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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
This webinar explores the cutting-edge partnership between Central Bank and Personetics, aimed at revolutionizing the way community banks deliver meaningful value by proactively helping customers better manage their finances. Hear directly from experts Daniel Westhues, Executive Vice President and CMO at Central Bank, and Jody Bhagat, President of Americas at Personetics.
Why watch?
Future-Forward Banking: Get a glimpse of the future of community banking, where customer engagement leads the way.
Proactive Customer Support: Discover how Central Bank leverages Personetics’ capabilities to offer proactive assistance, helping customers navigate their banking needs with ease.
Hyper-Personalized Insights: Learn about the scalable, personalized insights provided by Central Bank, ensuring every customer feels understood and valued.
Dive into the innovative approaches Central Bank is adopting to enhance financial wellness and customer satisfaction. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn from industry leaders about shaping the future of banking through personalized, proactive customer engagement.
Finovate webinar on demand, in collaboration with Quavo, on digitizing fraud & dispute management.
Financial institutions suffer billions in losses, expenses, and fines every year due to fraud, and the resultant impact on customer trust and loyalty presents an even bigger problem. 77% of customers say they would leave their bank if they do not receive a refund in the event of fraud yet, conversely, 80% say they would leave their bank for blocking a legitimate transaction.* Is there any way to win this battle?
Absolutely! But financial institutions must be willing to move away from antiquated systems and outdated processes that can no longer keep up with ever-evolving fraud and account holder expectations.
After nearly 20 years of working disputes at a top two bank and dealing first-hand with the challenges of outdated systems, Joseph McLean, Founder & CEO of Quavo Fraud & Disputes stepped out on his own to develop a better solution to significantly:
Reduce losses
Enhance the account holder experience
Improve operational efficiencies
Ensure regulatory and network compliance
How did he do it? What were the results? What are financial institutions saying about the AI-driven automation technology that has transformed fraud and dispute management?
Finovate webinar on demand, co-sponsored by Genesys and AWS
Hear wealth management experts from Genesys and AWS discuss how to navigate the changing client experience landscape. Learn how to leverage cloud technology to optimize your service model, balance shifting priorities, and enable goals-based wealth management. We’ll also explore how new technologies like generative artificial intelligence (AI) can enhance the client experience.
Webinar takeaways:
Learn about the evolution of the different service models, including Advisor-led, Self-serve and Hybrid approaches and growing client needs from UHNWI, HNWI, Family office, and Mass affluent customers
Gain a deeper understanding of client experience priorities including onboarding, service and channels, personalization, security, and education/financial literacy
Understand the potential and client use cases for generative AI – what’s real now and what’s coming next, the approach, and using it for internal vs. external workflows
Led by David Penn, Senior Research Analyst, Finovate, the panel will feature:
David Porter, Managing Director, Genesys
Christopher R. McDonald, Leader, Wealth Management Sector, AWS
Finovate webinar, on demand, in collaboration with Yext
The financial services industry is undergoing significant transformation driven by evolving customer expectations, the macroeconomic landscape, and the consumer need for personalization across their experience.
In today’s financial services environment, consumers are asking more questions than ever. The days of using family advisors and banking institutions are over, and the age of the personalized banking experience is here.
Watch this webinar and you’ll learn:
The current happenings in financial services
How consumer preferences are changing and why personalization is taking over the industry
Technology and tools to make personalization easy
And much more!
Led by Julie Muhn, Senior Research Analyst, Finovate, the panel will feature:
Shane Closser, Head of Industry/General Manager for Financial Services, Yext
It’s no secret that we’re facing many challenges right now. Declining VC investment, rising interest rates, and the looming threat of a recession are all obviously significant obstacles that must be overcome, but we’re also seeing a surge of innovators tackling real-world challenges head on.
At FinovateFall, we’ve seen exciting automation and AI use cases, including generative AI! We also heard financial institutions talk about their digital transformation journey and how they’ve applied technology to improve their processes and enable their businesses to grow. Plus, we met with industry agnostic experts who inspired us to be better leaders and innovators and who helped us think about a future with AI and a future in the metaverse.
In the constantly evolving landscape of open banking, lenders are presented with a remarkable opportunity to redefine their underwriting processes. By harnessing the power of cash-flow data, lenders can elevate their precision in assessing customer risk and confidently explore untapped markets.
As open banking data becomes more accessible worldwide, a central question emerges: How can lenders effectively utilize this data?
Join us for a groundbreaking discussion led by industry experts in open banking, where we will delve into the current state of the open banking landscape in credit underwriting (B2C and B2B).
Discuss strategies on how to effectively:
Tag and categorize cash flow data
Extract valuable signals tailored to your use case
Combine data from multiple open banking sources
Optimize your underwriting infrastructure to better leverage cash flow data
Don’t miss this unique opportunity to gain invaluable insights into the future of underwriting and discover how open banking can empower your lending strategies.
Moderated by Julie Muhn, Senior Research Analyst, Finovate
On the panel:
Maik Taro Wehmeyer, CEO, Taktile
Abhinav Swara, VP and Head of Credit Risk, Bluevine
2023 is bringing new regulations and transparency requirements to shape the Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI) marketplace. This guide, Navigating the Path to Data Modernization in the BFSI Industry, explores the practical steps business leaders can take to accomplish their objectives — from identifying suitable technological solutions to effectively implementing them to maximize their influence.
By following these recommendations, you as a business leader can embark on a successful journey of modernization that not only fosters growth, but also enhances the profitability of your business.
Key Highlights
Banking Data Modernization Challenges
Numbers Don’t Lie!
Data Modernization Isn’t a Brand-New Concept
Data Modernization – The Need of the Hour
The Journey of Data Modernization
First Step to Data Modernization
Data Modernization Roadmap: The 8 Pillars of a Winning Strategy
The End Objectives of Data Modernization
No Disruption on the Road to Digitization – Cheat Sheet: Key Tips for Next-Gen BFSI Orgs & How Can Indium Help
Fintech software has become a critical component of the financial services industry, allowing customers to readily access financial products on their own terms while also enhancing operational efficiency. Digital technology continues to revolutionize the way financial institutions operate, and developers work hard to create new applications that can manage workloads previously spread across multiple systems and software.
Document viewing and sharing capabilities are among the most important features for fintech applications. While developers can use a variety of document lifecycle solutions to avoid the difficult task of building those features from scratch, the financial industry faces unique security and compatibility requirements when it comes to selecting integration partners. To fully understand these technical challenges, it’s important to understand the role of Java in the development of today’s fintech applications.
How Java Became So Important to the Financial Industry
Financial institutions were early adopters of computerized workflows. The first electronic communication network that made it possible to trade financial products outside the stock market floor was introduced in 1969. Computerized order flows became more widespread in the 1970s, with most institutions developing their own in-house systems. Digitization really took off in the 1980s and early 1990s following the introduction of the Bloomberg terminal and the Financial Information eXhange (FIX) protocol. In the late 1990s, the Nasdaq made it possible to execute securities trades without manual intervention by adopting Island ECN.
Java burst onto the programming language scene in 1995, and its arrival proved to be well-timed. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw extensive mergers and acquisitions in the financial industry, which left many companies struggling to integrate disparate applications and data. Java programming language, with its ability to support multiple platforms (“Write once, run anywhere” was an early slogan used by Sun Microsystems) proved to be an attractive solution to this challenge, and many financial applications were ported into Java. It also helped that Java was easy to use and orders of magnitude faster than legacy code running on outdated platforms.
Within just a few years, Java became the dominant programming language for the financial services industry. Its popularity only accelerated after the release of OpenJDK, a free and open-source implementation of the language, in 2007. By 2011, an Oracle report estimated that over 80% of electronic trading applications and almost all FIX engines were written using Java. Even now, nearly 30 years after its introduction, Java remains the dominant programming language used by financial services, far outpacing other open-source alternatives.
Why the Financial Industry Loves Java
Developers in the financial sector haven’t just stuck with Java for so long out of habit or inertia; Java’s distinctive features make it uniquely suited for the needs of financial applications, both for longstanding enterprise-grade banking systems and innovative new fintech solutions.
Security
It goes without saying that security is always a top consideration in the financial services industry. Banking and trading applications need to have security measures in place to protect financial data and personally identifiable information from unauthorized access. Java makes it easy to restrict data access and offers a variety of memory safety features that mitigate potential vulnerabilities, especially those caused by common programming errors. Oracle also continues to provide regular updates that patch known vulnerabilities and account for the latest cybersecurity threats.
Portability
As a platform-independent language, Java applications can run on almost any device. This has always been a major advantage in the financial industry, but it has proved even more valuable in the age of cloud computing and mobile applications. Developers can use the same code to deploy software in a virtual environment and make it accessible to end-users from their smartphones, computers, or other devices. Java virtual machines also support other programming languages, which further enhances the language’s flexibility.
Reliability
Since Java has been in continuous use for nearly 30 years and enjoys support from a robust development community, it has become one of the most reliable programming languages in the world. Potential instabilities have long since been addressed and there are many developer tools and documentation available to ensure that software is built upon a strong foundation. This is critically important for banking and financial applications, which require high levels of performance paired with fault tolerance.
The Need for Java-Based Document Viewing & Sharing
As fintech developers continue to build new applications that make life easier for customers and employees within the financial sector, they are increasingly finding that users expect more when it comes to viewing and sharing documents. Nobody wants to waste time and resources processing paper documents by hand, and most organizations want to avoid the security risks that come with relying on external applications for managing digital documents.
Unfortunately, today’s application users expect complex document viewing capabilities that are difficult for most developers to build from scratch. While there are several integrations available that can add document lifecycle features, most of them are not Java based and require additional development work to incorporate them into existing fintech solutions. Without the ability to support viewing, sharing, and editing natively within the Java application, users often turn to workarounds involving external programs, which creates security and version confusion risks.
Implementing Java-based Document Features with VirtualViewer
Accusoft’s VirtualViewer is a powerful HTML5 document viewing solution built from the ground up using Java to ensure maximum compatibility with fintech applications in the financial services industry while also meeting complex functionality and security requirements. With support for diverse document types, such as PDF, TIFF, JPEG, AFP, PCL, and Microsoft Office, VirtualViewer eliminates the need for multiple viewing solutions to create a better user experience within fintech software.
As a Java-based integration, VirtualViewer is compatible with almost any operating system and is both easy to implement and manage. No software needs to be installed on the user’s desktop, which allows fintech developers to roll out a scalable solution that meets their critical security and business continuity requirements within a single, high-speed application. VirtualViewer’s server component quickly renders and delivers individual document pages for local viewing as needed so users can access, view, annotate, redact, and manipulate financial documents on the fly. Since documents are displayed within the web-based viewer, there’s no need to download or transfer files, which enhances both security and efficiency.
When implemented as a replacement for a mortgage lender’s content management system, VirtualViewer made it possible to import and deliver more than half a million documents across the enterprise each day. Documents could be retrieved and viewed in under two seconds, contributing to a 40% improvement in mortgage processing times.
Enhance Your Java Fintech Application with VirtualViewer
Accusoft’s VirtualViewer provides true cross-platform document support for your Java-based applications. Whether you’re deploying your application within the cloud, on-prem, or as part of a hybrid environment, VirtualViewer’s powerful APIs can instantly provide your software with the document viewing and sharing features your customers are looking for. Installing the viewer takes less than ten minutes, and our out-of-the-box connectors make it easy to quickly connect to leading ECM applications, including Alfresco, IBM, and Pegasystems.
A new Discover Bank fund aims to increase financial health throughout Delaware while enriching the state’s innovation ecosystem and enhancing Delaware’s reputation as a hub for banking and financial services.
The Discover Financial Health Improvement Fund will support startups and early-stage technology companies that are developing solutions to improve the financial well-being of low- and moderate-income residents, communities, and small businesses statewide. Discover Bank has made an initial capital commitment of $36 million to the Fund, which was announced in June and launches this month.
“We continually explore innovative ways to support our communities in which we operate, and the initial portfolio companies in the Discover Financial Health Improvement Fund have developed technologies that improve the financial health of people with modest means and provide tools to support small businesses growth,” said Matthew Parks, Vice President of Discover Bank. “It is our expectation that these technologies can both be profitable and beneficial to the community.”
By creating a framework to drive capital investments to fintech startups, the Fund ultimately seeks to ensure that affordable and relevant financial products and services are useful and accessible to unserved and underserved individuals and small businesses. Clients for these offerings include the unbanked and the underbanked and those with low credit scores, low savings rates and/or high borrowing costs.
The mission-driven initiative is a collaboration between Discover Bank, the Financial Health Network, ResilienceVC, and Delaware-based Chartline Capital. The Financial Health Network, a leading authority in its field, will help evaluate startups for their potential impact on financial-health improvement. ResilienceVC, a seed-stage domestically focused venture firm investing in embedded fintech startups, will manage Discover’s earlier-stage investments.
Venture capital firm Chartline Capital Partners was formed under the principle that entrepreneurship and venture capital can be leveraged to improve the world. The firm invests in high-growth business-to-business technology companies serving core industries after they have started scaling their go-to-market and helps founders and management teams accelerate growth. Chartline will manage Discover’s later-stage investments.
“Throughout time, new technologies have made people’s lives better,” said Ben duPont, Chartline co-founder and Managing Director. “Chartline is honored to partner with Discover to invest in companies leveraging new financial technologies to improve the lives of low- and moderate-income people, communities and small businesses.”
The Fund has a priority focus on investing in fintech startups that are willing to operate out of the new Financial Technology Building on the STAR Campus of the University of Delaware in Newark. Fund support will then seek to spread to companies that may be located throughout the mid-Atlantic region. Companies outside the region are still eligible for funding, but the venture must be focused on materially improving financial health for consumers and small businesses throughout the State of Delaware and/or the surrounding mid-Atlantic region. Any venture focused on improving financial health – regardless of its product or service’s delivery format or specific financial topic addressed – may apply for funding.
By boosting individual startups, the Discover Financial Health Improvement Fund also will bolster Delaware’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. According to Noah Olson, Director of Innovation at statewide economic development organization Delaware Prosperity Partnership, a legacy strength in financial services, coupled with a nurturing environment for business growth, makes Delaware a great place to grow a fintech company.
“Discover, a global company with a major footprint here in Delaware, is leading by example with this new fund,” Olson said. “Adding further investment resources to a growing startup ecosystem will be beneficial for the state, as well as for the portfolio companies who are focused on financial health improvement.”
Markets around the world have shifted from a growth-at-all-costs mentality to a more targeted approach that emphasizes onboarding the right customers while decreasing acquisition costs. But costs alone don’t tell the whole story. Successful customer onboarding strategies take into account risk tolerance, user experience, abandonment rates, operational costs, and the lifetime value of a good customer.
In this webinar, we’ll share how some of the world’s leading fintechs have optimized their onboarding to realize double-digit verification rate increases in key markets, improve onboarding rates, and gain significant operational savings.
Zac Cohen from Trulioo will share firsthand insights, including:
Key strategies to immediately optimize onboarding
How analytics changes the game for consumer and business verification
Real-world examples of how optimization can improve performance, speed, and the customer experience
Efficiencies deployed only during lean times can lead to short-term gains. But optimization with an eye toward the future can drive a long-term competitive advantage.
Finovate webinar, in collaboration with InterSystems, Thu 12 Oct, 3pm BST / 10am ET
How can financial services firms improve the client journey and experience? Next-generation technologies that advance digital transformation are at the heart of that answer, but these rely on the firm’s ability to gather and analyze all available data across the business.
By now, many in financial services will have adopted technologies such as AI, ML, and analytics to enhance the experience their customers receive. However, to reach their full potential, they depend heavily on a solid data technology platform to build, train, and continuously improve model quality and predictions.
Hyper-personalization can foster loyalty in an era in which loyalty has declined, and it pushes customers and investors towards those firms which can be agile in what they offer. This level of hyper-personalization offers immense growth opportunities for all providers if they can cater to small and specific groups – but on a large scale.
Watch this webinar and learn from the experts:
How to achieve competitive differentiation by delivering better customer experiences.
How to optimize your existing infrastructure with a smart data fabric.
How other firms are building these data foundations and the results of their deployment.
On the panel:
Joe Lichtenberg, Global Head of Product and Industry Marketing, InterSystems
Virginie O’Shea, CEO and Founder, Firebrand Research
As new trends emerge, such as the growth of P2P push payments, businesses need to implement verification processes to better protect their customers. Additionally, cross-border transactions require meticulous compliance with international AML regulations which can be challenging to navigate.
In this webinar, we’ll explore the role of identity in global payments and moving money across borders. Join our experts as they discuss strategies to ensure seamless customer experiences while staying fully compliant, incorporating essential concepts like KYB and KYC.
Key points of discussion will include:
Best trust and safety and compliance practices for moving money cross border and instantly
How account creation fraud spurs push payment fraud and ways to mitigate these joint abuses
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