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A look at the companies demoing live at FinovateAsia on November 7 and 8 in Hong Kong. Pick up your tickets today and save your spot.
Hyper Anna wants you to meet Anna, your artificial intelligence-powered data analyst.
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Hyper Anna offers 24/7 business intelligence.
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Kript is a decentralized mobile application designed to help invest in crypto assets.
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Kript is a multi-blockchain platform that implements a service function — a community for like-minded people, informational services, personalized support, and advice.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) -generated marketing campaign company Persado unveiled a new product this week, along with a fresh $30 million credit facility to fuel even more expansion.
Persado One, the new offering, provides personalized emotional engagement at scale. The company says the new development represents the “most significant advancement to date” of Persado’s AI platform. Available through the company’s Enterprise Level of service, Persado One uses deep learning algorithms to deliver personalized messaging to a customer based on their emotional profile.
The company is also launching a professional class of tools to help marketers predict response rates, generate higher performing campaigns, and refine language according to a brand’s style. At launch, the tools will be available for email and social media channels.
“The debut of Persado One and the expansion of Persado’s marketing language cloud solutions mark an important milestone for our company as we continue to reach a broader audience of marketers with tools to directly impact their business,” said Assaf Baciu, Co-Founder and SVP Product & Engineering at Persado. “These innovations are reflective of Persado’s success in generating ROI for the world’s leading brands and increasing marketplace demand.”
Silicon Valley Bank provided the credit facility, which Persado will use to “fuel the expansion of the Persado Marketing Language Cloud and further the rapid growth of the business.” Alex Vratskides, Persado Co-Founder and CEO said, “As a bank built around supporting innovation, Silicon Valley Bank is the ideal partner in our drive to challenge what’s possible in applying an industry-leading AI technology to marketing and beyond.”
Persado was founded in 2012 to offer brands insight into how consumers respond to their messages in different channels and scenarios. At FinovateEurope 2016, the company’s Chief Revenue Officer Lawrence Whittle launched Persado Go, an automated solution that offers business customers persuasive messaging in real-time via a self-service interface. In the demo, Whittle showed how a bank can create a marketing email to persuade dormant credit card clients to resume their relationship with the bank.
Since 2016, the company has seen a 3.6x increase in user numbers. Pesado counts Oracle, Salesforce, Cheetah Digital, and Oracle+Bronto, as clients and has expanded globally to Europe, Australia, Mexico, Japan, and the Republic of Korea.
Cognitive analytics company Personetics announced this week it is using its AI technology in a new way. The Israel-based company launched Personetics Act this week to offer banks a way to help customers repay their student loans ahead of schedule.
The new service uses the Nudge Theory to incentivize the 44 million U.S. student loan borrowers who owe more than $1.4 trillion in student loan debt to pay down their loans early and avoid paying thousands in interest. The Nudge Theory was demonstrated by 2017 Nobel Prize winner Professor Richard Thaler, who noted that people make better decisions to improve their financial health when the choice is made easy for them.
Personetics Act puts the Nudge Theory to work by helping banks identify consumers that 1) have a student loan and 2) can afford to pay it off faster. The program offers these consumer a tailored, automated service that adjusts to changes in their spending behavior and continually analyzes their financial picture to find unused funds that can be applied toward the existing loan balance. This can be set to automatically make payments on the customer’s behalf or to appear as a suggested recommendation. The company notes that applying an additional $50 per week towards a $40,000 student loan that bears a 5% interest rate can allow a customer to pay off the loan 3.5 years faster and save over $4,000 in interest payments.
“Existing bank plans are limited in scope and therefore unlikely to make a visible dent in any customer’s outstanding loan balance,” said David Sosna, Personetics’ Co-founder and CEO. “By applying AI algorithms to analyze individual customer cash flows, we’re able to identify windows of opportunity for customers to make these extra payments with no effort on their end.”
At FinovateFall 2016, Personetics demonstrated its Personetics Anywhere chatbot solution. The company was founded in 2011 and has received $18 million in total funding. Personetics recently onboarded Royal Bank of Canada to pilot an AI-powered financial guidance solution, NOMI Insights, and an automated savings platform, NOMI Find & Save. Last month, the company’s VP of New Markets and Solutions, Sudharshan Krishnan, authored a guest post titled, “Enabled by AI, Self-Service Is the Future of Banking.”
FinovateFall Best of Show winner Swych has introduced a new set of themed, e-gifting options. The new switchable Occasion, Category, and Event-themed e-gift cards are automatically redeemable in either U.S. dollars or Indian Rupees (depending on location) at retailers matching the category theme. A U.S. shopper who receives a Fashion e-gift card could “swych” it in order to make purchases at a retailer or speciality clothing boutique in the States, while the same card received by a shopper in India could be redeemed at a popular Indian retailer such as Shopper’s Stop.
“We are re-envisioning gifting between consumers by thinking about it in a social and fun way,” Swych founder and CEO Deepak Jain said. “Swych’s value proposition is to make every gift a perfect one; and now we are taking it further by making the gifting transaction between consumers located in two different parts of the planet as seamless and easy as sharing a video or having a chat conversation.” He added, “our launch of a multi-currency, global category gifting portfolio is a step in this direction.”
Examples of the category-themed e-gift cards include Birthday, Anniversary, Graduation, Wedding, New Baby, and Thank You products. The company is also planning to add special events and holiday-themed universal e-gift cards for Diwali, Christmas, and other occasions.
Swych’s e-gift cards are unique insofar as there are no other multi-currency, multi-retailer gift products available on the market that do not also incur interchange or foreign exchange fees when used. In the same way that e-gift cards have made gifting easier within countries and regions, Swych’s new offering makes it easy for consumers to send gifts to friends and family abroad, as well as for businesses and institutions looking to provide rewards and incentives to employees working in more than one country. Swych’s e-gifting solutions have no transaction fees, can be used at the recipient’s preferred merchant, and integrate readily within remittance, mobile banking, messaging, conversational commerce, and loyalty programs.
Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Swych demonstrated its Mobile Gifting Platform at FinovateFall 2016, winning Best of Show. The company has more than 130 U.S. retailers in its network and is partnering with 100 retailers from India, the Philippines, and other countries. Last month, the company announced a “major strategic investment” from UAE Exchange Group through which the two will jointly develop digital gifting services for consumers in emerging markets. In February, Swych released the beta version of its P2P gifting bot. The Swych mobile app is available to U.S. consumers on both iOS and Android.
There’s an interesting article in today’s WSJ about DoNotPay, a free AI-powered chat-based service that was built to help London residents automatically fight parking tickets. That service has now assisted 400,000 consumers fight off $11 million in fines (more background at TechCrunch).
It’s the brainchild of then 17-year old Joshua Browder (who is now 19, and of course, studying CS at Stanford). But Browder is not content beating the meter reader. He is now gearing up to equip everyone with free AI-powered law tools to take on bigger injustices and issues (see DoNotPay overview video above). His latest work, a tool to make it easy to process a no-fault divorce, something that typically can cost $10,000.
The article mentioned a few more areas ripe for this type of tool: airline restitution for delays and lost luggage and battling telemarketers and landlords.
But one area that’s sure to attract multiple consumer AI startups: bank fees, penalties, credit decisions, and more. What are you going to do when you start receiving hundreds, if not thousands, of cease & desist letters challenging NSF charges, late payment fees, and so on? Or worse, suing you in small claims court or threatening arbitration (see the current default “problem” at DoNotPay, how to sue Equifax for $25,000, inset).
You are not going to be able to afford the legal expense to fight for a $35 NSF fee. Eventually, you’ll have your own AI to fight their AI, but that’s a ways away (though if you saw Tim Huber’s AI talk at FF, it may be closer than we think).
An even bigger issue are all those sketchy charges on bank credit and debit card. It’s not a stretch to imaging the consumer’s AI routinely filing disputes and following up over and over again until you and/or the merchant capitulate.
Bottom line: Make sure your penalty fees are appropriate, well communicated, and understood by customers. And you might want to pay a bit more attention to new technologies available to answer customer queries, and even legal threats, in a semi-automated fashion.
Author: Jim Bruene (@netbanker) is Founder & Senior Advisor to Finovate as well as Principal of BUX Advisors, a financial services user-experience consultancy.
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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.
Credit service and financial wellness company Credit Sesame has raised more than $42 million in funding. Featuring new and existing investors such as Menlo Ventures, Inventus Capital, Globespan Capital, IA Capital, and SF Capital, the combined equity ($26.6 million) and venture debt ($15.5 million) financing will take Credit Sesame’s total capital to more than $77 million. The funding will help speed Credit Sesame’s growth, enable the company to hire more than 100 new employees over the next 12 months, and “advance its analytics, robo advisor and machine learning technologies.”
That’s right. Robo advisor. In addition to the company’s funding announcement, Credit Sesame founder and CEO Adrian Nazari introduced new robo advisory technology that enables consumers to automate the management of their credit and loans. Credit Sesame sees this as “addressing the liability side of the balance sheet” rather than the asset side typically watched over by most robo advisors.
“While many companies have spent the last few years catching up to our free credit score offering for consumers, Credit Sesame has been developing and proving robo advisor technology.” Nazari said. He added, “this technology translates consumer financial and credit information into simple and actionable steps that consumers can easily understand and utilize to improve their financial profile and leverage their credit.”
Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Mountain View, California, Credit Sesame demonstrated its credit-based PFM for a co-branded environment at FinovateSpring 2015. With more than 12 million members, Credit Sesame’s mobile and online solutions give consumers free access to their credit profile, including their credit score, credit report grades and monitoring, as well as interactive tools and tips for securing better borrowing options such as low or no-balance credit card offers and debt consolidation loans.
Credit Sesame has achieved 100% annual growth for the past three years, reaching profitability earlier this year. This spring, the company launched a new service to pre-qualify members for credit cards. In February, Nazari was named to the Entrepreneur’s List of Most Inspirational Leaders in 2017, one month after earning similar recognition from Inc.com.
Consumer analytics company SelfScore rebranded to Deserve today. The California-based company is still committed to providing underbanked Americans with access to credit, and to fuel that mission, Deserve has received $12 million in funding. Today’s round was led by Accel– with participation from Aspect Ventures, Pelion Ventures, Mission Holdings, Alumni Venture Group, and GDP Venture– and brings Deserve’s total funding to $27 million.
Deserve offers a credit card designed for Generation Z, whose members currently range in age from 6 to 21 years. This group accounts for 25% of the U.S. population and is projected to make up 40% of consumers by 2020. Because Generation Z consumers have thin-to-no credit files, they have difficulty accessing credit products at a fair rate. To combat this, Deserve uses an algorithm to predict credit potential by analyzing consumer attributes such as education, current financial health, and future employability. Sameer Gandhi of Accel described this application of machine learning as a “big opportunity to evolve past the antiquated FICO system in a technologically sophisticated way.”
The company’s Deserve Edu card is specifically focused on students, including international students. The card offers benefits such as an 18-month subscription to Amazon Prime Student, 1% cash-back on all purchases, and no fees on foreign transactions. And, for international students, there is no SSN required. To promote and encourage consumers to build their credit score, the company offers incentives for consumers to upgrade to the Deserve Pro Mastercard, which features 3% cashback on travel and entertainment, 2% cash back on restaurants, and 1% unlimited cash-back on all other purchases.
Under the SelfScore brand, the company assessed credit for more than 100,000 international students. Now, under Deserve, the company will target all 20 million college students and another 20 million young adults in the United States. “When I immigrated to America in 1995, one of the hardest parts of settling down in a new country was my lack of financial security and independence,” said Kalpesh Kapadia, founder and CEO of Deserve. “A credit card is one of many tools that was not accessible to me. This is why I wanted to implement technology that rethinks the process for offering access to fair and simple credit. Deserve represents that mission.”
Founded in 2012, Deserve demoed a consumer behavior analytics service at FinovateFall 2014 under the name SelfScore. The company’s accounts are issued by Utah-based Celtic Bank. Check out our profile of Deserve in our Finovate Debuts series in 2014.
Citing the strong “alignment between car shopper and car dealer motivation,” Global Lending Services has forged a partnership with auto financing innovator and Best of Show winner, AutoGravity. The partnership will enable the auto finance company, based out of South Carolina, to make financing offers through AutoGravity’s platform.
Bill Nemecek, Global Lending Services SVP of Marketing and Sales, said the partnership with AutoGravity would help the firm reach prospective car buyers who increasingly “look to technology to provide easier and convenient car purchasing options.” He added that the solution would also help car dealers, who want to both streamline the auto buying process as well as get cars into the hands of customers faster. “Our partnership with AutoGravity positions us to reach these shoppers, help them with financing, and guide them to dealerships who can deliver on this value proposition through state-of-the-art technology,” Nemecek said.
AutoGravity leverages smartphone technology to make buying and financing a car faster, easier and more transparent. The company partners with leading banks and financial services companies to give auto shoppers control over their financing options and access to a nationwide network of trusted car dealerships. “Every month, over 100,000 new users download the AutoGravity app so they can buy and finance their next car with smartphone simplicity,” AutoGravity CEO and founder Andy Hinrichs said. “Our partnership with Global Lending Services helps ensure that car buyers across the nation have access to multiple finance offers in minutes, anytime and anywhere they want.”
Headquartered in Irvine, California and founded in 2015, AutoGravity demonstrated its platform at FinovateFall 2016, winning Best of Show. The company has enjoyed a busy and productive 2017, beginning the year with a “multi-million Euro” investment from Daimler Financial Services, and picking up further investment capital from VW Credit in July. AutoGravity teamed up with Fletcher Jones Auto Group in June and forged a partnership with Hyundai Capital America in September, the same month the company announced surpassing $1 billion in financing requested via its platform. A member of CBInsights Fintech 250, AutoGravity presented A Digital Marketplace for the Auto Financing Space at our developer’s conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016.
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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.
In the fight for the fintech title — London, Berlin, Barcelona, New York, Silicon Valley, Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Cape Town, Abu Dhabi — Dubai is a heavy weight. With fintech investment set to grow 270% in the Middle East in 2017, the future of fintech might be in Dubai.
Join us on February 26 and 27 to find out.
Supported by Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), FinovateMiddleEast will keep demos at its core while introducing content driven panels, regulatory perspectives and world-class keynotes tailored to address the evolution of financial services and the impact on both the providers and the end-users.
See the speakers. See the demoing companies. See the regional startups. And save $200 when buying your ticket by October 26.
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