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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Finovate alums raised more than $2.7 billion in equity funding in 2022. The sum makes the $8.4 billion raised in 2021 seem all the more an outlier as our alumni funding levels return to those common in 2020 and before.
The fourth quarter of 2022 saw Finovate alums secure more than $380 million in funding. This amount recalls the relatively modest fundraising haul from Q4 2020, with a comparable number of alums raising capital.
Previous Quarterly Comparisons
Q4 2021: More than $1.2 billion raised by seven alums
Q4 2020: More than $472 million raised by 17 alums
Q4 2019: More than $876 million raised by 21 alums
Q4 2018: More than $800 million raised by 19 alums
Q4 2017: More than $730 million raised by 23 alums
Outsystems’ $228.4 million fundraising was easily the quarter’s standout investment. Also raising sizable amounts in the final three months of 2022 were Moneyhub, which raised more than $61 million over the course of the quarter, and Banyan, which secured $28 million in funding.
Top Quarterly Equity Investments
Outsystems: $228.4 million
Moneyhub: $61.6 million
Banyan: $28 million
Cinchy: $14.5 million
Buckzy: $14.5 million
Here is our detailed alum funding report for Q4 2022.
October 2022: More than $316 million raised by eight alums
If you are a Finovate alum that raised money in the fourth quarter of 2022, and do not see your company listed, please drop us a note at research@finovate.com. We would love to share the good news! Funding received prior to becoming an alum not included.
Continuous product design platform company Quantum Metric launched its Atlas solution this week.
Atlas provides enterprises with a library of pre-built industry guides to help them turn digital opportunities into new products and solutions for customers.
Quantum Metric won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope n 2021.
Quantum Metric, the continuous product design platform company that won Best of Show in its Finovate debut in 2021, unveiled its latest solution this week. The Colorado Springs, Colorado-based firm announced the launch of Atlas, a structured and accelerated solution to help organizations respond to “critical business questions” with “outcome-driven insights.” Atlas provides companies with a comprehensive library of pre-built industry guides that give businesses a tailored set of dashboards, metrics, anomaly detection, and alerts, providing them with a stepwise approach to improving digital use cases.
“Organizations consistently struggle to know if their teams are asking the right business questions and working hard to drive their experience forward to the benefit of both their business and their customer,” Quantum Metric CEO Mario Ciabarra said. “With Atlas, we are empowering every member of digital teams to focus on what matters most, winning the hearts of their customers.” Ciabarra called the launch “a defining day” for the company.
Quantum Metric helps enterprises negotiate the distance between recognizing new digital opportunities and turning those opportunities into revenue-generating, customer-engaging products and services. The company estimates that the average enterprise “leaves up to $220 million on the table per year in inefficiencies” and suggests that, by using Atlas, these companies can boost efficiency by up to 90%. “Atlas completely reimagines what we know about building and optimizing digital experiences today,” Ciabarra said.
At present, the Atlas library consists of 90 guides, and includes customized use cases for verticals such as consumer banking, insurance, telecommunications, travel, and retail. Quantum Metric indicated that it will offer cross-industry guides to common digital use cases in the future.
Founded in 2015, Quantum Metric offers businesses a way to recognize customer needs, quantify the financial impact, and assess priorities based on both customer impact and meeting business objectives. The launch of Atlas comes just days after Quantum Metric announced a year of “record-breaking” growth, including a 98% customer retention rate and customer base growth of 41%. The company today captures experiences from 40% of the world’s Internet users and offers insights from more than four billion user sessions each month. Quantum Metric includes 20% of the Fortune 500 among its customers.
Payments platform Trustly announced a strategic partnership with Sweden’s Nordnet.
The partnership will enable Nordnet customers to easily and securely deposit funds using Trustly pay-ins.
Trustly, which made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2013, was acquired by Nordic Capital in 2018.
A new strategic partnership between open banking, account-to-account (A2A) payments platform Trustly and Nordnet will enable customers of the Swedish savings and investment solution to easily and securely deposit funds in their accounts. The pact brings instant deposits to the whole Nordic region, including markets where instant payments are not yet available.
The new service is going live in Sweden initially, and will be available to all new customers who sign up for a Nordnet account. The service will launch in Norway in the first quarter of this year, and in Denmark and Finland later in 2023.
“Trustly’s technology and customer focus made them a natural choice and good fit for Nordnet in our ongoing work to build the best platform for savings and investments,” Nordnet Chief Product Officer and Deputy CEO Rasmus Järborg said. “With Trustly, our customers are able to fund their accounts instantly and start discovering what stocks or funds they want to buy.”
Founded in 1996 as Sweden’s first Internet broker, Nordnet currently provides savings, investment, lending, and pension services to customers in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. Nordnet operates the region’s largest social investment network, Shareville, which boasts more than 300,000 members.
The company also offers margin lending, residential mortgages, and unsecured personal loans both under its own brand and under the subsidiary Konsumentkredit. As a pension solutions provider, Nordnet offers endowment insurance in Sweden and Norway and, for Swedish customers, provides a digital pension management service. Headquartered in Stockholm, the firm reported total assets of more than $22.8 billion in 2021.
Trustly made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in London in 2013 and returned to the Finovate stage four years later for FinovateEurope 2017. The company was acquired by Nordic Capital for an undisclosed sum in 2018, and has since forged partnerships with companies ranging from Alibaba.com to NACHA to IKEA. Last year, Trustly acquired U.K. open banking vendor Ecospend (terms not disclosed). In November, the company welcomed back Alex Gontheir as CEO of its Americas division. Gontheir founded and led PayWithMyBank as CEO. PayWithMyBank merged with Trustly in 2019 and Gontheir became Executive Chairman in 2021.
Ping Identity has forged a partnership with device identification platform Fingerprint.
The partnership will integrate Fingerprint’s device identification technology into Ping Identity’s identity orchestration service, DaVinci.
Ping Identity made its Finovate debut in 2016 at FinovateEurope in London.
Ping Identity, which made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in 2016, announced a partnership with U.S.-based identity tech innovator Fingerprint. The collaboration will integrate Fingerprint’s device identification technology with Ping Identity’s DaVinci no-code identity orchestration service to enable users of DaVinci to accurately identify devices and stop fraud.
Fingerprint’s device identification platform provides 99.5% accuracy and, upon integration with PingOne DaVinci, will enable companies to enhance the customer experience by reducing the need for friction-producing multi-factor authentication for known users. The integration will enhance onboarding for new customers, as well. “Our mission is to empower developers to build safe and seamless Internet services,” Fingerprint CEO Dan Pinto said. He said that the partnership with Ping Identity would help show the effectiveness of the company’s device identity technology in a broad range of digital user journeys.
Fingerprint teamed up with Ping Identity as part of the latter’s Global Technology Partner Program. Growing the program and adding companies like Fingerprint is part of Ping Identity’s goal of delivering “better, more frictionless customer experiences” according to company SVP of Product Management Loren Russon. “Our partnership with Fingerprint leverages PingOne DaVinci’s seamless orchestration to ensure dynamic user journeys are delivered quickly and efficiently at every stage of the user journey,” Russon said.
PingOne DaVinci enables users to design secure and seamless customer experiences across an entire technology ecosystem. The platform’s no-code orchestration and drag-and-drop interface mean that anyone who can whiteboard an experience can orchestrate it using DaVinci. Users build, design, and refine workflows, and then easily optimize these workflows with A/B testing and, where necessary, quickly deploy fixes and changes.
Named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management for the sixth consecutive year, Ping One was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. The company was acquired by Thoma Bravo last year in an all-cash $2.8 billion transaction. When the deal was closed in October, Ping Identity founder and CEO Andre Durand credited the way that “identity security and frictionless user experiences have become essential in the digital-first economy.” Durand added that, “with the support of Thoma Bravo, Ping Identity can further accelerate innovation to deliver the easy and secure digital experiences customers demand from every industry.”
Finovate Podcast host Greg Palmer wrapped up a year’s worth of fintech conversations with this handful of episodes featuring Finovate Best of Show winners, innovative bankers, and insightful venture capitalists.
“What you should understand about our fund is that it’s all B2B. There are four themes that we specifically focus on – the key one is modernizing financial institutions. And whether that’s banks or insurers or asset managers or wealth managers, I think it’s all about bringing the technology, the digitalization, and more to these institutions to increase their competitiveness.”
Michael Ruttledge, Chief Information Officer and Head of Technology Services, Citizens Bank
“We set out a bold vision to modernize the technology platforms and infrastructure through something we called Next Generation Technology Strategy. What I’m most excited about are some of the key critical businesses we have been able to enable. We’ve done a tremendous job moving to the cloud; we partner with both AWS and Azure and, with AWS, we’ve actually built a platform that’s really been able to unleash developers.”
Melanie Pickett, Head of Asset Owners, Americas, Northern Trust
“I joined Northern Trust specifically to launch a fintech within the bank called Front Office Solutions, where we serve the world’s largest and most complex endowments, foundations, family offices, and pensions, and help them with the very complex portfolios that they’re managing and some of the very complex data management challenges that they have.”
Neepa Patel, Founder and CEO, Themis
Finovate podcast host Greg Palmer talks with Themis founder and CEO Neepa Patel on expecting more from your compliance department. Episode 153.
“Themis is a collaboration tech platform. Think of something like Airtable or Jira or Monday, but specifically created for governance, risk, and compliance workflows. Our modules represent different workflows that your company is already doing, but are probably doing it in the most inefficient way possible. We’ve brought all those tools that you’re using (and) put that information into one holistic view so that you get a better sense of what’s going on with compliance in your company.”
Don Shafer, Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist, Quilo
Finovate’s Greg Palmer talks with Quilo co-founder and Chief Evangelist Don Shafer about the company’s transformative approach to funding loans. Episode 152.
“We need(ed) to build a platform that would enable a banker or credit union to provide all of their customers (with) a way to get a loan quickly. And so with Quilo, we’ve timed it over and over. If you’re already a customer of a bank or a member of a credit union, you can get your phone and apply, go through approvals and get funded, and have the money show up in your debit card in less than 70 seconds.”
Earnix, an Israel-based company that provides insurers and banks with real-time, dynamic pricing and rating solutions, introduced a new Chief Executive Officer this week. Robin Gilthorpe will take over the top spot at the firm effective February 1st, replacing outgoing CEO Udi Ziv, who served as Earnix’s CEO for six years.
“Today’s end-customer demands unparalleled experience, alongside highly personalized and customizable solutions,” Gilthorpe said in a statement. “Earnix solutions serve as the go-to platform for financial services companies to address the growing demands of the world’s leading financial and insurance companies.”
Gilthorpe is a finance and insurance industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience at firms such as TIBCO, Vertexone, and Watersmart Software. He was most recently Chief Operating Officer at insurtech company Salty where he helped generate a “nine-figure outcome” in the firm’s sale to CDK Global.
Founded in 2001, Earnix made its Finovate debut in 2016 at FinovateSpring in San Francisco. In the years since then, the company has forged partnerships with companies like AI cloud platform DataRobot, cloud insurance software company Majesco and, last fall, J.D. Power. Also last fall, Earnix unveiled its Underwrite-It solution which helps businesses build and manage rules and decision logic to enhance decision-making during the underwriting process.
Earnix has raised more than $100 million in funding. The company includes Insight Partners, Israel Growth Partners, and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP) among its investors.
The seed funding round was led by Team8 and featured participation from ZIM Integrated Shipping Services. ZIM also was the entity behind the $100 million credit facility 40Seas received this week. The agreement comes with an option to extend the credit facility to $200 million.
40Seas leverages AI and data analytics to determine creditworthiness, and offers flexible payment arrangements to provide small importers and exporters, freight forwarders, and sourcing agencies with critical working capital. The company made its soft launch in October of last year and says that it already has financed transactions for “dozens of SMEs.”
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) reports that small businesses represent more than 40% of all cross-border trade volume. Nevertheless, compared to large, multinational corporations, SMEs are “seven times more likely to be denied trade financing,” according to the World Trade Organization. Among the obstacles to these firms are siloed banking jurisdictions, working capital constraints, legacy processes, and more. To this end, 40Seas helps exporters get paid as quickly as possible and gives importers payment options that enable them to grow their businesses without incurring sizable additional debt.
“Given today’s harsh macroeconomic conditions, now more than ever, SMEs need easy access to financing to have the best chance of survival,” 40Seas co-founder and CEO Eyal Moldovan said.
40Seas is headquartered in Tel Aviv and has offices in New York City, Toronto, and Shenzhen.
Last month CTech published a short list of what it called the “five most promising early-stage fintech startups” in Israel. The list was based on the opinions of “prominent investors in the Israeli market” and looked at both “business potential” and “managerial depth.”
The businesses represented included travel insurance (Faye), an automated accounting platform (Trullion), a compliance platform (Sedric), a loan exchange for SMEs (Lama AI), and a payments workflow automation company (Nilus). Combined, the five companies have raised more than $47 million in funding from investors including Viola Ventures, F2, Third Point Ventures, Greycroft, Homeward Ventures, StageOne, Foundational Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
We’ll keep an eye on these and other innovative fintechs that are helping build Israel’s unique fintech ecosystem.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
What are the biggest obstacles to digital transformation in banking and financial services? For Leda Glyptis, self-described “recovering banker” and author of the new book, Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition, the fault lies not in the stars, but in bankers themselves.
Fortunately, Glyptis sees bankers as the solution, as well.
“For years I have been blogging and speaking about how the biggest obstacle to progress inside banks is people. And that the only hope for change are also people,” Glyptis told Fintech Futures as the date of the world premier of her book was announced earlier this month. “What is so often approached as a technology journey often falls down or triumphs around the humans that keep on keeping on, the dreamers, the builders, the plumbers, and the storytellers of banking transformation.”
Leda Glyptis will discuss her experiences and insights as a veteran of the banking business in an afternoon keynote address on Day One of FinovateEurope, March 14 through 15 in London. Titled “The Problem With Digital Transformation is You,” Glyptis will discuss the human and structural obstacles to digital transformation with a focus on the kind of mentality and leadership bankers need to embrace in order to bring about the changes in banking and financial services that consumers increasingly demand.
For Glyptis, there is no reason – and no time – to wait for the rise of a younger, more digitally-native generation to do the work of transforming financial services. The time to act is now, and the ones to act are bankers — with “grit, determination and energy to drive change,” Glyptis insists. “Like us.”
Bankers Like Us will be available for pre-order on Friday, January 20th, and is expected to ship after February 10th. This provides plenty of time to get your copy of the book ahead of Glyptis’ keynote at FinovateEurope in March. At the event, after Glyptis’ afternoon keynote address, we will also host a special Networking Break & Book Signing with the author.
In addition to her work as an author, Glyptis is the Chief Client Officer at 10x Banking, a cloud-native core banking platform provider based in London. She is also a Non-Executive Director at leading U.K. cash deposit platform, Flagstone. Glyptis has a PhD in Politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and shares her thoughts on banking and financial services as a columnist – and “resident thought provocateur” – with Fintech Futures. Her latest columns have tackled topics such as the importance of preparation, the role of pain in learning, and the challenge of maintaining the courage of convictions.
Be sure to visit our FinovateEurope 2023 hub to save your spot at our upcoming fintech conference, March 14 through 15 – featuring author Leda Glyptis’ keynote address on the afternoon of Day One.
Card issuing platform Marqeta launched its new web push provisioning solution.
The new offering will enable consumers to pay for products directly from their mobile wallets without having to first download a mobile app – that may be rarely used again.
The web push provisioning solution was inspired in part during Marqeta’s Hack Week event back in October 2021.
Modern card issuing platform Marqetalaunched its new web push provisioning product this week. The new offering will reduce friction at the point-of-sale by enabling users to pay for purchases directly from their mobile wallets without having to download a mobile app first.
The new web push provisioning product is designed to address a major pain point for consumers: having to download an app – that may be rarely, if ever, used again – in order to complete a given transaction. Marqeta’s solution can help boost conversion rates by eliminating this requirement and thus streamlining the customer experience. Combined with Marqeta’s instant issuance capabilities, this week’s announcement reinforces and adds to the company’s leadership in the payment card tokenization space.
“Growing familiarity with digital wallets created demand for a solution that enables Marqeta customers to quickly and easily provision virtual cards and digital wallet tokens from the web for use with both Apple Pay and Google Pay,” Marqeta Chief Product Officer Simon Khalaf explained. “Our web push provisioning product meets that need and helps enable our customers to deliver a streamlined checkout experience to their end users.”
Marqeta’s offering comes as consumer adoption of digital wallets continues to show strength. According to Juniper Research, global digital wallet transactions are expected to grow 60% by 2026. Additionally, 71% of U.S. consumers in 2022 say that they have used a mobile wallet in the previous 12 months compared to 64% in 2020. Nevertheless, 75% of consumers admit to having abandoned a transaction after being prompted to download a mobile app in order to complete the purchase.
Marqeta’s web push provisioning solution, currently in beta and expected to be generally available later this year, was specifically designed to address this problem. The technology has its origins in a Hack Week event from last year, as members of Marqeta’s team realized the value of enabling brands to provision tokens from a mobile web browser. Built in partnership with both Apple and Google, the web push provisioning technology has been deployed by Bread Financial, which praised the way the product enabled the company to “offer flexible payment options that will keep the merchant’s brand at the forefront a deliver a better experience for the customer,” according to Bread Financial EVP and Chief Commercial Officer Val Greer.
An alumni of Finovate’s developer conference, FinDEVr SiliconValley 2016, Marqeta today is certified to operate in 40 countries around the world. Last fall, the company announced the launch of its Marqeta for Banking offering, which brought new banking capabilities to the company’s card issuing platform. Marqeta has forged partnerships in recent months with Raiffeisen Centrobank to power the institution’s new digital banking brand for customers in Poland and Romania – and with Blockchain.com, to power the cryptocurrency platform’s crypto-based Visa Card.
Headquartered in Oakland, California, Marqeta was founded in 2010. The firm is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ under the ticker MQ, and has a market capitalization of $3.4 billion. Jason Gardner is CEO.
Mastercard and upSWOT announced an open banking partnership this week.
The collaboration will enable upSWOT’s small business customers to access actionable insights and more readily secure financing.
upSWOT made its Finovate debut in 2020 and returned to the Finovate stage in 2022 for FinovateFall.
A collaboration between Mastercard and North Carolina-based fintech upSWOT will help banks better serve their small business clients by providing them with actionable insights and easier access to capital. Courtesy of Mastercard’s open banking platform and services delivered via its subsidiary Finicity, the partnership will bring open banking capabilities to upSWOT’s platform. This will enable SMEs on upSWOT’s platform to connect owner-permissioned financial data to 200 API-enabled apps, providing services such as accounting, payroll, e-commerce, CRM, and more.
“SMBs have long been accepted as the engines of economic growth and development but at times are underserved,” upSWOT CEO Dmitry Norenko said. “We believe that fintech innovation can dramatically reshape the success of SMBs.”
In a statement, upSWOT and Mastercard said that they will promote the new joint offering to their customers and to U.S. banks. The new features of the combined solution include:
Credit Boost: Enables businesses to share data with credit bureaus to potentially increase credit scores
Insights: Analyzes multiple data streams to suggest actions businesses can take to improve operations and profitability
Cash Flow Forecasts: Provides visibility into expected cash flows using sensitivity analysis and modeling
Bank reconciliation, cash management, business valuation, funding access, and ecommerce performance are also part of the new solution’s feature set.
“We are excited to partner with upSWOT to make it easier for financial institutions to offer their small business customers the ability to benefit from their financial data to make decisions, demonstrate their ability to manage a loan, and run their businesses more efficiently,” Mastercard EVP of U.S. Open Banking Andy Sheehan said.
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in Charlotte, upSWOT made its Finovate debut at our all-digital conference in 2020. The company returned to the Finovate stage last September for FinovateFall. Since then, the company has announced partnerships with Standard Chartered (SC) to launch a pilot project in Singapore and with fellow Finovate alum Cion Digital to bring embedded finance tools to more SMEs.
upSWOT has raised more than $5 million in funding from investors including Common Ocean Ventures.
The jury is still out on whether or not January is officially Financial Wellness Month. But savings platform Plinqitisn’t waiting around for any verdict. The Ann Arbor, Michigan-based fintech announced this week that it has partnered with SUMA Federal Credit Union to help give the institution’s 7,000+ members the resources they need to become better savers.
The partnership will enable SUMA FCU’s members to access tools such as Plinqit’s Build Skills solution. Build Skills provides users with content that helps them build their personal finance awareness and savings skills, and then pays them for learning new skills. In turn, the funds earned from learning more about financial wellness can help propel users toward their Plinqit savings goals. SUMA FCU members will be able to access the functionality via SUMA FCU’s digital banking platform, thanks to Plinqit’s integration with Jack Henry’sBanno Digital Toolkit.
SUMA FCU expects the new technology will help attract new members to the credit union as well as enhance the banking experience for existing members. The institution serves communities in Yonkers and Spring Valley, New York, as well as New Haven and Stamford, Connecticut. Both regions feature sizable populations of Ukrainian immigrants and parishioners of St. Michael’s Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church. Established more than 55 years ago, SUMA FCU has more than $400 million in assets today.
“Credit unions are known for having strong relationships with their member base and SUMA Federal Credit Union has exemplified this for decades,” Plinqit CEO and founder Kathleen Craig said. She highlighted SUMA FCU’s support of local institutions, including churches, Ukrainian youth groups, and other cultural organizations. “Plinqit is proud to partner with an institution that consistently strives to make a meaningful impact in its community,” Craig said.
Plinqit made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2019 in New York. At the conference, Plinqit demoed its Build Skills offering – “created by Millennials for Millennials” – which aligns data, behavior, and incentives to make savings goals easier to set and attain. Last year, the company secured $5 million in Series A funding. The round, co-led by Fintop Capital of Nashville, Tennessee, and JAM FINTOP of New York, took Plinqit’s total funding to nearly $10 million.
Plinqit’s partnership announcement comes just a week after the company released its latest State of Savings Report. This survey, which measures top savings priorities for consumers, showed that 43% of consumers are actively contributing to an emergency fund for both short-term and long-term potential expenses. “While the price increases for everyday necessities leave many U.S. households with financial stress, consumers remain focused on building up their emergency savings even in these trying times,” Craig said. “Providing tools to help them be successful in their savings goal is critical for financial institutions.”
KYC/KYB specialist Kyckr has agreed to be acquired by tech entrepreneur and billionaire Richard White.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
Kyckr is an alum of our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016, where the company presented “Corporate Identity on the Blockchain.”
Kyckr, a technology company that provides corporations with authoritative real-time data on potential and existing customers and suppliers, has agreed to be acquired by Richard White, an Australian technology entrepreneur. White, who founded Australian technology company WiseTech Global in 1994, will acquire the company via his personal investment vehicle RealWise KYK AV Pty Ltd. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
“The Kyckr team is delighted to have the strategic guidance, support, and vision that successful tech-entrepreneur and founder Richard White provides,” Kyckr CEO Ian Henderson said. “We are embarking upon an exciting evolution of our powerful offering to broaden its scope by building an integrated global software solution to enable businesses to navigate the highly complex and dynamic compliance and counterparty risk challenges that they face in an increasingly interconnected and digital marketplace.”
Kyckr specializes in providing businesses with real-time access to aggregated corporate Know Your Customer/Know Your Business (KYC/KYB) and Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO) data from more than 300 company registries and primary sources worldwide. This reach enables Kyckr to conduct real-time due diligence on more than 120 million companies around the globe. White noted that this capacity was especially important in a world with ever-expanding compliance laws and regulations on one hand and innovative financial criminals on the other. He described the contemporary challenge of KYC/KYB compliance as “increasingly high-risk, complex, time-consuming, and costly.”
White’s WiseTech Global bills itself as the “operating system for global logistics.” In a statement, White compared Kyckr’s ability to automate manual processes and aggregate data from real-time sources to the way WiseTech’s CargoWise solution has replaced legacy logistics systems with integrated technology. Both solutions, White indicated, are designed to “drive productivity, reduce compliance risk, and facilitate planning, visualization, and control.”
A Finovate alum since its appearance at our developers conference FinDEVr SiliconValley in 2016, Kyckr has raised more than $18 million in funding to date. The company maintains offices in the U.K., Ireland, and Australia.
Denmark-based Subaio announced this week that it was teaming up with fellow Danish fintech – and fellow Finovate alum – Aiia. Subaio will leverage its partnership with Aiia to better assess creditworthiness for its new white label offering. The collaboration will streamline creditworthiness assessment through a combination of Aiia’s access to financial data and Subaio’s recurring payments detection technology.
“To create automation and a product that works for solid credit scoring across industries, we need as solid and deep quality of data as possible to label the transactions and categorize them afterwards,” Subaio Chief Commercial Officer Soren Nielsen said. “That’s why we chose Aiia to help us bring this next exciting step in the Subaio journey up to speed.”
In some ways, partnerships like this are being encouraged by regulatory decisions. The EU’s revised Consumer Credit Directive of 2021 mandates that financial services firms document customer income and recurring expenses before offering financing to help lower the number of non-performing loans.
“With Aiia, Subaio will be able to offer their customers a hassle-free, cost-efficient and data-driven solution to assess creditworthiness,” Aiia SMB & Fintech Director Tanya Slavova said. “With our high quality data in mind, this open banking empowerment will grant borrowers better loan assessments based on the accurate overview of the consumer’s actual financial situation.”
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Denmark, Subaio made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2020 in Berlin. At the conference, the company demoed its white label subscription management service, which gives customers a comprehensive overview of their recurring payments, helps them cancel unwanted subscriptions, and provides notifications to enable customers to avoid “subscription traps.” The company returned to the Finovate stage two years later for FinovateEurope 2022 in London with a demo of its automatic creditworthiness assessment solution.
Subaio has raised $4.9 million in funding from investors including Global PayTech Ventures. Thomas Laursen is CEO.
Making its Finovate debut at our all-digital FinovateEurope 2021 conference, Copenhagen, Denmark-based Aiia was launched in 2017. A leading open banking platform in Northern Europe, the company demoed its account-to-account payment services at FinovateEurope 2021, showing how the technology facilitates everything from one-off payments for ecommerce to bulk payments for SMEs using a single API. Aiia was acquired by Mastercard in the fall of 2021 for an undisclosed amount. Rune Mai is CEO and co-founder.
In other fintech news from the Nordics, Boost.ai, a Finovate alum from Norway, announced that it will bring its conversational AI technology to Nordic bank DNB. Specifically, DNB will use Boost.ai’s technology to automate more than half of the bank’s chat traffic with its Aino virtual agent. Aino presently automates upwards of 20% of the bank’s customer service requests. According to DNB, more than one million of its customers have interacted with Aino.
Boost.ai VP of EMEA Sanjeev Kumar praised DNB has “one of the many forward-thinking organizations that are reaping the benefits of embracing a conversational AI solution.” Kumar highlighted the fact that conversational AI helps free up staff to enable them to focus on higher-order and more complex customer service tasks. Headquartered in Oslo, DNB is the largest financial services group in Norway. DNB offers a full range of financial services, including loans and savings, insurance and pension products, as well as advisory services for both retail and corporate customers.
“Artificial intelligence is an important part of our digital strategy,” DNB SVP and Head of IT Emerging Technologies Jan Thomas Lerstein said. “In leveraging AI, our aim is to revitalize our value chains, creating better service for our customers and, of course, value for the bank.” Lerstein added that DNB is evaluating other AI-enabled solutions including voice APIs to help the bank reach “higher levels of personalization.”
Boost.ai made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in New York in 2019, demoing its virtual agent technology. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Sandnes, Norway, the company introduced a new CEO – Jerry Haywood – in the fall of 2022. Haywood took over the position from founder and previous CEO Lars Selsås, who will focus on product development and innovation going forward.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Middle East and Northern Africa
UAE-based Careem Pay teamed up with Lulu Exchange to offer international remittances.
American Express agreed to acquire Israel-based B2B payments automation company Nipendo.
