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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.
Travel upgrades startup Upgrade Pack announced its expansion into Asia Pacific with the launch of a Singapore office and the appointment of a new regional COO.
Toby Berger (pictured) will serve as Upgrade Pack’s new APAC COO. Berger, who has spent the last decade working in the Asia Pacific region, has served in executive roles in Google and Expedia. He will be responsible for overseeing the rollout of customer rewards and loyalty across the Asia Pacific region.
“Singapore represents the perfect base for our first phase of international expansion,” said Upgrade Pack CEO Craig Unsworth. The city-state has firmly established itself as a global technology and finance leader, and with many of our potential banking and corporate clients here, this new office enables us to demonstrate the value Upgrade Pack delivers as a differentiated customer loyalty and employee benefit offering.”
Upgrade Pack offers a way for banks, credit card companies, or employers to enhance and build loyalty among their clients and employees. The company offers access to discounted upgrades on flight and hotel upgrades that are not available to the general public.
To accomplish this, Upgrade Pack is directly integrated with airlines and hotels to offer exclusive access to purchase unbooked upgrade inventory a discount. During the company’s appearance at FinovateEurope earlier this year, Unsworth demonstrated the process of upgrading to a first class ticket on an upcoming flight for a 30% discount.
Upgrade Pack is available in the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Switzerland. The company is headquartered in London and has raised $3.61 million (£2.9 million).
Upgrade Pack will demo its technology at FinovateAsia in Singapore next week. If you’re in the area, be sure to stop by the Marina Mandarin on October 14 and 15 and check it out. Tickets are still available.
Wealthtech company Hidden Levers announced this week it has reached $500 billion in assets on its platform, just in time for its 10th birthday.
“On our tenth anniversary, I’ve never been more proud of our company,” said Raj Udeshi, Founder and chief evangelist. He went on to explain that the company’s success is partly attributed to its focus on solving wealth management pain points. “This dynamic led to breakthroughs with portfolio stress testing and wealth management business intelligence,” Udeshi said, adding, “We call our culture free solo fintech.”
HiddenLevers originally launched in 2010, offering stress testing technology for investment portfolios. Udeshi debuted the technology at FinovateFall 2010 in New York. The company now offers three solutions, investment proposal generation for advisors, business intelligence and risk monitoring for advisory firms, and an asset manager platform for roboadvisory wholesalers.
Last month, Axxcess Wealth Management announced it selected Hidden Levers to power its portfolio management solution for financial advisors. And earlier this year the company teamed up with First Rate to help advisors better manage portfolio risk. HiddenLevers is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia and is self-funded.
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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.
Malta’s newest challenger bank Laskaris Finance, which aims to serve high-net-worth individuals and corporate clients, has chosen Temenos to be its cloud core banking provider, reports Ruby Hinchliffe of Fintech Futures, Finovate’s sister publication.
Laskaris is currently applying for a banking license from the Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA) and the European Central Bank (ECB), which will allow it to work as a credit institution in and from Malta.
Temenos says its T24 Transact core cloud product will enable the Maltese challenger to launch in the “shortest” time frames, keep to regulatory standards, and screen transactions to tackle financial crime with Temenos’ Financial Crime Mitigation (FCM).
“Laskaris accepts the responsibility of challenging the status quo in banking – naturally within the parameters set by the local and EU regulators – simply because clients deserve to be provided with a superior array of banking services,” said Laskaris founder and CEO Roderick Psaila.
The neobank wants to be a ‘one-stop-shop’ for high-earning individuals and corporate businesses by fusing personal and commercial banking needs together.
Malta, despite being just over 78,000 acres, was ranked in the top 20 financial service jurisdictions by the World Economic Forum’s 2017 to 2018 Global Competitiveness report.
Temenos’ Europe MD Steen Jensen said he’s “excited to see the growing list of challenger banks in Europe.” Laskaris is the tenth client for Temenos in Malta, with other customers including e-commerce payments solution Truevo and smart acquiring solution Credorax. Jensen called this “a testimony to our local expertise and growing footprint on the island.”
Founded in 1993, Temenos debuted its Connect Mobile Banking application at FinovateEurope 2015 in London. With 3,000+ bank clients in 150 countries, Temenos reaches more than 500 million end customers. In August, Temenos acquired Kony for $559 million. The company has a market capitalization of $11.8 billion.
A few days ago, we featured the Power Panels that will take place in Singapore at FinovateAsia next week. Today, we highlight the fintech analysts, executives, and entrepreneurs who will share their insights and experience at this year’s event.
FinovateAsia is just days away! To join us, visit our registration page today and save your seat as Finovate returns to Singapore! For more details, check out our full ,two-day conference agenda (including information about our additional Summit Day on October 16.)
FinovateAsia is right around the corner! For more information about our upcoming conference in Singapore, check out our FinovateAsia page for details on how to pick up your ticket, plan your visit, and more!
Enterprise blockchain solution company Ripple teamed up with Finastra this week. The two are collaborating to enable Finastra clients to transact with RippleNet partners and make international money transfers.
RippleNet is Ripple’s global payment network that works across 40+ currencies and consists of more than 200 financial institutions. Because RippleNet leverages the blockchain, users are able to track funds, delivery time, and status.
“This partnership will enable Ripple to expand the reach and solutions for our partners, and the footprint of RippleNet while allowing customers to transact directly with each other,” said Marcus Treacher, SVP of Customer Success at Ripple.
Riteesh Singh, Senior Vice President, FMS, Finastra said that the partnership will prove “particularly beneficial” to Finastra’s clients that rely on correspondent banks. That’s because, since RippleNet runs completely on the blockchain, transaction fees are lower than the industry average.
Ripple has offices in San Francisco, New York, London, Luxembourg, Mumbai, Singapore, Sydney, and, as of July, Brazil. At FinovateSpring 2013, company co-founder Chris Larsen debuted Ripple (originally known as OpenCoin). Ripple started this year by surpassing 200 customers and, in June, the company formed a strategic partnership with MoneyGram.
Finastra formed in 2017 from the combination of Misys and D+H after Vista Equity Partners acquired Misys in 2012 and bought D+H in 2017. Misys demonstrated its FusionFabric.cloud technology at FinovateEurope 2017.
A new partnership between Best of Show winner Voleo and Convergence Concepts will enable the Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based social investing platform to enhance its technology and improve the user experience on its iOS, Android, and online applications.
“This partnership will allow Voleo to focus on its core – growth and scalability in both the B2C and B2B partnerships,” said Voleo CEO Thomas Beattie. “We are hearing the feedback from our customers and we are delivering. Later this year there will be more features and developments introduced into the platform, a direct result of customer interaction.”
A major goal of the partnership is to achieve a unified codebase across all three platforms – iOS, Android, and online. This will make it easier for Voleo to introduce new features, as well as improve its ability to test new marketing and user journeys. Voleo anticipates this will help the company scale its current B2C customer base and provide support for more “nimble, robust integrations” with financial services companies, credit unions, and banks on the B2B side.
“Convergence is thrilled to become Voleo’s partner for product engineering and design, and it is a privilege to work with such a professional and experienced management team,” Convergence CEO Matthew Housser said. “We believe that the Voleo platform has huge potential in both the B2C and B2B fintech spaces, and we’re excited to help evolve and scale Voleo’s core platform and unique user experiences.”
Founded in 2015, Voleo demonstrated its social investing platform at FinovateFall 2017, winning Best of Show for its app that leverages the collective wisdom of investors to pursue higher returns in the market. Earlier this year, the company successfully completed the 2019 FIS Fintech Accelerator program in July, along with fellow Finovate alums Neener Analytics, Gremln Social, and Digital Onboarding.
Voleo also participated in Google’s Digital Strategy program over the summer in a bid to increase user acquisition. This spring, Voleo won the 2019 Best Stock Trading App award in the investment category of the FinTech Breakthrough Awards. In March, the company teamed up with Nasdaq to launch their second Student Equity Trading Competition.
Publicly traded on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker TRAD, Voleo has a market capitalization of $9 million.
Conversational AI technology company Finn.AI is helping banks deepen their connection to consumers. The new capability comes thanks to a partnership with Coconut Software, a digital scheduling solutions provider.
Finn.AI has integrated Coconut Software’s API into its own technology to allow users, through a natural chat conversation, to schedule a meeting with a live bank representative.
The partnership seems like an obvious fit to help banks communicate with a range of customers who have different comfort levels on digital channels. By adding the ability to schedule an in-person conversation, banks seamlessly communicate with customers and potential customers across channels, allowing them to switch between digital and in-person communication, depending on their channel preference.
“A fall off point for banks–that do not have a fully digital journey–is getting the consumer to interact with a banker, either in person or on the phone, after they have demonstrated an interest in a product online,” said Jake Tyler, Finn AI CEO. “By integrating with Coconut Software, we’re bridging that gap and making it easier for banks to interact with and convert online prospects.”
The combination of high tech and high touch is something we’ve seen a lot of in fintech, specifically in the wealth management space where consumers crave a high tech investment interface, but many still prefer to have a human to fall back on. In the chatbot arena, we’ve seen the insertion of the human touch in different ways. For example, some chatbots offer an option to view a phone number to call a customer service department. Other bots automatically change the conversation from bot to human, depending on the level of technicality. Finn.AI’s chatbot technology not only has this capability, but also leverages machine learning to learn from the human interactions.
Finn.AI has demoed twice at Finovate, taking home Best of Show honors both times. At its most recent appearance, FinovateFall 2017, Tyler demoed the company’s virtual banking assistant in Facebook Messenger and Google Assistant. Among Finn.AI’s recent partnerships are MX, TymeBank, and Auth0. The company was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.
Lendtech StreetShares, which offers business loans of up to $250,000 to US citizens, announced its partnership with rural US Farm Bureau Bank (FBB) to provide small business lending services to Farm Bureau’s six million members nationwide, reports Ruby Hinchliffe of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
StreetShares’ small business lending-as-a-service (LaaS) platform will provide the bank’s small business customers with “a decision in minutes and funding within 24 hours.”
FBB is a full-service digital bank in the US. Now able to offer fully-digital business loan applications with StreetShares’ technology, the bank says it chose the partner on account of its “flexibility and commitment to providing stellar service to underserved populations”.
“Since StreetShares is veteran-run, and we cater to rural America, we knew our values and mission would align with rural Americans’ small business lending needs,” said FFB’s director of national accounts Bob Baker.
By using a LaaS solution, FBB can offer unsecured lines of credit, making its loans faster and more competitive. The bank does not even have to integrate StreetShare’s platform with its core banking software.
“Since implementing the business lending platform, we have been able to expand our offerings and provide our members an innovative solution that meets their unique needs and helps them better manage and grow their businesses,” said Baker, who describes the entire loan process with StreetShares as “incredibly easy.”
Bank members can now apply from the comfort of their own home or office with instant replies and funding. Baker said the integration positions the bank “for continued growth” and “long-lasting relationships” with customers.
SteetShares’ CEO Mark L. Rockefeller said the bank’s adoption of its LaaS will “provide a better customer experience and expand its business lines.” Rockefeller hopes the partnership will bring small business lending to more qualified entrepreneurs across the country.
Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Reston, Virginia, StreetShares demonstrated its lending-as-a-service platform at FinovateFall 2019. The company has raised more than $261 million in funding, and includes Rotunda Capital Partners, Fenway Summer Ventures, and Accion among its investors.
On Finovate.com
Around the web
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.
Maybe you missed your chance to attend FinovateFall earlier this month. Or maybe you want to watch your favorite demos over again. Either way, today’s your day. We’ve just released all of the videos from the 75 companies that demoed their fintech on stage.
All of the 7-minute demos are available to stream and download for free at Finovate.com. And if you don’t know where to begin, we’ll get you started with the nine demos that won Best of Show at the event.
BlytzPay
Cinchy
College Aid Pro
ebankIT
Glia
MX
owl.co
Pinkaloo Technologies
Zogo Finance