Goodlord Partners with Open Banking Platform Tink to Enhance Tenant Reference Checks

Goodlord Partners with Open Banking Platform Tink to Enhance Tenant Reference Checks
  • U.K.-based renttech company Goodlord announced a partnership with open banking platform Tink this week.
  • Goodlord will leverage Tink Income Check to help landlords enhance their reference checking process.
  • Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, Tink is a two-time Finovate Best of Show winner.

Goodlord, a renttech platform based in the U.K., has announced a partnership with open banking platform Tink. Goodlord will use Tink Income Check as part of its effort to modernize its tenant application process. The technology will also help Goodlord enhance its fraud protection for both agents and landlords.

Tink Income Check will enable Goodlord to bring real-time data directly from tenant bank accounts to its reference checking processes. With the consent of the renter, landlords will be able to verify income from salaries, pensions, and more going back 12 months or longer. Tink Income Check also optimizes approval rates and reduces both fraud and application abandonment. The technology serves as an alternative to the standard affordability check.

“We’re very pleased to be partnering with Tink on our open banking capabilities,” Goodlord Referencing Operations Manager Nicola Harding said. “We’ve long been advocates of open banking technology. It plays a crucial role in both modernizing the process for tenants, while also protecting agents and their landlords from fraud.”

Founded in 2017, Goodlord was launched to help smooth the process of renting properties – for all parties involved. By 2020, the company had processed one billion pounds via its platform. A year later, Goodlord announced that it had 1,000 agency customers. The company’s technology works along with the landlord’s or agency’s CRM to manage the entire tenancy process – from offer letter to rent collection.

“In the current climate, it’s more critical than ever to have an up-to-date and comprehensive view of tenants’ finances, to know they can comfortably afford the rent,” Tink’s U.K. Banking & Lending Director Tasha Chouhan said. “It also ensures those renters whose income payments are irregular, such as the self-employed or those working in the gig economy, have a fairer chance to secure a rental property.”

A two-time Finovate Best of Show award winner, Tink most recently demoed its technology at FinovateEurope 2019. This year alone, the Stockholm, Sweden-based fintech has announced partnerships with credit provider Younited, Italian fintech ConTe.it Prestiti, and Finland-based Multitude Bank.

Visa acquired Tink in 2021. CEO Daniel Kjellén co-founded the company in 2012.


Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán

Open Banking Infrastructure Innovator Axway Acquires e-invoicing Specialist AdValvas

Open Banking Infrastructure Innovator Axway Acquires e-invoicing Specialist AdValvas
  • Open Banking infrastructure company Axway has acquired Belgium-based e-invoicing specialist AdValvas.
  • The acquisition brings new invoicing and compliance capabilities to Arizona-based Axway.
  • Axway made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateSpring in San Francisco.

Open Banking infrastructure company Axway has made an overseas acquisition. The Arizona-based fintech acquired AdValvas, a Belgium-based e-invoicing processes specialist. The purchase underscores Axway’s status as a leader in B2B integration and EDI and brings new invoicing and compliance capabilities to the firm. These new capabilities include embedded support for Peppol and French VAT reform – as well as other B2G (business-to-goverment) and B2B e-invoicing mandates around the world.

Neither Axway nor AdValvas disclosed the amount of the transaction.

The acquisition comes at a time of greater regulatory interest in e-invoicing. Regulators are debating new requirements for B2B invoicing in France. In the EU overall, B2G e-invoicing is currently mandatory for all public procurements. The trend toward Continuous Transaction Control provides additional impetus for firms to embrace e-invoicing.

“AdValvas has been at the forefront of Peppol and e-invoicing for the past decade, helping steer the direction of invoice compliance around the globe,” Axway CEO Patrick Donovan said. “We are thrilled to welcome AdValvas and look forward to leveraging their deep expertise to help our customers navigate the delicate compliance waters ahead.”

Michel Gillis, formerly CEO of AdValvas, will serve as VP of e-invoicing with Axway. He called the acquisition a “significant milestone” in AdValvas’ “growth journey.” Going forward, AdValvas will operate as an Axway subsidiary. The company’s products and services will be integrated into Axway’s B2B Integration platform.

Axway made its Finovate debut a year ago at FinovateSpring in San Francisco. At the conference, the company demoed how its Open Banking technology enabled the secure sharing of financial data across digital ecosystems. Axway offers configured open banking APIs; an intuitive, collaboration-friendly developer experience; and pre-configured consent management integration to minimize risk.


Photo by Paul Deetman

Bittrex Files for Bankrupcy After Being Sued by SEC

Bittrex Files for Bankrupcy After Being Sued by SEC
  • Digital asset trading platform Bittrex filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
  • Bittrex Global will not be impacted by the change.
  • Today’s news comes three weeks after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Bittrex and its former CEO William Shihara for operating an unregistered exchange, broker, and clearing agency.

U.S. digital asset trading platform Bittrex filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy yesterday. The company’s international operation, Bittrex Global, will not be impacted by the change.

Seattle-based Bittrex shut down in the U.S. on April 30, but has asked the bankruptcy court to allow it to re-open temporarily so that it can return crypto assets to U.S. customers who were unable to withdraw their funds prior to the April 30 closure.

Today’s bankruptcy filing comes after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged Bittrex and its former CEO William Shihara for operating an unregistered exchange, broker, and clearing agency on April 17. Specifically, the agency alleged that Shihara encouraged crypto asset issuers to delete public statements that could lead regulators to investigate those token offerings as securities.

Bittrex has denied the SEC’s allegations that its digital assets are securities or investment contracts.

Unfortunately for the crypto world, the news of a digital asset trading platform shutting down in the U.S. is not shocking. Bittrex’s U.S. shutdown and bankruptcy follow the demise of FTX, Celsius, Voyager, and BlockFi– all of which have taken place in the past year. One reason decentralized finance (DeFi) companies operating in the U.S. are becoming an endangered species is because of the ambiguous regulatory environment in the U.S.

The SEC has not firmly laid out rules for crypto companies and, based on the fines it has issued, is making it clear that crypto firms are not as welcome in the U.S. as they are in other geographies.


Photo by Melinda Gimpel on Unsplash

First National Bank of Oklahoma Partners with Teslar Software to Streamline Lending

First National Bank of Oklahoma Partners with Teslar Software to Streamline Lending

Teslar Software and First National Bank of Oklahoma announced a new partnership this week. The bank will leverage Teslar Software’s technology to streamline its lending processes. The partnership will also enable First National Bank of Oklahoma to better track exceptions and manage documentation.

First National Bank of Oklahoma president and CEO Mel Martin called Teslar Software a “natural fit to partner”. The relationship between the two entities goes back to the pandemic days when First National Bank of Oklahoma used the fintech’s PPP solution. “We experienced firsthand that they’re a nimble, dependable organization that truly understands and cares about community banks,” Martin said. He added that the technology from Teslar will not only help the bank become more efficient, “it will also help us better manage risk in our portfolio.”

Headquartered in Springdale, Arkansas, and founded in 2008, Teslar Software made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2015 as 3E Software. The company returned to the Finovate stage last year for FinovateFall. At the conference, Teslar demoed its technology that simplifies, digitizes, and automates the indirect lending process for community financial institutions.

“How can it be that a bank has a great relationship with a small business?” Teslar Software founder and CEO Joe Ehrhardt asked during his company’s live demo last fall. “How is it that they are financing them, but they fail to finance that business’ end user?” Teslar Software’s Indirect Lending product helps community financial institutions grow their customer base by teaming up with local businesses to provide financing for purchases of items like power tools, outdoor equipment, and furniture. As Erhardt explained, financing for these purchases is often cumbersome and inefficient for consumers. Facilitating partnerships between community financial institutions and local small businesses in the community is how Indirect Lending solves the problem.

With $750 million in assets, First National Bank of Oklahoma maintains offices in Oklahoma City, Ponca City, Tonkawa, and Tulsa. The bank was chartered in 1917, and recently celebrated its 105th anniversary. First National Bank of Oklahoma is only the most recent financial institution to partner with Teslar. The company teamed up with Ohio’s Merchants National Bank in March and announced a collaboration with Mississippi-based Magnolia State Bank in April.


Photo by Raychel Sanner

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: Illuma

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: Illuma

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.

Illuma’s Shield Voice Authentication is now integrated with Glia’s Digital Customer Service Platform for frictionless yet secure voice engagements.

Features

  • Better customer experience with frictionless account access
  • Improved operational efficiency by cutting minutes from each phone call
  • Better security with biometric voice authentication

Why it’s great

The Illuma Shield voice authentication integration with Glia improves operational efficiency, security, and customer experience for community banks and credit unions.

Presenters

Milind Borkar, Founder & CEO
Borkar brings a background in R&D and more than 50 successful product launches to his role as Founder and CEO of Illuma Labs.
LinkedIn

Greg Cummings, Director, Global ISV Partners
Cummings has over 20 years of experience in the customer engagement space and currently serves as the Director of Global ISV Partnerships at Glia.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: Wink

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: Wink

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.

Wink’s revolutionary biometric payments and identity platform eliminates passwords and fraudulent activities utilizing advanced AI/Machine Learning, cutting-edge face, and voice recognition for unparalleled authentication.

Features

  • Goodbye passwords, fraud, and compliance costs with multi-factor biometric authentication
  • Full-service payment orchestration delivers secure payment experiences with failover protection
  • Guest checkout elimination simplifies checkout

Why it’s great

Wink enables any institution to offer simpler and superior identity and payments experiences through biometrics that ensures full privacy protection that cannot be decrypted.

Presenters

Deepak Jain, CEO & Founder
With multiple patents in payment and security technologies, Jain has built transformational businesses and products in the NFC payments, neobanking, blockchain and cross-border payment spaces.
LinkedIn

Gary Bender, CBO
Bender brings a depth of experience with technology, payments, banking, fintech, and a track record for team building, refining strategies, and focused execution.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: pave.dev

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: pave.dev

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.

Pave.dev helps credit teams reduce risk and identify healthy borrowers. By unifying banking, credit, and proprietary performance data, their Scores & Attributes predict borrower behavior.

Features

  • Supplement credit report data with real-time cashflow to identify healthy borrowers
  • Dynamically adjust credit limits
  • Personalize payment plans to improve collections success

Why it’s great

With new data comes new risk – credit risk teams can’t keep up with the explosion of consumer permissioned data. Pave gives credit risk teams the best tools to power credit decisions with cashflow intelligence.

Presenter

Raymond Rouf, CEO & Co-Founder
Rouf is a 3x analytics founder with over 15 years of experience building and growing analytics products.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: upSWOT

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: upSWOT

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.

upSWOT enhances FI relationships with business clients by offering real-time, actionable insights, personalized suggestions, and relevant financing at the right time during the customer’s journey.

Features

  • Provides real-time actionable insights
  • Offers SMB underwriting data
  • Includes comprehensive health indicators for business clients

Why it’s great

Embedding upSWOT insights will improve outcomes and profitability for both the FI and the SMB.

Presenter

Adam Dolby, SVP Partnerships & Alliances
Dolby has been in the global fintech space for 20+ years and has worked to deliver solutions in partnership with industry leaders, such as Q2, Alkami, NCR, FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry, and others.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: Front Financial

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: Front Financial

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.

Front Financial is a modern embedded infrastructure with transfer and execution capabilities across 300+ financial institutions, exchanges, wallets, and brokerages.

Features

  • One click asset transfer to exchanges and wallets
  • Read, write, and transfer capabilities
  • Account aggregation across asset classes

Why it’s great

Front Financial offers embedded experience to their clients across asset classes and financial operations with their read, write, and transfer integrations.

Presenters

Bam Azizi, Co-Founder & CEO
Azizi is a serial tech entrepreneur and an API integration expert. At his previous startup, his team built over 2000 integrations with third-party apps.
LinkedIn

Rani Nagpal, VP Marketing
Nagpal is an innovative, tech-centric senior leader with deep operations and marketing experience and a background in economics.
LinkedIn

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: Flybits

FinovateSpring 2023 Sneak Peek: Flybits

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.

Flybits is an award-winning personalization platform, enabling financial institutions to deliver best-in-class personalized digital banking experiences across mobile, web, and the metaverse.

Features

  • Deliver hyper-personalized experiences
  • Bring the person back into personalization by contextualizing digital touchpoints and interactions
  • Create interactive VR experiences in a secure environment

Why it’s great

Flybits’ Open Dome enables users to deepen their relationship with their customers by interacting with them in a secure VR environment using advanced capabilities.

Presenters

Hossein Rahnama, CEO & Founder
Rahnama is the Founder of Flybits, a data intelligence company with over $60M in funding and global offices. He’s a visiting MIT professor, co-founded the DMZ, and has 40+ publications/patents.
LinkedIn

Chris Pinkerton, CGO
Pinkerton has over 15 years of experience working with companies like Google and Microsoft to apply insight to their acquisition and monetization models.
LinkedIn

Paydora Finance Unveils White-Label Banking Platform

Paydora Finance Unveils White-Label Banking Platform
  • Paydora Finance is publicly launching its white-label embedded finance tool today.
  • Germany-based Paydora Finance can help organizations launch their own branded digital bank account, payment card, and onboarding experience.
  • Dock is powering the technology and regulatory infrastructure behind Paydora Finance.

Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) company Paydora Finance announced its public launch today. The Germany-based company offers a white-label banking platform that enables organizations to offer their own embedded finance solutions.

Businesses and organizations can leverage Paydora’s solution to offer their B2B or B2C customers a fully branded digital banking account, Mastercard payment card, onboarding experience, and customer data hub. The product enables companies to create new revenue streams while maintaining control of the branded experience. What’s more, Paydora’s BaaS platform can be launched in as few as 30 days, with no coding experience necessary.

“Companies and organizations can now embed B2C and B2B banking solutions into their own product ecosystem much faster and without any development effort and bring them to market in the shortest possible time. This allows them to offer significant added value to their existing and new customers, which generates additional revenue,” explained Paydora Cofounder and CEO Claudio Wilhelmer.

Wilhelmer comes to Paydora from Revolut and NumberX. He is joined by co-founders Matthias Seiderer, previously with Anyline and NumberX; and Christofer Trowe, previously with PPRO and Payback.

Paydora, which was originally founded last year, counts retail chain Metro, mobility service provider Eurowag, travel portal Booking.com, and more as clients. The company’s technology and regulatory infrastructure is built from Dock, a BaaS company that helps businesses digitize complex financial processes and simplify their processing.

BaaS has taken off not only within the fintech world, but also across a range of industries. Many companies have sought to create additional revenue streams by adding digital banking tools, payment cards, and more under their brands. However, as BaaS popularity has increased, so has regulatory scrutiny. Last week, the FDIC sent a cease-and-desist order to fintech partner bank Cross River Bank. The government agency accused the bank of engaging in unsafe or unsound practices related to its fair lending compliance. 

Less Fraud, Less Friction: Darwinium Launches Continuous Customer Protection

Less Fraud, Less Friction: Darwinium Launches Continuous Customer Protection
  • San Francisco, California-based fraud prevention startup Darwinium has launched its Continuous Customer Protection platform.
  • The new offering helps close the gap between digital security and fraud prevention silos.
  • Darwinium made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateEurope in London.

Security and fraud prevention specialist Darwinium has launched its Continuous Customer Protection platform. The technology helps deal with the problem of disconnected point-in-time API integrations and risk scores. These issues can lead to both data breaches and a poor customer experience. Darwinium’s Continuous Customer Protection platform provides continuous visibility and control throughout the entire customer journey. This enables the technology to proactively cover the distance between the silos of digital security and fraud prevention.

In a statement, Darwinium co-founder and CEO Alisdair Faulkner noted research that highlighted the impact of fraud controls on the customer experience. More than 80% of businesses, according to the report, said that fraud controls contribute to unwanted friction for customers. “To create a low-friction customer experience while also enabling optimal fraud and security controls, Darwinium has architected a new path forward for improved fraud detection in real time that performs dramatically better and faster and takes only minutes to deploy – all while providing a positive and privacy-protected customer online experience and frustrating fraudsters,” Darwinium CEO and co-founder Alisdair Faulkner said.

Darwinium is deployed at the network edge, via content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure, using edge workers. This gives the technology full, omni-channel visibility and the ability to provide real-time insights into device, network, identity, behavior, content, and location. The solution also can call out to third-party APIs to conditionally refine risk decisions.

Darwinium’s primary customers are payment service providers, fintechs, gaming companies, and online marketplaces. Faulkner indicated that further penetration of these markets was high on Darwinium’s agenda. “The challenges online U.S. businesses face with surging fraud and operational silos, combined with our unique solution make this an ideal time to expand and enter the market in force,” Faulkner said.

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Darwinium made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateEurope in London. The company was launched in 2021 by the team that founded, built, and scaled digital identity innovator ThreatMetrix. Relx Group acquired ThreatMetrix in 2018.


Photo by Johannes Plenio