The QR Code Payment Revolution Comes to the Magic Kingdom

The QR Code Payment Revolution Comes to the Magic Kingdom

Courtesy of Blackhawk Network, championship-winning professional athletes aren’t the only ones headed to Disneyland. The branded payments solution provider announced late last week that it is leveraging its proprietary ScanIt solution to power retail ticket purchases using QR codes. Moreover, among the first customers of this new offering is none other than Disneyland, which will offer QR code ticket sales in major retailers throughout the state of California.

“Shoppers’ comfort with QR codes exploded in the last year,” Helena Mao, VP of global product strategy at Blackhawk explained. “Now, as consumers return to in-person entertainment, we are pleased to continue the innovation around QR codes with the introduction of entertainment and amusement park ticketing.”

Amusement parks are only one use case of Blackhawk’s technology. The company’s solutions can also be applied to other experiences that have historically relied on paper tickets, such as music concerts, museums, zoos, and other forms of live entertainment. Contactless, QR code-based payments also support the public’s growing preference for purchasing goods and services in the analog world the same way that they do in the digital world. Research conducted by Blackhawk, for example, suggests that 73% of consumers surveyed would prefer “online” payment methods – even when shopping “in-store.”

“Our technology affords retailers the luxury of a content selection that is no longer hindered by physical space,” Mao added. “And it gives shoppers access to a broader selection of digital content, such as e-tickets and digital gift cards, within a convenient purchase experience.”

To this end, Blackhawk Network has spent 2021 forging partnerships with a variety of companies. This year, the firm has teamed up with eGifting company Givingli, supermarket Tops Friendly Markets, digital asset marketplace Bakkt, and apparel retailer UNTUCKit. Most recently, technology from Blackhawk Network has been deployed to enable both PayPal and Venmo bring additional digital payment options to leading supermarket retailer Giant Eagle.

Blackhawk Network was founded in 2001, and has been a Finovate alum for almost ten years. A publicly traded entity on the NASDAQ – under the ticker “HAWK” – Blackhawk Network has a market capitalization of $2.5 billion. This year has featured a number of C-suite changes for the Pleasanton, California-based company, appointing former Google executive Nikhil Sathe as Chief Technology Officer in February, Cory Gaines as Chief Product Officer in May, and David McLaughlin as Chief Financial Officer in June.


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FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Signal Intent

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Signal Intent

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateFall on September 13-15, 2021. Register today and save your spot.

Signal Intent is reimagining financial guidance for the digital age. The company’s innovative platform transforms how banks and lenders engage customers at scale.

Features

  • Financial tools to engage and convert more customers
  • Shift from reactive to proactive marketing
  • Powerful customer data to prequalify and send relevant offers

Why it’s great
With millions of customer interactions happening every month, we’re building data models that empower banks to deliver personalized marketing and build stronger customer relationships.

Presenter

Matthew Covi, CEO & Co-Founder
Previously the Head of Growth at Stash, a fintech unicorn, Covi is now focused on reimagining financial guidance for the digital age.
LinkedIn

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: DocFox

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: DocFox

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateFall on September 13-15, 2021. Register today and save your spot.

DocFox is a SaaS business serving over 200 banks, fintechs, and credit unions helping them to onboard and perform ongoing due diligence for business and complex accounts.

Features

  • Seamless omni-channel account opening lets new clients interact online or in-branch
  • Document collection and review, allowing you to open accounts smoothly
  • Incredible client experiences

Why it’s great
DocFox is onboarding technology that creates incredible client experiences with ZERO manual effort and can intelligently read ANY document enabling automated business account opening.

Presenter

Ryan Canin, CEO
Canin is the CEO of DocFox, a digital tool which enables rapid account opening, customer onboarding, and automated complex workflows for business and commercial banking.
LinkedIn

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Autobooks

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Autobooks

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateFall on September 13-15, 2021. Register today and save your spot.

Autobooks‘s embedded modules for small businesses allows them to send digital invoices and accept online payments directly from a financial institution’s mobile or online banking application.

Features

  • Digital Invoicing
  • Online payment acceptance
  • In-app payment acceptance

Why it’s great
This new innovation directly integrates within the banking channel.

Presenters

Steve Robert, CEO & Founder
Robert is an accredited investor, adviser, and board member, who actively coaches, speaks, and blogs about start-ups, technology and entrepreneurship.
LinkedIn

Jo Jagadish, Head of Corporate Products, Services, & Innovation
Jagadish is the Head of Commercial Products and Innovation for TD Bank including Deposits, Cash Management, Global Trade Finance, Revenue Management, Product Sales Support, Servicing, and Implementations.
LinkedIn

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Icon Savings Plan

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Icon Savings Plan

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateFall on September 13-15, 2021. Register today and save your spot.

Icon‘s Portable Workplace Savings is a new generation in workplace savings. The company’s platform removes the complexity, cost, and fiduciary risk from employers and delivers personalized saving and investing.

Features

  • A turnkey plan that can be set up in minutes
  • All employees qualify: W2 and 1099
  • Fully portable, Icon travels from job to job, no more rollovers

Why it’s great
Employers and employees both want radical simplification, affordability, and customizable retirement savings plans.

Presenters

Alex Rowley, Head of Advisory Services
Rowley is Head of Advisory Services at Icon Savings Plan.

Sasha Mace, CTO
Sasha Mace is CTO at Icon Savings Plan.

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Ocrolus

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Ocrolus

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateFall on September 13-15, 2021. Register today and save your spot.

Ocrolus is a human-in-the-loop intelligent automation company that transforms documents into data analytics, helping financial services companies make high-quality decisions with accurate, trusted data.

Features

  • Verify key borrower data including cash flow, income, address, employment, identity, assets and liabilities
  • Eliminate data entry
  • Accelerate underwriting decisions

Why it’s great
Ocrolus works as a transparent API call, ingesting documents, identifying potential fraud, and providing actionable insights directly into your loan origination system.

Presenter

David Snitkof, VP Analytics
Snitkof is a technology entrepreneur and data and analytics leader with a successful track record of developing analytical systems, teams, and businesses from the ground.
LinkedIn

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Posh

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Posh

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateFall on September 13-15, 2021. Register today and save your spot.

Posh is a conversational AI company that deploys chatbots and phone bots for banks, credit unions, and insurance companies, so they can save and make money while providing the best banking experience.

Features

  • Saves contact center reps time and money
  • Makes financial institutions money through bots’ marketing and sales capabilities
  • Creates the most enjoyable banking experience for customers

Why it’s great
Posh has recruited a 40+ person team comprised of many PhD graduates from MIT and Harvard who come from Google, Amazon, Nuance, and other top conversational AI companies.

Presenter

Karan Kashyap, CEO & Co-Founder
Kashyap and his co-founder created Posh while they were masters students at MIT’s AI Lab because they wanted to create cutting-edge conversational AI for all financial institutions. 
LinkedIn

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: UNest

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: UNest

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateFall on September 13-15, 2021. Register today and save your spot.

UNest is a fintech app that helps parents build a better future for their kids by providing guidance and access to cost-effective financial solutions with a paperless approach that take 5 minutes!

Features

  • Set up a UNest Investment account in under 5 minutes
  • Earn investments in your child’s account through our 100+ partners with UNest Rewards
  • Easily have friends and family contribute a gift

Why it’s great
UNest is the fastest-growing fintech targeting millennial parents and now partnering with banks, credit unions, and employers to offer our solution.

Presenters

Garrett Gilbertson, Executive
Gilbertson is an Air Force veteran turned entrepreneur and investor. He is the founder of Startup Mavericks, Chairman of the Band of Angels Los Angeles and a Board Member at UNest.
LinkedIn


Peter Mansfield, CMO
Mansfield is an accomplished marketing professional with an impressive track record helping startups, growth stage, and corporate clients in fintech like Marqeta, Wallaby Financial, and Property Bridge.
LinkedIn

Ramp Raises $300 Million to Improve Corporate Expense Management

Ramp Raises $300 Million to Improve Corporate Expense Management

In a round led by Founders Fund, New York-based business card and expense management platform Ramp has secured $300 million in new funding. The Series C round more than doubles the firm’s total equity capital raised, and gives Ramp a valuation of $3.9 billion.

Ramp’s 5-in-1 approach to enterprise spending management offers zero-fee corporate cards, accounting automation, billpay (including invoices, approvals, and payments), as well as expense management and real-time reporting that delivers insights that can be key to uncovering further savings opportunities. The platform offers automated expense reporting that includes collection and verification of more than 90% of receipts, and smart-rule powered automated reconciliation which, along with multi-entity and custom field support, enables accounting teams to close books up to 86% faster. Ramp integrates out-of-the-box with more than 100 different accounting, productivity, and security software packages from QuickBooks and Xero, to Slack and 1Password, to Google Suite and Okta.

According to company co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman, Ramp customers are saving 3.3% on average after switching to Ramp. This comes courtesy of a combination of savings insights, real-time spend reporting, and a 1.5% cashback policy. “This is tangible money saved that customers are reinvesting into activities that actually grow their business,” he said.

In addition to its funding announcement, Ramp also announced an acquisition. The company purchased “negotiation-as-a-service” platform Buyer which helps facilitate big-dollar business costs such as annual software contracts. The acquisition was the first for Ramp, which was founded in the spring of 2019; terms of the transaction were not immediately disclosed.

In a blog post at the Ramp website, Glyman noted that the funding raised, as important as it is, was not “the main news.” Instead, Glyman underscored the value of the financing automation platform Ramp is building, a platform that will help business save “even more time and money that we’ve done to date.” Glyman added that this will enable the company to move from providing savings insights based on the past to instead being “able to proactively save you money before you spend.” Everything from helping companies save money on travel expenses to enabling them to keep software costs low are on Ramp’s radar.


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Cooperative Teachers Credit Union Collaborates with Scienaptic on AI-Enabled Credit Decisioning

Cooperative Teachers Credit Union Collaborates with Scienaptic on AI-Enabled Credit Decisioning

There were many lessons drawn from the economic response to the COVID pandemic in 2020. Among them was the role that digital technology can play in helping facilitate financial assistance to small businesses coping with lockdowns, quarantines, and a workforce wary of exposure to a deadly virus.

As many of our worst concerns about COVID-19 have begun to subside and economies have started to return to something approximating normalcy, the drive to make financing easier for individuals and small business remains an important part of a financial inclusion conversation that predates the pandemic. This is one of the reasons why we should expect to see more partnerships like the one announced today between Texas-based Cooperative Teachers Credit Union and AI-powered credit decisioning platform provider Scienaptic.

Courtesy of the new partnership, Cooperative Teachers Credit Union (CTCU) will be able to make faster, more accurate credit decisions for its members, as well as offer a range of additional financial options to them. Founded in 1953 “by teachers and for teachers,” CTCU currently serves more than 7,000 members and their families in East Texas and has more than $124 million in assets.

“Through the years, CTCU has grown in assets, in members, and in offerings,” the credit union’s president and CEO Tim Miller said. “We are excited to partner with Scienaptic and build upon this growth by tapping its AI-powered credit decisioning platform. Scienaptic’s AI will enable us to offer enhanced credit access to our members and improve their financial well-being.”

New York-based Scienaptic helps banks and credit unions move beyond outdated credit decisioning tools such as credit algorithms and traditional underwriting technologies that provide financial institutions with high credit loss rates and a subpar experience for potential borrowers. In contrast, Scienaptic drives traditional and alternative data through a powerful, preconfigured predictor library and explainable AI models to deliver more informed “yes/no” credit decisions, more accurate credit scoring and pricing, as well as more appropriate credit line levels for consumers. A boon for both credit underwriting and SME lending, Scienaptic’s platform is available as a hosted SaaS offering to keep capex costs low for its clients.

“By leveraging Scienaptic’s AI enhanced decision-making capabilities,” Scienaptic President Pankaj Jain said, “CTCU is positioned to create more approvals faster and strengthen member relationships, all while delivering an exceptional customer experience without increasing risk.”

The collaboration with CTCU is only the latest partnership Scienaptic has forged in recent weeks. In the month of August alone, the credit decisioning platform provider announced teaming up with automobile financing specialist Right Decision Financial Services, Oregon’s InRoads Credit Union, and the 140,000+ member Credit Union of Colorado.


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DriveWealth Raises $450 Million at $2.85 Billion Valuation

DriveWealth Raises $450 Million at $2.85 Billion Valuation

After recently receiving $450 million in funding, digital trading and brokerage company DriveWealth is now worth $2.85 billion. The investment brings the company’s total funding to $551 million.

The Series D round was co-led by Insight Partners and Accel and included a follow-on investment from Fidelity International Strategic Ventures, Base 10, FTX, and FlightDeck. Greyhound Capital, Softbank Vision Fund, and Point72 Ventures also participated.

The New Jersey-based company will use the new funds to become the forefront of embedded investing technology for global digital wallets and brokerages. Specifically, the investment will help DriveWealth hire new employees, make acquisitions, and form partnerships. The funds will also be crucial for the company as it seeks to expand its products and services, including launching a self-clearing product.

“We are in the early innings of a worldwide retail investing revolution,” said company Founder and CEO Bob Cortright. “Our goal is for DriveWealth to be the partner of choice to deliver the embedded investing experience of the future. This new capital and investor engagement will accelerate our global expansion plans in order to become the world-class, exchange-like technology company that powers tomorrow’s investing products.”

Julie Coin and Robert Cortright founded DriveWealth in 2012 with the goal to democratize investing across the globe. Via its API, the fintech helps companies make investing friendly for inexperienced investors with fractional trading, enabling users to begin investing with as little as $1. DriveWealth’s API also allows clients to provide non-U.S. citizens with access to U.S. markets.

DriveWealth’s clients include Revolut, Hatch, MoneyLion, and Sharesies. Through partnerships like these, the company’s technology reaches investors in 153 countries.


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Wahed Brings Ethical Mobile Wealth Management to South Africa

Wahed Brings Ethical Mobile Wealth Management to South Africa

For many, the economic inequality and low financial literacy that plague a country like South Africa are reasons to look elsewhere for fintech opportunities. But for New York-based Wahed, these same features are reason for not only optimism, but for investment and expansion.

The company, parent firm of a leading halal financial investment platform, announced this week that it has been granted a new regulatory license from the Financial Sector Conduct Authority (FSCA), South Africa’s financial markets regulator. The license will enable Wahed to launch its investment app in the sub-Saharan nation, making it easier for South Africans to grow their finances in a manner consistent with their cultural preferences and values.

“We are looking forward to making an impact in South Africa,” Wahed CEO Junaid Wahedna said. “We know we can help bridge the wealth divide in South Africa through our products. We combine fintech and values to create simple, accessible, and halal products – we are honored to be trusted and to launch in South Africa.”

With more than 200,000 customers in the nine different jurisdictions around the world, Wahed brings affordable and accessible investing to populations that are often overlooked and unable to use traditional investment solutions. The company enables individuals and families to invest in stocks and sukuks (Islamic bonds) – as well as in real estate and gold. Wahed offers free portfolio recommendations and the ability to invest in multiple accounts that may represent different investment goals – from saving for higher education to buying a first home. And with low, $100 account minimums, Wahed’s portfolios offer diversification among asset classes; efficiency and low cost; and optimization using modern portfolio theory to maximize returns based on the customer’s risk profile

Founded in 2015 and going live in the U.S. and the U.K. two and three years later, respectively, Wahed launched the first ever Halal equity ETF in 2019. By 2020, the company had topped more than 100,000 customers around the world. With its arrival in South Africa, Wahed looks forward to being able to serve the more than 446 million Muslims and others on the continent who need investment opportunities that are consistent with their faith and values.

“We are delighted to provide financial products that put the customer first,” General Manager for Wahed in South Africa Rashaad Kalla said. “South Africa has a thriving fintech ecosystem, an established banking sector, and a population that is hungry to reap the benefits of a new and better way to invest.”

Wahed has raised $40 million in funding from investors including Saudi Aramco Entrepreneurship Ventures, Rasameel Investment Company, Dubai Cultiv8, BECO Capital, and Cue Ball. In June, the company announced new U.K. General Manager Umer Suleman.


Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Central and Southern Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

Asia-Pacific

Sub-Saharan Africa

Central and Eastern Europe

Middle East and Northern Africa


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