Author: David Penn

SeedInvest Raises $1 Million in Round Led by Jumpstart New Jersey Angel Network

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: SeedInvest

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Crowdfunding platform SeedInvest announced that it has raised $1 million in new funding. The round was led by the Jumpstart New Jersey Angel Network, and included the participation of unnamed “prominent individual investors.”

The company plans to use the additional capital to help grow the equity-based platform, and to add new features. SeedInvest helps connect accredited investors with entrepreneurs seeking capital, providing both parties with web-based tools such as a due diligence dashboard, virtual boardroom, and streamlined funds transfer.

The Jumpstart New Jersey Angel Network is a private, angel group focusing on early-stage technology startups in the mid-Atlantic region. Started in 2002 and making its first investment in 2004, Jumpstart typically provides funds ranging from $200,000 to $1 million. To date, the Network has provided more than $33 million in funding for more than 50 companies.
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SeedInvest was founded in January 2012 by Ryan Feit and James Han, and launched its crowdfunding platform a little over a year later in February 2013. The company is headquartered in New York City.
SeedInvest demoed its technology at FinovateSpring 2013 in San Francisco in May. Watch the company’s presentation here.

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GoBank Goes Live, Mobile Banking App Available on iOS

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: GoBank, Green Dot

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Out of the beta and into the App Store.

That’s the news out of GoBank, the first bank designed from the ground up with mobile banking in mind. Developed by Green Dot and FDIC insured, GoBank has been in private beta all year. Today marks the first time that the general public will be able to download the GoBank app and begin opening and managing their accounts.

       

The GoBank mobile app is currently available only on iOS. An Android version is expected soon. The app can be downloaded from the Apple AppStore or at GoBank.com
A number of companies will be distributing the app, including Rewardable, Tango Card, WePay, and Finovate alum, Check. The launch will be accompanied by promotional campaigns ranging from in-store promotions at Barnes & Noble bookstores, to sponsorship of the upcoming season of reality show, Project Runway.
GoBank was one of the companies that demoed their technology at FinovateSpring 2013 this May in San Francisco. See the company’s technology at work here.

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IntelliResponse Adds VOICES to Virtual Agent Technology

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: IntelliResponse

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IntelliResponse announced its virtual agent (VA) based “voice of the customer” platform today. The technology translates and organizes VA interactions with customers into themes and categories useful to marketing and customer experience professionals.

The data is represented graphically, emphasizing for example more frequently queried topics, or grouping together related topics. The information also can be accessed at varying levels of detail, including at the individual question level. VOICES works in real-time, providing a wide-range of consumer behavior data from across multiple channels.

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Watch a video on the making of VOICES here. Featured are IntelliResponse President and CEO David Lloyd and Vice President of Technology, Jon Barnett.

            

Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, IntelliResponse was founded in 2000. The company presented its technology as part of FinovateSpring 2013 in San Francisco in May. Watch IntelliResponse’s demo here.

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Finovate Alumni News — June 25, 2013

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, GoBank, Green Dot, IntelliResponse, Lending Club, ProfitStars, Prosper, ReadyForZero
  • FinovateLOGO.jpgProfitStars launches Gladiator eBanking Compliance Services.
  • IntelliResponse announces release of VOICES, virtual agent technology that captures consumer data from client interactions.
  • GoBank emerges from beta, mobile app now available on iOS.
  • ACI Worldwide launches Proactive Risk Manager to combat account takeover and ACH/wire fraud.
  • Check out Stockr’s winning video at Splash LA May 2013.
  • ReadyForZero announces new credit score and mortgage resource centers.
  • Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche named 2013 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year award winner.
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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Check Announces Expedited Payments

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Check

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Check, the mobile PFM provider formerly known as Pageonce, announced today that it will now offer expedited payments to its eight million customers. 

Same day payments will start at $14.99, a nice savings compared to typical $20+ late fees. 

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“Industry-wide, expedited bill pay has saved customers more than $4 billion in potential fees in 2010,” said Check marketing VP, Daniel Kjellen, citing a 2011 Javelin Strategy & Research report. This amount is expected to climb to more than six billion by 2015.
Expedited bill pay also helps differentiate Check from its competitors. Said Kjellen “we want to be known as a payments company rather than just a personal finance company.”
Expedited bill pay is available as a feature of the Money & Bills App, available for download at both the iTunes AppStore and at Google Play.
Check was most recently in the headlines following news that the company had reached a deal with Alltel Wireless to allow the carrier’s customers to pay their bills via smartphone. 
The company announced its rebranding a little over a month ago.
Check demoed its technology as part of the FinovateSpring show in 2010. See the company’s presentation here.

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Better Haves Wins $50K FinCapDev Grand Prize

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Uncategorized

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An app called Better Haves won the Grand Prize at the FinCapDev $100K Demo Day held at Capital One 360 Cafe in San Francisco Tuesday evening. 

The event pitted 10 finalists against one another in a mobile app-making contest geared toward “helping working Americans make smart financial choices and gain better access to financial services.” 

Having made it past a qualifying round last fall, finalists gathered before a panel of judges to demo their mobile apps in two-minute elevator pitches. Finalists also fielded questions about their apps from the judges before the final voting. 
The Grand Prize-winning app, Better Haves, is a budgeting solution for couples to help them form better financial habits by sharing their spending tendencies and values. The Better Haves team consisted of Itai Leibowitz, Marcos Siqueira, and Vanya Pasheva – shown accepting their Grand Prize below.
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Two finalists picked up a pair of runners-up prizes. An app called Thrifty Bunch (the “Wikipedia for needs-based shopping”) uses a variation of crowdsourcing to help limit impulse buying. Down Payment Saver also earned a runners-up award. This budgeting app is geared toward helping renters overcome the single biggest hurdle to homeownership: coming up with a downpayment.

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A budget and savings app called Financial Forest, and an insurance advisory app named Smart Insurance earned Honorable Mentions.
Financial Forest focuses on helping those living paycheck to paycheck save enough money for a one-month emergency fund. Smart Insurance is an app that helps consumers make sound decisions on everything from whether or not to buy an extended warranty when purchasing an appliance to picking the best auto insurance deal.
All the finalists’ apps are available for download. Read more about each of the apps in the contest here.
The FinCapDev competition is presented and administered by the D2D Fund and the Center for Financial Innovation. The event is a companion competition to the MyMoneyAppUp Challenge sponsored by the U.S. Department of Treasury.
Grand prize for the FinCapDev competition was $50,000. Runners up received prizes of $20,000 each. Both Honorable Mention winners earned $5,000 each. 
Learn more about all of the finalists here.

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QuantConnect Adds FX, US Equity Tick Data; Raises Capital

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: QuantConnect

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How do traders and investors who “sell in May and go away” spend their summers?

If you are a quantitative trader looking forward to spending the sunny months indoors backtesting trading strategies, then QuantConnect has some very good news for you: the company just announced that it now provides backtesters with five years worth of foreign exchange tick data and U.S. equity tick data going back to 1998. For free.

“This has never been done before,” said QuantConnect CEO Jared Broad in a telephone conversation. The data comes courtesy of two new partnerships: U.S. data provider QuantQuote.com is providing the equity data, while FXCM, the largest retail FX broker in the United States, is making available the forex data.
Clean, extensive U.S. equity tick data is a precious enough commodity for most quants. But access to forex tick data can be almost impossible for the average, non-professional trader to come by. 

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What’s next on the data front for QuantConnect? The company is currently looking for quality futures data sources, ideally with trade execution. In addition to helping QuantConnect serve an even broader trading and investing public, futures data would also help attract those working in commodity-sensitive industries such as transportation and agriculture to the platform, said Broad.
QuantConnect’s data announcements come on the heels of the company’s recently closed funding round. The actual amount of the financing remains undisclosed. Broad said that the funding came from angel investors with backgrounds in quantitative trading and investing, and that the funds will contribute toward operations. 
QuantConnect demoed their technology as part of the FinovateEurope show in London earlier this year. Watch the company’s presentation here.
Correction: The U.S. equity data provider was misidentified in a previous version.

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Finovate Alumni News– June 14, 2013

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Arxan Technologies, Billeo, Encap, Heckyl Technologies, Jemstep, MoneyDesktop, Moven, Narrative Science, Nomis Solutions, Quantopian, Wallaby Financial, Zopa
  • Nomis Solutions wins patent for price sensitivity models.
  • Billeo announces acquisition of ecommerce platform, Swag.io.
  • Encap earns seven-figure investment from ProVenture Seed.
  • Money Marketing considers Narrative Science, Quantopian, Moven, MoneyDesktop and Jemstep.
  • Zopa named Most Trusted Loans Provider at the Moneywise Customer Service Awards 2013.
  • CU Broadcast interviews MoneyDesktop’s Bret Skousen.
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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Encap Earns Seven-Figure Investment from ProVenture Seed

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Encap

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Exact terms of the funding were not disclosed in Encap’s press release of the announcement. However, TechCrunch is reporting that the funding totaled $2 million.

This takes Encap’s total funding to more than $2.8 million, courtesy of previous investment from Alliance Ventures.

Based in Oslo, Norway, Encap specializes in mobile authentication, providing in-app, banking grade security. Encap’s technology eschews SMS codes, hardware tokens, and one-time, password-based authentication in favor of an approach that, in the words of ProVenture Seed Managing Partner, Herbjøm Skjervold, combines multi-factor authentication with risk profiling.
The company plans to use the capital to help expand into new regions, particularly the United States and United Kingdom, as well as to increase market share in a competitive market for security services. According to a report in SecureID News, the multi-factor authentication market itself should surpass $5 billion by 2017.
Encap demoed its technology as part of the FinovateSpring 2013 event in May. See the company’s presentation here.

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Locaid Closes $4 Million in New Funding

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Locaid

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FinovateFall 2012 alum Locaid just completed a $4.05 million Series D funding round according to VentureBeat.

Participating in the round were InterSouth Partners, H.I.G. Ventures, and Florida Growth Fund, as well as additional investors. The new funding puts Locaid’s total at just north of $30 million.

Founded in 2005, and now with offices in both Boca Raton and San Francisco, Locaid specializes in Location-as-a-Service (LaaS) solutions ranging from IP and Landline location to geofencing and location analytics.
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Locaid’s “footprint” extends to more than 4 billion connected devices worldwide, including more than 400 million mobile devices. The company is also the largest location gateway for major carriers such as AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. Locaid made headlines earlier this month with the release of its Compliance API.
To see Locaid’s FinovateFall 2012 presentation, visit the company’s demo page here.

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ayondo Launches in the United Kingdom

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ayondo

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ayondo’s European expansion just reached another border, as the company announces that it has launched its social trading service in the UK.

Based in Frankfurt, Germany, ayondo is an innovator in the world of social trading. The company’s platform allows average investors to share trades and investments and, more importantly, to trade and invest alongside the best performing traders and investors on the platform.

Those using ayondo can trade a variety of assets, including currencies, stock market indices, individual stocks, and commodities. Traders can begin following up to 5 top traders for a little as €100.

ayondohomepage.jpgThat ayondo would expand to the UK should probably come as little surprise. The company had already expressed its interest in the UK and Irish markets by adding spread betting to the platform earlier this year. Spread betting is available only to ayondo’s clients living in Ireland or the UK.

Said ayondo managing director Thomas Winkler in a press release, “ayondo is the first social trading platform to offer spread betting with proportional following for a wide range of asset classes.”
ayondo was founded in 2008, and launched its social trading platform in January 2012. The company demoed its technology as part of the FinovateEurope show a year later in London. See  the company’s presentation here.

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Intellaegis’ masterQueue Technology Helps Catch Wanted Fugitive

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Intellaegis

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There are many ways to describe the innovators in financial technology.

And thanks to Intellaegis, we can add “fugitive catcher” to the list.

The El Dorado Country District Attorney’s office in California sought out the services of hometown technology company, Intellaegis, to help them find an elusive fugitive who had been on the run for years.
Watch the news report from the CBS Sacramento affiliate.
According to the report, masterQueue was able to track the fugitive’s data footprints as she traveled across the country to states as distant as Michigan, California, and Florida. The fugitive had been on the run for three years. masterQueue was able to track her down in five minutes.
Intellaegis was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in El Dorado Hills, California. The company debuted masterQueue in 2011 as part of FinovateSpring in San Francisco. See the company’s presentation here.

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