FinDEVr APIntelligence

Our first developers conference in the U.K. is just over a month away. 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.

On FinDEVr.com

  • Trulioo Bolsters Regtech Solution with Mitek Partnership

Alumni updates

  • Trulioo Bolsters Regtech Solution with Mitek Partnership
  • Greenkey Technologies announces interconnection partnership with iMarket.
  • FinDEVr alum OutSystems expands to Asia with new office in Japan.
  • Ohio-based First National Bank of Pandora chooses core account processing platform from Fiserv.
  • Xero announces new partnership with Capital One to give SMEs more control over their data.

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

nCino Helps FIs Benefit from Cloud Banking

nCino Helps FIs Benefit from Cloud Banking

nCino_homepage_April2017b

What makes the nCino Bank Operating System the cloud banking solution of choice for a growing number of financial institutions (including “more than 130 FIs of all asset classes and from multiple countries” in the words of nCino CMO Jonathan Rowe)?

As Rowe said during nCino’s live demonstration at FinovateEurope 2017 earlier this year, “with nCino your customers get a transparent, digitally-optimized process, quick access to capital, and a true valued long-term relationship with your financial institution.” And for financial institutions themselves, he added, nCino brings increased loan growth “while lowering costs and increasing productivity and maintaining the highest levels of safety and soundness.”

Pictured (left to right): Jonathan Rowe (Chief Marketing Officer), Trisha Price (EVP, Product Development & Engineering), and  Nathan Snell (Chief Innovation Officer) demonstrating the nCino Bank Operating System at FinovateEurope 2017.

nCino used the example of a bank loan to demonstrate some of the features of the nCino Bank Operating System. Along with Product Development & Engineering EVP Trisha Price and Chief Innovation Officer Nathan Snell, the nCino team showed how a customer could apply for a small business loan using their smartphone, and get an instant real-time decision from the technology’s automated decisioning engine. The demo also showed how the platform provided workarounds like an automated counter offer when an applicant requested a loan amount that was too large. The technology also enables the customer to capture and upload images of documents like financial statements to help customers make the case for a larger loan.

On the bank’s side, the nCino team showed how the platform’s auto decision engine processed online loan applications and can be configured to match the FI’s own credit policies.  And by leveraging both the OCR and AI built into the nCino platform, bank professionals are able to quickly do deeper dives into applicant financials to find opportunities for funding that might have otherwise gone unfunded or cost the borrower more. “This is how banking and technology should work, and does work with nCino,” Rowe said, reminding the audience that nCino’s technology supports not just commercial banking, but also treasury management, and retail and consumer banking, as well.

Since nCino’s Finovate debut in February, the company has announced new enhancements to its platform that make it easier to serve small business borrowers. Named to Planet Compliance’s RegTech Top 100 Power List this spring, nCino partnered with North State Bank in April and teamed up with Valley National Bank in March to power commercial loan operations at both institutions.

Company Facts

  • Founded in 2012
  • Headquartered in Wilmington, North Carolina
  • Raised more than $79 million in capital
  • Works with more than 130 clients
  • Maintains more than 275 employees

We met with the nCino team in London to talk about the company’s debut at FinovateEurope. We followed up with a few questions by e-mail for Nathan Snell, nCino’s Chief Innovation Officer. His responses are below.

Finovate: What problem does your technology solve?

Nathan Snell: nCino is the worldwide leader in cloud banking. Its Bank Operating System, built on the Salesforce platform, enables financial institutions to deliver the speed and digital experience that customers expect, backed by the quality and transparency that bankers need.

nCino’s Bank Operating System acts as a financial institution’s single source of truth, eliminating the need for multiple, disparate software systems by combining customer relationship management (CRM), loan origination, workflow, enterprise content management, business processing and instant reporting all in one secure, cloud-based environment. Sitting alongside the bank’s core, nCino’s Bank Operating System drives increased profitability, productivity gains, regulatory compliance and operating transparency across all business channels and organizational levels. The platform facilitates a seamless and secure interaction between bank employees, customers and other third parties, providing bankers with an efficient and configurable way to digitally operate their institution.

Finovate: Who are your primary customers?

Snell: nCino’s client portfolio consists of more than 130 financial institutions in North America and Europe. Our customers span all asset classes – from $150 million in assets to over $200 billion – and include community and regional banks, credit unions, challenger banks and large enterprise institutions. Because of the flexible and scalable nature of our platform, the Bank Operating System is customizable for any size organization.

Pictured: The nCino Bank Operating System environments displayed on a laptop, a tablet, and a smartphone.

Finovate: How does your technology solve the problem better?

Snell: The nCino Bank Operating System is a comprehensive, end-to-end, cloud-based solution that offers a single platform across all lines of business (commercial, small business, retail), distinguishing us in a market category of our own. nCino was built from day one as an integrated solution on Salesforce’s Force.com platform, the world’s leading cloud computing platform.  Because of how we’ve built the nCino Bank Operating System, it’s also one of the first times a financial institution has a platform that can respond, in a configurable way, to their business needs as quickly as they come up as opposed to being constrained by their platform. While there are other companies that may offer point solutions or software systems that provide certain aspects of our technology, none combine our full spectrum of features and functionality into one cohesive offering.

Designed by bankers who understand the nuances of the marketplace, nCino revolutionizes the way financial institutions operate, helping them regain their competitive advantage and beat alternative lenders at their own game, while simultaneously satisfying customers’ demand for superior service in the digital era.

Finovate: Tell us about your favorite implementation.

Snell: It’s hard to pick a favorite implementation as they are all important; however, one that stands out is our successful implementation last year at SunTrust, a $205 billion-asset institution and a top 10 bank in the U.S. The implementation at SunTrust was a truly collaborative effort consisting of a multi-layered, multifunctional program team that included not only nCino, but also a system integration team from Accenture, and a large operational and technology team from SunTrust.

In less than 18 months, the nCino Bank Operating System was deployed to thousands of SunTrust teammates across sales, risk and lending operations. When asked about the process, Pam Kilday, head of operations for SunTrust, said, “This has been one of the finest implementations that we have had at SunTrust. We are now being looked at as a model of best practices to implement something of this range at SunTrust.”

Pictured: The automated decision engine of the nCino Bank Operating System.

Finovate: What in your background gave you the confidence to tackle this challenge?

Snell: Because nCino was designed specifically by bankers who understand both the challenges and opportunities in the marketplace, nCino is uniquely qualified to deliver a solution that best addresses a financial institution’s needs. In today’s environment, bankers are expected to do more with less, manage regulation, ensure data security, digitally engage with customers to foster stronger relationships, and deliver increased profit to shareholders. And, as customer demands and expectations rapidly evolve and non-traditional third parties enter the scene, the financial services industry is more competitive than ever before. nCino’s Bank Operating System enables a financial institution to improve efficiency, productivity and compliance across numerous departments and business lines, all while creating a more transparent and digitally engaging experience for customers.

Finovate: What are some upcoming initiatives from nCino that we can look forward to over the next few months?

Snell: This year, we’ll continue to expand the scope of the Bank Operating System. In 2016 alone, we added new functionality such as deposit account opening and automated decisioning that extended the platform to other areas of the bank – and that’s just the beginning. With additional functionality across small business lending and retail already in the pipeline, nCino continues to develop technology to help financial institutions save costs and increase productivity while simultaneously protecting their market share against emerging marketplace lenders.

There’s really so much opportunity in the financial services space today, that even beyond the next few months, we have quite a few exciting things planned that we believe will continue to help shape the landscape of banking.

Finovate: Where do you see nCino a year or two from now?

Snell: Over the past five years, we’ve experienced significant growth in our customer portfolio, technology roadmap and employee base – and we expect that growth to continue into the next year and beyond. We look forward to expanding our international presence in the U.K. and Europe, adding fresh talent to our workforce and introducing new and exciting functionality to our Bank Operating System as it touches additional areas of the financial institution.


Trisha Price (EVP, Product Development & Engineering), Nathan Snell (Chief Innovation Office), and Jonathan Rowe (Chief Marketing Officer) demonstrating the nCino Bank Operating System at FinovateEurope 2017.

Exclusive Interview with NuCypher’s CEO, MacLane Wilkison

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, NuCypher. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with NuCypher’s promo code NuCypher20LD17.

Here’s our interview with MacLane Wilkison, NuCypher’s CEO:


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

Wilkison: I 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?

Wilkison: NuCypher is a proxy re-encryption platform that enables enterprises to securely tap into the power of cloud computing. We’re purpose built for the era of cloud and big data computing.

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

Wilkison: NuCypher’s exciting use case is cloud enablement – by giving enterprises a way to securely and compliantly move bursty and transient workloads to the public cloud, we’re able to boost our customer’s agility and competitiveness.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Exclusive Interview with Harborx’s CTO, David Sung

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 CTO of one of the presenting companies, Harborx. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with Harborx’s promo code Harborx20LD17.

Here’s our interview with David Sung, Harborx’s CTO:


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

Sung: I studied Information Technology at City University of Hong Kong. In 2009, I started in iOS development, building numerous mobile applications for various industries ranging from entertainment and healthcare to insurance, banking and finance.

I bonded with co-founders of Harborx, Cyrus Wen and Wissam Sabbah, over the vision of creating a better trading experience for a wider audience, based on mobile technology and social trading. Together, we started crafting a unique mobile trading system based on our previous experience in fintech and mobile app development.

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

Sung: I believe that Harborx is made unique by the way we leverage functional and reactive programming.

We use functional programming extensively in backend and frontend development, providing traditionally complicated concurrency programming with elegant declarative style; breaking complex logical control flow by using functional composition.

Through adopting Reactive programming, i.e. ReactiveX, our frontend team can manipulate UI events and API responses, streaming data in a single consolidated framework. Our developers transform all signals from different parts of the system into UI elements presented in a mobile device.

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

Sung: If I had to pick one, it would be building our own trading engine on top of Akka Cluster. This technology takes the actor programming model to its extreme as a distributed system, providing the resilience and scalability the trading engine needs.

With Akka, we’ve been able to break the whole complex backend system into functional units which can be updated without affecting the rest of the modules, effectively minimizing system downtime.

Our team takes “Infrastructure as Code” (IaC) seriously. We have built the whole stack in the cloud using Kubernetes as the container engine. We avoid manual configuration of environments and enforce consistency by representing the desired state of their environments through code.

We have built an environment where team members can work together with a unified set of practices and tools to deliver applications and their supporting infrastructure rapidly, reliably, and at scale. This is something many development teams struggle with, and we’re happy to have found the solution.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • nCino Helps Financial Institutions Benefit from Cloud Banking
  • LendUp Gives the Underbanked What No Traditional Bank Will

On FinDEVr.com

  • Check out this week’s FinDEVr APIntelligence

Around the web

  • BanQu teams up with Eastern Congo Initiative to launch secure data storage network for farmers.
  • TransferWise announces operational profitability and monthly revenues of £8 million.
  • Lighter Capital adds Former Silicon Valley Bank’s Head of Risk, Marc Verissimo, to its Board of Directors
  • Wells Fargo selects Uniken for accelerator program.
  • Wipro launches Nine Solutions to Accelerate Adoption of Blockchain Across Industry Sectors
  • Societe Generale partners with Open Bank Project to launch internal Open Banking Hackathon
  • South Carolina-based Community First Bank hires Insuritas to install and manage insurance agency.

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.

SoFi Unveils Digital Wealth Management Platform, SoFi Wealth

SoFi Unveils Digital Wealth Management Platform, SoFi Wealth

Originally published at FinDEVr.com

Less than a month after announcing its new $105 million SoFi Prime Income Fund to help raise funds to issue loans, online lending innovator SoFi is making headlines again with the launch of SoFi Wealth. The new initiative, the company’s first digital wealth management offering, will allow investors in the U.S. to invest as little as $500 (or a $100 monthly recurring deposit) in automated, low-cost, ETF portfolios. But unlike many roboadvisors, clients of SoFi Wealth will have phone and/or chat access to human financial advisors.

SoFi believes that keeping human advisors as part of the overall investment picture is a plus for investors, especially the younger professionals that are a significant part of the company’s user base. “People love the low fees and automation of robo-advisors, but they struggle with not having an actual human being to talk to when facing big financial questions,” SoFi Wealth general manager, John Gardner said. “That guidance from a live advisor can help give them the confidence they need to start planning for a lifetime of financial success.”

Pictured (left to right): SoFi Wealth Head of Strategy Stephen Sikes and Quovo CTO and co-founder Michael Del Monte during their FinDEVr 2017 New York presentation, How Quovo & SoFi Perfected Bank Authentication.

In addition to providing live human advisors, low investment minimums, and access to low-cost automated ETF-based portfolios, SoFi Wealth also charges no management fees for clients who are also SoFi loan borrowers. Others pay a modest management fee of 0.25%, with no charge on the first $10,000 invested. Clients can access their accounts online, as well as via the SoFi Wealth app. Both Android and iOS versions are available.

The company also announced that it is developing a broader range of personal finance and financial planning solutions geared toward first-time home buyers and young families. SoFi anticipates rolling out these products and services over the summer of 2017.

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, SoFi made its FinDEVr debut earlier this year at FinDEVr 2017 New York. The company, in partnership with Quovo, discussed the challenge of managing consumer financial accounts in a presentation titled, How Quovo & SoFi Perfected Bank Authentication. The presentation focused on how Quovo developed a bank authentication API for SoFi that both improved security and streamlined UX. FinDEVr attendees gave the presentation a FinDEVr Favorites awards in the Favorite FinDEVr Alum category.

A member of CNBC Disruptor 50 for 2017, SoFi has raised more than $1.8 billion in funding – making the company one of fintech’s true “unicorns” – and includes Baseline Ventures, DCM Ventures, Discovery Capital, East West Bank and Morgan Stanley among its equity and debt investors. With origins in student loan financing, SoFi has since expanded significantly to include mortgage lending, personal loans, life insurance, and wealth management among the services it provides. Mike Cagney is CEO.

Swaper’s P2P Marketplace Guarantees Returns

Swaper’s P2P Marketplace Guarantees Returns

Screen Shot 2017-04-06 at 12.50.13 PM

Latvia-based Swaper seeks to make P2P investing as simple as possible. The company offers European investors access to unsecured consumer debt in Poland and Georgia, and has plans to expand its reach across the globe. What’s unique about Swaper is that every loan comes with a buyback guarantee. That means that even if a borrower fails to pay back a loan on time, the investor still receives their principal plus interest on the loan.

Founded in 2016, the company’s CEO, Iveta Brūvele, and COO, Elīna Rasmane, debuted the Swaper mobile app at FinovateEurope 2017. The Portfolio Invest feature of the app lets users invest in a single click. And because they can access their investments from their smartphone, users can control their portfolio anywhere and anytime.

Company facts

  • Originated 6,430 loans worth €1.3 million and saw investments from 161 active investors in November of 2016
  • Offers buyback guarantee
  • Boasts interest rates of 12% to 14%

(above) Iveta Brūvele (CEO) and Elīna Rasmane (COO) debut Swaper on the FinovateEurope stage in London

We interviewed Swaper CEO Iveta Brūvele (pictured) after FinovateEurope for a quick look at Swaper and its future plans.

CEO_Iveta_Bruvele

Finovate: What problem does Swaper solve?

Brūvele: The main difference from other investment opportunities is the high income that we offer our investors. The second is the BuyBack guarantee that is available for all loans on our platform. These two Swaper values are constant, and our aim is to keep them constant so investors can be sure that rules are not going to change, and they will receive the interest rate and the BuyBack guarantee that was promised.

The Swaper mobile app solves availability and easy usability problems too– we are the first of our closest P2P marketplace competitors who have launched a mobile app, and 80% of our customers use it.

Finovate: Who are your primary customers?

Brūvele: Investing on Swaper now is available to private individuals and companies from the European economic area. Our largest markets for now are Germany, Latvia, Spain, Austria, and Great Britain. And we also have plans to widen our customer base to other countries outside the EEA.

Finovate: How does Swaper solve the problem better?

Brūvele: Swaper was launched with the idea to build better financial products and to offer many different financial products. For now our company offers loans and investing options, but we are not going to stop at this. In the near future we are going to present new products. One of our most important advantages is our extensive experience in the financial services area– everyone on our team has gathered huge experience working in a financial sector.

Finovate: Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution.

Brūvele: I would say that it is our mobile app. Actually, the application itself is a step forward– according to the number of users we see, it was exactly what investors needed.
And the coolest feature in the app is definitely the slider that allows users to invest in a single click. Because all the loans offered for investments have the same interest rate and BuyBack guarantee, it doesn’t matter which loans the user invests in. That’s where the idea of the slider was born– after investors choose the amount and term, in just one click it’s done!

Finovate: What in your background gave you the confidence to tackle this challenge?

Brūvele: It is our team. Our team is very experienced in the fintech field, so we had no doubt we could build awesome financial products. Many of us have worked in different banks across the Europe as well as in the financial services area. The idea of knowing that we can do better is what unites us. And we really want to do better. Our main goal is to make financial services more understandable, available and suitable for the rhythm and technologies of modern life.

Finovate: What are some upcoming initiatives from Swaper that we can look forward to over the next few months?

Brūvele: We are going to launch two to three new loan products that will be offered as investments on Swaper. After a few months we will also offer our customers new financial products besides lending and investing options. Furthermore we are already working on new features for the Swaper mobile app.

Finovate: Where do you see Swaper a year or two from now?

Brūvele: Of course we have huge ambitions. And we are going to accomplish them, because our advantage is our experience in the financial area and we launch products and services much faster than our competitors do. We want to keep that rapidity and flexibility. We are going to be an international company that offers a wide range of available and contemporary financial services all around the world.


Iveta Brūvele (CEO) and Elīna Rasmane (COO) debut Swaper on the FinovateEurope stage in London

Six Alums Earn a Spot on on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 List

Six Alums Earn a Spot on on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 List

CNBC released its 2017 collection of 50 disruptive tech companies today. The fifth annual list names private companies “whose innovations are changing the world” and meet additional criteria according to CNBC’s methodology.

The list, which boasts 31 unicorns, includes household names such as Airbnb, Uber, and SpaceX. The 50 companies have an aggregate market valuation of $239 billion, and almost 20% of the list consists of fintech companies, six of which are Finovate and/or FinDEVr alums.

Trulioo
Identity verification specialist for AML/ KYC compliance
Rank: 37
Launched: 2011
Funding: $23.3 million
Showcased GlobalGateway at FinovateFall 2016

Payoneer
Global mass payout service platform
Rank: 40
Launched: 2005
Funding: $234 million
Debuted the Payoneer Commercial Account at FinovateAsia 2013

SoFi
A unique, online lending company that prides itself on social finance
Rank: 45
Launched: 2011
Funding: $1.9 billion
Presented its use of Quovo’s authentication API at FinDEVr New York 2017

Persado
Automated marketing messaging company
Rank: 48
Launched: 2012
Funding: $66 million
Debuted PersadoGo at FinovateEurope 2016

Quid
Offers unstructured data analysis
Rank: 50
Launched: 2010
Funding: $56.2 million
Demoed Opus at FinovateSpring 2016

Exclusive Interview with Harborx’s CEO, Wissam Sabbah

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, Harborx. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with Harborx’s promo code Harborx20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Wissam Sabbah, CEO of Harborx:


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

Sabbah: I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and an associate degree in Finance from the American University of Beirut. I worked as a developer, and after a year, entered the field of corporate banking. I fell in love with currency trading and had a blast as a dealer. But banking and trading are too traditional of an industry, so while I loved what I did, I didn’t enjoy much the corporate environment and craved for a change.

In the early 2010s, startups were happening everywhere, so this idea of taking currency trading, shaking it up and making it accessible to everyone in the form of a game-like mobile app came around, although, having a fully-mobile trading platform with no desktop version was unheard of at the time. I am passionate about trading, global markets and technology, and I was lucky enough to connect with Harborx co-founder and good friend Cyrus Wen, who shared my vision. Cyrus and his partners helped assemble a team of talented developers who loved our idea. This is how Harborx was born.

Every day, we learn from each other how to combine the best of both worlds – the drive and fun of the ever-moving financial markets with development solutions to build our own trading platform. Basically, we have developed a mobile app that we ourselves would like to play and learn something new every day.

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

Sabbah: Traditional forex brokers use a tried and tested third-party desktop-first solution which is reliable but lacks flexibility. It couldn’t work for us since we’re a fully mobile-oriented trading platform. Thus, to support the gaming features, we leverage the actor pattern (Scala/Akka) to build a distributed trading system of our own. Thanks to our decoupled architecture, which was developed in-house, we were able to adapt faster. Our event-driven programming paradigm allows us to decouple the core trading functionality from the gaming features through internal Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and Publish/Subscribe patterns.

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

Sabbah: I love the Leaderboard, one of our latest features. This is an ongoing competition where app users are ranked based on their trading success. The Leaderboard makes Harborx an addictive app and users are ranked in real time as they trade in real time.

In addition to being a competitive mobile app, Harborx is a live trading environment, where you have lightning-speed price feeds and extremely low latency. While the speed is a must-have for most games these days, this requirement increases tenfold when people trade with their real funds. At Harborx, we stream price feed data to our users by leveraging the power of Message Queue Telemetry Transport, aka MQTT, i.e. the same technology behind Facebook Messenger.

The Leaderboard is the project where the live trading environment weaves with a live game, a synthesis of everything we’ve learned over the years. The team worked hard on the Leaderboard, and we are happy with the result.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Six Alums Earn a Spot on on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 List

On FinDEVr.com

  • Online Lending Innovator SoFi Launches Robo Advisor

Around the web

  • Upserve grows 100%, Boasts 32 Million Active Diners, 21 Million Meals per Month, $11 Billion in Annual Transaction Volume.
  • Passport Launches Mobile Parking App in Ann Arbor.
  • Alkami has increased client base by 38%; grown users by 103%,  & grown contracted users by 51% since January 2016

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.

Exclusive Interview with Streamdata.io’s CEO, Eric Horesnyi

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, Streamdata.io. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with Streamdata.io’s promo code Streamdata.io20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Eric Horesnyi, Streamdata.io’s CEO:


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

Horesnyi: I started my career as a developer for a B2B ISP in France then coded a (back then) high bandwidth (384kbps!) Internet access layer for a US ISV. After a database experience in Mexico and B2B data architecture for multinationals, I joined the founding team of Radianz to run our midmarket and exchange business in the US, as part of the Flashboy team depicted by Michael Lewis. We sold Radianz to British Telecom, and this first step in the cloud industry allowed me to get a clear view of the path technology and finance were taking together, especially with the rise of the API economy.

When I joined Streamdata.io as CEO back in 2014, there was already a very skilled and gifted team in charge of developing our product. All this knowledge allowed me to easily interact with them and start working on the SaaS solution I had the feeling the market was waiting for.

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

Horesnyi: If I was to think about one thing and one thing only, I think I would talk about time-to-market. Nowadays, the pace of innovation is so fast that there’s no longer room for a company to waste time developing everything on its own. With our solution, any API provider can save a year of development (and associated costs) to implement real-time features. And for developers consuming API data, it’s just a matter of minutes for them to transition from polling data to taking advantage of real-time data flow.

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

Horesnyi: I really like what Xignite did with its CloudStreaming solution. Through a partnership between our two companies, Xignite’s CloudStreaming solution leverages our unique technology to deliver streaming market data directly to millions of devices and apps. For us, working with such a player in the financial data industry is a great way to demonstrate how robust and efficient our product is.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Exclusive Interview with eWise’s CTO, Allan See

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 CTO of one of the presenting companies, eWise. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with eWise’s promo code eWise20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Allan See, eWise’s CTO:


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

See: I started out as junior developer in a startup consulting company in the Philippines. Our main clients back then were other startups that built their business around open source technologies like Maestro for Maven. That’s where I immersed myself with open source technologies and how to navigate through its communities, including with people all around the world from Australia to Asia, Europe and America.

A few years later, I started working for a Japanese company specialized in internet ad marketing – like what Google Adwords does but for the Japanese market. That was my first experience with a massive scale application handling 4TB of data, 1M partner relationships generating 200M page views, 3M clicks and 100k transactions a day. After this experience, I started to work in the banking software space. I joined a fortune 500 company that provides online banking solutions and was managing their channel division. That’s when I heard of eWise and all the great things the FinTech company was doing, which made me decide to join eWise.

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

See: When I joined eWise, I had the mission to reengineer entirely eWise Aegis, our patented core technology platform that allows safe and secure financial account aggregation. Aegis is ground breaking in the sense that it flips an old idea on its head. When given the task to attain data from several sources, a typical approach would be to check whether those sources have APIs that can be used for data retrieval. If the APIs do not exist, then comes in the hard decision for technical leaders, whether or not they want to opt for the HTML parsing/screen scraping approach. This is usually a hard decision to make because it’s not a matter of whether they can do it but rather, can they maintain it and what would be the cost of maintaining those. And if they do decide to opt for the approach of screen scraping, there’s the matter of accessing data through a secured means. Meaning, they would also have to get access to their users’ financial accounts credentials and store them securely on their servers, so that when they execute their screen scrapers, they can use those credentials to access the user’s data on behalf of that user. Of course, engineering and security teams would always be familiar in how to secure those data from a technical standpoint to a process one, but it would continuously be an arm’s race preventing a possible breach/leak. The risk of losing those data is just too high.

eWise’s Aegis, though, manages all those risks. The platform allows the user to save and store all of their financial accounts credentials (login and password) in the Personal Data Vault installed on their own device, and no one else than the user can access these credentials. Neither the service provider (the bank using eWise Account Aggregation service) nor eWise are storing the user’s credentials, which considerably reduces the risk of being hacked.

That is, Aegis technology allows us to connect both to direct channels like PSD2 APIs and to indirect channels via HTML parsing. Aegis also manages all the complexity of creating and maintaining these connectors by investing in internal tooling to allow us to maintain those connectors the most effective and automated way. And with Aegis’s patented technology, the risk of having all your eggs (i.e. credentials) in one basket (i.e your server) is gone because Aegis connectors run in the client side – i.e. the end user’s device like his laptop or phone. That means eWise’s clients (financial institutions, fintechs, etc.) would just have to provide their users the Personal Data Vault which they install on their laptops or phones, and the Aggregation will be performed from the user’s device. Instead of sending credentials to the server side where aggregators are running, they will send it to the locally installed Personal Data Vault, which means the end user’s credentials never leave their device.

To summarize, what’s ground breaking about eWise’s technology is that it allows data aggregation both via direct channels (APIs) and indirect channels (HTML parsing for non payment accounts – not included into PSD2 scope), and it allows the end users to be the custodian of their own data, not the aggregation provider.

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

See: We have launched many cool implementations lately. One of the latest ones will be the launch of a challenger bank mobile app, and Account Aggregation is at the core of their app. “First, with the app, you can view your current bank accounts, transfer money instantly, and we’ll save you thousands of pounds a year by analyzing your data and figuring out how we can improve your finances. A central objective is not trying to make customers shift bank accounts – rather, adding loads of value up front,” said their CEO. They are launching a lifestyle focused banking portal, regardless of banking relationships.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.