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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Keytrade Bank, the first online bank in Belgium, has turned to Infosys Finacle to modernize its core banking system. Courtesy of the partnership, Keytrade Bank will swap out its legacy platform in favor of the Infosys Finacle suite. This will help the financial institution boost efficiency, accelerate time-to-market for products, and provide a superior experience for customers.
Keytrade Bank CEO Thierry Ternier noted in a statement that the new technology would “future-proof” the institution, and enable Keytrade Bank to “tackle the challenges of a fast-moving environment.” Keytrade Bank will subscribe to Infosys Finacle suite in a SaaS mode on the Microsoft Azure public cloud. This will facilitate the bank’s ability to leverage Finacle’s open API repository on the cloud, enabling easy and seamless integration with ecosystem partners.
Keytrade Bank is part of Credit Mutuel Arkea, one of the largest banking groups in France. The institution offers both banking and investment services to its retail customers, stemming from its origins as an online brokerage. The bank offers a current account with a €0.05 bonus for every transaction, as well as a savings account and a trading account. Keytrade also provides investment plans for as little as €25 euros per month, online portfolio management, and an open architecture funds supermarket with more than 660 funds.
The deployment of core banking technology from Infosys Finacle will help further Keytrade Bank’s development into a full-fledged bank. Founded in 1998 as VMS-Keytrade, the institution secured its banking status in 2002 when it acquired RealBank. Keytrade Bank maintains an impressive array of trading tools, including its professional day-trading and trend trading platform, Keytrade Pro. The company’s partnership with Infosys Finacle gives it the opportunity to bring its banking business up to a comparable level of innovation and service.
“With Finacle, Keytrade Bank has a core banking solution that has proven itself around the world for accelerating innovation, driving automation and operational excellence, and helping deepen customer engagements,” Infosys Finacle Chief Business Officer and Global Head Sanat Rao said. “This collaboration marks yet another milestone in our expanding presence in Europe and underlines our commitment to helping European banks stay ahead in the digital age.”
Headquartered in Bangalore, India, Infosys Finacle has been a Finovate alum since 2009. In the years since, the company has grown into a major digital banking solution provider, and is now a part of EdgeVerve Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Infosys. The company offers solutions for a variety of banking needs including core banking, lending, digital engagement, payments, cash management, wealth management, treasury operations, the blockchain, and more. Banks in more than 100 countries use Finacle’s technology to help a billion people and millions of businesses improve the way they save, invest, borrow, and make payments.
A number of sources are reporting that FIS has acquired Bond Financial Technologies for an undisclosed sum.
The acquisition was first reported by Fintech Business Weekly’s Jason Mikula, who subsequently shared an internal note from FIS describing the acquisition.
Neither company has commented publicly about the acquisition reports.
Both FIS and Bond Financial Technologies are being discreet about the news. But a growing number of sources – from TechCrunch to Twitter – are reporting that FIS has acquired the embedded finance company for an undisclosed sum. The news broke on June 1 via a tweet from Fintech Business Weekly’s Jason Mikula. TechCrunch confirmed the story days later, citing unnamed sources. But neither FIS nor Bond has issued an official statement on the news. Mikula followed up his initial tweet with a tweet on Friday sharing an internal communication from FIS president of platform and enterprise products, Tarun Bhatnagar, that provided additional details.
What do we know? In his tweet, Bhatnagar said that FIS was “welcoming 30 Bond colleagues to the FIS team” and that Bond co-founder and CEO Roy Ng will stay on, reporting to Bhatnagar. Bhatnagar noted that the acquisition makes sense for FIS insofar as it brings both banking-as-a-service and embedded finance talent and experience to the company. Bhatnagar added that the acquisition will “close a gap” when it comes to FIS’ embedded finance capabilities, and accelerate time-to-market for the company’s new embedded finance projects.
Founded in 2019, Bond has raised $49 million in funding according to Crunchbase. The company’s embedded finance platform enables program management teams to build, launch, and operate their own financial products. Account verification solutions, deposit accounts, virtual and physical cards, and money movement tools are among the products that Bond’s technology helps companies create. With modern APIs and a robust integration layer, Bond simplifies the process of building and launching new products without having to partner with multiple institutions and vendors. Bond also manages the programs so that companies do not need to worry about securing banking licenses or staffing their own compliance teams.
Earlier this year, Bond announced a partnership with College Ave Student Loans. The collaboration will enable the private student loan provider, one of the top three in the U.S., to develop financial solutions for students and their families. Ng praised the company for its refinancing program and loan products for undergraduates, graduates, and parents, alike. “We look forward to partnering with College Ave to help millions of young adults build a strong financial future,” Ng said.
CardRates published an extensive profile of Bond and its founders at the beginning of the year.
This week’s edition of Finovate Global takes a look at recent fintech developments in Germany.
German fintech Blinglaunched its SavingsTrees solution this week. The new offering helps German families invest sustainably starting with as little as €1 a month. The solution is offered in partnership with wealthtech Evergreen, and represents an evolution in Bling’s product line, expanding from its origins as a family money management educational app and prepaid card.
“Simplicity and sustainability were paramount in the development of our investment offering,” Bling CEO and co-founder Nils Feigenwinter explained. “We prioritize families in our product development to offer a tailored solution that meets their needs. Everyone underestimates the market potential of families, which is why banks have neglected this area for decades. With Bling, we are addressing this.”
Cost savings was one of the reasons why Bling reached out to Evergreen. Cost is also one of the main reasons why more than 80% of German parents do not invest in the country’s capital markets, according to Bling. The complexity of investing and a lack of knowledge about investment products also have contributed to this lack of participation. To this end, Bling leverages visualizations and explanations from finance experts to make the investment process easier to understand.
Funds invested in SavingsTrees are globally diversified and are allocated specifically to sustainable investments. Direct investments in sustainable projects and companies, are available, as are investments in funds that support sustainability initiatives.
Read more about Bling in this TechCrunch profile from December.
Banxware, an embedded lending technology provider headquartered in Germany, has teamed up with Netherlands-based Rabobank to help SMEs secure the financing they need in order to grow. Rabobank will take advantage of Banxware’s embedded lending solution, which enables businesses to apply for short-term financing in as little as 15 minutes. After approval, funds can be available in the borrower’s account within 24 hours.
“This partnership brings Embedded Financing products tailored to the need of SMEs to popular business platforms,” Banxware CEO Miriam Wohlfarth said. “Together with Rabobank we now provide the full financing supply chain, including funds and end-to-end loan management to bridge cash flow shortfalls before they become an issue.”
The deployment will let business founders and owners apply for financing in familiar, everyday digital environments such as e-commerce platforms and booking software. Each firm will focus initially on marketing the solution in their home markets of Germany and the Netherlands, respectively.
Banxware’s partnership announcement follows news that the Berlin-based fintech had teamed up with liquidity management and financial planning company Agicap. Based in France, Agicap helps businesses automate, manage, and forecast their cash flows. Via its strategic partnership with Banxware, Agicap will add access to quick and tailored growth capital to its liquidity management offering.
“From now on, (SMEs) can not only see and manage their cash flows in a centered way, but they can also get new money when there are opportunities for growth,” Agicap Country Manager DE Stephan Krehl said.
Founded in 2020, Banxware is headquartered in Berlin. The company has raised $15 million (€14 million) in funding from investors including Varengold Bank and Element Ventures.
Finovate is proud to showcase fintech innovations from companies headquartered in Germany. This includes hosting our annual European fintech conference in Berlin in 2020.
Here’s a quick list of some of the Germany-based companies that have demoed their fintech innovations on the Finovate stage over the years.
aixigo
ayondo
Bitbond
BörseGo
Cash Payment Solutions
Coconet
collectAI
Device Ident
Ecolytiq
figo
Fincite
FinTecSystems
Fintura
HAWK:AI
iBrokr
IND Group
Kreditech
Mambu
Modifi
NDGIT
Nextmarkets
Open Bank Project (OBP)
payever
Payworks
Pockets United
Risk Ident
Scalable Capital
Smartify.it
SOFORT
SwipeStox
TeamViewer
TESOBE
Vaamo
YUKKA Lab
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Middle East and Northern Africa
Egypt-based fintech Axis launched its new digital payments platform, AxisPay
Dubai Islamic Bank launched its DIB ‘alt’ product, a new digital umbrella brand for the bank’s digital offerings.
UAE-based B2B fintech solutions provider FOO introduced its prepaid travel card and white label digital wallet.
Central and Southern Asia
India-based digital lender Lentra raised $27 million in a Series B extension round.
BNE Intellinews profiled Uzbekistani SME lender, Oasis.
India’s PayU partnered with Visa and Yes Bank to launch its Business Payment Solution Provider program.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Argentina-based mobile banking company Uala launched a new saving account offering in Mexico.
Brazil’s Nubankreached one million accounts in Mexico milestone in one month.
Lanistar introduced crypto trading on its app for users in Brazil.
Asia-Pacific
Singapore-based B2B payment infrastructure platform Thunes raised $60 million in Series C funding.
International payments software provider OpenWay launched a second hub in Vietnam.
Wise platform inked its first Japanese partnership, teaming up with GMO Aozora Net Bank.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Nigerian fintech Flutterwave forged a partnership with account-to-account (A2A) payments company Token.io.
International payment solutions company Unlimit secured license to operate in Kenya two months after expanding to Nigeria.
Harvard Business Review asked and answered the question “What African Fintech Startups Can Teach Silicon Valley About Longevity?”
Central and Eastern Europe
Klarnabrought its Pay in 3 offering to Romania this week.
German identity verification company IDnow added automated document liveness capabilities, financial risk checks, and more to its platform.
International development agency USAID partnered with Albanian business solutions provider CBS to launch, Lores Plus, a platform to help Albanian SMEs get access to financing.
Alternative bank and payment data company RIBBIT has acquired risk mitigation and compliance solution provider ValidiFi.
The amount of the transaction was not immediately available.
ValidiFi made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in 2019.
ValidiFi founder and CEO Oscar DiVeroli noted the “commonality of entrepreneurial grit and innovation” among upsides of the newly-announced acquisition of his company by RIBBIT, an alternative bank and payment data provider.
Reported late last week, the acquisition will combine RIBBIT’s predictive analytics and data assets with ValidiFi’s verification and compliance solutions. The goal is to create the largest alternative database of bank and payment data in the market. “I’m excited about the enormous opportunity to bring these two dynamic, industry-leading companies together,” RIBBIT CEO Greg Rable said. “The combination of talented people, robust data, and best-in-class products makes this a win-win for our customers and for us.”
Existing investor ABS Capital supported RIBBIT in the acquisition, along with new investor MissionOG.
ValidiFi made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in 2019. At the conference, the company demoed its Payment Risk Optimizer (PRO) technology. PRO is a Platform-as-a-Service solution that scrubs payment files for ACH and card payments. The technology leverages proprietary payment instrument data services to assess the likelihood of a successful payment. PRO can be used to schedule recurring payments for customers, or to create a subscription service, on-demand marketplace, retail store, or gateway.
“Today there are 22 billion dollars of bank overdraft and NSF fees that are charged to merchants and to consumers each and every year,” ValidiFi Chief Operating Officer Jesse Berger said from the Finovate stage in September. “The PRO all but eliminates NSF overdraft fees to consumers and return fees to the merchants. It uses automated workflows and real-time AI source data from the banks directly to verify and validate how much funds are available in the bank account. The PRO solves that age-old question of whether or not a payment transaction will go through successfully.”
Founded in March 2015, ValidiFi is based in Sunrise, Florida. The company began 2023 as a Nacha Preferred Partner for Account Verification, earning the certification in January.
Glean.ai has launched its Automated Accruals solution to help finance teams more accurately report costs.
The new offering is a feature of Glean.ai’s intelligent AP platform.
The company made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateFall in New York.
Spend management solutions company Glean.ai has announced new functionality for its Intelligent AP platform. The company recently unveiled its Automated Accruals technology, which will help companies more accurately report costs.
“Managing accruals manually in spreadsheets and over email is very time-consuming, error-prone, and can lead to an inaccurate reporting of expenses,” Glean.ai Growth Marketing Manager Spencer Campbell noted in a company blog post. Campbell wrote that reconciling accrued expenses is one of the “most time-consuming parts” of any accountant’s close process. “They have to determine which costs have been incurred by their company that have not been invoiced yet,” Campbell explained, “if invoices have been received for prior accruals, and if prior estimates of costs incurred were sufficient.”
To this problem, Glean.ai has introduced Automated Accruals as the latest feature on its spend management platform. The enhancement works by alerting users to potential accruals based on either past billing patterns or budget expectations. This enables finance teams to consult directly with vendors to determine if services were performed and to secure estimates for costs. From here, users can record the expense amount, record date, and reversal date for the accrual. Glean.ai’s technology automatically syncs the entries to the user’s general ledger, and also features real-time reporting to ensure transparency and a comprehensive view of all accrued expenses whether they are booked or reversed.
The addition of automated accruals, according to Glean.ai, is an example of the smart automation that drives the firm’s innovations. The company uses the phrase “Intelligent AP” to describe its approach to leveraging the data that flows AP and accounting to automate processes and empower decision-making.
Howard Katzenberg (CEO), Ankur Patel (Head of Data), and Alexander Jia (Head of Product) co-founded Glean.ai in 2020. The company demoed its technology in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in September of last year. At the conference, Katzenberg talked about how millions of small businesses inadvertently overspend when paying vendors. This occurs, Katzenberg said, due to errors or other costs that could be reduced or eliminated with greater scrutiny. “Fifteen percent of their cash is silently walking out the door,” he said. To this end, Glean.ai analyzes all of the business’ bills at the line item level. This enables the technology to track purchases, prices, and volumes, and deliver “timely, relevant, and actionable ways to save money.”
Katzenberg added, “There are many AP solutions that will help you pay your vendors quicker, but there are none that will help you pay your vendors less – until now.”
Glean.ai is headquartered in New York. The company has raised more than $10 million in funding from investors including Outpost Ventures and B Capital Group.
What are the biggest challenges, concerns, and factors that impact LGBTQ financial consumers in 2023?
A wide-ranging survey by the Center for American Progress (CAP) from the beginning of the year actually sheds some light on the relationship between financial services themselves and the LGBTQ community. This knowledge can help guide banks, fintechs, and financial services providers better tailor their products, services, and experiences for a more diverse customer base.
Here’s one interesting example. The LGBTQ respondents tended to have higher employment rates compared to the non-LGBTQ respondents. At the same time, members of the LGBTQ community were more likely than members of the non-LGBTQ community to be engaged in part-time, freelance, or gig economy work. In the latter category, LGBTQ respondents outnumbered non-LGBTQ respondents 5% to 1%. With regard to transgender respondents, they were twice as likely as non-transgender respondents to report working part time.
These survey results have significant implications for financial services companies. Among other things, the responses underscore the importance of mobile and remote access to financial services. This includes features like virtual assistants to ensure 24/7/365 service for workers with atypical or irregular working hours. Offerings like Earned Wage Access can help workers smooth out irregular cash flows for part-time workers. Additionally, LGBTQ respondents to the CAP survey reported incomes that were on average lower than those of non-LGBTQ respondents. Providing cash flow services can be a way of helping this community avoid the temptation of more costly and potentially predatory financing options.
These responses also suggest a new approach for financing and lending services companies. In order to compete, they may need to think differently about creditworthy potential borrowers who don’t have traditional employment histories. The trend toward an embrace of alternative data in credit scoring is a good development, and one that is likely to benefit LGBTQ communities. The same is true about initiatives to deal with the challenge of bias in AI.
Both as workers in the financial services industry and consumers of financial services, members of the LGBTQ community suffer from discrimination and harassment. This can range from verbal harassment to the denial of equal access to services. While many companies in the financial services industry have been commended for their LGBTQ-friendly policies and environments, ensuring that the financial services workplace is free from anti-LGBTQ behavior is important for both workers and customers alike.
Global payouts platform PayQuicker announced three new fintech partnerships this week.
The company has teamed up with Qolo, Web3 infrastructure company Fortress, and payments platform Citcom.
PayQuicker made its Finovate debut last September at FinovateFall in New York.
International payouts platform PayQuicker announced a trio of new fintech partnerships this week. The company has teamed up with Qolo, Fortress, and Citcon, who will take advantage of and enhance the functionality of PayQuicker’s Payouts OS platform. PayQuicker recently demoed the technology at FinovateFall.
“No single bank or payment provider can solve for cross-border payments alone,” PayQuicker President Charles Rosenblatt said. “We are uniting the power of these notable partners under our first in-market payouts orchestration platform to bring agile, secure, and convenient payout methods to businesses, and bring hard-earned money to gig and alternative workforces around the globe.”
Qolo will serve as an issuing-processing partner for PayQuicker’s Payouts OS. The company will issue an advanced suite of card solutions for corporate as well as SME business clients. This will make it easier for firms who need to make payouts to gig economy workers, for example, or to marketplace sellers. Fortress is a Web3 infrastructure company. Its partnership will enable PayQuicker to offer its clients a stablecoin wallet for payees. This will allow businesses to make disbursements in crypto instead of fiat currency. Lastly, Citcon is a global payment platform that offers solutions for payments in-store, online, and via mobile. PayQuicker customers around the world will gain new outlets via the collaboration.
“By combining Citcon’s robust global payment networks with PayQuicker’s expertise in secure and efficient payouts, we are empowering businesses to streamline their operations and enhance user experiences,” Citcon co-founder, President, and COO Wei Jiang said.
PayQuicker’s Payouts OS platform leverages a single REST API to deliver turnkey integration for multiple banks and global payment rails. The technology intelligently determines and facilitates the fastest and most cost-effective payout method for a given client. This includes saving clients time and money by comparing the processing and interchange fees.
Joined by company Chief Technology Officer James Legan, PayQuicker’s Rosenblatt demoed Payouts OS at the company’s appearance at FinovateFall last year. The team showed how the company has used Payouts OS to enable instant payouts in more than 200 countries and territories. These payouts were in local currencies and disbursed via prepaid debit card, virtual cards, and mobile wallets. “Payouts OS is the first Payouts-as-a-Service product,” Rosenblatt explained from the Finovate stage in September, “a payment orchestration platform for payouts that allows companies to go out and get the best rate, the best speed.” He added, “It will use lowest cost routing in order to be able to determine that for our clients.”
Founded in 2007, PayQuicker is baed in Rochester, New York.
“NayaOne is a digital transformation platform that helps you leverage the fintech ecosystem. We work with product, innovation, and tech teams in banks and insurance companies to help them get their products to market much, much quicker. We have synthetic data sets and building tools on the platform. Typically, it takes companies nine to twelve months to begin working with a fintech. Our customers can get to that outcome in about six to eight weeks.”
“We provide the industry with a digital banking market research platform that’s analyzing the digital offerings of banks, fintechs, credit unions, across the U.S. and worldwide. We analyze – from A to Z – what the banks, fintechs, and credit unions are offering, how they offer it, (and) how well they offer it, all while providing them with the ability to benchmark against the market and organize their product roadmap to implement their digital banking strategies.”
Greg Palmer chats with Nicole Sanders and George Broom of 10x Banking on streamlining product development and getting to market faster. Episode 171. Demo video.
“10x is a cloud-native banking platform that acts like a real-time operating system for banks. It allows you to build and run your bank at record speed at a fraction of the cost. We demonstrated that at Finovate through the use of our Bank Manager UI application. This allows product managers at banks to build products in minutes rather than months. In that seven minutes, we built a current account with a card and also a loan ready for launch to production.”
“We are a scale-up, San Francisco-based, that provides a software-as-a-service, machine learning platform which enables business experts to stay in control of their AI models. We also empower the data science and engineering teams through our technology that consists of the ability to continuously learn from the data as the business world changes. We provide continuous explanations to business users and give them the ability to give feedback to the models so that the models are aligned with the business all the time.”
Stay tuned for more insightful conversations from Greg Palmer and the Finovate Podcast!
The round was led by Queensland Investment Corporation (QIC). True Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, August Capital, DNS Capital, Invicta Management, and H. Barton Asset Management also participated.
Fresh valuation data was not immediately available. The company’s latest investment takes the firm’s total equity capital to more than $118 million, according to Crunchbase. The funding will enable the company to accelerate growth and further development of its payments platform.
“Our growth has continued to accelerate as we serve the needs of more and larger clients,” PayNearMe CEO Danny Shader said. “This investment enables us to deploy additional resources to increase the rate of innovation for our clients, allowing us to support the increasing demand for frictionless payments in new and existing vertical markets by developing features that deliver value across the full payment experience.”
Founded in 2009, PayNearMe facilitates cash, debit, credit, ACH, and mobile payments – including both Apple Pay and Google Pay – for thousands of businesses and organizations across the U.S. PayNearMe clients benefit from access to payments data which enables them to increase operational efficiency and produce new revenue streams by building “hyper-personalized” experiences for their customers. QIC Partner Matt Diestel underscored this opportunity, noting in a statement that “payments data is the next emerging opportunity for businesses”. Diestel added that “PayNearMe is enabling its clients to access that data and leverage it as a strategic asset.”
PayNearMe won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in 2010, and went on to take home top honors twice again within the following three years. Earlier this year, the company announced that U.S.-based iGaming operator Maverick Gaming had chosen PayNearMe’s MoneyLine platform to expand the number of payment types it can offer.
Also this spring, PayNearMe announced a partnership with Allied Business Systems, and a collaboration with Lottery Now – which, like Maverick Gaming, is also deploying PayNearMe’s MoneyLine platform. Note that the technology won “Best Consumer Payments Platform” at the FinTech Breakthrough Awards for a fourth year in a row.
Due to the number of extension requests we’ve received, Finovate has decided to extend the Finovate Awards nomination deadline to June 16. Our aim is to celebrate the best and brightest the fintech industry has to offer, and we want to make sure everyone is able to get their entries into the mix.
The 2023 Finovate Awards winners will be announced during FinovateFall in New York, and we’ll be crowning winners in fields like alternative investing, payments, UX/CX, DeFi, and more. Here’s a complete list of categories, including two that are brand new for this year, Best Use of Robotic Process Automation, and Best Banking as a Service Provider.
Once all the nominations are in, we’ll be announcing the finalists in mid-July. Given the increasingly competitive nature of the awards, making it to the final stage is already an strong mark of distinction.
Don’t miss out on your chance to celebrate your team’s success. Submit your nomination today!
This week’s edition of Finovate Global takes a look at one of the innovative fintech companies headquartered in Estonia: Ender Turing. The firm, which specializes in voice conversation intelligence and automation, made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateEurope in London.
Headquartered in Tallinn, Ender Turing was founded in 2020. The founding team consisted of two AI researchers with experience in automatic speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP), as well as a third member with experience in enterprise-level call center software. Together, the team formed Ender Turing and have since launched Ender Turing AI Speech Analytics. The new solution automatically analyzes and assesses the communication content between financial institutions and their customers. This helps FIs enhance the customer experience, as well as meet quality guidelines and compliance requirements in areas such as customer service, sales, and debt collection.
We corresponded with Ender Turing CEO Olena Iosifova via email. Below are her responses to our questions.
Read more about fintech in Estonia in this Finovate Global column from earlier this year.
What problem does Ender Turing solveand who does it solve it for?
Olena Iosifova: Eight hundred million voice conversations are recorded daily in Europe and many more worldwide. A tiny 1% of these conversations are checked for quality control, employee training, and business results improvement. Ender Turing is a conversations intelligence and automation platform to close 99% of the conversation gap for business growth.
Our daily business users are customer service, sales, and collection departments. But marketing and product teams also get value from making client’s research right on our platform.
How does Ender Turing solve this problem better than other companies?
Iosifova: Ender Turing created the fastest-to-value platform that performs in 24 languages. We use a proprietary speech-to-text engine to fine-tune models for every client to achieve the highest accuracy. Our machine learning pipelines are very efficient, and we can fine-tune speech recognition for free.
Also, the user interface does all the system setup for reaching business KPIs. There is no need to wait for the time slot at the IT department to help a business unit make it.
Who are Ender Turing’s primary customers?How do you reach them?
Iosifova: Our primary customers come from financial industry. These are banks, debt collection firms, and other financial services companies. But we also have clients in the public sector and in healthcare.
Direct outreach is our main channel of getting noticed by potential customers – as well as our partnership network. We cooperate with system integrators and call center software vendors and offer added value to their customer base.
Participation in conferences serves as a great supporting touch.
Ender Turing CEO Olena Iosifova demoing Ender Turing AI Speech Analytics at FinovateEurope 2023.
Can you tell us about a favorite implementation or deployment of your technology?
Iosifova: We have two great examples of our technology implementation. One is OTP Bank, and another is Creamfinance Group.
In OTP Bank it started with the call center customer service department. One month after we started, the debt collection department joined, seeing great results. OTP Bank saw hundreds of hours of saved time every month for quality management, employee training, and improved conversion rates – results we mutually enjoy.
With Creamfinance Group, the best indicator of great business results is that after implementation in their headquarters in Poland, we now serve also their offices in Spain, Mexico, and the Czech Republic.
What in your background gave you the confidence to respond to this challenge?
Iosifova: Three founders in Ender Turing have positive experience and skills in artificial Iitelligence R&D, business management, and a passion for building highly performing teams. We enjoy analyzing our potential customers’ strategies and market trends to foresee the challenges they might face in the next three to five years. With constant innovations inside our R&D, we build our product to deliver value for today and the future.
What is the fintech industry like in Estonia? How do traditional financial institutions treat Estonian fintechs?
Iosifova: Apart from the big name in fintech, Wise, coming from Estonia, other exciting fintechs are growing here. To name a few – Grunfin, Scrambleup, Tuum, Salv, Montonio.
They partner with traditional financial institutions actively. For example, LHV Bank is the best client of Tuum. And Salv is the AML solution that works exactly in a traditional financial services market.
You recently demoed your technology at FinovateEurope in London. What was that experience like?
Iosifova: This is truly an international event where we met companies from all over the world. This was a pleasant surprise. We will participate again.
What are your goals for Ender Turing?
Iosifova: Our goal is to become a number-one choice platform for banks and financial services companies regarding conversation intelligence and automation, providing the best quality of service, sales conversation rate, and recovery rate.
What can we expect from Ender Turing over the balance of 2023?
Iosifova: Our growth in 2023 gets us to expand to the U.S. and Latin America. But what’s more interesting is that we bring real-time agent assistance to fill the gap between the top-performing agents and the rest of the team and ensure real-time compliance monitoring in every conversation.
FinovateSpring 2023 is in the books! Congratulations to the winners of Best of Show, and thanks to the hundreds of fintech and financial services professionals whose passion and enthusiasm continue to make our conferences such unique and rewarding experiences.
Do you have a favorite moment from FinovateSpring 2023? Was it Dan Latimore of Celent and his creative deployment of generative AI during the Analyst All-Stars presentations? Maybe it was Peggy Mangot of JP Morgan who led a Power Panel full of diverse insights on where the smart money is investing in fintech. How about the first-ever company to begin its Finovate demo with a song performed live on stage?
Whatever moment of FinovateSpring was your favorite, there were plenty of good times and great networking opportunities to go around. Check out this review from Finovate Senior Research Analyst Julie Muhn who compiled her top seven takeaways from the event.
And stay tuned to the Finovate blog where we’ll soon share demo videos from the conference, as well as one-one-one video interviews, testimonials, our event e-magazine, and more!
