Author: David Penn

Best of Show: Catching Up with the Faves of FinovateEurope

Best of Show: Catching Up with the Faves of FinovateEurope
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Best of Show, FinovateEurope 2022, List series

FinovateEurope 2022 is less than a month away, and innovative fintechs from all around the world are gearing up to demonstrate their latest technologies live on the Finovate stage. Find out more about our annual European fintech conference, including how to register and save your spot as Finovate returns to live events in Europe for the first time since 2020 next month on March 22 and 23.

One of the goals of every company demoing their solutions at Finovate is to win a coveted Best of Show award. This honor is granted exclusively by our Finovate attendees who evaluate every company on stage and select only those innovators whose technology is most impressive and, potentially, impactful. To give you a sense of the kind of companies to win this award, here’s a look at the FinovateEurope Best of Show winners from the previous two years – as well as an update on what they’ve accomplished since winning their award.

2021

Dbilia earned a Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2021 for its platform that enables creatives and influencers to sell digital memorabilia. The New York-based company was featured in the July edition of MarTech in a look at the rising NFT trend.

Property investment platform Proptee, also a Best of Show winner in its Finovate debut last year at FinovateEurope, raised more than $57,000 in seed funding in December from Lebenheim Capital and Steep VC.

Continuous product design innovator Quantum Metric was among the Finovate newcomers to earn a Best of Show award at FinovateEurope 2021 last March. Since then, the Colorado Springs, Colorado-based company has announced the availability of its solution on Salesforce AppExchange, and forged partnerships with Korea Air, iGaming operator BetVictor, luxury fashion brand La Perla, experience management software company Qualtrics, and video-based human insight innovator UserTesting.

2020

If 2021 was the year Finovate audiences showed their appreciation for conference newcomers, 2020 marked the year when veteran Finovate alums earned their place in the spotlight. Four of the companies that won Best of Show at FinovateEurope in that pre-pandemic year – Dorsum, Glia, iProov, and W.UP – picked up their second awards in a row (or more) having taken home Best of Show honors at the previous year’s conference in 2019.

Investment software provider Dorsum followed up its second, FinovateEurope Best of Show award in 2020 with the formation of a new business consulting unit a few months later. In the fall of 2020, the company introduced a new Chief Business Development Officer Bálint Fischer, and launched a new subsidiary in Poland in July of the next year. This month, Dorsum announced that it had joined Fintech Belgium, a community of financial services and fintech professionals as part of what the company called its “next step (toward) venturing into Western Europe.”

Digital customer service innovator Glia has been one of Finovate’s most popular demoing companies in recent years, with multiple Best of Show wins in Europe and in the U.S. Earlier this month, the company announced a partnership with insurtech leader Sureify, integrating its capabilities into Sureify’s Lifetime platform. In 2021, Glia reeled in $78 million in funding, and earned recognition from Deloitte with a spot on the firm’s Technology Fast 500 for the second consecutive year. Among the company’s new partnerships forged in 2021 were collaborations with Kasisto, Posh, Apiture, Liberty Bank, fellow Finovate alum Clinc, and Zensar.

Horizn, which specializes in helping financial institutions and their employees maximize and accelerate their digital transformation efforts, earned the first of its Best of Show awards at FinovateEurope in Berlin in 2020. The company announced a partnership with Pacific Western Bank at the beginning of this month, powering the Los Angeles, California-based financial institution’s newly launched digital learning platform.

Biometric authentication company and FinovateEurope veteran iProov earned its third Best of Show award at our European fintech conference in 2020. The company secured $70 million in funding from Sumeru Equity Partners to start this year and, earlier this month, was granted a patent to extend its Genuine Presence technology to include driver’s license and government ID verification. Named to the Deloitte Fast 50 of the fastest growing technology firms in the U.K. last year, iProov reported a record 2021 in which the company achieved revenues that were 3x the previous year’s results.

Sonect demonstrated its global platform for cash transactions during its Finovate debut in Berlin in 2020, winning a Best of Show award. The company, headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, enables users of its technology to withdraw cash via smartphone at any one of its 2,500 partnering retailers. Last summer, the company announced that its service would be available to customers in the U.K., following its participation in the U.K. Finance Community Access to Cash Pilots Initiative. In October, Sonect announced that it had raised more than $5 million (EUR 4.65 million) in funding from Italian Angels for Growth to bring its cash access solution to Italy.

Budapest, Hungary-based digital banking solution provider W.UP is another FinovateEurope favorite, having been awarded Best of Show in each of the last three FinovateEurope events. The company offers a personalization platform which leverages data to help institutions offer better banking services. In October of 2021, the company merged with BSC of Czechia to form a new company Finshape that is dedicated to driving digital transformation in banking in Europe.

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Identity Verification Specialist OCR Labs Secures $30 Million in Series B Funding

Identity Verification Specialist OCR Labs Secures $30 Million in Series B Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Funding, OCR Labs
  • OCR Labs, an identity verification company founded in Australia and headquartered in London, announced a $30 million Series B round.
  • The funding takes the company’s total capital to $46 million and will be used to help OCR Labs expand further in North America and EMEA.
  • Making its Finovate debut in 2016, the company won Best of Show at FinovateAsia a year later.

In a round led by Equable Capital, a New York-based family office, identity verification specialist OCR Labs has raised $30 million in a Series B round. The investment will be used to help the London, U.K.-based company grow its team in North America and EMEA, and gives the firm $46 million in total capital.

“2021 was an incredible year for OCR Labs, with continued validation from customers who have chosen us as their provider for online digital identity verification,” OCR Labs CEO John Myers said in a statement. “This investment provides us with the capital to continue our growth while bringing a value-added investor on to our board.”

Boasting a 5x increase in new clients and 3x growth in the size of its team over the past 12 months, OCR Labs offers automated identity verification via ID document validation, facial biometrics and other techniques. OCR Labs’ approach removes the need for human intervention in the customer identification process, and gives companies the tools they need to meet AML and KYC requirements and reduce fraud.

The company made its Finovate debut at our developers conference FinDEVr Silicon Valley in 2016 and returned one year later to win Best of Show at FinovateAsia in Hong Kong. Securing Series A funding last year, OCR Labs also recently opened a new office in North America, added a direct sales force, and hired a global Chief Revenue Officer.

“Our vision remains unchanged,” Myers said, “we strive to be the leading technology provider of digital identity verification, globally. The market opportunity continues to grow, and with our expansion in the U.S., and investment in our global sales effort, we’re in a phenomenal position to grow our customer base.”

The first private company to earn accreditation as an identity provider under the Trusted Digital Identity Framework (TDIF) of the Australian government, OCR Labs serves customers in a wide variety of verticals including financial services companies, brokerages, insurers, telecoms, and gaming companies.

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Virgin Money Partners with HooYu to Boost Success of Customer Onboarding Process

Virgin Money Partners with HooYu to Boost Success of Customer Onboarding Process
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, Daily news, HooYu

If making a great first impression is important, then Virgin Money’s decision to partner with customer onboarding and KYC technology specialist HooYu should make a pretty good impression of its own.

“Our smart digital tools put our customers in control and the HooYu journey helps our customers to successfully pass KYC where traditional name and address checks fail,” Virgin Money Head of Digital Customer Experience Linda Robertson said. “We chose to work with a regtech partner like HooYu because their platform enables us to easily build a range of digital onboarding journeys that are simple for our new customers to complete.”

A two-time FinovateEurope alum, HooYu combines a variety of KYC tools and technologies to ensure the success of the customer onboarding journey. This includes giving companies confidence that their customers are who they say they are. HooYu’s identity verification service leverages selfie capture, liveness detection, ID document capture and validation, facial biometrics, address proofing, and geolocation in a seamless process that reduces abandonment and increases conversions. Features such as dynamic customer prompts, white label customization, and flexible customer journeys help reduce friction and streamline the account opening experience.

Calling the emphasis on the digital customer experience an “obsession” with banks like Virgin Money,” HooYu Marketing Director David Pope said it was HooYu’s role to help these institutions “refine their new account journeys and achieve the origination goals.”

Virgin Money serves 6.5 million customers in the U.K. A full-service digital bank, the institution offers current, savings, and business accounts; credit cards and insurance; mortgages and personal loans; as well as pensions and investments. Originally launched as Virgin Direct in 1995, the company secured its banking license 2010 and rebranded as Virgin Money two years later.

“It’s our job to help banks like Virgin Money to orchestrate KYC services and easily configure and deploy with a great customer journey,” Pope said.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in London, U.K., HooYu began the year by leveraging open banking to support identity and affordability checks. The new offering, Bank Connect, enables users to establish their identity or affordability by logging into their bank account during the KYC process. With the user’s consent, Bank Connect provides identity, account overview, transaction, and card data. This information is analyzed, scored, and presented in a HooYu report. HooYu deletes all the user’s Bank Connect data once the client has reviewed the results of the report.

The technology is currently being rolled out to gaming operators, who benefit from the insights into customer affordability and use the information to make more accurate customer risk assessments. In fact, one month after announcing Bank Connect, HooYu introduced new partner MrQ, one of the U.K.’s growing number of online casinos.

Want to meet companies like FinovateEurope alum HooYu? Check out our FinovateEurope 2022 Sneak Peek series and learn more about the companies demoing their latest technologies next month at FinovateEurope in London, March 22 and 23.

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Savings App Plinqit Raises $5 Million in Series A Funding

Savings App Plinqit Raises $5 Million in Series A Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Funding, Plinqit
  • Savings app Plinqit has raised $5 million in Series A funding, bringing its total capital to nearly $10 million.
  • The technology helps users save safely and efficiently, and offers rewards for users who improve their financial literacy by engaging in educational content via the app.
  • Plinqit was founded in 2015 by CEO Kathleen Craig

Michigan-based savings app Plinqit has secured $5 million in funding this week. The company, which made its Finovate debut in 2019 at FinovateFall in New York, will use the new capital to help scale the business to meet growing demand. The Series A round brings Plinqit’s total capital to just under $10 million.

“Financial wellness is crucial for all of us in financial services,” Plinqit founder and CEO Kathleen Craig said. “We created Plinqit to help builders create solutions that truly help people in a way that is engaging and rewarding. It was critical for us that it was technology that they would want to use – and they are.”

The round was led by Nashville, Tennessee-based Fintop Capital and New York’s JAM FINTOP. Also participating in the investment were Invest Detroit, Michigan Rise, and Michigan’s 4Front Credit Union.

Plinqit is a brandable, mobile-first savings app – built by Millennials for Millennials. The platform empowers users to create up to five savings goals, and begin setting aside funds for each goal while earning rewards. The app’s Build Skills feature not only helps users develop financial literacy, it also pays them for doing so, rewarding users for engaging with content which boosts user engagement for financial institutions that offer the technology. Plinqit also offers a virtual account management system – Vi.Ledger – which enables financial institutions to build their own custom savings programs using virtual accounts within the app.

Launched in 2015, Plinqit is one of the leading solutions offered by app development company, HT Mobile Apps (HTMA). The technology has been adopted in recent years by a number of community financial institutions including The Milford Bank ($482 million in assets), ChoiceOne Bank ($244 million in assets), and First Arkansas Bank & Trust ($760 million in assets). “We created Plinqit as a tool to not only help customers safely and securely meet their savings goals, but to also help financial institutions compete for deposits and develop deeper relationships with their customers,” Craig said when the partnership with First Arkansas Bank & Trust was announced in the summer of 2020.

Last fall, Plinqit announced an integration with the digital banking platform of fellow Finovate alum Q2. Funds saved on the Plinqit app are FDIC- or NCUA-insured, and the service is free to users.

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ThetaRay Forges Historic Partnership with UAE’s Mashreq Bank to Enable Secure Cross-Border Fund Transfers

ThetaRay Forges Historic Partnership with UAE’s Mashreq Bank to Enable Secure Cross-Border Fund Transfers
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global, Nordigen, Nubank, Temenos, ThetaRay

Historic news out of the Middle East leads off our international fintech coverage this week on Finovate Global. Israel’s AI-powered transaction monitoring innovator ThetaRay has been selected by the UAE’s Mashreq Bank to help ensure secure cross-border transfers for its correspondent banking business.

The partnership marks the first time that an Israel-based fintech company has teamed up with a financial institution from the UAE. The collaboration was made possible by the historic Abraham Accords, signed in the fall of 2020, which normalized relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco.

“Mashreq Bank is our first customer in the UAE,” ThetaRay CEO Mark Gazit said. “We look forward to accelerating collaboration with additional financial institutions in the UAE and the entire Middle East, as part of the continued expansion of ThetaRay’s global reach.”

Making its Finovate debut in 2015, ThetaRay offers banks and financial payment providers the ability to detect anomalies in multiple data sets, regardless of size or source. This makes the company’s cloud-based, SaaS AI analytics platform is especially effective in monitoring cross-border payments, an area that has become increasingly vulnerable to financial crime – including money laundering – in recent years. ThetaRay estimates that the cross-border payments market will grow from $37.15 trillion in 2020 to nearly $40 trillion by 2026, potentially attracting an even greater number of fraudsters and thieves.

“ThetaRay’s technology, underpinned by advanced machine-learning based models complementing rules, sets the foundation for next-generation transaction monitoring,” Mashreq Bank’s Group Head of Compliance and Bank MLRO Scott Ramsay said. “By combining speed and agility with efficiency, it allows banks to effectively thwart financial crime risks in the increasingly complex space of cross-border payments.”

A leading MENA-area financial institution, Mashreq Bank is the oldest privately owned bank in the UAE, founded in 1967 as the Bank of Oman. Last fall, the bank announced a partnership with Visa to develop a new digital reconciliation platform for business expense tracking. Mashreq Bank was also the first regional bank to launch an API developer portal, going live with the platform back in October. A month later, the institution reported a net profit of $72 million (AED 265 million) for the nine months ending September 30th.

“Mashreq’s advanced digital transformation program has continued to deliver outstanding service to customers throughout the nine months ending 30th September 2021,” Group CEO Ahmed Abdelaal said. He highlighted the role of digital platforms in supporting the bank’s growth, and embraced the “development of a diverse, inclusive, and enabling working environment” courtesy of Mashreq’s adoption of a “work from anywhere culture.”

FinovateEurope 2022 is just one month away. If you are an innovative fintech company with new technology to show, then there’s no better time than now and no better forum than FinovateEurope. To learn more about how to demo your latest innovation at FinovateEurope 2022 in London, March 22 and 23, visit our FinovateEurope hub today!

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Central and Eastern Europe

Middle East and Northern Africa

Central and Southern Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

Asia-Pacific

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Backbase Inks New Partnership with Boston-based Eastern Bank

Backbase Inks New Partnership with Boston-based Eastern Bank
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Backbase, Daily news
  • Backbase has forged a new partnership with New England-area financial institution, Eastern Bank.
  • Eastern Bank will leverage Backbase-as-a-Service and Backbase Digital Sales technology to streamline its new account opening process, as well as create and release new financial products and services.
  • With $24 billion in assets and more than 120 locations, Eastern Bank serves customers in eastern Massachusetts, southern and coastal New Hampshire, and Rhode Island.

A new partnership between engagement banking innovator Backbase and Eastern Bank will bring a fully digital account opening experience to the Boston-based financial institution’s customers. Eastern Bank ($24 billion in assets) will deploy both Backbase-as-a-Service and Backbase’s Digital Sales solutions, which will give Eastern the technical infrastructure it needs to create and deliver new products and services faster.

The deployment of Backbase’s Digital Sales solution will enable Eastern Bank to combine Backbase’s out-of-the-box accelerators and integrations with solutions from third-party fintechs to offer their customers personalized digital banking services – as well as remove much of the complexity customers encounter when opening new accounts. Eastern Bank expects to offer Backbase’s Digital Sales capabilities in the first half of this year to new retail customers. The bank’s new commercial and business banking customers can expect a similar offering later in 2022.

“We are thrilled Eastern Bank chose to collaborate with us around this commitment to technology and innovation,” SVP of Americas at Backbase Vincent Bezemer said. “Like us, they are passionate about delivering the best digital experience possible for customers.” Bezemer complimented Eastern Bank’s team as “agile and digitally-focused” as well as having a “human-centered approach” to collecting and incorporating customer feedback to ensure high-quality customer experiences.

Founded in 1818, Eastern Bank offers banking, investment, and insurance products and services for retail consumers and businesses in parts of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The bank earned the 2021 Impact Innovation Award for Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Analytics by Aite-Novarica Group and was a finalist in the Best Small Business Banking Solution category at the 2021 Finovate Awards.

A multiple-time Finovate Best of Show winner, Backbase is one of Finovate’s oldest alums, having made its debut on the Finovate stage in 2009. More recently, the company participated in Finovate’s return to live events last September as part of FinovateFall in New York. At the conference, Backbase demonstrated its complete customer onboarding technology that consolidates customer finances via direct deposit, billpay auto linking, and debit card account opening.

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Backbase was named “Best in Class” among digital banking platform vendors in Javelin’s 2021 Digital Banking Platform Scorecard. In addition to its partnership with Eastern Bank, Backbase has collaborated in recent months with Wyoming-based Blue Federal Credit Union and St. Louis, Missouri-based, family-owned First Bank.

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FinovateEurope’s Digital Kick Off Previews Upcoming In-Person Event

FinovateEurope’s Digital Kick Off Previews Upcoming In-Person Event
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateEurope 2022, Speaker series

A week before FinovateEurope’s in-person event begins on March 22nd, our annual Europe-based fintech conference will feature a special Digital Kick Off. This afternoon session on March 15 is accessible from anywhere and 100% virtual. The day will feature a mastermind keynote, a fireside chat, a set of digital demos from fintech innovators, and a power panel on the future of fintech.

Here, we will introduce two of our Digital Kick Off speakers – Zennon Kapron, founder and director, Kapronasia; and Malin Lignell, VP of Digitalization & Innovation, Handelsbanken. For more information on FinovateEurope, including both the Digital Kick Off on March 15 and the in-person event on March 22 and 23, visit our FinovateEurope hub.

Zennon Kapron

Founder and Director of Kapronasia, Zennon Kapron will lead a Mastermind Keynote on our Digital Kick Off day titled The Trends & Opportunities Shaping Fintech in Asia. Kapronasia provides research and consulting services with a focus on financial and blockchain technology.

Previous to Kapronasia, Kapron was Intel’s Global Banking Industry Manager and, before that, CIO for Citigroup Portugal. He has extensive experience with fintech and Asia, currently serving as an instructor in fintech at the Singapore Management University, an ambassador with the Emerging Payments Association of Asia, and founder and director of China Fintech, which works with startups, financial institutions, and investors to build an ecosystem that develops innovative solutions for China’s financial industry.

Kapron is also the author of Chomping at the Bitcoin: The History and Future of Bitcoin in China. He earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Syracuse and an MBA from INSEAD.

Malin Lignell

Vice President of Digitalization & Innovation with Sweden’s Handelsbanken, Lignell will provide a Fireside Chat as part of our Digital Kick Off event on March 15th. A 20+ year veteran of the Swedish bank – the oldest company on the Swedish stock exchange – Lignell has served in leadership roles, including as Deputy Branch Manager, for more than half of her tenure at Handelsbanken. She joined the Digitalization and Innovation team at the bank in the fall of 2019, where she works at both the strategic and operational level to help drive the institution toward greater innovation as it pursues its digitization objectives.

With a special focus on the way that emerging technologies shape and change customer behavior and business models, Lignell has spoken frequently on the challenges that financial institutions face as they undertake digitization. She has noted that while behavioral changes are often the most difficult component of technological transformation, often the forces that help propel change (for example, the global pandemic) nevertheless serve as a powerful and effective incentives to solve new problems in new and creative ways.

Lignell is an alum of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) where she received a diploma in Accounting and Finance. She also earned a Master of Science in International Business Studies and Economics from Ekonomihögskolan i Växjö, and a degree in Business Administration and Economics from The University of Graz.

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Xignite Introduces its Cryptocurrency Data API, XigniteCrypto

Xignite Introduces its Cryptocurrency Data API, XigniteCrypto
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Xignite
  • Leading market data API company Xignite launched its cryptocurrency API, XigniteCrypto API, this week.
  • The new offering helps wealth managers and brokers serve clients interested in trading or investing in digital assets.
  • The XigniteCrypto API provides real-time and historical data on more than 900 different cryptocurrencies.

Market data API provider Xignite has launched a new solution to help its broker and wealth management customers take advantage of the cryptocurrency revolution. This week, the San Mateo, California-based fintech introduced the XigniteCrypto API, the first API of its kind to combine the large and growing universe of cryptocurrency information with the stock, exchange-traded fund (ETF), and options data that brokers and wealth managers rely upon to serve their clients.

Xignite CEO and founder Stephane Dubois highlighted the challenge of working with cryptocurrencies for the average broker or wealth manager. “Cryptocurrencies tend to operate in their own world,” he explained. “This means that if you want to offer integrated equity, option, and crypto trading or analytics for your clients, you are going to have to cobble up a lot of heterogeneous data from many disparate sources, and that’s a pain.”

The new cryptocurrency API provides real-time and historical quotes for more than 900 different cryptocurrencies, including coins and tokens. The solution features unique API endpoints to help brokers and wealth managers engage digital traders and investors, and provides data and tools such as price alerts, historical charting, currency conversion, and news to help customers make sound trading and investing decisions using cryptocurrencies.

“With our new crypto API, you get the depth of coverage, the quality, and the reliability across all asset classes you need to grow your business – all in one integrated solution,” Dubois said.

A market data innovator for nearly two decades, Xignite launched the first commercial REST API and has since grown into one of the leading providers of market data API solutions to brokers, wealth managers, and fintechs. Today, the company’s APIs are used by 700+ companies more than 500 billion times a month to serve their digital investing clients. A Finovate alum since 2014, Xignite has raised more than $37 million in funding from investors including StarVest Partners and Japan-based QUICK.

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From Equipment Financing to Product Quality, African American Executives Take the Finovate Stage

From Equipment Financing to Product Quality, African American Executives Take the Finovate Stage
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni profile, Diversity in Fintech

As part of our commemoration of African American History Month, our Alumni Profile feature for this week showcases two African Americans who represented their companies at Finovate events in 2021.

Nathan Gibbons

Nathan Gibbons is Chief Operating Officer of Innovation Finance USA, the company behind QuickFi, a fully digital mobile, self-service business equipment financing platform. QuickFi made its Finovate debut at FinovateAsia during the summer of 2021 and returned to the Finovate stage later that year for FinovateFall.

“Businesses acquire new equipment as they grow, and most equipment is financed by banks or manufacturer finance companies through leases and loans, similar to the way that automobiles are financed by consumers,” Gibbons explained at the beginning of QuickFi’s demo last year. “In fact, roughly a trillion dollars of business equipment is financed each year in the U.S.”

“Unfortunately, the equipment financing process is lengthy, opaque, and takes days or weeks to complete. And this is a real problem. Because there are literally millions of businesses whose growth and success is stifled by a slow, antiquated, equipment financing process.”

Previous to joining Innovation Finance, Gibbons was an executive with First American Equipment Finance, serving as Vice President for five years and as Project Manager for six. Educated at the University of Rochester, where he earned a B.A. in Spanish, Gibbons received his MBA from the University’s Simon Business School. He is both a Certified Lease and Finance Professional (CLFP) and a Certified DISC Behavioral Analyst. He is also a member of the Board of Directors for the Equipment Leasing and Finance Association and the CLFP Foundation.

Headquartered in Fairport, New York, and founded in 2018, QuickFi has partnered with companies like Johnson Controls, SANY America, and Juniper Networks. The company was recognized last November by the 2021 Asset Finance Connect UK Conference and Awards by Asset Finance International. The following month, QuickFi was named a 2021 Pan Finance Award winner in the Innovative Commercial Financial Platform, USA category.

Anthony Heckman

Anthony Heckman is Head of Business Development and Growth for and founding member of unitQ, a product quality monitoring platform that enables fintechs and other companies to pursue a data-driven approach to product quality and enhancement. The company made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in New York last September.

“We’ve built a world-class, machine learning platform. And today, I’m going to show you how we help some of the best companies in the world – companies like Chime, BRD, Truebill, and Pinterest — fix the right quality issues faster,” Heckman said last year at FinovateFall. “And by doing so, (we help them) improve product quality, (and) important metrics like retention and app store ratings. We’re cutting ‘time to fix’ for some of the best engineering organizations in the world so they can win in hyper-competitive markets like fintech.”

A graduate of the University of Southern California, where he received his Bachelors degree, Heckman earned his JD from the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. He is mentor with Defy of Northern California, an organization that helps current and formerly incarcerated men, women, and youth develop the skills they need to pursue legal business opportunities and careers. Heckman is also a board member of Safe & Sound, an organization that works to prevent child abuse.

Based in Burlingame, California and founded in 2017, unitQ raised $30 million in Series B funding last fall in a round led by Accel. With partners including Chime, HelloFresh, NerdWallet and, most recently, PagerDuty, unitQ gives product managers a single, platform with which to observe and benchmark user feedback and product quality signals. Earlier this month, the company unveiled its February 2022 unitQ Scorecard of the highest-ranking apps with the best product quality across a range of different industries.

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Marqeta Teams Up with Plaid to Simplify ACH Transfers

Marqeta Teams Up with Plaid to Simplify ACH Transfers
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Marqeta, Plaid
  • Marqeta and Plaid have teamed up to simplify and streamline the ACH transfer process to enable faster funding of financial accounts.
  • The collaboration is designed to provide both seamless account funding as well as additional security during data transfer.
  • Both Marqeta and Plaid made their Finovate debuts as part of Finovate’s developer conference series, FinDEVr.

A partnership between a pair of Finovate alums – card-issuing platform Marqeta and financial data network Plaid – will simplify ACH transfers to make it easier for customers to authenticate and fund their accounts.

Per the agreement, Marqeta customer cardholders will be able to transfer money seamlessly between customers and external accounts, as well as verify and link to external accounts faster. The company’s customers also will be able to keep cardholders informed on the status of fund transfers via real-time notifications, and better manage issues ranging from initiations to cancellations to return. Enhanced security is another benefit of the partnership. Marqeta customers no longer will need to store sensitive information from cardholders’ external bank accounts – relying instead on tokens while Plaid and Marqeta exchange necessary bank account information in the background.

“We’re making it as simple as possible for consumers to access their bank information from one application, and reduce the time it takes to fund and begin using their account,” Marqeta Chief Operating Officer Vidya Peters explained. “Through our Plaid integration, developers building on Marqeta can authenticate users’ bank accounts without the complexity and extra time associated with traditional ACH processing, creating an overall more seamless experience.”

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Oakland, California, Marqeta is an alum of our developers conference FinDEVr Silicon Valley. The company’s card issuing platform provides businesses with the infrastructure, technology, and tools to build and manage their own payment programs. Last month, Marqeta announced that it has secured certification to operate in three countries in Southeast Asia – Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines – which means the company’s platform is now enabled in 39 countries around the world. Marqeta announced that, with its further expansion into the Asia Pacific (the company is also active in Australia and New Zealand), it will establish an Asia Pacific regional hub in Singapore later this year.

Also a veteran of our developers conference, Plaid began 2022 with the launch of its data privacy solution, Plaid Portal. The new privacy tool is designed for customers who have used Plaid to connect their financial accounts to apps and services in the U.S. Plaid Portal allows account holders to see which apps have accessed their financial data and to control where the data is shared. The company calls the new offering “one of many tools” under development to give customers both greater visibility into and control over how their data is shared. Ideally, this additional transparency will help allay data privacy concerns and provide users with greater confidence when it comes to taking advantage of increasingly open nature of the modern digital financial ecosystem.

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Thought Machine Secures $54 Million Investment from Italian Bank Intesa Sanpaolo

Thought Machine Secures $54 Million Investment from Italian Bank Intesa Sanpaolo
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Funding, Thought Machine
  • Core banking technology innovator Thought Machine has signed a partnership with Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest bank by total assets.
  • As part of the partnership, the bank has invested $54 million (£40 million) in the U.K.-based fintech.
  • The partnership with Intesa Sanpaolo is the third bank partnership Thought Machine has secured this year.

U.K. based core banking technology company Thought Machine inked its third bank partnership of 2022 this week, teaming up with Italian Bank Intesa Sanpaolo. The collaboration will bring Thought Machine’s core banking engine, Vault, to the Italian financial institution, who will use the technology to power its new digital banking platform Isybank. The new platform will be geared initially toward the bank’s four million mass-market customers in Italy. Beyond that, Intesa Sanpaolo plans to further deploy Thought Machine’s core banking technology into its infrastructure more broadly, swapping out mainframe-based core technology in favor of the cloud.

Pointing to the digital preferences of its younger clientele, Intesa Sanpaolo CEO Carlo Messina said, “this new digital bank will evolve our retail business from incumbent to fintech challenger in the mass market, with the option to expand internationally.”

In addition to the technology partnership, Intesa Sanpaolo announced that it would invest $54 million (£40 million) in the U.K.-based bank technology firm. The funding takes Thought Machine’s total capital to more than $402 million.

“We chose Thought Machine as our partner due to its international standing as a fintech innovator,” Messina added. “We believe so strongly that Thought Machine is the right partners for this transformation that we are also announcing our investment in the company to be a part of its growth story.”

With 13.5 million customers in Italy and 7.1 million customers around the world, Intesa Sanpaolo and its subsidiaries are active in 12 countries in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in Egypt. The bank is the largest in Italy by total assets and one of the 30 biggest banks in the world.

A Finovate alum since its debut at FinovateEurope in 2018, Thought Machine has sealed partnerships with three banks so far in 2022, including Intesa Sanpaolo. Thought Machine began the year announcing that Al Rajhi Bank Malaysia (ARBM) would leverage its technology to build an Islamic digital bank later this year. ARBM is a subsidiary of Al Rajhi Bank of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest Islamic bank by assets. The deployment of Thought Machine’s Vault is part of a multi-year digital transformation project begun last year by ARBM. The bank has credited Vault’s product building functionality for enabling it to create a full suite of Shariah-compliant banking products.

Also this year, Thought Machine announced that U.S. mutual savings bank Mascoma Bank will deploy Vault and migrate its customers to the new technology. A certified B corporation serving customers in the New England states of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine, Mascoma Bank will use Vault to both innovate and add new solutions to its product line, as well as provide the institution with a single source of record by housing all of its data in a single location to more easily understand and serve its customers.

“We believe that modern technology is the key to unlocking superior customer service,” Mascoma Bank president and CEO Clay Adams said. “We are proud at Mascoma Bank to be different by design – we are adopting Thought Machine’s modern technology to deliver on our mission of better serving our customers and communities, to offer new products and be a leader in community banking.”

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Filipino Neobank Tonik Secures $131 Million; Latin American Payments Company EBANX Turns Ten

Filipino Neobank Tonik Secures $131 Million; Latin American Payments Company EBANX Turns Ten
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Daon, Entersekt, Finastra, Finovate Global, NICE Systems, Nordigen

Tonik, a digital neobank based in the Philippines, has secured $131 million in a Series B round that will help the institution expand in the Philippines, as well as throughout Asia. The investment was led by Mizuho Bank of Japan, and gives the company $175 million in total funding.

Also participating in this week’s Series B funding round were Prosus Ventures, Sixteenth Street Capital, Nuri Group, and individual investor Rahul Mehta, co-founder of DST Partners. Valuation estimates were not immediately available.

Launched in the Philippines in the spring of 2021, Tonik has been one of of the fastest growing new banks, topping $100 million in consumer deposits in its first eight months of operation. The neobank has partnered with Finovate alums Finastra for its cloud-based core banking proposition, NICE Actimize for its AML technology, and Daon for its biometric authentication solutions. In the Philippines, where more than 70% of the population is unbanked, Tonik sees a $140 billion retail deposit market and an unsecured lending opportunity of $100 billion.

“The partnership with Mizuho will provide Tonik with enhanced access to the international wholesale funding markets and world-class managerial talent, as well as serve as a fantastic platform for our future international expansion,” Krasnov said.

Tonik offers a variety of retail financial products, including deposits, loans, current accounts, payments, and cards. The first licensed, digital-only bank in Southeast Asia, Tonik began this year with a partnership with Google Cloud. The neobank will leverage Google Cloud’s platform as part of its strategic to boost financial inclusion and open banking in the Philippines.

EBANX Emerges from its First Decade

Last month we highlighted Latin American payments company EBANX and its expanded operations in Mexico. This month, we congratulate the Brazil-based fintech on its 10-year anniversary.

“In these 10 years, we have been able to witness important transformations in the digital market, in the payments industry, and in innovation ecosystems around the world,” EBANX co-founder and CEO João Del Valle said in a statement. “We are pleased to have actively participated in these movements in Brazil and Latin America, using cutting-edge technology and local knowledge.”

With nearly a billion total payments processed and offices in ten countries, EBANX notched more than 110 percent in processed volume last year. Also in 2021, EBANX launched its EBANX One payments platform that unites all of its payment solutions via a single integration, acquired a pair of Brazilian fintechs Juno and Remessa Online, and raised $430 million in Series B funding. Already in 2022, EBANX has opened new offices in Mexico City and appointed former Google VP Paula Bellizia as its new president of Global Payments.

“Today is the day to celebrate all the achievements so far,” Del Valle said, “but, above all, to outline the new challenges ahead, always with the clear mission of creating more access between people and companies from all over the world.”

FinovateEurope 2022 is just one month away. If you are an innovative fintech company with new technology to show, then there’s no better time than now and no better forum than FinovateEurope. To learn more about how to demo your latest innovation at FinovateEurope 2022 in London, March 22-23, visit our FinovateEurope hub today!

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Asia-Pacific

Sub-Saharan Africa

Central and Eastern Europe

Middle East and Northern Africa

Central and Southern Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

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