Open Banking Advances in Nigeria; Singapore’s soCash Secures $6M Series B

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global

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

Latin America and the Caribbean

  • Mexican fintech Prestanómica raises $300,000 in Series A funding.
  • TechCrunch profiles Dataplor, a company that indexes microbusinesses in emerging markets, as it announces a $2 million funding ahead of its planned expansion to Chile, Peru, and Colombia.
  • Mexican crypto exchange Bitso becomes the first Latin American fintech to earn an international cryptocurrency license.

Asia-Pacific

  • UnionBank successfully pilots blockchain-based cross-border remittance solution from the Philippines to Singapore.
  • Singapore-based fintech soCash secures $6 million in Series B funding.
  • The first cross-border mobile payment alliance in Asia, Singtel’s VIA, goes live in Japan.

Sub-Saharan Africa

  • EY reaches agreement with Open Banking Nigeria to develop a standard API for financial services companies in the country.
  • Kenya’s KeshoLabs launches its payments and remittances platform, Pesabase.
  • African telecom Africell pledges to spend “part” of $100 million line of credit from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation on expanding infrastructure and fintech services.

Central and Eastern Europe

  • Vienna, Austria-based Bitpanda announces it has topped one million users on its trading platform.
  • Fintech Futures takes a look at Lithuania’s efforts to attract more fintechs to the country.
  • Moscow Department of Information Technology launches initiative to ease access to billpay, internet banking, and other services via unified city ID.

Middle East and Northern Africa

  • Egyptian fintech XPay raises $250,000 in pre-seed funding.
  • M-Gurush, the first mobile money service in South Sudan, goes live.
  • Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) signs Memorandum of Understanding with OneConnect Financial Technology.

Central and Southern Asia

  • In partnership with National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and Indian banks, JCB International has launched its first branded card in India.
  • India-based, cloud banking and enterprise payments platform Zeta locks in Series C funding that boosts the company’s valuation to $300 million.
  • Indian B2B payments firm PayMate closes Series D round.

Top image designed by Freepik

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Finovate Alumni News

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Digital Onboarding, Five Degrees, Gremln, ID R&D, Intellaegis, Neener Analytics, PaySend, Voleo

On Finovate.com

  • ID R&D’s Voice Biometric Solution Satisfies Need for Speed, Omni-Channel Reach.
  • Finovate Global: Open Banking Advances in Nigeria; Singapore’s soCash Secures $6M Series B.
  • Paysend Garners $10.6 Million in Funding.

Around the web

  • PassTime partners with masterQueue to help locate and contact customers for debt collection.
  • Five Degrees is selected to join the Kickstart innovation program.
  • Voleo, Neener Analytics, Gremln Social, and Digital Onboarding all successfully complete 2019 FIS Fintech Accelerator program.

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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Betterment Now Wants Your Liquid Cash, Too

Betterment Now Wants Your Liquid Cash, Too
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Betterment

Betterment knows its clients are smart when it comes to saving for their futures. And with that well-established, financially savvy client base, the company launched a checking and savings platform this week.

The new platform is called Betterment Everyday (because what’s better than a user base that logs in every day?) and is aimed to help the company’s clients better manage their money today so that they can maximize earnings for the future.

Betterment Everyday offers savings and checking accounts, with customer deposits held at partner banks including Citi, Barclays, and Valley National. The savings accounts, available today, can earn up to 2.69% APY until the end of this year, after which will drop to 2.43% and be subject to change.

The checking product will be available later this year and comes with benefits typical of online-only banks. Users will receive a debit card issued by nbkc bank of Overland Park, Kansas, will be reimbursed for all ATM fees worldwide, will not be charged monthly maintenance fees, and do not need to maintain a minimum balance.

“As we launch Betterment Everyday, we’re starting to bring our role as your financial advisor into your everyday life, turning your daily choices and transactions into saving for the future,” said Betterment CEO Jon Stein in a blog post. “We’re building the framework for where we believe the industry can (and should) move. We believe the future is smart money management, and we’re leading the way.”

In addition to attracting new clients and refocusing existing users, the new account offerings also serve to compete with fintechs that have launched similar products in recent months. Wealthfront, SoFi, which offer high interest savings accounts boasting yields of 2.57% and 2.25%, respectively, and Acorns, which offers a debit card for a fee of $3 per month.

Last year Robinhood launched a checking account that boasted a 3% interest rate, but quietly rescinded the product after regulators from the SEC and SIPC cited lack of regulatory oversight. The startup had not consulted regulators before the proposed launch and is now working on a new version of the checking account. Today, Betterment may be in a similar situation. The company did consult regulators before this week’s launch, but, according to CNBC, has been asked to provide more information on the new offering.

Betterment CEO Jon Stein debuted the company’s MultipleGoals feature at FinovateFall 2011. Since it was founded in 2008, the company has raised a total of $275 million. Last fall, Betterment unveiled a Trust Account Opening feature that allows advisors to manage the entire process. And this year, the company was honored on the Forbes Fintech 50 list for the 4th year in a row.

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BlueRush Inks IndiVideo Deal with Nikia Dx

BlueRush Inks IndiVideo Deal with Nikia Dx
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BLUERUSH

Personalized software-as-a-service innovator BlueRush unveiled a new distribution partnership designed to drive further market penetration of its Best of Show winning IndiVideo platform. BlueRush’s partner, Nikia Dx, will promote the company’s solution over its client network of insurers, financial service providers, and utility companies.

“We are delighted to partner with Nikia Dx to access their strong pipeline of market opportunities,” BlueRush CEO Steve Taylor said. He highlighted personalized video bills and financial statements as technologies that many companies are exploring, and noted that BlueRush’s platform was well-positioned to enable these initiatives. “Since these documents are sent in such high volumes, and IndiVideo is highly scalable,” Taylor said, “there is significant opportunity to add personalized videos to increase loyalty, engagement, retention, and investment in products or services, while capturing valuable data-driven insights.”

IndiVideo integrates readily into existing marketing infrastructure to accelerate and enhance the customer journey. The platform leverages predictive analytics and customer data to produce intelligent, personalized videos that are rendered locally on the viewer’s device. This boosts the technology’s scalability and avoids per render fees. The solution also captures customer interactions with the videos to enable it to better analyze data and understand customer preferences over time.

“We are focused on realizing the promise of customer engagement for our clients through disruptive digital solutions,” Nikia DX CEO Phil Santoni said. “Our team has been effectively delivering strategic transformation solutions in every business sector, unlocking assets and creating business value for our clients, for more than 30 years. We see exciting market opportunities for BlueRush’s IndiVideo platform.”

Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based BlueRush demonstrated IndiVideo at FinovateSpring earlier this year, winning a Best of Show award. Last month, the company announced that its platform had surpassed $100,000 in committed monthly recurring revenue. In April, BlueRush and its Chilean partner Kunder won Best Financial Services Online Video at the 2019 Internet Advertising Competition awards. Also this spring, the company partnered with Bee Concept to help a large Colombian bank deploy the IndiVideo platform to boost the rate of mortgage sign-ups.

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Finovate Alums Honored at PayTech Awards 2019

Finovate Alums Honored at PayTech Awards 2019
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, Award winners, Emailage, Fiserv, Green Dot, HooYu, Sberbank, Token

A handful of Finovate alums were among those earning top honors at the second annual PayTech Awards earlier this month. In categories ranging from e-commerce to real-time payments, four Finovate alums won commendations for their contributions to “excellence and innovation in the payments industry.” Another trio of alums took home “Highly Commended” runner’s up recognition.

We’ve listed those honored alums below along with the categories they competed in and a link to their most recent Finovate/FinDEVr conference demo video.

  • Token – Best Consumer Payments Initiative – video

And here are the alums that earned Highly Commended recognitions.

  • Fiserv – Real-Time Payments Solution Provider – video

The PayTech Awards consists of three categories: Judged Awards, Leadership Awards, and Ovum Payments Innovation Awards. In addition to those alums that won their categories – or earned Highly Commended honors – a few Finovate/FinDEVr alums were also short-listed ahead of the final votes. These companies – along with their category and most recent Finovate/FinDEVr video – are below:

To learn more about the awards – including a look at last year’s winners – visit the PayTech Awards homepage.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: AdviceRobo, BeSmartee, Betterment, BLUERUSH, DriveWealth, Mambu, MasterCard, SumUp, ThetaRay

On Finovate.com

  • Betterment Now Wants Your Liquid Cash, Too.
  • Finovate Alums Honored at PayTech Awards 2019.
  • BlueRush Inks IndiVideo Deal with Nikia Dx.

Around the web

  • DriveWealth announces collaboration with U.S.-based registered investment advisor Vested Finance to give investors in India access to U.S. stock.
  • Mastercard forges new partnership with SumUp, boosting the number of electronic payment acceptance locations across 27 countries in Europe.
  • Singapore-based Cheers Paytech chooses core banking technology from Mambu.
  • New Zealand’s seventh largest bank, TSB, goes live with Temenos Infinity for online account opening and onboarding.
  • ThetaRay launches version 4 of its analytics platform to help banks detect and prevent cybercrime.
  • BeSmartee announces direct integration with real estate document collaboration and recording technology solution provider Simplifile.

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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Helps Us Raise the Female Quotient at FinovateFall

Helps Us Raise the Female Quotient at FinovateFall
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: FinovateFall 2019

There’s one perk that comes with working as a woman in a male-dominated field– there’s never a line for the ladies restroom. In fact, at a handful of Finovate conferences, we’ve had to convert some of the women’s restrooms into men’s rooms in order to make a the wait time for the men more reasonable. When that happens, you know there’s a problem– one that goes beyond toilets.

Lack of workforce diversity has many drawbacks, the most obvious of which is the gender pay gap. According to the film Equal Means Equal, a documentary that looks at how women in the U.S. are treated today, “Compared to white men, white women working full time, based on median annual full-time earnings, earn 78 cents to every dollar a man earns.”

In an effort to help tip the scales of the gender ratio and bring awareness to the wage gap, Finovate is offering female registrants tickets to FinovateFall for 78 cents on the dollar. That means women who register by this Friday, July 26, can purchase a ticket to FinovateFall for 22% off just by entering the code EQUALITY on page two of the booking form.

Here are a handful of speakers who are helping to bring the female quotient up a notch at FinovateFall this year:


The conference takes place September 23 through 25, with an additional summit day on September 26, at the New York Marriott Marquis.

To take advantage of this offer, book online today with code EQUALITY, contact our customer service team at +1 (888) 670-8200, or register@knect365.com. Rooms can be reserved at the New York Marriott Marquis.

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Gusto Raises $200 Million with $3.8 Billion Valuation

Gusto Raises $200 Million with $3.8 Billion Valuation
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Gusto

Payroll, benefits, and HR platform Gusto just landed $200 million in funding, a slew of new investors, and a valuation of $3.8 billion. The Series D round almost doubles the $2 billion valuation the San Francisco-based company received in December of last year after closing $140 million in funding. Gusto’s total funding now sits at $510 million.

The new investors, Fidelity and Generation Investment Management, were joined by existing investors T. Rowe Price Associates, Dragoneer, General Catalyst, CapitalG, 137 Ventures, Y Combinator Continuity, and Emergence Capital. Gusto CEO Joshua Reeves said that Gusto selected the group “based on their long-term perspective.” He added, “These investors are committed to our view of creating a durable and sustainable business, and their investments will fuel our ongoing creation of equitable solutions and inclusive economic growth for everyone.”

Gusto will use the funding to further its research and development efforts, specifically in the fintech and healthcare arenas. The company also plans to grow its workforce, which currently sits at more than 1,000 employees spread across Denver, San Francisco, and New York.

Along with the funding, Gusto has onboarded its first independent board member, Anne Raimondi (pictured), former SVP of operations at Zendesk.

Gusto has added two notable features to its platform recently, including Time Tracking, which syncs hourly employees’ time directly to the company’s payroll in order to properly calculate time off and holidays; and Flexible Pay, which allows employees to select when they prefer to receive their paycheck. This year, the company formed partnerships with ScaleFactor and Trainual to deliver accounting and offer new hire training, respectively.

As for what’s next, it’s hard not to wonder about an IPO. We interviewed Reeves for a blog post titled M&A is the New IPO last month. When asked about the company’s plans, Reeves said, “There are pros and cons to being a public company, and we believe that today, the benefits of Gusto staying private outweigh the benefits of being public.” He added, “An IPO isn’t our end-goal; instead, it’s creating a world where work empowers a better life. We currently serve more than 1% of all employers in the U.S., which is an accomplishment we’re incredibly proud of, but we realize we still have a lot more work to do. Building Gusto to its full potential is a multi-decade mission for me.”

Gusto launched in 2012 under the name ZenPayroll. At FinovateSpring 2014, Reeves showcased the company’s flagship payroll solution while smiling throughout the entire seven minute demo.

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Content Capture Innovator Ephesoft Allies with Grant Thornton

Content Capture Innovator Ephesoft Allies with Grant Thornton
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Ephesoft

Enterprise content capture and data discovery solution provider Ephesoft has partnered with Chicago, Illinois-based accounting consultancy Grant Thornton. The firm now offers Ephesoft Smart Capture to its customers to help them enhance back office operations, including invoicing, accounts payable, and contract management. The solution also will improve the ability of companies to manage more challenging processes such as tax calculations and revenue recognition.

“Ephesoft’s patented, supervised machine learning technology reduces the overall document processing time by an average of 65% and increases employee productivity by as much as 400%,” Ephesoft founder and CEO Ike Kavas explained. “Now we can work with Grant Thornton to help more clients in more locations gain control over their documents and unstructured data.”

Advisory practice leader for Grant Thornton’s central region Nick Vellani added that the technology would help businesses deal with the problem of not just managing but actually leveraging large amounts of unstructured data to produce valuable insights. He praised Ephesoft’s technology and its ability to help alleviate these “workflow and collaboration nightmares.”

“When we saw how easily the Ephesoft Smart Capture platform plugged into our tech environments – and the benefits it provided to our professionals – we knew it was something our clients could benefit from as well,” Vellani said.

It’s worth noting that Grant Thornton is no newcomer to Ephesoft’s technology. In addition to using the company’s technology in-house to enhance the tax services it provides to clients, Grant Thornton also has deployed Ephesoft’s technology for “several clients” to help them improve their tax functions, as well.

Founded in 1924, Grant Thornton is the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International, a global professional services network of independent accounting and consulting companies. With revenues of more than $1.8 billion and 58 offices across the U.S., Grant Thornton provides auditing, tax planning, and financial advisory services in a wide variety of verticals including financial services, private equity, and real estate, as well as transportation, manufacturing, and retail.

Named One of the Best Places to Work in Orange County, by the Orange Country Business Journal and the Orange Country Register, Ephesoft demonstrated its cloud-based, smart document capture and analytics platform at FinovateSpring 2018. The technology identifies documents and extracts the relevant data, transforming unstructured content into actionable information. The platform also leverages data mining and analytics to provide valuable business intelligence to help institutions make better decisions and manage risk more effectively.

Ephesoft began the year with the launch of its Cloud HyperExtender add-on, which enables users of the company’s Transact technology to boost processing speeds up to 2,500 pages per minute. More recently, company CEO Kavas was named a semifinalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2019 Award in Orange County.

Headquartered in Irvine, California, Ephesoft was founded in 2010. The company has raised $15 million in funding courtesy of a Series A round in 2017 led by Mercato Partners.

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Finovate Alumni News

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Backbase, Betterment, CardFlight, Ephesoft, Finastra, FIS, Gusto, LoanScorecard, NIIT Technologies, Scalable Capital, TD Ameritrade

On Finovate.com

  • Content Capture Innovator Ephesoft Allies with Grant Thornton.
  • Gusto Raises $200 Million with $3.8 Billion Valuation.

Around the web

  • TD Ameritrade offers voice-activated investing technology.
  • NIIT Technologies’ revenue grew 16+% YoY, and its after-tax profit increased 2% YoY.
  • Scalable Capital partners with Futurae to add multi-factor authentication technology into its investment platform.
  • LoanScorecard goes live with its Bank Statement Analyzer tool.
  • Betterment adds savings and checking accounts to its offerings.
  • U.K. neobank revverbank to deploy cloud banking technology from Finastra.
  • CardFlight partners with PAX Technology to make SwipeSimple terminal available to clients on the PAX A920 and PAX A80.
  • Australia’s Volt Bank teams up with FIS to power its mobile and card payment services.
  • Alterna Bank unveils its new advanced digital platform, Forge, powered by Backbase.

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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CrediVia Adds Multifamily Options to Financing Platform

CrediVia Adds Multifamily Options to Financing Platform
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: CrediVia

CrediVia, the Raleigh, North Carolina online commercial real estate loan marketplace, has added multifamily investments to its platform. The move, just one year after the company’s debut at FinovateFall, will help the fintech startup bring its smarter, faster, and easier commercial lending process to more commercial real estate (CRE) lenders and borrowers.

“We came on the scene to specifically serve the niche vertical of hotel financing, the riskiest of CRE assets,” CrediVia co-founder and CEO Anuj Mittal said. “Our greater mission, however, has not changed: to provide speed, transparency, and ease of transaction to both the lender and the borrower.”

CrediVia offers a platform that enables interested CRE lenders and qualified borrowers to engage and connect securely. Borrowers benefit from a singular location where documents can be uploaded and then easily submitted to multiple lenders. Lenders benefit from a borrower pool that is pre-screened before being added to their queue. The result is an easier, more efficiently process for borrowers, and a greater closing rate for lenders.

Multifamily investments, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer Michael Richardson explained, are an ideal addition to CrediVia’s platform. Highlighting the absence of a “typical profile” for a multifamily investment, Richardson noted the “reasonable” risk of the investment and the opportunity for diversification multifamily investments can provide. He added that investing in these properties can also provide a way for institutions considering an expansion into CRE financing.

“Multifamily assets are a common stepping stone to more sophisticated CRE financing for many institutions looking to build or broaden their business lending portfolio,” said Richardson, who joined CrediVia last month. “CrediVia’s move into multifamily is a direct response to listening to the market, as responding with a solution that relieves the common pressures and interruptions found in these exchanges. We’re here to drive the loan process forward.”

Founded in 2018, CrediVia demonstrated its platform at FinovateFall 2018. The company added to its C-Suite talent with the hire of Trusha Patel as Chief Business Development Officer this spring.

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Daon’s New Features Bring Two-in-One Approach to Onboarding, Authentication

Daon’s New Features Bring Two-in-One Approach to Onboarding, Authentication
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Daon

Browser-based onboarding, third-party identity checks, automated decisioning, and optional human review are among the top-level, new features of Daon’s IdentityX Digital Onboarding 2.0. The updated platform, launched this week, enables companies to offer a frictionless and fraud-resistant onboarding experience for their customers, reducing abandonment rates and operating costs while ensuring KYC/AML compliance.

Decrying what he called the “false choice between convenience and compliance,” Daon CEO Tom Grissen highlighted the new platform’s “two-in-one” approach that enables users to leverage their onboarding credentials to authenticate across both digital and physical channels. “Daon’s unprecedented integration of onboarding and authentication is a powerful new realization of our longstanding commitment to a frictionless, omni-channel experience at every step of the customer journey,” he said.

Reston, Virginia-based Daon demonstrated its IdentityX platform at FinovateFall 2016. The technology leverages biometric inputs such as face, voice, and fingerprint, as well as other authentication strategies such as device binding, geolocation, and liveness detection to provide an “inherently multi-factor,” future-proof authentication option for banks, payment processors, and other businesses.

With the launch of 2.0, Daon adds the ability to onboard users online instead of relying on the mobile app, and the capacity for businesses to achieve a higher or more specific degree of authentication by connecting to third party identity verification solutions. The new features give users the option to configure decision, action, and review paths, and features an optional human review process to examine challenging or questionable applications more effectively.

“For too long, organizations have been stuck choosing 90% customer abandonment rates on the one hand, or billions of dollars lost to fraud and regulatory fines on the other,” Grissen said. “Today, with all-digital customer onboarding from Daon, the process isn’t just more frictionless than traditional onboarding; it’s also more secure.”

Founded in 2000, Daon made fintech headlines earlier this month with news that it would bring its biometric identity technology to digital onboarding and anti-fraud company CTMS. Also in July, Daon announced that it had partnered with GEMADEC to build a life certificate digitization solution for the Moroccan Interprofessional Pension Fund’s (CIMR) mobile app.

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