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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
For the third Q3 in a row, Finovate alums have raised at least $1 billion in equity funding. This year’s third quarter is consistent with both the amounts raised ($1.1 billion) and the number of alums securing investment (14) from the same quarter last year.
Interestingly, August continues to be a strong month for alum funding during the third quarter; for a third consecutive year, August investment has exceeded that of both July and September for our Finovate alums.
Previous Quarterly Comparisons
Q3 2020: More than $1.2 billion raised by 14 alums
Q3 2016: More than $500 million raised by 30 alums
The third quarter of 2021 also saw one company, DriveWealth, become far and away the biggest recipient of investment dollars, topping the second biggest fundraiser by 3x. Three companies, M1 Finance, Alloy, and AuthenticID, secured triple-digit investments of at least $100 million.
The top ten equity investments, in a quarter with fourteen total alum fundraisings, represented the lion’s share of Q3’s investment total. Approximately 90% of the quarter’s total funding was represented by Q3’s top ten investments.
Top Ten Equity Investments for Q3 2021
DriveWealth: $450 million
M1 Finance: $150 million
Alloy: $100 million
AuthenticID: $100 million
Ocrolus: $80 million
Paystand: $50 million
Sezzle: $30 million
Dwolla: $21 million
Moneyhub: $18 million
Capitalise.com: $13.8 million
Here is our detailed alum funding report for Q3 2021.
July 2021: More than $469 million raised by seven alums
If you are a Finovate alum that raised money in the third quarter of 2021, and do not see your company listed, please drop us a note at research@finovate.com. We would love to share the good news! Funding received prior to becoming an alum not included.
A newly announced collaboration between AI-powered credit and analysis technology company Pagaya and personal financial services innovator SoFi will help more eligible consumers find and secure financing. The partnership will enable SoFi members to leverage Pagaya’s AI network to access a wider range of financial solutions in what Pagaya said is the largest deployment of its technology in the fintech space to date.
“We are excited to leverage SoFi’s sophisticated tech platform, strong brand, and consumer appeal to originate loans through Pagaya’s AI network,” SoFi CEO Anthony Noto said, “extending its business to a broader audience, so more people can access credit and achieve their financial goals.”
Pagaya’s technology and infrastructure enables financial institutions, including lenders and fintechs, to offer their customers access to financial products beyond those available via traditional credit models. Using both AI and machine learning, Pagaya lowers risk for lenders and helps them make better credit decisions. The goal is to provide a better, more positive experience for borrowers, and higher conversion rates for loan providers, as well as improving the overall credit ecosystem.
“As Pagaya grows, it is imperative that we partner with companies that share our vision of providing increased efficiency through our AI network for lenders and access for its customers,” Pagaya CEO and co-founder Gal Krubiner said. “Working with a company such as SoFi, we are able to apply our artificial intelligence in a way to not only help SoFi extend capital to more people, but do so in a way to create less risk for our partner. This creates a symbiotic, win-win-win ecosystem across all parties.”
Founded in 2016 and maintaining offices in Tel Aviv, New York, and Los Angeles, Pagaya became a public company earlier this fall in a $9 billion SPAC merger with EJF Acquisition Corporation. Earlier this month, Pagaya appointed former JP Morgan CMO Leslie Gillin to the post of Chief Growth Officer. Gillin arrives at a time when the company is looking to expand into new markets including personal and auto loans, credit cards, point-of-sale financing, single-family residencies, and more.
SoFi is an alum of our developers conference FinDEVrNewYork in 2017, which the company participated in with financial data platform Quovo. In the years since, SoFi has grown into a digital financial services giant with more than $50 billion in funded loans, and more than two million members who have paid off a total of more than $22 billion in debt. Additionally, the company recently has launched solutions such as SoFi Money and SoFi Invest which offer cash management (including early payday) and brokerage services, in a major expansion beyond its roots as online loan financing and refinancing innovator.
SoFi is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ under the ticker SOFI and has a market capitalization of more than $16 billion. SoFi is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
In a round led by Upstart, and featuring participation from DeFi network Stellar Enterprise Foundation and new investors Kindred Ventures and the J. Safra Group, emerging markets digital lender Tala has raised $145 million in funding. The Series E round takes the company’s total capital raised to more than $350 million. The investment also gives the company a valuation estimated at more than $800 million.
The new capital will help the company continue to offer lending services to both consumers and small businesses. The additional funding will also enable Tala to “accelerate the rollout” of a new offering: a financial account designed to make it easier for its customers to “grow, save, and manage” their money. Tala currently provides loans between $10 and $500 and noted in a blog post that more than six million people have used its app since inception. The company has customers in Kenya, the Philippines, Mexico, and India who have borrowed a total of $2.7 billion. Tala added that more than 12,000 new users are signing up for the service every day.
Tala is also looking to expand into the digital asset business, as well. “We’ll also work to develop one of the first mass-market crypto products for emerging markets to help make crypto solutions more affordable and equitable for those who need them most,” the company added. Tala will use its new relationship with the Stellar Network to pursue this project.
Tala evolved from InVenture, a company launched by Tala founder and CEO Shivani Siroya to help micro-entrepreneurs in Africa and India build credit histories. The rebrand was an effort to move “beyond building just credit scores to become a company that will also take the first risk on our customers and lend to them directly.” Tala leverages applicant phone data and activity (such as the timeliness of bill payments) to establish creditworthiness and to determine appropriate lending amounts. Via the Tala app, borrowers can apply for funding in minutes and, once approved, can have funds deposited in their accounts or sent to a preferred cash out location in seconds.
This week’s investment also featured participation from existing investors including IVP, Revolution Group, PayPal Ventures, and Lowercase Capital. Launched in Nairobi, Kenya, Tala is currently headquartered in Santa Monica, California.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Pagos, a startup that provides intelligent payment infrastructure for commerce, is placing its stakes in the payment space today. The newly-minted company landed $10 million in a round led by Underscore VC and Point72 Ventures that also included participation from Amit Jhawar, Bill Ready, Billy Chen, and Rich LaBarca.
Pagos will use the funds to build out its team with more engineers.
Company founders Klas Bäck, Albert Drouart, and Daniel Blomberg launched the company earlier this year to help businesses optimize their payment infrastructure by integrating Pagos’ API micro-services into their payments stack.
Pagos offers a range of four products to help understand and build a better payment infrastructure. Offerings include Parrot, which provides enhanced Issuer Identification Number or bank identification number data; Peacock, which connects to business’ processors to provide payment analysis and optimization tools; Canary, which detects patterns and predicts opportunities from customer data; and Toucan, an API to integrate network tokenization into any payment stack.
“The challenge we saw pretty much for every one of our customers was that they didn’t have enough knowledge, not enough data and not enough tools to be able to execute a strategy around payment processing or know how to optimize it,” Bäck told TechCrunch. “This means they are a lot slower and they have a much harder time doing all the things they need to do and producing the results they want.”
Pagos holds a lot of promise, and not only because of consumers’ recent shift to online shopping and digital payments. As Chris Gardner, partner at Boston-based Underscore VC explained, “…their potential market is every e-commerce merchant in the world — and there are millions of them. Those are two potent ingredients in a winning recipe.” Additionally, company Founders Bäck and Drouart have both held senior leadership roles at PayPal for almost a decade, while Blomberg has launched seven startups, five of which were acquired, over his career.
When it comes to financial inclusion, it’s easy for some people to turn a blind eye. However, when banks and fintechs help to solve gaps in the current environment, there’s more potential to boost everyone’s financial health.
Lloyd Pitchford, CFO at Experian, is working on promoting financial inclusion via Experian’s Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) program, which helps Experian improve its performance across ESG matters, including supporting financial inclusion and financial health.
We spoke to Pitchford about the program and his view of the current financial inclusion environment and how the industry should respond.
How have you seen financial inclusion awareness evolve into what it is today? What has prompted the increased awareness?
Lloyd Pitchford: The United Nations includes access to financial services, such as credit and microfinance, among its Sustainable Development Goals. Access to affordable credit opens the door to opportunities for people to transform their lives – from homes and healthcare to education and entrepreneurship. This has never been more important than it is today, following the global pandemic.
There are times in most of our lives where we can’t get access to the financial system in a way that we want, be it for a mortgage, a car, or a business loan. We’ve all experienced the frustration when you feel you’re on the outside of the system and you can’t do the things you want for yourself or your family. At Experian, it’s our job to change that. We want to make sure everybody is included and has access to fair and affordable financial products. Financial inclusion is fundamental to our business.
When it comes to financial inclusion, what are some of Experian’s offerings you are most proud of?
Pitchford: As the pandemic took hold in 2020, we stepped in with data and analytics to support governments, health services and national emergency response efforts. Our data and analytics helped them plan ahead and direct health care and financial support to the most vulnerable people through major initiatives such as COVID Radar in Brazil and Experian CORE (COVID Outlook & Response Evaluator) in the USA.
It soon became clear that the impact, not just on physical health, but on financial health, would be far-reaching for people around the world. We looked at how we could mobilize our expertise and resources to help communities through the crisis and focused on financial education as the best way to strengthen their resilience and support their road to recovery.
Through the launch of our United for Financial Health programm we rapidly established 11 NGO partnerships across our biggest consumer markets to deliver targeted financial education for some of the communities hit hardest by COVID-19. By the end of the year, we had reached nearly 35 million people, more than double our original goal of 15 million, and we’re not stopping there. We aim to reach 100 million people by 2024.
Part of our efforts include our member relationships around the world. This year, we surpassed the milestone of 100 million direct relationships with consumers globally and delivered further innovations to support people through our business, such as the launch of products like Experian Boost in the UK and Serasa Score Turbo in Brazil. This, of course, is on top of our ground-breaking Experian Boost launch in the United States a few years ago. Our goal is to have a direct relationship with as many people as possible; to truly become the Consumers’ Credit Bureau and power financial opportunities for all.
What advice would you give other incumbents who are trying to drive financial inclusion within their organizations?
Pitchford: I would point to our culture of innovation. It helps us harness opportunities to drive business growth. We are continually investing in product innovation and new sources of data to address emerging market opportunities that can make a real difference to global communities. In 2020, around 1,000 innovators from across Experian joined our annual Future of Information Conference – which was held virtually because of the pandemic – to encourage them to think differently in their work. Topics included fairness in artificial intelligence, transforming agribusiness, and enhancing the consumer healthcare experience. Teams at our DataLabs in Brazil, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S.A. tap into our culture of innovation to continually create new solutions to global challenges. The result of all this is that our Social Innovation products have now reached 61 million people since 2013. We aim to reach 100 million by 2025.
What challenges exist in serving underbanked communities as an incumbent? Would it be easier as a startup?
Pitchford: Our annual Sustainable Business Report notes that more than a billion people in Asia Pacific lack access to formal financial services, 45 million in the U.S.A. have no credit profile or are unscoreable, 45 million in Brazil are unbanked, and over five million in the U.K. have no credit history. So we know we’ve got more work to do and we remain focused on using our business to make real and sustainable change. With social innovation running so deeply through the core of our culture, and our commitment to improving global financial health front and center of our thinking, we will continue to push to find new solutions to help people, serve communities and protect the environment, helping to create a better future for all.
Arival Bank, which won Best of Show in its FinovateAsia debut in 2018, is now a fully licensed and regulated bank. The company was granted its U.S.-based banking license in Puerto Rico and will leverage its “U.S.-based but internationally friendly” license to work with customers around the world. The license generally allows banks to offer full stack fiat banking services, upon receiving the necessary authorization from the local regulator.
Arival Bank’s primary customers are international technology firms. The bank offers these companies USD-based bank accounts, and supports both domestic and international payments for global technology companies. Arival so far has onboarded more than 100 business customers from more than 25 countries, with the biggest demand coming from firms in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., European Union, and Singapore. Arival has experienced 1.7x month-over-month growth and boasts $13 million in assets under management.
“We’re focused on providing bank accounts to customers who have been labeled as ‘abnormal’ or ‘too risky’ by traditional banks,” Arival Bank COO Jeremy Berger explained in a statement. These firms include everything from international tech startups, digital SMEs, and money service businesses, to crypto exchanges and blockchain startups. “We’ve proudly turned this market of misfits into our niche, and we strongly believe the market demand of the ‘abnormal’ will soon outgrow the demand of the traditional banking clientele,” he said.
Arival’s management team (Director of IT Security Raul Rosado, Head of Finance Vivien Fernandez, CCO Sonia Camacho, Head of Global Compliance Ana Cavallini, Co-Founders Igor Pesin and Jeremy Berger) at the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
In terms of traction, Arival Bank recently was invited to FinCEN’s innovation program to showcase its compliance technology to more than 20 top U.S. regulators. FinCEN is the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury that focuses on defending the financial system against criminal and illicit activity, including money laundering. “We’ve built a compliance-first culture and like to think of ourselves as a cutting-edge compliance firm with a banking license,” Berger said. “That’s really our X factor at the end of the day.”
Additionally, Arival Bank has inked a partnership with Railsbank to launch SGD accounts and local payments as part of its borderless account opening offering. The company noted that it may leverage its relationship with Railsbank to expand its services in regions like Europe and Latin America.
“We’ve achieved significant traction since our launch – in large part thanks to our supportive group of visionary investors from our Seed and Pre-A rounds,” Arival Bank co-founder and CFO Igor Pesin said. “They’ve enabled us to invest heavily into key facets of building a digital bank fit for the 21st century: licensing, technology, infrastructure, compliance, and user experience.”
“We’re starting to gear up for our Series A round as we enter a new phase of growth driven by scaling our footprint internationally,” Pesin added. “Being live operationally is somewhat atypical for a licensed digital bank at their Series A round. In other words, our commitment to infrastructure meets our readiness to scale. And we have the license, product, and team to become the go-to digital bank for a new generation of businesses and entrepreneurs.”
Founded in 2018, Arival has 50 employees and hopes to double its workforce by 2022. The company’s investors to date include SeedInvest, Crowdcube, and Polyvalent Capital. Earlier his year, Arival Bank was nominated by Daily Finance as one of the top Fintech Companies in Singapore.
Just days after relaunching its online store and appointing a new CEO for its European operations, point of sale (POS) technology provider SumUpannounced the acquisition of customer loyalty startup Fivestars for $317 million. The purchase marks SumUp’s sixth overall acquisition but its first in the U.S.
“Our global community of merchants has battled through lockdowns and volatility and we’re confident that this acquisition will further energize the U.S.’s recovering small business economy,” said SumUp Co-founder Marc-Alexander Christ. “Now is the time to make sure our presence is as strong in the U.S. as it is in Europe and, by acquiring Fivestars, SumUp will deliver for U.S.-based merchants as it has in other international markets.”
SumUp launched in 2011 and now helps three million merchants across the globe get paid. The company offers card reader, QR code and POS payment technologies, along with management and reporting tools and invoicing capabilities. Lacking in this product lineup, however, are loyalty and rewards offerings. This is where the integration of Fivestars’ technology comes in. Providing small business clients a way to reward their customers and build loyalty will help SumUp compete with other POS technology providers such as Square, Shopify, PayPal and Zettle.
Founded in 2010, Fivestars helps businesses set up a digital rewards program that gives customers points and gifts for their purchases. The technology automatically sends campaigns to welcome new customers, celebrate their birthdays, and bring back customers who haven’t visited recently. Fivestars also offers enterprise loyalty programs for larger franchises; clients include brands such as Play it Again Sports, Super Cuts, and Orange Leaf.
The acquisition will also help SumUp launch operations in a new geographical market. The U.K.-based company will now have access to Fivestars’ 70 million consumer members and 12,000 small businesses; a network which drives $3 billion in sales and 100 million transactions each year. Fivestars’ San-Francisco-based team, along with its CEO, Victor Ho, will remain in their roles and continue to operate Fivestars.
SumUp raised $869 million (€750 million) earlier this year, bringing its total funding to $1.4 billion. The company supports over three million merchant users in 34 markets.
This is a sponsored post by Cyvatar, Gold Sponsors of FinovateFall 2021. Written by Craig Goodwin & Corey White.
In case you missed it, we’re losing the battle against hacks and breaches. Even though more and more security tools come online every year, personal information and other sensitive data doesn’t get better protected.
We buy more products. We get breached.
We adhere to compliance standards. We get breached.
Why can’t we do better?
Increasingly sophisticated and relentless attacks and high-profile breaches, like the one at Solarwinds, spur the purchase of more and more tools, but companies rarely (if ever) have the right people and processes in place to ensure the tools they purchase are installed–installed and configured correctly–to say nothing of the ongoing assessments, remediation, and maintenance needed to achieve a solid return on their cyber investments.
The industry’s response has long been to build newer, shinier products, knowing that buyers will come; when the technology fails to defend against a breach, managed services providers step in to remediate after the fact and “manage” the customer’s environment against future incursions.
Then a Solarwinds or an Equifax or a Marriott happens.
It’s a vicious cycle–a cycle companies can break by stepping away from traditional notions of ownership (i.e., buying or “owning” a security tool, platform, or solution) and embracing the Membership Economy.
What is the Membership Economy?
The Membership Economy, coined by Robbie Kellman Baxter in 2015, includes any organization whose members — what another company might call customers or clients — have an “ongoing and formal stake” in that organization.[1] The human desire to belong, to be part of a community or affiliated with an exclusive organization, is fulfilled in the Membership Economy, and Netflix is one of its best-known acolytes.
Key components of the Membership Economy include:
Continually focusing on the needs of members
Understanding your members’ frustration as well as their satisfaction
Embracing a willingness to forge new paths to meet member desires or address their concerns–flexibility, innovation, and evolution are all part of this process
Communicating a strong, clear value proposition
Investing in the membership experience
Cybersecurity companies, like many technology organizations, still focus on transactional sales. Customers buy a software or services package for a period of time–typically two to three years–and are largely left to fend for themselves until their contract comes up for renewal. Also like other technology deployments, security installations can be complex, costly, and time consuming, often making it difficult for customers to change or add products in their production environments. Even when a customer is unhappy with a product, swapping it out for something new may be more trouble than the customer thinks it’s worth, which leaves little incentive for transaction-driven security companies to foster meaningful innovation in their offerings.
In other words, ownership in cybersecurity is a liability. The thousands–even millions–of dollars organizations spend on tools and platforms tied to those multiyear licensing agreements effectively hold them hostage regardless of product efficacy. In the event of a breach, they’re still stuck in their contract and may even feel the need to buy more tools to bolster their security posture. Security product companies are hamstrung by the model too: Once they create products to deliver their solutions, they become limited by the scope of their own design, for good or ill, and innovation remains stalled.
Groundbreaking innovation through experimentation, development, and even dumb luck has enabled significant economic growth–and has toppled entire organizations that were upended by the thoughtful and rapid advancement of others,[2] as Blockbuster was by Netflix. As the pace of technological change continues to accelerate with force, so too does the cyber attack surface.
Taking the next step
Membership–the Netflix model–is just such a foundational change. It can be every bit as disruptive and transformational to the cybersecurity industry as Netflix itself was to the movie rental and streaming industries. Here’s how.
Subscriptions alone do not a Membership Economy make.
Subscriptions are a good first step. Subscriptions make it easy for members to select the pricing and options that are best for them, and consistent and predictable revenue streams benefit shareholders and users alike. But subscriptions alone do not a Membership Economy make. It’s important that security companies understand the need behind each package they develop so they can grow members into new offerings and ensure value is continuously delivered.
Additionally, the Membership Economy can’t work without high levels of member engagement, which is why Baxter recommends that a good membership program be beneficial for members as well as the company that serves them. Benefits stemming from loyalty create bonds, even emotional connections, between members and the companies they associate with, which in turn create vibrant communities of influencers and evangelists that become a continual source of innovation for Membership Economy organizations. By staying close to your members and active in the communities you share with them, you’re always a part of the feedback loop, enabling you to continue to evolve your offerings to meet member needs.
Cybersecurity-as-a-service, or CSaaS, brings all of these concepts to life. CSaaS is inherently a member-driven model, allowing providers to focus on access rather than ownership. Instead of selling transactional point solutions or fee-for-services to create what we used to call customer “stickiness,” security companies can use the membership model to level the playing field and democratize cybersecurity, making the best protection accessible and affordable for every size organization, even those with no cybersecurity expertise in house.
The CSaaS membership model offers a new, innovative paradigm for successful protection from today’s advanced cyber-attacks by pairing skilled security advisors with proven processes and best-of-breed technologies to deliver guaranteed business outcomes. Importantly, CSaaS handles the heavy lifting associated with evaluating and recommending solutions from more than 4500 security vendors so that members can focus on scaling their businesses without worrying about securing the sensitive data and information that make those businesses successful.
CSaaS also ensures that recommended solutions are installed and configured completely–and correctly–in addition to providing ongoing remediation of cyber threats and vulnerabilities and regular maintenance of security tools. By selling membership rather than ownership in the CSaaS model, members can achieve faster compliance to standards like NIST CSF, SOC 2, PCI, and HIPAA.
[1] Baxter, Robbie Kellman. “The Membership Economy: Find Your Superusers, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue.” McGraw-Hill Education. 2015, p. 26.
Cryptocurrency exchange platform Coinbaseannounced plans this week to launch its own NFT marketplace. Dubbed Coinbase NFT, the new marketplace will help users mint, purchase, showcase, and discover NFTs.
“Just as Coinbase helped millions of people access Bitcoin for the first time in an easy and trusted way — we want to do the same for the NFTs,” said Coinbase VP of Product and Ecosystem Sanchan Saxena.
Coinbase NFT, which the company aims to launch at the end of this year, will offer a user-friendly interface that the company said will be “as simple as tapping a few buttons.” The new platform will be creator-centric, placing art and the artist’s experience at the forefront.
Coinbase is putting creators first by leveraging decentralized contracts and metadata transparency to help artists maintain creative control. Additionally, the platform will cultivate a community for artists and their fans using social features to help users discover and discuss NFTs. Coinbase NFT will curate a personal feed based on users’ interests. User profiles will showcase all of their NFTs and will help them connect with like-minded collectors and artists.
“Our ambition with Coinbase NFT is to allow everyone to benefit from their creative spark; to contribute to a future where the creator economy isn’t a small subset of the real economy, but a central driver,” said Saxena.
Coinbase NFT will compete with NFT exchange platforms such as OpenSea, one of the major players in the space. According to TechCrunch, OpenSea facilitated $3.4 billion in transaction volume in August of this year. Coinbase NFT boasts two differentiating factors that set it apart from OpenSea. The first is that Coinbase is placing a large focus on the social and community aspects of its tool, something that OpenSea lacks. Coinbase’s second differentiation is that it comes with brand recognition and a built-in client base of 68 million users.
Currently, there is no word from Coinbase on the commission percentage it will charge artists, nor on the royalty percentage for perpetual trades. Whatever it decides, it will need to compete with OpenSea’s relatively-low 2.5% fee.
Coinbase went public on the NASDAQ earlier this year, trading under the ticker COIN. The San Francisco-based company’s user numbers increased 44% in the third quarter of this year, up from 56 million users in the previous quarter. Brian Armstrong is CEO.
Accounts receivable automation firm Billtrust made its first acquisition since going public via a SPAC merger a year ago. The New Jersey-based company purchased collections management company iController for $58 million.
Belgium-based iController was founded in 2017 and offers a SaaS product that provides credit and collections professionals visibility into cash flow management. Billtrust will acquire the iController team, along with the company’s 566 Europe-based clients. iController employees will continue working in the company’s offices in Belgium The Netherlands.
“Acquiring a great company like iController is consistent with our growth plan of strategic global expansion in targeted ways to broaden our customer footprint and provide extended value to our current customers,” added Billtrust Founder and CEO Flint Lane.
Billtrust was founded in 2001 and today’s deal marks the company’s eighth acquisition.
Billtrust offers a wide variety of products, including credit, ecommerce, invoicing, payments, managed services, training, and more. The company also offers a collections tool, which will be enhanced with iController’s collections product. Billtrust President Steve Pinado described iController as “a strong strategic fit,” saying that the company will help Billtrust not only expand its physical presence in the European market but also enhance its collections capabilities.
In 2013, Billtrust launched its Business Payments Network, a service that connects suppliers to accounts payable automation platforms buyers are using to pay, as well as to a network of third-party banks and ERPs. Earlier this year, the company updated the platform to now support bi-directional exchange of transactional data and documents. The new release now enables invoice presentment to accounts payable portals.
Data-driven decision-making is something most businesses aspire to. However, for the majority, significant data silos across the enterprise often means that the data they are using is delayed and inconsistent – resulting in decisions that are neither timely nor accurate. Instead, what organizations need is real-time access to their data and a consistent enterprise view. Fortunately, this is where a data fabric with both embedded analytics and self-service business intelligence (BI) can be extremely powerful.
The use of embedded analytics and self-service BI in combination with a data fabric allows organizations to give a wider range of users the ability to visualize and explore data more freely, empowering employees, partners, and customers with accurate information. Yet, while most organizations recognize the value of actionable analytics, currently most struggle to provide critical metrics and access to ad hoc analysis. In fact, our research shows that only 7% of organizations say more than half of their employees have access to a data analytics platform.
With a staggering 93% of organizations revealing that the majority of their employees don’t have access to analytics, let’s look at how they can set themselves up to become a more data-driven organization.
Bridging data silos with embedded analytics tools
To gain the most benefit from their data and analytics platform, businesses should look to start prioritizing and bridging data within their organization. While they are likely to be faced with a large number of silos, prioritizing key metrics and iteratively connecting data sources will allow companies to reduce redundant data and provide a common language across data sources.
Implementing a smart data fabric, a new architectural approach, will also help to remove silos and help organizations to gain a common semantic view of the data, even if that data remains distributed. Businesses that have grown through mergers, acquisitions or organic expansions benefit from both local and organization-wide visibility. A common semantic view will also enable performance comparisons over time – day to day or year over year, and allow for analysis of patterns and trends.
Vitally, this enterprise view will give businesses a firm foundation to introduce analytics capabilities.
Figure out what needs to be measured
Once they have started taking incremental steps to unify their data, organizations should seek to understand where the real business problems lie and the questions they need to answer. As part of this, they should consider what issues or challenges their CEO and business counterparts, such as the CIO and COO, currently face and what will help them characterize and measure improvements.
Using this as a starting point and working back will allow the IT teams who will be undertaking the implementation to understand what data and insights they need to provide to answer the questions those leading the business have. It is also important to leave capacity for additional metrics because once they are being used effectively, there will be a need for future measurements and answers.
This approach will ensure the organization is clear about where to apply analytics to derive the most value and to impact the most change. Following this method, they can then build out the capabilities across different parts of the organization.
Success lies in collaboration
While likely to be driven by IT teams, implementing analytics platforms isn’t just an IT initiative. Instead, it requires collaboration from individuals across the organization.
To guarantee success, different teams should work together iteratively and constantly assess the contributions being made by the introduction of analytics platforms and continue to refine the use cases and required metrics to understand whether they are providing value and what changes might be needed to measure progress.
Taking this approach will help to iron out any issues as they occur and ensure that all users are extracting real value from the platform.
Simplifying the complex
For most businesses, obtaining a single source of truth from which they can gain insights can be extremely complex. Not only do organizations tend to have a large number of data silos, but they already have a range of different technology in place, from data warehouses, data lakes and data marts, to integration platforms and BI tools. As such, the majority are ideally looking to simplify their technology infrastructure, but without having to rip and replace.
Smart data fabrics make this possible, helping businesses to unlock the true potential of their data by speeding up and simplifying access to data assets across the entire business. This is all while allowing existing legacy applications and data to remain in place, to enable organizations to maximize the value from their previous technology investments.
Realizing the value of embedded analytics
The benefits of embedded analytics capabilities span across all industries, allowing businesses to make more informed decisions and enabling a variety of business users to have access to actionable insights. A data platform like InterSystems IRIS which includes embedded analytics and ad hoc analysis tools, also forms an integral part of a smart data fabric architecture. InterSystems IRIS can provide organizations with access to live data on-demand, integrated from multiple applications such as trades, equity and fixed income positions, or treasury.
This technology ensures that businesses are able to make decisions on current data, including live transactional data, and eliminates latency from source systems. Additionally, it supports business user self-service analytics, enabling drill down and ad hoc capabilities and can also help to automate time consuming tasks such as ongoing integration and interoperability – freeing up the IT team to focus on more value-adding tasks.
With access to more comprehensive, accurate, and timely information, employees across businesses will be better placed to make informed decisions and measure the success of new initiatives needed to drive their organization forward.
Grab the popcorn. It’s time to watch some FinovateFall demos and chill. All 74 of this year’s live demos from FinovateFall 2021 are ready for your viewing pleasure.
Simply check out the demo tab on the Finovate website to browse, find, and watch any of the seven-minute demos from last month’s event for free. Already seen them all? Send a link to a colleague who wasn’t able to make it!
The best way to dive in is to check out the demos that the audience voted as Best of Show. Here’s a list to get you started:
