Visa’s Minority Stake in Interswitch Creates Africa’s Latest Fintech Unicorn

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global, MasterCard, VISA

As Finovate goes increasingly global, so does our coverage of financial technology. Finovate Global is our weekly look at fintech innovation in developing economies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe.

FinovateMiddleEast returns to Dubai next week, November 20 and 21. Learn about our Day One and Day Two agendas, our demoing companies, and then visit our FinovateMiddleEast registration page and pick up your ticket today.

Central and Southern Asia

  • Yes Bank launches India’s largest banking developer platform.
  • Pakistan-based digital lending platform Finja closes $3 million convertible note funding round.
  • India’s National Stock Exchange launches an open trading API sandbox.

Latin America and the Caribbean

  • Mastercard partners with Mexico’s weex wallet to offer physical debit cards.
  • Colombian fintech Simetrik inks agreement to serve as payment gateway for Mercado Pago transactions.
  • Brazilian lender Banco Inter unveils new e-commerce app.

Asia-Pacific

  • MoneyGram and Wing partner to launch new mobile wallet in Cambodia.
  • Bank of International Settlements (BIS) and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) agree to locate the BIS Innovation Hub Centre in Singapore.
  • New Hong Kong license in hand, Tencent announces plans to build a blockchain-based digital bank.

Sub-Saharan Africa

  • Visa acquires minority stake in Nigerian digital payments company Interswitch Group, an investment that takes the African firm’s valuation to $1 billion.
  • South African P2P insurance provider Pineapple wins $1.5 million (R22.5 million) in taking home top prize in the Connecticut Innovations VentureClash 2019 competition.
  • Kenya institutes data protection law to support investment in its technology sector.

Central and Eastern Europe

  • Billon, a Polish-British blockchain company, joins initiative with Raiffeisen Bank International to digitize the euro.
  • Trusted identities innovator OneSpan partners with Poland’s Bank Millennium.
  • Visa teams up with Georgian challenger bank Space.

Middle East and Northern Africa

  • A new interest-free, credit service, Postpay, goes live in Dubai.
  • Executive Magazine looks at the fintech industry in Lebanon and the role of regulation in stimulating growth.
  • Tunisia announces the digitization of its national currency, the dinar, making the first country to convert a portion of its money supply to digital form.

Top image designed by Freepik

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Avaloq, DefenseStorm, Experian, TransferWise, VISA

On Finovate.com

  • New Experian Credit Solution Brings Enhanced Predictive Performance
  • Finovate Global: Visa’s Minority Stake in Interswitch Creates Africa’s Latest Fintech Unicorn

Around the web

  • Avaloq completes acquisition of Derivative Partners.
  • TransferWise to offer $150,000 in prize money to Singaporean bank customers to help them defray the cost of hidden fees charged by their banks.
  • DefenseStorm completes (SOC)2 Type II Audit examination for its security data platform.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

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Spreedly Raises $75 Million in Growth Funding

Spreedly Raises $75 Million in Growth Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Spreedly

Online and mobile payments enabler Spreedly has picked up a $75 million investment from Spectrum Equity. The growth funding will help the Durham, North Carolina-based company both accelerate product development and support its international expansion. Spreedly’s total funding now stands at just over $81 million.

“Our platform helps customers unlock their online and mobile revenue streams,” Spreedly CEO Justin Benson explained. “With this investment from Spectrum Equity, we are positioned to extend our leadership globally, in particular to leverage our momentum in Latin America. We’re excited to bring Spectrum’s experience working with other high growth FinTech and commerce platforms to bear as we execute on our growth plans.”

Spreedly provides a payments infrastructure that leverages a single API to enable businesses to grow their online and mobile revenues. The company’s PCI compliant vault securely stores card data for customers like Cabify and SeatGeek who use tokenized card data to optimize nearly $14 billion in transaction volume each year.

Managing Director at Spectrum Equity Adam Margolin praised Spreedly as “uniquely positioned” to help businesses meet the challenges of online and mobile payments. “With minimal prior funding, Spreedly has grown rapidly and today powers nearly one million transactions daily, 108% more than the year before, on behalf of its customers,” Margolin said.

Benson shared some additional thoughts on what the investment meant for the company at the Spreedly blog. And for those curious about Spreedly’s path from founding concept to contemporary success story, Benson’s reflections are especially worth reading. He concludes his remarks by saying:

“Ultimately, for you our customer, all this really means is that we’re more effectively resourced today to execute upon our ambitious product roadmap. We have more financial and intellectual capital at our disposal to build the best payment platform for merchants that we can. Thanks for your support and here’s to the next big chapter.”

Spreedly demonstrated its Networked Commerce solution at FinovateFall 2018. Networked Commerce enables businesses to connect payment systems to partners for superior scale, helps merchants process multiple-vendor transactions, and empowers consumers to make purchases through the same network – web, mobile, or voice – where they initially encounter a good or service.

This September, the company unveiled Spreedly 3DS2 to help execute 3DS2-compliant transactions across multi-gateway environments. The previous month, Spreedly – in partnership with Webio – won the 2019 Innovation Lab Award at the Payments Ed Forum. This spring, Spreedly was featured in WRAL Tech Wire’s look at local technology companies.

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nCino Brings AI to its Bank Operating System with nIQ

nCino Brings AI to its Bank Operating System with nIQ
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: nCino

Cloud banking leader nCino is enlisting AI in the fight to help financial institutions make better, more informed decisions faster. The Wilmington, North Carolina-based company announced this week the release of nCino IQ (nIQ), a new expansion to its Bank Operating System that works across front, middle, and back office operations, to automate and connect. This not only reduces expensive and error-vulnerable manual data entry, the technology also enables financial institutions to leverage automation and analytics to make data-driven decisions that enhance the customer journey.

“Since its inception, nCino has championed the idea of the agile enterprise, where financial institutions can reduce loan cycle and account opening times by digitizing and automating their processes via our single end-to-end platform,” Chief Product Officer Trisha Price said. “Now, with nIQ, we’re evolving that concept further to the Intelligent Enterprise, where AI is injected into every stage of production and stands at the center of every business line we support.”

nIQ has three main components: nIQ Data Recognition, which automates data extraction; nIQ Insights, which uses predictive analytics to measure and monitor organization-wide performance and risk; and nIQ Digital Assistant, which gives bankers the real-time data they need in order to build personalized experiences. The solution can be used in commercial, small business, and retail banking, as well as for customer engagement.

“With nIQ supercharging their operations,” Price added, “financial institutions can achieve a competitive advantage that allows them to increase savings and, most importantly, make more informed decisions to more effectively and efficiently serve their customers.”

The product news from nCino follows company’s $80 million funding raising – its largest to date – announced last month. The funding, which took nCino’s total capital to more than $213 million, was led by a group investors advised by T. Rowe Price, and featured the participation of existing investor Salesforce Ventures. Also last month, nCino announced a partnership with CNB Bank, a $3.2 billion asset FI based in Pennsylvania, and added David Rudow to its C-suite, appointing the software and technology executive as Chief Financial Officer.

nCino demonstrated its Bank Operating System at FinovateEurope 2017. Founded in 2012, and named to the Forbes Cloud 100, the company partners with more than 250 financial institutions around the world. Pierre Naudé is CEO.

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Lloyd’s Syndicate to Insure Ledger’s Vault

Lloyd’s Syndicate to Insure Ledger’s Vault
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Ledger

Crypto holders are exposed to a significant amount of risk. Increasingly sophisticated hackers can easily drain crypto account balances as they have in the past (does Mt. Gox ring any bells?).

Ledger, which helps to secure crypto account balances using its hardware wallet that stores users’ private cryptocurrency keys, made an announcement today that will help its users feel even more secure. The Paris-based company arranged a $150 million insurance policy covering digital assets secured using the Ledger Vault platform.

Ledger has been working for the past year with broker and risk advisor Marsh and crypto-asset insurance underwriter, Arch Insurance (a syndicate of Lloyd’s of London), to create the insurance policy. The policy insures crypto assets up to $150 million in the event of:

  • Third-party theft of the master seed and private keys following a physical breach of a hardware security module in a secure data center
  • Secure transmissions of the master seed fragments upon client onboarding
  • Ledger employee theft caused by collusion

“We consider insurance a crucial part of a comprehensive plan as digital assets gain a foothold in institutional portfolios. As a new class of assets, securing digital currencies has become a complex challenge for both institutions and insurers,” said Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier. “Through our efforts with Marsh and Arch to curate this comprehensive crime insurance policy, we are playing a pivotal role in the movement to secure and insure all critical digital assets.”

Since Ledger is not a digital asset custodian it is not required to carry insurance. However, the company wanted to take the extra step to insure clients’ digital assets. Ledger is also giving its clients the option to directly purchase their own primary coverage.

At FinovateEurope 2016 Ledger’s then-CEO (and now Executive Chairman) Eric Larchevêque debuted Ledger Blue, a touch-screen smart card for developers that offers a second display and thwarts malware attacks by delivering the correct payment address.

Ledger has sold more than 1.5 million Nano devices. The company’s institutional offering, the Nano Vault, has more than 40 clients located among APAC, MENA, and the Americas. Since it was founded in 2014, Ledger has raised $88 million.

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NLP Innovator Eigen Technologies Closes $37 Million Series B

NLP Innovator Eigen Technologies Closes $37 Million Series B
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Eigen Technologies, Funding

In a round co-led by Lakestar and Dawn Capital, natural language processing technology provider Eigen Technologies has raised $37 million (£29 million) in new capital. The investment, which also featured participation from Temasek and Goldman Sachs Growth Equity, takes the London-based company’s total funding to $55 million (£43 million).

Eigen plans to spend the funds to accelerate growth, including investments in technical and commercial talent. The company will also strengthen its transatlantic profile by basing additional senior management in New York.

“When we founded Eigen five years ago, I wanted to build a research-led transatlantic business,” Liu said in a statement. “Since the Series A, we have made great progress by massively scaling the company, expanding our client base, and integrating cutting-edge machine learning techniques into our NLP product.” Liu added that in this time Eigen has more than doubled the size of its workforce, grown recurring revenues by 6x, and expanded its customer base to now include more than 25% of the global systematically important banks (G-SIBs) in the world.

The funding announcement comes just a week after the release of Eigen 3.0. Eigen 3.0 extracts data 2x to 5x faster and features a new UI that accelerates the training process by 30%. The company noted that the platform will better enable it to serve both its traditional big bank customer base, as well as new customers among hedge funds and asset managers.

“Our customers asked us for three things in Eigen 3.0: a superuser workflow, improved performance for large teams working simultaneously, and easier document handling,” said Eigen Chief Product Officer Dr. Ashley Fidler, who joined the company in August. “Eigen 3.0 delivers all these improvements and more.”

Eigen Technologies demonstrated its platform at FinovateFall earlier this year. At the conference, Dr. Liu showed how Eigen’s flexible natural language processing solution automatically and accurately extracts data from a wide range of document types at scale. The technology can be integrated into customer workflows, and leverages machine learning algorithms to recognize patterns in text data.

Founded in 2014, Eigen’s clients include Goldman Sachs, Hiscox, Allen & Overy, and ING. The company won the Financial Times Intelligent Business Award for Repapering Technology in October and was named to the FinTech50 2019 in September. Eigen Technologies began the year earning recognition from CB Insights, which featured the company in its 2019 AI 100 roster of the Most Innovative Artificial Intelligence Startups.

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FinovateMiddleEast: Digitization, Disruption, and the Business of Banking

FinovateMiddleEast: Digitization, Disruption, and the Business of Banking
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateMiddleEast 2019

FinovateMiddleEast begins next week, November 20-21, in Dubai, UAE. A few days ago, we introduced some of the themes that will dominate the discussion on Day One of our conference. Today we’ll take a look at what we’ve got in store for attendees on Day Two.

In addition to our live fintech demos (check out our FinovateMiddleEast Sneak Peek series for more information on our demoing companies), Day Two will feature a variety of conversations on topics ranging from challenger banks and digital disruption to small business banking and the future of work in an increasingly automated world.

Challenger banks and digital disruptors: The future of banking?

  • With a wave of new digital banks entering the sector, how are these new challengers using digital and technology to improve the customer experience?
  • How, as an incumbent bank, can you take inspiration and reinvent your organization in the face of the threats challenger banks present?
  • What can we learn from exploring the different models of challenger bank that are emerging, their advantages, and how to harness elements of their model to tackle customer pain points better?

Digitization and the future of work

  • Exploring how your team looks today and how it will look in the future as more technologies are introduced into day-to-day-processes.
  • Discussing the future of work: what is HSBC doing to upskill its staff and future-proof its workforce to adapt to change?
  • Harnessing the balance between automation and a better-skilled workforce in order to improve the customer experience

Defining innovation: Case study of building processes and strategies for success

  • Defining expectations to set out measurement criteria for innovation.
  • Building channels and processes for the complete spectrum of innovation, from incremental to game-changing.
  • Discovering what motivates people to participate and what difficulties have to be overcome: learning what works and what does not.
  • Moving from idea to reality: how to implement brilliant ideas quickly.

Other topics to be featured on Day Two of FinovateMiddleEast include:

We will also host a Mentoring Power Panel with representatives from AMANIcircle, Startupbootcamp, Intesa Sanpaolo, Radicle, and Angivest Ventures.

Tickets to FinovateMiddleEast are still available. Visit our FinovateMiddleEast page to register and get more information on how to plan your visit.

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FinovateMiddleEast Sneak Peek: Okanii

FinovateMiddleEast Sneak Peek: Okanii
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: FinovateMiddleEast 2019, FinovateMiddleEast 2019 Sneak Peek, Okanii

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateMiddleEast on November 20 and 21, 2019 in Dubai. Register today and save your spot.

Okanii solves all of the problems of moving value around the world by creating the true internet of value.

Features

  • Cost – Okanii offers a 100x cost reduction that makes $0.01 micro-payments profitable
  • Security – Quantum proof hyper-tokenization, unbreakable, zero fraud
  • Scalability – easily supports all of the worlds’ transactions

Why it’s great
Okanii is the opposite of blockchain. Make payments/ transactions in any asset (181 currencies, stocks, bonds, commodities, real estate) across any use-case (P2P, B2C, B2B), instantly, securely, and at no cost.

Presenter

Grant Colhoun, CEO
Colhoun is a serial entrepreneur, payments expert, and a recovering investment banker.
LinkedIn

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FinovateMiddleEast Sneak Peek: Circlys

FinovateMiddleEast Sneak Peek: Circlys
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Circlys, FinovateMiddleEast 2019, FinovateMiddleEast 2019 Sneak Peek

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateMiddleEast on November 20 and 21, 2019 in Dubai. Register today and save your spot.

Circlys is a social saving plan based on circles model (rotating savings and credit association /committees) with trusted users that have been risk accessed.

Features

  • On-time payment
  • Flexible plans
  • Long term saving benefits
  • Access to liquidity that fits any financial plans

Why it’s great
Circulate with Circlys and according to plan.

Presenters

Hanan Alanazi, Operations manager

Khaled Hassoun, CEO
Hassoun has eight plus years of experience in tech start-ups in which he undertook multiple roles in managing business aspects.
LinkedIn



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FinovateMiddleEast Sneak Peek: fcase

FinovateMiddleEast Sneak Peek: fcase
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: fcase, FinovateMiddleEast 2019, FinovateMiddleEast 2019 Sneak Peek

A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateMiddleEast on November 20 and 21, 2019 in Dubai. Register today and save your spot.

Fraud prevention has many layers, each with its own view. However, fraudsters attack across all layers. With fcase holistic fraud investigations, you can now manage all fraud from one mission control.

Features

  • Centralized fraud prevention automation
  • Holistic manual fraud investigations
  • Fraud mission control

Why it’s great
Built from the ground up to massively manage your fraud operations from one mission control, fcase is one golden source of fraud data, delivering a reduction in fraud, customer friction and improves efficiency.

Presenters

Bulent Ozkan, VP
LinkedIn

Barry Bowen, Global Head of Sales
Bowen has 25 years of experience building, implementing, and marketing fraud prevention systems.
LinkedIn

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Finovate Alumni News

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Circlys, Coinbase, DriveWealth, Eigen Technologies, fcase, Finastra, Insuritas, Ledger, MasterCard, nCino, Okanii, On Deck Capital, Salt Edge, Spreedly

On Finovate.com

  • Spreedly Raises $75 Million in Growth Funding.
  • NLP Innovator Eigen Technologies Closes $37 Million Series B.
  • nCino Brings AI to its Bank Operating System with nIQ.
  • Lloyd’s Syndicate to Insure Ledger’s Vault.

Around the web

  • DriveWealth partners with Bamboo to give Nigerians real-time access to trade 3,500+ stocks listed on the U.S. stock market.
  • OnDeck builds liquidity with new $125 million securitization.
  • Salt Edge teams up with Exprivia to expand access to open banking solutions.
  • Insuritas partners with Security Federal Savings Bank to launch digital insurance agency platform.
  • Coinbase adds five new currencies to its Coinbase Card – XRP, BAT, REP, ZRX, and XLM – as it brings its card to ten new countries.
  • Mastercard launches Mastercard Accelerate, a worldwide initiative that gives fintechs access to the company’s suite of digital solutions to help differentiate their offerings.
  • Finastra inks partnership with UAE-based United Arab Bank, which will deploy the company’s Fusion Corporate Channels and Fusion Cash Management solutions.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

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SheerID Lands $64 Million for Segmented Identity Verification

SheerID Lands $64 Million for Segmented Identity Verification
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, SheerID

Customer segmentation identification company SheerID is receiving a boost for its platform today with a $64 million investment. The funds bring SheerID’s total funding to $96 million.

The round was led by CVC Growth, which will join SheerID’s board of directors. SheerID will use the funds to fortify its marketing, sales, and engineering efforts; launch in more geographies, and add more consumer segments relating to occupation, interests, causes, and affiliations.

SheerID was founded in 2011 to help companies gate exclusive offers to high-value customer segmentation groups. The segmentation, for example, prevents customers from using their student ID from the 1990s to score a discount on a laptop today. Other segmentations include military personnel, teachers, and seniors. “Our platform allows brands to create offers that honor and recognize an entire consumer tribe, increasing trust and word-of-mouth, and decreasing customer acquisition costs,” explained SheerID CEO Jake Weatherly.

The new funds come at a time of significant growth for SheerID. The company has seen 4.5x revenue growth over the past three years, ranked 243 in the Deloitte and Touche Fast 500, and landed 200 customers including Target, Amazon, Lowe’s, Comcast, Google, T-Mobile and Urban Outfitters.

“Our exponential growth is driven by major shifts in personalization, privacy, and performance marketing,” Wealtherly said. “Marketers are struggling to capture the attention of consumers who want more control over their personal data and less uninvited marketing from brands.”

Oregon-based SheerID demoed its verification platform at FinovateSpring 2019. The demo showed how the SheerID platform can help banks not only verify credentials for exclusive offers but can also fuel personalized marketing.

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