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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.
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.
Fintech matchmaker Matchi has made a major match of its own: The Hong Kong-based company agreed to an acquisition by KPMG this week. Terms of the deal were not immediately available.
Calling the combination of the two entities a “powerful fintech resource,” Matchi CEO David Milligan said that the acquisition will help Match “fulfill the promise of collaboration between financial institutions and fintech firms, which can ultimately benefit all consumers.” Global co-leader of Fintech for KPMG International, Ian Pollari called Matchi’s curated approach” as very different from the “fintech databases that merely provide lists.” He added “It is designed to identify, match, and enable collaboration with the most innovative fintechs and solutions to address specific issues being faced by financial institutions.”
Matchi’s platform featured more than 700 curated fintech solutions as well as a 2,500+ company database of fintech innovators that FIs can collaborate and work with. FIs can search for specific companies or technologies, and take advantage of Matchi’s Innovation Challenge feature by issuing a specific business issue or problem on the platform and see what fintechs are interested in pursuing a solution. “Finding fintech companies who are pre-validated, helps to reduce risks and can accelerate time to market,” Pollari explained.
Founded in 2013, Matchi demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall 2014. The company has played matchmaker for more than 100 leading banks and insurance companies worldwide, helping firms deploy a variety of technologies ranging from next generation payments to the blockchain. Last month, Matchi teamed up with ATB Financial and KPMG Canada to run a customer onboarding innovation challenge for fintech companies.
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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.
What does it take to turn your fintech startup into one of the industry’s great success stories?
The growth of fintech worldwide is creating more opportunities than ever for entrepreneurs and startups. The same industry that is making it easier for the underbanked to build a financial future is also making cross-border payments cheaper, safer, and more transparent for the world’s largest financial institutions.
And from crowdfunding platforms to chatbots, fintech is the place where the social and the “artificially-intelligent” are partners in helping us save, spend, and invest.
How can startups harness this global opportunity in fintech and turn it into demand for their own innovations and solutions? What does it take to separate your fintech startup from the rest of the pack?
On May 17th at 11am Eastern, Finovate will host its first-ever webinar: “How to Make it in the Fintech Industry: 3 Startup Success Stories.” Join Moven CTO Kumar Ampani, Clinc founder and CEO Jason Mars, and Jeff Cain, Director of the Envestnet | Yodlee Incubator as they share insights on what fintech entrepreneurs need to know in order to turn their innovations into the solutions, apps, and services of tomorrow.
Panelist: Kumar Ampani
Chief Technology Officer
Moven
Panelist: Jeff Cain
Senior Director
Envestnet | Yodlee Incubator
Panelist: Dr. Jason Mars
Co-founder and CEO
Clinc
Moderator: David Penn
Research Analyst
Finovate
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.
In a funding round led by online payment service provider, PayU, Germany’s Kreditech has raised $120 million (€110 million). The investment is the largest equity investment in a German fintech company to date. Kreditech CEO Alexander Graubner-Müller said his company was looking forward to bringing “point-of-sale finance” to markets where “reliable credit risk assessment” is lacking. Graubner-Müller added “Teaming up with PayU provides underbanked customers new possibilities and supports our mission of providing financial freedom through technology.”
In addition the record-setting nature of the funding, the partnership between Kreditech and PayU also represents what the company called in a press release: “the first such strategic cooperation pact between a payment service provider and a technology driven consumer finance company.” Pointing to its commitment to bring credit and financial services to the underbanked, PayU CEO Laurent le Moal said his company’s “substantial investment” in Kreditech will “help to bring pioneering machine learning and AI technology to the many high growth markets around the world that need better access to financial services.”
This week’s funding adds to the $10.4 million Kreditech raised in a round led by Japan-based Rakuten last December. With total capital of more than $280 million, the Hamburg-based online lender has earned a valuation of between $325 million and $540 million, according to an estimate in TechCrunch.
Kreditech has processed more than four million loan applications via its subsidiaries, leveraging its API-driven, lending-as-a-service approach to make it easy for partners to integrate and custom-fit a variety of consumer finance solutions. These include loan application and credit risk management products, e-signature and customer service, loan refinancing, processing, and collections. The company is active in more than five markets around the world – including Russia, Mexico, Spain, and Poland, where Kreditech and PayU recently completed an $11 million (€10 million), 12-month pilot program.
Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Hamburg, Germany, Kreditech demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2014. Named to H2 Ventures and KPMG’s Fintech 100 in 2016, the company added a pair of new board members last month: former Vanquis Bank CEO Michael Lenora and OneSavings Bank CEO Andy Golding.
Our first developers conference in the U.K. is just over a month away. If APIs and SDKs are just a few of your favorite fintech acronyms, then join us for two days of developer-focused presentations, demonstrations, and conversations at FinDEVr 2017 London, June 12 and 13. Stop by our registration page today and save your spot.
FinDEVr 2017 London is a part of London Tech Week, which runs from June 12 to June 16.
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Peer-to-peer small business financing platform Bitbond announced today it has received a debt commitment from Obotritia Capital, which has agreed to fund $5.4 million worth of loans on its platform. Obotritia has also invested an undisclosed amount of equity in Bitbond, whose current funding now totals more than $2.14 million.
Headquartered in Germany, Bitbond offers small businesses across the globe fast access to working capital. It does so by connecting small business owners with individual and institutional investors. Because it leverages the blockchain, Bitbond sends cross-border payments to merchants quickly and inexpensively. Since it was founded in 2013, Bitbond has originated 1,700 loans to small businesses in 120 countries.
At FinovateFall 2016, the company launched an automated SME scoring engine. “The main challenge about creating an international lending platform is credit scoring because data is different from one country to another,” said Bitbond CEO and founder Radko Albrecht in his recent FinovateFall demo. He added, “At Bitbond we have solved this and created the most international and most scalable SME scoring mechanism.” The tool offers a universal, automated scoring method that offers borrowers instant funding after their application is accepted. Because Bitbond requires less manual involvement than traditional underwriting methods, it also has the advantage of scalability.
Earlier this year, Bitbond partnered with blockchain remittance service Bitpesa to improve access to working capital for small businesses in Africa. Last fall, the company received its BaFin license, a certification that allows it to conduct asset brokerage on its platform independent of banks.
The amount of the investment was undisclosed. But blockchain startup and smart contracts specialist, Symbiont has picked up funding from China-based Hundsun Technologies. The investment in Symbiont is the first in the U.S. for the financial services software provider and the company, which is partly-owned by Alibaba founder, Jack Ma, will also add an observer to Symbiont’s board of directors. Symbiont CEO Mark Smith referred to the investment as a “clear vote of confidence for Symbiont” and called Hundsun Technologies a “strong partner in Asia.”
Symbiont’s innovation is a smart contracts platform that enables FIs to develop applications based on distributed ledger technology. Current use cases enabling the issuance, trading, and processing of corporate bonds, syndicated loans, and other low-liquidity financial instruments. Guan Xiaolan, executive president of Hundsun highlighted the company’s “superior, mature, and highly differentiated DLT stack,” as well as the technology’s high level of security. “Its smart contracts have a proven ability to automate complex business logic, such as highly tailored employee compensation waterfalls for private companies,” he added.
It has been almost a year since the State of Delaware partnered with Symbiont in a project called The Delaware Block Initiative designed to make it easier for state government and businesses to leverage blockchain technology. In an update published as part of the Delaware law series last month, Andrea Tinianow of the Delaware Blockchain Initiative and Caitlin Long of Symbiont noted that the “first milestone of DBI’s roadmap” – deploying distributed ledger technology at the state’s public archives – had been achieved. Underscoring the relevance of this initial effort, the two wrote: “By being the first to adopt the technology, the State will maintain its leadership in corporate registry services.”
Also this spring, Symbiont added Yale University computer science professor, Dr. Zhong Shao, to its Technical Advisory Board, and partnered with commodity services specialist, Orebits, who will use Symbiont’s smart contract technology to further develop their eponymous commodity-backed digital assets. The first digital assets, called “orebits,” were made available on Symbiont’s platform in March.
Symbiont was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in New York. Adam Krellenstein, CTO and co-founder of the company, presented “Distributed Ledgers and Smart Contracts” at FinDEVr New York 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.
Data security specialist Vera announced a strategic investment of $15 million today. The funding was led by Hasso Plattner Ventures (HP-Ventures), and featured the participation of Amplify Partners, Battery Ventures, Clear Venture Partners, Leslie Ventures, and Sutter Hill Ventures. The company’s total capital is now more than $50 million. Ajay Arora, CEO and co-founder of Vera said the investment will help fuel expansion particularly in Europe where new regulations on data security, specifically the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), are pending.
GDPR was enacted just over a year ago by the European Parliament and Council in an effort to improve data security for individuals in the EU. The scheduled implementation date of the GDPR is less than a month away on May 25th and observers like Gartner are warning that less than half of companies are will be fully compliant by the end of 2018, much less the end of May. “The GDPR will affect not only EU-based organizations, but many data controllers and processors outside the EU as well,” Gartner research director, Bart Willemsen said. He added that both the threat of “hefty fines” and what he called “the increasingly empowered position of individual data subjects” are pressuring companies to do a better job of protecting personal data.
And this is where companies like Vera come in. Vera’s technology innovates by securing the data itself. From files and Word documents to images and video, Vera enables companies to control access and the ability to manipulate data after it has left its traditional perimeter of control. During the company’s live demonstration at FinovateSpring, Vera’s Grant Shirk used a single click to secure a word document and an Excel spreadsheet after attaching them to an email. In addition to quickly establishing a variety of access permissions, Vera’s technology also enables digital watermarking, restrictions on the ability to edit (including cut and paste), and provides auditing and tracking.
Underscoring Vera’s uniqueness as its first cybersecurity investment, HP-Ventures General Partner, Yair Re’em credited the company’s “incredible momentum and hypergrowth in markets large and small” as well as Vera’s ability to “help protect and control data after a breach has happened.” He said: “The crumbling state of enterprise security has clearly demonstrated the need for a fundamental paradigm shift in cybersecurity.” Chris Rust, Clear Venture Partners co-founder and General Partner, added that Vera was “the driving force behind a positive and profound shift away from perimeter-based security and towards a more flexible and reliable data-centric model.” Rust will join Vera’s board of directors as part of the strategic investment.
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Vera demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2016. Earlier this year, the company launched its enterprise communications security solution, Vera for Mail. Last fall, Vera announced that Logica Capital Advisors had selected them to manage business information and internal collaboration files. The company has produced more than 4x revenue growth since launching publicly in 2015 and grown its Fortune 100 customer base by 5x. Vera won the 2017 SC Trust Award Winner for Best Cloud Computing Security in February and, in March, the company was named to CRN’s annual Security 100 list.