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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
Founded by an award-winning fintech veteran, Andes Wealth Technologies offers the “Google Maps for Financial Advisors,” a set of unique, modern tools to transform the wealth management experience.
Features
Risk Tolerance Test: The best ever.
Real-Time Risk Monitor: 360° risk visualization for markets and portfolios.
Practical Behavioral Finance, including a special tool for baby boomers.
Why it’s great Unique ideas and visualizations. Beautiful yet practical tools backed by rigorous research and robust data analytics. It will indeed revolutionize the advisor and client experience.
Presenter
Helen Yang, Founder and CEO A winner of the prestigious Harry Markowitz Award in 2011, Yang has 20+ years of leadership in Fintech and holds an MBA from MIT. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
Trulioo presents EmbedID, a fast and simple way for startups and developers to verify customers across borders while supporting AML/KYC compliance requirements.
Features
Integrate and test Trulioo’s identity verification API in minutes
Fully customize onboarding fields and forms
Verify customers in real time
Why it’s great With only a snippet of code embedded into any website, Trulioo’s EmbedID enables organizations to verify over 5 billion identities worldwide.
Presenters
Anatoly Kvitnitsky Kvitnitsky has a wealth of experience working in fintech and identity markets, and is committed to helping solve identity challenges that organizations face in scaling their products for global use. LinkedIn
Marat Asadurian A software engineering manager at Trulioo, Asadurian enjoys building new products as well as new teams. In his current role, he is managing a team that generates new business lines for GlobalGateway. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
JSOL Corporation provides IT consulting and digital transformation related services to clients from various industries by leveraging its technology and know-how developed over the years.
Features
Predict growth/deterioration of business partners
Visualize transactional networks of businesses and assess spillover effects
Monitor/analyze up-to-date financial conditions of business partners
Why it’s great Use JSOL Corporation’s tool to gain insight into your business partners’ projected financial performance and to make informed financing decisions.
Presenters
Kimitaka Honma, Deputy Unit Director Honma is a Deputy Unit Director of the Digital Innovation Business Unit and has ample experience assisting financial institutions with their digital transformation efforts.
Andrew Ogata, Sales and Strategic Partnerships Ogata is a sales specialist in the Digital Innovation Business Unit and focuses on domestic/overseas sales and strategic partnerships.
A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateFall on September 23 through 25, 2019 in New York City. Register today and save your spot.
The StreetShares platform provides “Lending-as-a-Service” technology to community banks and credit unions, empowering them to offer fully-digital small business loans… up and running in 30 days.
Features
Ability to grow and retain small business customers
Fully-digital borrower onboarding and management with no core software integration
Precision, 100% digital underwriting at the industry’s leading loss rates
Why it’s great Community banks and credit unions struggle to make small business loans due to costly underwriting and core software integration. StreetShares Lending-as-a-Service technology solves this problem.
Presenters
Mark Rockefeller, CEO Rockefeller leads the StreetShares team in its mission to help community banks and credit unions offer fully-digital small business loans to America’s main street businesses. LinkedIn
Sanjay Bhaskar, Vice President, Development and Partnerships Bhaskar focuses on identifying opportunities for community banks and credit unions to use StreetShares Lending-as-a-Service technology to offer fully digital small business loans. LinkedIn
Indian online lending marketplace Namaste Credit announced it is becoming a “fully-fledged digital-only bank” for micro small and medium businesses (MSMEs), reports Ruby Hinchliffe of Fintech Futures, Finovate’s sister publication.
The neobank will have a “foundational software-as-a-service (SaaS) play” and aims to offer the first one-stop-shop for MSMEs. It will include automated credit, banking, and accounting solutions.
The soon-to-be-launched app, dubbed Namaste Biz, will centralize MSME’s cash flow, banking applications, and credit management tools.
“Our transition to a neobank will not only help the start-up get a firmer grip into the banking and non-banking financial company (NBFC) ecosystem but also balance revenues with customer acquisition costs to maintain a profitable growth path,” said Namaste Credit’s co-founder and director, Lucas Bianchi.
He added, “We believe a technology-based integrated platform that can bring together banks, NBFCs and other stakeholders can completely transform the financial services industry, specially from a B2B perspective.”
The company is confident the conversion will give them a “substantial competitive advantage.” Fellow co-founder and director Gaurav Anand said the newly-turned neobank will “accelerate customer and channel acquisition,” “reduce operational costs significantly,” and allow them “to expand quickly to global markets.”
At its core, Namaste Credit serves as an online marketplace for small business loans. The service connects borrowers with relevant lenders to help them find the loan that best suits their circumstance. The company also offers robotic process automation to help underwriters accurately assess risk. Namaste Credit demoed at FinovateFall 2018.
Credit SesameRaises $43 Million in Advance of IPO.
Around the web
Salt Edgemarks 400+ integrations with open banking APIs.
Payfoneteams up with Digital Matrix Systems to help companies fight fraud.
Fenergoappoints Louise O’Connell to the newly created role of Chief Customer Officer.
StrategyCorpsbrings on former Geezeo executive, Bryan Clagett.
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.
One month after digital core banking provider Five Degreesannounced its collaboration with fellow Finovate alum W.UP, the company is back in the fintech headlines with another round of partnership news: digital security platform Entersektwill join its Open Banking Marketplace.
“Partnering with Entersekt is testament to our vision for the future of banking and finance so we are delighted to welcome the company as part of our Open Banking Marketplace,” Five Degrees EVP Peter-Jan van de Venn said. “Our marketplace is championing a culture of collaboration throughout the industry, enabling us to provide a better customer experience via interconnected APIs.”
In their statement, the companies indicate that the partnership between the two companies will help financial service providers perform better both at home in Europe as well as in their global banking and finance operations. Five Degrees Open Banking Marketplace is designed to encourage financial services companies and fintechs to work together to build engaging digital customer experiences, increase their own efficiencies, and make regulatory compliance easier.
“(We) help tens of millions of end users across the globe, securing 150 million digital transactions every month in 45 countries,” Entersekt CEO Schalk Nolte said. “We look forward to being part of five degrees’ Open Banking Marketplace and are confident that our partnership will drive further innovation in (digital services) and help our mutual customers differentiate themselves from the competition.”
Entersekt’s Chief Technology Officer presented “Securing Mobile Applications through Transport Layer Diversity” at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, in 2014. The South African company, which was founded in 2008, opened its second office in Cape Town in April, and that same month was named to the Wealthtech 100. Entersekt teamed up with fellow Finovate alum BioCatch in March to offer financial services companies a “one-stop-shop” for security solutions such as continuous and multi-factor authentication, passwordless login, and enhanced remote user registration.
In its most recent Finovate appearance at FinovateEurope 2018, Five Degrees demonstrated its digital wealth management solution, Prospery. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, the company was selected last month to join the Kickstarter Innovation Program. In June, Five Degrees announced a partnership with Bankingblocks to assist challenger banks and payment companies as they offer new solutions to their customers.
With $11 million (€10 million) in funding, Five Degrees includes Karmijn Kapitaal and Velocity Capital Private Equity among its investors.
Personal sales assistant Vymo recently teamed up with FE Credit, the consumer lending services division of Vietnam-based VP Bank.
Through the partnership, Vymo is handling pieces in FE Credit’s mortgage lending workflow. Specifically, Vymo is helping FE Credit with customer acquisition, lead generation, and onboarding. The India-based company will offer its automated sales tool to help FE Credit’s team of 20,000 sales executives and 8,000 agents become more productive.
Vymo prompts the salesperson to make notes about their sales calls
After the deal is closed, Vymo helps agents follow up with up-sell and cross-sell opportunities and makes it easy to track down missed payments.
Vymo’s sales tool offers multiple ways of driving productivity, beginning with assisting with client onboarding and authentication. The tool also assigns each lead to the best agent for the job based on experience and geographical location, offers next best action suggestions, and sends timely nudges to sales agents. Additionally, by notifying agents of the leads on their mobile device, FE Credit’s team is able to follow up on inquiries within 15 minutes. When a meeting is complete, the app prompts the salesperson to make notes about the client and how the meeting went.
FE Credit, the largest lending organization in Vietnam, initiated the partnership in an effort to work on its ambition of “better, not more,” meaning that it wants to improve upon its existing services before offering consumers more services. Kalidas Ghose, Vice Chairman and CEO of FE Credit, said the company selected Vymo “because of its unique application of automation and AI technology that allows for seamless data capture and contextual recommendations.”
With 140 employees, and 100,000 users on its platform Vymo has raised $23 million since it was founded in 2013. The company demonstrated its sales tool at FinovateAsia 2018 and has since made a major geographical expansion, launching in the U.S. a couple of months back.
Financial and blockchain API provider Hydrogen is the latest technology to achieve “Powered by Oracle Cloud” status, making the app building platform available to Oracle Cloud customers via the Oracle Cloud Marketplace.
“Hydrogen’s participation in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace further extends our commitment to the Oracle community and enables customers to easily reap the benefits of our APIs,” Hydrogen co-founder and CEO Mike Kane said. “We look forward to leveraging the power of the Oracle Cloud to help us achieve our business goals.”
Described as the global financial operating system by its founders, Hydrogen offers a wealth of fintech and blockchain APIs – known as atom and molecule respectively – to power a wide range of financial services from banking and investing to savings, financial wellness, and insurance.
The Oracle Cloud provides enterprise-quality services at all levels of the technology stack including both platform as a service (PaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS). And by joining the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, the Hydrogen platform will be readily accessible by Oracle Cloud customers. The marketplace has an intuitive user interface to make it easy for developers to browse and discover not only applications and services, but also solution ratings and reviews from users to help customers find the optimal resource for their needs. The Marketplace recently has unveiled its automated application installation tools to enable customers to deploy provider business apps from a centralized, cloud-based UI.
“Hydrogen’s commitment to innovation with the Oracle Cloud and quality execution helps our mutual customers receive cloud-enabled fintech solutions ready to meet critical business needs,” Oracle VP for Worldwide ISV Cloud Business Development David Hicks said.
At FinovateEurope 2018, Hydrogen made its Finovate debut, demonstrating how its technology enables developers to build sophisticated financial apps – such as a European savings platform with UI/UX, onboarding, simulations, backend connectivity, and business intelligence – in a matter of minutes.
Hydrogen has seen its share of plaudits this year. The company was named to the Wealthtech 100 in April, the same month it was listed in Fast Company’s “World Changing Ideas” compilation in the Developing World Technology category. Hydrogen joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA) in May and, the following month, was named a finalist in WealthManagement.com’s 2019 Industry Awards in the Blockchain/Cryptocurrency category.
More recently, the company earned recognition from Bank Director’s FinxTech Awards, winning a finalist spot in the Best of FinXTech Connect category. Hydrogen was named a finalist in the Financial Inclusion category of the Finnosummit Challenge and was shortlisted for three awards – Top Emerging Tech Company, Best Use of Blockchain, and Innovator of the Year – at Finovate’s inaugural awards series (check out more information on the Finovate Awards, or FinovateFall, which will take place the same week in New York this month).
Founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York City, Hydrogen includes Canadian bank and wealth manager TD Bank, global insurer Principal, and investment manager CI Investments among its clients.
The following is a guest post by April Rudin, founder and president of The Rudin Group, a firm that designs marketing campaigns for financial services companies.
Rudin will host the Wealthtech and Investech stream at the Summit, which takes place right after FinovateFall on September 26. The event also features an AI stream, which will be hosted by Lindsay Davis of CB Insights. Tickets are available as an add-on to FinovateFall or as a separate event.
Wealth management has entered the digital age. While it might not be readily apparent given the breathless coverage of whether and when the industry will cross the threshold, rest assured, the moment is here. The question is: Are all firms ready to seize the moment?
The financial services industry has been historically reticent to adopt new technology. And for good reason — finance, and wealth management especially — is a client-driven business where discretion is valued as much as — if not more than — financial acumen. In the early days of fintech, financial firms could rest knowing that they were keeping their client’s data and dollars safe rather than chasing the new, shiny tech toy on the block.
But now, financial service firms cannot afford to rest on their laurels and their patchwork of clunky, proprietary, tech solutions. Clients are used to being able to access the world at their fingertips and are no longer willing to let their financial data live elsewhere. And it’s not just Millennials and Generation Z demanding the convenience. Mobile Baby Boomers also want to be able to safely access their financial data with just a few clicks of a mouse whether they’re at home or traveling.
But despite the demand, companies still delay implementing new tech solutions, citing both perceived costs and compliance risks. While these factors shouldn’t be brushed aside, wealth management firms must find intelligent ways to power through.
Whereas firms once had the luxury of relying on the anticipated return on investment when deciding to embark on new technology products, a new ROI has entered the block: return on inertia. Put another way, what is the cost of doing nothing while rival upstarts and incumbents alike find ways to intelligently integrate technology into their firms?
It used to be that technology was housed only in the IT department of financial services firms. These were specialists who mostly loaded computers with new programs and knew how to troubleshoot when things went awry. But in today’s world, IT can no longer be thought of as an ancillary part of the business. Everything from onboarding, performance tracking, to investment recommendations has the ability to be touched by technology — freeing up time advisors can spend doing direct client work. The whole wealth management supply chain is being automated and firms must have tech specialists at all levels.
Does this mean that firms have to jump into tech willy nilly? Not necessarily, but the time of taking a wait and see approach for technology has also passed. The technology is here and clients demand it.
Waiting to implement technological solutions will only lead to otherwise avoidable costs and heightened risk exposure, Ernst & Young noted in a recent report.
Client onboarding is one area where tech is sorely needed. While some clients may appreciate the personal touch of in-office meetings to handle paperwork and account transfers, others may see the analog approach as a red flag. How does a paper-based business ensure the safety of client records, they may wonder. Video conferencing, online ID verification, and e-signatures are just a few of the ways the onboarding process can be made less cumbersome and client friendly while still falling inline with compliance.
From there, wealth management firms can consider implementing robo-advisor-like technology into their practice to facilitate decision making. The human touch will always be important for wealth management but tech-aided portfolio construction and reporting will allow advisors to have more meaningful discussions with clients, freeing up time for more customized solutions.
The ease of making and monitoring recommendations becomes especially important as high net worth families often have their assets spread across multiple investment types and financial institutions. While 10 years ago having a dashboard that can provide real-time data of those assets was once considered a novelty, clients now demand that rapid transparency.
Firms can no longer get away with listing the reasons not to embrace technology. And while risks to data integrity and security should not be minimized, firms will have to think of ways to buttress their controls while also directing their firms into the new era.
The return on investment may at first appear uncertain, but the return on inertia is definite — and bleak.
Low-code platform OutSystems has formed a deal with Nationwide to develop a new digital business savings service, reports Ruby Hinchliffe of FinTech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
By “dumbing down the back-end” so it becomes “a system of record only,” OutSystems will take on all the business logic and process for Nationwide, giving it a more agile front-end with less reliance on its legacy back-end.
OutSystem’s regional financial services and insurance director, Garry Larner, told FinTech Futures: “There’s a lot of legacy technology out there. It’s difficult and expensive to find talented developers, especially when it comes to native mobile. It’s becoming too costly to innovate, so that’s where we come in.”
He added: “In an ideal world you’d want to rip everything out and start from the beginning. But from a practical view, that’s not possible unless you’re prepared to spend hundreds of millions.”
The software platform can offer a traditional bank like Nationwide access to accelerators, such as templates, patterns and multi-factor authentication plugins which all speed up the UX development process.
It’s newest partnership with Nationwide is all about “creating the digital channel for business saving customers. Banking at the drop of a fingertip.”
Speaking more broadly on low-code, Larner recognized the “enormous” market opportunity, excited the industry is “finally catching up with the concept challenging the status quo – that traditional development is not the only option.”
OutSystems has had a 54% yearly growth rate globally and enjoyed a $360 million investment from Goldman Sachs and KKR last year.
Larner said: “There’s going to be a series of very large enterprise customers which we’ll be announcing over the next three or four months, because it’s almost caught up with the mainstream.”
Currently OutSystems works with British councils to digitize taxes, insurance companies to build broker portals, and, most recently, it is working on a new credit comparison market with a fintech to be announced soon.
Founded in 2001, OutSystems presented “Low-Code: The Next Evolution in App Dev Platforms” at our developers conference, FinDEVr New York 2017. The company is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and has raised more than $422 million in total funding from investors including Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Goldman Sachs, and North Bridge Venture Partners & Growth Equity.
Merck Sharp & Dohme FCU deploys trio of biometric authentication solutions from Fiserv.
New partnership bringsnCino’sBank Operating System to Allied Irish Banks.
Entrust Datacardpartners with JPMorgan Chase to pilot email security project.
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.
