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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
When it comes to foreseeing the future, nobody gets things 100% right. However, Strategic Futurist at TEDx Curator Nancy Giordano is poised to come pretty close with her predictions.
Giordano is a keynote speaker at FinovateWest Digital, a online event hosted November 23 through 25. At her presentation, Just One Percent In – Learning to Navigate the Next Economy, Giordano will discuss how we are only 1% into this new technological era and what that may mean for your five-year, 10-year, and 50-year outlook. She will detail four massive shifts in human awareness and behavior that are reshaping the understanding of business, society, technology, and ourselves, and will offer hope for the days ahead.
Giordano is a 10-year TEDx curator in Austin. Described as endlessly optimistic, she is a strategic futurist with a drive to help enterprise organizations and visionary leaders transform to meet the escalating expectations ahead. With growing conviction of what will (and needs to) shift, executives value Giordano’s unique abilities to sense and synthesize the terrain ahead, and guide those ready to build more relevant and sustainable solutions.
Don’t miss Nancy Giordano’s presentation at FinovateWest Digital on Monday, November 23, 2020 at 1:20 pm. If you still haven’t registered for FinovateWest Digital, book now to get the best discounts.
SoFi has spent the past few years broadening its focus. What launched as an alternative lending company has emerged as a platform that provides a deeper breadth of banking services including insurance, checking accounts, credit score monitoring, investing, estate planning, and small business financing.
After building all of these tools, SoFi began focusing on building something different– community. The fintech offers a membership program with a range of perks including career coaching and financial planning.
Today, the company is leveraging its community in the launch of social trading and investing features. The new capabilities allow users to share their investment portfolios and discover and follow the holdings, watchlists, and activity of fellow members who opt in to the feature.
“According to SoFi’s research, about 70% of SoFi Invest member respondents indicated that they regularly (at least weekly) discuss their investments with family members, peers, or colleagues,” said SoFi CEO Anthony Noto. “Our new social investing features not only help us live up to our name of Social Finance, but provide ways for investors to see specifically what members on the platform are doing with their investment decisions, discover new investment ideas, and see how they stack up in their investing performance. Given the importance of investing early and consistently, we are thrilled to be able to provide a more informative, engaging, interactive mobile investing experience rooted in building better investing habits.”
To encourage social interaction, SoFi’s new tools allows users to comment on and react to the others’ trades and compare their performance on dynamic leaderboard.
For privacy purposes, participation is optional and members are not automatically enrolled. Additionally, the amounts of investment portfolios are hidden from other users.
If you’ve studied fintech for any length of time this should sound familiar. U.K.-based eToro launched its CopyTrading platform in 2011. This social investing platform is different from SoFi’s in that it pays top investors when others copy their trades.
In a round led by Left Lane Capital and featuring participation from Jump Capital and Clocktower Technology – as well as other investors – M1 Finance has scored $45 million in funding. The Series C round takes the finance super app company’s total to more than $95 million, adding to the $33 million M1 Finance raised in June.
CEO and self-described “personal finance nerd” Brian Barnes highlighted ways the new investment would help power the company forward. In an extended blog post, Barnes listed investment in the client experience, more products and features, and more talent as initiatives customers can look forward to over the balance of the year and into 2021. “We’re not just stepping on the gas,” he wrote, “we’re now on a rocket ship.”
M1 Finance’s Finance Super App combines investing, borrowing, and spending functionality in one automated platform. Clients can use the platform to build their investment portfolios for free, take advantage of fractional share investing and schedule automatic, one-click rebalancing. A flexible portfolio line of credit is available to users once their portfolio value reaches $10,000; and the platform’s M1 Spend feature enables users to schedule and pay back loans, as well as set up direct deposits, automatic investments, and transfers.
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, M1 made its Finovate debut at our New York conference in 2016. In September, the company partnered with Rackspace Technology in order to bring expanded Amazon Web Services functionality to its platform. That same month, M1 reported that it had reached $2 billion in assets under management, and added more than 229,000 new accounts since February. More recently, the company launchedSmart Transfers, a new feature for its Plus members that provides greater control and flexibility in setting automatic transfers and investments.
“We’re here to empower a new world of personal financial well-being through a simpler, smarter, stronger platform,” Barnes wrote this week. “With more funds and the opportunity to continue working with people we know and trust, we can expand what we do for you and your money.”
The following is a guest post by Lisa Bigelow who writes for Bold.org.
Robo advisors. Touchless payments. Zelle. These are just a few ways that digitalization has transformed how people manage their money. Although consumers have experienced a few hiccups along the way — lame chatbots, we’re looking at you — fintech is making an enormous impact on how banks will serve their customers now and in the future.
Here are five futuristic fintech trends that reveal where banking is headed.
In five years, AI will dominate customer service
You’ve probably used your bank’s chatbot to accomplish a simple task like disputing a transaction, but have you considered asking it how much you spent at the grocery store last month? Some digital transformation experts estimate that 95% of customer service interactions will be powered by artificial intelligence by 2025.
Consumers expect AI-driven interactions to satisfy bigger customer service expectations, according to a Drift survey. Businesses that delay improvements in natural language processing or that rely on human responders will be at a disadvantage, with one IBM study showing a 99% improvement in response times when using AI. With 38% of baby boomers expecting a 24-hour response, that’s significant.
Yet chatbots are more than basic analytics delivered quickly. They can also offer suggestions on the best mortgage or investments for your finances. Even high net worth investors may be surprised to learn their financial managers rely on roboadvisors for complex algorithms that recommend investment strategies.
In China, digital payments — not cash — is king
Digital payments went mainstream in Asia long before COVID-weary consumers turned away from cash for health reasons. In China — where a mobile payments market worth $17 trillion flourishes — vendors often prefer cashless transactions, even for small purchases. And with 91% of Chinese tourists saying they would shop more overseas if mobile payments were an option, all economies — and their banking systems — will benefit by adopting fintech.
In addition, cash payments don’t always offer consumers more convenience or better pricing, especially with browser add-ons making finding deals easier. Peer-to-peer shopping platforms like eBay and Alibaba have given consumers more choices than ever before. And with players like Venmo and Zelle allowing instant cash transfers, it’s never been more convenient to shop.
Fintech is changing cross-border education
American colleges prize international students for reasons related to finances and diversity. International students value American college educations for their quality and name recognition. Before fintech, financing an international education and recording international tuition payments was time-consuming and difficult.
Fintech helps lower the barrier to entry to the U.S. education market. Take the University of Virginia, which adopted Flywire as a means of helping foreign students establish payment plans and transfer funds. And in China, Superyou and myMoney allow students to complete cross-border transactions with the touch of a mobile button.
What about those who can’t afford the sometimes $70-thousand-and-up annual price tag of American education? Enter Prodigy Finance, a U.K. lender that finances students based on their future earning potential. Think that can’t possibly work? Think again — Prodigy says its repayment rate is 99%.
Students, for their part, are eager to learn about fintech. At Georgetown, MIT, NYU and other top-tier institutions, courses related to financial innovation are filled, with fewer expressing career aspirations in once-hot areas like trading.
Tech startups are also playing a role in increasing accessibility to education with platforms like Bold.org creating and hosting exclusive scholarship opportunities for students.
India is adopting fintech quickly
You already know that China, the U.S., and the U.K. are fintech hotspots. But what about emerging markets with large, tech-savvy populations and unmet banking needs?
Enter India, widely regarded as the “next frontier” in fintech. According to a 2019 report on emerging technologies in banking, PWC ranked India second worldwide in fintech adoption, with a rate of 57.9%, driven by favorable government policies and funding from foreign venture capitalists.
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em
Traditional banks are eager to jump aboard the innovation train. Collaboration is at an all-time high, with staid players such as Lloyds, American Express and PNC partnering with hot innovators like Swave, GreenSky and OnDeck, respectively.
A 2017 PWC study found that 82% of banks, insurers and wealth managers surveyed plan to invest or collaborate with fintech firms over the next three-to-five years, with 88% fearing lost revenue should they not make the move to fintech. PWC says, “Businesses need to understand how this new world affects all of their touchpoints with the customer if they are to actively reinvent their own future and not be at the mercy of external events.”
In addition to improving operational efficiency and lowering costs, traditional banks believe that fintech will ultimately improve the customer experience for less money. And that means fintech will drive your financial decisions sooner than you ever thought possible.
Lisa Bigelow writes for Bold.org and is an award-winning freelance content creator who helps people learn more about personal finance, real estate and information security. Bigelow has contributed to Finance Buzz, Life and Money by Citi, MagnifyMoney, Well + Good, Smarter With Gartner, Popular Science and Cadre Insights.
In today’s era of embedded finance, everything is available as a service. Digital banking services company Q2 is at the leading edge of this trend, offering a range of solutions for banks’ retail clients, their commercial customers, and fintechs.
Many fintechs sell an “as-a-service” offering that focuses on a single aspect of banking. Q2, however, takes a more holistic approach. Here’s a look at some of the company’s embeddable offerings.
Q2’s consumer solutions include remote onboarding, PFM tools, remote deposit check capture, lending tools, marketing offers, behavioral biometrics, and authentication. The company helps banks leverage client data using machine learning technology that brings the necessary intelligence to effectively market new products to customers.
On the commercial side of things, Q2 can aid with account opening, loan origination, ERP integration, and scalable tools to suit a range of business sizes.
Q2 offers fintechs both lending-as-a-service and banking-as-a-service tools to integrate into their existing offerings. The former focuses on the application, approval process, and loan funding, while the latter offers bank accounts, debit cards and payment solutions without the need to partner directly with a traditional bank.
In addition to these embedded finance offerings, Q2 is venturing into the bank-fintech collaboration space. In a Best of Show winning demo at FinovateFall last month, Q2 launched its Partner Marketplace, an app store integrated within the company’s digital banking platform. Fintechs can upload their tools on the platform’s app store and banks can browse the offerings they’d like to integrate.
By relying on fintechs to bring the tech, the Partner Marketplace broadens Q2’s reach as a provider of embedded finance. The company offers banks access to a variety of fintech solutions that range beyond what Q2 itself is able to create or provide.
For fintechs, the marketplace lowers customer acquisition costs by making the startups’ solutions visible to Q2’s network of bank partners on the platform. It also helps with integration and deployment– after integrating with Q2’s digital banking platform, fintechs can offer their product to 400+ banks and credit unions, one million businesses, and 16+ million end users.
CU Solutions Group, a CUSO (credit union services organization) that provides technology, marketing, and advisory products and services to more than 3,400 credit unions across the U.S., has announced a new partnership with digital card services platform Ondot Systems. Via the agreement, CU Solutions Group is now a Card App reseller partner with Ondot and will offer its digital card management program to credit unions in its network.
“We are excited to be able to offer our credit unions a way to level the playing field with the digital-first card experiences being offered by tech giants like Apple, Google, and Samsung,” CU Solutions Group President and CEO Dave Adams explained. “Consumers have long said they want to bank with digitally-savvy credit unions, and this helps ensure those desires are met.”
Ondot’s Card App enables financial institutions to offer their customers a mobile app for managing, tracking, and controlling both credit and debit card usage. The solution makes it easy to monitor transactions and improve financial planning and decision-making for users, while enabling card issuers to benefit from fewer service calls and more customer engagement. Last month, Ondot announced that eleven card issuers – from American State Bank to Utah Community Credit Union – had selected Ondot’s Card App to provide “digital-first card experiences, similar to cards launched or announced by Apple, Google, and Samsung.”
Ondot VP Jim Cahill referenced the challenge that financial institutions face from platform players that are determined to have a role in the card space. “Cards are the most critical touchpoint between consumers and a financial institution, and currently non-banks are promising a better user experience than banks and credit unions,” Cahill said. “The 11 financial institutions that have selected Ondot’s Card App are examples of regional and community issuers that can compete on digital experiences and win.”
A Finovate alum since 2014, Ondot’s digital card services platform is used by more than 4,500 banks and credit unions to power cardholder engagement. The San Jose, California-based company won “Best Overall FinTech Mobile App” at the 2020 FinTech Breakthrough Award for its Card App this spring, and was also named to the Financial Times’ inaugural The Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies 2020 roster. Founded in 2011, Ondot counts Citi Ventures among its investors.
When it comes to payment and savings account services designed for minors, most large banks have stayed on the sidelines. In fact, much of the development has come from fintechs that layer kid-friendly tech on top of existing bank accounts.
This bank-fintech partnership is exactly what Chase is relying on for its new bank account for kids that it is launching this week in collaboration with Greenlight, a company that provides financial tools for children. The new offering, Chase First Banking, aims to help parents manage allowances, complete and check off chores, monitor spending, and help kids save towards a goal.
“Families are juggling so many more responsibilities today than ever before,” said JPMorgan Chase Head of Digital for Consumer and Community Banking Allison Beer. “To help, we’ve made it easy for parents to manage kids’ allowances, keep track of chores and teach important financial skills from within the Chase Mobile app.”
The accounts have three features that encourage kids to earn, spend, and save. The Earn function allows parents to set allowances and assign chores and allows the child to check off when each chore has been completed. The Spend tool provides kids with their own prepaid debit card that they can use to shop at stores that their parents have approved. Parents have ultimate control of the card and can lock or freeze it at any time. The Save function helps the child set aside money toward a goal and allows parents to move funds, as well.
Chase First Banking accounts, which are aimed at grade school children, are available for free to Chase retail deposit account customers. The bank already offers checking and savings accounts tailored to high school and college-aged users.
Founded in 2014, Greenlight competes with startups such as Oink and FamZoo. In addition to the Earn, Spend, and Save features offered with Chase, Greenlight’s B2C offering, which costs $5 per month, also offers a Give tool and will soon launch an Invest feature. The company rebranded earlier this year which helped it double its growth and set it on track to double again by the end of the year. Late last year Greenlight raised $215 million. The company is valued at $1.2 billion.
Finovate alums raised more than $1.2 billion in equity funding in the third quarter of 2020. This year’s sum tops the amount raised in Q3 of last year, making it one of the strongest third quarters for Finovate alums to date.
Fourteen alums announced funding over the summer months, a lower total than in previous years.
Q3 2016: More than $500 million raised by 30 alums
As was the case last year, Klarna ranks at the top of the third quarter investment hauls; indeed, this year’s $650 million is significantly higher than the $460 million the buy now pay later company received in Q3 2019. Other sizable investments of this year’s third quarter include the $100 million raised by PayActiv and the $80 million secured by Revolut.
With fourteen alums receiving funding in the quarter, it is no surprise that the top ten equity investments represent an overwhelming amount of the total capital raised by alums in Q3. This year, the top ten equity investments provided more than 96% of the quarter’s total.
Top Ten Equity Investments for Q3 2020
Klarna: $650 million
PayActiv: $100 million
Revolut: $80 million
Blend: $75 million
Splitit: $71.5 million
Taulia: $60 million
Scalable Capital: $58 million
Thought Machine: $42 million
Alloy: $40 million
Socure: $35 million
Here is our detailed alum funding report for Q3 2020.
July 2020: More than $240 million raised by four alums
If you are a Finovate alum that raised money in the third quarter of 2020, 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.
Revolut has added a new feature to its Revolut Junior app for youth aged seven to seventeen that will help parents teach the value of saving to their children. Goals enables both parents and child users to set and track financial savings objectives, and leverages the app’s other main features – Allowances and Tasks – to provide a more comprehensive financial wellness solution that works for kids and their parents.
Available to Revolut’s Premium and Metal customers, the new option can be used by parents to create financial savings goals and monitor their child’s progress as savings accrue. Kids can set their own savings goals as well, which can be supervised via the parent’s app. Goals can be funded directly by parents or by child users via their Allowances or by completing assigned tasks and chores.
“Goals, along with payments, allowances, and tasks, was one of our customers’ top requested and valued features,” Revolut Head of Premium Product Felix Jamestin said in a statement. “(We’re) excited to be building a product that is making saving fun and easy for both kids and parents.”
Revolut launched its Revolut Junior app earlier this year, and now boasts more than 200,000 children signed up for the program. Currently available in the EEA and the U.S., Revolut plans to offer the solution in Singapore, Japan, and Australia “in the near future.”
Alumni News Updates
LendingClub sheds P2P lending en route to bank rebirth: You would be forgiven for thinking the first rule of a company called “LendingClub” is to lend money. But LendingClub’s pivot away from its origins as an innovator in the P2P space 14 years ago continues as it announces that it will shut down its retail P2P platform as of the end of the year. The move comes more than a year after LendingClub shuttered its small business lending arm, and is widely understood to be a path-clearing effort en route to LendingClub incarnation as a bank.
Fenergo, IBM partner to bring AI to customer onboarding: A new integration between IBM Watson, the IBM Cloud, and Fenergo’s client lifestyle management technology will improve the efficiency of the onboarding process for financial institutions. IBM Customer Lifecycle Management with Fenergo combines Fenergo’s leadership in customer journey and digital transformation with IBM’s AI-enabled, AML and KYC solutions to provide better personalization, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance.
Eigen Technologies hires its first CFO: London-based NLP technology innovator Eigen Technologies has selected Spyros Karageorgis as its first Chief Financial Officer. Karageorgis comes to Eigen after tenures as CFO and COO at image recognition company Cortexica Vision Systems, and as CFO at SaaS e-commerce platform Venda. Karageorgis is one of two new members of Eigen’s C-suite: the company also announced new Chief Revenue Officer Tony Ehrens.
When we asked a dozen-odd fintech founders and CEOs what they thought was a bigger deal: AI or Bitcoin, during our FinovateFall 25 in 5 Q&A series, the number of respondents more excited by the former than the latter was sizable. But bitcoin fans made their preference known, suggesting that the brightest days for cryptocurrencies were definitely still ahead of us.
We suspect those bitcoin bulls were buoyed by this week’s news that digital payments company Square has invested $50 million in bitcoin. The approximately 4,709 bitcoins purchased by the San Francisco, California-based company represent a fraction of Square’s total assets – around one percent, as of the end of Q2 2020 – but it is not the first time the company has expressed interest in the cryptocurrency. Via its Cash App, Square has offered bitcoin trading since 2018, and a year later, the company launched Square Crypto, a unit dedicated to supporting open source work on bitcoin. But this week’s investment marks the firm’s first financial investment in BTC.
Square CFO Amrita Ahuja explained the investment in part by expressing optimism about bitcoin’s adoption worldwide, saying that it has “the potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future.” Ahuja added that Square anticipated participating in the adoption of bitcoin “in a disciplined way.”
It is likely worth noting that Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is a big supporter of bitcoin. In 2018, Dorsey said he believed bitcoin – or a similar cryptocurrency – would become the world’s single currency at some point in the not-too-distant future. CNBC’s coverage of Square’s investment noted that other tech-savvy fintechs, such as Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital use cryptocurrencies like bitcoin as a hedge.
As the Black Lives Matter-inspired social justice movement swept through the Western world this summer, corporations went into overdrive with efforts to show their support for ending racial discrimination. Many of these initiatives were outwardly directed toward potential customers, potential future employees, investors, the media, the public at large … But many of these attempts to show support were more inwardly directed, with companies encouraging their own workers to make their concerns with regard to social justice issues known – even, if not especially, in the workplace.
Unique among this trend was Coinbase, whose CEO Brian Armstrong not only took a different tack to politics in the workplace, but also put the company’s money behind its Keep Your Politics to Yourself policy. Armstrong made headlines weeks ago when he wrote in a blog post that, because Coinbase was a “mission-focused” company, “We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.” Moreover, he added that if employees disagreed with Coinbase’s policy of leaving politics at the front door, he was happy to offer them a relatively generous severance (including up to six months of pay depending on tenure) if they decided to leave.
“Life’s too short to work at a company that you are not excited about,” Armstrong wrote, requesting his employees decide whether to stay or go by the end of September. And with Armstrong’s Wednesday deadline come and gone, it appears that 60 workers, approximately 5% of the Coinbase’s workforce, have taken the deal.
The move has been controversial, with others in the technology community – including Jack Dorsey of Square and Twitter – suggesting that a healthier environment could be achieved if companies like Coinbase embraced the challenge of these kind of conversations. But, at this point, Armstrong seems at a minimum happy that the policy did not result in what would have easily been the worst possible outcome. “I’ve heard a concern from some of your that this clarification would disproportionately impact our under-represented minority population at Coinbase,” Armstrong wrote in a follow-up blog post. “It was reassuring to see that people from under-represented groups at Coinbase have not taken the exit package in numbers disproportionate to the overall population.”
It will be worth watching to see if other companies – in or out of tech – take a similar strategy.
Italy’s Nexi to Acquire Rival SIA in $5.4 Billion Deal
Italy has a new payments behemoth on the block courtesy of a big acquisition in its financial services industry. Nexi, the country’s biggest payments processor with more than $1.16 billion (€984 million) in revenue in 2019, has agreed to acquire banking and fintech solution provider SIA. The purchase price on the all-stock deal comes in at nearly $5.4 billion (€4.6 billion), and will create a new payments contender in the European market with a market capitalization estimated at $17.7 billion (€15 billion).
The acquisition will mark the second big deal in Europe’s payments space this year; Worldline agreed to acquire Ingenico Group earlier this year for $8.6 billion (€7.8 billion).
The combined company will be led by Nexi CEO Paulo Bertoluzzo, and will have two million merchants and 120 million cards. Analysts have suggested Nexi will be able to double its 2019 annual revenue to $2.13 billion (€1.8 billion) post acquisition, and enhance its business in Central and Eastern European markets in particular.
Curious about fintech in the EU’s third most populous member state? EY’s 2020 FinTech Waves report provides an in-depth overview of Italy’s fintech market, which grew from 16 fintech startups in 2011 to 345 fintech startups in 2019. The report notes that the country’s banking sector, though challenged by legacy systems in many instances, is focused on leveraging technology to improve efficiency and boost revenues. Five areas where Italian fintech startups have been especially active, based on EY’s research, are crowdfunding, machine learning/AI, smart payments and money transfers, lending, and insurtech.
“According to our analysis, the Italian FinTech ecosystem is heterogenous, small in size, but with high potential,” the report authors write. Read the full 100+ page report.
Nigerian Fintech Sees Opportunity in CEE SMEs
Lidya, which helps finance small businesses in its home country of Nigeria, has tuned its radar to opportunities far away: in Eastern Europe, to be specific. Earlier this week, the company announced that it had lent three million to small businesses based in the Czech Republic and Poland. Lidya went live in the Czech Republic in March and began offering its services in Poland one month later.
Lidya currently operates in 14 countries in Africa. The company’s expansion gives it the opportunity to lend not only to more small businesses, but to make larger loans, as well. Loans in Lidya’s native Nigeria average $1,500, and are available for as low as $150; Lidya co-founder Ercin Eksin said he anticipates that its operations in Europe could yield loan sizes 4x as big, given the GDP per capita difference between African markets and those in the CEE.
For more on Lidya and the technology scene in sub-Saharan Africa, check out this TechCrunch interview with Lidya CEO and co-founder Tunde Kehinde.
Here is our look at fintech around the world.
Sub-Saharan Africa
South African challenger bank Bettr readies for 2021 launch.
Ventureburn features PayCurve, an “ethical salary early access solution” provider based in South Africa.
Nigeria’s ImaliPay introduces new tailored financial products for gig economy workers.
Central and Eastern Europe
Four of Estonia’s biggest banks partner with AML startup Salv to launch pilot program AML Bridge.
Vienna, Austria-based Trality, which is developing a trading bot for cryptocurrencies, raises $1.95 million (£1.5 million) in new funding.
Estonia’s Sparq secures $517,800 (€440,000) in funding from Baltic International Bank.
Middle East and Northern Africa
Fintech Magazine features Commercial Bank of Dubai COO Stefan Kimmel on digitization in banking.
Dubai-based financial services platform Rise introduces its Xare app for expatriate workers to remit money back home.
Albawaba profiles five of the “biggest fintech startups” in the Middle East: PayTabs, Bayzat, Liwwa, Tribal Credit, Aqeed.
Central and Southern Asia
State Bank of India (SBI) launches the country’s first contactless payments wristwatch.
Uni, an Indian fintech startup that seeks to bring affordable financing options to the underserved, raises $18.5 million in seed funding.
A collaboration between Pakistan’s National Center for Cybersecurity and the National Clearing Company of Pakistan Limited has led to the creation of an AI-based cybersecurity system to help spot suspicious activity in financial transactions.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Financial Times looks at the role of Colombian fintechs in the overall landscape of banking in Latin America.
IBS Intelligence reviews the top five fintech funding rounds from September, highlighting Neon, dLocal, Marco Financial, Ideal, and Zoop.
In a world in which ride-sharing apps are getting into fintech, Costa Rican fintech Omni announced this week that it was launching a ride-sharing service.
Asia-Pacific
Bank of Thailand introduces the world’s first blockchain-based platform for government savings bonds.
Indonesian fintech BukuWarung, which provides financial services to small businesses, raises as much as $15 million in new funding.
MyMy, a digital payments startup based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, raises $2.8 million (RM 12 million) in the country’s largest fintech seed round to date.
Above-target growth and a pair of C-suite appointments characterize the first half of 2020 for risk management platform Feedzai. The company announced this morning that it has recorded H1 growth of 44% and negotiated “multiple multi-year enterprise contracts” during the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic and related market uncertainty. This, along with new leadership in the CFO and CMO roles, enabled the company to have what co-founder and CEO Nuno Sebastiao described “one of the best quarters ever” despite the pandemic.
“This simultaneously shows that our technology is mission-critical, and our business is crisis resilient,” Sebastiao continued. “I’m confident that our next phase of growth will benefit from market conditions in which digital transformation will play a larger than ever role, and from a set of strategic decisions we’ve made in the last 9 months.”
SafetyPay, Credorax, and PayU are among the companies that have teamed up with the San Francisco, California-based risk management platform this year. And joining Feedzai’s executive ranks are Amaury Dauge, former Euronext CFO, who will take over as the company’s new Chief Financial Officer, and Varun Kohli, who has been appointed Chief Marketing Officer.
Founded in 2008 and a Finovate alum for six years, Feedzai leverages artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning to analyze 30 million transactions valued at $5 billion every day. The company’s technology is used by 10 of the world’s largest 25 banks, and has been recognized as “Best in Class” by Aite Group.
Financial crime has taken on new significance during the global health crisis. With more individuals working remotely, and more companies accessing new channels and agents in search of financial assistance, there has been a significant rise in the number of ways criminals can take advantage of the uncertainty of the current environment. Feedzai, in its statement, highlighted mule accounts, phishing attacks, and employer fraud, among the top three types of financial crime that have increased during the pandemic.
“Fraudsters thrive on periods of confusion and chaos,” Aite Group Research Director Julie Convoy said, “and this pandemic represents fertile breeding ground.”
