ezbob Lands Undisclosed Investment from Honeycomb Investment Trust

ezbob Lands Undisclosed Investment from Honeycomb Investment Trust
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: EZBOB, Funding

Alternative business lending company ezbob closed a round of equity funding this week. The amount of the financing was undisclosed and boosts the U.K.-based startup’s total combined debt and equity funding higher than its previous total of $136 million (£103 million). Of that amount, $50.3+ million (£38.2+ million) is equity and $81.9 million (£62.2 million) is debt.

Today’s Series C funds come from Honeycomb Investment Trust, which is managed by Pollen Street Capital, one of the leading investors focused on lending startups. Lindsey McMurray, Pollen Street founding partner, will join ezbob’s Board of Directors. ezbob will use the funds to build out a more robust automated lending portfolio and to expand into new geographical territory.

Regarding McMurray’s involvement, Tomer Guriel, founder and CEO of ezbob said, “Our initial focus is on the SME community, many of whom struggle to acquire the financial support they need to achieve their personal and professional business development goals. My vision is to create a portfolio of innovative solutions which streamline and accelerate the entire lending process for both the borrowers and loan providers. With the support of highly experienced individuals like Lindsey, together with the new funding, there is nothing to stop us from turning our shared vision into a sustainable reality.”

“We have watched ezbob develop from being a niche player into a leading lending platform provider,” said McMurray. “ezbob are pioneers in this space and I believe both the financial institutions, and the businesses they support will derive significant benefits from this new and innovative approach to lending,” she added.

In addition to lending directly to small businesses in need of capital, ezbob offers banks a lending-as-a service platform for their small business banking customers. Esme Loans and Clydesdale Yorkshire Bank are among the company’s clients.

Founded in 2011, ezbob has 70 employees across offices in London, Tel Aviv, and Bulgaria. At FinovateEurope 2014, Guriel demonstrated ezbob’s online application process. The company started this year off on the right foot with the announcement of a $21 million funding round. Late last year, ezbob won an award for “Best Technology Initiative” at the Financial Innovation Awards.

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Paysend Seals Deal on $20 Million Financing

Paysend Seals Deal on $20 Million Financing
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, PaySend

 

In a round led by MARCorp Financial, global money transfer platform Paysend has raised $20 million in new funding. The company said that the capital, which takes the company’s total to $23 million, will help it launch new services and expand globally.

“Paysend has created the first integrated B2B and B2C global payments business which is already disrupting the market,” said MARCorp Financial Chairman Michael Fazio. “Their three businesses – Global Transfers, Global Account, and Global Processing – are leaders in their respective fields. We look forward to being a part of the next stage of Paysend’s growth.”

Paysend CEO Europe Ronald Millar demonstrating the Paysend Global Account at FinovateSpring 2018.

Via its Global Transfers service, Paysend enables card-to-card money transfers from customers in more than 60 countries. With the recipient’s name and a 16-digit card number, cardholders can make fast, secure, low-cost money transfers 24/7. Paysend charges a fixed rate for international transactions regardless of the amount transferred. Recipients can withdraw cash from millions of ATMs around the world, and pay by card at any merchant that accepts Visa or Mastercard. The service is accessible via both an iOS and Android app as well as online.

Global Account, demonstrated live at FinovateSpring 2018 in May, provides a digital wallet for both fiat and crypto currencies. The solution enables fund transfer between currencies as well as sending money to other Global Accounts or crypto wallets, and making online and in-person payments. The account comes with a prepaid card, physical and virtual, that can be linked to any of the currencies in the account, enabling the user to pay with both fiat and crypto currencies. Cardholders can also withdraw cash from the account in 125 different currencies.

Paysend’s Global Processing division processes credit and debit cards, and helps boost revenue for merchants by taking what the company calls a “data-driven approach to customer shopping.”

“I am proud of what we have achieved to date, and what we have planned for the future,” Paysend CEO Europe Ronald Millar said. “We are the only global card-to-card platform, and the technological and operational expertise required to create that could only have come from an executive team with special knowledge, creativity and ambition – our team.”

London, U.K.-based Paysend announced a number of major service expansions this year including launches in Turkey in June, in Israel in May, and in both Canada and the UAE in April. Nigeria was added in February. Paysend’s partnership with China UnionPay, announced back in December, enabled card-to-card transfers to China.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Bluefin, Cardlytics, Coinbase, EZBOB, Hydrogen, Mitek, NCR Corporation, PaySend, Sberbank, ThetaRay, Unison

On Finovate.com

  • Paysend Seals Deal on $20 Million Financing.
  • ezbob Lands Undisclosed Investment from Honeycomb Investment Trust.
  • New Investment Takes ThetaRay’s Total Capital to More than $60 Million.

Around the web

  • Cryptocurrency trading platform DXE chooses Mobile Verify from Mitek for automated ID verification.
  • Delano.lu profiles developer platform Hydrogen, recognized last month as the 2018 fintech startup of the year by KPMG Luxembourg and Luxembourg House of Financial Technology.
  • Benzinga interviews Unison CEO Thomas Sponholtz in the wake of the company’s $40 million Series B round.
  • Hypepotamus features Cardlytics post-IPO, interviews CEO Scott Grimes.
  • Bluefin and NCR expand POS payment security to provide PCI-Validated Point-to-Point Encryption (P2PE).

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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Zopa’s Record Lending Figures Suggest a Healthy U.K. P2P Lending Sector

Zopa’s Record Lending Figures Suggest a Healthy U.K. P2P Lending Sector
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Zopa

P2P lending platform Zopa not only announced its move back into profitability, it also released a handful of metrics suggesting growth sustainability in the P2P industry.

After the U.K.-based company was founded in 2005, it reached profitability in 2011 and continued that momentum until 2012. Five years later, and after a bit of restructuring, Zopa achieved revenues of $61 million (£46.5 million) in 2017. This represents 40% year-over-year growth from the company’s 2016 revenues of $23.5 million (£33.2 million).

The company attributes the growth to its increased focus on tech innovation, especially offering instant feedback on loan approvals, as well as its efforts to expand its customer base through partnerships. The boost in growth is also thanks to a rise in loan volumes. In 2016, the company lent out $906 million (£690 million) and last year increased it’s loan volume by 43% to $1.3 million (£985 million).

In a press release Zopa CEO Jaidev Janardana said, “2017 was a landmark for us. We’re proud to see the company’s efforts reflected in our record lending figures, profitability and strong customer growth…. We’ve invested significantly in technology, in our proprietary back office infrastructure, and in our people, all of which have helped Zopa to continue to scale and grow sustainably.”

Some of those investments Janardana alluded to include the announcement of plans to launch a challenger bank; receiving full FCA authorization in May of last year; and, in 2018, restructuring the company with the appointment of a trio of new C-level hires. Helping to sustain this growth is a $41 million investment the company received about a year ago from Wadhawan Global Capital of India and Northzone.

These positive revenue figures as well as the increase in loan growth allude to the health of the overall P2P lending sector in the U.K. In fact, the U.K. P2P Finance Association (P2PFA) reports that, since the second quarter of 2017, growth in the U.K.-based P2P lending sector has a whole has increased more than 40% from $8.4 billion (£6.4 billion) to $11.7 billion (£9 billion) in the first quarter of 2018.

Much of this growth, the organization described, is thanks to an uptick in business borrowing. This may explain the region’s difference compared to the U.S., where P2P lending has fallen slightly out of favor– thanks to a decrease in both lenders and investors, as well as recent regulatory scrutiny. To let numbers speak for themselves, Lending Club’s market cap has fallen from $9.3 billion at its peak in 2015 to its current $1.6 billion.

Zopa’s former CEO Doug Dolton debuted the P2P lending platform at FinovateSpring 2008 at Finovate’s very first show in the Bay Area. Zopa co-founder Giles Andrews is now CEO. Last spring, the company unveiled its latest offering, the Innovative Finance ISA, the first tool to expand the company’s focus into broader banking products. Earlier this spring, Zopa ranked 278 on the FT 1000, the Financial Times’ list of the fastest growing companies in Europe.

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TransUnion Acquires iovation

TransUnion Acquires iovation
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Mergers & Acquisitions, TransUnion

Just two months after announcing plans to acquire CallCredit for $1.4 billion, credit reporting agency and risk information provider TransUnion has finalized its purchase of device intelligence company iovation.

TransUnion announced its plans to acquire iovation in May and received authorization from the FTC last month. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Today’s acquisition will expand TransUnion’s global reach and customer base, and is expected to give the company a boost in the fraud and identity management space. TransUnion’s current fraud offerings include credit protection, identity management, identity verification and authentication, fraud detection and prevention, and data breach services. The company will leverage iovation’s device reputation database, which offers insight into almost 5 billion devices from more than 35,000 brands across 50+ countries, for its IDVision suite of fraud and identity solutions.

“The completion of this acquisition allows us to begin efforts to seamlessly integrate iovation’s device identity and consumer authentication capabilities into IDVision, TransUnion’s suite of innovative fraud and identity solutions,” said Jim Peck, TransUnion’s president and chief executive officer. “The combination of our solutions will create an unmatched network of offline and online identities that will benefit both our business customers, and ultimately, consumers who are transacting with them.”

TransUnion was founded in 1968 and has corporate headquarters in Chicago, Illinois. The company has office locations in Hong Kong, Mumbai, Toronto, Johannesburg, Colombia, and Brazil. At FinovateFall 2016, TransUnion showcased Prama, a suite of analytics tools that help lenders gain market intelligence and act on insights to drive growth and build a risk policy. Last month, TransUnion teamed with MIB to allow MIB’s 400 U.S. life insurance member companies to receive customer identity verification services through a new integration with TransUnion’s Identity Verification solution.

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Additiv Partners with Orange Business Services to Bring Digital Wealth Management to FIs

Additiv Partners with Orange Business Services to Bring Digital Wealth Management to FIs
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: additiv

European robo advisor additiv its leveraging is relationship with Orange Business Services to make its cloud-based digital wealth management technology available to banks and other FIs. Offered as a SaaS solution, additiv’s wealth management as-a-service technology features out-of-the-box solutions including robo advisory, portfolio management, and client and advisory dashboards.

“By partnering with Orange Business Services we can provide financial institutions with a fast and highly-secure way of tapping into this new market opportunity, while improving the end-client experience and reducing operating costs,” explained additiv CEO and founder, Michael Stemmle.

Michael Stemmle, CEO and founder of additiv, demonstrating the company’s cloud-based robo advisor at FinovateAsia 2017.

Stemmle added that the joint platform will give FIs access to the company’s Digital Financial Suite, as well as its global ecosystem of partners who offer a range of additional services including client administration, execution and custody services with access to 35,000 FIs across eight asset classes.”

The new solution will be introduced in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Asia Pacific on dedicated Orange cloud platforms. Orange Business Services is the B2B division of the Orange Group, the first mobile operator to make contactless cash payments available in Europe. The company launched its Orange Money solution in 2008, linking a mobile account with an Orange mobile number to support the cash needs of customers in the Middle East and Africa. Last year, the Orange Group launched Orange Bank in France.

“Our highly-secure cloud platform is providing additiv with a smart and efficient way for financial institutions to plug in a game-changing range of products and map the entire data journey to provide valuable customer insight,” CEO of Orange Business Services, Helmut Reisinger said. “It will make digital wealth management easier and more convenient, which will undoubtedly broaden the appeal of wealth management.”

Headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, and founded in 1998, additiv demonstrated its configurable, cloud-based robo advisor at FinovateAsia 2017. A provider of digital financial and wealth management solutions to banks, insurers, wealth, and asset managers in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region, additiv has more than 15 existing deployments of its technology.

Additiv has raised $21 million (CHF 21 million) in funding courtesy of an investment from Switzerland’s BZ Bank last spring.

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Ohpen Teams Up with Dutch Savings Bank LeasePlan

Ohpen Teams Up with Dutch Savings Bank LeasePlan
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Ohpen

LeasePlan Bank, the online savings bank based in the Netherlands, has chosen Ohpen to upgrade its whole core cloud banking engine, Pieter Aartsen and Angelique Schouten, global board members at Ohpen, told Henry Villar of FinTech Futures.

The bank will do a full-stack upgrade of its core engine and all other tech, which moves away from Oracle FSS’s Flexcube, an on-premises system onto Ohpen’s cloud-native engine.

This move will cover both the Dutch and German operations of the bank. Although the bank is headquartered in the Netherlands, a part of its client base is based in Germany.

The partnership was effective as of the 27th of June, but the team will officially start the implementation on the 4th of July. During the implementation, the bank’s whole system, bar the website, will be provided by Ohpen’s tech. For the bank it is the retail savings and deposits IT infrastructure, which is what LeasePlan Bank specialises in.

“Migrating LeasePlan Bank’s customers to the Ohpen core banking platform will reduce the complexity of their savings and deposits IT architecture and make LeasePlan Bank more agile,” said Aartsen.

Ohpen has been gaining traction over the last few years. Knab, a challenger bank subsidiary of Aegon, moved to Ohpen’s core from Sopra Banking Software’s system. Aegon is also a customer of Ohpen.

Former Delta Lloyd Bank, which was taken over by Nationale Nederlanden (NN) Group last year, also made the jump onto Ohpen’s tech, alongside NN Bank. On the way out are Temenos with its T24 system and Able (a local banking software provider).

When asked about the reason for this momentum, Schouten cited Ohpen’s “power of one” motto.

“We have one core banking engine running in the cloud, one code base, one version of our platform for all countries. The fact that it’s one solution and cloud-based means that it is faster, more reliable and we can release our new software to all clients at the same time, which happens every month,” she told us.

Aartsen added: “We were the first ones going all-in cloud, fully cloud natives and programmed a whole new bank from scratch and have been running it in the cloud and offering it as a SaaS for nine years now. This means that our tech is now future-proof, and we can adapt it in the future without the deployment demands of on-premise architecture.”

Ohpen demonstrated its core banking platform at FinovateFall 2012. Earlier this year, Ohpen raised $31 million in a Series C round led by PE firm Amerborgh, which took the company’s total equity capital to $50 million. Chris Zadeh is founder and CEO.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: additiv, Efigence, Finicity, MapD, Neener Analytics, Ohpen, Open Bank Project, Temenos, TransUnion, YellowDog, Zopa

On Finovate

  • Additiv Partners with Orange Business to Bring Digital Wealth Management to FIs.
  • Zopa’s Record Lending Figures Suggest a Healthy U.K. P2P Lending Sector.

Around the web

  • Iraq’s Banque Liban-Francaise completes upgrade to Temenos’ T24 core banking system.
  • P2P lender Zopa announces 40% revenue growth and a return to profitability.
  • Ohpen signs LeasePlan Bank as its latest customer.
  • Efigence implements technological side of Alior Bank open banking project.
  • Open Bank Project collaborates with Citizens Bank hackathon.
  • The World Economic Forum names Neener Analytics as a Technology for Integrity 2018.
  • YellowDog wins Business Innovation Award at inaugural Best New Business Awards.
  • Finicity forges data sharing agreement with USAA.
  • MapD debuts MapD 4.0 for interactive location intelligence at scale.

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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Veridium’s $16.5 Million Series B Led by Michael Spencer

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Veridium

Exactly one week after pocketing a $150k grant, Veridium has made headlines again after the company reported a Series B funding round totaling $16.5 million. Because Veridium’s initial funding round was unreported, the company’s total funding is unknown.

U.K. entrepreneur and philanthropist Michael Spencer led the round, contributing $14.2 million of the total financing. Other contributors include Citrix Systems, and investor Michael Powell. Both Spencer and Powell will join Veridium’s board of directors.

The company will use the capital to boost product development and to scale its sales and marketing efforts across the Americas, Europe, and Asia in order to meet demand. Veridium already boasts customers in multiple industries across the globe, having recently added several large financial services organizations. In February, the company onboarded the largest bank in the Nordic region, Nordea, and last month, it signed a deal with a multinational Swiss bank to replace passwords, tokens, and swipe cards to create a more user-friendly authentication process.

“In today’s digital age, global organizations are challenged to secure their most critical assets against advanced threats in a way that’s both convenient and secure,” said Spencer. “Veridium is unique in the industry because it provides organizations with an enterprise-ready authentication solution to address those problems with the adoption of biometrics – while increasing security and convenience.”

Veridium offers biometric authentication solutions available through a software-only biometrics platform. The identity access management technology allows users to replace passwords, tokens, and swipe cards with their own facial and fingerprint biometrics that can be read on the sensors already available on their smartphone.

At FinovateEurope 2017, Veridium showcased 4 Fingers TouchlessID, a multi-finger touchless biometric authentication that works on smartphones with a camera. Headquartered in London and Boston, Veridium was founded in 2015. James Stickland is CEO.

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Inspire FCU to Deploy Core Banking Solutions from NYMBUS

Inspire FCU to Deploy Core Banking Solutions from NYMBUS
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: NYMBUS

Inspire FCU, a 15,000-member financial institution founded in 1936 that serves the community of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, is making the move to NYMBUS.

“In order to deliver the enhanced experience and competitive, digital financial products our members ask for, it was clear our legacy core was setting us up to fail,” President and CEO of Inspire FCU Jim Merrill said. He faulted the inflexibility of their legacy system, praising NYMBUS’s advanced core, digital, and payment solutions as an ideal replacement. And not just of the credit union’s legacy system, either.

“Inspire will eliminate 15 technology vendors after we convert to NYMBUS,” Merrill said, referring to the large number of different vendors the credit union had been relying on, which complicated workflows and detracted from the Inspire’s member experience. “And, we will deliver a much more intuitive user experience to better compete with larger financial institutions and new fintech companies that have entered the market.”

Inspire will take advantage of NYMBUS’ full suite of advanced banking solutions including SmartCore, NYMBUS’ turnkey core banking platform; SmartDigital; NYMBUS’ internet and mobile banking suite; and SmartPayments, which will manage the authorizations and transactions for Inspire’s debit card program while providing real-time fraud protection.

“Today’s financial institutions risk extinction if they don’t adapt to the disruption of digital innovation,” David Mitchell, President of NYMBUS said. “Inspire has recognized the scale of this disruption and embraced a digital-first view of banking.”

Based in Miami Beach, Florida, NYMBUS demonstrated its core banking technology at FinovateSpring 2016. Last month, NYMBUS completed a four-month conversion process for Surety Bank ($111 million in assets). In April, the core banking technology innovator unveiled its SmartLaunch solution that makes it easier for banks to build turnkey digital banking solutions in 90 days.

NYMBUS has raised $28 million in funding, and includes Home Credit Group and Vensure Enterprises among its investors.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BlueVine, Coinbase, Hidden Levers, NCR Corporation, NYMBUS, ThreatMetrix, Veridium

On Finovate.com

  • Inspire FCU to Deploy Core Banking Solutions from NYMBUS.
  • Veridium’s $16.5 Million Series B Led by Michael Spencer.

Around the web

  • NCR and Advanced Fraud Solutions team up to fight check fraud at interactive teller machines (ITMs).
  • ThreatMetrix partners with Lumin Digital to improve security for online and mobile banking.
  • Bluefin to collaborate with NCR to provide merchants with fraud fighting solutions.
  • The dream of Coinbase is alive in Portland.
  • HiddenLevers moves HQ location from NYC to Atlanta suburb.

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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Bento for Business Raises $9 Million in New Funding

Bento for Business Raises $9 Million in New Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Bento for Business, Funding

In a round led by Edison Partners and featuring participation from current investor Comcast Ventures and new investor MissionOG, Bento for Business has raised $9 million in funding. The financial management solutions provider will use the capital to bolster its marketing and engineering efforts with new hires, and to expand the Bento for Business platform across payments, spend management, and business banking.

“Time and again, research says that poorly managed business spend is the single largest threat to the profits of small and midsize businesses in the U.S.,” Bento for Business founder and CEO Farhan Ahmad explained. “We solve this problem and bring our customers an intelligent financial management solution that stops unauthorized spending before it happens.”

The funding nearly doubles Bento for Business’ total capital to $18.5 million.

Bento for Business provides SME owners with a card-based digital spending management solution that enables employers to prevent unauthorized expenditures by controlling when, where, and how much their employees spend at the point of sale. The platform stops unapproved business spend before the purchase, saving time and money on returns and cancellations. The technology also has features like receipt upload and the ability to automatically sync Bento with popular accounting systems like Quickbooks to reduce the need for expense reports.

The company’s solutions include expense cards, API virtual cards, and ghost cards. Bento’s tiered levels of service range from a free program that supports up to two cards to its enterprise level offering with unlimited cards for $149 a month. Bento does not charge a setup fee and all paid programs (Team, Professional, and Enterprise) come with free, 60-day trials.

Bento for Business demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2015. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the company was featured in Inc.com’s article 7 Cool Productivity Tools You Probably Haven’t Heard Of last month. Bento’s technology was also highlighted in CardRates.com in March, the same month the company launched its Business Fraud Risk Calculator. The calculator is a two-minute diagnostic test that identifies potential fraud risk factors at small businesses by asking questions about expense policies, receipt handling, and accounting systems.

In February, Finovate founder Jim Bruene featured Bento in his look at startup challenger banks with a small business focus. Last fall, the company unveiled a suite of new solutions, opened up its APIs, and announced a partnership with The Bancorp.

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