Workfusion Brings Robotic Process Automation Global with New Partnership

Workfusion Brings Robotic Process Automation Global with New Partnership
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: WorkFusion

Robotic process automation (RPA) specialist WorkFusion partnered with NEC Corporation this week to bring AI-fueled RPA to global markets.

Through the partnership, NEC will become a reseller of WorkFusion solutions around the world, starting with its home territory of Japan. The timing for the launch of WorkFusion’s RPA tools in Japan aligns with the country’s recent work reform legislation. In April, Japan implemented a reform designed to help improve employee well-being and productivity. Because of this, many firms are turning to automation and AI to minimize the amount of time workers spend doing repetitive work.

“We designed our platform with intelligence and analytics at the core, which allows businesses to overcome the challenges faced not only with manual repetitive work but with legacy RPA technologies, and deliver true business value,” said WorkFusion CEO Alex Lyashok. “We’re thrilled to work hand in hand with NEC to help businesses in Japan and throughout the world experience the transformative power of AI-driven RPA as they work to adapt to a changing workforce.”

As a part of the deal, WorkFusion worked with NEC to create cognitive bots that facilitate specific finance and accounting processes unique to Japan. The two taught WorkFusion’s Intelligent Automation Cloud software a wide range of business tasks. The software leveraged machine learning to become familiar with a wide range of tasks, and eventually began to independently carry out more tasks on its own.

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in New York, WorkFusion has a mission to help firms deal with the rapid rise of AI by reducing the complexity of the technology. The company helps customers exploit the AI opportunity by leveraging products that pair people with the power of robotic software. Specifically, use cases for WorkFusion’s AI-powered RPA include creating a more efficient account opening process, increasing loan booking accuracy, and automating rule-based processes in trade finance.

At FinovateFall 2014 WorkFusion demoed Active Learning Automation in New York. In April of this year the company unveiled its new AI-powered Intelligent Automation Cloud, along with a go-live program, to help companies automate operations beyond RPA or other existing technologies.

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Trulioo Teams with Refinitiv for Financial Inclusion

Trulioo Teams with Refinitiv for Financial Inclusion
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Trulioo

Identity verification company Trulioo announced this week it will be promoting financial inclusion across the globe via a new partnership with financial market data provider Refinitiv.

The two are hoping to foster financial inclusion by promoting access to digital identity solutions. By combining Trulioo’s GlobalGateway solution with Refinitiv’s risk intelligence, banks can verify billions of customers online while remaining compliant with AML and KYC regulations and ultimately reduce fraud.

“The combination of Refinitiv’s trusted data and compliance expertise and Trulioo’s identity verification capabilities and global coverage, will bring modernized KYC processes to thousands of financial institutions around the world, and in turn, help millions of underbanked gain access to the financial services they deserve,” said Stephen Ufford, CEO of Trulioo. “Both organizations share a common mission of supporting financial inclusion through the power of world-class data and technology.”

Trulioo’s GlobalGateway maintains information on more than 5 billion people. Combined with Trulioo’s Digital Identity Network, the GlobalGateway database enables organizations to run identity verification checks on a wide range of the global population.

Founded in 2011, Trulioo leverages 400 data sources to offer verification of 4.5 billion personal identities and 250 businesses in 80+ countries. The Canada-based company also offers a data exchange platform that allows data partners to provide access to consumer data for electronic identity verification purposes, allowing them to set bid prices for electronic ID verification on a region-by-region basis.

At FinovateSpring 2019, Trulioo’s Head of Growth, Anatoly Kvitnitsky, demonstrated GlobalGateway’s instant onboarding with EmbedID. EmbedID enables businesses to query Trulioo’s GlobalGateway API to instantly verify customers in multiple markets by embedding a snippet of code to their website.

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Mastercard’s Mobile Payments Service Pay by Bank Teams up with Yoyo

Mastercard’s Mobile Payments Service Pay by Bank Teams up with Yoyo
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: MasterCard, Yoyo

A new partnership between U.K.-based payment and loyalty marketing platform Yoyo and Mastercard’s mobile payment service, Pay by Bank (PbBa), will bring a new, secure and fast payment option – and merchant-specific, personalized rewards – to high street retail.

The new offering is expected for later in the year for both retail and bank customers. It will enable users to make transactions using Pay by Bank in physical stores, and earn retail specific loyalty, rewards, and other personalized offers.

“We are delighted to be working with Mastercard and Pay by Bank app,” Yoyo CEO Michael Rolph said. “We’ve always believed that adding both security and value to the payments process is crucial for the future of bricks and mortar retail, and this partnership is going to significantly enhance the customer experience for PbBa users.”

Pay by Bank was developed by Mastercard’s Vocalink division and enables consumers to make payments from their bank account via their mobile banking app without requiring additional password verification. Launched in 2016, the app offers bank grade security which, combined with Yoyo’s double tokenization technology, keeps payment data and user identity protected.

“The combined Yoyo and Pay by Bank app proposition will provide both customers and retailers with added speed and security at the point of sale,” Rolph said, “as well as an omnichannel payment and loyalty experience that is unrivaled in the market.”

With more than 1.5 million users – including 750,000+ active monthly users – and processing three million transactions a month, Yoyo demonstrated its retailer-specific bank card loyalty offering at FinovateEurope earlier this year. Just a few weeks ago the company announced that former Mastercard executive David Yates would join Yoyo as chairman.

In April, the company partnered with PAUL UK to help the French bakery launch its first mobile payments and loyalty app. Yoyo began 2019 teaming up with SOHO Coffee to build a payments and loyalty solution for the artisan coffee chain.

Founded in 2013, Yoyo has raised $60.3 million in funding. SOSV and Hard Yaka are among the company’s investors.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Bpm'online, Digital Onboarding, Featurespace, Gremln, INSIDE Secure, iProov, Jumio, MasterCard, Neener Analytics, OneSpan, SplitIt, Trulioo, Voleo, wipro, WorkFusion, Yoyo

On Finovate.com

  • Mastercard’s Mobile Payment Service Pay by Bank Teams Up with Yoyo.
  • Trulioo Teams with Refinitiv for Financial Inclusion.
  • Workfusion Brings Robotic Process Automation Global with New Partnership.
  • OneSpan Unveils its Secure Agreement Automation Solution.

Around the web

  • Splitit (formerly PayItSimple) announces partnership with Hong Kong-based EFTPay.
  • bpm’online launches 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.
  • Featurespace to power transaction monitoring for Permanent TSB.
  • Jumio wins 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.

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Linxo Launches Real-Time Payment Card

Linxo Launches Real-Time Payment Card
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: linxo

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.

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The Newest Trends in Middle Eastern Fintech

The Newest Trends in Middle Eastern Fintech
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: accelerator

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.

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Tink Secures Strategic Investment from PayPal

Tink Secures Strategic Investment from PayPal
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, PayPal, Tink

PayPal has joined Team Tink.

Swedish open banking solution provider Tink announced 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 Braintree presented Making 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.

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InComm Buys Hallmark Cards Subsidiary

InComm Buys Hallmark Cards Subsidiary
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: InComm, Mergers & Acquisitions

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.

InComm offers more than 500,000 points of retail distribution with 1,000+ brand partners in more than 30 countries. The company debuted CorFire Mobile Commerce at FinovateFall 2011. More recently, InComm showed off the Cashtie API at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2014. In May, the company expanded into wearables by making its MyVanilla Prepaid Mastercard compatible with Fitbit Pay and Garmin Pay.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, Currency Cloud, InComm, linxo, PayPal, Signicat, SplitIt, Tink, Trulioo, VISA

On Finovate.com

  • Tink Secures Strategic Investment from PayPal.
  • InComm Buys Hallmark Cards Subsidiary.

Around the web

  • ACI Worldwide makes strategic investment in Indian digital payments company Mindgate Solutions.
  • Currencycloud and VISA forge partnership to fuel innovation in cross-border and travel payments.
  • Trulioo partners with Refinitiv to improve access to digital identity solutions.
  • German open digital identity scheme yes.com to integrate into Signicat’s Digital Identity Platform.
  • Splitit appoints 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.

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Webinar: Don’t Disrupt – Avoiding the Dangers of Transformation

Webinar: Don’t Disrupt – Avoiding the Dangers of Transformation
By Charlie Burgess Posted on
Categories: Finovate Webinar

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

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BeSmartee Unveils New Mortgage TPO Platform

BeSmartee Unveils New Mortgage TPO Platform
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BeSmartee

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.

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Temenos Teams Up with Eurobank, Bank of Khyber

Temenos Teams Up with Eurobank, Bank of Khyber
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Temenos

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.

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