Finovate Global: Fintech News from the Periphery

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Bambu, Finovate Global, Flywire, Neener Analytics, Personetics, Revolut, Turnkey Lender

As Finovate goes increasingly global, so does our coverage of financial technology. Finovate Global: Fintech News from the Periphery is our weekly look at fintech innovation in developing economies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe.

Asia

  • Singapore Business Review names Turnkey Lender and Bambu among Singapore’s hottest startups.
  • Citi introduces Facebook Messenger bot in Singapore as initial stage of wider worldwide rollout. (link)
  • Revolut founder and CEO Nikolay Storonsky discusses plans for APAC expansion with TechWireAsia.

Africa

  • Flywire and Flutterwave partner on cross-border payments & receivables in Nigeria.
  • Africa-based fintechs picked up almost one third of all Venture funding in Africa in 2017, according to a report from Disrupt Africa.
  • Village Capital Fintech Africa Cohort 2018 lists its incoming class of 12 startups.

MENA

  • Fintech Circle and Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) to launch fintech education courses.
  • Gulf News Banking takes a look at the digitization of the fintech sector in the Middle East.
  • Bahrain-based security startup, Eazy Financial Services, launches first biometric payment network in MENA.

LATAM

  • Neener Analytics Completes Proof-of-Concept with Jamaican Payday Lender.
  • Alipay partners with Openpay to connect Chinese consumers with merchants in Mexico. (link)
  • Amazon.com unveils first debit card in Mexico as part of e-commerce initiative.

CEE

  • Personetics Brings Cognitive Banking to Romania’s Banca Transilvania.
  • Sberbank to host the first International Cybersecurity Conference in July.
  • CEE Fintech Survey for 2017 cites Poland’s fintech industry as the region’s most vibrant.

Top image designed by Freepik

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Bankjoy Signs Credit Union of Ohio

Bankjoy Signs Credit Union of Ohio
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Bankjoy

Digital banking services company Bankjoy may bring a bit of joy this week to the members of Credit Union of Ohio. That’s because Credit Union of Ohio is now leveraging the Michigan-based startup’s online and mobile banking technology to bring its members a new, omnichannel banking experience.

The move is strategic for Credit Union of Ohio. The credit union’s VP of Marketing & Strategic Planning Jill Gerschutz said that the implementation is an “ideal way” to retain members because it shows that Credit Union of Ohio is adapting and evolving with new trends. Gerschutz also hopes the move will boost the number of members who use the credit union’s mobile app. “We see the importance of constant movement to enhance our services – especially when it comes to technology and their online banking needs,” Gerschutz said.

After Credit Union of Ohio’s previous online banking provider announced it was discontinuing its product and would no longer provide updates, the credit union reached out to Bankjoy. “With an ever-changing technology environment,” Gerschutz said, “we knew this was crucial to finding a new product.” And since Bankjoy has already worked with all of Credit Union of Ohio’s third-party vendors, the transition will be an easier one. Other factors swaying Credit Union of Ohio toward Bankjoy include the number of customization options, as well as the startup’s innovative nature, such as offering facial recognition and TouchID login options.

At FinovateFall 2016, Bankjoy Founder and CEO Mike Duncan showcased the company’s API. It is a REST API that offers real-time transaction data and features such as card management, check deposit, money transfer, bill payment features, and loan applications. It has been a busy deal-making season for Bankjoy. The Y-Combinator alum inked a deal with SafeAmerica Credit Union last month to provide the credit union’s 35,000+ members a better online and mobile banking experience.

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Finovate Alumni News

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Bankjoy, Lendio, Modo Payments, Neustar, Prosper

On the web

  • Bankjoy Signs Credit Union of Ohio.

Around the web

  • Digital Signage Pulse interviews Neustar’s Kathleen Dundas about the company’s expansion to the digital-out-of-home (DOOH) market.
  • Lendio franchise announced in Seattle Central region.
  • PYMNTS talks to Modo CEO Bruce Parker about payments in the cloud.

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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NICE Actimize Launches AI-Powered Financial Crime Investigation System

NICE Actimize Launches AI-Powered Financial Crime Investigation System
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: NICE Systems

Data analytics and insights company NICE announced the launch of an AI-enabled investigation management system today.

The new tool, Actimize ACTone, is an alert and case management platform for financial services. The overall aim of the new offering is to provide financial services companies with one platform (hence the name ACTone) to manage alerts and cases from a wide ecosystem of financial crime solutions.

ACTone leverages AI combined with analytics and automation to aid in financial crime detection, investigations, and operations process. This approach relies on NICE’s Autonomous Financial Crime Management product, which enables financial services companies to deploy robots to collaborate with human investigators to more efficiently tackle financial crime investigations.

The new investigation manager tool suite includes:

  • Entity Insights: Offers visual relationships across entities and helps uncover risks and reveal deeper insights
  • Virtual Workforce: Eliminates manual data gathering and reduces costs and errors with robotics process automation
  • Entity Risk: Assigns a dynamic risk score to every entity using machine learning to make faster decisions
  • Activity Center: Provides instant notifications on changes made to cases or work items
  • Visual Storytelling and Modern User Experience: Offers intuitive navigation with graphical data representations to provide instant insights.

In the press release, Joe Friscia, President of NICE Actimize said, “In an autonomous world, instead of machines assisting humans to complete work, humans will assist the machines. With financial criminals getting smarter every day, it’s time for us to do the same. This is why we are so committed to our vision of Autonomous Financial Crime management which provides these benefits and more as we attack all aspects of financial crime.”

Actimize ACTone will be included in NICE Actimize’s Suspicious Activity Monitoring (SAM) anti-money laundering solution, as well as within its enterprise fraud and financial markets compliance solutions.

Founded in 1986, the company serves 25,000 customers, 85% of which are Fortune 100 companies. Among NICE’s clients are Alliance Data, Walgreens, and Capital One. At FinovateEurope 2015, the company showcased Real-Time Authentication, a passive, phone-based authentication offering that leverages voice biometrics. Earlier this year, Gartner recognized NICE in the Leaders quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Workforce Engagement ‎Management for the second year in a row.

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Basisbank to Deploy FICO’s Rules Management System, Blade Advisor

Basisbank to Deploy FICO’s Rules Management System, Blade Advisor
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FICO

Denmark-based online lender Basisbank is implementing FICO’s Blade Advisor rules management system to “control credit risk and accelerate its digital transformation”, according to the vendor, reports Tanya Andreasyan of Banking Technology (Finovate’s sister publication).

“As a fintech, we need to be fast and responsive to customer demands, while maintaining strong risk management,” said Morten Larsen, head of business development at Basisbank. “We need to give our risk analysts the maximum flexibility to make changes quickly, not wait in a queue for IT to make changes. In our review of the market, FICO provided the most powerful and flexible solution, and also has the greatest expertise in financial services.”

Basisbank was founded in 2000. It offers simple banking and finance products consumers direct to market and at point of sale at retail partners and car dealers. Today, it has over 90,000 customers and partners with 700+ retail shops and automotive dealers. It says that more than 75% of its credit applications come from mobile devices.

FICO’s Shalini Raghavan (Senior Director, Product Management) and Tom Traughber (VP, Chief Architect, Product Development). presented “Rapidly Deliver Contextually-Powered Stream Processing” at our developers conference, FinDEVr New York 2016. The discussion focused on how FICO’s Decision Management Platform Streaming supports high volume, latency analytics for batch and stream sources.

Founded in 1956 and headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. FICO leverages predictive analytics and data science to improve operations ranging from risk management and fighting fraud to customer service. The company’s solutions are used by businesses in more than 100 countries.

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eToro Raises $100 Million in Series E

eToro Raises $100 Million in Series E
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: eToro, Funding

In a round led by China Minsheng Financial, social trading network eToro has raised $100 million in new funding. The Series E, which featured participation from SBI Group, Korea Investment Partners, and World Wide Invest, as well, will help the company expand into new markets. The new capital will also help eToro build on its R&D efforts in blockchain technology and asset digitization. eToro’s total capital is now $162 million.

“This round of investment will be critical in helping us to further develop our technology infrastructure to support the rapid growth that we’ve recently experienced,” eToro founder and CEO Yoni Assia said. “It will also help us to enter new markets, enabling us to bring our social approach to investing to more people around the world, and providing more people with safe and secure access to the markets.”

Assia added that the funding would enable eToro to remain as innovative technically as it is in the field of social trading and investing. “As new technology continues to change finance,” he said, “we want to remain at the forefront of that change. So today’s announcement will help us to continue our market leading work in blockchain research and the development of digital assets.”

Digital assets and blockchain have proven to be significant opportunities for growth for eToro. In February, the company added XLM (Stellar Lumens) to its offerings. Back in December, eToro teamed up with CoinDash to build blockchain-based social trading products. The company enabled direct trading of five major cryptocurrencies – Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Litecoin, and Ripple – back in September, shortly after earning a spot on the European Fintech 100.

Named a company to watch by Disruptor Daily, eToro has offices in Tel Aviv, Israel, and New York City. The company demonstrated its CopyFunds for Partners solution at FinovateEurope 2017. With a trading and investing community of more than nine million users, eToro’s network gives users the opportunity to automatically copy the buying and selling of the network’s most successful traders and investors. Those traders and investors can earn income when their trades are copied by members of the community as part of eToro’s Popular Investor program. Stocks, exchange-traded funds, currency pairs, indices, and commodities, as well as cryptocurrencies can be traded on eToro’s platform.

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Finovate Alumni News

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, CardFlight, Compass Plus, eToro, Hyperwallet, IdentityMind Global, Kasasa, LendingTree, MaxMyInterest, NCR Corporation, NetGuardians, NICE Systems, Revolut

On Finovate.com

  • LendingTree Launches Free Credit Monitoring.
  • eToro Raises $100 Million in Series E.
  • NICE Actimize Launches AI-Powered Financial Crime Investigation System.

Around the web

  • Hyperwallet tackles payments for staffing and recruiting platform tilr.
  • Compass Plus offers active-active database clustering on TranzAxis.
  • Steward Bank selects NetGuardians to help fight against fraud.
  • Kasasa named one of “2018 Best Places to Work in Financial Technology” by American Banker
  • CardFlight announces that over 80% of SwipeSimple merchants have been upgraded to EMV quick chip payment acceptance.
  • Revolut launches disposable virtual cards for online payments.
  • ACI Worldwide teams up with Shanghai-based UnionPay International.
  • IdentityMind Global announces GDPR-readiness ahead of the EU’s May 25th deadline.
  • MaxMyInterest adds former TD Ameritrade executive Tom Bradley to Advisory Board.
  • NICE Actimize unveils new AI-powered financial crime management solution, Actimize ACTone.

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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LendingTree Launches Free Credit Monitoring

LendingTree Launches Free Credit Monitoring
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: LendingTree

Online loan marketplace LendingTree is expanding its horizons today. The North Carolina-based company introduced a free credit monitoring service for members of My LendingTree, a financial intelligence platform launched in 2014.

Through a partnership with TransUnion, LendingTree monitors credit profiles of My LendingTree’s 7 million enrolled users on a daily basis and notifies them of any changes within 30 minutes of the report activity. Users with the LendingTree mobile app will be alerted of changes via a push notification. Upon receiving a credit notification, users can confirm or dispute the activity within the My LendingTree platform.

“LendingTree empowers consumers with the information they need to feel more confident in their financial decision making,” said Charles Battle, LendingTree’s Senior Director of Product Management. “By adding free credit monitoring to My LendingTree, we’re making it even easier for consumers to manage their credit and monitor their financial health.”

This new offering falls outside of LendingTree’s core competency as a loan match-maker. However, it helps create a relationship with consumers who may not be shopping for a loan but may be looking to borrow in the future.

Since it was founded in 1998, LendingTree has facilitated more than 65 million loan requests. The company went public on the NASDAQ in 2000 and was acquired by InterActiveCorp (IAC) in 2003. At FinovateSpring 2015 the company debuted My LendingTree, a personalization platform with a dashboard to view all credit-related accounts.

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Currencycloud Helps Businesses Extend Global Reach

Currencycloud Helps Businesses Extend Global Reach
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Currency Cloud

International payments platform Currencycloud is empowering businesses to tap into the global economy with its new offering, Global Collections, a multi-currency accounts receivable product.

With Global Collections, banks and payment companies can offer their clients a low-fee cross-border payment acceptance tool that is faster and has less friction than traditional offerings. The new capability allows businesses in the U.S. or E.U. to generate international bank account numbers (IBANs) and Virtual Account Numbers (VANs) so they can receive U.S. dollars or Euros without incurring fees. In other words, businesses can get paid in foreign currencies as if they were operating their business locally.

Neil Ambiker, CEO of payments company B2B Pay, said, “[Global Collections] does so much more than streamline account receivables. It has empowered us to provide customers a frictionless experience, foster trust in our brand and most importantly, grow at an international level.”

While Currencycloud has always offered the ability to send funds, the collections capability is new. Todd Latham, Currencycloud CMO and Head of Product described the move as a “natural next step.” He added, “This launch is a revolution in collections and provides the infrastructure needed to fast track B2B innovation, allowing companies to go global while acting local.”

Currencycloud will roll out Global Collections later this month.

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in London, Currencycloud most recently presented at FinovateFall 2016 where it debuted its Payment Engine. Earlier this month, the company was named an “outstanding place to work,” and last June was listed in CB Insights’ Fintech 250.

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Trusted Knight Unveils Financial Fraud Fighting Solution, Protector Air

Trusted Knight Unveils Financial Fraud Fighting Solution, Protector Air
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Trusted Knight

Digital data security specialist Trusted Knight launched Protector Air this week. The cloud-based solution deploys in-stream between consumers and businesses to defend against cyberattacks and fraud. The solution is capable of protecting against a variety of fraudulent activity and malware including rootkits, man-in-the-middle browser attacks, session hijacking, and account takeovers.

“The conventional security approach has been to protect the endpoint and the web application separately using two distinct solutions,” Trusted Knight CEO and founder Joseph Patanella explained. “What we’ve enabled is the modern paradigm of accepting that there will be compromised endpoints as well as attacks on web servers, but secure business can still take place if each touch point of each transaction is protected,” Patanella said. “We are creating a new category of solutions with Protector Air – one that provides full transaction stack protection.”

Protector Air secures three cyberattack vectors: protecting websites from direct infrastructure, framework, and application logic attacks; protecting users from endpoint and browser-based malware such as keyloggers and Trojans; and protecting the communications itself from service disruption caused by distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks. With an anti-fraud intelligence layer to protect transactions, Protector Air’s technology is unified, agentless, turnkey, cloud-based, and platform independent.

Headquartered in Annapolis, Maryland and founded in 2010, Trusted Knight demonstrated its Protector Anti-Crimeware Software at FinovateSpring 2013. Last fall, the company forged a strategic partnership with channel enablement specialist, eTECH Channel to help it better bring its full product suite of anti-fraud solutions to market faster and more efficiently. Last summer, Trusted Knight was named a finalist in the SC Awards 2017 Europe in the Best Fraud Prevention solution category. The company secured Series B funding in 2016 (the amount of the investment and the name of the investor were undisclosed) and has made one major acquisition, the purchase of Massachusetts-based cybersecurity firm, Sentrix.

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Your Sneak Peek into FinovateSpring Begins Next Week

Your Sneak Peek into FinovateSpring Begins Next Week
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: FinovateSpring 2018, FinovateSpring 2018 Sneak Peek

Spring is officially here and it’s time for a fresh look at the dozens of companies that will take the stage at FinovateSpring at the Santa Clara Convention Center on May 8 through 11. New this year, we’ve expanded the show to four to include discussions and analyses of a range of fintech topics.

If you haven’t registered yet, there’s still time to save on your ticket.

Your sneak peek into the demos

Finovate’s demo-only format will take center stage on the first two days, highlighting a range of fintech startups who will demo their newest offerings.

To get ready for what’s to come, we’re featuring a series of sneak peeks of some of the demoing companies. Stay tuned on the blog throughout the next few weeks as we reveal what each company is working on and why it’s worth paying attention to. As FinovateSpring draws near, we’ll also highlight notable speakers and keynote addresses that will take place later on in the conference.

For more of what to expect, check out the agenda, view the list of demoing companies, and plan your visit.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BioCatch, CAN Capital, Currency Cloud, Finastra, Jack Henry, Payfone, PayPal, Roostify, Trusted Knight

On Finovate

  • Trusted Knight Unveils Financial Fraud Fighting Solution, Protector Air.
  • Currencycloud Helps Businesses Extend Global Reach.

Around the web

  • Beacon Community Bank to deploy Jack Henry’s SilverLake System for core processing.
  • Finastra welcomes APAC early adopters to its FusionFabric.cloud 0pen architecture ecosystem.
  • Roostify announces new VP for Business Development, Mark McLaughlin.
  • BioCatch voted “Best Innovation in Securing Transactions” at the European Payments Summit’s Florin Awards.
  • Payfone launches Instant Experiences for Retail platform.
  • Users can now add multiple credit and debit cards to their PayPal account directly from BofA’s mobile app.

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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