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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Financial Identity as a Service Innovator Juvo Teams Up with DOCOMO Digital

Financial Identity as a Service Innovator Juvo Teams Up with DOCOMO Digital
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Juvo

Juvo, a company that specializes in building financial identities for the underbanked, announced this week that it has forged a strategic partnership with global mobile commerce company DOCOMO Digital. The collaboration will marry Juvo’s financial-identity-as-a-service capabilities with DOCOMO Digital’s payments platform to give prepaid mobile users broader payment options when it comes to paying for digital services.

The partnership specifically helps address the challenge that many prepaid mobile users in emerging markets face when accessing digital services. Many users abandon purchases because of insufficient prepaid balances or lack of other payment options such as credit cards. Working together, Juvo and DOCOMO Digital will now offer micro-credits, in real-time, to allow the transactions to be completed without requiring the user to top-up their balance immediately.

Founder and CEO of Juvo Steve Polsky described the company’s mission as creating a “YES economy” that provides financial identities for the 68% of adults around the world who are unable to participate in the regular economy because they do not have a credit history. “By creating financial identities, Juvo empowers our partners with the data to say YES to more of their customers, opening up new revenue streams,” Polsky said.

The emerging markets are a particular focus for the initiative. In a statement, DOCOMO Digital CEO Jonathan Kriegel said the partnership will make it easier to provide financial services to the underbanked in these regions, where access to mobile and data services is on the rise. “Our partnership with Juvo aligns perfectly with our endeavor to make the mobile commerce experience seamless for consumers, while unlocking more value for mobile operators and digital merchants,” Kriegel said.

Juvo introduced its Financial Identity as a Service (FiDaaS) platform in September. The solution uses alternative, typically untapped data sources to establish creditworthiness and build financial identities for the underbanked that will help them access financial services. Juvo’s platform presently updates more than five billion data points daily for 200 million consumers on four continents.

Juvo demonstrated its Identity Scoring solution at FinovateFall 2016. At the conference, Polsky and VP of Product Jason Robinson showed how the technology leverages consumer internet “know-how,” data science and game mechanics to identify mobile users and encourage them to engage with their mobile operator. The cloud-based solution also offers intelligence and reporting tools to give mobile operators the analytics and insights they need to boost engagement.

Named to the Deloitte 2019 Technology Fast 500 earlier this month and honored by Frost & Sullivan for Strategic Excellence in Emerging Markets in July, Juvo was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company has raised $54 million in funding, and includes Samsung NEXT, Wing Venture Capital, and New Enterprise Associates among its investors.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: AdviceRobo, AlphaPoint, HackerOne, ID R&D, Juvo, Pendo Systems, SheerID, SplitIt, Strands, Tradeshift, TransferWise, Xero

On Finovate.com

  • Financial Identity as a Service Innovator Juvo Teams Up with DOCOMO Digital
  • SheerID Lands $64 Million for Segmented Identity Verification

Around the web

  • HackerOne awards $3,500 in bounties to a pair of researchers who discovered vulnerabilities on its own platform.
  • AlphaPoint adds support for margin trading to its platform.
  • Bank of Georgia goes live with a new smart personal financial management (PFM) solution, mBank, developed by Strands.
  • Installment payment solution Splitit announces a new partnership with chiliPAD sleep system maker, Chilli.
  • Tradeshift integrates with fraud protection specialist SiS-id to reduce payments fraud.
  • Xero launches Pay with TransferWise, a new domestic bill payment solution to help U.K. customers pay and manage bills.
  • Pendo Systems teams with WSN to help customers navigate digital transformation.

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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Financial Literacy Focused Best of Show Winner Zogo Unveils 11 New Partners

Financial Literacy Focused Best of Show Winner Zogo Unveils 11 New Partners
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Zogo Finance

How many partners does it take to help drive a national effort to boost youth financial literacy?

According to news from Finovate Best of Show winner Zogo, eleven is a great place to start.

Zogo announced late last month that it has teamed up with 11 community banks and credit unions across 12 different states to offer its teen financial literacy app to customers and members as a branded offering. Each institution will get an access code specific to their bank or credit union that they provide to the users of the app. Once the code is entered, the Zogo app becomes branded with the institution’s logo, helping create a more unique, partner-specific experience for the customer.

“With Zogo, we wanted to create a financial education experience our peers would actually use,” Zogo co-founder and CEO Bolun Li said. “We are excited to partner with community-focused financial institutions to bring this vision to life.”

The app works by guiding users through more than 300 educational micro-modules that help them meet the national standards for financial literacy. These include topics such as using credit, saving, and financial investing. Successfully completing a module earns the user points that can be redeemed in the form of gift cards. Zogo won Best of Show honors at FinovateFall in September for its live demo of the app, which leverages behavioral economic research developed at Duke University in North Carolina to help foster literacy in younger adults.

The firms that will be using the app as early as this year are:

  • CommunityWide FCU (Indiana)
  • Diamond CU (Pennsylvania)
  • First Bank & Trust (Louisiana)
  • Magnolia FCU (Mississippi)
  • MassMutual FCU (Massachusetts)
  • North Star Community CU (North Dakota)
  • Pen Air FCU (Florida)
  • Pyramid FCU (Arizona)
  • RelyOn CU (Texas)
  • Southern Chautauqua FCU (New York)
  • West Town Bank & Trust (Illinois, North Carolina)

Founded in 2018, Zogo has raised $295,000 in pre-seed funding, and is backed by Techstars and MetLife. In addition to its Finovate Best of Show honors, Zogo was the winner of the National Association of Credit Union Service Organizations (NACUSO) 7th Annual Next Big Idea contest earlier this year.

“Zogo is such a timely application, built to connect with young adults as they are beginning to learn the value of money,” NACUSO President and former USAA Bank CEO Jack Antonini said. “Delivered through ubiquitous mobile phone, this app can help credit unions capture new members, while teaching and reinforcing responsible financial habits.”

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Kofax Embraces AI and ML as Intelligent Automation Platform Evolves

Kofax Embraces AI and ML as Intelligent Automation Platform Evolves
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Kofax

Intelligent Automation software provider Kofax is the latest company to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance the capabilities of its solutions. The company announced this week that it is using AI and ML – along with natural language processing (NLP) – to add sentiment analysis and entity extraction to its intelligent automation offering. This improvement will make it easier for customers using Kofax’s technology to better understand and derive value from unstructured content.

“With new AI capabilities to process structured and unstructured data as well as understand intent and sentiment, Kofax is unrivalled in our ability to help enterprises glean greater insights from any type of content, react quicker to customer needs, and deliver a significantly better experience,” Kofax Chief Strategy Officer Chris Huff said.

Sentiment analysis enables organizations to discern the intent and emotion in the unstructured language of emails, legal documents, social media, and customer support queries. Entity extraction adds the ability to locate key elements in unstructured data and classify it into pre-defined categories. Kofax referred to it as the ability to easily locate “people, places, and things” from unstructured data.

The solution will enable organizations to manage the challenge of processing sizable amounts of unstructured and semi-structured data, alleviating the need for manual review of documents. With the ability to extract data in real-time, companies will see increases in productivity and efficiency while benefiting from deeper insights into customer behavior and preferences.

“Our investment in AI technologies to complement rules-based automation is paying off for our 25,000+ customers who’ve come to rely on our experience, dependability, and reliability for achieving true digital transformation at scale,” Huff added.

Founded in 1991 and acquired by Lexmark in 2015, Kofax launched its intelligent automation software platform and marketplace earlier this year. The technology automates end-to-end business operations at scale, and enables companies that have made a commitment to digital technology to further increase efficiency and productivity via automation.

“Kofax’s Intelligent Automation platform has driven excitement, and more energy around further adoption and expansion of the program,” Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group’s Yoshiaki Nishita said. “In addition, our employee mindset is changing as well. They’re no longer concerned automation will replace them. They see it as an extension of themselves. Ultimately it’s become a fundamental shift in their thinking.”

Kofax demonstrated the KYC Automation with RPA extension of its TotalAgility platform at FinovateSpring 2016. The technology uses existing API infrastructure – or its own Synthetic API capability if necessary – to help organizations meet KYC requirements and fight financial fraud.

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WeInvest Bolsters its WealthTech with the Launch of StratWealth

WeInvest Bolsters its WealthTech with the Launch of StratWealth
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: WeInvest

Wealth management solutions provider WeInvest launched a new product today that aims to help financial services companies discover new investment tactics.

The new offering, StratWealth, is a strategy marketplace with more than 100 algorithmically-generated, customized investment strategies for banks, brokers, and asset managers to choose from. With an initial investment minimum of $4,000, StratWealth also caters to retail clients. The platform, which hinges on a dashboard to visualize different products, offers access to portfolios comprised of 90,000 funds including customized stock and ETF baskets.

“Through our proprietary StratWealth platform, we are enabling financial institutions by providing them with a pool of expert investment ideas to choose from and hence accelerating the entire process of product development,” said CEO Bhaskar Prabhakara. “With this, we hope that the collective financial landscape globally will benefit – with better investment strategies and a wider variety of customized portfolios to choose from.”

The impetus for StratWealth was the rising demand for thematic investments which often deliver better long term performance than traditional investment strategies.

WeInvest’s partners for the tool include MSCI, Solactive, and Schroders. “Our indexes will provide them with the tools they need to assess and measure these structural trends and create customized thematic portfolios with a focus on a number of megatrends,” said Beng Eu Lim, Head of South East Asia Client Coverage at MSCI.

Founded in 2015 and with 38 employees, WeInvest offers its services in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Dubai. Prabhakara most recently presented AdviseWealth at FinovateMiddleEast 2018 in Dubai. WeInvest’s clients include Singapore’s Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC), Thailand’s Siam Commercial Bank and Dubai’s Mubasher Financial Services.

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