David Penn, Author at Finovate

BlackRock Acquires Online Investment Adviser, FutureAdvisor

By David Penn Posted on August 26, 2015
Categories: FutureAdvisor

When the going gets tough in today’s wealth-management business, the tough acquire robo-advisers.

International risk- and investment-management titan BlackRock has agreed to acquire FutureAdvisor, the San Francisco-based online investment adviser founded in May 2010, for an undisclosed sum.

In an email to clients and customers Wednesday morning, FutureAdvisor co-founder and CEO Bo Lu singled out BlackRock’s retirement-planning tools, specifically BlackRock’s CoRI retirement indexes. Lu added that the merger will allow the company to “build out new features at an even faster clip,” and assured clients there would be no change in the relationship between clients and FutureAdvisor.

“Our brand, our culture, and our people will work to serve you and improve your digital experience every day, just as we did before the acquisition,” Lu said.

From left: CEO Bo Lu, founder, and Joe Cianciolo, VP of business development, demonstrated FutureAdvisor’s technology at FinovateFall 2013 in New York.

FutureAdvisor provides a few services, such as a basic portfolio review, for free. For investors who want the full suite of services, FutureAdvisor Premium charges a flat 0.5% of funds managed to handle everything from fund selection, based on criteria and goals set by the investor, to periodic portfolio rebalancing. And rather than being a solely automated solution, FutureAdvisor also provides licensed advisers to answer questions and explain concepts, as well as service personnel to help investors navigate the platform.

The merger comes as robo-advisers in general, and FutureAdvisor in specific, have been making headlines. FutureAdvisor reached the $600 million-under-management milestone in June, and took its total capital to more than $20 million in May, courtesy of a $15 million investment led by Canvas Venture Fund’s Rebecca Lynn. Earlier this summer, FutureAdvisor launched its online investment library, and was named a 2015 Technology Pioneer by World Economic Forum.

Interestingly, FutureAdvisor came under takeover speculation in July, when an analyst at Seeking Alpha suggested that a merger between FutureAdvisor and market-data aggregator Yodlee (a fellow Finovate alum) was a good idea. Citing the company’s strategy of combining robo-advisory with human specialists, FutureAdvisor’s rapid growth, and the size of the average FutureAdvisor account of more than $150,000: “Can you say farm system?” the analyst wrote, “Are you seeing the fit potential?”

Headquartered in San Francisco, FutureAdvisor last appeared on the Finovate stage at FinovateFall 2013 in New York.

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Finovate Debuts: INETCO Analytics Helps FIs Leverage Transaction Data

By David Penn Posted on August 26, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, INETCO Systems

For financial institutions, there may be no more valuable information than real-time transaction data. And that may be why a company like INETCO, which has competed in more than one tech-rodeo since its 1984 founding, has developed technology to put real-time transaction data right where bank CMOs want and need it.

“Often this kind of software is very general,” INETCO’s VP of Product Marketing Marc Borbas explained to me in a conversation during FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose. “We flipped that on its head. ‘You’re a channel manager,’ we asked. ‘How do we provide you with the things you need to do well?'”

From left: Dallas Pretty, CFO, and Marc Borbas, vice president of product marketing, demonstrated INETCO Analytics at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

INETCO demonstrated its solution, INETCO Analytics, in its Finovate debut in San Jose, Calif., this past spring. The technology has been on the market since January 2015, and it functions as a self-service analytics application for channel managers. The ATM deployment of the technology was on display in San Jose, but Borbas says that other channels are just a matter of time. The point, he emphasized, was the fundamental shift away from focus on the device (i.e., the ATM, the POS terminal), and more focus on the customer and their actual interaction with the network.

“We ask all these questions about what the device is doing, whether it has paper, whether it has cash, how available it is,” Borbas said. “What if we looked instead at how customers are actually using it? And what if we did this not just for the ATM channel, but for any channel, mobile, online, branch, IVR, you name it … that’s what we’re doing with INETCO Analytics.”

Company facts:

INETCO was founded in June 1984
Headquartered in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Produced more than 100% revenue growth annually since 2012
Serves more than 150 banking, retail, telecommunications, and payment-processing customers in more than 50 countries.
Bijan Sanii is CEO

How it works

The special sauce at the heart of INETCO Analytics is how the technology is able to pull transaction data from the network, and the plaform’s ability to package that data into “role-specific” solutions. INETCO manages to pull this off with a patented set of technologies (seven of them, to be specific) that do not rely on agents on the ATM—no changes to the transaction switch or host, no data warehouse or data mart in the FIs environment is touched.

“What’s nice is that you don’t have to change your app,” Borbas said. “It’s a very light way to get at that data.”

INETCO Analytics currently provides ATM content managers with essential information about where their customers are, which ATMs are being used most frequently and when, whether there are competing ATMs in the area, and more. The technology even lets channel managers know who their best customers are, as revealed by ATM-usage data, at least, as well as cash-utilization rates and levels.

“You can see if there are cash dispensers, or other banks, and use that to refine your placement strategy,” Borbas said. He also talked about how the solution could help ATM channel managers see just how efficiently their machines are working. “When you run a large ATM estate,” he explained, “you want to know where do you have lineups building, where are you disappointing customers, where is someone hitting the end of a queue and leaving because they don’t want to do business with you.”

Borbas says INETCO can see the transactions not only as they happen, but also how frequently those transactions occur. “It’s the next best thing to having a college intern sitting by the machine watching people go by,” he says.

INETCO’s role in bringing big (transaction) data to banks comes after three decades of experience producing network software. Borbas said while building network software has been good for the company, there was a realization that much might be gained by turning the equation around.

“IT people were saying that the transaction data flowing through the channel would be valuable to marketing folks,” Borbas said. So now, instead of focusing on software that runs networks, INETCO is making sure the “network is monitoring the software.”

The future

INETCO has had a busy 2015. In addition to launching Analytics at the beginning of the year, and demonstrating the technology at Finovate in the spring, INETCO in May forged a partnership with Mexico’s Edenred, a corporate services provider with more than 2 million users, and inked a deal with BECU (Boeing Employees Credit Union; $12 billion in assets) to deploy its Analytics platform with the 850,000+ member credit union.

“It’s no secret that omnichannel is big with bankers,” Borbas said, adding that the next step for INETCO Analytics will be to take the technology beyond ATMS to channels such as mobile and POS. He says that 2015 is an ideal time for the channel expansion, and that it’s “just a matter of deciding which one.”

INETCO will be guided by what Borbas called “the pain-point story.” The company made the bet that somewhere in the bank the data exists and that it’s just hard to get. The issues with ATMs in terms of time lags made it a first choice, but the company is looking for the next best way to deploy the technology. “Who is going through the most pain to get the information they need?” Borbas said, framing the question. “We have the aspirin.”

Check out the FinovateSpring 2015 demo video for INETCO below.

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FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Hedgeable

By David Penn Posted on August 25, 2015
Categories: FinovateFall 2015 Sneak Peek, Hedgeable

The Sneak Peek series looks at the innovators demoing live on stage at FinovateFall 2015. Be sure to pick up your tickets to our annual autumn conference, and we’ll see you in New York!

Hedgeable is the first private banking platform for millennials.

Features:

Ultra high-net-worth wealth platform for millennials
No account minimum
Killer member rewards available to all clients

Why it’s great
The private banking experience has finally been democratized.

Presenters
Michael Kane, Master Sensei
Co-founder and Master Sensei at Hedgeable, Kane was formerly with Bridgewater Associates.
LinkedIn

Matthew Kane, Chief Ninja
Co-founder and Chief Ninja at Hedgeable, Kane formerly ran Morefield Partners, a startup consulting firm.
LinkedIn

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FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Quisk

By David Penn Posted on August 25, 2015
Categories: FinovateFall 2015 Sneak Peek, Quisk

The Sneak Peek series looks at the innovators demoing live on stage at FinovateFall 2015. Be sure to pick up your tickets to our annual autumn conference, and we’ll see you in New York!

Quisk partners with banks to enable the next-generation of mobile money: bank-led, interoperable and more useful. In short, Quisk enables consumers to use their money without needing cash or cards.

Features of Quisk:

Cloud-based, direct-debit platform for straightforward integration to back-end, core banking systems
Bank-led, interoperable and more useful mobile money
Safe, secure, and convenient for consumers

Why it’s great
Quisk’s innovative technology platform and business model enables banks to create the next generation of mobile money.

Presenters

Dan Glessner, Chief Marketing Officer
Glessner leads the marketing function at Quisk Inc. with prior leadership experience at Hewlett-Packard, Palm, Trend Micro, and Symantec. He holds a master’s in business administration from Harvard Business School.
LinkedIn

Praveen Amancheria, Chief Technology Officer
Amancheria leads all technology and product development at Quisk Inc. Formerly, he held leadership roles at CyberSource. He has a master’s in computer science from Michigan State University.
LinkedIn

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FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Soundpays

By David Penn Posted on August 25, 2015
Categories: FinovateFall 2015 Sneak Peek, Soundpays

The Sneak Peek series looks at the innovators demoing live on stage at FinovateFall 2015. Be sure to pick up your tickets to our annual autumn conference, and we’ll see you in New York!

The mobile wallet from Soundpays is an entirely unique system in the world of mobile payments and the first to enable secure transactions with nothing more than regular sound waves.

Features of Soundpays:

Requires only a microphone/speaker and internet connection to work
No merchant hardware to install
Works on all mobile phones

Why it’s great
Soundpays integrates into existing POS and e-commerce engines and makes nearly all interactive media a living buy-button.

Presenters

Peter Misek, CEO, Founder
Misek is a globally recognized technology analyst with almost two decades’ experience on Wall Street, Bay Street, and City of London, including 15 years of VC experience.

Jason Squire, CFO, Founder
Creating Canada’s first 4G network in the early 2000s is just one of Squire’s notable achievements; he has a decade-plus of mobile- and cloud-development expertise.

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Finovate Debuts: Slice Introduces Intelligent Shopping Assistant API

By David Penn Posted on August 25, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, Slice

It is no exaggeration to say that when it comes to providing consumers and FIs with unprecedented insight into consumer spending, Slice truly takes it to another level.

And that level is Level 3: the item level data of what is actually purchased rather than what is called Level 1 data that simply tells you where you spent money. The difference between Level 1 data and Level 3 data, explained Karen Chu, Slice’s Director of Business Development, is the difference between knowing that you spent $200 at Macy’s on something last month, and knowing that you bought a cashmere sweater, two shirts, and a few pair of socks.

Traditionally, FIs only have access to Level 1 data. But the growing use of electronic receipts both online and offline has enabled technology companies like Slice to leverage the data in these e-receipts to give consumers new tools to manage their financial life, and to provide FIs with new ways to engage and market to their customers.

Pictured: Harpinder Singh, CEO and co-founder of Slice, demonstrated the Slice Platform API at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

“We have built an absolutely world-class extraction-and-categorization technology,” said Slice co-founder and CEO Harpinder Singh from the FinovateSpring stage. “We extract information from electronic receipts, categorize it, and make it available via a white label API.”

Company facts:

Founded in 2010
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California
More than 2 million users

How it works

Slice works by scanning the data in e-receipts in your email inbox, and extracting the level-3 or item-level information. The technology works with the vast majority of email types, according to Singh, and the applications of the data range from package tracking to building more exacting PFM apps to helping FIs better target and customize offers and rewards.

Scanning item-level detail makes budgeting more accurate for the consumer, and can provide more flexibility in setting spending controls. The item-level detail also includes warranty information and can be used to alert the purchaser in the event of a product recall or even a subsequent price drop.

Combining credit-card information with the item-level detail from Slice can also be used as an anti-fraud tool. Slice can alert the consumer, for example, when a card charge does not have an accompanying electronic receipt. Small businesses can take advantage of the technology to track expenses and tax deductions for employees.

A perfect example of the technology at work was Citibank’s trial-use of Slice’s prototype—an app called Citiscape—as part of the Citi Mobile Challenge last year (Slice was a finalist). Citiscape combined the transactions Citi sees on credit cards with the e-receipts Slice sends to the e-mail inbox. “We know what you actually bought at Amazon,” Chu said. “Not just ‘Travel,’ but where. Not just ‘Baby Products’, but which ones.”

“Data enrichment enables a lot of wonderful things,” Singh concluded from the Finovate stage this spring. “People are more engaged with your apps. They are spending more time looking at their purchases and tracking what they bought. And with the item-level information you can today monetize these users much better than the banks can.”

The future

Slice came to Finovate to make offers/deals with companies, as well as meet with bank-data aggregators and companies looking to provide personalized experiences. “Finovate provides a wide playing field,” Chu said. “Not just traditional financial service companies, but up and comers, as well. There’s a breadth and depth.”

For Slice, this includes talking with everyone from the Yodlees of the world to the Plaids (both Finovate and FinDEVr alums). The variety of use cases for the technology gives both established banks and startups different opportunities to leverage Slice’s item-level data.

“We built the API for various spaces,” said Chu. “Fintech, commerce—we don’t want to be siloed. We are agnostic as to what partners have.”

Try Slice on iOS here. Or Slice for Android users here.

Check out the FinovateSpring 2015 demo video for Slice below.

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FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Sliced Investing

By David Penn Posted on August 25, 2015
Categories: FinovateFall 2015 Sneak Peek, Sliced Investing

The Sneak Peek series looks at the innovators demoing live on stage at FinovateFall 2015. Be sure to pick up your tickets to our annual autumn conference, and we’ll see you in New York!

Sliced Investing is democratizing access to elite investments for as little as $10,000 and will demo Sliced Institutional, a platform solely for RIAs.

Features:

Access to hedge funds and private equity
Automates all tasks associated with private investments
Has intelligent portfolio recommendations, streamlined reporting, custodial integrations and more

Why it’s great
Say good-bye to operational obstacles. With Sliced, RIAs can grow their practice while providing incredible investment opportunities for their clients.

Presenters

Akhil Lodha, CTO, Co-founder
Lodha leads the engineering, product, and data science teams. Prior to co-founding Sliced, Lodha worked with Motif Investing and Citigroup.
LinkedIn

Mike Furlong, CEO, Co-founder
Furlong, CEO of Sliced Investing Inc., previously worked in business development at Twilio and as a trader at Citigroup in their distressed municipal debt division.
LinkedIn

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FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Capriza

By David Penn Posted on August 25, 2015
Categories: Capriza, FinovateFall 2015 Sneak Peek

The Sneak Peek series looks at the innovators demoing live on stage at FinovateFall 2015. Be sure to pick up your tickets to our annual autumn conference. We’ll see you in New York!

Capriza modernizes your business by simplifying and mobilizing critical workflows. Capriza’s platform enables IT to mobilize any legacy application with no coding, APIs, upgrades, or integrations.

Features:

Most secure way to go mobile—no data stored on device; ISO 27001 compliant
Modernizes legacy applications; inherits business logic
No business disruption; immediate deployment

Why it’s great
Capriza provides the fastest, most cost-effective approach to mobilizing enterprise applications. The solution applies to packaged applications—SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, etc.—and to custom applications.

Presenters

Ivan Prafder, Vice President Regional Business Development
Prafder is a highly enthusiastic technology leader, motivated by helping organizations bring their business processes into the 21st century. He is an agent for change and has a passion for harnessing innovation.
LinkedIn

Stephen Insdorf, Senior Solutions Engineer
Insdorf is a 20-year veteran of the technology sector with enterprise-level, customer-facing technical roles at SAIC, Fujitsu, Symantec, and Salesforce.
LinkedIn

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FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Buzz Points

By David Penn Posted on August 25, 2015
Categories: Buzz Points, FinovateFall 2015 Sneak Peek

The Sneak Peek series looks at the innovators demoing live on stage at FinovateFall 2015. Be sure to pick up your tickets to our annual autumn conference, and we’ll see you in New York!

Buzz Points is a localized banking-rewards program and innovative mobile app. Sophisticated geo-targeting and gamification engage cardholders, influencing their profitable behaviors.

Features:

Proven to drive significant lift in interchange revenue
46% lower attrition rate among Buzz Points enrollees
Ongoing marketing and cross-sell campaigns provided and delivered entirely by Buzz Points

Why it’s great
Buzz Points is the only rewards program to strengthen local, community connections while incorporating sophisticated technology that customizes the experience to the cardholder’s current location.

Presenter

Michael Hall, Director of Product Marketing
Hall has spent the last 10+ years in startups developing, marketing, and delivering new products to the financial technology and social media markets. Sometimes at the same time.
LinkedIn

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on August 24, 2015
Categories: Avoka, DRAFT, Expensify, Flint Mobile, FutureAdvisor, Larky, Matchi, Open Bank Project, Patch of Land, Payoneer, Venmo

On Finovate.com

“More than 30 Alums Earn Spots on the Hot Topics 100 Most Influential People in Fintech Roster”

“Finovate Debuts: How DRAFT Offers Transparency into Investment Performance”

Around the web

Patch of Land to directly secure all existing and future loans with underlying collateral.

The College Investor reviews FutureAdvisor.

The Denver Post profiles Broomfield-based Avoka Technologies. See Avoka at FinovateFall 2015 in New York City in September.

Matchi launches new insurance category.

Pymnts interviews Flint Mobile’s CEO Greg Goldfarb on how its solution will adapt to the upcoming liability shift.

Larky to power CoastHills Credit Union’s privi, a mobile app that delivers instant member savings and loyalty.

Let’s Talk Payments looks at Venmo and its new group-payments feature.

Payoneer partners with freelance jobs platform, Nebbish.com.

Expensify launches real-time expense reports.

Royal Bank of Scotland hosts hackathon in partnership with Open Bank Project.

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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Finovate Debuts: FundAmerica Helps Crowdfunders Stay Compliant

By David Penn Posted on August 21, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, FundAmerica

Ask FundAmerica founder and CEO Scott Purcell what his company’s services are and who they are for, and his answer is refreshingly simple: “Anyone raising money online needs to use our services,” Purcell says with a smile. “We’re the guys that keep you from going to jail.”

Put a little less colorfully, FundAmerica provides an API- and browser-based compliance platform for crowdfunders. FundAmerica’s back-end compliance solutions include everything from AML and escrow services, to payment processing and state dealer representation; in short, all that is needed by investment advisers, broker-dealers and others to raise capital pursuant to 506(c), 506(b), Reg A+, and rule 4(a)(6) crowdfunding regulations.

FundAmerica founder and CEO Scott Purcell demonstrated FundAmerica’s API for crowdfunding platform compliance at FinovateSpring 2015.

At FinovateSpring 2015, FundAmerica demonstrated its API for crowdfunding platform compliance. Purcell noted that in a few years “every business, every real estate developer, anyone looking for capital will be doing so online. And that presents a very complex set of problems so it can be done effectively and safely.”

Fortunately for crowdfunders, there’s FundAmerica.

Company facts:

Founded in November 2011
Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada
Raised $2.25 million in angel investment
Signed 125 crowdfunding platforms
Opened more than 40 escrows in the first three months
Scott Purcell is founder and CEO

How it works

FundAmerica’s platform ensures that crowdfunders are doing everything correctly and in a compliant manner. This begins with collecting issuer information, and associated persons such as executive officers, directors and major shareholders. This ensures that the AML process is off to a compliant-start, including background “bad-actor checks” with the SEC.

Details of the offering can be recorded on the platform for ready provision to the registered transfer agent. This takes account of both basic information, legends or restrictions, as well as whether the offering is equity or debt.

Once all the information is entered into the system, the subscription and escrow agreements are generated for investors to sign. At this point, Purcell explained, “The transaction is in the system, it’s registered, AML has been run, due diligence has been looked at. Everything is ready for this issuer to now conduct a compliant online fund-raise—either by themselves or through a crowdfunding platform.”

Potential investors visiting the crowdfunding platform see information about the company, its leadership, background, metrics, and so on. The difference is that with FundAmerica, each offering will include an “Invest Now” button that, when pressed, fast-tracks the process.

A pop-up menu allows investors to enter in their name, contact details, amount of investment and payment method. Then, relevant documents to facilitate the transfer, such as an electronic ACH debit-authorization form and a substitute 1099 form, appear automatically for completion and electronic signing.

All completed documents are stored online for compliance and emailed to the investor for their records.

“The idea is to make it as easy and as friction-free as possible for the issuer to get the money into escrow,” said Purcell. “For the back-end service providers to do the AML checks [necessary] on the issuer; to [ensure] the funds that are going to transfer, are settled and cleared; and that all of the blocking and tackling on the banking ecosystem is able to happen.”

On the issuer side, the system provides an alert that lets him or her know both when new funds have been pledged as well as when they actually arrive in escrow. Simultaneously, the back-end processes ensure everything is happening in the proper sequence: AML is conducted before the securities are actually sold, and funds are settled and cleared before anything is released from escrow and transferred to the issuer.

“That’s what FundAmerica does,” Purcell said. “We package the ecosystem—the plumbing—for the crowdfunding industry.”

The future

“People are excited that someone is doing what FundAmerica is doing,” Purcell said. “There’s no one else doing it.” FundAmerica combines technical knowledge with a strong compliance-oriented management team, a good place to be “when a company’s security attorneys come to us,” Purcell says. “We’re good, authoritative people for them to talk to. We give out a lot of free advice.”

Since its Finovate debut, FundAmerica launched its “flex” payment-processing feature, which allows platforms to separate their share from an issuer payment and forward the rest to investors. The feature is available through both the online portal as well as the API, and serves as a boon for platforms that earn revenues from the difference between the rate a sponsor or developer pays and the rate paid out to investors.

June 2015 marked the month FundAmerica unveiled its FundAmerica Stock Transfer (“FAST”) service, a registered transfer agent for Reg A+ and 506b/c. Using RESTful APIs to make it easy to integrate into crowdfunding platforms, FAST helps with investor records management and other tools to manage changes in ownership, payment histories, vesting details, and more.

New initiatives aside, FundAmerica has just begun a Series A funding round, so the company is actively looking for and talking with investors. Beyond that FundAmerica is eager to make strategic partners. “We are the Intel Inside for crowdfunding platforms,” Purcell said. “We build solutions to help crowdfunders conduct a compliant operation with the least amount of investor friction.”

Check out the FinovateSpring 2015 demo video for FundAmerica below

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Finovate Blog

Author: David Penn

BlackRock Acquires Online Investment Adviser, FutureAdvisor

From left: CEO Bo Lu, founder, and Joe Cianciolo, VP of business development, demonstrated FutureAdvisor’s technology at FinovateFall 2013 in New York.

Finovate Debuts: INETCO Analytics Helps FIs Leverage Transaction Data

From left: Dallas Pretty, CFO, and Marc Borbas, vice president of product marketing, demonstrated INETCO Analytics at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Hedgeable

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Quisk

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Soundpays

Finovate Debuts: Slice Introduces Intelligent Shopping Assistant API

Pictured: Harpinder Singh, CEO and co-founder of Slice, demonstrated the Slice Platform API at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Sliced Investing

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Capriza

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Buzz Points

More Than 30 Alums Make Hot Topics 100 Most Influential People in Fintech

Finovate Alumni News

Finovate Debuts: FundAmerica Helps Crowdfunders Stay Compliant

FundAmerica founder and CEO Scott Purcell demonstrated FundAmerica’s API for crowdfunding platform compliance at FinovateSpring 2015.

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