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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Upcoming webinar Title: Customer Engagement Tactics to Boost Loyalty and Monetization Date: Thursday, April 15, 2021 Time: 04:00 British Summer Time Duration: 1 hour
Research shows brands that excel in customer engagement often exceed their revenue goals. But how well is the financial services industry really responding to customers, and delivering on promises of “customer-centricity?”
Join this upcoming webinar where our expert panel will explore the top trends in customer engagement in 2021 for financial services companies, growth levers for financial service businesses, and how customer engagement strategies can be used to drive long-term growth. Find out which steps you can implement now, and in the long term, to improve customer engagement. Hear first-hand insights from Wise, including how the company has advanced its customer engagement strategy over time.
Featuring:
Erin Bankaitis, Strategic Business Consultant, Braze
“The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we bank, possibly forever,” Nymbus CEO Jeffery Kendall said. “It provided the push for local banks and credit unions to establish more secure, flexible, end-to-end digital banking solutions.” Kendall added that the partnership with Red Hat would give Nymbus’ partners more “freedom of choice” in the way they implemented their cloud banking strategies as well as the “multi-cloud uptime” Kendall said was “critical for the banking industry.”
Courtesy of the new partnership, Nymbus customers will be able to deploy and launch a turnkey, digital bank-in-a-box – running on OpenShift – on whatever cloud platform they prefer. The open source, cloud-agnostic nature of Red Hat’s solution helps institutions avoid being dependent on a sole vendor, which can impede innovation.
“Cloud technology is reshaping the way banking services are created and delivered in our digital world,” Red Hat VP and Global Head of Financial Services Richard Harmon said. “It is providing service providers the ability to quickly adapt to market changes and make it easier for community banks and credit unions to consume new software. We are excited to work with Nymbus to bring the innovation of open source and cloud technology to the market. Nymbus truly embraces the open source way of working, and we are looking forward to contributing to their success.”
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Miami Beach, Florida, Nymbus most recently demonstrated its technology on the Finovate stage in 2019 as part of FinovateFall. The company began this year with a pair of C-suite hires – Chief Alliance Officer Sarah Howell and Chief Product Officer Larry McClanahan – a new partnership with NYDIG to support bitcoin banking, and a $53 million Series C funding round that took the company’s total capital to more than $98 million.
Digital lending platform Blend has agreed to acquire Mr. Cooper-owned Title365 for $422 million.
Blend will leverage Title365 for its title, escrow, and settlement services. Integrating this technology into Blend’s platform will allow the company to automate title commitment upon loan application submission, digitally reconcile settlement fees in real time, and streamline communication among parties. Ultimately, Blend anticipates that Title365’s industry expertise will help minimize costs by integrating title and settlement into the loan process.
Title365 was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in California. The company fits nicely with Blend’s approach of offering a modern experience with its mission “to be the most technologically advanced title insurance and settlement services provider.”
Title365 will be part of Blend’s title marketplace that allows lenders and consumers to choose their preferred title and escrow partner. The tool will be similar to Blend’s insurance marketplace that allows consumers to shop for competitive rates from more than 25 insurance carriers.
“We’re really excited about the agreement to add Title365 to our team as we continue our work to build the full consumer homebuying journey into our platform,” said CEO Nima Ghamsari. “With Title365, we will be able to expand our ability to put lenders at the center of a vastly improved homebuying journey that delivers new levels of efficiency, speed, convenience, and cost savings to everyone.”
Founded in 2012, Blend recently received $300 million in new funding, bringing its total funding to $665 million and boosting its valuation to $3.3 billion. The company facilitated $1.4 trillion in loans last year and counts 285+ lender partners, which together are responsible for around 30% of all mortgage volume in the U.S.
ESG investing is no longer the only environmentally conscious aspect of the financial services world. Recently, we’ve seen an explosion of fintechs– both new and incumbent players– going green.
Here’s a roundup of who’s who in sustainable fintech:
Ando Money
Ando Money is a California-based digital bank that uses client deposits to support green initiatives.
Ant Group
Ant Group, the fintech subsidiary of China-based Alibaba Group, has pledged to go carbon neutral by 2030.
Aspiration
Aspiration is a digital bank that won’t use consumer deposits to fund fossil fuel projects like pipelines, oil drilling, and coal mining. Additionally, the fintech plants trees in collaboration with reforestation partners when users round up their purchases.
Atmos Financial
California-based Atmos Financial offers a savings account that uses client deposits to exclusively finance climate-positive projects at scale.
Carbon Chain
Founded in 2019, CarbonChain offers organizations visibility into the emissions of their supply chains to identify the highest polluting transactions.
Carbon Collective
Carbon Collective offers roboadvisory services that help users divest from fossil fuels and invest in stock market funds that are low-carbon and don’t depend on fossil fuels for their core business.
Carbon Zero
Carbon Zero offers a credit card that rewards users’ purchases by using merchant-paid fees to buy carbon offsets.
Cloverly
Cloverly integrates with existing fintech apps, financial institutions, and payment processing services to assess their carbon impact and determine offsets needed.
Cooler Future
Still in beta, Cooler Future is a Finland-based startup that enables users to invest in a sustainable portfolio.
Doconomy
Doconomy is a Sweden-based digital bank that wants to inspire behavioral changes and reduce unsustainable consumption and carbon emissions.
Ecocart
Ecocart is a browser extension that works with merchants to help customers offset the environmental impact of their online purchase.
Helios
Founded in 2019, Helios is a France-based fintech that offers a digital bank account that helps users offset their carbon footprint.
Joro
Joro connects to users’ payment cards to analyze their carbon footprint and determine the biggest drivers of their carbon footprint.
Meniga
As part of its digital banking platform, Meniga provides a Carbon Insight tool that offers end users visibility into their carbon footprint based on their spending.
NetZero
NetZero connects to users’ bank accounts to determine the carbon footprint of their purchases. The fintech also helps users reduce their emissions and offset their footprint.
Nori
Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Nori is developing a marketplace for carbon removals.
OpenInvest
OpenInvest helps advisors offer their clients ESG investing that align with their values.
Raise Green
Raise Green offers a marketplace where users can invest in local, impactful projects.
ReGal
Headquartered in the U.K., ReGal offers alternative financial services based on Green Blockchain.
Ripple
Payments network Ripple pledged to be carbon net-zero by 2030 and to decarbonize public blockchains.
Stripe
U.S.-based ecommerce and mobile payments company Stripe offers a tool called Stripe Climate. The offering enables businesses to direct a portion of their revenue to help scale emerging carbon removal technologies.
Tomorrow
Tomorrow offers a digital bank account that uses customer deposits to fund sustainable initiatives. The startup’s premium account, Tomorrow Zero, offers a payment card that is made of wood.
Treecard
Treecard offers a free payment card made of wood. The company donates 80% of its profits to reforestation.
Trine
Trine is a Sweden-based company that allows firms as well as private and professional investors to crowdfund solar energy products.
Tumelo
Tumelo helps investment platforms and pension providers engage investors by showing them the companies in their portfolio and empowering them to vote on ESG issues.
Digital identity verification company Socure announced that it has secured $100 million in Series D funding in a round led by Accel and featuring participation from the investment divisions of Citi and Wells Fargo. The investment brings the company’s total capital to more than $196 million.
“We are now more confident than ever that we will be the first company to eliminate identity fraud while unlocking complete and fully-automated coverage of every good ID,” Socure CEO Johnny Ayers said.
Also participating in the round were Commerce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Flint Capital, Strategic Capital, Synchrony, Sorenson, and Two Sigma Ventures. And while a specific new valuation was not included in the funding announcement, Socure’s Ayers hinted at the lofty level – and more – in congratulating his team on the company’s success.
“Reaching unicorn status is a testament to our dedicated and talented team which we are looking forward to rapidly scaling to meet demand,” Ayers said. “We are incredibly grateful for the chance to innovate and partner to solve this problem with some of the greatest companies in the world and are energized for the opportunities that lay ahead for Socure, especially as we make our march to a potential IPO.”
A Finovate alum since 2013, the company demonstrated its digital-to-physical identity verification technology at our fall conference in 2017. Socure’s predictive analytics platform marries AI and machine learning with trusted on- and offline data intelligence from a wide variety of sources to verify identities in real time. Operating in a number of verticals ranging from financial services and eCommerce to gaming and telecom, Socure has more than 350 customers including three of the top five banks, six of the top 10 card issuers, and more than 75 of the most innovative fintechs including Varo Money, Chime, and Stash.
More recently, Socure announced a partnership with advisory, tax, and assurance firm Baker Tilly that has since established that Socure’s Intelligent KYC product meets “and creates additional assurance” in providing USA PATRIOT Act compliance. Earlier in the year, Socure had announced that Intelligent KYC would be made available to digital gaming operators in eleven states.
Payments ecosystem giant PayPal announced a collaboration with Flutterwave, a leading payments technology company in Africa, this week. Through the collaboration, PayPal will enable its users to pay African merchants using Flutterwave’s platform.
The partnership will not only connect Flutterwave’s African merchant clients with PayPal’s 377 million accountholders, it will also help them work around the fragmented and complex payments infrastructure in Africa. To use the new functionality, online shoppers across the globe simply select the Pay with PayPal option while checking out at an African merchant’s page online.
Flutterwave launched to help businesses and individuals make payments across the continent flexibly and affordably. This comes at a crucial time for Africa. The ecommerce sector on the continent is expanding and is expected to grow from $16.5 billion in 2017 to $29 billion by next year.
“The collaboration reinforces our vision of creating a seamless digital payments system for Africa’s business communities that can now transact with international consumers,” said Flutterwave Founder and CEO Olugbenga Agboola. “By working with PayPal, we can further strengthen our commitment to our customers and service users as we will be enabling them to transact and expand their business operations to reach new markets.”
Flutterwave was founded in 2016 and has since processed over 140 million transactions worth over $9 billion. Today’s news comes just a couple of days after the company closed a $170 million round at a $1 billion valuation.
“International trade and foreign exchange can be a complex business for financial institutions of any size to manage successfully,” Finzly CEO and founder Booshan Rengachari said. “With one integration to the core, our FX STAR and EXIM STAR solutions help institutions like Fulton Bank to more efficiently, securely, and cost-effectively meet the needs of their customers.”
Finzly specializes in connecting banks and their customers via a real-time payment services hub and cloud-based bank operating system, BankOS, delivering a modern, digital banking experience. The company’s platform leverages open APIs and integrations into core technology to enable financial institutions to subscribe, try, and launch both Finzly’s and third-party fintech apps and solutions. With FX STAR, Finzly’s customers are able to execute foreign currency transactions, purchase foreign currencies in bulk using multi-currency accounts, as well as initiate payments. EXIM STAR serves as an international trade finance solution to help financial institutions manage the transaction lifecycle for commercial letters of credit, standby letters of credit, and documentary collections.
“We recognize Finzly as a proven provider that understands the unique business needs of regional financial institutions,” Fulton Bank International SVP and Manager Amy Sahm said. “Through the implementation of their user-friendly platform, our bank has been able to achieve better standard functionality across the board – from improved access to reports and confirming trades, to upgrades in investigation and reconciliation capabilities.”
Fulton Bank operates more than 223 financial centers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as in the mid-Atlantic states of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. The firm is a subsidiary of Fulton Financial Corporation, a financial holding company based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with $26 billion in assets.
Finzly made its Finovate debut in 2019. The Charlotte, North Carolina-based company most recently demonstrated its digital account opening solution at FinovateWest 2020, earning a Best of Show award from conference attendees. This year, in addition to its partnership with Fulton Bank, Finzly teamed up with Lead Bank, a Kansas City, Missouri-based “community-minded” commercial bank. Lead Bank implemented Finzly’s Payment Hub – part of Finzly’s Bank OS – to boost its own payment and digital capabilities.
“The ability to service our fintech and corporate clients with a Banking as a Service solution, as well as communicate messages to and from the core platform, is crucial to fulfilling and facilitating the requirements of Lead Bank and our channel partners,” Sheila Stratton, Director of Digital Strategy, Lead Bank said. “Finzly’s solution provides a modern technology platform in which our bank can expand payment capabilities while tapping a flexible and innovative solution to support our bank in delivering on the specialized needs of our clients.”
As well as partnerships, 2021 marked the launch of Finzly’s SWAP STAR solution. The new technology provides an end-to-end, sales, trading, and post-trade processing system for interest rate derivatives. SWAP STAR is available as an app within Finzly’s BankOS cloud-based bank operating system.
Aiia‘s open banking platform provides easy ways to innovate on top of financial data and the ability to pay and receive money with open banking payments.
Features
Aiia Data: Full access to account information services
Aiia Pay: Makes it possible for all to leverage open banking payments
Aiia Hub: Puts the end-user in control of their shared data
Why it’s great Open banking for all. Aiia lets a wide range of financial institutions, fintechs, accounting system providers, payment service providers, and others leverage open banking with one single line of code.
Presenter
Gudmundur Hreidarsson, CTO & Co-Founder Hreidarsson is the Co-Founder of two major fintech successes in the Nordics: open banking platform and advisor, Nordic API Gateway (Aiia), and the personal finance management app, Spiir. LinkedIn
DATA Reply‘s quantum-inspired accelerator, MegaQUBO, solves optimization problems very fast and is applicable to collateral optimization.
Features
Massive parallelization and solving speed
Focus on the quality of the solution and improved accuracy
Service scalability and ease of use
Why it’s great The quantum-inspired accelerator, MegaQUBO, finds solutions to highly complex optimization problems in real business contexts with great speed and improved accuracy, and it scales with your projects.
Presenters
Sara Felloni, Senior Consultant Felloni is the Senior Project Manager at DATA Reply. She holds a master’s degree in Applied Mathematics at University of Milan and a PhD in Quantum Information Processing. LinkedIn
Davide Caputo, Senior Consultant Caputo is the Senior Data Scientist at DATA Reply. As a quantum computing specialist, he holds a master’s degree in Physics at University of Turin and a PhD in Experimental Physics. LinkedIn
Blanca Silva Fernández, Consultant Silva Fernández is a Data Scientist at DATA Reply. As a quantum computing specialist, she holds a master’s degree in Physics at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and a PhD in Experimental Physics. LinkedIn
As experts in big data, AI, and machine learning since 2004, Strands creates highly-customizable digital money management software for top-tier financial institutions worldwide.
Features
Offers financial control and wellbeing for retail banking customers
Helps users plan ahead and budget with all their accounts in one place
Provides visual insight about where every cent goes each month
Why it’s great Strands’ PFM means smarter money management for the customer, improved bank-user engagement, and a greater share of wallet for the bank. Know how people spend, and then help them do it better.
Presenter
Claudio Cungi, Head of Product Cungi has six years of experience in management consulting. He joined the CRIF group in 2018 as a Product and Business Development Manager for open banking. LinkedIn
Social trading and investment marketplace eToroannounced today that it is making the leap to go public. In true 2021 style, however, the Israel-based company isn’t pursuing an IPO. Instead, eToro is merging with FinTech Acquisition Corp. V, a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), in a deal worth $10 billion.
When the deal is finalized, the combined company will operate as eToro Group Ltd. and is expected to be listed on the NASDAQ.
The move to go public comes after a period of growth for the Israel-based company. Last year, eToro added more than five million new users and brought in $605 million in revenue, 147% higher than the revenue it saw in 2019. Additionally, average monthly registrations have grown from 192,000 in 2019 to 440,000 in 2020. In January 2021 alone, eToro added more than 1.2 million new registered users. Similarly, the number of trades executed on its platform has grown– from eight million average trades per month in 2019, to 27 million in 2020, and 75 million in January 2021 alone.
“We founded eToro with the vision of opening the global market for everyone to trade and invest in a simple and transparent way,” said eToro CEO Yoni Assia. “Today, eToro is the world’s leading social investment network. Our users come to eToro to invest, but also to communicate with each other; to see, follow, and automatically copy successful investors from all around the world. We created a new category of wealth management – social investing – and we are dominating the market as evidenced by our rapid expansion.”
eToro is the seventh fintech to use a SPAC to go public in the past few months, joining SoFi, BankMobile, Payoneer, MoneyLion, Apex, and OppFi.
eToro was founded in 2007 and has offices in Cyprus, the U.K., Australia, and the U.S. The company is among Finovate’s earliest alums, demoing at the very first FinovateEurope conference in 2011.
“As one of the fastest growing technology companies in the world, this cash injection – in addition to having the built-in option to expand the financing – will significantly accelerate the growth of our customer base, enhance SumUp’s technology leadership position, and drive the development of new services to support our merchants globally,” SumUp co-founder Marc-Alexander Christ said.
SumUp’s funding news comes at a time when the company is adding to its product portfolio in both Europe and the U.K. Much of this growth has come through acquisitions of POS software providers like London-based Goodtill, as well as Tiller, a digital service provider for gastronomy merchants. Separately, SumUp’s recent acquisition of Paysolut, a Lithuanian cure banking system provider will enable the company to fortify the banking services that it offers to its merchants.
SumUp supports more than three million merchants around the world. In addition to its expansion in Europe – going live in Romania to bring the total number of its European markets to 29 – the company has added to its interests in the Chilean market and launched operations in Columbia – the fourth largest economy in Latin America.
At the beginning of this year, SumUp announced that it was working with Shutterstock to give merchants the ability to add high-quality visual images to enhance their online storefronts.
“It’s important now more than ever that small businesses have the means to trade in the e-commerce space in order to take on larger competition,” SumUp European EVP Alex von Schirmeister said. “This partnership with Shutterstock will do just that, giving them more visibility to grow their customer bases.”
Founded in 2011, SumUp made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in 2013. Daniel Klein is CEO.
