Finovate is part of the Informa Connect Division of Informa PLC
This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.
Around the web
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.
Silicon Valley-based wealthtech player Personal Capital is living up to its name as it has raised $50 million in a Series F funding round led by IGM Financial, reports Antony Peyton of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
The firm is in a personable mood as it has recently surpassed $8.5 billion in assets under management and two million registered users on its platform, which tracks more than $650 billion in aggregated account value.
The company didn’t go into specifics, but the funding will be used for growth, enhance its technology platform, and invest in partnerships.
“We have stayed laser focused on our mission of building a business that uses the ideal combination of technology and advisors to help Americans achieve clarity and confidence in their financial lives,” said Jay Shah, CEO of Personal Capital.
In terms of details, it has launched Smart Withdrawal, a personalized and interactive withdrawal strategy planner for retirement.
The company also announced a partnership with Alight Solutions and AllianceBernstein to create WealthSpark that will provide American workers with insights to their finances through Personal Capital’s technology.
Personal Capital is headquartered in Redwood City with hubs in San Francisco, Denver, Dallas, and Atlanta. It was founded in 2009.
IGM Financial is a Canadian personal financial services company, with approximately $154 billion in total assets under management. Its activities are carried out principally through IG Wealth Management, Mackenzie Investments and Investment Planning Counsel.
Personal Capital demonstrated the One Click Investment Proposals feature of its platform at FinovateSpring 2014. The company is also a veteran of our developers conferences, most recently providing a presentation titled Data-Driven Account Opening at FinDEVr Silicon Valley in 2016.
FinovateEurope 2019 kicks off this week here in London, U.K. And for the second year in a row, FinovateEurope has a new home in England: London’s famous Tobacco Dock. We’re hoping that you’ll be able to join us this week for what promises to be three days (plus an additional summit day on Friday) of innovative fintech demos, insightful keynotes, and deep dive breakout sessions.
To help ensure you make the most of the event, here are a few last minute notes and need-to-knows.
Registration for FinovateEurope is still open! If you haven’t picked up your ticket, run – don’t walk – to our registration page to make sure you don’t miss a minute of this year’s event. Group, government, and startup discounts are available. Contact us at [email protected] for information on government and regulatory entity discounts. For more information on startup discounts, email us at [email protected].
FinovateEurope moves to London’s Tobacco Dock this year. Located in London’s growing enterprise zone and just one stop on the DLR from Bank, Tobacco Dock is close to the Tower of London and only a few kilometers from Tech City and London’s Financial District. Tobacco Dock is on Wapping Lane, St. Katharine’s & Wapping, London, E1W 2SF.
Registration on Tuesday morning begins at 0800, and the first demo starts at 0925. Both coffee and a continental breakfast will be provided, so be sure to arrive a little early, pick up some refreshments, and join us in the main hall.
On Thursday, registration begins at 0800, with our Chairman’s opening remarks – courtesy of Dave Birch, Global Ambassador with Consult Hyperion – starting at 0840, and our opening keynote beginning at 0845 – featuring Tan Le, founder and CEO of EMOTIV. On Friday, registration begins at 0815, with opening remarks from our Chairs begin at 0900. Opening keynotes begin at 0910 for the Open Banking Summit and at 0915 for the AI Summit.
Both Tuesday and Wednesday will feature four live demo sessions each for a total of 64 scheduled demos. Get to know our demoing companies ahead of time via our FinovateEurope 2019 demos page, and then learn a little more about them in our FinovateEurope 2019 Sneak Peek series.
On Thursday, we bring the experts to the stage to discuss some of the most important technology trends in fintech. We will begin with an opening address and opening keynote, and then proceed to a variety of main stage addresses and panels on topics including e-commerce, innovation and collaboration, and digital transformation. Thursday will also feature streams on subjects such as challenger banks, blockchain technology, the the democratization of data, and the role of augmented intelligence in chatbot technology.
And remember we will also hold a special Summit Day on Friday with two streams: one dedicated to Open Banking, and the other focused on AI. For more information on how to attend our Friday Summit Day, check out our registration page. Discounts are available for attendees purchasing tickets to all four days of FinovateEurope 2019.
As you can see, there’s a whole lot going on at FinovateEurope this year. We look forward to seeing you this week here in London at the Tobacco Dock!
Have a question about FinovateEurope? Check out the FAQ section on our FinovateEurope 2019 page, or send us an email at [email protected].
On Finovate.com
Around the web
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.
New York Community Bancorp will move to Fiserv’s DNA core platform to improve its retail banking and commercial lending services, reports Antony Peyton of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
The bank, which has $51.2 billion in assets, will use an integrated suite of digital banking and payment solutions. It will also move from in-house processing to an application service provider (ASP) model hosted by Fiserv.
It is understood the new tech will replace the legacy Miser solution from Fiserv’s rival FIS.
Barbara Tosi-Renna, assistant chief operating officer, New York Community Bancorp, said: “We chose Fiserv because its solutions, integration and expertise put us in the strongest position to succeed in our fast-changing marketplace.”
The bank will add solutions from Fiserv including Commercial Center for commercial cash management and business banking, and the open, real-time Dovetail Payments Platform (paytech provider Dovetail was acquired by Fiserv in 2017).
It also will move existing in-house solutions including the Corillian Online and Mobiliti digital banking solutions from Fiserv to the bank’s new outsourced environment.
New York Community Bank is the “leading producer of multi-family loans” in New York City and the largest regional bank headquartered in New York by assets.
The bank has customers in New York, New Jersey, Florida, Ohio, and Arizona through a network of more than 250 branches.
Meanwhile, Fiserv has been busy. As usual.
Just last month, Banco CTT, one of Portugal’s newest banks, selected Fiserv to enable anti-money laundering (AML) capabilities.
In addition, and a much bigger deal, Fiserv revealed it will acquire First Data in an all-stock transaction of $22 billion.
Ahead of FinovateEurope in London next week, we talked with Tobias Christen, CEO of Zurich, Switzerland-based DSwiss, about his company and its flagship digital safe technology that supports the long-term secure, safe-keeping of personal files and passwords.
DSwiss was founded in 2008 and most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2018.
Finovate: Banks offer an adapted version of your digital safe directly from their online banking portals. But why would people want to save passwords and files with their bank?
Tobias Christen: A recent PwC-survey concluded that banks are amongst the most trusted organizations when it comes to privacy and cybersecurity, outranking healthcare providers, nonprofits, and online retailers. This only confirms our own experience: Increasingly, people are looking for a trusted partner that can help them keep important data safe. Banks are really well-positioned to act as that partner because of their long history as custodians of wealth.
The study also revealed that only 10% of consumers feel they have complete control over their personal information. In my opinion, that’s because they started out making the mistake of saving everything with companies whose business model was to sell data. There’s nothing wrong with using social media, iCloud or Google Docs but we’re seeing a growing understanding that not all data is made equal. Some documents are worthy of a superior protection – copies of ID papers, financial documents and passwords for example – and people are really looking for a safe alternative to store such data.
This is where a digital version of the bank safe seems like a very logical place to go. People feel safer storing essential data here because the business model of banks is not based on selling customer data but rather on their ability to keep such assets safe.
Finovate: How do you keep up with consumer demands and ensure that the digital safe stays relevant to them?
Christen: We’ve had a two string approach to that. On the one hand, we develop and market our own B2C solution called SecureSafe, which has more than 1 million users. Being behind our own B2C solution gives us direct access to highly valuable user feedback. Due to the popularity of such services as Dropbox, SecureSafe users started asking for more advanced file sharing and sync capabilities. We responded with secure sharing and encrypted sync functionality.
On the other hand, we’ve established a highly collaborative approach to the digital safe. Since our first private and cantonal bank clients joined us in 2009, DSwiss experts have joined forces with banks to develop strategic features that fit their particular needs. In 2011, we started to work on a patented single sign-on technology to allow for smooth integration of digital safes in online bank portals. eDelivery for the safe transfer of bank documents directly to clients’ safes followed soon after. After entering our first collaboration with a major bank in 2015, we’ve been able to speed up the collaborative product innovation.
Our latest innovation combines original meta-data that is passed along with documents (or requests) and data that is extracted with rule-based and machine-learning-based algorithms. This might sound very technical, but at Finovate London 2019 we’ll show you how it makes onboarding for a mortgage a lot faster and easier for bank clients. Ultimately, this feature makes any interaction between bank advisor and end-client user-centric. This fosters customer loyalty and helps a bank stand out to prospect clients.
Finovate: How do you keep up with security demands from your bank clients?
Christen: Banks have always been focused on a particularly high level of security and are understandably cautious when it comes to collaborating with fintechs. However, DSwiss was built on the principles of privacy by design from the get-go. We’ve employed zero knowledge architecture, double encryption and triple data redundancy since the very beginning. In particular, our zero knowledge architecture takes the confidentiality protection, which banks generally implement, to the next level. Throughout the years, we’ve been so fortunate as to work with banks of all sizes, both private and retail. That has enabled us to build up a lot of experience with the specific regulations that concern banks, such as GDPR.
Finovate: According to you, what are the biggest challenges to online security and privacy protection today?
Christen: In the old days, cyber criminals were quite often isolated individuals with limited financial resources. They were principally motivated by curiosity, pride or revenge. Today, the offenders are mostly motivated by economical perspectives and they are often engaged by governments. This means that we increasingly see well-organized and well-founded groups at work.
Watch DSwiss and dozens of other innovative fintech companies demonstrate their latest technologies live at FinovateEurope 2019, 12-14 February at the Tobacco Dock in London, U.K. For more information, including how to buy your ticket and save your spot, visit our registration page today.
Around the web
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.
Data is a valuable asset to your business – driving competitive advantage and transforming the customer experience. However, most organizations are unable to leverage it.
Join us on Thursday, March 14th for a case study on Using Smart Technologies to Modernize and Transform the Customer Experience in Banking. Norman Wren, former Director of Technology and Operations at Santander, and Dave Jones, Vice President of Product & Industry Marketing at Nuxeo, will show how to defuse data issues by using smart technologies like AI, micro-services, and modern content services.
In our latest Finovate webinar, Wren and Jones will discuss real world examples of practical business applications and solutions that can help you:
• Leverage existing data systems
• Drive value from unstructured data
• Have flexible, yet secure, and auditable data
• Remove obsolescence, reduce costs, and maintain compliance
Register today to learn how to modernize the customer experience in banking with smart technology and turn your data into a valuable asset.
Featuring:
Norman Wren, Financial Services Consultant; Former Director of Technology and Operations, Santander
Wren is a senior financial services executive with over 20 years’ experience operating at the board level, in complex and challenging regulated organizations. He has a wealth of experience in leading transformational change and delivering digital transformation projects for global companies including Santander, AXA, and Barclays and consulting with Anderson Consulting.
Dave Jones, Vice President of Product & Industry Marketing, Nuxeo
Jones is VP of Product Marketing for Content Services at Nuxeo. He is responsible for developing the global go-to-market strategy and execution plan for Nuxeo’s modern enterprise Content Services Platform.
The keynote addresses at Finovate conferences are more than just an opportunity to catch up on the coolest conversations in fintech.
From author Tim Urban, who delivered a thrilling presentation on AI and the prospects for superintelligence, to 
futurist Rohit Talwar who discussed the relationship between AI and the future of work, our keynotes help put fintech in the larger context of some of the most impactful technological trends of our time.
This year at FinovateEurope will be no exception. For our opening keynote, we will feature Tan Le, founder and CEO of EMOTIV, for a conversation on artificial 
intelligence, brain augmentation, and more that you won’t want to miss.
Check out this excerpt from her TedGlobal presentation from 2010.
Communication between people, on the other hand, is far more complex and a lot more interesting because we take into account so much more than what is explicitly expressed. We observe facial expressions, body language, and we can intuit feelings and emotions from our dialogue with one another. This actually forms a large part of our decision-making process.
Our vision is to introduce this whole new realm of human interaction into human-computer interaction so that computers can understand not only what you direct it to do, but it can also respond to your facial expressions and emotional experiences. And what better way to do this than by interpreting the signals naturally produced by our brain, our center for control and experience.
EMOTIV is a bio-informatics and technology firm, founded in 2011 in Australia and currently headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company develops and manufacturers wearable electroencephalogy (EEG) products designed for a variety of use cases: from enhancing performance and well-being to supporting brain controlled technologies to helping businesses conduct consumer research.
In her presentation at FinovateEurope next week, The NeuroGeneration – How the New Era in Brain Augmentation is Revolutionizing the Way You Think, Work, Lead, and Live, Le will explain how automation and AI can serve as allies en route to a new, extended, augmented human organism.
To catch Le’s presentation – and several more insightful takes on the role of technology in our lives – be sure to join us at FinovateEurope 2019 next week at London’s Tobacco Dock. For more information, including how to pick up your ticket and reserve your spot, visit our registration page today.
Less than a week away from its return to the Finovate stage, open banking platform Tink has raised $63 million (€56 million) in new funding. The investment, the largest for the Stockholm, Sweden-based fintech, was led by Insight Venture Partners and will help power the company’s growth plans.
Also participating in the Series C were current investors Sunstone, SEB, Nordea Ventures, and ABN AMRO Digital Impact Fund. New investors Christian Clausen, former Chair of the European Banking Federation, and Nikolay Storonsky, founder of fellow Finovate alum, Revolut, were involved in the round, as well.
“This funding round allows us to accelerate our European roll-out but also invest further in our data services,” Tink co-founder and CEO Daniel Kjellén said. “As Europe gradually embraces open banking, our platform has proved to be its rails and brains – delivering the technology that makes it possible.”
Kjellén also credited the company’s success to being “the first platform provider to combine Account Aggregation and Payment Initiation, the scale of our connectivity and our smart data products that make it all understandable.”
In addition to the funding news, Tink also announced that it is live in five new markets in Europe, making it possible for developers in the Nordics, the U.K., Austria, Germany, Belgium, and Spain to get access to financial data via Tink’s account aggregation API. The company said it plans to add four more offices this year to accommodate growth, doubling its European workforce to “around 300,” and hopes to have a presence in 20 markets by the end of 2019.
Calling Tink a “category leader” in the field of financial services API providers, Insight Venture Partners Managing Director Teddie Wardi praised the company’s “impressive list of current customers in both fintech and traditional banking” and said Tink was “well positioned” for continued expansion in Europe. “We are excited to welcome Tink into our portfolio and look forward to helping the company drive continued growth,” Wardi said.
Tink demonstrated its platform, which combines aggregation, account information, and payment initiation services to create a virtual banking experience in line with PSD2 regulations, at FinovateEurope 2017, winning Best of Show. Founded in 2012, the company launched its developer platform last spring to make it easier for developers to take advantage of its Account Aggregation and Categorization solutions. Tink also announced a partnership with BNP Paribas Fortis in the first half of 2018, integrating its aggregation, PFM, and payment initiation technology into the bank’s mobile app.
Join Tink as it demonstrates its latest technology live on the Finovate stage next week at FinovateEurope. For more information, including how to get your ticket and save your spot, visit our registration page today.
In a conscious move, BBVA’s Propel Venture Partners has invested into psychology and machine learning (ML) tie-up business DataSine, reports Antony Peyton of Fintech Futures (Finovate’s sister publication).
The bank says it has co-led the latest funding round of $5.2 million (£4 million). BBVA and DataSine do not reveal the other names and have been contacted for more details.
The funding will be used to help DataSine launch a new content personalization platform called Pomegranate.
This is described as a collaborative artificial intelligence (AI) powered campaign platform that “tailors content to personality specific to the customer”.
DataSine founder and CEO Igor Volzhanin said: “I launched DataSine after moving to London to do a PhD in Psychology because I believed that personality can help companies understand their customers as a whole, which empowers them to truly connect with customers through every interaction, and move beyond traditional focus of click optimization.”
The platform works by applying ML to behavioral data that companies already collect to build customer profiles, and provides an AI-powered content editing platform to guide marketers in tailoring a range of content elements, including words and images.
DataSine is entering the SME market through the launch of Pomegranate in March. Pomegranate already integrates with HubSpot and MailChimp, and the company is looking to launch further integrations throughout the year.
DataSine launched in 2015 and has worked with various companies from across Europe, including BNP Paribas and Tinkoff Bank.
For BBVA, it likes to invest in a wide range of firms. Call it hedging your bets or diversification – the choice is yours.
Just last month, it was one of the big names in India-based investment app Groww’s $6.2 million funding round.
Headquartered in London, DataSine demonstrated its Pomegranate personality profile platform at FinovateEurope 2018.