This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.
Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Tinkhires Stripe’s former head of EMEA banking as its new Country Manager for the U.K. and Ireland.
DemystDatamakesEquifax data assets available on its marketplace in expansion of current partnership.
Fenergoearns recognition from Chartis Research in its RiskTech 100 2020 report as a category leader for Client Lifestyle Management and Know Your Customer.
RISQ Intelligent Software International and Compliywin finalist spots in the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Global FinTech Hackcelerator.
Sensibillnamed a “Company to Watch” in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 Awards.
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.
Analytics and decision management technology company FICOannounced two new products this week as it snapped up security access provider EZMCOM. Transactional details of the acquisition were undisclosed.
The acquisition has facilitated the launch of FICO Identity Proofing, digital onboarding technology; and FICO User Authentication, a suite of multi-factor, biometric, and behavioral authentication capabilities.
EZMCOM was founded in 2006. The company’s identity proofing, biometric, behavioral and risk-based authentication technology is used by tier-1 banks across the globe, ultimately serving 60 million customers.
“As our clients expand their digital offerings, they are requesting more sophisticated identity proofing and authentication capabilities to complement our fraud, compliance, customer lifecycle, and customer engagement applications,” said FICO CTO Claus Moldt. “Behavioral and biometric authentication are becoming the gold standard to prevent identity spoofing and improve customer protection, while reducing friction. By adding this technology to our portfolio, we will provide our clients with a seamless approach to authentication and customer onboarding – across digital channels, mobile devices, servers and workstations.”
Founded in 1956 as Fair Isaac Corporation, FICO presented “Rapidly Deliver Contextually-Powered Stream Processing” at FinDEVr New York 2016.
Last week, Q2 completed its sixth acquisition since its 2004 launch. The digital banking services company closed the books on a $510 million deal to purchase PrecisionLender, a sales enablement platform.
“We are thrilled with the outstanding talent, culture and industry expertise the PrecisionLender team brings to the Q2 family,” said Q2 CEO Matt Flake. “We are also excited about the potential we have to help our customers improve margins, profitability and the quality of their relationship with their key accounts using our combined data insights and commercial banking solutions.”
Q2 will leverage PrecisionLender to further its corporate banking expertise and solidify its leadership in digital banking. Going forward, PrecisionLender will operate as Precision Lender, a Q2 company.
Q2 debuted Q2 Biller Direct at FinovateSpring 2018 and the company’s CIO Lou Senko made a cameo appearance in ALTR’s demo at FinovateFall earlier this year.
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateMiddleEast on November 20 and 21, 2019 in Dubai. Register today and save your spot.
Hakbah is an Islamic fintech startup with a mission to increase financial inclusion via its Smart Cooperative Saving Platform. The focus is on digitizing traditional financial habits (like Jamiya).
Features
Provide a smart and easy digital solution in a smart savings platform
Increase financial inclusion via savings products
Move the informal financial channel into a financial system
Why it’s great Hakbah is capturing and digitizing the consumer’s traditional financial habits embedded within the financial system. The solution also offers savings products for underbanked individuals.
Presenter
Naif AbuSaida, Founder and CEO AbuSaida has seven years of experience in banking, cash management, money transfers, operational risk, and financial risk. He has 13 years of experience in marketing and communications and corporate strategy. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateMiddleEast on November 20 and 21, 2019 in Dubai. Register today and save your spot.
FinFirst is an end-to-end financial services aggregator that pairs businesses and consumers with banks and NBFIs and offers fully automated onboarding, credit assessment, and fulfillment.
Features
Serves businesses and consumers as an AI-driven aggregator of financial services
Supports financial inclusion and serving the underbanked
Offers alternative lending and alternative investing
Why it’s great FinFirst is a one-stop shop for financial services.
Presenters
Omar Mehanna, Chief Executive Officer – UAE Mehanna is an award-winning, commercially-minded business leader with over 25 years of banking and investment experience with leading international financial institutions and early stage/growth businesses. LinkedIn
Abbas Hijazi, Chief Executive Officer Hijazi has originated and executed landmark transactions in M&A and corporate finance. He has expertise in fintech, private equity, venture capital, real estate, and M&A. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateMiddleEast on November 20 and 21, 2019 in Dubai. Register today and save your spot.
JuicyScore provides next generation device authentication and data analytics. The company makes the internet safer via improving end-user security and alternative data engineering without using personal or sensitive data.
Features
Robust device authentication technology stack and wide output data vector
End-user security that does not utilize personal data
Worldwide accessibility based on open API principles
Why it’s great Every online trace leads to valuable data which is safe, predictive, and extremely powerful for fraud prevention, risk management, and financial inclusion purposes.
Presenters
Alexander Akhlomov, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder Akhlomov has extensive experience in product development and information services for financial institutions, together with expertise in risk management and portfolio analytics. LinkedIn
Andrew Reddikh, Chief Technology Officer Reddikh has extensive engineering experience in multiple areas such as travel, banking, and finance. He has worked with many backend and frontend tools including GoLang, Java, PHP, NodeJS, JavaScript, and ReactJS. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateMiddleEast on November 20 and 21, 2019 in Dubai. Register today and save your spot.
DAPI is an API that connects applications to banks.
Features
Simple integration for MENA-wide bank connectivity
Access to end users financial information in their bank accounts
Payment initiation and automation
Why it’s great A one-stop shop for fintech infrastructure in MENA, DAPI is the first unified banking API in the region.
Presenter
Mohammed Aziz, Co-Founder and CEO Aziz is an innovator, tech entrepreneur and fintech expert who built successful tech startups prior to cofounding DAPI, which he is building with the vision to disrupt the fintech landscape in MENA. LinkedinA
A little over a year ago, U.K. challenger bank Starling and automated online insurance advisory Anorak Technologiesforged a partnership to bring personalized life insurance options to bank customers. Now, the two companies are back in the fintech headlines with a new offering. Starling announced that it will offer income protection insurance for the self-employed courtesy of its collaboration with Anorak.
“If you’re a freelancer, contractor, or sole trader, you may need income protection insurance to provide peace of mind if something happens that means you can’t work,” Team Starling noted on the company blog this morning. “Everyone has bills to pay, sometimes for a whole family, and if something goes wrong, an insurance provider could cover your outgoing when you don’t have a regular income.”
In order to access the insurance offering, Starling app users simply tap on the Anorak link in the Insurance category of the app. Anorak will guide the user through a quick, free, online assessment during which the user’s Starling Bank transactions are analyzed and the user is given advice on how much income protection and life insurance would be advisable. The technology also lets users know how long they should be covered and why. Starling Bank notes that the intention is to provide income protection and insurance coverage that is not just the most affordable, but is also the best choice for the consumer, as well.
“Bancassurance 3.0 is a reality,” Anorak wrote on its LinkedIn page today. “Technology redefines the way people access life insurance. With Starling Bank we help sole traders easily protect their biggest asset, themselves.”
Anorak demonstrated its Smart Life Insurance solution at FinovateSpring 2018. Embedded into the bank’s mobile app and leveraging bank data to provide quick insurance assessments, Anorak’s technology is designed to make it easy for partners ranging from challenger banks to online retailers to investment platforms to offer their customers personalized insurance options.
Named to FinTech Global’s list of the top 100 insurtech companies, Anorak teamed up with protection and mortgage advice company Albany Park over the summer. The partnership brought telephony protection advice to Anorak’s online platform. Anorak began the year with news that it was joining the FinTech Innovation Lab London’s 2019 cohort – along with fellow Finovate alums Exate Technology and FutureFlow.
Founded in 2017 and headquartered in London, U.K., Anorak has raised $11.5 million (£9 million) in funding and includes French insurtech startup studio Kamet among its investors. David Vanek is co-founder and CEO.
P2P lending company and newly initiated challenger bank Zopa is taking a first step on its banking journey with the rollout of a new savings product. The U.K.-based company is launching fixed-term savings accounts that will be available for terms of one month and pay 4% interest.
This news comes after the company received partial authorization from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) last December and launched bank products with its staff as beta testers. This partial authorization is the reason behind the limited nature of the savings accounts. Zopa is currently operating in a period called AWR (authorization with restrictions), meaning the company has met all of the FCA’s conditions and is allowed to begin testing bank products.
Under those restrictions, Zopa cannot accept more than $64,000 (£50,000) in customer deposits, so it is only inviting 200 current investors to test out the new savings product. There is no word yet on when the restrictions will be lifted.
“Inviting existing customers to test our Fixed Term Saver is a major milestone in our bank journey,” said Zopa CPO Didier Baclin. “It is a great opportunity to ensure that the product meets their expectations before the full launch next year so that we deliver a great product that customers can trust.”
Zopa’s choice to start its bank product offerings with a high-interest savings account doesn’t come as a surprise. As we covered last month, multiple fintechs are offering high interest bearing accounts in order to attract customer deposits away from their primary, traditional bank.
Last year, Zopa closed a $77 million (£60 million) investment round that contributed to the company’s total of $297 million in funding it’s received since launching in 2005. Zopa is seeking to raise additional funding this year, stating that the fresh capital will offer the boost it needs to have the FCA’s restrictions removed.
Zopa’s former CEO Doug Dolton debuted the P2P lending platform at FinovateSpring 2008 at Finovate’s very first show in the Bay Area. The company was founded in 2005, pioneering peer-to-peer lending in the U.K., and has since amassed 400,000 customers and facilitated $5 billion (£4 billion) on its platform.
Revolutunveils metal cards in silver and space grey.
Chief Administrative Officer of the Royal Bank of Scotland interviewsBioCatch CEO.
ITSectorinaugurates 6th Software Development Center that will focus on the financial sector, AI, and 5G.
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.
How serious is IBM about making an impact in fintech? The company, which demonstrated its wealth management technology at FinovateSpring in 2016, launched its first financial services-ready public cloud today and revealed Bank of America as its initial partner. The two companies have been working together on the project for more than a year, and the bank said it plans to host key applications and workloads on the platform to better serve its 66 million banking customers. According to reporting in The Wall Street Journal, Bank of America currently has 80% of its IT workload on a private cloud and has been planning a move to a public cloud since 2012.
The IBM financial services public cloud will help banks and other financial services companies more effectively engage with qualified technology vendors. In its statement, IBM highlighted the fact that the cloud will also help financial services firms meet regulatory, security, and resiliency requirements for working with fintechs. The company added that the solution is the only industry-specific, public cloud platform to provide preventative and compensatory controls for financial services regulatory workloads, multi-architecture support, and proactive and automated security.
Bank of America helped IBM develop the platform’s control requirements which, for example, will help both ISVs and SaaS providers of all sizes focus on their businesses rather than security, infrastructure, and compliance issues once platform controls are established.
Calling the pact, “one of the most important collaborations in the financial services industry cloud space,” Bank of America Chief Operations and Technology Officer Cathy Bessant explained that the bank expects to give as much as it gets from the relationship. “This industry-first platform will allow Bank of America to use the public cloud, putting data security, resiliency, privacy, and customer information safety needs at the forefront of decision-making,” Bessant said. “By setting a standard that addresses the concern of hosting highly-confidential information, we aim to drive the public cloud to a safety level that is unmatched.”
The IBM financial services-ready cloud will run on IBM’s public cloud. IBM’s public cloud leverages open source technologies, including a managed Red Hat OpenShift environment, to support more than 1,000 enterprise clients. The platform leverages more than 16,000 production clusters, provides industry-leading compliance for data encryption, and relies on integration with IBM Security to deliver threat monitoring and management from a centralized security dashboard.
“The financial services-ready public cloud represents an ongoing focus from Bank of America, IBM, and Promontory to help develop a technology ecosystem where regulations can be addressed,” IBM SVP for Global Industries, Clients, Platforms & Blockchain Bridget van Kralingen said. “Together we plan to help our customers address their ongoing compliance requirements, coupled with highly scalable, standardized capabilities that will be built to help serve today’s modern financial services industry.” Promontory is an IBM business unit focused on financial services regulatory compliance consulting that was brought in to ensure an environment that was compliant with relevant regulations.
In addition to its FinovateSpring appearance in 2016, IBM also participated in our developers conference, FinDEVrNewYork 2017. The presentation by CTO Tom Eck discussed how thousands of developers were successfully building and monetizing “cognitive-enabled” financial services apps quickly and at scale.
Founded in 1911, IBM is based in Armonk, New York. The company is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker IBM, and has a market capitalization of $122 billion.
Social trading and investment platform eToro is making moves this month. In addition to launchingCopyTrader in the U.S. last week, the company announced today it has acquired Delta, an app for tracking crypto portfolios.
Delta’s app helps its 1.5 million users track and analyze their crypto portfolios, offering information on more than 6,000 crypto assets traded on more than 180 exchanges.
The deal will close for an undisclosed amount, though TechCrunch rumors the purchase price is around $5 million. Delta is eToro’s second acquisition this year (and overall) after buying blockchain company Firmo in March.
“When we started eToro our goal was to disrupt the world of trading. We wanted to change the way people think about trading and investing, ultimately reducing dependency on traditional financial institutions and make trading and investing more transparent and fun,” said eToro Cofounder and CEO Yoni Assia. “This mission remains our guiding light and we will continue to evolve both organically and by acquisition in order to bring our customers the very best experience.”
eToro’s purchase of Delta shows the company’s increased commitment to the crypto space. Last year the company launched its subsidiary eToroX, a regulated digital asset exchange and crypto wallet to support tokenized asset trading. Doron Rosenblum, Managing Director of eToroX, said that Delta is “a great addition” to eToro’s crypto offering. Rosenblum also mentioned that he plans to integrate Delta into the eToroX platform to allow customers to trade from within the app.
Logistically, the Delta team will become part of eToroX, reporting to Rosenblum, but will continue working from its headquarters in Belgium.
And if you haven’t seen eToro’s video featuring Alec Baldwin pitching the U.S. launch of CopyTrader, here you go:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBBuFuHAxoY
eToro most recently showcasedCopyFunds for Partners at FinovateEurope 2017. Originally known for being a social trading platform, the company began pioneering bitcoin trading in 2013 via CFDs and in 2017 allowed clients to trade and invest in Ethereum, XRP, Litecoin, and other cryptocurrencies. eToro has raised $223 million since it was founded in 2007.
