FinDEVr APIntelligence

FDNY17-Logo-RevTickets for upcoming FinDEVr London and FinDEVr New York are at their lowest prices now. Register for FinDEVr New York now and save!

On FinDEVr.com

  • Payoneer Launches Cross-Border, Mass Payment APIs.

Alumni updates

  • FinDEVr veteran Hyperwallet adds former SecureNet Payments EVP, Mark Engels, as Chief Revenue Officer.
  • Best of Show winner AutoGravity forges new partnership with Westlake Financial Services to expand financing options for car shoppers.
  • The Paypers interviews Nicole Mantow, General Manager of EVO Payments, parent company of FinDEVr veteran, EVO Snap.
  • PayPal Acquires TIO Networks in $230 Million Deal.
  • Thomson Reuters Labs’ latest data science lab opens in Singapore.
  • Bluefin Payment Systems powers payment processing solution for ticketing and ecommerce platform, AudienceView.
  • Mitek to provide AML and KYC compliance technology for European blockchain firm, Nocks.
  • AutoGravity Earns Multi-Million Euro Investment from Daimler.
  • Northern California’s Kaiperm Diablo FCU to deploy core banking technology from NYMBUS.
  • Arxan launches Arxan Application Protection for JavaScript to protect JavaScript-based applications.

Stay current on daily news from the fintech developer community! Follow FinDEVr on Twitter.

Alexa, Tell Me About D3 Banking’s New Voice Banking Skill

Alexa, Tell Me About D3 Banking’s New Voice Banking Skill

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Data driven digital banking services company D3 Banking launched a voice banking skill, an Amazon Alexa-specific app, to enable end users to communicate with their bank or credit union.

Using the intelligent, voice banking solution, members can check account balances, move money, listen to messages, and set financial goals. D3 Banking collects and analyzes consumer interactions and uses AI to personalize Alexa’s responses with marketing and specific calls to action. Javelin Strategy & Research found that voice banking is not just for tech-savvy consumers. In fact, the firm reported “more than half of all mobile bankers express interest in using voice commands” and that it is “not just for millennials; a majority of seniors reported that they would find it faster than navigating multiple menus in a mobile banking app.”

The Alexa voice banking fits in with the rest of D3 Banking’s offerings, which include an open and flexible API-driven infrastructure. The company intends to add voice recognition for fraud prevention and customer service calling capability. Additionally, D3 Banking has plans in place to expand the services to other virtual assistants, such as Google Home.

Founded in 1997, D3 Banking debuted its small business banking capabilities at FinovateFall 2015. In June of last year, the Nebraska-based company landed $10 million from West Partners, which brought its total funding to $27 million. Mark Vipond is CEO.

Bitbond Closes on $1.2 Million in Funding

Bitbond Closes on $1.2 Million in Funding

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If peer-to-peer lending isn’t hip enough to pique your interest, how does bitcoin lending sound? That’s exactly what Germany-based Bitbond is doing that earned them $1.2 million in investor funding today. This boosted the online SME lender’s total funding to $2.3 million.

The round was led by mobilike founder Şekip Can Gökalp. Other contributors include Fyber founders Janis Zech and Andreas Bodczek as well as Kreditech co-founder & CEO Alexander Graubner-Müller. Founder & CEO of Bitbond Radoslav Albrecht said, “We are happy to have such experienced investors supporting us on this exciting journey.” According to Albrecht, the funds will help Bitbond to “make lending and borrowing globally accessible” by furthering product development and growing its user base in underserved markets. Currently, the company has 76,000 registered users from 120 countries.

Since launching in 2013, Bitbond has extended 1,600+ loans worth $1.2 million. The company matches investors with SME borrowers from across the globe by leveraging the blockchain for cross-border payment processing. In October of 2016, Bitbond received a regulatory license from German regulator BaFin, making it one of the first regulated blockchain-based financial services providers.

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Bitbond’s Radko Albrecht (CEO & Founder) and Jarek Nowotka (CTO) on stage at FinovateFall 2016 in New York

At FinovateFall in September, the company launched automated, universal scoring for SME lending. As Albrecht said in his demo, “The main challenge about creating an international platform is credit scoring, because data is different from one country to another.” The new offering solves this with its scalable, automated scoring mechanism that offers applicants an instant loan decision.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Check out this week’s FinDEVr APIntelligence.
  • Alexa, Tell Me About D3 Banking’s New Voice Banking Skill.
  • Finie Gets Funding: AI Innovator Clinc Closes $6 Million Series A.

On FinDEVr.com

Around the web

  • Zopa named Best Personal Loan Provider and Best Alternative Finance Provider at British Bank Awards
  • 7-Eleven names InComm Vendor of the Year.
  • ProfitStars introduces Gladiator Incident Alert for complex risk monitoring and management.
  • D3 Banking unveils Amazon Alexa-based intelligent banking service.
  • FinDEVr veteran Hyperwallet adds former SecureNet Payments EVP, Mark Engels, as Chief Revenue Officer.
  • Fiserv recognized among “world’s most admired companies” for fourth year in a row.
  • Best of Show winner AutoGravity forges new partnership with Westlake Financial Services to expand financing options for car shoppers.
  • Feedzai and Merchant Risk Council (MRC) team up to leverage AI and machine learning to fight fraud.
  • Klarna adds to payment options for omni-channel commerce technology innovator, Radial.
  • The Paypers interviews Nicole Mantow, General Manager of EVO Payments, parent company of FinDEVr veteran, EVO Snap.

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.

FinDEVr Feature — Riverbed

See Riverbed (+Teneo) and the rest of the FinDEVr New York speaker lineup on March 21 & 22. Register and save 10% with the promo code FinDEVrBlog.

Interview with George Karamanoglou, Riverbed‘s Director of Advanced Business Solutions:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?
I have over twenty years’ experience with leading suppliers and consumers of advanced application operations technology. I’ve held various strategic technical and management roles with a focus on application infrastructure performance and developed a keen understanding of market needs, with substantial experience introducing and discussing emerging disruptive technology to large complex organizations.

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

Riverbed solutions are focused on identifying and managing application performance constraints across infrastructure domains. By delivering better visibility, performance, and control of critical application infrastructure Riverbed can help you bring the promise of digital transformation to life.

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

Implementing Riverbed solutions for the best application performance management and monitoring to gain real-time visibility into the end-user experience, infrastructure and applications. As a result, we enable the ability to diagnose application performance problems down to the offending code, service function, network, or system resource in development and production environments.


FinDEVr New York 2017 is partnered with American Banker, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, CIOReview, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Harrington Starr, Level39, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Speak to 400+ Fintech Developers this June — Apply for FinDEVr London

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The second deadline to apply to speak at FinDEVr London is this Friday, February 24. If you’re interested, there are a few things to consider: Is FinDEVr the right fit for your company? What should you show on stage? Is the timing right?

FinDEVr events focus on the tech side of financial, banking and payments technology. Companies showcase the latest in enabling tools — APIs, SDKs, cloud services and platforms, explore use cases, and walk through tutorials of best practices, implementation, etc.

FinDEVr is a good fit if you’re developing enabling technology and want to reach a technical audience (CTOs, software architects and engineers, developers, etc.) to do the following:

  • Drive product adoption of APIs/platforms/SDKs (like Stratumn and Streamdata.io)
  • Showcase new and trending technology and the inspiration behind it (like DigiByte)
  • Establish technical leadership of the industry while educating the market (like Braintree and Google)
  • Garner press recognition and gather feedback on innovations

With 15 minutes on stage, speakers balance live coding, slides, video and demos. Check out DriveWealth’s presentation from our most recent FinDEVr event to see what this looks like:

And then apply ASAP. The second deadline to apply to speak is this Friday, February 24. Submissions are reviewed and presenters selected on an ongoing basis. Even though the final application deadline is not until March, applying early is advantageous (early-bird discounts on the speaker fee are available).

For more information on speaking, please review the brochure for prospective presenting companies here: london2017.findevr.com/presenterpdf. And then fill out the online application here: london2017.findevr.com/application.

If you have any questions, please email london@findevr.com.

Qumram’s Regtech Offering Lands $1.49 Million

Qumram’s Regtech Offering Lands $1.49 Million

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Here’s more proof that regtech is coming of age– Switzerland-based Qumram closed on $1.5 million in funding today. This brings the company’s total funding to $6.2 million.

Today’s funds come from Madrid-based Mundi Ventures, a technology-focused VC firm that also operates in Barcelona, London, and Seattle. In addition to the funding, Mundi will provide due diligence support and will offer Qumram access to corporate executives, new markets, and new customers via the Mundi Club, a global network of 500+ Spanish business leaders.

Regarding the purpose of the new round, Qumram CEO Patrick Barnert said, “These funds are continuously applied to international expansion, with strong focus on the financial services markets of Europe, the U.K., and U.S.A. Qumram has already gained great traction in the US. Our first client win was Russell Investments, and other financial institutions followed soon after.”

Founded in 2011, Qumram offers banks technology that lets them record and replay all digital activity and interactions with clients. The movie-like playback gives banks an auditable record for compliance purposes. In addition to facilitating compliance, Qumram offers internal and external fraud detection, as well as actionable insights that inform banks how to improve the user experience. At FinovateFall 2016, the company showcased its regulatory compliance tool that facilitates client communication. In September of last year, Qumram debuted a social media recording solution that is compliant with WhatsApp and in August won Swisscom Startup Challenge 2016.

Spiff Partners with Nordea Liv to Launch Mobile Savings App

Spiff Partners with Nordea Liv to Launch Mobile Savings App

Spiff_homepage_February2017

FinovateEurope alum Spiff has teamed up with Norwegian life insurance corporation, Nordea Liv, to develop its social savings app. Together the two companies will begin a pilot project of the app for a limited number of users “very shortly,” with a full launch anticipated “before the summer.”

“Our aim is to lower the bar and make it easier for everybody to save by offering them the most innovative, efficient, and user-friendly saving and investment platform,” founder and CEO of Spiff, Carl-Nicolai Wessmann said. Nordea Liv CEO Randi Marjamaa added that with individuals increasingly responsible for managing their own finances – including pensions – solutions like Spiff are especially valuable. “Spiff offers us a new approach to saving that is easy, fun, and social,” Marjamaa said. “It is more important than ever to save.”

Spiff_stage_FEU2017

Pictured (left to right): Kristin Juland Møller (Social Media and Communication Manager) and Carl-Nicolai Wessman founder and CEO) demonstrating the Spiff savings app at FinovateEurope 2016.

Spiff enables users to create personalized savings plans and share them with family and friends. Users begin by choosing goals – personal goals, children’s future, or rainy-day savings – which help the app shape the appropriate saving plan for each individual. They name the plan, add a brief description of the savings goal, and then choose a monthly savings amount, with allocations going to either a connected bank account or a fund. Users choose a transaction date for the funds to be transferred, confirm all selections, and the savings plan is set. The app makes it easy to build additional savings plans (for children, for example; as well as for other goals), and to send completed savings plans to relatives and friends, encouraging them to contribute.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Oslo, Norway, Spiff demonstrated its simple savings app designed with women in mind at FinovateEurope 2016. The company has raised NOK 10 million in funding and includes Sverre Munck (former board chairman of Opera), Trond Riiber Knudsen (TRK Group), and StartupLab’s Founder Fund among its investors. Last summer, Spiff announced a partnership with developer startup, Fink , providing a engineering boost to the company. We featured Spiff’s Kristin Juland Møller in our International Women (in Fintech) Day post last spring.

PayPal Acquires TIO Networks in $230 Million Deal

PayPal Acquires TIO Networks in $230 Million Deal

TioNetworks_homepage_February2017

In a cash deal valued at $233 million ($304 million CAD), PayPal Holdings has agreed to acquire Canada’s TIO Networks. PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman praised the way the company’s combination of digital platform and physical, in person locations made billpay “simpler, faster, and more affordable” – particularly for the underbanked. TIONetworks_HamedShahbaziChairman and CEO of TIO Networks, Hamed Shahbazi (pictured), emphasized this point as well. “We founded TIO to make speed and access part of the bill payment experience for the underserved, and we believe that we have created affordable products to serve the needs of all customers,” Shahbazi said.

TIO Networks will continue to operate as a service within PayPal after the acquisition, which is still pending shareholder approval. The purchase price of the Vancouver, British Columbia-based company, which made its Finovate debut in 2012, represented a premium of more than 25% of its recent share price. PayPal anticipates completing the acquisition in the second half of 2017.

Among the strategic benefits of the acquisition, according to PayPal, is the addition of 14 million consumer bill pay accounts with an estimated 60 million transactions processed as of TIO’s fiscal 2016. In addition, TIO Networks:

  • Processes more than $9 billion in bill payments a year
  • Accepts payments at more than 70,000 locations nationally
  • Provides access to more than 10,000 billers in network
  • Serves a wide variety of verticals including:
    • financial services companies
    • wireless carriers
    • insurance companies
    • app developers
    • national and local retail chains
    • general loan providers

TIO Networks was founded in 1997 and is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The company demonstrated TIO MobilePay at FinovateSpring 2012. Five-year revenue growth of 125% helped TIO Networks make Canada’s 2016 PROFIT 500 list last fall, and in May, the company rebranded its consumer-facing acquisition, Chargestmart from 2014, as TIO.com. One of the top two tech companies in the 2016 TSX Venture 50, TIO was named by the Canadian Innovation Exchange as one of Canada’s 20 “hottest most innovative” public tech companies.

FinDEVr Feature — Modelshop

See Modelshop and the rest of the FinDEVr New York speaker lineup on March 21 & 22. Register and save 10% with the promo code FinDEVrBlog.

Interview with Tom Tobin, Modelshop‘s Founder:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?
Modelshop 2I started as a rocket scientist. No, literally. I worked for General Dynamics in the late ’80s and wrote flight control software for the Atlas II satellite launch platform. The launches were exciting, but the coding really wasn’t. It took weeks to write 100 lines of code, with hundreds of people double checking your work.

I got out of avionics code and took a role building golf ball flight trackers using machine vision for Callaway golf. Definitely more exciting, but I really wanted to be part of a software company that was solving big problems.

I joined a small company in San Diego called HNC Software (now FICO). They were solving the credit card fraud problem using Neural Networks. Fast forward 25 years and I’m still creating solutions in financial services using data and analytics to solve tough problems such as credit pricing decisions, fraud detection and portfolio optimization. Modelshop is the culmination of what I’ve learned delivering these solutions to some of the largest (and smallest) financial institutions out there, and it has the potential to change how decisions are made in our industry.

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

Modelshop 1At its core, Modelshop is an incredibly flexible ontology engine. It can morph the way organizations leverage information to transparently move between data, logic, policy, analytics and back to data. What’s interesting is that spreadsheets also do a pretty good job of this and can be powerful in the hands of capable business analysts. Our goal with Modelshop was not only to replicate that ease of working with information to produce immediate answers for businesses, but also to deliver that on a more scalable, shareable, real-time and analytically robust platform. Technology aside, our vision is to enable businesses to deliver unique analytic applications and services on a larger scale than with traditional coding. We believe we have successfully delivered a platform that accomplishes that vision.

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

Blinker.com is an early stage company based in Denver that connects private party auto buyers and sellers and facilitates the purchase transaction, including financing. They have created an incredible user experience and all of the analytic decisioning behind the scenes is powered by Modelshop. I love the product they have built, and I’m proud of the role we’ve played in delivering their solution in an incredibly short time frame.


FinDEVr New York 2017 is partnered with American Banker, BayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Breaking Banks, Byte Academy, Canadian Trade Commissioner Service, Celent, CIOReview, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Distributed, Economic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Harrington Starr, Level39, Mercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, Swiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Spiff Partners with Nordea Liv to Launch Mobile Savings App.
  • PayPal Acquires TIO Networks in $230 Million Deal.
  • Qumram’s Regtech Offering Lands $1.49 Million

On FinDEVr.com

Around the web

  • TransferWise announces integration with Facebook Messenger.
  • Valiant Bank to deploy new customer engagement platform from Backbase.
  • Thomson Reuters Labs’ latest data science lab opens in Singapore.
  • Malauzai reports record growth for 2016.
  • Santander’s VC arm invests undisclosed amount in Personetics.
  • Standard Chartered leveraging WeChat’s online payment gateway to launch e-commerce solution for corporates.

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.

Banking Opportunity: Synced Joint Accounts

Banking Opportunity: Synced Joint Accounts

simple shared account

One thing we are looking forward to this year is the launch of Simple’s (part of BBVA) Simple Shared checking account. When the beta was announced last September (2016) and the company said it would be launching “some time in 2017.” See screenshots above.

The account promises to help users track their individual purchases, while also maintaining a shared transaction area and goal(s) that includes an Our Safe-to-Spend number across both users. Users would be able to simply transfer money to each other as well. And interestingly, it appears that any two people (and maybe more?) will be able to sync their Simple accounts together, it won’t have to be an actual legal joint account. That’s exactly how it should be.

Innovating in the Deposit Business
The deposit business is relatively straightforward. There are checking accounts, debit cards, and savings accounts (most paying a negligible amount of interest). So how does a bank differentiate itself in this absurdly low interest-rate environment? Branding, trust and location have been the traditional drivers and are still vital. And every decade or so a new technology comes along and there is some jostling along the way until everyone offers it (ATMs, VRUs, debit cards, online banking, mobile banking, etc.).

But even in a world where every FI offers the same basic product lineup, there are still ways to add value and increase market share and/or margins. Synced joint accounts, like Simple’s Shared Account. Married couples are the biggest opportunity, but there are other segments as well: Parents that need to sync with their kids. adults that need to sync with their aging parents, employers with employees, advisors with their clients, and so on.

There has been progress on this front. Many (most?) business accounts offer ways to enable third-party accountant/advisor access. Person-to-person transfers make it easy to send money to kids at college. And PFM solutions such as Mint, allow money-tracker couples to keep an eye on their spending across multiple accounts.

Bottom line: Existing solutions are often difficult to use, missing key features, and not fully integrated within big-name financial brands. Simple, which already offers a state-of-the-art checking account with Safe to Spend balance forecasting, natural-language search, and overall great UI, is expected to raise the bar considerably when Shared Accounts launches. I look forward to using it.


Author: Jim Bruene is Founder & Senior Advisor to Finovate as well as
Principal of BUX Advisors, a financial services UX consultancy.