David Penn, Author at Finovate

Finovate Alumni News– January 25, 2013

By David Penn Posted on January 25, 2013
Categories: BillFloat, Cachet Financial Solutions, Concur, Geezeo, Lending Club, Simple, Tradeshift, TransferWise, TSYS, ValidSoft

Silicon Valley Business Journal interviews BillFloat CEO and co-founder Ryan Gilbert.

Commercial Bank of Qatar to deploy latest version of TSYS card and merchant management platform.

TransferWise wins “Best Middleweight Startup” at The Europas. See them demo at FinovateEurope in February!

Concur rolls out new datacenters in France and the Netherlands.

Santander receives 2012 Banking Technology Award for Best Security Initiative for its SIM swapping solution, developed with ValidSoft.

Portland’s KATU.com features Simple.

UK’s KashFlow integrates with Tradeshift to enable SMBs who use its cloud-based accounting software.

The Paypers reports: Geezeo enters 2 new partnerships.

VatorNews considers what’s next for Lending Club.

Cachet Financial Solutions partners with Volunteer Corporate to provide mobile RDC to their 325 member CUs.

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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New TradeKing Finds Focus in Customer-First Mindset

By David Penn Posted on January 24, 2013
Categories: TradeKing

When TradeKing met Zecco, and the two online brokerages merged last year, the big question was whether or not the whole would be more than merely the sum of its parts.

Based on a review of where the “new” TradeKing stands at the beginning of 2013, the answer seems to be an ever-less-qualified “yes.”

The combined entity now boasts more than 500,000 total accounts, making TradeKing the sixth largest online brokerage. And once known primarily for its “disruptive” approach to the industry due to its low and transparent pricing strategy, TradeKing now has the opportunity to impress a whole new cohort of traders and investors with its customer service and investor education resources, as well.

Here’s a look at what TradeKing has accomplished as of the end of 2012:

Earned a four-star ranking for six years in a row in Barron’s Online Broker Survey
Voted #1 for customer service for the fourth time in the SmartMoney annual broker survey
The number of daily users of TradeKing LIVE has doubled since the Zecco acquisition
More than 49% of TradeKing’s registered representatives have FINRA Series 4 licenses
More than 50% of TradeKing’s registered reps have Series 24 licenses
TradeKing has hosted more than 60 live educational events for accountholders, with more than 8,000 total attendees

To that last point, TradeKing clients have watched more than 280 of the brokerage’s educational videos for more than 15,000 hours of watching and more than 57,000 total views.

TradeKing also announced that its trading platform now includes streaming charts, enhanced options functionality (including strategy recognition) and real-time, intraday updates. The company has also unveiled TradeKing Forex, which allows clients to trade more than 50 currency pairs, plus gold and silver, as well as provides access to charting tools, trader education, and actionable research.

Both TradeKing and Zecco made their Finvoate debuts back in 2008 at FinovateSpring.

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Pageonce Handling $1 Million per Day in Mobile Bill Payments

By David Penn Posted on January 23, 2013
Categories: Pageonce

You may or may not want to send money to friends and family. But sooner or later, we’ve all got bills to pay.

And betting on the latter is paying off for mobile payment company, Pageonce.

Here are the key items from the company’s recent announcement as reported in TechCrunch:

Processing $1 million in mobile bill payments every day
Expecting an annual payment volume run-rate of $1 billion by the middle of 2013
Reached a 30% month-over-month growth in payment volume

Source: TechCrunch

Pageonce has more than 7.5 million users and 6,000 billers. The company’s mobile bill payment operation began a year ago. An upgrade last November added new features such as File Cabinet and Scheduled Payments.

With more than 50 employees, Pageonce has raised more than $20 million in venture funding capital. They demoed at FinovateSpring 2010.

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Finovate Alumni News– January 23, 2013

By David Penn Posted on January 23, 2013
Categories: ACI Worldwide, Bazaarvoice, Bill.com, DemystData, Dwolla, Expensify, EZBOB, Fiserv, Holvi, Intuit, LearnVest, Monitise, Pageonce, SimpleTuition, Temenos, TradeKing, Tradeshift

Temenos wins praise as “top advisor solution” from Aite Group. Come see their demo at FinovateEurope in February!

Spredfast announces Bazaarvoice integration.

Pageonce reaches $1 million mark in daily mobile bill payments processed.

A look at TradeKing after the merger.

ACI Worldwide‘s Money Transfer System helps FIs with Dodd-Frank compliance.

EZBOB forms partnership with ChannelGrabber. Watch EZBOB in action at FinovateEurope!

Monitise and CGI Logica form mobile FS alliance to target European retail banks.

Tradeshift partners with Intuit to bring its social invoicing platform to more than 5m QuickBooks users.

American Banker reports: Fiserv extends relationship with BofA. Come to FinovateEurope in London to see its live demo.

CNBC talks with Alexa Von Tobel, LearnVest CEO.

Bill.com and Expensify announce product integration.

GrowthBusiness profiles Holvi. Comes see Holvi’s new tech at FinovateEurope next month.

Fast Company reports you can now pay taxes in Iowa using Dwolla.

SimpleTuition reports 2012 success metrics for SmarterBucks program.

DemystData a finalist in AWS Global Startup Challenge.

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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FinovateEurope 2013 Sneak Peek: Part 2

By David Penn Posted on January 22, 2013
Categories: Backbase, Biletu, Birdback, FinovateEurope 2013, Heckyl Technologies, Holvi, Kalypton, mBank & Efigence, Metaforic, Pockets United, rplan, SumUp

Here’s part 2 of the sneak peek of the companies that will demo at FinovateEurope on February 12 and 13 in London.

Each company provided a short summary of the innovation they will debut on stage. We published 27 last week and we will complete the preview next week.

Don’t miss the opportunity to experience the hottest innovations in financial technology. Get your FinovateEurope ticket here.

______________________________________________

Backbase

Digital Marketing professionals can use Backbase purely for digital marketing purposes: e.g. collecting user behavior and running campaigns in specific sections of existing websites and platforms, then assigning certain areas where Backbase collects data and shows campaigns.

With Backbase you can now start small. Just embed in your existing site and expand from there, creating a full cross-device user experience platform.

Innovation type: Marketing, mobile, online

Heckyl Technologies

Heckyl FIND (Financial In News & Data) is real time news and data analytics platform for retail traders and brokerages.

FIND is integrated with trading terminals to provide high quality information, visuals, heat maps of sentiment and market data to help traders find trading opportunities in this fast moving market.

FIND helps you explore new ideas and keep pulse on current business events/issues. Whether you are a short term trader, investor, or fund manager – whether you prefer equities, futures and options, forex or commodities – you will find a wealth of information that matters to you streaming at your fingertips.

Innovation type: Investing & asset management, online

Holvi

Holvi is the long tail of retail banking. It changes the whole concept of the bank account from a passive utility to an active enabler of any activity. Out-of-the-box Holvi comes with built-in payment acceptance, tools for financial understanding and the ability to share it with a group. We bring in building blocks from our banking and payments partners that our customers can add to their Holvi accounts.

Holvi is used by small businesses, non-profit organisations, projects and individuals. Holvi is regulated by the FIN-FSA and is located in Finland. Holvi is launching Europe-wide in 2013.

Innovation type: Online, payments small business

Kalypton

Point solutions for payments? Why limit yourself? Proven at scale in Africa, Tereon is a complete payments ecosystem and toolkit designed to support rapid innovation.

With Tereon, you can implement any number of innovative products and payment services, be they point solutions or new networks. You can support any business logic, and you can use existing core systems and settlement processes to provide secure, inter-operable, account-to-account, payments that meet stringent regulatory standards.

We will demonstrate a four-party deployment that supports payments from phone to phone, phone to card terminal, card to terminal and on-line in multiple currencies.

Innovation type: Banking

Metaforic

Metaforic has a product that protects mobile applications from unauthorized changes and subversion of the existing code. In effect, by using our solution, the financial institution has control over what the application does if it is compromised. It can quit, display a message, send a silent security alert to bank servers or any other behavior the developer cares to define.

For financial institutions that have a lot of mobile developments underway, Metaforic technology can be integrated with existing developments at the end of the software development lifecycle. This technology is an automatic process not requiring significant developer time or security expertise.

Innovation type: Security

Pockets United

Pockets United occupies a hot space: carriers see their business threatened by all-encompasing data flats, while traditional banks and credit card companies see payment shifting to mobile devices – whose users are owned by the carriers, ultimately leaving both seeking for differentiators.

BAM! ‘Social’ is the next big thing in mobile payments, yet it is not easy to implement for existing PSPs or banks. A category killer in this field must be social by design.

Think of us as Paypal, just with a lot more pal – and get excited about a cutting-edge user experience that is fun to use day after day! Because, after all, dividing expenses should lower the burden for all, not cause additional effort for some.

Innovation type: Mobile, payments, PFM

rplan

Investing can be time-consuming. rplan has created a simple, easy-to-use tool to create your own personal investment portfolio from over 2,400 available investments to find the ones best suited to you.

rplan is for customers who want choice, but who don’t want to become finance specialists just to manage their investments – because there are better things to do in life than researching mutual funds.

Innovation
type: Investing & asset management, online, PFM

SumUp

SumUp’s vision is to change commerce on a global scale starting with a real and existing payments problem.

Today, millions of small businesses are missing out on customers because they cannot accept card payments due to high fees and long contract durations. SumUp offers the easiest way for small businesses to accept card payments.

Using only a portable card reader and an app for iOS and Android, merchants can accept card payments on their mobile device, with a transparent fee of only 2.75% per transaction.

SumUp will demo a new cashless point-of-sale solution that will radically simplify the way people pay in every day life.

Innovation type: Cards, mobile, payments, rewards

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Prosper Announces New CEO, $20 Million in New Financing

By David Penn Posted on January 22, 2013
Categories: Prosper

Major new executive-level changes and a big financing round have U.S. peer-to-peer lending pioneer Prosper starting off 2013 with a bang.

Stephan Vermut will be taking over as chief executive officer. The company will also separate the president and CEO roles, and appoint Aaron Vermut to the former position.

Both Stephan and Aaron, as well as new addition Ron Suber who will serve as Head of Global Institutional Sales, previously worked together at Merlin Securities, a brokerage firm acquired by Wells Fargo last summer. Stephan was founder and managing partner of the firm.

The funding comes courtesy of venture capital heavyweight Sequoia Capital. The VC firm led the $20 million round, along with all Prosper’s current crop of investors. More information on the P2P lender’s investors is here.

This latest round of funding brings the company’s total to $95 in venture capital raised.

Prosper has more than 1.5 million members and more than $400 million in funded loans. The company demoed with Finovate as part of Finovate Startup 2009

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Paypal Partners with NCR and Expands Retail Presence

By David Penn Posted on January 21, 2013
Categories: PayPal

When payments companies go to sleep at night, do they dream of Paypal?

Paypal’s latest headline-making move is a deal with NCR that will allow restaurant shoppers to take care of their bill using their Paypal account. This comes courtesy of NCR’s new mobile payment app, Mobile Pay, launched in December.

In addition to making it easier for consumers to pay the tab (re-order drinks and opine on their evening out via social media), Mobile Pay eventually will allow patrons to place orders from their mobile devices.

There’s more to the partnership than a good meal at a nice restaurant, however. The plan is to further integrate Paypal into other NCR products, such as Convenience-Go and Netkey Endless Aisle. Convenience-Go is an app geared toward gas stations, mini-marts, and convenience stores. The Netkey Endless Aisle app is a digital companion for in-store shopping.

How big of a deal is this for Paypal? Here are a few facts and figures about NCR:

It has 1.2 million point-of-sale systems deployed by retailers
Its Aloha point-of-sale system is used by more than 60,000 restaurants
It has deployed more than 100,000 self-checkout kiosks at retailers
It is used by more than a third of the top 100 U.S. restaurant chains.

This is far from Paypal’s only foray into the food business.The company is testing a mobile, pre-order app in 30 McDonald’s locations in France. The system allows consumers to order meals ahead of time and pay online. The company is currently testing a similar system with Jamba Juice in the U.S.

Paypal, Retail, and Putting the Shopping Back into Window Shopping

Paypal continues to prove itself more than capable of playing well with others. The company announced new brick and mortar partners in Radio Shack and Dollar General, adding to a roster that already includes a variety of retailers from Aeropostale to Tiger Direct.

With 23 retailers on board nationally as of the end of 2012 Paypal’s in-store technology allows shoppers to make payments via a PIN code or a Paypal credit card. One significant attraction of the new technology is that it does not require merchants to swap out their existing payments infrastructure.

And while Paypal has no professed interest in moving merchants away from their current POS systems, the company continues to compete aggressively against traditional credit cards and other mobile payment systems.

In fact, as reported late last year, Paypal is experimenting in Amsterdam with a QR code strategy to really put the “shopping” in “window shopping.” When fully implemented, window shoppers will be able to scan and order items they spot in store windows and have them delivered to their homes.

Paypal By the Numbers

Forecast $10 billion in mobile payment volume in 2012
Has more than 100 million active accounts
Provides in-store service at 23 national retailers and 18,000 brick-and-mortar stores
Plan to have Discover Financial Systems merchant locations accept Paypal payments by Spring 2013

See Paypal’s most recent Finovate demo here.

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Finovate Alumni News– January 21, 2013

By David Penn Posted on January 21, 2013
Categories: ACI Worldwide, BBVA, Credit.com, Dwolla, Lending Club, Movenbank, Pageonce, SafetyPay

Android Does takes a look at the latest update to Pageonce Money & Bills app.

ACI Wordwide announces winners of its Excellence Award for 2013.

Forbes considers Movenbank’s view of online reputation. See Movenbank demo live at FinovateEurope February 12 and 13.

The Des Moines Register takes an inside look at Ben Milne’s thoughts on the future of Dwolla.

SafetyPay announces record growth: Number of transactions in 2012 increased 149% over 2011, the dollar value of transactions increased by 88.5% in 2012 over 2011.

BBVA announces mobile RDC for iPhone. Come see BBVA demo its new tech at FinovateEurope in London.

Lending Club issues the 100,000th loan on its lending platform.

Credit.com‘s “Credit Cards” app now available on Google Play.

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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Angel Investing Round Earns Azimo £300,000

By David Penn Posted on January 18, 2013
Categories: Azimo

Money transfer start-up Azimo is beginning the year with positive news on the funding front. The company just announced £300,00 ($480,000 USD) in angel investment.

Although the complete list of investors is undisclosed, among them is Matt Cooper according to reporting in The Next Web. Cooper is chairman of Octopus Investments. Before that, he was principal managing director of Capital One Bank.

Based in the U.K., Azimo serves the growing population of foreign-born residents in Great Britain by providing a means to send money to any bank account or to send cash to 150,000 locations around the world. Azimo processes payments faster than banks traditionally do – between 2 and 24 hours compared to three to five days – and launched its mobile app last September.

See Azimo in action at FinovateEurope in February. More information available here.

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BillFloat Raises $21 Million in New Funding

By David Penn Posted on January 17, 2013
Categories: BillFloat

BillFloat announced that it has raised $21 million courtesy of Investor Growth Capital, which led the financing round along with previous investors Venrock, First Round Capital, and Baseline Ventures. New investor Bronze Investments also participated in the round.

The new funding comes as the company focuses on its More-Time-to-Pay (MTP) platform, which provides customers with real-time payment flexibility. Consumers can access MTP online, in stores, and through mobile thanks to the company’s partnership with more than 2,500 billers – from cable companies to utilities.

Founded in 2009, BillFloat has raised more than $36 million. On the agenda for 2013 according to CEO and co-founder Ryan Gilbert, are the following:

Expand team by two-thirds, mostly through new developers
Drive more than $400 million in loans
Raise up to $100 million in debt financing to fund loans

BillFloat offers loans up to $200 to its more than 700,000 registered users. See BillFloat in action at its most recent Finovate demo here.

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Finovate Alumni News– January 17, 2013

By David Penn Posted on January 17, 2013
Categories: Bill.com, BillFloat, Compass Plus, Dashlane, Dwolla, ImpulseSave, Jack Henry, MasterCard, Mitek, PayPal, Standard Chartered Bank, TIO Networks

BillFloat announces $21 million in new funding.

Jack Henry & Associates launches retail and commercial lending platform.

Compass Plus completes benchmark testing on HP servers.

ImpulseSave releases Google Chrome e-commerce plug-in.

Dashlane partners with Pwnedlist to enhance security alerts. Check out Dashlane’s live demo at FinovateEurope next month.

Mitek to launch Mobile Deposit Alliance, allowing participant banks to share deposit data.

TechCrunch reports: eBay And PayPal Expect To Do $20 Billion Each In 2013 Mobile Commerce.

El Paso Electric Company partners with TIO Networks Corp to launch EPE MobilePay.

Dwolla introduces Guest Send to help developers building bank software make payments from one account to another.

Bill.com wins Best Software as a Service category of the 2012-2013 Cloud Awards Program.

Clearstream chooses Standard Chartered Bank as its clearing and settlement agent for its investments in South Africa.

Payments.com profiles MasterCard Worldwide’s initiatives in Africa.

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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eDeposit Launches First Mobile App

By David Penn Posted on January 16, 2013
Categories: eDeposit

What’s new in finance apps for iOS? Now businesses can use their iPhones to manage their eDeposit accounts.

The new mobile app from eDeposit allows merchants (and their customers) to send and accept payments, as well as conduct other banking business such as checking balances and monitoring account activity.

Here’s a screenshot.

Version 1.2.1 is available for free on iTunes.

Watch eDeposit in action at their most recent Finovate demo here.

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Finovate Blog

Author: David Penn

Finovate Alumni News– January 25, 2013

New TradeKing Finds Focus in Customer-First Mindset

Pageonce Handling $1 Million per Day in Mobile Bill Payments

Finovate Alumni News– January 23, 2013

FinovateEurope 2013 Sneak Peek: Part 2

Prosper Announces New CEO, $20 Million in New Financing

Paypal Partners with NCR and Expands Retail Presence

Finovate Alumni News– January 21, 2013

Angel Investing Round Earns Azimo £300,000

BillFloat Raises $21 Million in New Funding

Finovate Alumni News– January 17, 2013

eDeposit Launches First Mobile App