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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
BeSmarteeannounces 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.
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 [email protected]. Rooms can be reserved at the New York Marriott Marquis.
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.
Enterprise content capture and data discovery solution provider Ephesofthas 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.
NIIT Technologies’ revenue grew 16+% YoY, and its after-tax profit increased 2% YoY.
Scalable Capitalpartners with Futurae to add multi-factor authentication technology into its investment platform.
LoanScorecardgoes live with its Bank Statement Analyzer tool.
Bettermentadds savings and checking accounts to its offerings.
U.K. neobank revverbank to deploy cloud banking technology from Finastra.
CardFlightpartners 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.
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.
Browser-based onboarding, third-party identity checks, automated decisioning, and optional human review are among the top-level, new features of Daon’sIdentityX 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.
Small business loan marketplace Lendio is entering into the cloud-based accounting software field with the launch of Sunrise. The new endeavor is the result of the Utah-based company’s just-announced purchase of online bookkeeping startup Billy. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded by Toke Kruse in 2012, Billy aimed to create “hassle-free” finance software for business owners who wanted to focus on their business, not accounting. After the acquisition, Lendio rebranded the Portland, Oregon-based company to Sunrise and pivoted it into a freemium bookkeeping software that offers accounting, cash flow management, and loan and credit information, as well as access to Lendio’s loan marketplace into a single platform.
“We are very excited to announce the acquisition of Billy and the re-brand to Sunrise. The Sunrise platform will bring together previously disparate sources of information for small business owners, such as accounting, loan and credit data,” said Brock Blake, CEO and founder of Lendio. “It’s our goal for Sunrise users to feel more confident in making financial decisions that help their businesses grow.”
The free version of Sunrise offers cash and accrual-based accounting, as well as an invoicing system, estimate creator, and a customer-facing credit card payment portal for billing. Businesses can also sync their financial accounts to categorize and track expenses and income, store receipts, and view profit and loss statements, balance sheets, and other reports such as accounts receivable, customer statements, and more.
A paid subscription, which ranges from $99/ month to $499/ month, enables business owners to automate accounting tasks by outsourcing bookkeeping duties to professionals who use a system to recognize revenue, take care of invoicing, and reconcile books on a monthly basis. The paid version also integrates with Stripe, PayPal, and Square.
Sunrise offers invoicing capabilities
Lendio is already working to improve upon Sunrise by building out capabilities such as enhanced loan integration. The company also plans to launch a Sunrise mobile app, add auto categorization, and offer tax software integration.
At FinovateSpring 2011, Lendio showcased its flagship loan marketplace. With an ecosystem of 75+ lenders, the company facilitates an average loan size of around 27,000. Since it was founded in 2011, Lendio has helped close $1.5 billion in financing (half a billion of which closed in the past six months alone) via 70,000 small business loans.
After launching franchising opportunities in 2017, the company announced it would find financing alternatives for small businesses whose loan applications are initially rejected. In a recent interview, when asked “What’s next?” Blake said, “At some point, maybe we’ll either go public or someone will come and give us an offer we can’t refuse. Then, we’ll kind of take a step back and say, ‘Okay, what next?'”
Capital on Tap is partnering with Marqeta, a global modern card issuing platform, to power payment processing for its small business credit card, relied on by over 60,000 UK enterprises, reports Sharon Kimathi of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
Since its launch in 2012, Capital on Tap has competed with the offering of major banks, by offering small businesses a faster and more transparent way to fund their business. Capital on Tap has already provided close to £1 billion in funding to more than 60,000 small businesses across the UK.
“Capital on Tap have shown themselves to be true innovators in the UK fintech space, taking an underserved market like credit for small businesses and building a product that can make a real difference for their customers,” said Ian Johnson, head of European growth at Marqeta.
Founded in Oakland, California in 2010, the Marqeta platform is used by various innovators to drive new modes of commerce through modern card issuing.
“We’re excited to partner with Marqeta,” said David Luck, co-founder and CEO of Capital on Tap.
“We loved the transparency and simplicity of their technology and how future focused and innovative their open-API platform is. They showed an intuitive understanding in how they could support our mission to help small businesses thrive through better access to working capital.”
Marqeta’s European digital banking solution supports instantly issued virtual cards and offers advanced spend controls to engage users and grow card use. It’s platform and APIs are highly configurable and scalable, and allow Marqeta partners to access actionable, real-time transaction data to drive program improvements.
Marqeta CTO Tony Ford presentedDemocratizing Issuer Payment Processing with Just-in-time “JIT” Funding at our developers conference, FinDEVR Silicon Valley, in 2016. During the discussion, Ford explained the anatomy of a payment card authorization, the importance of putting customers into the authorization stream, and the role of open payment APIs.
With more than $376 million funding from investors including Coatue Management and Granite Ventures, Marqeta was founded in 2010 and is headquartered in Oakland, California.
ID R&Dships new version of IDVoice that combines AI and voice technology to increase biometric matching speed and improve enrollment and authentication.
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.
Cloud banking innovator nCino is adding the financial analytics and compliance capability of Salt Lake City, Utah-based Visible Equity to its platform. The acquisition, announced last week, brings enhanced portfolio management and analytic insights to nCino’s Bank Operating System, and is designed to help banks and credit unions better manage risk and meet compliance regulations with regard to fair lending.
Calling Visible Equity “a perfect complement to our vision, mission and company culture,” nCino CEO Pierre Naudé put the news in the broader context of nCino’s long-term commitment to “transform” financial services. “We believe this acquisition will further enable us to execute on that mission,” Naudé said, adding that together Visible Equity and nCino will give clients “greater insights, efficiency, and risk management while furthering their customer relationships.”
In their statement, the companies said that they will continue to market their solutions separately, but added “the two platforms will become fully integrated to provide a seamless client and cloud-based experience.”
With more than 850 financial institution customers, Visible Equity provides analytics, data warehousing, and reporting to enable FIs to better identify and manage risk. The company’s technology blends customer data from loans, applications, deposits, marketing and other sources with advanced analytics to empower banks and credit unions to make accurate, data-driven decisions.
Visible Equity CEO and President Brad Hansen called the acquisition by nCino “the right move for us and a natural fit.” He highlighted the two companies’ shared “passion for innovation” and emphasis on customer success. “A key driver of our desire to become a part of the nCino family is their industry-leading Bank Operating System and ability to support a global client base of enterprise, regional, and community financial institutions,” Hansen said.
nCino made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2017, demoing its Bank Operating System. The technology leverages the Salesforce platform to provide financial institutions with an end-to-end, cloud-based banking solution that features CRM, loan origination, workflow, ECM, business intelligence and reporting all in one secure environment. nCino notes that its client institutions on average have experienced 40% decrease in loan closing times, 92% reduction in servicing costs, and 127% increase in account opening completion rates.
Other recent headlines for nCino include the appointment of Andrew Carriline as Strategic Advisor and the opening of a new office in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The company has announced a slew of new partnerships in 2019, teaming up with Westfield Bank and South State Bank in June; collaborating with S&T Bank in May, Navy Federal Credit Union in April, and both Project B-North and St. Louis Bank in March.
Based in Wilmington, North Carolina, nCino has raised more than $133 million in funding from investors including Salesforce Ventures, Wellington Management, and Insight Partners. The company was founded in 2012.
Seattle, Washington-based Trusted Key will bring its innovations in blockchain-based, digital identity management technology to Workday, courtesy of a recently-announced acquisition. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
“With our new platform, Workday wants to bring credentials into the digital age,” Workday SVP Jon Ruggiero wrote in a blog post discussing the role of credentialization in identity management. He highlighted the way that blockchain technology can help create “a new form of digital credential – one that puts individuals in control of their data, and is portable, authentic, and secure.”
Trusted Key’s digital identity management technology enables financial institutions to leverage credentialization and tokenization to provide a more seamless and secure authentication experience for users. The platform uses strong cryptography and blockchain technology to convert government-issued identity documents into secure, cryptographic credentials and tokens. These tokens can be used to securely establish identity to access both online assets as well as mobile apps, without relying on passwords. The credentials can also be used to authorize transactions and make digital signatures.
A leading cloud core financial management suite provider, Workday will use blockchain-powered credentialing technology to help companies improve their HR operations to more efficiently verify applicant skills and qualifications, as well as to onboard new workers. As Ruggiero noted, digital credentialing does more than just alleviate an otherwise time-consuming, error-prone manual process. It also makes it easier for firms to respond to a changing workforce that is both “more mobile, distributed, and diverse,” and helps companies in tight labor markets move faster and with less friction to attract and onboard their preferred candidates.
Launched in 2005 and headquartered in Pleasanton, California, Workday was featured this year by Gartner as a leader in cloud core financial management suites. This marked the third year in a row the company has been recognized in the category. With customers ranging from Bank of America and Thomson Reuters to Netflix and Denny’s, Workday has processed more than 100 million credentials and 70 million job applications – as well as employment records, certifications, licenses, and more. The publicly-traded company is listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker WDAY and has a market capitalization of $48 billion. Aneel Bhusri is co-founder and CEO.
Trusted Key demonstrated its Digital Identity Platform at FinovateFall 2017. The company is also an alum of our developers conference, winning a Crowd Favorite award at FinDEVr London 2017 for its presentation, Secure Digital Identity.
Founded in 2016 by Prakash Sundaresan and Amit Mital, Trusted Key picked up $3 million funding last spring. The round, led by Founders Co-Op, took the company’s total equity financing to more than $4 million. Trusted Key is the first exit for Kernel Labs, a Seattle startup studio with a focus on machine learning, computer vision, and security.
