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
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.
Vymo, the company that helps sales professionals #DoMore when it comes to managing leads and maximizing opportunities, just got a little help of its own. The company announced this week that it successfully closed its Series B round, raising $18 million to grow its business in the U.S. and around the world.
The Series B was led by Emergence Capital and featured participation by existing investor Sequoia India, which led the company’s $5 million Series A in 2016. Vymo’s total equity now stands at $22 million.
“Just as Veeva changed the game for pharmaceutical sales reps, Vymo aims to enable financial sales reps with a platform tailor made for their needs,” Emergence Capital Partner Jake Saper wrote at the firm’s blog discussing the investment. “Vymo is mobile-first, geo-aware, and makes use of contextual data to make targeted suggestions to reps on next best actions like which client or prospect to prioritize.”
Saper praised Vymo as a company that can help sales teams navigate diverse client bases and challenging regulatory environments as they build quality, personal relationships with their customers. He highlighted the company’s partnerships with Allianz, AXA, and Generali, and the high number of registered users of Vymo’s technology – more than 75% – who log on to the platform and take action on a daily basis.
Founded in Bangalore, India, and currently based in New York City, Vymo made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateAsia, demonstrating its Personal Assistant for Sales. The technology boosts the effectiveness of sales professionals by leveraging AI to detect the sales professionals actions automatically, predict the next best steps for the sales rep to pursue, and coach the rep on how to achieve the best outcomes.
The intelligent assistant learns from the best performing sales reps in the organization, and has established a positive revenue impact of 3% to 10% in sales productivity metrics such as conversions, turnaround time, and sales activity per opportunity. More than 100,000 sales reps across 50+ companies and institutions use Vymo to make their sales efforts more productive.
Earlier this month Vymo was featured in Nikkei Asian Review, which took a look at the use of the company’s intelligent assistant by sales professionals in Japan. In May, the company announced a partnership with Microsoft that will help grow the market for Vymo’s intelligent personal assistant solution. Vymo picked up the FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce) Award for Innovation in Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics in March, and began the year with a pair of partnership announcements, teaming up with Vietnam’s FE Credit in February and Zurich Topas Life in January.
Alternative ecommerce payments company Sezzle made its public debut this week. The Minneapolis, Minnesota-based company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) under the ticker SZL.
Within two hours of listing, Sezzle was being traded 82% above its opening price of $0.83 (AUD $1.22). The company was ultimately able to raise $30 million on its first day of trading. Sezzle will use the funds to attract more retailers to its platform, which currently boasts just over 5,000 merchants. The company will also enhance support for its 430,000 clients.
Why Australia? Sezzle is the first one to admit it has no plans of operating in Australia in the near future. The company’s reasoning for listing on the ASX is that the country’s investors are more familiar with Sezzle’s buy now, pay later model since one of its rivals, Afterpay, is based in Melbourne. Sezzle CEO Charlie Youakim explained this in further detail during an interview with Bloomberg yesterday.
Sezzle allows customers to split their payments into multiple installments
Sezzle’s technology, which allows customers to split their ecommerce purchases into four installments with only 25% down and no fees, is only available for shoppers in the U.S. and, as the company just announced this week, Canada. It is also available for merchants regardless of their location across the globe as they seek to expand their North American customer base.
When asked about international expansion, Youakim told Bloomberg in an interview, “The product lends itself to expanding internationally,” he said. “We’re researching new markets but the vast majority of our focus is in North America.”
The company makes money not by billing users, but by charging merchants, which face a 6% + $0.30 fee on each transaction. And the model seems to be working. From March 2018 to March 2019, Sezzle’s merchant sales grew by 16x to $28.3 million. In exchange for the fee, merchants are paid upfront and don’t inherit the risk of the customer not paying back all of their installments.
Sezzle demoed its alternative payment platform at FinovateFall 2018. Prior to today’s IPO the company had raised almost $117 million.
An infusion of $37 million in debt financing from BMO will help cloud-based digital banking and low-code platform company Kony “accelerate growth” in its two signature solutions: KonyDBX, the company’s digital banking technology, and Kony Quantum, its low-code development platform. The financing, courtesy of BMO’s Technology and Innovation Banking Group, adds to the more than $115 million in funding Kony has raised to date.
“Finding a strong and committed capital partner who understands digital is an important complement to our market-leading IP and aggressive growth agenda in both digital banking and multi-channel low-code development,” said Kony chairman and CEO Thomas E. Hogan.
BMO Bank of Montreal managing director of technology and innovation banking Devon Dayton underscored the critical role of “leveraging digital as a strategic function” for all businesses regardless of size. “Kony’s solution has enabled their clients to accelerate their digital transformations,” Dayton said. “We look forward to continuing this relationship and working alongside them to help them accelerate their growth.”
Kony’s financing news comes just a few weeks after the company was named a Leader by Gartner in its 2019 Magic Quadrant for Multiexperience Development Platforms (MXDP) report. This marked the expansion of the category from its previous mobile app development platform (MADP) designation to reflect what Gartner called “the evolution of MADPs to serve expanding app use cases and development requirements.”
Kony is well positioned to take advantage of this broader way of looking at development platforms. In addition to this year’s recognition from Gartner, the company was named a Leader in The Forrester Wave digital report on development platforms last year, as well as a Leader in the firm’s report on low-code development platforms for this year.
Kony demonstrated its retail banking solution at FinovateFall 2017. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company has been on a strong, partner-making pace in recent months. Kony teamed up with Qualifacts in May to power the behavioral healthcare solution provider’s mobile app, CareLogic. In April, Kony partnered with Micronotes, a firm that leverages AI to provide marketing automation for digital banking. That same month, the company announced a collaboration with fellow Finovate alum, IDology, to integrate new authentication services into Kony DBX digital banking solutions.
Financial market data provider Xignite serves 9+ million API calls per day and with today’s announcement of a new partnership, the company will add handsomely to that number. Xignite has partnered with Canada’s WealthSimple, which will leverage the California-based company’s APIs to power its new mobile stock trading app, WealthSimple Trade.
The app enables users to buy and sell more than 8,000 publicly-traded stocks and ETFs. Embedded within the app, Xignite’s APIs offer users real-time stock price data, information to power trades, and algorithms that automate users’ investment decisions.
“We are proud to be a key enabler of the fintech revolution in Canada,” said Stephane Dubois, Xignite CEO. “We help power and inspire the disruption of the financial services industry by providing entrepreneurs like Wealthsimple with financial data APIs to help them invent new businesses and revolutionary user experiences. The world’s leading robo-advisors use Xignite market data to power their platforms and apps.”
Xignite sources its cloud-based market data from 250+ providers, including data collectors, data originators, feed consolidators, OTC marketplaces, and index companies. In addition to leveraging data from Morningstar, FactSet, and EuroNext, Xignite also curates its own data. The comprehensive nature of Xignite’s data eliminates the need for clients to work with multiple vendors.
Xignite, which counts Interactive Data and Quandl as competitors, provides data to more than 800 organizations across the globe, including fellow Finovate alums Betterment, Personal Capital, Envestnet, and eToro. The company has raised almost $38 million since it was founded in 2000.
At the company’s FinovateAsia 2017 demo, Dubois showcased the Xignite Cloud Add-in, which integrates market data into spreadsheets.
VymoReels in $18 Million for its Intelligent Sales Assistant.
Around the web
Deal sealed: Fiservcompletes acquisition of First Data.
Visaannounces strategic partnership with SME banking service Open.
eToroenables retail customers to invest in drone technology via its latest portfolio.
iGTB to enhance trade finance operations for two Raiffeisen banks, Niederosterreich-Wien and Landesbank Steiermark.
CREALOGIX to power new consumer digital investment platform from MeDirect Group.
JP Morgan Chase ends loan origination partnership with OnDeck.
ThetaRaybrings on Idan Keret as Chief Customer Success Officer.
GreenDotoffers customers 3% cash back on online and in-app purchases and a savings account paying 3% APY.
Fintech Finance interviews Olga Feldmeier, Smart Valor CEO.
Redrock Biometricssecures a perfect score in Level 1 Presentation Attack Detection confirmation testing by iBeta.
SpyCloudexpands into Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
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.
We’re excited to announce that Finovate is offering pitch sessions exclusively for early-stage startups! This is a brand new initiative from Finovate, and we’re seeking cutting-edge companies focusing in AI or Wealth Management for 3 minute pitches at FinovateFall’s Summit Day.
For less than the price of a single ticket, seed-stage startups will receive a three minute pitch on stage, a dedicated space at the Startup Pitch Bar, access to our powerful networking app, and a ticket to attend the full conference. In order to qualify, companies must be a pre-seed fintech with less than $100k in annual revenue and less than $1M in total funding.
Finovate has always been a powerful platform for promoting new financial technology innovations, and we want to make sure that our show remains accessible for the new companies that represent the bleeding-edge of the industry. We expect startup pitch slots to fill up fast so act now if you want to get involved! Visit our website for more information, or email dominika@finovate.com.
A new partnership between Splitit and payment service GHL ePayments will make Splitit’s installment payment solution available to more than 2,000 online merchants in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The deal will allow GHL to offer Splitit’s installment payment option to its customers, and enable Splitit to grow its presence in the Asia-Pacific region, according to company CEO and co-founder Gil Don.
“We are delighted to offer GHL merchants a simple way to boost sales and improve customer satisfaction by offering interest-free installments at the checkout,” Don said. “Splitit’s payment solution is a highly effective way for merchants to ease eager travelers’ budget woes, while increasing brand loyalty for merchants.”
Splitit enables consumers to divide the cost of online purchases into no interest, no fee monthly installments. Consumers can use their existing debit or credit card to make purchases from participating online merchants, choose the Splitit option, and receive instant approvals. The company notes that merchants have seen an 11% decrease in cart abandonment, a 12% increase in sales, and an 80% increase in average order value (AOV) after deploying the technology.
Danny Leong, Group CEO of GHL Systems Berhad, praised Splitit as a unique addition to the suite of solutions GHL provides to its merchant partners. “Splitit’s non-lending offering is unlike any other payment player’s and we believe this partnership will help us continue our growth as ASEAN’s trusted payment experts,” Leong said. One of the major merchant acquirers in the ASEAN region, GHL processes more than $241 million ($350 million AUD) in total online and offline transaction value each month across its merchant network. The firm manages more than 368,000 point of sales in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Cambodia, and Australia.
Making its Finovate debut as PayItSimple in 2014 at FinovateFall, the company rebranded as Splitit a year later as part of an emphasis on serving “all members of the credit card payment ecosystem.” More recently, the company partnered with EFTPay to bring its installment payment option to merchants in Hong Kong and Macau, and teamed up with Australian retailer Kogan. Splitit also bolstered its executive ranks this summer, adding former Intuit and PayPal executive Brad Paterson to lead its North American operations.
Based in New York City, Splitit announced a post IPO equity round in May, raising $20.7 million ($30 million AUD). The funding followed the company’s successful IPO on the Australian Stock Exchange at the beginning of the year. Trading under the ticker SPT, Splitit has a market capitalization of $200 million.
New Zealand bank TSB has gone live with TemenosInfinity for online account opening and onboarding in just nine weeks, reports Sharon Kimathi of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
Included in the short implementation period was an API-based connectivity for workflow integration directly with TSB’s existing Microsoft Dynamics’ client relationship management (CRM) system.
It now provides applicants with the option to “save and resume,” returning to an application later, on any channel, without the need to start over.
Hamish Archer, TSB general manager – technology said: “We want more Kiwis to experience our world-class service, so we’re excited to use technologies like this which work seamlessly alongside our people, who genuinely care about doing the best for our customers.”
Martin Frick, managing director – APAC, Temenos, said: “We are delighted that TSB has chosen Temenos to power its growth, and that they are already starting to see results from the implementation.”
Since going live, Temenos Infinity has shortened the time needed to complete customer applications and insert the completed digital application directly into the TSB back office process.
Temenos was founded 1993, and is based in Geneva, Switzerland. The company demonstrated its Connect Mobile Banking solution at FinovateEurope 2015. Later that year, the company participated in our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, presenting its B2B Financial Apps Marketplace.
Nvstrearns a spot in the Financial Venture Studio’s incoming cohort.
CREALOGIXintroduces new Chief Financial Officer Daniel Bader.
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.
Cross-border remittance startup Paysend has received a money transfer of its own this week. The London-based company landed $10.6 million (£8.5 million) in Series B funding, bringing its total raised to $30.7 million.
There’s no word on an updated valuation but before today’s round, the company was valued at $155 million.
The investment comes courtesy of GVA, which contributed almost $5 million (£3.95 million), as well as a Seedrs crowdfunding campaign that brought in $5.6 million (£4.6 million). Launched last month, the Seedrs campaign garnered contributions from investors, including Plug and Play and Digital Space Ventures, which co-led the round.
Regarding company’s decision to crowdfund the round, Paysend CEO Ronald Millar said, “This funding round has been the next step in our journey to create money for the future, and we’ve been delighted that we’ve been about to open it up to our customers in order to give them the opportunity to join us on the exciting next phase of the Paysend journey.”
Paysend, which demonstrated its Global Account at FinovateSpring 2018, competes with the likes of Transferwise and CurrencyFair to help users request money from 50 countries and send money across 70 countries. On a monthly basis, the company facilitates more than 2 million transactions totaling $55 million for its 900,000 users.
The company recently releasedPays XDR, its own digital currency. Pays XDR is a stable coin backed by cash reserves, matched to the proportion of the International Monetary Fund’s Special Drawing Rights.
Adding to its already busy year, in May Paysend launchedPaysend Link, an app that allows users to send money to anyone with just their phone number. Fund recipients can immediately transfer payments they receive to their Mastercard, Visa, or UnionPay card. The money is immediately available to use or to withdraw.
Unveiled this week, the latest version of ID R&D’s voice solution, IDVoice, leverages AI and voice technology to give users a major boost in biometric matching speed and an enhanced, multi-channel onboarding and authentication process.
“As enterprises migrate to conversational interfaces through mobile, web, and call center applications, a strong cross-channel voice authentication capability is essential,” ID R&D Chief Science Officer Konstantin Simonchik said. “With IDVoice v2.7, we are making it much easier and more efficient for enterprises to deploy voice biometrics consistently on all channels using the programming tools they prefer.”
IDVoice enables enterprises to execute on their omni-channel voice biometric strategy, while avoiding the drawbacks common to many other voice biometric solutions. With IDVoice, for example, developers can account for different channels without requiring separate enrollments for each channel (i.e., mobile, web app, call center, etc.). This is made possible by the platform’s biometric engine architecture which is channel, language, and age variance agnostic, as well as being resistant to environmental noise.
Other enhancements to the technology improve its ability to detect voice activity and add a 10x speed improvement to a critical platform algorithm. Together these improvements ensure that IDVoice provides higher quality and faster onboarding and verification, saving time and improving the user experience. Opus Research founder and lead analyst Dan Miller referred to the technology as offering a “zero-effort authentication process (that is) fast becoming a necessity for businesses with customers who reach out across multiple devices and channels.”
The launch of the latest version of IDVoice comes just days after ID R&D announced that sound recognition technology specialist Wavio would integrate ID R&D’s AI and machine learning acoustic detection functionality into its sound recognition solution, SoundAI.
“Wavio was highly impressed when we tested ID R&D’s software, and after learning more about ID R&D’s deep research and knowledge of voice, audio processing, and the very latest in artificial intelligence methods, we were convinced that ID R&D is the right partner to help us fulfill our mission,” Wavio CEO Greyson Watkins said.
ID R&D demonstratedSafeChat, its frictionless, continuous authentication for remote logins and conversational interfaces, at FinovateFall 2018. The technology provides authentication by leveraging a combination of biometric inputs that are available through the normal interactions between users and the device. This enables the solution to verify the identity of users without requiring them to do anything specific to authenticate. ID R&D noted that the technology brings a biometrically-secured, Alexa-like experience to mobile, conversational, and IoT platforms.
Founded in 2016, ID R&D is headquartered in New York City. The company has raised $5.7 million in funding from investors including GSR Ventures and Gagarin Capital Partners. Alexey Khitrov is CEO.
