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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Mastercard’s Mobile Payment Service Pay by Bank Teams Up with Yoyo.
TruliooTeams with Refinitiv for Financial Inclusion.
WorkfusionBrings Robotic Process Automation Global with New Partnership.
OneSpanUnveils its Secure Agreement Automation Solution.
Around the web
Splitit (formerly PayItSimple) announces partnership with Hong Kong-based EFTPay.
bpm’onlinelaunches its new tool for collaborative process design, bpm’online Studio Free.
Wipro to acquire digital engineering and manufacturing solutions firm, International TechneGroup Inc. (ITI).
Business Cloud UK interviews Andrew Bud, CEO and founder of Best of Show winner, iProov.
Four Finovate alums – Digital Onboarding, Gremlin Social, Voleo, and Neener Analytics – earn spots in the fourth Venture Center FinTech Accelerator program sponsored by Fidelity Information Services.
Inside Secure ships Whitebox Designer, a new software security tool.
Featurespaceto power transaction monitoring for Permanent TSB.
Jumiowins the 2019 Fortress Cyber Security Award for Authentication and Identity from the Business Intelligence Group.
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.
Personal finance startup Linxo is launching its first payment card. The new, Visa-branded card will be available starting next year.
Linxo is positioning the card as a “real-time” payment card. This means that consumers will see instant notifications after they make a payment. Users will be able to manage their budget in real-time, since the expense will be immediately visible in the app.
“We are seeing users’ practices evolving quickly in two strong directions: firstly, the requirement for a very good user experience, and, secondly, the introduction of real-time as a new payment standard,” said Bruno Van Haetsdaele, Linxo cofounder. “So, we thought to ourselves: how can we offer the best money management experience and the best payment experience?”
Founded in 2010 and headquartered in France, Linxo offers its 2.8 million users a personal financial management app that aggregates all of their spending information across accounts. The app not only allows users to view and analyze their spending, it also helps them manage their finances by enabling them to transfer funds without logging into their bank account.
Linxo’s app will work in tandem with the new payment card by categorizing and monitoring expenses, offering a view of all the user’s accounts, and providing a budget forecast that predicts the user’s future balance based on their current spending. Some features, such as the budget forecast, are only available with Linxo Premium, a service available for $34 (€29.99) or $5 (€4.49) per month.
In addition to teaming up with Visa, Linxo is partnering with Natixis Payments, which will help the company build out the payment management system. Linxo selected Natixis Payments because it can help the company move the new payment card to market quickly. “We were attracted by the state-of-the-art offer and rapidity provided by the Xpollens solution which allows for the creation of a first card and payment account in just 100 days,” explained Van Haetsdaele. “On this basis, we can then co-build the best money and payment management mobile solution directly with our users. Our aim is to focus on our expertise: creating the best user experience.”
Van Haetsdaele demoed Linxo at the first FinovateEurope conference, which was held in 2011. The company has received a total of $26.2 million in funding, most recently in a 2017 venture round.
There are two great ways to get a sense of the newest regional trends in Middle Eastern fintech: 1) attend industry conferences 2) talk to accelerators. We’re 100% up-to-date on the first piece (FinovateMiddleEast is taking place November 20 and 21 in Dubai). And as far as accelerators go, we recently caught up with one of the newest fintech accelerators in the region, the DIFC FinTech Hive, to get a sense of the local fintech trends.
The Fintech Hive recently clued us in on what trends its mentorship partners in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia are currently interested in. The following are the top categories:
Credit scoring
Customer acquisition
Onboarding
Security
Data analytics
Additionally, the mentorship partners want to focus on insurtech-specific trends, including:
Data aggregation
Connectivity
Customer journey
This list comes from the accelerator’s 21 mentorship partners, which include financial institutions, insurance firms, and strategic partners. Specifically, the group’s partners include Finablr, Standard Chartered, Visa, AXA Gulf, AIG, Cigna Insurance Middle East S.A.L., and MetLife.
If you’re a startup interested in participating in the DIFC Fintech Hive accelerator, be sure to submit your application by June 10 for the next three-month program, which begins this September.
Swedish open banking solution provider Tinkannounced today that PayPal is its latest investor and customer. In a blog post sharing the news, the Swedish company called the investment and partnership a “major vote of confidence in our tech and an indicator of the strength of the open banking movement in Europe.”
Today’s investment from PayPal adds $11.2 million (€10 million) to Tink’s capital, boosting the fintech’s funding total to more than $105 million. As Tink’s newest partner, the payments giant plans to leverage Tink’s account aggregation technology to enable its European customers to connect their bank accounts to their PayPal accounts.
“It’s a testament to the versatility of our technology,” the company wrote on its blog on Tuesday, “it can be implemented to improve a range of use cases for businesses big and small.”
Offering account aggregation and payment initiation services via a single, API integration – as well as data enrichment and categorization and PFM services – Tink empowers fintechs to maximize the opportunities of open banking. More than 1,400 developers are using Tink’s API platform to access financial data from hundreds of banks and financial institutions in markets across Europe. This access is paving the way for what the company called “the next generation of financial services.”
VP of global markets and partnerships for PayPal, Jennifer Marriner echoed Tink’s enthusiasm for the transformative potential of open banking. “Tink has developed the infrastructure and data services for this new financial world – and we’re excited to work together to continue to democratize financial services,” she said.
Today’s funding will help drive Tink’s continued expansion across Europe. In recent months, the fintech has partnered with NatWest in the U.K., Mash in Finland, and Lunar Way in Denmark. The company began the year with both a big funding – picking up $63 million (€56 million) in a round led by Insight Venture Partners – and a big expansion, going live in five new European markets. Tink demonstrated its API platform at FinovateEurope earlier this year. Founded in 2012, the company has 150 employees and 500,000 users of its PFM app.
PayPal and BraintreepresentedMaking Payments Fun at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, in 2014. PayPal also demonstrated its Instant Account Creation solution at FinovateEurope 2012. Trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol PYPL, PayPal has a market capitalization of $127 billion. The San Jose, California-based company was founded in 1998.
Prepaid payments company InComm has purchased Hallmark Business Connections, a subsidiary of Hallmark Cards that provides employee incentive programs. Terms of the deal were undisclosed.
Hallmark built Hallmark Business Connections as its business relationships unit. The subsidiary offers physical and digital greeting cards to promote employee engagement to celebrate career milestones, company achievements, workplace excellence, and personal growth. Hallmark Business Connections also sells customer engagement cards such as those for direct marketing, customer care, and member outreach.
Hallmark Business Connections customers, which include Wells Fargo, State Farm, and Zappos, span a range of industries. The company is headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, with offices in Minneapolis and Duluth, Minnesota.
“Hallmark Business Connections has built on the iconic Hallmark greeting card brand to empower companies with the means to create personalized incentive programs that recognize employees for dedication to their organization,” said Brooks Smith, CEO of InComm. “By combining this business with InComm’s existing loyalty and incentives solutions, we are able to offer an unprecedented level of technology and expertise that will help companies create the most engaging incentive programs possible.”
This is InComm’s ninth acquisition after buying digital lottery company Linq3 Technologies in March. The purchase helps solidify the Atlanta-based company’s expansion from stored value reward cards into more comprehensive incentives programs.
ACI Worldwidemakes strategic investment in Indian digital payments company Mindgate Solutions.
Currencycloud and VISAforge partnership to fuel innovation in cross-border and travel payments.
Trulioopartners with Refinitiv to improve access to digital identity solutions.
German open digital identity scheme yes.com to integrate into Signicat’sDigital Identity Platform.
Splititappoints former Intuit and PayPal Exec to lead North American operations.
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.
Challenger banks shouldn’t stand a chance. Incumbent banks have tens of millions of customer relationships, decades of risk-management experience, and petabytes of data.
Yet incumbent banks struggle to adapt to rising customer expectations quickly enough. This has encouraged well-funded, design-led, new market entrants to pose serious competitive threats. Incumbents struggle with rapid change because of the legacy systems, silos, and data volumes that exceed human capacity to analyze them.
In pursuit of disruptive innovations, banks have embarked on digital transformation programs and big data projects. But the low odds for success for these initiatives make them dangerous. Seventy percent of digital transformations fail, according to McKinsey. And 60% of big data projects fail, according to Gartner. These are investments with high risks and mostly uncertain return.
Watch this webinar, to learn about a new approach. You will learn how to: • Leverage legacy systems and understand data across systems and silos • Turn inhuman amounts of data into information for human decision-makers • Reduce the cognitive burden on employees so they can use their unique skills • Increase revenue and cost productivity while reducing risk • Scale solutions with natural language processing and machine learning
Featuring:
John Finneran Senior Product Marketing Manager, Financial Services Sinequa
Finneran is the Senior Product Marketing Manager, Financial Services at Sinequa. He is responsible for go-to-market strategy and designing industry-specific use cases and solutions. Sinequa helps financial institutions become information driven. The platform extracts real-time relevant information and insights from large amounts of data across all formats. R
Mortgagetech innovator BeSmartee, which demonstrated its Smart Mortgage advanced origination technology at FinovateSpring 2017, announced late last week that its new automated loan submission offering is now available for wholesale lenders and their third-party originators (TPO).
The BeSmartee Wholesale Mortgage TPO Platform provides an automated, centralized submission portal originators can use to submit borrower applications and related documentation. Once this simple, guided process is completed, the third-party originator will be automatically directed to the MLO Command Center where they can work with borrowers in real-time to ensure loan requirements are met. This includes tasks such as editing files and running pricing to lock or float the interest rates.
“We’ve worked side by side with our wholesale lender clients for over two years to create the BeSmartee Wholesale Mortgage TPO platform,” BeSmartee co-founder Arvin Sahakian explained. “(The solution is) a truly ideal loan submission portal (that) not only meets the needs of our respective wholesale lender clients, but also their valued TPO network of brokers.”
BeSmartee’s new offering can also be paired with the company’s mortgage POS technology. This provides an even more seamless, fully-automated application, collection, and submission process that removes the need for the third-party originator to be involved in file submission. The TPO platform also gives loan originators the ability to access more than 165 partner software integrations including mortgage pricing engine tools, automated underwriting systems (AUS), and electronic signature solutions.
Founded in 2008 and based in Huntington Beach, California, BeSmartee made its Finovate debut two years ago at FinovateSpring 2017. Last fall, the company announced that it had integrated with Fannie Mae’s Desktop Underwriter system to further automate and streamline loan originations. With more than 25,000 applications a month processed via its platforms, BeSmartee announced both an integration with fellow Finovate alum Equifax and a partnership with mobile platform designer LoanFuel last summer.
Eurobank Group is to overhaul its core and digital banking with Temenos’T24 Transact and T24 Infinity, reports Martin Whybrow of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
The project will cover the group’s international operations. It will start in Cyprus, with the intention of swiftly moving on to Eurobank Private Bank Luxemburg, with Eurobank Bulgaria AD (Postbank) and Eurobank AD Beograd (Serbia) also on the roadmap.
The project comprises a full IT renovation program. The bank has also taken Temenos’ WealthSuite for Cyprus and Luxembourg, with the aim of reducing time-to-market for new products and services and improving automation of its private banking operations.
Also in the mix is Temenos Analytics to support Eurobank’s marketing campaigns. Development tools, which will use the T24 APIs, are intended to speed up building and deploying applications around the core.
In terms of the initial project in Cyprus, Stavros Ioannou, deputy CEO and group COO, Eurobank, said: “We look forward to this cooperation, as this is the first stage in the wider implementation of Temenos banking software across the group.” He described the project as supporting the bank’s “vital digital transformation journey” which is intended to shape “advanced relationships” and provide customers with “high quality service and a vast variety of innovative and tailor made products.”
The bank currently uses a range of legacy international and Greek packages, including Oracle FSS’s Flexcube in Serbia and CSoft’s VCSBank++ in Bulgaria, FinTech Futures understands. The holding group is Greece-based EFG Eurobank Ergasias.
Founded in 1993 and headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, Temenos participated in our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, in 2015. The company is also an alum of our Finovate conferences, demonstrating its Connect Mobile Banking solution at FinovateEurope – also in 2015.
In other Temenos news, the company announced a partnership with Pakistan-based Bank of Khyber, which will also deploy Temenos’ T24 Transact and Infinity solutions.
National Data Consultants (NDC), Temenos’ partner in the region, was selected as the system integrator for the project.
Government-owned Bank of Khyber embarked on new core banking software search in 2018, as reported by FinTech Futures, looking for new tech to support its network of 166 domestic branches (including 84 Islamic banking branches).
Temenos and NDC were selected “after a thorough due diligence process,” according to Muhammad Azfar Latif, CIO, Bank of Khyber.
“We hope to turn this bank as a model for other industry players locally and internationally,” he said.
Saif Ul Islam, MD and CEO, Bank of Khyber, believes the new technology will enable the bank “to have a strong footing on the digital platforms.” It also meets “the bank’s strategic long-term plans in increasing operational efficiency,” he added.
Jean-Paul Mergeai, MD, Temenos Middle East and Africa, said Bank of Khyber has become the thirteenth bank in Pakistan to join the vendor’s client list. Other T24 Transact users in the country include Khushhali Bank, State Bank of Pakistan, Silkbank, Soneri Bank, and Meezan Bank.
At every Finovate, we welcome four leading fintech research analysts to take the stage for seven minutes each to present key opportunities for the future. Take a look back on our most recent set from FinovateSpring 2019 featuring Michelle Evans, Global Head of Digital Consumer Research at Euromonitor International; Jacob Jegher, Senior Vice President, Banking Head of Strategy, Javelin Strategy and Research; Dan Latimore, Senior Vice President, Banking Group, Celent; and Paul Berg, Senior Managing Consultant, Gallup.
Early booking for FinovateSpring 2020 is also now open! Book your tickets now at the lowest possible price!
Identitii is now a ‘Co-Sell Ready’ partner for Microsoft.
Feedzailaunches tools to help banks offer account opening solutions with fraud prevention.
Bankingblocks leveragesFive Degrees’Matrix solution as its digital core banking platform.
Eurobank Group selectsTemenos‘ T24 Transact for its subsidiaries.
InsuritasLaunches Tucson Federal Insurance Agency for Tucson FCU.
Former Mastercard executive David Yates joinsYoyo as chairman.
AlphaPointnames co-founder Igor Telyatnikov as its new CEO.
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.
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.
Middle East and Northern Africa
SoFiannounces $500 million investment led by Qatar.
Emirates NBD to leverage technology from Amazon Web Services to build an AI-enabled “bank of the future”.
New partnership between Turkey’s Isbank and Yandex.Checkout to support transactions in rubles for Russians shopping online in Turkey.
Central and Southern Asia
Strandsstrikes digital banking deal with India’s Tech Mahindra.
BankBazaar to offer financing options for customers of furniture and home products marketplace Pepperfry.
Amitabh Kant, CEO of Niti Aayog, a premier think tank of the Indian government, sees a $31 billion Indian fintech market by 2020.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Brazilian exchange brokerage, Frente Corretora de Cambio, goes live with cross-border remittance solution powered by Ripple technology.
World Finance features Sao Paulo among its Top 5 Emerging Fintech Hubs.
IMFBlog looks at how fintech can lower remittance costs in Latin America.
Asia-Pacific
The central bank of Indonesia, Bank Indonesia, unveils its Quick Response Indonesia Standard (QRIS), a new QR code system.
Mastercard and UOB partner to introduce the UOB Retail Business Metal Card designed for APAC SMEs.
B2B cross border payments company TransferMate picks up payment license in Singapore.
