FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: Project Finance

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: Project Finance

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateSpring on May 8 through 11, 2018 in Santa Clara, California. Register today and save your spot.

Project Finance is a personal finance management and decision-making application that shows you the future of your finances based on the spending and saving choices you’re making today.

Features

  • See the future of your bank account based on your spending and saving behavior
  • Explore the scenarios and tradeoffs you can make with your money
  • Get insight designed to maximize your wealth

Why it’s great
Good spending and saving behavior starts with being confident in your ability to meet future obligations. Project Finance is designed to help you understand your future and the actions you can take today.

Presenter

Colby Ross, Co-Founder & CEO
Ross is a finance geek and product designer, and he’s building a company he’s always wished existed.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: Covered Security

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: Covered Security

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateSpring on May 8 through 11, 2018 in Santa Clara, California. Register today and save your spot.

In a world of constant breaches, what if protecting your online life was easy and rewarding? Covered Security motivates and empowers consumers to improve security – and creates a digital opportunity for banks.

Features

  • Gamified identity theft risk assessment and education
  • Personal assistant for online security and alerts
  • Simple, automated guidance to reduce your risk of identity theft

Why it’s great
In the face of skyrocketing cybercrime, you are not powerless. Covered helps you take control of your digital identity to avoid the time and hassle of identity theft.

Presenters

Christopher Zannetos, CEO
Zannetos has founded and led security companies to be profitable, visionary leaders – generating more than $300 million in revenue. He’s also a passionate supporter of STEM education to battle poverty.
LinkedIn

Brian Milas, CTO
Milas has architected market-leading products that serve tens of millions of users worldwide, making security simple and fast. Though far from his roots, he retains his Midwestern good nature.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: 280 CapMarkets

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: 280 CapMarkets

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateSpring on May 8 through 11, 2018 in Santa Clara, California. Register today and save your spot.

280 CapMarkets‘ BondNav technology platform provides a fully transparent, modern way for investment advisors to search, compare, and transact from a broad universe of bonds.

Features

  • Has access to thousands of wholesale bond offerings
  • Offers pre-trade price transparency that helps advisors compare and trade with confidence
  • Supports the best execution requirements with 280 Best X documentation

Why it’s great
BondNav levels the playing field for independent investment advisors in the fixed income markets, providing a simpler way to buy, sell, and manage bonds.

Presenters

Gurinder S. Ahluwalia, CEO
Ahluwalia has 25+ years of operating and financial services experience, most recently in wealth management. Previously, he was President and CEO of AssetMark.
LinkedIn

Prescott Nasser, Chief Technology Officer
Nasser has more than 15 years of technology experience, building financial services software and teams. He was previously VP of Engineering at Vouch Financial.
LinkedIn

Dave Rudd, Managing Director, Co-Head of Institutional Sales Rudd is a 20-year veteran of institutional fixed income sales and trading, and one of the visionaries behind 280 CapMarkets.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: Eltropy

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: Eltropy

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateSpring on May 8 through 11, 2018 in Santa Clara, California. Register today and save your spot.

Eltropy empowers financial firms to engage clients across messaging apps such as iMessage, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat, to grow revenue rapidly.

Features

  • Offers a messaging-based customer engagement and sales solution
  • Uses AI to predict client buying behavior
  • Provides predictions banks can leverage to follow-up with the right clients at the right time with the right product

Why it’s great
Messaging + AI is the future of customer communication for financial institutions. And that’s where Eltropy comes in – they enable financial firms to engage their clients over messaging.

Presenters

Ashish Garg, CEO and Founder
An MBA graduate from the Wharton School and BITS Pilani, Garg has spent his career in defining and launching technology products that grow revenue.
LinkedIn

Troy Pittock, VP Financial Services
Pittock leverages his deep background in sales and marketing leadership to help customers drive and increase revenues through Eltropy’s messaging-based sales engagement platform.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: SynapseFI

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: SynapseFI

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateSpring on May 8 through 11, 2018 in Santa Clara, California. Register today and save your spot.

Synapse Financial Technologies has built an intuitively designed bank with automated back office and servicing. This results in reduced costs and offers best-in-class financial products to all, regardless of their bank balance. The White Label Loan Issuance originates and services unsecured consumer or business loans to customers.

Features

  • Customizable decisioning
  • Automated compliance
  • An origination and servicing UI

Why it’s great
SynapseFI has truly simplified banking. They make banking truly accessible for all Americans by enabling other companies and fintech platforms to build and deliver innovative financial products.

Presenter

Sankaet Pathak, CEO & Founder
Pathak’s passion for cognitive science, AI, and machine learning in the fintech space and how to use this technology for back office automation has lead him to build an intuitive bank, accessible to all.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: Q2

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: Q2

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateSpring on May 8 through 11, 2018 in Santa Clara, California. Register today and save your spot.

Q2 Biller Direct is a new billpay solution that enables card payments to dramatically improve the user experience and economic model of billpay.

Features

  • Card payments generate interchange revenue for every bill paid
  • Modern user experience features bill aggregation and push notifications
  • API allows ultimate flexibility for development and integration

Why it’s great
Biller Direct uses card payments to turn billpay from a cost center to a revenue generator.

Presenter

Rahm McDaniel, VP of Strategic Solutions
McDaniel is an entrepreneurial sales and marketing executive with 19 years of experience leading complex, cross-functional initiatives. He currently serves as Q2 Open’s VP of Strategic Solutions.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: CUCollaborate

FinovateSpring Sneak Peek: CUCollaborate

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateSpring on May 8 through 11, 2018 in Santa Clara, California. Register today and save your spot.

Credit unions offer the best rates but figuring out which ones you can use is nearly impossible. CUCollaborate’s new product, JoinCU, makes it easy to find, join, and borrow from credit unions.

Features

  • Prequalifies consumers’ eligibility for every U.S. credit union
  • Increases credit unions’ online application conversion rate
  • Establishes referral network of and between credit unions

Why it’s great
CUCollaborate works with both credit unions and companies that connect consumers with products offered by credit unions (financial products, insurance, etc.). JoinCU can be implemented as an API.

Presenters

Sam Brownell, founder
Brownell has worked in the credit union industry for more than 10 years, bringing multiple solutions for credit unions and their partners to market. Before CUCollaborate, he worked at Callahan & Associates.
LinkedIn

Jason Hishmeh, CTO
Hishmeh has more than 15 years of experience in application development and cyber-security and more than eight years of technology experience on Wall Street within the financial services industry.

Lendio Launches Lender Turndown Program

Lendio Launches Lender Turndown Program

Small business loan marketplace Lendio is helping lenders turn a negative response into a positive one through the unveiling of its Lender Turndown program this week.

With the new program, Lendio’s network of lending partners can offer a loan alternative, instead of an absolute rejection, to small businesses that do not fit their risk profile. Through their partnership with Lendio, lending partners will offer small business borrowers access to Lendio’s marketplace, where more than 75 lenders can offer an alternative source of funding. The program, which has already provided more than $60 million in funding to small businesses, has 20 lending partners, with new partners being added every month.

“We are excited about the rapid growth of this program,” said Jim Granat, President of Lendio. “We are seeing an increase of lending partners joining the turndown platform because it allows them to turn an application decision from a ‘no’ into a ‘yes.’ Working closely with our trusted lending partners to provide additional funding options shows their commitment to customer satisfaction; it’s a great way for us to partner in helping main street get much-needed access to capital.”

Lendio showcased its marketplace at FinovateSpring 2011. The company’s average loan size is just under $27,000 and Lendio reports that 70% of businesses received the funds they requested within five days of submitting an application. The top business categories funded on Lendio’s marketplace include construction, restaurants, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing.

Last summer, the company surpassed the milestone of matching small business borrowers with more than $500 million in loans on its platform. For every loan it facilitates, Lendio donates a percentage of the funds to low-income entrepreneurs through Lendio Gives, an employee contribution and employer matching program.

You Don’t Need an Innovation Lab

You Don’t Need an Innovation Lab

We’re living in an era where major banks and financial services companies have their own in-house innovation labs. Major players who are generally thought of as too clunky to operate hip, fast-moving, tech-adopting divisions are getting in on the game. The list of financial services companies who have launched labs in the past ten years is a long one.

Banks such as Capital One, Citi, Visa, Chase, BBVA, DBS Bank, Fidelity, JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, FIS, and Lloyds have all launched their own fintech labs. Some banks, such as USAA, even have member labs, where the bank’s customers can opt to test out new services before they’re released, and offer feedback.

Even non-banks are starting labs of their own. At FinovateSpring last year, NCR showcased a lab-grown technology that leverages virtual reality to offer ATM servicing help. And earlier this year, business commerce platform Tradeshift launched an innovation lab to leverage new enabling technologies. The result of these labs are often beneficial and have led to multiple, successful product launches. In fact, Many products pitched from the Finovate stage started out as projects from a lab.

The photo above shows off Standard Bank’s innovation lab, from the Financial Brand’s article titled Peek Inside 7 of The Banking World’s Coolest Innovation Labs. As the article suggests, it’s cool. But do you really need a place that looks like a daycare to create and launch new services for your members? Smaller FIs may argue that they can’t– they are already strained for resources and aren’t able to move fast enough to bring a product to market before technology changes. So how can small banks compete?

Room to fail

Create room in your culture to fail. If all of a bank’s or a fintech’s employees are afraid to fail, none will be willing to take on the risk of suggesting or trying new things. When you remove the fear of failure and replace it with an incentive to test new ideas, you’ll be surprised how the culture shifts.

Start small

Fintech innovation doesn’t necessarily mean creating the next mind-reading IoT device that automatically optimizes your investments and doubles as a mobile wallet. Instead of being intimidated by fintech vaporware, think about a spreadsheet or a process that your team dreads. What move can you take to change that process? Maybe you can make it more efficient adding productivity-enhancing technologies to automate or digitize more tedious, time-consuming parts of the process. Or perhaps some portions of the process are no longer necessary, and the simplification is the innovation. Sometimes, starting small is starting tiny.

Use your size as an advantage

The advantage of creating change in a small credit union or community financial institution is the small size, which translates to small scale. When you want to implement a fintech initiative as a smaller FI, you can get your entire organization on board. Big banks can’t do that. If 100% of a bank or credit union is excited about the change and willing to push the new initiative, things can happen a lot faster.

GoodData Goes for Insurtech

GoodData Goes for Insurtech

Data analytics and insights company GoodData expanded into the insurance industry this week to simplify claims and underwriting. The San Francisco-based company’s foray into insurtech is marked with the launch of two analytical solutions, Underwriting Insights and Claims Insights.

These two products aim to help insurance companies enhance the end customer experience by automating data integration. GoodData leverages machine learning and AI to automate multiple steps in the claims and underwriting process. The solutions alert insurers of recommended actions that reduce underwriting risk and improve insurance adjusting decisions.

In a press release, Roman Stanek, founder and CEO of GoodData said, “While most Business Intelligence tools require a separate pane of glass to deliver static information based on historical data, we’re bringing analytics and recommendations directly into the business process so employees can determine the correct course of action within seconds.”

Underwriting Insights and Claims Insights are only the start of GoodData’s move into insurance. The company already has other insurance-specific offerings in the works, such as a Customer Acquisition Optimization tool.

GoodData crafted the insurtech solutions to be quick to onboard. While most of the company’s solutions can be implemented in eight weeks, with the new insurance offerings, firms can be production-ready in six weeks.

GoodData was founded in 2007 and works with 70,000 companies across the globe, including 8 of the 10 largest brands. The company’s business intelligence solutions reach more than 1 million end users. At FinovateFall 2017, GoodData showcased its Insights PaaS. Earlier this spring, Carol Lee joined the company as chief financial officer and last December, GoodData added James Smith as chief marketing officer.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

Around the web

  • PaySimple announces latest payment integration with Profit Rhino’s selling app for home service companies.
  • The Financial Times ranks Transferwise, Kantox, Zopa Featurespace, Trustly, Kreditech on its FT 1000 list of Europe’s fastest growing companies.
  • Jumio and Insights Network partner to deliver “Passport” for blockchain projects.
  • LendingTree launches Credit Analyzer, a free credit and debt analysis tool.

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.

WorkFusion’s $50 Million Round to Fuel Robotic Process Automation

WorkFusion’s $50 Million Round to Fuel Robotic Process Automation

Robotic process automation (RPA) technology is a term that’s becoming more and more common in fintech. And thanks to WorkFusion’s $50 million round announced today, it’s a trend that’s gaining even more footing.

This Series E investment was led by Hawk Equity and Declaration Partners, with contributions from previous investors Georgian Partners, iNovia Capital, and NGP Capital. WorkFusion’s total funding now stands at $118 million.

The company also announced today it has appointed former President Alex Lyashok as CEO. Lyashok will take the reins from Co-founder and former CEO, Max Yankelevich, who will transition to Chief Strategy Officer.

Hawk Equity Founder David Hawkins said that WorkFusion is a “clear leader” in leveraging intelligent automation for workforce efficiency. The company plans to use the $50 million to expand its global operations, which is essential to accommodate growing interest in RPA software. According to Lyashok, “Demand for our products grew 850% in 2017, reaffirming the power of AI to automate common business processes such as customer onboarding in banking, claims processing in insurance, or accounts payable in shared services.”

WorkFusion was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in New York City with offices in eight countries throughout Europe and Asia. At FinovateFall 2014, Yankelevich demoed how banks can leverage the company’s active learning automation technology to create workflow efficiencies. Last year, the company partnered with IBA Group to launch a Smart Application for customer support email processing.