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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Short-form video sharing and social network app TikTok and commerce platform Shopify announced a partnership today that will offer Shopify merchants exposure to TikTok’s highly engaged users.
The integration will allow merchants to create and connect their TikTok business account and launch shoppable video ads directly within Shopify. The merchant simply selects the product they’d like to feature in the video and combine their existing imagery or video with a selection of pre-made templates designed for commerce.
“We are delighted to partner with Shopify and provide a channel for their merchants to reach new audiences and drive sales on TikTok,” said Blake Chandlee, Vice President of Global Business Solutions at TikTok. “As social commerce proliferates, retailers are recognizing that TikTok’s creative and highly engaged community sets it apart from other platforms.”
Shopify is using its ShopifyChannels to help merchants promote their products using TikTok. Shopify Channels are sales and marketing channels that help merchants to connect with their customers via integrations with social media, entertainment, search platforms, and major marketplaces such as Amazon and Walmart.
“TikTok is one of the world’s fastest growing entertainment platforms with over 100 million highly engaged users in the U.S. alone,” said Satish Kanwar, Vice President of Product at Shopify. “The TikTok channel means Shopify merchants—even those without a strong TikTok following of their own yet—can connect with these new audiences using content that feels authentic and genuine to the TikTok experience.”
As part of the partnership, Shopify and TikTok have teamed up to allow users to spotlight their favorite Black-owned businesses using the hashtag #ShopBlack. The campaign, which runs from November 10 to 15, will highlight products from more than 40 Shopify merchants.
Shopify’s TikTok channel is now available in the U.S. The company plans to launch it in additional markets throughout North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia in early 2021.
Identity verification and authentication provider Onfido has provided a guiding light when it comes to digital identity in 2020 and the company’s Q3 sales results can back it up.
Onfido’s global sales increased 82% over the course of the third quarter. The company also doubled the number of sales from its 103 new clients. Overall, Onfido saw a 237% increase in U.S. sales during the third quarter and attributes the growth to new customers switching from other providers.
Aiding Onfido’s success is its decision to partner with Identity Access Management (IAM) companies to spur demand for enterprise-level customers. Some of the company’s marketing plays in this area include hosting an e-voting roundtable with Okta, integrating into Auth0’s Marketplace, and listing on the Salesforce AppExchange.
Additional key partnerships for Onfido this year include:
Alior Bank partnered with Onfido to power digital onboarding.
Hub City Media partnered with Onfido to resell and distribute Onfido’s identity verification and authentication services.
Deliveroo expanded its partnership with Onfido to accelerate its onboarding process for drivers.
Curve partnered with Onfido to enhance its Digital Identity and Know Your Customer (KYC) processes.
SwissBorg partnered with Onfido to provide a compliant customer onboarding experience.
Delfin Health partnered with Onfido on its app that predicts, monitors, and tests the health and safety of workforces.
MyCash partnered with Onfido to power digital onboarding.
Bondora partnered with Onfido to streamline its onboarding and KYC processes.
Voima Gold partnered with Onfido to allow customers to securely buy, sell, and store physical gold.
EstateGuru partnered with Onfido to automate KYC and AML compliance processes.
Onfido leverages the power of machine learning and AI to help companies cross-verify users’ identity documents with a live biometric of their face. The company can verify more than 4,600 document types from 195 countries.
“Our mission is to create a more open world, where identity is the key to access. This starts with widening access, creating opportunities for everyone to connect with the services they need and making sure that it’s as inclusive as it can be,” said Husayn Kassai, CEO and Co-founder of Onfido. “We made significant strides over the last quarter to make our product offering not only more conducive to enterprise-level organizations, but also fairer when it comes to verifying people from different ethnicities. We believe these changes will only accelerate our growth further.”
Onfido most recently showcased its technology at FinovateFall 2018, where it debutedFacial Check with Video. The tool, available via an SDK, prompts users to film themselves repeating numbers and performing randomized movements to ensure liveness and enhance identity verification.
Brokerage infrastructure API provider DriveWealthbrought in $56.7 million in Series C funding today. The investment is more than double the Series B round of $21 million the company received in 2018. Today’s investment brings the company’s total to $100.8 million.
The round saw participation from existing investors Point72 Ventures– which led the round– as well as Raptor Group, SBI Holdings, and Route 66 Ventures. New investors Mouro Capital and Fidelity International Strategic Ventures also participated.
DriveWealth will use the funds to strengthen its technology, make strategic acquisitions, and grow the organization to scale its business.
The New York-based company offers a suite of APIs that allows its partners to embed investment experiences of U.S. securities within their own apps. Among DriveWealth’s products are tools for advisors, fractional share investing, and purchase round-up investment capabilities.
“DriveWealth saw its partners open more accounts in 2Q than E*Trade, Schwab and TD Ameritrade combined, and 3Q saw a 33% increase over 2Q,” said DriveWealth Founder and CEO Bob Cortright. “This type of activity speaks to the power of making it simple for consumers to start investing immediately. The new funding from our great investors will only help us improve our technology capabilities to democratize investing.”
Since it was founded in 2012, DriveWealth has already scaled its business to serve a range of geographies and now reaches investors in 153 countries. The company has formed partnerships with firms on six continents, including Asia, where it collaborated with Singapore-based Bambu on the launch of a white-label roboadvisory platform for U.S. wealth managers; and Africa, where the company teamed up with Sigma Securities and Trove Technologies to launch a digital U.S. equities trading product for retail investors in Nigeria.
Among DriveWealth’s clients are Hatch, Revolut, Stake, and Moneylion. The company recently partnered with Access Softek to help community banks and credit unions offer their members access to investing tools.
Ant Group has set the price for its shares of its dual IPO today, and it is shaping up to be the largest public offering to-date, coming in at $34.5 billion.
The IPO will be spread equally through 1.67 billion new shares issued on Hong Kong’s Hang Seng, which is expected to raise $17.24 billion (HK$133.65 billion), and 1.67 billion new shares issued on Shanghai’s Star Market, which is expected to raise $17.23 billion (¥115 billion).
Ant will debut on November 5 on Hong Kong’s Hang Seng. The company has not disclosed a date for its planned offering on Shanghai’s Star Market.
Ant’s new valuation is anticipated to top $313 billion, up from an estimated value of $218 billion earlier this year. According to Statista, this valuation, when compared to U.S. megabanks, sits only below JP Morgan Chase, which has a market capitalization of $434 billion.
The anticipated $34.5 billion raise is a record amount, breaking the previous highest IPO set when oil company Saudi Aramco went public at $29.4 billion earlier this year. Ant’s parent company Alibaba holds the record for the second-highest IPO when it listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014 and raised $24 billion.
Alibaba plans to maintain its 33% share in Ant Group by having its subsidiary Zhejiang Tmall Technology purchase 730 million shares in the company.
As we reported earlier this year, Ant’s double-listing is intentionally avoiding U.S. markets. This is not only because of geopolitical tensions, but also to take advantage of new innovations in both Hong Kong and Shanghai markets, which offer weighted voting rights and offer more market-driven pricing than other domestic exchanges.
Ant was founded in 2014 and has more than 1.3 billion active annual users. Simon Hu is CEO.
Nordic challenger bank Lunar announced a $47 million (€40 million) Series C funding round today, bringing its total raised to $122 million. The funds come from investment firm Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker and individual investors Klaus Oestergaard and Alan Howard.
Lunar plans to use the new funds to enter the buy now, pay later (BNPL) space. “It’s the most profitable banking landscape in the world, but also the most defensive, with least competition from the outside,” Founder and CEO Ken Villum Klausen told TechCrunch. “This means that the traditional banking customer is buying all their financial products from their bank.”
The decision to launch a BNPL tool comes after the company’s many successful launches, including paid subscriptions, consumer loans, and business bank accounts. The bank currently counts 5,000 business users and 200,000 retail banking users across the Nordic region.
Unlike established players in the BNPL market, Lunar’s BNPL tool will not rely on merchant partnerships. Instead, the bank will ask users after they make a purchase if they want to split the payment amount into installments. This model will work with both brick-and-mortar retail as well as ecommerce purchases.
Villum Klausen founded Lunar in 2015. The company’s 180 employees work in the company’s offices across Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) made a small move with big potential today. The U.S. agency issued an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPR) that requests information from the public on how consumers’ access to their financial records should be regulated.
The CFPB is asking “all interested parties” to comment on how the agency develops regulations to implement Section 1033 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which provides for consumer rights to access financial records.
This ANPR is the first step in creating formal regulation in the U.S. around open banking. This explicit regulation around structured data access is something that the E.U. has had in place via PSD2 for nearly three years.
The open banking environment in the U.S. is slightly hostile at the moment. This is partially because of the number of stakeholders involved. Consumers want to be able to use their financial data across a multitude of third party platforms, third party fintechs want to create compelling services to help individuals manage their finances, banks want to keep their consumers’ information secure, and data access providers are in the business of opening up the data.
Over the past few years, there have been multiple instances of large banks clashing with data access providers. Unfortunately, when banks shut out data access companies, the main loser is the end consumer, who usually ends up frustrated that their bank won’t connect to their favorite new fintech app. Banks would argue, however, that they are protecting the consumer from unnecessary risk.
Today’s move by the CFPB is a monumental step because once regulation is formalized in the U.S., all players will work from a standardized approach.
If you’re interested in submitting your thoughts to the CFPB, you can do so via the Federal eRulemaking Portal at https://www.regulations.gov or you can email 2020-ANPR-1033@cfpb.gov. Include Docket No. CFPB-2020-0034 or RIN 3170-AA78 in the subject line.
What happens when you combine two of fintech’s hottest trends– buy now, pay later (BNPL) and banking-as-a-service? Afterpay is about to find out.
That’s because the Australia-based company has inked an agreement with Westpac to become the bank’s first client for its digital banking-as-a-service offering. The deal will allow Afterpay to offer WestPac checking accounts, savings accounts, and cash flow management tools to its 3.3 million Australian customers.
Afterpay will make the new banking products available in the second quarter of next year.
“The platform allows us to combine our banking experience with the innovation of our partners to support new customer experiences,” said Westpac CEO Peter King. “We look forward to working with Afterpay to deliver new products and services.”
By selling a banking-as-a-service offering, Westpac is finding a way to work alongside third party fintechs. Instead of competing with them, the bank will not only profit from them by selling its banking-as-a-service tools, but also acquire additional client accounts in the process.
Founded in 2014, Afterpay helps merchants to allow shoppers to pay for their purchases in four interest-free installments over a short period of time. The service is offered by more than 50,000 retailers across the globe and is used by more than 9 million shoppers. The company is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange under the ticker ASX and has a market capitalization of almost $29 billion. Anthony Eisen is CEO.
Today’s news comes a week after the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Austrac) cleared Afterpay from anti-money laundering accusations.
Accounts receivable automation company Billtrust announced today it agreed to a merger with South Mountain Merger Corporation, a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
The combined entity, which will operate under the name BTRS Holdings Inc., will be a publicly traded company with a value of approximately $1.3 billion. BTRS is expected to trade on The Nasdaq Stock Market under a new ticker symbol.
Billtrust’s management team, which is led by Flint Lane, Founder and CEO, Steve Pinado, President, and Mark Shifke, CFO, will continue to lead the Company.
“As we begin our journey as a public company, we are thrilled to partner with the South Mountain team and know we will benefit from their extensive industry experience,” said Lane. “We believe accounts receivable (AR) is ripe for innovation, and together we will continue to invest in opportunities to scale the business, growing both organically and inorganically, as we seek to tackle the large total addressable market. As a leader in AR automation, we believe Billtrust is well-positioned to own a disproportionate share.”
Founded in 2001, Billtrust and has since worked to create a suite of solutions that simplify and automate B2B commerce through cloud-based software and integrated payment processing solutions. In 2018, the company launched its Business Payments Network (BPN). The network connects buyers, suppliers, and financial institutions to simplify and streamline electronic payment acceptance.
The transaction is expected to close in early 2021 and is subject to stockholder approval and closing conditions.
Cloud banking technology provider Thought Machine has been tapped by U.K.-based Curve to power its new buy now, pay later (BNPL) offering that allows customers to pay for purchases in installments.
The new product, Curve Credit, allows users to spread their payments over three, six, or nine month periods. Thanks to Thought Machine’s core platform and Curve’s Go Back in Time technology, credit can be applied both retrospectively and prospectively.
The retroactive payment functionality will rely on the smart contracts product-building system in Vault, Thought Machine’s cloud native core banking engine.
“Thought Machine is the only technology that allows us to deliver the flexibility and manageability we desired for our customers,” said Head of Curve Credit Paul Harrald. “Curve Credit’s ethos is about responsible lending and responsible borrowing. Alongside Curve OS, this three-way dynamic will be able to give each customer the clearest possible terms via a simple and beautiful product and experience.”
Founded in 2014, Thought Machine provides core banking technology for tier one banks, neobanks, and fintechs across the globe. The company counts Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered, Atom bank, Monese, and SEB among its clients. Thought Machine’s funding total was boosted to more than $148 million in July of this year after the company closed a $42 million round.
Curve, which landed a partnership with Samsung Pay in August, enables users to consolidate all of their cards onto a single smart payment card. The company was founded in 2015 and has raised just over $74 million.
Lending and marketing automation platform CuneXusannounced this week it has agreed to an acquisition by CUNA Mutual Group. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
CUNA began its relationship with CuneXus in 2017 when its venture capital entity, CMFG Ventures, became an early-stage investor in the Santa Rosa, California-based company.
“We are continuing our journey into a more diverse, digital-first world,” said Robert N. Trunzo, president and CEO of CUNA Mutual Group. “Our company is committed to using technology to enhance consumers’ access to financial solutions that work for them and create a more equitable financial system and society. This is a top priority for all of our core businesses.”
CuneXus works with more than 140 financial institutions to help lenders maximize customer relationships by offering turn-key access to its application-free consumer lending tool, cplXpress. The company helps banks offer pre-approved, “click-to-accept” consumer loans to customers that are personalized to appear where and when they need them.
“CuneXus is on a strong growth trajectory, and adding their expertise and product solution to our company portfolio allows us to maximize its growth potential and enhance our long-standing efforts to make a brighter financial future accessible to everyone,” Trunzo added.
Founded in 2008, CuneXus has raised $6.7 million.
“We are genuinely excited to join the CUNA Mutual Group family,” said CuneXus CEO Dave Buerger. “Our capabilities and culture align very well, and we believe we can greatly enhance CUNA Mutual Group’s digital evolution in the lending space.”
When we saw Ninth Wave Founder and CEO George Anderson’s keynote presentation at FinovateFall titled, “Open Banking: Ignore at Your Own Peril,” we wondered what else the tech industry is missing about the topic.
After the event, we tracked him down to ask him a few questions about what we’re missing about open banking and where the U.S. stands on the path to an open banking paradise.
When it comes to open banking, there’s a lot of terminology out there: open banking vs open finance, for example. What’s the difference?
Open banking is often viewed as a set of regulations and government-mandated standards (e.g., U.K. Open Banking, PSD2 in the E.U.) and usually describes the consumer-permissioned exchange of financial account and transaction data. I see open banking as a basic “check-the-box” feature for financial institutions.
Open finance represents a broader paradigm shift. Anything we can do by walking into a bank branch, calling our financial advisor, or logging into the bank app, we should be able to do from any app, software, or online service. Open finance is the natural extension of open banking and as such can be a strong differentiating factor for financial institutions.
What is one thing most fintechs don’t know about open banking?
One thing many fintech firms don’t realize is that, when using an aggregator or other API service, they will pay fees to get data they can get for free by integrating directly with the banks. While it’s currently not practical for smaller fintechs to do that, the move towards a standardized API – such as the FDX API standard – will make this more and more feasible. Why pay fees for data you can get for free?
A close second would be for fintechs to try and step into the shoes of the bank. This could make their business model more successful in the long run and also face less resistance from data providers. Questions entrepreneurs should ask themselves include: How does the bank perceive what I am offering? Can we find a win-win situation for the bank by adding value for them in some way?
What is one thing most banks don’t know about open banking?
Many financial institutions (FIs) still see open banking as a threat to their traditional business model. I think that’s a shortsighted view. I believe that banks that embrace open finance will be able to reinforce the “trusted advisor” relationship with their customers and also leverage third-party integrations as a true differentiator from other financial institutions.
Open finance API platforms, such as the Ninth Wave Platform, allow customers to securely share their data, integrate their bank accounts with third-party software, and most importantly, act on this data. This means that customers can initiate payments from non-bank-owned applications. Banks can regain control by having the necessary tools to securely and transparently manage data exchange with fintech applications, aggregators, and other third parties.
Without specific governmental regulation, do you think it’s possible for all banks, fintechs, and consumers to be on the same page when it comes to open banking?
On the surface, it would appear that banks, fintechs, and consumers have different viewpoints and interests. While I agree it’s really a tall order, I think it is possible to get all market participants aligned on open banking since they all realize that customer security and privacy must come first and foremost. Without these, the ecosystem completely breaks down.
The Financial Data Exchange (FDX), of which we are a member and contributor, is a group of ~150 companies, consumer, and industry groups which are developing and promoting a common, interoperable, and royalty-free data sharing standard. This includes banks, aggregators, fintechs, as well as other companies that provide or request financial data. The FDX working groups contributing to the standard have balanced representation of interests from members.
Having said all that, regulation may not be that far off, as indicated by the recent CFPB “pre” ANPR (Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking) on Section 1033 of the Dodd Frank Act.
The Open Banking Implementation Entity recently unveiled that over two million U.K. residents now use open banking. What will it take for the U.S. to reach that point?
While the U.S. may not have a government agency tracking users of “Open Banking”, I believe the U.S. is already at or beyond that level of utilization. Earlier this year, the Financial Data Exchange said that nearly 12 million end consumers have been transitioned away from screen scraping since 2018. This has been achieved mainly by large organizations embracing stronger security and data access methods, such as APIs, to reduce or eliminate screen scraping. I also believe the U.S. is leading with open finance initiatives – which go well beyond the definition of open banking – and have seen immense adoption during the COVID-19 pandemic. Embracing open finance will allow the U.S. and U.S. institutions to lead global adoption.
Sometimes the open banking conversation can feel like a battle between banks and fintechs! Where does the end customer fit in and how can firms consider their needs?
This is a great question and one I very much enjoy speaking about. I’ve watched this ecosystem evolve for longer than I care to admit. While Ninth Wave officially launched in 2018, the experience of our team is unmatched in this space.
The one constant I’ve been seeing is the perceived tug-of-war between banks and fintechs. Predominantly, I see three groups of players. First is the consumer or account owner, next comes the financial institutions, and third are the apps a consumer wishes to use and the aggregators/API players that connect fintech apps to financial institution account data.
Everyone needs to understand that the data belongs to the account holder. Period. Once you acknowledge and embrace that, it becomes much easier to understand the customer, meet their needs, and protect them.
Stripe has been partnered with Nigeria-based Paystack for quite some time, even leading Paystack’s Series A financing round in 2018. Today Stipe unveiled it is taking things a step further.
The San Francisco-based company has agreed to acquire Paystack for an undisclosed amount. Additional terms of the deal were not disclosed but Stripe made it clear that Paystack will operate independently, growing its operations in Africa and adding more international payment methods.
“This acquisition will give Paystack resources to develop new products, support more businesses and consolidate the hyper-fragmented African payments market,” said Matt Henderson, Stripe’s business lead in EMEA. “We can’t wait to see what they will build next and how their growth can turbocharge the African tech ecosystem.”
In the video below (which is well-worth watching) Paystack Co-founder and CEO Shola Akinlade describes how the company got its start and why it chose to align with Stripe.
Stripe will eventually embed Paystack’s capabilities into its Global Payments and Treasury Network (GPTN), a platform that moves money across 42 countries.
Paystack, which counts 60,000 business clients and processes more than half of all online transactions in Nigeria, plans to expand across Africa. The company recently launched a pilot with businesses in South Africa.
As for Stripe, today’s move furthers its geographic expansion efforts that have been on the rise as of late. In the past year-and-a-half the company has added 17 countries to its platform. Stripe Co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison told TechCrunch that there is “enormous opportunity” in Africa. “In absolute numbers, Africa may be smaller right now than other regions, but online commerce will grow about 30% every year. And even with wider global declines, online shoppers are growing twice as fast. Stripe thinks on a longer time horizon than others because we are an infrastructure company. We are thinking of what the world will look like in 2040 to 2050.”
Stripe recently closed a $600 million round of funding and is valued at $36 billion.
