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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Blockchain-Based Payments and Rebooting the Financial System.
Around the web
BioCatchbeefs up insights on behavioral biometrics platform.
Fujitsu partners with Personetics to leverage Personetics’ cognitive AI recommendation engine for its new personalized banking cloud service.
AutoRABIT partners with nCino to help banks deploy software solutions on the nCino Bank Operating System faster.
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.
Payments titan PayPal is shelling out $4 billion today in a transaction to purchase Honey, an online shopping and rewards platform. The deal is PayPal’s 20th acquisition and closely follows the California-based company’s arrangement with GoPay last month that gives it a 70% ownership in the China-based company.
PayPal, which offers solutions for both end consumers and merchants, will leverage Honey to create a better experience for the end customer while giving its merchant clients a boost through increased sales and customer engagement.
Honey brings with it a network of 30,000 online retailers and 17 million monthly active users. PayPal will be able to engage with these shoppers while they are still at the beginning of their online purchasing experience. Leveraging access PayPal’s 275+ million active customers and network of 24 million merchant accounts, Honey will be able to scale up its user base considerably.
Calling today’s purchase as one of the “most transformative” in the company’s history, PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman went on to praise Honey for its ability to improve the online shopping experience. “The combination of Honey’s complementary consumer products with our platform will significantly enhance our ability to drive engagement and play a more meaningful role in the daily lives of our consumers,” Schulman said. “As a partner of choice for our merchants, this is another way that we can help them build and strengthen their customer relationships, provide personalized offers, and drive incremental sales.”
Logistically, Honey will stay intact, maintaining its headquarters in Los Angeles. The company’s co-founders George Ruan and Ryan Hudson will continue to lead the Honey team, reporting to PayPal’s Senior Vice President John Kunze.
PayPal showcased its Instant Account Creation feature at FinovateFall 2012. The company has a market capitalization of $120 billion.
Pinkaloo revealed this week it has raised $1.25 million in funding for its white label giving platform. Newly-minted Squadra led the round, marking the Baltimore-based venture capital fund’s second-ever investment.
Existing investors and new angel investors also contributed to the round, which brings Pinkaloo’s total funding to $1.8 million when combined with last year’s $550k seed round. The company will use today’s investment to support ongoing pilots with current bank partners, continue product investment, and grow its ADP Marketplace channel partnership to support the workplace version of its giving solution.
Pinkaloo’s Modern Giving solution, which CEO Gideon Taub showcased in a demo that won Best of Show at FinovateFall earlier this year, is a white-label solution that helps banks and credit unions facilitate charitable giving options for their accountholders. Through Modern Giving, users can round up their card purchases to the nearest dollar and donate their spare change, convert rewards points into charitable dollars, and invite friends and family to chip in to crowdfunding campaigns.
“This funding, along with the tractions that we are seeing with banks and the recognition from our Finovate Best of Show Award demonstrate that our product is helping companies drive their business forward,” said Taub. “We’re excited to be able to continue on our mission of helping clients build deeper relationships with their customers, employees, and communities.”
Pinkaloo’s platform echoes a larger philanthropic trend, spawned by end users’ increased interest in charitable giving. Recently, fintechs such as Meniga, Revolut, and Betterment have all launched programs to facilitate donations to humanitarian causes. As a standalone donation facilitation platform, Pinkaloo can help traditional financial institutions compete with fintechs on this level.
Founded in 2017, Pinkaloo has facilitated hundreds of thousands of dollars in charitable giving for the end users of its dozens of clients.
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.
Revolut and Mastercard have teamed up this month to help rebuild schools in Mozambique after they were destroyed by a cyclone this spring. The effort, which is timed with UN’s Universal Children’s Day, aims to raise $207,000 (£160,000) to help get children in Mozambique back to school.
Revolut accountholders are able to show their support by making an in-app donation to Save the Children. Revolut and Mastercard will match donations from Revolut Mastercard customers. The goal is to complete the fundraising by January 2020 so that the schools can be built in time for the school year.
The campaign is made possible by the Donation feature Revolut launched in July. The feel-good feature allows cardholders to set up a recurring payment, make a one-off donation, or round up their purchases to the nearest whole number and donate the spare change. In addition to partnering with Save the Children, Revolut also facilitates donations to WWF and ILGA-Europe.
This campaign is part of a larger philanthropic trend moving through fintech lately. Other fintechs facilitating charity efforts include Meniga, which recently formed a partnership with the UN to allow users to donate their cash-back rewards to fight climate change, and Radius (recently acquired by Kabbage) which launched its Data for Good campaign to help the company’s employees and customers give back to their communities.
Revolut debuted its digital banking technology at FinovateEurope 2015 in London where the company’s CEO and founder Nikolay Storonsky showed off the app’s money transfer capabilities that help users avoid banking fees without actually using a bank.
Last month, Revolut launched in Singapore and announced plans to make its products available in the U.S. in the next couple of months. And in early October the company tapped investment bank JP Morgan to conduct a $500 million funding round and issue it a $1 billion convertible loan. The loan will turn into shares if Revolut receives a U.S. banking license.
Truliooappoints Zac Cohen as chief operating officer.
Trustlyreaches 100 live gaming brands with its Pay N Play player registration and verification product.
Tradeshiftmoves Bucharest team to larger office in Tower Center, announces plans to hire more staff next year.
Globitex tapsSalt Edge for strong customer authentication.
After Belfast launch earlier this year, Signifydrecruits 63 people with plans to recruit 150 more over the next three to five years.
Revolut and Mastercardteam up with Save The Children to support Universal Children’s Day.
The San Diego Union-Tribune namesJack Henry & Associates a top place to work in San Diego for the fourth year in a row.
CredoLab, Neener Analytics, and Vymowin finalist spots in the India FinTech Forum’s IFTA 2019 awards.
Cheturanked as the number two of 50 top software development firms in the U.S.
Payments company VoPay teams up with Plaid to offer a new credit card alternative to consumers in North America.
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.
NoSQL data solutions firm Aerospikereceived $32 million in Series D funding today. The round is the company’s largest investment to date and brings Aerospike’s total funding to $78 million.
Triangle Peak Partners led the round, followed by existing investors NewView Capital Partners, Alsop Louie Partners, and Eastward Capital Partners. Triangle Peak Partners Co-founding Partner Dain DeGroff and NewView Capital Operating Partner Tim Connor will join Aerospike’s Board of Directors.
Aerospike will use the funds to expand its geographic presence into Asia Pacific, develop additional data infrastructure integrations, and grow partnerships. There is no updated valuation for the company, which was valued at $90.8 million in 2017.
“Companies are on a journey to convert unprecedented amounts of data into intelligence and push it from the core to the edge and gain a competitive advantage,” said John Dillon, Aerospike CEO. “Aerospike is the critical real-time data platform in a new stack of technologies underpinning this sea change, and our footprint continues to aggressively expand within enterprises as real-time transactions and analytics become more pervasive and mainstream.”
Founded in 2009, Aerospike delivers a NoSQL database for a range of industries, including advertising, ecommerce, financial services, and telecommunications. The technology stores petabytes of data that can be instantly accessed for real time decisioning.
The company, which counts Adobe, Wayfair, and Verizon Media as clients, has been growing at a rate of more than 50% year-over-year and has maintained a 95% customer retention rate for more than five years.
Aerospike is a five-time participant in our developers conference, having most recently presented at FinDEVr London 2017. During the presentation the company’s CTO and Cofounder, Brian Bulkowski, talked about rapid application design in financial services.
FinovateMiddleEast begins tomorrow, which means our demoing companies are rehearsing their pitches of the newest technologies they plan to show off on stage.
What’s hot in the MENA region right now? The best way to find that out is to attend FinovateMiddleEast (taking place at the Ritz Carlton DIFC in Dubai November 20 and 21). The second best way is to take a look at the following word cloud that depicts trends from the live demos that will take the stage on the second day of the show.
Aside from the obvious banking trend that appears front and center of the word cloud, the following fintech sub sectors are expected to make a big impact at FinovateMiddleEast this week:
EVERFI and Zelle Partner to Boost Youth Financial Literacy.
Around the web
Tradeshiftpartners with Wax Digital to launch a procurement tool called web3.
Trilogy Health tapsTuition.io for student loan repayment assistance.
Non-bank payment service provider CreDec enables users to create a Virtual Account within their Xero platform account.
ThetaRaynamed a “Rising Star” in Chartis Research’s 2020 RiskTech 100 report.
Jack Henry & Associatesnamed a “Top Workplace in the Dallas-Fort Worth Area” by The Dallas Morning News for the second time.
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.
Crypto holders are exposed to a significant amount of risk. Increasingly sophisticated hackers can easily drain crypto account balances as they have in the past (does Mt. Gox ring any bells?).
Ledger, which helps to secure crypto account balances using its hardware wallet that stores users’ private cryptocurrency keys, made an announcement today that will help its users feel even more secure. The Paris-based company arranged a $150 million insurance policy covering digital assets secured using the Ledger Vault platform.
Ledger has been working for the past year with broker and risk advisor Marsh and crypto-asset insurance underwriter, Arch Insurance (a syndicate of Lloyd’s of London), to create the insurance policy. The policy insures crypto assets up to $150 million in the event of:
Third-party theft of the master seed and private keys following a physical breach of a hardware security module in a secure data center
Secure transmissions of the master seed fragments upon client onboarding
Ledger employee theft caused by collusion
“We consider insurance a crucial part of a comprehensive plan as digital assets gain a foothold in institutional portfolios. As a new class of assets, securing digital currencies has become a complex challenge for both institutions and insurers,” said Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier. “Through our efforts with Marsh and Arch to curate this comprehensive crime insurance policy, we are playing a pivotal role in the movement to secure and insure all critical digital assets.”
Since Ledger is not a digital asset custodian it is not required to carry insurance. However, the company wanted to take the extra step to insure clients’ digital assets. Ledger is also giving its clients the option to directly purchase their own primary coverage.
At FinovateEurope 2016 Ledger’s then-CEO (and now Executive Chairman) Eric Larchevêque debutedLedger Blue, a touch-screen smart card for developers that offers a second display and thwarts malware attacks by delivering the correct payment address.
Ledger has sold more than 1.5 million Nano devices. The company’s institutional offering, the Nano Vault, has more than 40 clients located among APAC, MENA, and the Americas. Since it was founded in 2014, Ledger has raised $88 million.
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateMiddleEast on November 20 and 21, 2019 in Dubai. Register today and save your spot.
Okanii solves all of the problems of moving value around the world by creating the true internet of value.
Features
Cost – Okanii offers a 100x cost reduction that makes $0.01 micro-payments profitable
Security – Quantum proof hyper-tokenization, unbreakable, zero fraud
Scalability – easily supports all of the worlds’ transactions
Why it’s great Okanii is the opposite of blockchain. Make payments/ transactions in any asset (181 currencies, stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate) across any use-case (P2P, B2C, B2B), instantly, securely, and at no cost.
Presenter
Grant Colhoun, CEO Colhoun is a serial entrepreneur, payments expert, and a recovering investment banker. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateMiddleEast on November 20 and 21, 2019 in Dubai. Register today and save your spot.
Circlys is a social saving plan based on circles model (rotating savings and credit association /committees) with trusted users that have been risk accessed.
Features
On-time payment
Flexible plans
Long term saving benefits
Access to liquidity that fits any financial plans
Why it’s great Circulate with Circlys and according to plan.
Presenters
Hanan Alanazi, Operations manager
Khaled Hassoun, CEO Hassoun has eight plus years of experience in tech start-ups in which he undertook multiple roles in managing business aspects. LinkedIn
