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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
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.”
This year, FinovateFall Digital brought representatives from some of technology’s biggest players to our all-digital stage. One of these individuals was Paul Rohan, Solutions Consultant with Google Cloud.
Rohan’s presentation on the future of banking showed a connection between the evolution of branch banking and the necessary changes banking will need to undergo in order to thrive in the 21st century. He also discussed the changing nature of competition in financial services brought on by trends like open banking.
Check out our interview with Rohan ahead of his FinovateFall Digital presentation last month.
On the current state of open banking and PSD2
This is a major change in mindset because you start to realize that you could have the very best banking product with superb features and brilliant pricing. But if it’s not a part of these connected digital experiences across multiple brands that customers are increasingly demanding, it could fail. And you could have a middle of the road, not the best financial product, with not the best prices and not the best features. But, boy, if it pops up with the right context, with the right personalization, and the right customization – in these connected digital experiences – it could be a tremendous success.
On open banking as 21st century branch banking
Why did unit banks fall away and then branch banking become the norm? Because it didn’t matter how superb the staff were in the one branch you had, or how wonderful the customer experience was once they came into the branch, or how fast the decision-making was because everyone in your bank was in that one location. But if your one branch was in the wrong town, or beside the wrong industries, as things changed, it didn’t matter how wonderful the user experience was … In essence, (branch banking) started to allow customers to begin their customer journey with the bank where they were living their lives or where they did business.
On the difference between pursuing an app strategy versus a platform strategy as a financial services provider.
The sociology is quite different. In a traditional enterprise that’s quite reliant on doing everything themselves, and there’s always a human desire to innovate and serve your customers, if you do something clever to serve your customers, there is a big round of applause: “This is exactly what we should be doing.”
Companies that are immersed in the connected experiences of digital ecosystems (are) all about trying to make your partners clever. Enable them to be clever because they’ll do the customization, they’ll do the personalization. So there’s a huge amount of thought that goes into taking friction and difficulty out of your partner’s ability to deal with you, and to extend your brand and your proposition into segments you don’t want to serve yourself directly or you couldn’t serve yourself directly.
Oh say, can you see… new digital banking technology landing on U.S. shores? Meniga can.
The U.K.-based company with Icelandic roots is expanding operations into the U.S. with a New York City headquarters location. The U.S. team, led by North America Heads of Sales, Wim Van Lerberghe and Paul Renken, will work remotely until the offices open next year.
Meniga is making the expansion to meet new, pandemic-induced demand for digital banking solutions. “In the current economic climate, it is crucial that Americans are getting the support they need from their banks, and help with the management of their personal finances. But if the bank fails to respond with anything but an efficient and enjoyable user experience, those customers will go elsewhere,” said Meniga CEO and Cofounder Georg Ludviksson. “We know that the unrivalled expertise and local market insight brought by Wim and Paul will allow us to fully export our technology to the U.S., granting American banking partners access to cutting-edge digital products and apps that their customers will love to use every day.”
While many know Meniga as a PFM solutions provider, the company has broadened its approach. The company now has leveraged data to offer a more personalized customer experience via predictive analytics and personalized engagement technologies including spending reports, automated budgeting, personalized nudges, savings challenges, and personalized cashback rewards.
Unique to Meniga is the company’s transaction-based carbon insights tool. Launched earlier this year, the carbon insights tool allows end users to track the carbon emissions that result from their spending.
Meniga has brought this technology to 165+ banks across 30+ countries, reaching more than 90 million end-users across the globe. The company has offices in London, Reykjavik, Stockholm, Warsaw, and, as of last year, Barcelona and Singapore.
“Since expanding into the Southeast Asian market just last year, we’ve also been instrumental in getting some of the area’s most popular banking apps to market. By opening up to the U.S., we’re going to be leading the charge here too,” said Renken. “We see banks as the bastions of the customer, designed to protect and manage assets, particularly during such a financially unstable climate. However, in order to remain competitive, this means they also need to move, and digitalize, with the times. With Meniga’s technology and expertise, banks all across The States will be able to achieve this; creating a customer experience that is intuitive and seamless as well as secure and reliable.”
Among Meniga’s clients are UniCredit, Santander, and UOB. Founded in 2009, the company has raised $43.9 million.
By many accounts, 2020 has been a difficult year full of events nobody could have anticipated or planned for.
As an industry, however, fintech has faired rather well. The shift to digital combined with an enhanced focus on the customer experience have benefitted banks, end users, and even fintechs themselves.
Fintech’s wealthtech subsector is no different. In fact, roboadvisory tools have evolved over the past decade with near-futuristic new features and offerings that are helping today’s consumers battle the challenges of 2020.
Here we’re taking a look at six ways roboadvisors have improved to (unknowingly) prepare for the toughest year yet.
AI has gotten smarter
Thanks to machine learning capabilities, the AI technology that powers investment strategies, forecasting, and reporting has improved significantly since roboadvisors hit their peak in 2015. Additionally, the amount of data has increased and computing power has been significantly upgraded, meaning that AI has never been smarter.
Recession forecasting
One of my favorite tools that launched this year is Personal Capital’sRecession Simulator. While many investment portfolio models offer a range of what-if scenarios, the Recession Simulator helps users illustrate the effects that historical recessions may have on their portfolio. Currently the Recession Simulator allows users to mimic returns of the DotCom crash of 2000 and the Financial Crisis of 2008.
Challenging the challengers
Last year ushered in the era of challenger banks, and roboadvisors were quick to jump on the opportunity. Three of the top roboadvisors by assets under management– Wealthfront, Betterment, and Personal Capital– all launched checking tools last year. These accounts help consumers keep all of their cash in a single, unified place and some offer tandem, high-yield savings accounts.
Automation
While many fintechs have promised to automate savings, investing, and billpay, many have been slow to deliver. Recently, however Wealthfront has made strides toward its Self-Driving Money concept. Last month the company unveiledAutopilot, the first product in its self-driving money suite. Autopilot takes clients’ savings and automatically monitors their balances and moves money around on their behalf to maximize their savings and returns.
Looking beyond retirement
While everyone hopes to save for retirement, there are plenty of other events to save for, too. Many roboadvisors have set up their platforms to enable users to save up for relatively smaller savings goals, such as a kitchen renovation, a child’s education, or a wedding.
Built for everyone
While many investment platforms cater to a variety of risk appetites, some have started to cater to new client bases, such as gig workers. Betterment, for example, launched a promotion with Steady, a gig economy workforce platform, to offer its users free financial advisory services for one year.
A new partnership will enable customer onboarding platform Instnt to leverage phone intelligence-based authentication to enable firms to “green light” more customers without having to resort to time-consuming, knowledge-based authentication protocols. The company announced that it has teamed up with Prove, whose technology is used by more than 1,000 businesses and 500 bank clients to provide frictionless, passive authentication to their customers.
“As mobile devices have become the de-facto second-factor authentication tool, Prove’s robust phone intelligence technology becomes a crucial component to enable frictionless digital acceptance and authentication of consumers on Instnt’s digital customer onboarding managed service,” Instnt CEO and founder Sunil Madhu explained. “Through this partnership, Instnt aims to bring digital inclusion and one-click federated sign-up to consumers across mobile apps and websites on the internet.”
Instnt enables retail financial institutions and e-commerce merchants to sign up more customers with less risk and fewer fraud losses. Using Instnt’s technology, companies follow a simple, three-step process to create their digital sign-up form and generate a single line of code. This code is added to their website or app to create the onboarding functionality. Instnt leverages AI-powered predictive analytics to validate the user and the device being used during the onboarding process, conducting device and cohort analysis, network analysis, and data validation and verification to provide high accuracy and “requirement levels of compliance.” Instnt goes so far as to indemnify users of its customer onboarding offering for up to $100 million in annual fraud losses.
Instnt’s partnership with Prove comes just weeks after the company announced that it was collaborating with ComplyAdvantage. The partnership will bring machine learning and natural language processing-powered financial crime detection capabilities to Instnt’s onboarding and verification platform. Instnt began the year raising $2.9 million in seed funding from Charge Ventures, Fantail Ventures, Third Prime, and Revel Partners.
Based in New York City, Instnt made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateFall. The company returns to Finovate’s all-digital stage in November for FinovateWest Digital. Find out more about our upcoming live and on-demand fintech event, November 23 through 25.
Digital banking solutions provider Alkamiacquired payments fraud prevention technology company ACH Alert this week.
Terms of the deal are undisclosed but the announcement comes just a few days after Alkami closed a $140 million round of funding.
Founded in 2008, ACH Alert offers two flagship solutions, PRO-TECH and PRO-CHEX, which provide a real time ACH approval process and a check positive pay service, respectively. Alkami will leverage ACH Alert’s solutions to provide a platform to enable banks to increase revenue, reduce complexity, and improve fraud prevention.
“ACH Alert provides FIs with a seamless solution that eliminates the flaws and inefficiencies in existing processes. These inefficient, paper-based processes not only undermine customer adoption and profitability, but also lead to a higher incidence of fraud,” said Alkami CEO Mike Hansen.
Among ACH Alert’s latest clients are Mountain America Credit Union and Citizens Union Bank. Last November, the Tennessee-based company signed a distribution agreement with Apiture, which will offer ACH Alert’s fraud detection services to its 450+ financial institution customers.
Headquartered in Dallas, Texas and founded in 2009, Alkami seeks to provide an end-to-end digital banking experience by offering tools for onboarding, user engagement, and account servicing.
“Together with ACH Alert, we expect to continue to create and deliver winning digital solutions to our clients and their consumer and business digital users,” Hansen added.
This is a guest post written by Shannon Flynn, managing editor at ReHack.com.
Voice recognition technology is experiencing something of a golden age right now. You can control virtually anything with your voice now, from your lights to your TV to your phone. As these technologies keep improving, their applications in banking grow more promising.
Voice tech encompasses a range of technologies that involve recognizing and responding to users’ voices. The potential for these services in the financial industry is immense. You could use your voice to log into your bank, make withdrawals or ask for financial advice.
The advantages of voice tech for banks are impressive, but there are still some roadblocks ahead. Here’s a closer look at three benefits and three drawbacks of the technology.
Benefits
Roughly 111.8 million Americans use voice assistants at least monthly. That’s more than a third of all internet users in the country. The American public is already comfortable with these technologies, so bringing them to banking is a natural next step.
Banks shouldn’t adopt voice tech just because people would use it. Thankfully, the technology has benefits beyond high adoption rates. Here are three of the most significant.
1. Streamlined Banking
Think of how easy voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant make routine tasks. You can check the weather, read your messages and hear the news without lifting a finger. Banks can bring those same benefits to their user experience by integrating voice technology into their apps.
Users could make a deposit or withdrawal by merely asking their phones to do so. Mobile banking allows people to perform routine actions in less than three minutes on average. Voice tech could shorten that to a few seconds since users wouldn’t have to press any buttons.
2. Increased Accessibility
Mobile apps made banking more accessible than ever, but the industry can still improve. You still need to have full function of your fingers to work these apps, which can be a barrier to some users. Voice controls can allow more people to experience the convenience of banking apps.
VOIP will also gain some next-gen improvements in the next few years due to 5G. For instance, more banks may achieve faster, unified communication with the help of voice-to-text functionality and faster networks. With the VoIP market gaining $35 billion by 2025, we will most likely see additional innovation for these communication systems.
Voice tech gives users more options, which makes banking services more appealing to consumers and businesses alike.
3. Biometric Security
Voice commands aren’t the only application of voice tech in banking. Banks could also use this technology to as another layer of biometric security. Since voice assistants can differentiate between voices, they can use your voice to verify your identity.
Unlike with passwords and PINs, you can’t steal biometrics. This security advantage is why fingerprints and facial recognition have surpassed passwords, and voice recognition adds another layer of security. With all of these options, banks could offer biometric multi-factor authentication.
Drawbacks
Despite these advantages, there are still some downsides to voice tech in banking. As much as these technologies have improved, they’re still relatively new and far from perfect. As such, there are a few risks that come with their adoption.
These disadvantages will likely fade as voice technologies improve. At the moment, though, they may dissuade some users from using voice services, making them less profitable for banks. Here are three of the most prominent of these drawbacks.
1. Privacy Concerns
Voice technology may increase security, but it also raises questions about privacy among some users. According to a Microsoft report, 41% of voice users are concerned about issues like passive listening. People may not use banks’ voice tech out of fear that someone may be listening.
Even if users don’t interact with voice recognition features, they may turn away because of them. People may worry that banking apps always listen to them, even while they’re not using voice features. If banks can’t assure people that their privacy is safe, these features could repel users.
2. Faulty Voice Recognition
There are still some lingering concerns about how accurate voice recognition technologies are. A 2017 study found it takes just two years for your voice to change enough that these systems won’t recognize it. Recognition errors could lock people out of their bank accounts, causing unneeded complications.
In fact, foreign language barriers don’t just exist between humans. When you’re dealing with finances, any translations errors could be costly. If your system misunderstands your voice commands, it could make unwanted transfers or deposits. Voice recognition has to be almost perfect for banks to use it extensively.
3. Regulatory Complications
Any financial institution has to comply with strict regulations, and voice tech could be an issue here. Right now, there aren’t any standards for how banks can or should use this technology. The legal ambiguity could cause banks to run into some complications while using these services.
Finding out how voice tech fits into existing regulations could be a headache. Working through these gray areas could be more trouble than it’s worth to many institutions.
Voice Tech Is Promising but Imperfect
The efficiency and security of voice technology is enticing for financial institutions. Still, many banks may avoid the technology right now due to its current drawbacks. More firms will embrace it as the technology improves, but that could take a few years.
Voice tech today is far from perfect, but it does have potential. With further advancement, it could revolutionize digital banking.
ShannonFlynn is a technology and culture writer with two plus years of experience writing about consumer trends and tech news.
The big changes we are seeing in the realm of customer engagement have to do with inevitable trends becoming immediate demands. Whether the need is reaching customers over the digital channel for the first time or automating and streamlining processes to improve efficiency and maximize productivity, the global health pandemic has been the midwife – if not the mother – of the fast-changing technology landscape we live in today.
“Meeting customers where they are” has been a rallying cry for customer engagement specialists for years. And as the number of channels grows, more companies are offering new solutions that provide easy-to-use, secure, and compliant ways for businesses to more comprehensively engage with their customers and clients.
One company in this space is Revation Systems. A Minneapolis, Minnesota-based firm, founded in 2003, Revation recently partnered with fintech and regtech solution provider Computer Services Inc. (CSI), who will offer Revation’s LinkLive Banking platform to community banks. LinkLive Banking provides regional and community banks, as well as credit unions, with key capabilities such as digital messaging, AI-powered chatbots, voice and video communications, and the ability to move seamlessly between physical and digital channels.
“Given the remote work demands of COVID-19, LinkLive Banking empowers our banks to provide a world-class customer experience while taking precautions to protect the health and safety of their employees and customers,” CSI Group President of Enterprise Banking Giovanni Mastronardi said. “Together with Revation Systems, we’re providing the innovative technology necessary to increase customer satisfaction and reduce friction in the customer journey.”
In addition to its messaging, chatbot, voice, and video functionalities, the platform also provides secure desktop sharing and encrypted email. LinkLive Banking leverages AI to power service chatbots with keyword recognition and the ability provide fast, automated responses to common banking queries. The video banking capabilities, announced in August, are the most recent addition to the platform.
“We are extremely excited about utilizing LinkLive’s video banking features as we seek to improve our member experience,” United Educators Credit Union CTO Dennis Griesgraber said. He noted that the new feature integrated not only with the LinkLive contact center the credit union used, but also with the institution’s digital banking platform. John Eyre, Assistant VP of Information Technology at TAPCO Credit Union underscored the technology’s value for enhancing communications among employees, as well. “LinkLive’s video banking feature will not only enhance the interactions between our members and representatives, but will also help improve communication among our own staff internally,” Eyre said.
Active in the healthcare vertical as well as financial services, Revation has more than 400 customers using its LinkLive Banking platform, representing more than 100 million digital banking customers. Adding the video banking component, Revation notes, requires only a few configuration changes to the LinkLive platform, and does not require the customer to download an app or manage a separate communications account to participate in video banking.
Perry Price, Revation CEO, echoed the now-common wisdom that the pandemic has accelerated pre-existing, if not inevitable technology trends. He noted that while adoption of video banking before COVID-19 had been a “long-term goal,” the onset of the crisis had turned those goals into “urgent” priorities.
Featured in CIOReview’s Most Promising FinTech Solution Providers for 2020 this spring, Revation is scheduled to make its Finovate debut next month at FinovateWest Digital. To learn more about our upcoming, all-digital event and how to watch Revation’s technology in action, visit our FinovateWest Digital hub.
Venmo is one step closer to being a full-service bank competitor with today’s news. The PayPal-owned company is rolling out a credit card offering that is available to select customers starting this week.
The Visa-branded card, which is issued by Synchrony Bank, offers many features one would expect to pair with a mobile-first account, such as an app-based virtual card for online shopping, tools to track spending and rewards, and the ability to pay off the card balance from within the app. The cards, which pander to a mostly millennial user base, also offer five unique color designs.
One feature specific to Venmo’s new credit card is the use of a QR code printed on the card. Similar to Venmo accounts, users can scan their friends’ unique QR code to send or request money. This QR code technology, along with an embedded RFID chip that enables users to tap to pay, provides an (almost) contactless payments.
Another unique feature is the way the Venmo card handles rewards. Instead of offering a pre-determined rewards category or even allowing users to choose which category they’d like to receive rewards for, Venmo rewards consumers based on the categories in which they actually spend.
To do this, the company separates customers’ spending into categories such as dining, travel, bills, health and beauty, grocery, gas, transportation, and entertainment. Venmo rewards users 3% cash back for purchases made in the category in which they spend the most, 2% cash back for purchases in the second-highest spending category, and 1% cash back on everything else. The rewards cash is automatically transferred to the user’s Venmo account at the end of each period.
The card adds to Venmo’s existing offerings, including a robust P2P payments ecosystem and its Mastercard-branded debit card launched in 2018. Venmo plans to market the new credit card to its 60 million active users, a built-in audience comprised of its target market.
