIn | bruce@modopayments.com

Parker is a self-declared payments geek, a visionary and strategist for some of the largest and most innovative payments-technology companies in the world. Parker has created new products, built partnerships, and shaped strategies that have moved the payments industry.

Aaron Wilkinson, Chief Architect, Founder
LinkedIn | aaron@modopayments.com

Wilkinson has a decade-and-a-half of experience in software engineering that began with a foundation of real-time, embedded software for high-end military vehicles. He has branched out to many other fields, from user interfaces to software architecture and web services.

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FinDEVr Live: Clarify API Turns Audio and Video into Actionable Intelligence

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: Clarify, FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco

clarify.io | clarify.io/blog | @clarifyio

The Clarify.io API gives you the ability to search and understand your audio and video to make them actionable.

Don’t be a Smaug, reinvest!
You’ve collected terabytes of recordings. You protect them like Smaug protected his gold. If someone wants to hear what a trader said to a customer, they face a multi-day, 15-step process just to listen to it. That’s insane. Recordings are full of data that could be used to make gold. You could help clients get better information faster. You could see patterns before they appear in trade data. You could extract relationship information that belongs to the company, but instead compliance officers hoard it like gold and discard it as soon as the retention policy allows. “Honey, where did you put that bag of money?” “Oh, I threw it out. I didn’t think we needed it anymore.”

Key takeaways:

There’s a lot of actionable data buried in your compliance recordings.
That actionable data is worth a lot of money.
It’s easier to get at than you think.

Presenter:
Paul Murphy, CEO
LinkedIn | @prmurphy | paul@clarify.io

Murphy has spent 20 years in tech, including 10 years building systems for clients like J.P. Morgan and Saloman Brothers. He later joined Adeptra as CTO, a pioneer in automated outbound calling for credit-card fraud detection. He has now dedicated his time to leveraging emerging voice processing.

Ivo Rothschild, VP, Research and Development

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FinDEVr Live: Coinalytics Helps Businesses Leverage the Blockchain for Actionable Intelligence

By David Penn Posted on October 7, 2015
Categories: Coinalytics, FinDEVr 2015, FinDEVr 2015 San Francisco

coinalytics | blog.coinalytics.co | @coinalytics

Driven by the vision of decoding the world’s most powerful dataset, Coinalytics has developed an end-to-end intelligence platform, combining a variety of datasets and analytics to provide actionable insights and operational intelligence to the bitcoin industry. The path-breaking platform brings real-time machine learning and graph analytics capabilities to the blockchain.

Decoding the blockchain
The blockchain is the underlying ledger of bitcoin, where every transaction is recorded. Due to its decentralized and pseudonymous nature, understanding the data and deriving actionable insights in real time is no small challenge. We will cover a high-level overview of the Coinalytics platform and its architecture, taking a deep dive into the API. We explore some use-cases and applications for real-time blockchain intelligence.

Key takeaways:

Leveraging the blockchain for compliance and operational intelligence
Understanding the challenges of real-time blockchain analytics
Interacting with the Coinalytics platform

Presenters:

Bill Gleim, Tech Lead
LinkedIn | @billgleim | bill@coinalytics.co

James Edwards, Principal Infrastructure Engineer

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Finovate
Blog

Author: David Penn

Finovate Alumni News

FinDEVr Live: Build Blockchain 2.0 Apps with Technology from Blockstack.io

FinDEVr Live: OpenTok from TokBox Enables Developers to Add Live Video, Voice, and Messaging to Apps

FinDEVr Live: Checkbook Introduces API for Digital Checks

FinDEVr Live: Temenos Introduces its B2B Financial Apps Marketplace

FinDEVr Live: Entrust Datacard Secures the Omnichannel Experience with a Trusted Identity

FinDEVr Live: Apex Clearing Helps Consumers Fund, Trade, and Invest in an Instant

FinDEVr Live: CenturyLink Enables Developers to Build Applications with Docker and Containerization

FinDEVr Live: Markit’s Technology Shows Modernization and Modularity as Keys to Rich UX

FinDEVr Live: Modo Payments Shows Developers How Digital is the New Mobile

FinDEVr Live: Clarify API Turns Audio and Video into Actionable Intelligence

FinDEVr Live: Coinalytics Helps Businesses Leverage the Blockchain for Actionable Intelligence