Author: Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz)

Mastercard Takes Blockchain Mainstream with API

Mastercard Takes Blockchain Mainstream with API
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: MasterCard

Mastercard announced it has tested and validated its blockchain and will be opening access to it via a set of three APIs published on the Mastercard Developers website. The APIs include the Blockchain Core API, the Smart Contracts API, and the Fast Pay Network API.

Mastercard will pilot the blockchain for use in the business-to-business space, implementing it to increase speed and transparency in payments and decrease costs for cross-border payments. The blockchain solution aims to offer a new way for consumers, businesses, and banks to transact. The company describes it as the “key” to its strategy of providing payment solutions that “meet every need of financial institutions and their end-customers.”

Mastercard’s blockchain operates independently of a digital currency. As Justin Pinkham, a senior vice president at Mastercard Labs told Forbes, “We are not using a cryptocurrency, and we are not introducing a new cryptocurrency, because that introduces other challenges—regulatory, legal challenges. If you do a payment, then what we can do is move those funds in the way that we do today in fiat currency.”

The company lists four main differentiators of its blockchain:

  • Privacy — Mastercard ensures that transaction details are only shared among individuals who are a party to the transaction.
  • Flexibility — it can be used in combination with other Mastercard APIs; SDKs are available in six different languages.
  • Scalability — it is designed for commercial processing speeds.
  • Reach — it is integrated into Mastercard’s payment network, which includes 22,000 financial institutions.

“By combining Mastercard blockchain technology with our settlement network and associated network rules, we have created a solution that is safe, secure, auditable, and easy to scale,” said Ken Moore, executive vice president of Mastercard Labs. “When it comes to payments, we want to provide choice and flexibility to our partners where they are able to seamlessly use both our existing and new payment rails based on the needs and requirements of their customers.”

The company’s rival Visa has also began working with the blockchain. Last October, the company announced it had teamed up with Chain to launch a blockchain-based B2B payments service called Visa B2B Connect. Neither companies have made firm announcements regarding blockchain use cases for end consumers.

Founded in 1966, Mastercard demoed its Cash Pick-Up ATM solution at FinovateFall last month. Cash Pick-Up allows the sender to disburse cash to banked and unbanked consumers without a card at an ATM. In addition to today’s blockchain developments, the company has recently joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance to explore possible use cases for Ethereum.

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MapD Partners with IBM Power Systems

MapD Partners with IBM Power Systems
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: IBM, MapD

Analytics platform MapD has partnered with IBM Power Systems to enhance its analytical performance. California-based MapD has optimized its MapD Core database and MapD Immersive visual analytics client to take advantage of IBM Power Systems to target the speed at which SQL queries can be performed.

Running queries on IBM Power Systems S822LC for HPC servers versus x86-based servers offers an SQL querying speed that is up to 1.3 x faster than recent benchmarks. On average, the updated queries show a 65% acceleration over the original, benchmarked SQL queries. Upgrades such as these help users analyze billion-row data sets in real-time.

“We’re bringing new performance capabilities to a broader audience only available on IBM Power Systems,” said Ashish Bambroo, VP of Business Development at MapD Technologies. “IBM Power Systems are optimized for the kind of compute-intensive applications where MapD’s technology excels. By harnessing the advantages of IBM Power Systems, we can provide our enterprise customers with more options for tackling the toughest workloads.”

To increase the speed, MapD is leveraging IBM’s POWER CPUs and NVIDIA Tesla P100 graphics processors. The POWER processor CPU works together with the NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU, accelerating CPU-to-GPU analytic pipelines up to 2.5X. This acceleration bolsters MapD’s platform that uses GPUs to query and visualize billions of records in real-time. The company’s GPU-based platform performs from 75 to 3,500 times faster than traditional CPU databases.

MapD was founded in 2013. The company’s CEO Todd Mostak most recently demoed the company’s Core and Immerse components at FinovateSpring 2017. Mostak also gave a presentation at FinDEVr New York 2017 titled How GPU-Powered Visual Analytics Are Remaking Financial Services. Last month, MapD ranked among the best database and analytics tools according to InfoWorld.

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Finovate Alumni News

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Azimo, Dream Payments, Efigence, Lendio, MapD, MasterCard, Stash, ThreatMetrix, VASCO, VISA

On Finovate.com

  • Efigence Teams Up with Alior Bank, Telekom Romania to Help Launch Telekom Banking.
  • Mastercard Takes Blockchain Mainstream with API.
  • Zighra Launches Flagship Continuous Authentication Product.
  • Stash Reveals Plans to Launch Mobile-First Banking Service.

Around the web

  • Latvian Bank Citadele secures mobile and online banking with VASCO’s DIGIPASS for Apps and CRONTO
  • Azimo’s momentum continues with triple-digit growth.
  • Visa to offer ThreatMetrix technologies through its Visa ID Intelligence platform.
  • Lendio joins lending platform association.
  • Dream Payments unveils its point of sale solution for First Data’s Clover merchants.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

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Kony to Launch Digital Banking Solution Leveraging Daon Biometrics

Kony to Launch Digital Banking Solution Leveraging Daon Biometrics
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Daon, Kony

Enterprise application and mobility solutions company Kony unveiled a new digital banking platform and suite of apps. These Next Generation Digital Banking solutions help banks deliver a better user experience cost effectively across any channel.

The suite will be released in the Spring of 2018 and will include digital banking apps for retail banking, business banking, loans, new account onboarding, and digital wallets. In addition to the suite of apps, the company will release its Digital Banking Marketplace that hosts third party partner services to help speed the notoriously-slow app development process.

And thanks to a partnership with Daon, Kony’s Digital Banking Platform will authenticate users with facial, fingerprint, and voice recognition biometrics using the Virginia-based company’s IdentityX solution. IdentityX uses factors such as device-binding, geolocation, liveness detection, and more to offer a seamless user experience. The flexible solution allows for new technology and biometric methods to be integrated as they become available in the future.

Thomas E. Hogan, chairman and CEO, Kony said, “The new Kony Digital Banking Platform, combined with our growing portfolio of banking applications, and our strategic partnership with Diebold Nixdorf, will enable us to achieve our vision to facilitate banking anytime, anywhere, and through any channel – both physical and digital.”

Kony’s CTO, Bill Bodin and Product Marketing Manager, Antonio Sanchez, recently showcased its Digital Banking Platform at FinovateFall 2017. In August, the company unveiled the Kony AppPlatform V8 that aims to help professional developers meet demand for apps and help organizations simplify the app development and deployment processes. Founded in 2007, Kony is headquartered in Austin, Texas.

Daon most recently presented its authentication technology at FinovateFall 2016. Today, the company announced that it was selected by VISA to power biometrics for the VISA ID Intelligence Platform that will offer a seamless way for consumers to shop, pay, and bank on their mobile device. Earlier this summer, the company teamed up with EyeVerify to add EyeVerify’s EyeprintID technology to its IdentityX platform. In May, Daon integrated with Experian’s fraud and identity management platform, CrossCore. Check out our profile of Daon along with an interview with the company’s President of the Americas, Conor White.

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EFL Merges with Lenddo

EFL Merges with Lenddo
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Entrepreneurial Finance Lab, Mergers & Acquisitions

Psychometric credit scoring company Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) announced today it has merged with alternative credit score provider Lenddo. The two companies have joined forces to offer a suite of credit scoring and identity verification products.

Both companies share a mission of “providing financial inclusion for more than one billion new and underserved individuals across the globe.” The new, combined company’s products will be available in more than 20 emerging markets, enabling lenders in those markets to offer citizens access to financial products and tools. Because of limited financial data and credit history availability, access to financial products has been previously unavailable to this underserved group.

“This merger will allow us to apply the right data at the right time on a per client basis, allowing people to use their digital profiles and personality traits to increase their financial options. Financial institutions across emerging markets will be able to predict risk like never before through the combination of our data sources and innovative risk modeling techniques,” said Jared Miller, CEO of EFL.

Each company has facilitated more than 5 million credit assessments since launching– EFL in 2010 and Lenddo in 2011– and have individually helped more than 50 financial institutions to disburse more than $2 billion in credit to people with limited information. The combined company will serve individuals and small businesses by offering banks, telcos, retailers, microfinance institutions, and insurers access to global data as well as machine learning and risk modeling techniques. Borrowers have the ability to choose if and when lenders use their psychometric, social media, and mobile phone data to underwrite risk.

The two entities will operate independently at first and will announce further changes over the next few months. The companies anticipate a name change will “most likely” happen, and expect to announce a branding decision in early 2018. The terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

The first joint product offering went live in Asia and Latin America yesterday. Additional products and features will be announced in the “coming months.”

Headquartered in Bermuda, EFL showcased its credit scoring tool at FinovateAsia 2012 in Singapore. Last year, the company teamed with FICO to enhance the company’s credit scoring methodology. EFL was recently nominated as a finalist in the 2017 MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge.

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AlphaPoint Teams with Intel to Launch Secure Smart Contracts Solution

AlphaPoint Teams with Intel to Launch Secure Smart Contracts Solution
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: AlphaPoint

One way to make a smart contract even smarter is to enhance document access and security. Digital currency exchange platform AlphaPoint has achieved that with today’s partnership with Intel. The two have teamed up to launch TrustedVM, a solution for secure smart contracts that enhances AlphaPoint’s Asset Digitization solution.

TrustedVM leverages Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology to enable smart contracts and any set or subset of blockchain data to remain confidential. The data is protected against access by intermediaries and network participants to boost the security of AlphaPoint’s Distributed Ledger Platform (ADLP).

“Our collaboration with AlphaPoint aims to deliver enterprise-ready blockchain solutions to the financial services community,” said Rick Echevarria, Vice President of Software and Services Group and General Manager of the Platforms Security Division at Intel. “AlphaPoint is expanding blockchain use cases to include illiquid assets; art, collectibles, and real estate, and [the] use of Intel SGX will help increase the security and privacy of those transactions.”

AlphaPoint’s President and COO Igor Telyatnikov noted that the company’s customers seek the benefits of the blockchain but don’t want the security and privacy issues that typically come with existing blockchain solutions. Since smart contracts execute inside TrustedVM, the hardware layer ensures that unpermissioned parties never have access to the data.

Founded in 2013, AlphaPoint powers digital asset networks and maintains the AlphaPoint Distributed Ledger Platform (ADLP), the platform on which the asset issuance and custody solution is based. The ADLP interoperates with more than 20 ledger technologies. Earlier this year, the company launched a crowdfunding capability on the ADLP, which enables users to host ICOs. The ICOs issue newly created digital assets on the exchange, which is hosted on AlphaPoint’s infrastructure.

At FinovateFall 2017, the company showcased the ADLP Reconciliation Platform, which combines blockchain-based asymmetric access controls and machine-enforced domain compliance for order management and other activities. The Reconciliation Platform reduces time and cost associated with manual, post-trade reconciliation processes. The company was recently selected by Capital Trust Group and W Ventures to create a blockchain infrastructure for Trust City. AlphaPoint is headquartered in New York, has raised $3 million, and has 30 employees.

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Finovate Alumni News

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Aerospike, AlphaPoint, Check Point, Entrepreneurial Finance Lab, FIS, iSignthis, Kony, Modo Payments, Sberbank, WePay

On Finovate.com

  • AlphaPoint Teams with Intel to Launch Secure Smart Contracts Solution.

Around the web

  • Finextra: Sberbank joins Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
  • Aerospike announces upcoming new version of its database — Aerospike 4.0 Enterprise Edition.
  • Checkpoint Systems wins Asia Business Achiever Awards.
  • Kony unveils its next generation digital banking platform and suite of applications.
  • FIS to provide cash management and payment solutions for Citi’s corporate treasury customers in new partnership.
  • iSignthis to integrate its Paydentity UBO Service with Web Shield’s InvestiGate platform.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

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BlueVine Lands $130 Million in Debt Financing

BlueVine Lands $130 Million in Debt Financing
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: BlueVine, Funding

Alternative lending company BlueVine received a boost today, landing a $130 million round of debt funding. The company’s overall financing now totals $273 million, which is now comprised of $205 million in debt and $68 million in equity.

Supporting BlueVine in this round are Silicon Valley Bank, SunTrust Bank, Bank Leumi, and TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corporation. The company will use the funds to support its invoice factoring offering and grow its overall business. Ana Sirbu, BlueVine’s Vice President of Finance and Capital Markets said the company is “building a business for the long term” and notes that more than 80% of the company’s business comes from returning customers.

Additionally, the company has launched a new credit line that allows businesses to make payments on a monthly, instead of a weekly basis over the course of a 12-month term. Last year, the company increased its maximum line of credit to $100 million. “BlueVine’s goal is to offer the optimal solution for every working capital challenge faced by business owners, and our new product is another step forward in fulfilling this vision,” says BlueVine Founder and CEO Eyal Lifshitz. “Business owners have diverse needs, and by augmenting our product offering, we are able to offer the solution that fits best.”

Founded in 2013, BlueVine is best known for Invoice Factoring, in which it issues cash to small businesses who sell their unpaid invoices at a discount, then receive up to $2 million in working capital in a matter of days to help manage operations. This summer, the company partnered with Solomoto to combine its offering with Solomoto’s digital marketing platform.

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BankBazaar Receives $30 Million in Funding Round Led by Experian

BankBazaar Receives $30 Million in Funding Round Led by Experian
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: BankBazaar, Funding

India-based online credit processing platform BankBazaar is sure to have a happy Diwali this year. That’s because the company has landed $30 million in a Series D funding round led by Experian.

The company didn’t name other contributors to today’s round, but cited existing backers Amazon, Sequoia, Eight Roads (Fidelity Growth Partners) and Walden International, who have helped boost BankBazaar’s total funding to $110 million. “The funds from this round will be used to further strengthen our position as the leader in secure paperless access to loans, cards, and Mutual Funds,” said BankBazaar CEO Adhil Shetty. The company also noted that it will use the funds to support international expansion efforts. BankBazaar has already made inroads into Singapore and is considering further expanding into Asia, the Middle East, Malaysia, Australia, Hong Kong, UAE, and the Philippines.

Founded in 2008, BankBazaar serves as a single platform where users can shop for and access a variety of financial products, including mortgages, personal loans, car loans, credit cards, fixed deposit accounts, and insurance offered by more than 75 financial institutions. The company began focusing on paperless finance last year, when it introduced paperless loan applications. Shetty expects Experian to help it “accelerate towards [its] vision of paperless access to all financial products.”

Ben Elliott, CEO of Experian Asia Pacific, said, “We believe that consumer adoption of fully digital experiences coupled with paperless access to financial products will push customer acquisition 10X by 2020. With e-commerce shoppers growing significantly over the next few years, companies with paperless technology platforms are well-positioned to leverage the latest trends in consumer technology and help millions of Indians gain access to formal banking and finance products, further enabling financial inclusion for millions of underserved consumers.”

BankBazaar demoed its real-time credit processing platform at FinovateAsia 2012 in Singapore. The company recently partnered with Experian to offer users access to view their credit score for free. Last year, BankBazaar was awarded the ‘Emerging Brand of the Year’ and ‘CEO of the Year’ awards at the 7th CMO Asia Awards in Singapore for Excellence in Branding and Marketing.

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Mitek Acquires ICAR for $15 Million

Mitek Acquires ICAR for $15 Million
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Mergers & Acquisitions, Mitek

Mobile capture and identity solutions company Mitek Systems scored a win for its identity verification arm this week. The company has acquired Barcelona-based ICAR for $15 million (€12.75 million).

In addition to strengthening Mitek’s position in the consumer identity and access management market, the move is expected to bolster the company’s stance overall in the industry. The acquisition will enable Mitek to offer extensive identity document coverage in North America, Europe, and Latin America and will increase Mitek’s capabilities with several new factors of authentication. Additionally, Mitek can now enable customer onboarding and authentication on both web and mobile interfaces.

“The technical and cultural fit between ICAR and Mitek is a tremendous opportunity to maximize value for shareholders, while expanding our mission to bring the highest quality user experience and digital identity verification solutions to our customers globally,” said James B. DeBello, Chief Executive Officer of Mitek and Chairman of the Mitek Board of Directors.

ICAR was founded in 2002 and facilitates more than 20 million identity validations per year. The company is headquartered in Barcelona with offices in Madrid, São Paulo, and Mexico City. ICAR is a spin-off of Computer Vision Center of the Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona which, combined with researchers from Mitek Labs, will boost Mitek’s expertise in how machine learning and computer vision enhance digital identity verification.

At FinovateEurope 2017, ICAR’s CEO Xavier Codó and CMO Mariona Campmany demonstrated the company’s IDMobile solution that analyzes factors such as the consumer’s geolocation, email address, social networks and compares them with the user’s selfie and ID photo. Check out an interview we conducted with Campmany earlier this year.

Mitek recently demoed its MobileVerify solution at FinovateFall 2017. The company is publicly traded on NASDAQ under the ticker “MITK”. Mitek was founded in 1985 and is headquartered in San Diego, California. Last month, the company began leveraging near field communication (NFC) technology to add another factor of authentication by reading data held on RFID chips embedded into documents.

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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Launch UnderBanked Service in Partnership with Dwolla, Ripple, and Others

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Launch UnderBanked Service in Partnership with Dwolla, Ripple, and Others
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Dwolla, Ripple

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced the launch of a service today that it created with in partnership with Dwolla, along with collaboration with Ripple, Crosslake Technologies, ModusBox, and Software Group. The new tool is an open-source code for creating a payments infrastructure intended for unbanked populations.

Called Mojaloop, the system is named after the Swahili word for “one.” The program is aimed to empower local, unbanked communities by offering a single, secure, digital payment method that replaces the use of cash, which is inconvenient and often insecure. The code is secure and interoperable and can be used at scale to serve an entire country or region, and the open-source nature enables developers to build, enhance, or adapt the code to suit specific needs.

“Imagine your life without banking. How would you pay your bills? Or store your money for safe-keeping? For two billion people around the world, these challenges are very real,” the launch video for Mojaloop begins. It goes on to explain that the service helps users spend and save money easily and securely, while offering financial providers access to a group of new clients. Mojaloop has three main layers:

  1. An interoperability layer, which facilitates payments made among various services, including bank accounts, and mobile money accounts.
  2. A directory service layer, which is responsible for routing each payment to the correct provider
  3. A transaction settlement layer, which records each transaction in each provider’s master ledger

Before creating Mojaloop, Dwolla undertook market research that took “countless calls, work-sessions, and meetings” to curate. The company described Mojaloop as “a true victory for the development of global payments” and said that the project “evens the playing field, so everyone can benefit from the sophistication of a ubiquitous payments infrastructure.”

Participating in the Mojaloop project, Dwolla said it drew from its experience in creating FiSync, and leveraged ideas from its Fast Payments Proposal. In a blog post announcing the launch, the company said, “As an organization, we are excited to see where the Gates Foundation and the open-source community, continues to strive to find a payments solution for the betterment of the global economy.”

Dwolla, which most recently demoed FiSync at FinovateSpring 2015, was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Des Moines, Iowa. Earlier this summer, the company added a multi-user feature to its Access API dashboard. In May, Dwolla teamed up with Plaid to offer a fully tokenized ACH payment integration. Ben Milne is founder and CEO.

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ACI Launches Payments Risk Management Solution to Boost Fraud Protection

ACI Launches Payments Risk Management Solution to Boost Fraud Protection
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide

Electronic payments company ACI Worldwide announced it will enhance its fraud protection efforts today. The Florida-based company launched the UP Payments Risk Management Solution, which Andreas Suma, vice president of ACI Worldwide said “combines fraud and transaction data from the payment universe and insights from ACI’s global fraud experts—stopping fraud and improving every customer experience across the payments ecosystem.”

The solution offers cloud-based, real-time fraud management services to protect payments, regardless of a number of circumstances. The payment can be card-present or card-not-present; initiated using ACI’s or a third-party’s payment engine; or conducted by a bank, intermediary, or merchant. By leveraging machine learning, Up Payments Risk Management can react and adapt to new fraud signals, then use fraud and payment data through modeling and analytic systems. “The necessity for universal fraud management services in the cloud continues to increase, and banks, intermediaries, merchants and telcos seek to outsource everything from payments, fraud, compliance and security-related tasks,” Suma said.

Founded in 1975, ACI Worldwide has been delivering fraud protection and prevention for more than 20 years and draws on more than 40 years of payments experience. The company executes more than $14 trillion in payments and securities each day for more than 5,100 organizations across the globe, including more than 1,000 of the largest financial institutions.

At FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016, the company gave a presentation titled, Simple, Global, and Secure eCommerce Payments with ACI Worldwide’s Next-Generation API. The presentation showcased ACI’s COPYandPAY solution, an SAQ-A compliant JavaScript payment-form solution. Earlier this month, the company partnered with STET, a European clearing and settlement system, to serve payment service providers across Europe. In July, ACI Worldwide expanded its operations by opening a new office in Romania. The company has 4,100 employees in 31 offices across the globe and is publicly traded on the NASDAQ under the ticker ACIW.

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