Finovate Blog

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO & Co-Founder of one of the presenting companies, LeanXcale. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with LeanXcale’s promo code LeanXcale20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Dr. Ricardo Jimenez-Peris, LeanXcale’s CEO & Co-Founder:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Jimenez-Peris: For 25 years, I have devoted my career to resolving the main bottleneck of operational databases — transactional processing — in my position as director of Distributed Systems Laboratory at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Additionally, I am the CEO and Co-Founder of LeanXcale and the technical director of the international projects CoherentPaaS, LeanBigData and CloudDBAppliance.

During my scientific career, I have been a co-author of over 100 publications in international conferences and journals, co-author of a book on database replication, as well as the manager of large international research projects, such as Adapt, Stream, and CumuloNimbo. The projects included teams between 20 to 50 people and involved 6 to 11 companies and research organizations, receiving public grants amounting to over 6 million euros. In addition, I am a co-inventor of 2 patents and 1 additional patent application. The research of my laboratory resulted in technology transfers to big international companies such as Ericsson, Telefonica, and Bull.

In March 2015, I quit my scientific career to launch LeanXcale. The idea behind the business was to commercialize an ultra-scalable database and the technology at the core of LeanXcale attracted much attention in Silicon Valley. Ten top tech companies — Twitter, Salesforce, Cloudera, HortonWorks, Pivotal, Heroku, HP, and Microsoft — invited me to speak at their headquarters.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

LeanXcale has developed an Ultra-Scalable SQL Operational & Analytical database using unique scalability to solve the lack of real-time big data support for financial organizations.

Jimenez-Peris: My favorite features of the LeanXcale platform are

• The scalability of the operational database to millions of transactions per second and 100s of nodes
• The combination of operational and analytical capabilities in a single database system
• The elasticity of the database, which enables the provisioning and decommissioning of new nodes as needed in a totally non-intrusive way.
• The polyglot integration with other NoSQL data stores enabling queries across SQL and different NoSQL data stores.
• The efficiency of the storage engine in multi-core and NUMA architectures, as well as its hardware acceleration by means of vectorial processing and the acceleration, thanks to its hybrid columnar storage.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Jimenez-Peris: Operational database for fintech, either on premise or in the cloud, with capabilities to perform analytical queries over operational data.

FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking Technology, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New Coin, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global Data, Harrington Starr, Holland Fintech, Level39, London Tech Week, Mapa Research, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, Startupbootcamp, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the developer community manager of one of the presenting companies, eSignLive by VASCO. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with eSignLive’s promo code eSignLivebyVASCO20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Michael Williams, eSignLive’s Evangelism & Developer Community Manager:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Williams: My career started as a Technical Evangelist at Actuate Corporation (now OpenText Analytics), a data analytics company. My role there was to build an online community of developers and support them through the delivery of a wide range of tools and documentation. It was an extremely successful model and one that I implemented when I joined eSignLive over two years ago. Today, my team of technical evangelists and I support prospects, customers and partners that use the eSignLive API and SDKs through our online developer community. It has become THE place for developers to find information about how to integrate e-signatures into their web and mobile apps. We’ve developed quick start guides, tutorials, an online forum to enable peer-to-peer conversations, and a code share section where developers can post and find code examples to facilitate rapid integration. A huge success that I am personally very proud of.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Williams: Electronic signature as a whole is game-changing technology because it allows organizations to fully automate businesses processes – processes that would normally fall to paper whenever a signature or approval is required. Taking away the paper problem improves operational efficiencies and helps deliver an exceptional customer experience that can drive high adoption and completion rates. One of the biggest advantages of e-signature technology, and with eSignLive in particular, is the ability to use the same code no matter the deployment type (e.g., public cloud, private cloud or on-premises), device or channel. This can all be done without investing in the test infrastructure for the solution and without costly install periods or developer licenses.

E-signature technology also provides direct visibility into how and when the transaction took place. You can track who signed, in what order, when and where – something that simply isn’t possible in the paper world. Coming from a data analytics background, the more data the customer can gather from a transaction the better. This information is not only beneficial from an audit and compliance perspective but can also help glean insights into the customer journey – enabling organizations to measure the effectiveness of the customer experience and pinpoint areas of drop-off or confusion.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Williams: The analyst firm, Celent, recently published a case study about BMO (Bank of Montreal) and their digital transformation initiative in personal banking. BMO implemented an enterprise-wide eForms and eSignature shared services platform in order to provide a contextual and responsive digital user experience across its mobile account opening process. Partnering with software companies, GMC Software and eSignLive by VASCO, BMO delivered a straight-through digital on-boarding process – enabling customers to open an account using their smartphone in less than 8 minutes. A fantastic customer success story that is helping the bank save $98 million (U.S.) annually.

FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking Technology, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New Coin, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global Data, Harrington Starr, Holland Fintech, Level39, London Tech Week, Mapa Research, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, Startupbootcamp, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the speaker for one of the presenting companies, aixigo. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with aixigo’s promo code aixigo20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Marcus Gruendler, aixigo’s Head of Portfolio Management Systems:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Gruendler: I am a technical consultant and software architect at aixigo AG in Germany. Having more than 15 years of expertise in developing and managing international software projects for financial services, I’m currently actively developing high performance portfolio management software.

My focus is combining software engineering skills with the ability to bridge technical and business backgrounds. These skills are based upon the experiences from software projects in the european banking sector such as Citigroup, Commerzbank, DAB Bank, Cortal Consors and several more.

My current field of interest focuses on delivering digital wealth management software solutions at retail scale.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Gruendler: With aixigo’s Digital Portfolio Management solution we offer you high performance services for complex portfolio data. So that you can not only provide high speed responses for human speech interaction but can also perform mass calculations for millions of portfolios within a few minutes. With this technology, we bring new business models (for example Wealth Management) to the retail market that have only represented a conceivable opportunity for high value clients so far.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Gruendler: The core component of our portfolio management system is a high performance in-memory-engine. Current programming models waste performance speed due to slow memory access. Our new stream oriented computing engine optimizes data access in a way that enables the CPU to perform operations 100-200 times faster than classic algorithms can. This high performance engine allows for the provision of complex functionalities for a large set of clients, as well as allowing for such a provision in low latency scenarios (e. g. analytics, monitoring or rebalancing). It is even possible to use our services with human speech interactions (such as Amazon Alexa) or AI interactions (IBM Watson).

FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking Technology, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New Coin, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global Data, Harrington Starr, Holland Fintech, Level39, London Tech Week, Mapa Research, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, Startupbootcamp, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO of one of the presenting companies, CASHOFF. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with CASHOFF’s promo code CASHOFF20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Dmitry Gorkov, CASHOFF’s CEO:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Gorkov: I studied at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, at the department of Mechanics and Mathematics. Studying at one of the most famous and oldest universities in Russia, under the guidance of the best professors, helped me form my personality and gave me a push of inspiration.

Of course, I didn’t start my own start up right after graduation. It took me a while to master my tech skills in practice. After graduation, I worked at a major Russian company engaged in e-banking software development, where I implemented about 50 projects, which turned out to be a success. That’s when I decided to create my own product in this sphere, which could combine all the financial data and data from receipts in order to use it in mobile banking applications.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Gorkov: CASHOFF is a cloud-based service, which collects not only the transaction data from banks but also the lists of items from shop receipts in one mobile banking application. This information describes the consumer the best and opens wide opportunities for analysis of his/her buying behavior and obtaining the most relevant insights. The technology helped us to conquer the Russian market. Currently, we are observing the European market, so that our product could meet new standards of quality and become popular abroad.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Gorkov: When we launched our PFM service in banks and they saw its value, we started to think about how to make our service more convenient for the clients. So we developed a mobile version of CASHOFF and deployed it inside the VBRR Bank (top-30) mobile application. The mobile version of the service possesses the features of the web one, but it is adapted for mobile devices. We got fivefold increase in activity at distant channel and positive feedback from the bank’s clients. Another remembered implementation was in one of the best mobile banking application in Europe – Tinkoff Bank. Now we are working in collaboration with the global Citi bank. Both projects gave us a very good experience that would help us in future developments.

FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking Technology, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New Coin, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global Data, Harrington Starr, Holland Fintech, Level39, London Tech Week, Mapa Research, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, Startupbootcamp, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.