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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
FinovateEurope 2023 begins next week, March 14 through March 15, at the Intercontinental O2 in London, U.K. Tickets are on sale now. Visit our FinovateEurope hub today and secure your spot!
This year’s annual European fintech conference is on track to be even bigger than last year’s event. What’s more, we have all of the top 20 EU banks confirmed to attend. This is a big step for FinovateEurope. But it’s an even bigger opportunity for attendees seeking meaningful, quality connections with representatives of some of the most important financial institutions on the continent and in the world.
Making meaningful connections
At FinovateEurope, you will be a part of a global audience of more than 1,000 senior attendees from across the fintech industry. More than 50% of FinovateEurope’s attendees are from financial institutions. These include both senior innovators from fintechs, as well as senior decision-makers from trailblazing financial institutions. Here’s a word cloud of who they are and what matters to them.
If these sound like the kinds of people and trends that can help make a difference in how you do business, then join us next week at the Intercontinental O2, March 14 and March 15.
Making it happen with networking done right
Knowing that all the right people are in the room is one thing. Getting a quality conversation with them is another. At FinovateEurope, we’re here to help.
To start, we’ll open up our networking app days before you travel to the event. This will give you the opportunity to not just create your profile, but also to start learning more about your fellow attendees, and pre-arranging your highest priority meetings. Leverage our ConnectMe app to build your contact list and send messages via the app’s live chat feature. And when the conference ends, you will be able to download your contact list to keep in touch with new friends and continue those valuable conversations.
Here’s a look at how to make the best use out of the ConnectMe app for FinovateEurope.
With four hours of dedicated networking time on Tuesday and another two and a half hours on Wednesday, FinovateEurope treats fintech like the people business it is. We’ll help you get connected and stay connected to the people who matter most to you and your organization.
Bankjoy, a Michigan-based digital banking solutions provider, has secured new funding. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.
The round was led by credit union service organization (CUSO) Curql Collective and featured participation by current and prospective credit union clients of Bankjoy.
Bankjoy made its most recent Finovate appearance at FinovateFall last September.
Digital banking solutions provider Bankjoyannounced a new investment round led by credit union service organization, Curql Collective. The amount of the funding was not immediately disclosed. In addition to Curql, a number of Bankjoy’s current and prospective credit union clients also participated in the round. Among these investors were AEA Credit Union, Community Wide Federal Credit Union, and Statewide Federal Credit Union.
“We are thrilled to bring Curql on as an investor as Bankjoy continues to grow, as this latest round of funding will allow us to pursue new opportunities to redefine the digital banking experience and help more community financial institutions thrive in an increasingly competitive environment,” BankJoy CEO Michael Duncan said.
A Finovate alum since 2016, Bankjoy most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall last September. At the conference, the Detroit, Michigan-based company showcased its business banking platform that makes it easier and more cost-effective for FIs to deliver digital banking technology to their banking customers. The platform provides a single portal for multiple business accounts, as well as the ability to manage multiple users, control permissions, send transfers to multiple recipients, and more. The Bankjoy Business Banking Platform features more than 60 integrations with core banking platforms and other third-party vendors.
“We build all of our products in-house,” Duncan said at the beginning of his FinovateFall demo in 2022, “because we believe that’s the best way for us to deliver the most seamless, and the most beautiful, and the most visually consistent digital experience across all these channels.”
Bankjoy’s funding news comes a little over a month after the company launched its Online Account Opening 2.0 solution. The new offering enables financial institutions to quickly and seamlessly onboard new customers. The process takes 90 seconds, including ID upload and a selfie match, to ensure a secure and efficient experience for members and clients. The company ended last year having inked deals with a trio of credit unions – Mobility CU of Irving, Texas ($350 million in assets); Lafayette FCU of Rockville, Maryland ($1.6 billion in assets); and SIU CU of Carbondale, Illinois ($465 million in assets).
“Over the last 12 months, 43 percent of small businesses have increased their use of online banking services via computers or tablets, and 40 percent used more mobile banking services, according to Ernst & Young data,” Duncan said. “Clearly, a majority of businesses now expect to be able to engage with their financial institutions through digital channels and this is what Bankjoy’s business banking platform was designed to solve.”
We featured Michael Duncan in our look at black and African American Finovate alums as part of our Black Heritage Month commemoration in February.
Ireland’s Central Bank to Staff: No ChatGPT for You!
While organizations, institutions, and businesses of all kinds are scrambling to figure out how to best make use of generative AI technologies like ChatGPT, the Central Bank of Ireland already has staked out a position – at least for its employees.
Ireland’s The Business Post reported that the Central Bank of Ireland has banned its staff from using ChatGPT as part of its cybersecurity policy. The move was described to the newspaper as the implementation of “appropriate and relevant technical and organizational measures to ensure the on-going protection of the organization.”
The Irish Central Bank isn’t the only financial institution in the region giving ChatGPT the side eye. The Business Post reported that three of Ireland’s high street banks – AIB, Permanent TSB, and Bank of Ireland – are considering similar restrictions. The Central Bank’s decision comes just a month after JP Morgan and a number of Wall Street institutions including Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America banned their employees from using ChatGPT for internal communications.
Bank of Ireland to Boost Tech Staffing
In roles ranging from engineering and cloud technology to cybersecurity and data, the Bank of Ireland announced that it will be hiring 100 new technology workers. The goal will be to have the new workers develop new customer features on digital channels, help the bank execute its cloud strategy, and protect consumers from cybercrime.
“We have some exciting digital projects underway across the Group, and we’re looking for talented specialists who want to drive improvements in the banking experience for millions of customers,” HR director for Group Technology & Customer Solutions, Eimear Harty said. “Banking is changing fast, it’s exciting, and these new positions will be at the forefront of advances in the sector.”
The staffing decision comes in the wake of the bank’s recruitment of 230 technology specialists since 2021. The Bank of Ireland was fined $26 million (€24.5 million) by the country’s central bank over IT deficiencies that took the Bank of Ireland more than 10 years to fix.
Taxback International Teams up with WTS Global on VAT Compliance
Irish VAT compliance specialist Taxback International (TBI) has forged a strategic partnership with global tax practice WTS Global. The company will leverage TBI’s Comply platform to power its VAT compliance services around the world. Comply will give WTS Global a supported and configurable compliance platform that uses complex, country-specific rules to keep businesses compliant when operating in different – and changing – markets and regulatory regimes. In addition to using Comply to power its VAT compliance service around the world, WTS Global will also promote the technology in its global partner network.
Taxback International CEO Karl Nolan called the partnership “a great endorsement for Irish fintech” and a testament to both the “talent and vision” in Ireland’s fintech industry. Founded in 1996, Taxback International is headquartered in Kilkenny. The company enables the real-time processing of more than 10 billion transactions across 180 countries. With “almost all” of the Fortune 500 among its clientele, Taxback International supports more than 12,000 customers in 129 countries.
A Look at the Rise of Northern Ireland’s Fintech Industry
Our sister publication, Fintech Futures, published a special feature on fintech in Ireland earlier this week. Sponsored by Invest Northern Ireland, the article discusses the way the region became a global hub for technology and financial services innovation in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The article also notes that the capital of Northern Ireland, Belfast, was “named a top three fintech location for the future” by the Financial Times in its 2019 Foreign Direct Investment Markets report.
“Today, there are roughly 46,000 people employed in the financial and related professional sectors in Northern Ireland,” the article noted. “In fact, Northern Ireland has the highest concentration of fintech employment in all of the United Kingdom.”
Cryptocurrency infrastructure provider Binance added support for African currencies including the Liberian Dollar, Gambian Dalasi, and Cape Verdean Escudo.
ImaliPay inked a deal with Renda to support order fulfillment for SMEs in Africa.
U.K.-based Ramp raised $5 million in Seed funding for its business forecasting tools.
This marks the company’s first round of funding.
The round was led by AlbionVC and Eurazeo with participation from Triple Point Ventures and a group of Angel Investors.
Business forecasting company Ramp (not to be confused with business finance automation startup Ramp) raised $5 million in Seed funding this week. The round was led by AlbionVC and Eurazeo with participation from Triple Point Ventures and a handful of Angel Investors.
Ramp, which plans to use the funds to streamline and scale client onboarding, offers businesses forecasting tools to help finance teams enhance revenue predictions. The company aims to replace the Excel spreadsheets many businesses use for revenue forecasting with a more sophisticated tool. Ramp’s technology enables businesses to run scenarios and forecast in a matter of minutes and predict customer behavior, future revenue, and annual growth.
“Our platform dramatically increases the accuracy of revenue forecasting in a fraction of time it would take in spreadsheets,” said Ramp Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder Angus Lovitt. “What took us all a day in terms of number crunching we can now do in minutes. Yet what really excites me about the platform are the strategic decisions we empower businesses to make.”
Lovitt brings his experience from the computer gaming world to Ramp. He helped scale the popular Candy Crush game during his tenure at King Digital Entertainment. Lovitt also carries over his connections to the gaming community. He has brought on a handful of gaming clients– including Space Ape Games, FRVR, Pixel United, and Netspeak Games– to Ramp.
U.K.-based Ramp was founded in 2018 and specializes in cohort-based forecasting. With an ambition to become a tech unicorn, today was Ramp’s first round of funding. “Our long term goal is to position Ramp as a single source of truth for the future of businesses, from which prescriptive and proactive analytics services can stem,” said company CEO Dan Marcus. “We’re at the forefront of this new product category and it’s great to have such renowned investors believe in this vision and join us on this journey.” Marcus described the VC funding process in a recent blog post.
This is a sponsored blog post by Saurav Gupta, Sales Engineer, InterSystems
Financial services organizations are awash with data, and there’s a clear appetite in the sector to make use of it for a wide variety of initiatives, including analytics on real-time transactional data and reducing customer churn. But doing so requires putting the right data management architecture in place. That is rarely easy. Over the years, organizations have tried different ways to deliver consistent views of enterprise data to support their business needs but rapid changes in the demands of what their IT infrastructure and data environments need to deliver, like the implementation of data lakes and data warehouses, mean that challenges still remain.
While data within financial services organizations is often siloed and difficult to access and consume, we are now seeing the emergence of new approaches to data management that can overcome these challenges. Two of the most promising: data fabric and data mesh, are designed to help organisations leverage maximum business value from their data and existing data infrastructure.
There are many similarities between the two approaches. Both allow the data to remain stored in place at the source – a key differentiator over legacy systems that require data to be copied and moved using batch processes.
In addition, both a data fabric and a data mesh connect disparate data and applications, including on-premises, from partners, and in the public cloud, to discover, connect, integrate, transform, analyze, manage, and utilize them. By leveraging these capabilities, both approaches enable the business to meet business goals quickly and efficiently.
Points of differentiation
Despite the parallels between the two, there are also some important differences to consider here, which highlight why they are complementary rather than interchangeable. With a data fabric, the metadata, governance, and semantics are managed centrally. This structure is more frequently encountered in financial services companies that employ a Chief Data Officer that takes a top-down approach to data management.
The latest iteration, smart data fabrics, build on the data fabric foundation and incorporate a wide range of analytics capabilities, including data exploration, business intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning directly within the fabric itself. For financial services, this means there is an ability to perform analytics on real-time event and transactional data, without impacting the performance of the transactional system. Organizations can move away from querying on offline or intraday numbers, to making decisions in the moment with real-time insights.
A data mesh, on the other hand, enables local domain teams to own the delivery of data products based on the premise that they are closer to their data and understand it better. It’s supported by an architecture that leverages a domain-oriented, self-serve design, enabling local teams to discover, understand, trust, and use data to inform decisions and initiatives and develop and deploy data products and applications.
One key difference between the two is that a data mesh allows data governance to be defined and managed at the source systems (endpoints), while a data fabric provides an overarching fabric that includes governance, lineage, security, etc., applied and managed centrally, for example, by the CDO. Looking at this in practical terms, a data mesh may be appropriate for situations where there are data sovereignty concerns, whereas a data fabric may be the right approach where the office of the CDO is defining an organizational taxonomy with access privileges.
Complementary approaches
These points of differentiation highlight the fact that the two approaches are not mutually exclusive – far from it. In fact, when it comes to determining which type of architecture to use, the selection is dependent upon the business use case. If the senior team wants to have an enterprise view of their data assets with enterprise level governance, for example, they will likely choose to implement an enterprise data fabric. If the organization wants to empower certain trusted parts of the enterprise with the flexibility to create and manage their own applications to speed innovation and digital transformation initiatives, or if data sovereignty issues are of concern, a data mesh may be an appropriate component of their overall architecture.
However, it’s equally true that, in the right circumstances, the two approaches can, and often do, work together positively to achieve positive outcomes. As one of our major financial services customers puts it: “Fabric and mesh share the same goal of easy access to data, and under the right circumstances can in fact be complementary approaches.”
Working together in perfect harmony
The reality is that data fabric architectures can co-exist with data mesh initiatives where it makes sense, such as in large organizations that must manage campaign data locally within regions.
One example where a data fabric and a data mesh work simultaneously can be seen in the demands of a large multinational wealth management firm with customer 360 initiatives.
In this use case, the company’s overall data strategy is managed centrally (data fabric), but sovereignty issues over data retention and processing are present in certain countries where local marketing campaigns are being executed. Allied to this, there is specific local knowledge of the customers in the regions, which informs variations in local campaign management. These variations are dealt with by the regional, country, or local IT teams (data mesh).
Finding a way forward
These kinds of practical examples of how data mesh and data fabric can work together to deliver tangible business benefits are ultimately far more illuminating than the debate about the respective merits of each approach.
It’s all about how the approaches can help in streamlining and simplifying business architectures so that organizations can focus on leveraging their data in meaningful ways that deliver tangible business value. Over time, we would expect to see further evolution of the two approaches with data mesh innovations in areas like domain-oriented data ownership coming together with the increasingly mature data fabric architecture. All the time though, the pragmatic focus must remain on what this combination of capabilities delivers to the bottom line. For too many organizations, data infrastructure is still seen as a cost center, but these new paradigms are paving the way for a new understanding of its value, allowing it to be appreciated in a new light as a profit center that contributes its own substantial value to the business.
This week starts the official commemoration of Women’s History Month. And with FinovateEurope less than two weeks away, we thought the two occasions provided a great opportunity to showcase some of the women who will take center stage on March 14 at the Intercontinental O2 in London to demo their company’s latest fintech innovation.
Gerlinde Berghofer, COO and Co-Founder, BehaviorQuant
FinovateEurope starts on March 14 and continues through March 15. Tickets are still available – and early-bird savings end this week. So visit our FinovateEurope hub today and save your spot!
Modern Payments and Silicon Valley Bank partnered to launch a cross-border money movement tool called Global ACH.
Global ACH leverages local payment rails to enable mutual clients to send cross-border payments.
Global ACH differs from SWIFT in that it is less expensive and works better for fast, one-off transactions.
Payment operations platform Modern Treasury has teamed up with Silicon Valley Bank to create a new cross-border payments solution. Global ACH, the new tool, will allow mutual clients to send cross-border payments via local payment rails.
The goal of Global ACH is to provide users an option other than the SWIFT network to send payments internationally. Global ACH enables customers to automate international payments using the local payment rails– equivalent to ACH and RTP– in each country. Leveraging local rails promotes efficiency and helps to lower the costs associated with cross-border payments.
“Payments are in the midst of a massive transformation, and it’s critical that we support our customers with an international footprint in the same way we support them domestically,” said Modern Treasury CEO and Co-founder Dimitri Dadiomov. “Global ACH means providing customers with more choice, greater efficiency, and lower costs. We’re happy to work with Silicon Valley Bank to bring this capability to our mutual clients to help them scale.”
Potential use cases for Global ACH include:
Marketplaces that pay out users and suppliers in international markets
Shipping and logistics firms that disburse funds to vendors and suppliers abroad
Financial services such as payroll and lenders sending funds to international recipients
Companies that need to pay large numbers of international suppliers and contractors
Software providers offering accounts payable services for clients paying out globally or facilitating remittances
Today’s partnership builds on an existing relationship between Modern Treasury and Silicon Valley Bank. The two currently offer international payment capabilities using the SWIFT network. SWIFT differs from Global ACH in that it works well for fast, one-off international payments. SWIFT is also more expensive than Global ACH. This is why the two anticipate Global ACH to be more popular for companies with recurring international payments and smaller value payouts.
“We are always looking to enhance the payments experience for our fast-growing and innovative clients, many of whom have, or plan to have, an international presence,” said Silicon Valley Bank Head of Payments Kathleen Pierce-Gilmore. “By bringing together the power of SVB’s Global ACH capabilities and the strength of Modern Treasury’s platform, we will enable more of our mutual clients to move money faster, with real-time data visibility and more efficient workflows.”
Founded in 2018, Modern Payments offers APIs to automate money movement while providing control over fund flows with approval workflows, notifications, reporting, and more. The company has raised $183 million and is headquartered in California.
Paris-based natural language analytics data provider SESAMm raised $37 million (€35 million) in Series B2 funding this week.
The company will use the investment to grow its workforce and fuel global expansion.
A Best of Show winner at FinovateEurope 2022, SESAMm culls billions of web articles and other content to provide organizations and businesses with sentiment and ESG data on public and private companies.
Natural language analytics data provider SESAMm has raised $37 million (€35 million) in Series B2 funding. The investment will help accelerate the Paris, France-based company’s growth and plans for global expansion. SESAMm also will use the capital to add to its workforce in sustainability, technology, sales, and marketing.
“We are happy and grateful to close this €35 million Series B2 round to continue our growth journey and expand to new international markets such as Singapore,” SESAMm CEO and co-founder Sylvain Forté said. “Raising a significant amount during challenging market conditions highlights the relevancy of SESAMm’s focus on two key trends: AI and sustainability. In turn, these tools enable organizations to make better decisions and fill the data gaps, particularly in ESG, on both public and private companies.”
SESAMm’s funding comes almost a year after it won Best of Show at FinovateEurope in London for the live demo its TextReveal solution. Powered by SESAMm’s natural language processing engine, the platform analyzes over 20 billion web articles and messages to deliver daily sentiment and ESG data. The company serves top private equity firms, hedge funds, and other asset management companies, as well as both small and large corporations, with services ranging from controversy detection and private equity due diligence to ESG and SDG sentiment scores and suppliers monitoring.
This week’s round was co-led by deep tech VC firm Elaia and BNP Paribas’ venture capital arm, Opera Tech Ventures. The funding takes SESAMm’s total equity funding to $53 million (€50 million). Also participating were asset manager Unigestion, Raiffeisen Bank International’s venture capital arm Elevator Ventures, AFG Partners, and CEGEE Capital. Investors in SESAMm’s previous Series B1 round, including Carlyle and New Alpha Asset Management, also participated.
Founded in 2014, SESAMm finished last year as the recipient of the Real Deals ESG Tech Award, which recognizes both demonstrated customer and revenue growth, as well as the impact of the recipient’s work on businesses and clients. In November, SESAMm announced a partnership with EthiFinance to help the European risk analysis and ESG rating specialist launch its EthiMonitor solution. The technology provides ESG controversy analysis “for any SME universe.” Also late last year, SESAMm teamed up with South Korea-based Kyobo AXA Investment Managers to develop machine learning models based on SESAMm’s NLP alternative data.
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateEurope in London on March 14. Register today and save your spot.
Numeral’s banking aggregation platform enables fintechs and financial institutions to connect to EU/U.K. payment schemes by integrating with their preferred sponsor bank.
Features
Includes easy, fast, and comprehensive access to EU/U.K. payment schemes
Delivers reduced time-to-market
Provides future-proof infrastructure with no ongoing maintenance
Why it’s great
Building robust, multi-scheme, pan-European payment workflows with Tier 1 banks is easy, fast and cost-effective with the Numeral banking-aggregation platform.
Presenters
Edouard Mandon, Co-Founder & CEO Prior to working at Numeral, Mandon worked at iBanFirst and Qonto. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateEurope in London on March 14. Register today and save your spot.
JJCFinTech’s regulator-grade solution, Cerebro, accelerates compliance with AML obligations using a ready-to-go rules repository to define a company’s regulatory obligations and how to meet them.
Features
Reduces overall cost of compliance
Offers ready-to-go regulatory guard rails in a single digital solution
Delivers traceability from regulations and firm policies into workflow and rules systems
Why it’s great
Cost-accessible compliance for clients at all stages of their growth cycle.
Presenter
Yas Jaffer, Co-Founder Jaffer has a wealth of experience developing world-class regtech solutions for the financial services industry. Jaffer was previously an MD at IHS Markit (S&P Global), running a $50M business line. LinkedIn
Execute POCs 10x faster with results in 4-6 weeks instead of 12-24 months
Includes secure sandbox environment with 2.5 billion data points to support evaluation
Reduces cost by 80%
Why it’s great
NayaOne provides the fastest way to execute on digital transformation projects using fintech solutions to innovate, remain competitive, increase revenue, and stay ahead of customer expectations.
Presenters
Karan Jain, CEO& Founder Jain is the former CIO of a multinational bank and a highly regarded technologist and practitioner, now solving a problem in the market he experienced firsthand. LinkedIn
Oli Platt, Product & Marketplace Manager Platt is a data-led product manager with a data science background leading NayaOne’s tech marketplace, working with the best vendors in financial services. LinkedIn
It’s the first day of March, which means FinovateEurope is officially taking place this month on March 14 through 15 at the Intercontinental O2 in London (there’s still time to register). As you preview the agenda and prepare your notes on must-see company demos, you’re probably also filling your schedule with meetings and after parties. Because, let’s face it– sometimes the networking is just as good as the on-stage content.
After 12 years of attending Finovate events, I’ve seen some unique attendees on the networking floor– including a dog and a baby. But who can you expect to see this year? Our audience is generally comprised of financial institution executives, startup representatives, industry analysts, and venture capitalists. However, everyone has a unique “conference personality.” Below, I’ve broken down these personalities into five categories.
The Front Row Fiend
This is the person that arrives extra early to secure their seat in the front row. They’re usually analysts or journalists in search of taking quality, up-close pictures of the on-stage discussions. As an added bonus, because they have their choice of auditorium seat, they usually secure a spot next to a much-coveted power outlet.
The Standing Room Only
Opposite in personality to the Front Row Fiend, the Standing Room Only person prefers the back row. They like being in the back so much that they forgo the luxury of sitting, even during the longest sessions. Whether they stand in the back because they are hoping to run into a colleague or because they enjoy watching the people in the audience, it is possible that the handful of people that stand in the back of the auditorium know something that the rest of us don’t.
The Demo Obsessed
Finovate was a pioneer of the tech demo model back in 2007, and many veteran attendees return each year just to watch the demos. This is where the Demo Obsessed personality comes from. These are the people that pay attention to every detail of every demo. They are both quick to applaud and quick to critique. This brings me to the next personality…
The Tweeter
This person is the perfect combination of someone who thinks quickly on their feet and who knows how to work a social platform. During every session, the Tweeter always has their two thumbs ready to type a comment, reply, critique, or a recently stated statistic into Twitter– and they always do so using the correct hashtags while tagging the proper username.
The Hallway Conference Caller
If you go to enough conferences, there’s no doubt you’ve been the Hallway Conference Caller at some point. This is the person huddled in a corner wearing ear pods and holding their computer so they can jump on a weekly scheduled call and quickly have their input before returning to the auditorium or networking floor.
