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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Refine Intelligence has introduced its Digital Customer Outreach for Check Fraud Prevention solution.
The technology automatically contacts customers whose checks have been flagged as suspicious, and provides a user-friendly digital inquiry process to help customers resolve issues in seconds.
Refine Intelligence made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2023 in London.
Refine Intelligencelaunched its Digital Customer Outreach for Check Fraud Prevention solution this week. The technology, which works with all existing check fraud detection systems, will help banks and other financial institutions deal with an increase in check fraud due to both mail theft and the development of advanced counterfeiting techniques.
Digital Customer Outreach for Check Fraud Prevention automatically contacts customers whose checks have been deemed suspicious. A user-friendly digital inquiry process that takes a few seconds to complete enables customers to review the flagged check and immediately verify key issues such as the amount and the payeee.
“Fraud teams are under time pressure to deal with a tidal wave of alerts about potentially fraudulent checks,” Refine Intelligence CEO and co-founder Uri Rivner said. “In an ideal world, they’d ask the customer about each alerted check, but chasing customers over the phone is expensive and irritating for everyone involved. This new solution closes the gap between detection and prevention by enabling customers to resolve alerts themselves. It works with any detection system, maximizing the current workflow and reducing fraud losses and operational costs for dealing with fraud claims.”
Refine Intelligence’s Digital Customer Outreach platform helps financial crime and compliance teams tackle a range of fraud and financial crime issues. The platform gives banks the ability to automatically contact customers to resolve both AML and check fraud alerts, as well as to automate enhanced due diligence (EDD). The technology leverages proprietary AI to glean insights into anomalous transactions, enabling fraud and compliance teams to learn the context in which the anomaly occurred and to determine whether the transaction is legitimate or not.
NCR Voyix has teamed up with customer interactive technology company Glia.
Glia will integrate its unified interaction capabilities into the mobile version of NCR Voyix’s digital banking platform.
Glia has won Finovate’s Best of Show award 10 times, including in the company’s debut (as SaleMove) at FinovateFall 2015.
NCR Voyix’s mobile banking app just got a lot more interactive.
Courtesy of a partnership with Glia, NCR Voyix will enhance the mobile version of its Digital Banking platform with unified interaction capabilities. Glia’s ChannelLess Architecture enables seamless transitions between multiple interaction channels: from phone calls and digital messaging to chatbots, video chats, and SMS. Now a part of NCR Voyix’s mobile solution, the technology will help banks and credit unions boost customer and member engagement and loyalty.
Glia Chief Product Officer Jay Choi talked about the importance of the mobile channel for a younger, generation of financial services customers. “Forcing customers to exit the mobile app experience to receive guidance or support results in inefficiencies, delays in resolutions, and frustration for all involved,” Choi explained. “With the integration of our digital-first tools into the NCR Voyix mobile app, we are empowering banks and credit unions to overcome this challenge, instead providing instant, personalized and seamless engagement where customers and members already are.”
Among the FIs to deploy the technology are Texas-based 5 Point Credit Union, which has credited Glia’s solution for increasing staff efficiency, simplifying processes, and reducing fraud. The credit union also underscored how the technology enhanced its ability to communicate and engage with its members, improving in-app support.
Founded in 2012 and headquartered in New York, Glia won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2015 (as SaleMove). The company has gone on to win a total of 10 Finovate Best of Show awards, including in its most recent appearance on Finovate’s digital stage in 2021.
Last month, Glia unveiled its responsible AI platform purpose-built for financial services companies called Glia Cortex. The technology provides personalized self-service experiences at scale, helps agents become more productive, and gives managers new insights into agent/customer interactions. Among the solution’s early adopters is Service 1st Federal Credit Union, a Danville, Pennsylvania-based institution founded in 1975.
NCR Voyix was formed in October 2023 when NCR Corporation split into two entities. The company’s ATM business was spun-off as NCR Atleos. NCR Voyix is the successor to NCR Corporation, which demoed its technology at FinovateSpring in 2016 and again in 2017.
Reconciliation and reporting services provider Kani Payments has partnered with issuer processor CLOWD9.
CLOWD9 will leverage Kani Payments’ platform to power its data reporting and reconciliation capabilities.
Kani Payments made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2023.
Reconciliation and reporting services provider Kani Payments has inked a partnership with CLOWD9. The cloud-native issuer processor selected Kani Payments to power its data reporting and reconciliation capabilities and help the company manage the unique data standardization requirements faced by banks and fintechs alike.
CLOWD9 will use Kani Payments’ SaaS platform to collect and standardize transaction data, including both authorization and settlement data from payment schemes. The platform will enable CLOWD9 to report to clients across the payment value chain faster, as well as provide enhanced and easy-to-understand data customization and visualization via the Kani Payments’ portal dashboard. This will empower clients with the flexibility to configure data as they choose.
“The sweet spot is taking standard data, formatting it for the individual needs of our mutual clients, and accelerating reconciliations with it,” CLOWD9 Chief Product Officer Richard Wray explained. “Kani Payments are the experts in that area and their understanding of the depth, detail, and specializations within the payment data value chain is unsurpassed.”
Headquartered in Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K., Kani Payments made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateSpring in San Francisco. At the conference, the company demoed how its automated reconciliation and reporting platform provides fully automated reconciliations, as well as automated legal, regulatory, and scheme reporting. Kani CCO Marc McCarthy used the example of a simple transaction at a coffee shop to explain the myriad actors – issuing bank, network, processor – that play a role in managing the data of even an everyday purchase. “Each one of those organizations has a different version of that event,” McCarthy said. “We here at Kani Payments provide a reconciliation and reporting platform that helps each one of those actors to have compliance, to have validation of their data, and to have insightful reports of what they can see with their information.”
Earlier this year, Kani Payments announced a partnership with core banking platform Pismo. The collaboration makes Kani’s platform available to Pismo’s bank, marketplace, and fintech clients. Vishal Dalal, Pismo CEO for North America, EMEA, and APAC said that the partnership “will unlock useful insights to help (financial institutions) make better, more informed decisions, shaping a new era for banking and payments.”
Kani Payments was founded in 2018. Aaron Holmes is CEO. Holmes co-founded the company following tenures at Flex-e-card, Global Processing Services, and NBS Card Solutions (now Wirecard).
Greenville, South Carolina-based MTC Federal Credit Union has turned to Mahalo Banking to enhance its member experience.
Mahalo’s technology will bolster MTC FCU’s offerings, including online account opening, Skip-a-Pay, and Savings Jar.
Mahalo Banking won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023.
MTC Federal Credit Union (MTC FCU), a credit union based in Greenville, South Carolina with assets of $292 million, has partnered with Mahalo Banking to enhance its member experience. Mahalo’s online and mobile banking solutions will power a range of member-centric features for the credit union, including a number of member-requested tools and services designed to streamline platform navigation and boost engagement.
“Mahalo’s committed member and core-centric focus, alongside their dedication to continuous innovation including security and neurodiversity solutions set them apart from other providers,” MTC FCU President/CEO William H. Love Jr. said. “Mahalo is a true partner in our endeavor to provide a comprehensive digital banking experience for our members while attracting new members looking for a state-of-the-art platform with an outstanding user experience.”
Among the enhanced self-service solutions that will be available to MTC FCU members in addition to online account opening are Skip-a-Pay and Savings Jar. Skip-a-Pay enables borrowers to defer loan payments for 90 days – over November, December, and January – when they make a donation of $36 to the MTC Federal Foundation. The foundation supports health and sustainability initiatives, funding for natural disaster relief, and financial education and scholarship awards. Skip-a-Pay eligible loans include personal, vehicle, recreational vehicle, ATV, motorcycle, and watercraft loans. Savings Jar is a round-up transactions feature that helps make saving an effortless part of everyday shopping.
“Our deep credit union ties enable our team to form strong bonds with the credit unions we serve, and that has been the case throughout our partnership with MTC Federal Credit Union,” Mahalo COO Denny Howell said. “Working with MTC Federal Credit Union allows us to deliver on what we do best, empowering the credit union with a member-centric platform that provides enhanced, user-friendly functionality and meets members where they are.”
Mahalo Banking won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in New York last year. At the conference, the company demoed its online banking solution that fully integrated comprehensive neurodiverse functionality directly into its platform. This innovation enables credit unions to support members who have unique needs ranging from color-blindness to autism, dyslexia, and epilepsy.
Founded in 2018, Mahalo Banking is headquartered in Troy, Michigan. The company’s June partnership announcement is only the latest deal the fintech has forged of late. Just a few weeks ago, the company reported that Texas-based Memorial Credit Union selected Mahalo as “an ideal partner to help transform and improve our digital offerings,” in the words of Memorial CU President and CEO Thomas Rogers. In May, Mahalo Banking partnered with Affinity Credit Union of Iowa. In April, the company announced that it was working with a pair of Michigan-based FIs: Gerber FCU and The Local CU.
A holiday-filled week that began with Father’s Day, continues through Juneteenth, and brings us the first official day of summer.
Don’t be surprised if this week yields a lower than usual fintech news flow as the temperatures rise and the days stretch long. We’ll keep you posted if you decide to step outside and enjoy the season.
Payments
Uruguayan cross-border payment platform dLocalforged a partnership with Lithuanian gaming marketplace Eneba.
Digital payments platform CleverCardsraises $8.5 million (€8 million).
Shift4acquires a majority stake in Vectron Systems, one of the largest European suppliers of point-of-sale (POS) systems to the restaurant and hospitality verticals.
This week’s edition of Finovate Global looks at recent fintech developments in Egypt.
Egyptian fintech Sahl raised $6 million in funding
An investment of $6 million will help Cairo-based fintech Sahl pursue its expansion in Saudi Arabia. The funds – courtesy of a Series A round led by Ayady for Investment and Development and featuring participation from existing investors Egypt Pay, Delta Electronic Systems, and E-Finance – will also help support Sahl’s mobile bill payment platform.
Sahl enables users to pay for more than 50 services, including electricity, water, mobile bill payments, and more via NFC-enabled, rechargeable prepaid cards. The firm also offers B2B solutions: the company’s Services Gateway serves as a central hub to aggregate billpay services for other payment processors and digital apps, while Sahl’s Acceptance solution helps businesses accept online payments. Founded in 2020, Sahl is among the few Egyptian companies to directly integrate with government agencies and telecom operators.
Ultimately, the company plans to grow into a more comprehensive financial services provider. For now, Sahl’s growth strategy involves becoming the dominant force in the payments market for utilities companies – a market worth EGP 250 billion a year.
“At Sahl, we are committed to addressing the challenges faced by consumers in utility payments, starting with electricity and expanding to water, gas, telecom, and various other essential services,” Sahl CEO Abdullah Assal said. “Our innovative use of NFC technology eliminates the need for consumers to leave their homes to charge prepaid cards, saving valuable time and effort.”
Sahl serves more than 12 million customers a month and 15 million households in Egypt.
HSBC Egypt to launch $31.5 million fund for SME-based fintechs
You don’t have to be Sahl to feel as if good funding fortunes are coming your way. HSBC Egypt will launch a new $31.5 million (EGP 1.5 billion) fund dedicated to small and medium-sized businesses in the fintech sector. The fund, which will be managed by EFG Holding, has secured approval from the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) as well as the backing of financial institutions such as the Suez Canal Bank. The fund is slated to go live in Q3 of 2024.
The focus on fintech is designed to take advantage of the spread of digital banking and payments in the region. But the initiative is part of a grander strategy by HSBC to encourage technological innovation and spur economic growth in Egypt.
Established in 1982, HSBC Bank Egypt supports a network of 100 branches and 20 mini-bank units throughout the country. The largest foreign bank in Egypt, HSBC Bank Egypt has total assets of approximately $7 billion and a market share of 7%.
Banknbox Egypt announced multiple strategic partnerships
Digital services and paytech provider Banknbox Egypt has inked strategic partnerships with banks and fintechs in eight countries so far in 2024. Backed by the Central Bank of Egypt, Banknbox has teamed up with firms and financial institutions in countries ranging from Iraq and Libya to Moldova and a number of African countries.
“We would like to thank the CBE for its continuous support in ensuring that Banknbox achieves its vision of transforming Egypt into a regional hub,” Banknbox Chairperson and Managing Director Bassem Mahmoud said.
Banknbox is a regional payment solutions and processor offering issuing and acquiring services, as well as value-added services such as billpay and fraud management. The company also offers integrated digital banking services, including mobile and internet banking, electronic wallets, eKYC and encoding services, and more. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Cairo, Banknbox began the year partnering with SWFT, a banking and finance platform for SMEs. The strategic partnership will give SMEs a suite of innovative banking solutions and tools for smart cash flow management.
“We believe that by uniting efforts with SWFT, we can revolutionize the way SMEs manage their finances,” Mahmoud said. “It’s a new opportunity for Banknbox to provide more services to the Egyptian market, relying on its regional platform in Egypt to serve companies and banks in the region. This strategic cooperation complements the company’s successes in achieving growth rates in the Egyptian market.”
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Central and Southern Asia
International e-wallet service provider and payment gateway STICPAY integrated with India’s real-time payments system, UPI.
Pakistan-based consultancy Dellsons Associates partnered with UAE-based NymCards to expand into Pakistan and the Middle East.
Indian digital lending platform Fibe raised $90 million in Series E funding.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Payments orchestration platform Paysecure announced a strategic alliance with a55 as part of its expansion plans in Latin America.
What challenges are small and medium-sized businesses facing when it comes to getting the capital they need when they need it? What role does technology – especially enabling technologies like automation and AI – play in helping make it easier for entrepreneurs and SMBs to access critical financing?
This week, Finovate VP and host of the Finovate Podcast Greg Palmer spoke with Marius Silvasan, CEO of eCapital, to discuss these and other issues important to small businesses and the financial services companies that serve them.
“SMBs in this current market are under pressure,” Silvansan explained in his Finovate Podcast interview. “They are challenged. And the reason behind that is we’ve come from an environment in which inflation is coming down, but has been high over the last year-and-a-half. We’ve come from an environment in which borrowing costs were near zero – and they’ve increased substantially over the last several years. And the labor market has been very tight, so it’s been tough for SMBs to hire, it’s been tough for SMBs to retain qualified personnel. So that’s made the environment for SMBs quite challenging over the several years.”
Headquartered in Miami, Florida, eCapital helps small and medium-sized businesses secure the financing they need in order to grow. Founded in 2006, eCapital offers a wide range of financing solutions including freight and invoice factoring, payroll funding, asset-back lending, equipment refinancing, and lines of credit.
Bud Financial, a data intelligence platform, has joined the open banking network of Akoya.
The move will help Bud Financial market its personalization solution and data insights to financial institutions.
Bud made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023 in New York last year.
Data intelligence platform Bud Financialhas joined the U.S. open banking ecosystem of Akoya. The move will make it easier for the company to enable financial services companies to offer their customers hyper-personalized financial experiences. The new resources will also help FIs take advantage of new growth and revenue opportunities.
“We’re really excited to bring together Bud’s AI banking personalization with Akoya’s unique data aggregation capabilities,” Bud CEO and Co-Founder Ed Maslaveckas said. “Banks and fintechs that work with Bud can leverage a full stack solution, bringing all consumer data into one place with access to tools that understand the data. This means anyone within a financial institution can create hyper-personalized experiences or insights, improving cross and up-sell of products.”
The combination of Bud’s AI-powered data enrichment techniques and Akoya’s secure and scalable open finance network of trusted data providers will offer FIs a number of major benefits. These include the ability to offer personalization at scale, enhanced personal finance management, data-driven risk management and cash flow analytics, as well as other efficiency gains that are achievable thanks to deep insights into customer data.
“Increased transparency, enhanced customer experiences, and streamlined operations are just a few of the ways this partnership will deliver real value,” Akoya CEO Behram Panthaki said.
Bud is the second Finovate alum that Boston, Massachusetts-based Akoya has partnered with this year. Last month, Akoya announced a strategic partnership with white-label data platform 9Spokes, which won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2023. 9Spokes aggregates permissioned business data from multiple sources to help companies improve financial management and strategic decision-making. The Auckland, New Zealand-based firm was founded in 2012.
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in New York, Bud made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateFall in New York. At the conference, the company showed how its generative AI platform can transform bank data into a comprehensive financial picture with customer-level, transaction-level, and portfolio-level insights to power better decision-making. Bud securely enriches 300 million transactions a month and boasts that “zero” of its 100+ employees across four countries have access to client data.
Social investing and trading platform eToro has partnered with social media platform X.
eToro will publish investment education content on X, leveraging investment experts and thought leaders from its eToro Academy.
Founded in 2007, eToro has won Finovate Best of Show awards on each of its six Finovate appearances.
It may not be a step on the road to making X a payments superapp, but the decision to partner with eToro to publish investment education content on the social media platform is among the most interesting fintech/financial-related moves from X to date.
eToro and X announced this week that they are working together to provide investment content on the social media platform via video, posts, and Spaces. The content will consist of insights and analysis from thought leaders from the investing community who will discuss a combination of breaking financial news, top trends in finance and investing, as well as investment fundamentals live on the platform. The material will be free to all X users and will be available in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the UAE.
“We believe that there is power in shared knowledge,” eToro Co-founder and CEO Yoni Assia said. “It’s why we created a collaborative, social investment platform, and it’s why we prioritize financial education through our eToro Academy. Having been long-term collaborators with X, we are delighted to extend our partnership to provide more opportunities for financial learning and the sharing of investment insights on X.”
The partnership announcement comes with a renewed agreement for title sponsorship for X’s real-time Cashtag feature. This feature provides charting tools and data from TradingView on stocks, cryptocurrencies, and other assets, as well as the ability to trade and invest with eToro.
“Bringing eToro Academy to X is testament to the strength of the partnership we have built together and the continued growth of the financial investment conversation on X,” the social media platform’s CEO Linda Yaccarino said. “The continued success of our collaboration will bring more high-quality video content to the service, building on our innovation around cashtags and new features.”
To Yaccarino’s point about the growth of what used to be called “fintwit,” it’s worth knowing that there were more than 1.4 billion posts on X last year that were about trading or investing. This figure reflected year-over-year growth of 54%.
“We know that an increasing number of people turn to social media for accessible, relevant financial content,” Assia said. “It provides a forum for many who were excluded by more traditional channels. Partnering with X will enable us to deliver the very best in financial education to a global audience.”
Founded in 2007, eToro supports more than 35 million registered users and investors on its trading and investing platform. The company offers a collaborative investing community to help investors and traders learn the skills and develop the tools they need in order to reach their financial goals, whether through traditional assets or non-traditional assets. One of Finovate’s earliest and most popular alums, eToro won Best of Show in each of its six Finovate appearances from 2011 through 2017.
Munich, Germany-based Hawk announced an extension of its Series B funding round this week.
The amount of the extension was not disclosed. But the anti-financial crime regtech said that the investment did increase its valuation.
Hawk made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring in 2022.
Germany-based regtech Hawkannounced an extension of its Series B funding round. The amount of the extension was not disclosed, but the company noted that the investment did significantly boost its valuation. The extension included funding from Rabo Investments, and also featured participation from existing investors BlackFin Capital Partners, Sands Capital, DN, Picus, and Coalition. Hawk will use the additional capital to fuel international growth and to help the firm meet growing demand for its AI-powered anti-financial crime solutions.
“We’re honored that Rabobank has recognized the significance of our technology and joins us in building a global market-leading enterprise, while also benefiting first-hand from our solutions and experience,” Hawk CEO Tobias Schweiger said. “I would also like to gratefully thank our existing investors for their ongoing support and look forward to continuing our partnership.”
Hawk, which rebranded from “Hawk AI” earlier this year, offers anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-the-financing-of-terrorism (CTF) technology that leverages explainable AI to detect more financial crime and reduce false positives. In fact, the company’s AI-powered technology delivers a 3x to 5x increase in risk detection and a 70% average reduction in the number of false positives. Banks, payments companies, and other financial services firms benefit from the ability to combine AML transaction monitoring, payment screening, and (Perpetual KYC) pKYC in a single solution that also includes powerful fraud prevention capabilities.
“Rabobank has been working with machine learning applications for many years,” Rabo Investments Managing Director Martijn Scholtes said. “What impressed us most about Hawk is that they’re delivering compelling results using explainable AI. Their advanced screening, detection, and monitoring capabilities align very well with our mission to build a more secure and robust financial ecosystem.”
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Munich, Germany, Hawk AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2022. At the conference, the company demoed its AML Surveillance Suite, which leverages traditional rule-based models and AI to provide financial institutions with next generation AML compliance. “AI should be used to achieve three major outcomes,” Hawk GM of North America Steve Liú explained at the event, “one, finding suspicious and risky behavior that peer rule systems simply cannot; two, decrease the number of false positives drastically by using behavioral profiling on top of existing rules; and third, that all of this is fully explainable for operators and auditors, and available to our users on a platform allowing for secure information sharing.”
Hawk began the year by appointing former HSBC executive Michael Shearer as its Chief Solution Officer. Less than a month later, the company introduced new APAC General Manager Robin Lee, formerly of Napier. In February, Hawk won the XCelent Advanced Technology 2024 award and, in May, the company earned a spot on the 2024 FinTech Global Fincrime Tech 50.
Earlier this year, we looked at how the drive for real-time payments in the West could benefit from studying the successes of India’s real-time payments network, UPI. Last week, we learned that there is at least one country in the Western hemisphere that’s taking us up on our suggestion and that country isn’t the United States, it’s Peru.
Launched in 2016, the National Payments Corporation of India’s United Payments Interface was built to support both peer-to-peer payments and transactions with merchants via mobile phone. The initiative has been hugely successful; in 2023, the number of UPI transactions exceeded 100 billion. The Indian government boasts that more digital transactions are completed in India than in any other country in the world.
Now, it looks like Peru is getting into the act. The Central Reserve Bank of Peru (BCRP) and India’s NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) have signed a deal to deploy a real-time payments system in Peru based on India’s UPI. This partnership makes Peru the first country in South America to adopt the technology. The development is a major feather in the cap of India’s fintech industry and another great example of how countries in Latin America are embracing fintech innovation to promote financial inclusion.
“This will undoubtedly offer new and accessible payment services to everyone, especially the unbanked population of Peru, complementing the existing payments industry,” BCRP governor Julio Velarde said. He referred to the partnership as a “significant step in strengthening and modernizing our payments system, aiming to expand access to digital payments in Peru.”
NIPL was launched in 2020 as the international arm of NCPI. Earlier this year, NIPL teamed up with French payments company Lyra Network to bring UPI payments to France. Outside of India, the UPI system is currently supported in Sri Lanka, Mauritius, the UAE, Singapore, Bhutan, and Nepal. Last month, NIPL announced that it was working to bring a UPI-type payment system to Namibia.
The arrival of UPI-based real-time payments in Peru will also bring innovations including QR code payments, biometric authentication, and AI-powered fraud detection. Alleviating the reliance on cash and enhancing financial inclusion and digital financial literacy are among the goals of the initiative.
It’s worth noting that Peru has made significant strides in helping move its citizens from the ranks of the un- and underbanked to full participants in the country’s financial system. In 2015, the number of adults with at least one financial product was approximately 35%. By 2020, this number had increased to more than 43% – and this was before the government’s pandemic-era decision that created millions of bank accounts for unbanked Peruvians to help facilitate aid payments.
Nevertheless, Peruvians remain relatively unbanked compared to those in neighboring countries. The unbanked constitute only 30% of the Brazilian population and only 26% of Chile’s. With a population of more than 32 million, Peru has its work cut out for it. But now, courtesy of NPCI, the third-largest nation in South America has help.
“We will be working together to address our common objective of promoting digital payments, financial inclusion, cost optimization, and transparency in the payment landscape, with scope for further scalability and adaptability, to embrace future technological advancements and market demands,” NPCI International CEO Ritesh Shukla said. “Once live, Peruvian citizens will gain access to an unparalleled level of convenience, security, and efficiency in financial transactions.”
For more on fintech news from around the world, be sure to check out our Finovate Global column, published every Friday afternoon.
Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity firm SpyCloud has raised $35 million in financing.
The capital will be used to expand the company’s solutions to help businesses investigate and defend themselves against cybercrime in general and account takeover fraud in specific.
SpyCloud won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2017 in New York.
In a round led by CIBC Innovation Banking, Texas-based cybersecurity company SpyCloud has secured $35 million in growth financing. The investment follows SpyCloud’s $110 million Series D fundraising from August 2023, and will be used to expand the firm’s solutions to help businesses investigate and defend themselves against financial crime.
“As the threat landscape continues to evolve, it’s imperative that digital identities are well protected since they’re the entry point for so many targeted attacks,” SpyCloud CEO and Co-Founder Ted Ross said. “Building automated solutions that combat cybercrime has been our vision since day one, and the financing we received from CIBC Innovation Banking will allow us to continue innovating and growing.”
SpyCloud’s total capital raised stands at more than $203 million, according to Crunchbase. CIBC Innovation Banking is the investment division of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
SpyCloud specializes in helping firms combat account takeover. The company’s platform scans and analyzes data from breaches, devices infected with malware, and the dark web to find employee login credentials that have been exposed. SpyCloud leverages this data to provide companies with actionable insights to enable them to blunt fraud losses, stop ransomware attacks, and fully investigate cybercrime incidents as they occur.
With customers ranging from Uber, Zscaler, and Samsonite to LendingTree, Canva, and the University of Oklahoma, SpyCloud recaptures 40 million exposed assets every week. The company’s technology seamlessly integrates into a variety of identity response and orchestration systems including Active Directory, Okta, Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, and more.
Founded in 2016, SpyCloud won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2017 in New York. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company has more than 550 customers around the world and has recaptured more than 560 billion identity assets. This spring, SpyCloud released its 2024 SpyCloud Identity Exposure Report, which indicated that more than 60% of all data breaches in 2023 were malware related.
“Threat actors are linking together identity records from hundreds of sources to impersonate their victims,” SpyCloud Chief Product Officer explained, “making it extremely difficult for platforms to differentiate between legitimate users and criminals.”
To this end, the report indicates that there is plenty that individuals can do to make it harder for them to be the victim of stolen credentials. Foremost among these strategies is better password hygiene. SpyCloud recaptured nearly 1.8 billion passwords from dark web sources in 2023 alone – a year-over-year increase of more than 80%. Unfortunately, it is not difficult to see how. Beneath a subhead titled, “The U.S. government continues to struggle with bad password practices,” the report observed “the most common passwords associated with .gov emails were password, pass1, and 123456.”
