Nostrum Group Acquired by Equiniti Group

Nostrum Group Acquired by Equiniti Group

Just a few days after Vantiv and Worldpay made merger and acquisitions headlines in the payments world, here come Equiniti and Nostrum Group with some M&A news of their own in the lending space. Announced today, Equiniti has agreed to acquire Nostrum Group in a deal that will boost Equiniti’s ability to provide technology-enabled lending solutions. Equiniti CEO Guy Wakeley said “The integration of Nostrum will provide greater depth, scale and capability in a dynamic growth market, whilst also providing the platform for a range of new products and services.”

Calling the acquisition “the next chapter in the development of our businesses,” Nostrum Group CEO Richard Carter described the combined entity as a blend of “Equiniti’s rich feature set and Nostrum’s agility.” Carter will stay on as Managing Director of the newly-formed Equiniti Credit Services brand.

Pictured: Nostrum Group CEO Richard Carter demonstrating the company’s Digital Lending Platform at FinovateEurope 2016.

Nostrum Group specializes in automated digital loan management software for banks and finance companies. The company’s technology provides solutions for every step of the process from originations (including application capture, processing, documentation, underwriting, and completion), servicing (including payment processing, document management, and reporting), and collections (including profiling and segmentation; payment and arrangements; work prioritization and automation; and third party management). More than focusing on acquiring new customers, Nostrum Group also offers tools lenders can use to retain their existing customers, as well. As Carter explained from the Finovate stage last year, Nostrum Group offers lenders the technology “to facilitate the production of appropriate offers that are tailored to those customers and then delivered to them.”

Headquartered in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, U.K. and founded in 2001, Nostrum Gr0up demonstrated its Digital Lending Platform at FinovateEurope 2016. Later that year, the company’s CTO Alex Stephen, Head of PMO Tom Martin, and Head of Software Development Simon Quin presented the “Nostrum Loan Engine API” at our developer’s conference in New York. This year, CEO Carter was named to the Maserati 100, a roster of top British entrepreneurs from high-end carmaker, Maserati, and The Sunday Times.

Technology services provider Equiniti was founded in 2009. Many of the largest pension schemes in the U.K., and 70% of the FTSE 100, use Equiniti services to manage share registration and related investors services. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange under the symbol, “EQN,” and has a market capitalization of £750 million ($972 million).

 

Logical Glue Locks in Investment from New Look Founder, Tom Singh

Logical Glue Locks in Investment from New Look Founder, Tom Singh

Terms of the investment were not disclosed, but London-based predictive analysis specialist Logical Glue has secured funding from Tom Singh, founder of U.K.-based fashion retailer, New Look. The investment will support the continued development of Logical Glue’s machine learning and statistical modeling platform, including its white box, decision-making engine and data visualization technology.

Singh highlighted the platform’s effectiveness in a range of verticals. “Fast, accurate and automated decisions based on data have a place within many industries, from retail through to finance,” he said, crediting Logical Glue for “(bridging) the gap between data science and the boardroom.” Logical Glue co-founder Daniel McPherson called the company’s technology “the machine learning platform of the future,” and added that FSOs would be among the big beneficiaries of a solution that was “delivering better, faster decisions and providing the consumer with the best customer experience.”

Pictured (left to right): Robert De Caux (Chief Product Officer) and Jon Rimmer (UX Architect) demonstrating Logical Glue Ensemble at FinovateEurope 2016.

Logical Glue has developed a cloud-based platform that enables companies to use data to solve “prediction problems.” As the company’s Chief Product Officer Robert De Caux explained during his FinovateEurope demo last year, questions like:  “Will a customer repay their loan? Will they buy my product?” “Is this transaction fraudulent?” are answerable by applying the right predictive analytic tools to data that lenders and banks already have. More importantly, Logical Glue enables lenders and banks to use these tools without having to hire data scientists and coders to build and run them. During the company’s demonstration of its platform, Ensemble, De Caux and UX Architect Jon Rimmer showed the automatic categorization feature during the data input process, and the feature selection tool which helps ensure that only the most historically valuable and predictive features in the data are included during the model building process.

“You’ll find if you have hundreds or thousands of predictive variables that you want to assess, it’s often that if you remove some of them, you can improve your model performance,” De Caux explained. “At a time when companies are drowning in a sea of data from multiple sources they don’t properly understand,” he said, “it’s a great way to reduce costs and improve insight.” In addition to the data input and model building stages, the team from Logical Glue demonstrated how the models can be customized to the company’s specific business preferences, and then easily deployed in the cloud.

Logical Glue gives users three different predictive models to choose from: one geared toward the best statistical technique, one based on the best machine learning technique, and another De Caux called “the best for insight, which allows you to see why a decision has been made.” The company says its technology helps improve acceptance rates for lenders by 40% and grow profits by between 5-20%. Logical Glue adds that the platform also decreases default rates by 15%, boosts recovery collection rates for debt collectors by 18% and reduces manual interventions for underwriters “20-fold.”

Founded in 2012, Logical Glue demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2016.  The company’s partners include fellow Finovate alums ExperianmiiCard and Equifax.

Ohpen Garners $17 Million Investment

Ohpen Garners $17 Million Investment

Ohpen landed new funding to fuel its mission to develop the best core banking platform in the world. The Amsterdam-based company earned $17 million in Series B funding from Amerborgh this week, but its total funding remains undisclosed.

The investment boosts the company’s valuation to more than $114 million. Ohpen will use the funding to grow the company geographically, specifically to the U.K. where the company recently opened a new office. Ohpen received approval from the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority in January.

In a press release, Ohpen founder and CEO Chris Zadeh said, “The first step, back in 2009, was to actually develop a whole new core banking engine and offering it as SaaS using cloud technology,” Zadeh added, “The second step was to get a client and create a strong home base. After becoming the number one player in our home market, we knew it was time to enter new markets and truly scale up the company.”

Founded in 2009, Ohpen offers a cloud-based core banking API that gives banks a different option from legacy systems. At FinovateFall 2012, the company explained its multilingual cloud banking platform. Ohpen’s 100 employees have facilitated the execution of 14.6 million transactions in the past 12 months. The company recently won third place in the popular vote of the fintech impact awards at the NRC Live conference.

Summit View: Changes in the Wealth Management and Investing Scene

Summit View: Changes in the Wealth Management and Investing Scene

Our expanded FinovateFall conference is coming up on September 11 through 14, and we’re taking a look at each of the six summit discussions that will take place after the demos. Today, we’re examining wealth management and investing.

Summit #3: Wealth Management & Investing

Wealth management and investing technologies were two of the hottest trends from 2016. How has 2017 matured the market? Here’s a look at a few key changes to keep an eye on.

Industry consolidation

Following the recent influx of roboadvisors and investment technologies to the market, the past few months have brought some consolidation to the industry. We’ve seen five mergers and acquisitions in the last year, and expect there to be another handful of M&A announcements in this space in the following months. That said, it is likely the industries will take another three-to-five years to truly consolidate down to key players.

The hybrid approach will win

A year ago, roboadvisors took one of two approaches: a pure robo method (such as the Betterment model) and a hybrid strategy (such as Personal Capital’s approach of high-touch mixed with high-tech).  Today, the industry is tilting toward the hybrid approach, which has the potential to offer the best of both worlds. In fact, even Betterment has changed its tune. The company recently pivoted to include a human advice offering alongside its traditional, strictly-robo advice tool. Catering to clients who prefer a human touch (or are simply undecided) will lead to increased customer acquisitions in the long-run.

Larger players take the lead

Unlike years past, when smaller players dominated the wealth tech industry with their innovative approaches, the coming years will bring larger players into the competitive landscape. Blackrock, which acquired FutureAdvisor in 2015, is known as one of the pioneers in using an AI-based investing strategy for its clients. Since then, many other large financial institutions have also joined in; Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and many others have implemented AI and machine learning techniques to their wealth management approaches. Industry consolidation, such as in the Blackrock example above and with Northwestern Mutual’s acquisition of LearnVest in 2015, will increase the number of larger players in the space as more large firms scoop up smaller fintech companies.


The upcoming Wealth Management and Investing Summit at FinovateFall will span two days of discussions from industry thought leaders, top fintechs, and banks. Be a part of these live panel discussions at FinovateFall; register before tomorrow and save on your ticket. A few summit highlights include:

  • Roboadvisors
  • New asset classes enabled by technology
  • Banks and robos: build vs. buy
  • New investing tools: thematic investing
  • Advisor platforms: using technology to enable advisors

This is the third of our six FinovateFall Summit series. Stay tuned next week, when we’ll cover regtech and insurtech.

Save $400 to Attend FinovateFall – Register by Tomorrow!

Save $400 to Attend FinovateFall – Register by Tomorrow!

FinovateFall comes to NYC in style this September. Join us to see the future of fintech with 70+ demos from a fantastic group of innovative companies on stage. Keep an eye out later this month for details of who’s presenting.

  • Network and make connections with digital decision makers from financial institutions and fintech leaders.
  • Share the experience with a colleague with a split ticket – more details.

Space is limited – book this week to save $400.

Book online, call 1 (888) 670-8200 or email register@knect365.com.

Sincerely,

The Finovate Team

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Summit View: Changes in the Wealth Management and Investing Scene
  • Logical Glue Locks in Investment from New Look Founder, Tom Singh
  • Ohpen Garners $17 Million Investment
  • Nostrum Group Acquired by Equiniti Group

Around the web

  • ACI Worldwide partners with Planet Payment to enable Union Pay card acceptance online.
  • Infosys to open Technology and Innovation Hub in North Carolina, employing 2,000.
  • CASHOFF wins spot in inaugural Innotribe Startup Challenge Russia.
  • FIS and Cardtronics to expand Cardless Cash at ATMs Across the United States.
  • Malauzai reports monthly increase of 3% to 5% in RDC usage, now processes more than 200k transactions per month.
  • MicroStrategy Unveils MicroStrategy 10.8.

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.

Holy Transatlantic Transactions! Vantiv to Merge with Worldpay in $10 Billion Deal

Holy Transatlantic Transactions! Vantiv to Merge with Worldpay in $10 Billion Deal

Smack dab in the middle of an otherwise sleepy fintech summer is the blockbuster news that U.S. credit card processor  Vantiv has agreed to merge with fellow Finovate/FinDEVr alum, Worldpay. The deal is valued at $9.9 billion, and Vantiv reportedly edged out J.P. Morgan in the pursuit of the U.K. payments company. J.P. Morgan is Worldpay’s corporate brokerage firm.

The terms of the deal call for Vantiv to pay 385 pence per share: 55 pence in cash – 0.0672 of a new Vantiv share – and a 5 pence cash dividend per Worldpay share. The amount represents a premium of nearly 19% on the $4.8 billion company’s Monday closing share price.  The new company will be led by Vantiv’s Charles Drucker and Worldpay’s Philip Jansen.

Reuters quotes analysts at Cowen and at Berenberg suggesting that Worldpay’s e-commerce business is the chief prize in the merger. Cowen analysts pointed out the lack of non-North American exposure for Vantiv, as well as its “excessive exposure to the offline U.S. market.” Worldpay supports more than 400,000 merchants in 126 currencies in 146 countries and is a major player in the payment processing market in the U.K. Vantiv is America’s biggest merchant acquirer by transaction volume. Combined, the new company’s reach extends from the U.K. and the U.S. to Europe, South America, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Vantiv demonstrated TriPOS, a next generation payment integration payment solution at FinovateFall 2014. Headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio, Vantiv partnered with fellow Finovate alums, Malauzai Software and OnDot to help launch a PFM solution, Family Manager, SmartKid Control, in May. Also this year, Vantiv acquired B2B workflow automation specialist, Paymetric. Vantiv is a veteran of our developer’s conference, having presented “The Evergreen Developer Solution – triPOS Cloud” at FinDEVr New York this spring. Publicly traded on the NYSE under the ticker “VNTV” since the spring of 2012, Vantiv has a market capitalization of more than $11 billion.

Worldpay presented “It’s Not Just About Getting Paid, It’s About the Payment Journey” at our developer’s conference in Silicon Valley last fall. Founded in 1991 and based in London, U.K., the company went public in the fall of 2015, trading on the London Stock Exchange. Last month, Worldpay announced that it was testing payments in the virtual reality space, and in January, the company partnered with UnionPay for bumper Chinese New Year.

 

TSYS and Featurespace to Provide New Fraud Fighting Solution, Foresight Score

TSYS and Featurespace to Provide New Fraud Fighting Solution, Foresight Score

 

Courtesy of its partnership with FeaturespaceTSYS had added new fraud prevention capabilities to its suite of risk and fraud offerings. The new solution, TSYS Foresight Score, leverages Featurespace’s machine learning technology and adaptive behavioral analytics platform, ARIC, to better fight fraud and reduce false positives. The tool is the product of an agreement to work together the companies announced more than a year ago.

Featurespace CEO Martina King pointed to ARIC’s particular effectiveness against transactional card fraud, adding that the combination of Featurespace’s technology and TSYS’ “industry experience and robust client base” would give TSYS Foresight Score “tremendous potential in the fight against fraud.” TSYS president and COO Pam Joseph said the tool would also help “increase revenue and improve operational efficiency. In the press release accompanying the announcement, TSYS cited a Nilson Report that put total fraud losses by FIs and merchants on payment cards at more than $21 billion in 2015 and on track to reach $31 billion by 2020.

TSYS Foresight Score pledges a 20% increase in overall fraud detection ability, a 35% increase in CNP (card not present) fraud detection, and a 79% gain in high-ticket transaction fraud detection. What makes the tool unique is its self-learning technology, which enables it to become better and more precise in detecting and stopping fraudulent transactions with increased use, and its ability to anticipate and score customer behavior in real-time. With Featurespace’s Bayesian-based statistical modeling, TSYS Foresight Score provides a strong compliment to traditional, consortium-based, anti-fraud approaches such as FICO scores and even TSYS’s own fraud detection solution, Falcon. ForeSight Score will be available to TSYS customers via the TSYS CardGuard ecosystem.

Featurespace Commercial Director Matt Mills demonstrated ARIC Fraud Manager at FinovateFall 2016. Headquartered in Cambridgeshire, U.K., the company was named to FinTechCity’s FinTech50 for 2017. This spring, Featurespace teamed up with digital family banking platform, goHenry, and partnered with merchant payment solution specialist, CashFlows. Featurespace has raised more than $16 million in funding, including a venture round in June. The company includes TTV Capital, Nesta Ventures, Imperial Innovations, Cambridge Capital Group, and Cambridge Angels Group among its investors. Martina King is CEO.

TSYS demonstrated its Authorization Controls at FinovateAsia 2013. Founded in 1983 and headquartered in Columbus, Georgia, TSYS announced an extension of its partnership with Tesco Bank last month and in May, enabled tokenization across its commercial card platforms in North America. TSYS began the year with news that both Avanzia Bank and BBVA were renewing their card and payments agreements with the company. Trading on the NYSE under the ticker, “TSS,” TSYS has a total market capitalization of more than $10 billion.

 

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • TSYS and Featurespace to Provide New Fraud Fighting Solution, Foresight Score.
  • Holy Transatlantic Transactions! Vantiv to Merge with Worldpay in $10 Billion Deal.

Around the web

  • Kashoo celebrates earning the #2 spot in PC Mag’s accounting software ranking.
  • BancPass, makers of the PToll app, hire John Freund as President.
  • Capsilon partners with Optimal Blue to enhance its mortgage PoS solutions.
  • International Business Times quotes Finicity co-founder Nick Thomas.
  • Flybits CEO Hossein Rahnama named to Canada’s Top 40 Under 40 for 2017.
  • Pendo Systems CEO Pamela Pecs Cytron discusses extracting insights from unstructured data at MarketWatch.

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.

Ayondo Opens Offices in Barcelona and Madrid

Ayondo Opens Offices in Barcelona and Madrid

Ayondo is taking its social trading revolution to Spain.

“We are extremely excited to join the Spanish retail trading market,” ayondo co-founder and CEO Robert Lempka said. “We will introduce the new concept of Social Trading to Spanish investors.” The brokerage and social trading innovator is planning two new offices in Spain, one in Barcelona and another in Madrid. The expansion will make the country ayondo’s third major redistribution market, along with the U.K. and its native Germany.

Founder and former Activotrade CEO Raza Perez will lead ayondo’s new efforts in Spain as Head of Product. In a statement, Perez praised the “global appeal” of social trading, and pointed out how the combination of “transparency and reciprocity” in social trading provides opportunities for both new and veteran, successful traders. “It is a new form of investment which combines the principles of classical exchange trading with social media characteristics,” Perez said.

The news of ayondo’s expansion comes on the heels of the company’s announcement enabling Bitcoin trading on the platform. Within ayondo’s social trading environment, investors interested trading the digital currency for the first time  – as with any other asset available on the platform – can follow along, tracking and emulating the moves of savvier, more experienced traders. Beginners can start on the ayondo platform for as little as £1,000, and the company offers a risk-free demo account, as well. Top traders earn income by allowing other traders on platform to “tail” their trades.

With more than 2 million users in more than 190 countries using its technology, ayondo demonstrated its platform at FinovateEurope 2013. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Germany, ayondo acquired fellow Finovate alum, TradeHero, last fall. The deal provided ayondo with exposure to Asian markets and access to a popular mobile-based, social trading technology that was the top finance app in the Apple app store in more than 90 countries. The acquisition was also seen as a step toward the ayondo’s anticipated listing on the Singapore stock exchange.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Ayondo Opens Offices in Barcelona and Madrid

Around the web

  • Financial Times profiles Avi Turgeman, founder of BioCatch.
  • Metro Bank to deploy workforce management technology from NICE.
  • Let’s Talk Payments interviews OneVisage founder, Christophe Remillet.
  • Darwinex reveals winners of its DarwinIA Trading Challenge.
  • Synergix features CashSentinel (in French).
  • Siam Commercial Bank deploys Ripple technology for cross-border payments between Japan and Thailand.

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.

 

44 Alums Populate CB Insights’ Fintech 250 List

44 Alums Populate CB Insights’ Fintech 250 List

This week, CB Insights unveiled its Fintech 250 list. The research outfit selected 250 emerging, private companies in 17 sub-sectors of fintech that are changing the face of financial services. The roster includes 44 Finovate and FinDEVr alums that were selected using CB Insights’ data-driven process that analyzes company momentum, market participation, funds raised, and investor quality.

The list is in alphabetical order.

Algomi

AutoGravity

Avalara

Behalf

Betterment

Blend

Chain

Coinbase

Credit Karma

Currencycloud

CurrencyFair

Fenergo

Financeit

Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll)

Juvo

Kabbage

Kensho

Kreditech

Klarna

LendUp

Moneytree

PayNearMe

Payoneer

Personal Capital

Plaid

Quantopian

Quovo

Revolut

Ripple Labs

Roostify

Signifyd

SocietyOne

Socure

Tink

Token

Tradeshift

Transferwise

TrueAccord

Trulioo

VATBox

Wealthfront

Xignite

Zooz

Zopa