Finovate Blog

See CardLinx 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 Silvio Tavares, CardLinx Association‘s CEO & President:

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

An electrical and computer engineer by training, my first job was at AT&T Bell Labs where I worked on one of the earliest methods for web-based payments. Since then, I have authored over fifteen granted or pending patents in the fields of digital commerce, electronic payments and payments analytics. My work in the business side of payments informed the direction of the technologies I pursued. These leadership positions included my time at ABN AMRO Investment Bank in London, where I was Director and Head of Financial Technology Investment.

More recently, I was Global Head of Information Products, SVP at Visa, leading a business unit generating several hundred million dollars in annual sales and successfully launching key new products in the areas of payment fraud detection, digital marketing and merchant loyalty. I joined Visa from First Data, the leading payments processor, where I was Global Head of Information and Analytics, SVP. At First Data I created and launched SpendTrend™, First Data’s U.S. macro-economic spending indicator based on credit card transaction data.

My work at the intersection of payments and technology culminated in the founding of the CardLinx Association, where I am President and CEO. Working with our founding members including Mastercard, Discover, First Data, Facebook and Microsoft, we’ve become the leading voice for the card-linking and online-to-offline industries.

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

Consumer spending makes up 70% of the US economy. 90% of that spending occurs in stores not online. Card-linking enables companies to link a consumer’s online data with their in-store shopping. We are excited to announce to the fintech industry the first open source card-linking software.

The underlying technology was developed by Microsoft and they have provided the codebase for its Earn card-linking platform on the CardLinx website. It is free and publicly available. The software demonstrates API access to the leading payment networks (Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover) and is available for banks, digital publishers, messaging platforms and other tech companies to build on the code and bring their card-linking and loyalty programs more quickly to market.

Just as other platforms experienced explosive growth after APIs were made available, like Apple’s App Store and Facebook’s messaging API, an open source card-linking code is the next logical step in the development of card-linking and the overall growth of the online-to-offline industry.

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

We released the open source code at the beginning of January. At this time there are a number of companies using it as a foundation for their own card-linking and loyalty programs. I will be excited to share the names of the companies at my demo on March 21 at FinDEVr New York!

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, Cooper Press, 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.

See Symphony Software Foundation 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 Gabriele Columbro, Symphony Software Foundation’s Executive Director:

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

I have been in the open source software business for about 15 years now, across Italy, Netherlands, UK and the United States. Given my early engagement with mainstream open source communities, I am an Apache Software Foundation committer, and having covered virtually every technical role (Sales Engineer, Principal Consultant, Head of Support, Product Manager) in an enterprise open source company like Alfresco, I have built a deep understanding of every persona’s perspective on technology.

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

Our Foundation’s key differentiation is definitely the open source + open standards combination we can bring to the financial services industry on a pervasive technology like the Symphony platform. With the impressive roster of Members and our Foundation features, we feel we have an unprecedented opportunity to enable traditionally siloed firms to collaborate in the open, providing a leveled playing field for larger FinServ and smaller FinTech firms to bring true innovation to the industry.

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

Our Foundation hosts around 50 open source projects, so it’s a hard choice. I believe the most powerful usage of the Symphony platform in the trading world is through its bots, which can perform natural language processing and bring so much needed automation in the trading front-office and most importantly back-office workflow.

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.

See Finicity 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 Nick Thomas, Finicity’s Co-Founder & EVP:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?
Before joining Finicity, I worked for organizations of all different sizes, including Komodo, Unicity, 3Com, US Robotics and Megahertz. Overall, I have more than 20 years of experience in technology design, development and marketing. More than 15 of those years have been focused on personal financial wellness and data aggregation. I’ve spoken internationally on topics such as fintech, finance, regulatory standards, crowdfunding and mobile payments, and my views on mobile technology, pervasive computing, APIs and credit/lending decisioning have been featured in major media outlets like American Banker.

As the co-founder of Finicity and executive vice president of our data services business, I oversee a passionate and energetic team dedicated to innovating in the financial services sector.

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

At FinDEVr New York, we’ll be demonstrating our new Finicity Connect drop-in UI widget, which will enable developers of financial management, payment and lending apps to more rapidly stand up Finicity’s data insights and aggregation services. This is an exciting fintech solution because it further simplifies the experience of utilizing our rich aggregation platform. Our technology is a game-changer because it’s a great example of utilizing big data to transform industries and day-to-day living for individuals.

For example, utilizing our modern RESTful API, we can now incorporate transaction data into an existing business system, like loan origination. We’re digitizing the credit decisioning process, making it faster, simpler, more secure and more accurate — while also making it a better experience for lenders and consumers. It really will be transformational.

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

One of our favorite implementations of our data insights and aggregation technology will be in the credit and lending space. By utilizing the real-time data we can access through aggregation, we’re able to generate asset and income verification reports. This is a key component of the loan origination process which, to date, has basically been a “pen and paper” process.

Now, we are enabling lenders to see validated information rapidly. For consumers, they won’t have to chase down all the information, and that’s just the beginning. With real-time data, we’ll actually be able to generate a financial health picture for those that may be well suited for a loan but don’t have the credit history a lender is looking for. This is just one example of an industry that we’re transforming with our solutions. There are others we’re already helping, and I’m sure we’ll see new ones pop up in the future.

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.

See NuCypher 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 MacLane Wilkison, NuCypher‘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?

I’m a software engineer at heart but started my career at Morgan Stanley where I advised technology, media, and telecommunications companies on M&A and equity/debt financings. I spent a lot of time covering internet infrastructure
during the early innings of cloud infrastructure. I also saw first-hand the security and compliance obstacles faced by large enterprises in adopting these new technologies. At NuCypher, a lot of the problems we’re solving have to do with removing these roadblocks to cloud and big data adoption.

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

We embed access policies directly into encryption so that security follows the data wherever it goes. This allows us to deliver the full security of encryption while avoiding the typical functionality and performance tradeoffs.

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

I’m particularly excited about the use cases we’re seeing around secure and auditable cross-organizational sharing of encrypted data. With NuCypher, it’s possible to delegate and revoke access to your data to third-parties in a cryptographically secure way. We have several customers building shared industry data lakes with multiple participants contributing data — something which historically has required a trusted third party to manage.

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.