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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
NuData Security will be demonstrating its flagship product NuDetect, a behavioral biometrics platform that monitors behavioral interactions. The platform accurately verifies identity based on unconscious natural behaviors in real-time. It can detect most forms of account-based, automated, anomalous, and fraudulent online behavior even when valid credentials are presented.
Why it’s a must-see
See how to verify users in real-time before a transaction—even when the correct credentials are presented—identify higher risk activities, and leverage an extensive behavioral network. Behavioral biometrics offers financial institutions the balance between real security and a great customer experience. NuData supports new account creation, ATO, and automated use-cases.
Digital Business Art will present its Digital Banking Platform (DBP). The main virtue of the product is its ability to ensure 99.99% of a bank’s front-end-system availability, regardless of the state of the bank’s back-end system. This means that a bank’s client services will be permanently available and will not depend on its internal processes.
Why it’s a must-see
This innovative platform is built to ease the life of a bank’s IT department and its specialists, and to ensure seamless functioning of the business. DBP delivers an agile, flexible system-orchestration, impressive performance, and lower cost. This allows banks to focus on customers and products, rather than waste a huge budget on expensive infrastructure.
Cognitect will introduce you to Datomic, its immutable database that never forgets. It’s naturally distributed, built for modern architectures, and it scales with your data—without sacrificing your existing storage investments. The company will share how Datomic’s built-in history has been used in fintech to more effectively manage critical data.
Why it’s a must-see
Cognitect’s approach to auditability will change your world. Using Datomic, an immutable database that never forgets, you can query across all history, without any extra effort on your part. No more loss of valuable time and critical resources to answer basic questions. No more workarounds to understand the story of how your data got to now.
With Entrust Datacard you’ll learn how integrating second-factor authentication into banking applications using soft tokens and one-time passwords (OTPs) can safeguard your banking applications. Banks can leverage the security protection offered by Entrust Datacard without the need for a large investment in development resources.
Why it’s a must-see
Offers a simplified way to incorporate second-factor authentication into banking applications.
Helps combat fraudulent transactions, especially card-not-present fraud, which is on the rise due to the move to EMV technology.
Ability to leverage this technology without significant investment in resources.
MX will be unveiling a next-generation financial API platform. The fintech community can benefit from advanced features and real-time, open-source solutions. This presentation will explore how to create call-back mechanisms and client-side libraries, including RubyGem and NodeJS.
Why it’s a must-see
The company’s MX Atrium API gives you more than 30,000 connections to financial institutions. It also cleanses, categorizes, and classifies all transaction data with the greatest accuracy on the market—all with fintech-friendly pricing and no user limitations. Get access to the code in 30 seconds and see our world-class documentation for yourself.
Thomson Reutersunveils blockchain dev platform, BlockOne ID.
Banking Technology looks atMisys and its plans for a November IPO.
Revolutpartners with Bank of Lithuania to promote cross-border payments.
Hyperwalletintroduces its Tax Compliance Services initiative.
Cloud Lending Solutionsappoints new chief revenue officer and chief financial officer.
Yandex.Moneyto offer mobile money-transfers and support-group chats for crowdfunding via Apple’s iMessage.
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.
Half of the companies in the FinTech Forward 20 “Companies to Watch” list presented by American Banker and BAI this week are Finovate/FinDEVr alums. These 10 companies range from payments innovators and security specialists to alt-lending platforms and mobile banking app builders—the list even includes a pair of alums that have earned multiple Best of Show awards.
“The following 20 companies are the standouts among a pool of companies that nominated themselves and ones familiar to our judges,” American Banker declared in an announcement accompanying a slideshow of the FinTech Forward 20. When evaluating the various companies, judges were encouraged to ask themselves questions such as: “Is this organization solving relevant problems for the banking industry?” and “Does it speak to the challenges the industry faces now.”
Below are the ten Finovate/FinDEVr alums that made the cut. The rest of the FinTechForward 20 is listed below.
Commenting on its spot on the list, Finovate newcomer InSpirAVE founder and CEO Om Kundu said the recognition was a “testament that our patent-pending technology enables financial institutions partnering with us to set themselves apart.” Kundu said his company’s solutions help FIs “tangibly boost deposits and payments revenues” as well as improve customer engagement and share-in-wallet in enduring ways.
Co-founder and CEO of CUneXus credited his firm’s one-click consumer-lending technology for catching the Fintech Forward judges’ attention. He said banks and credit unions were growing the size of their loan portfolios and “competing with emerging technologies” by adopting CUneXus’ solutions.
Speaking for Alkami Technology, which demoed at Finovate 2009 as iThryv, founder Stephen Bohanon, chief strategy and sales officer, pointed to his company’s flagship Alkami ORB platform and called it an example of the sort of “user experience brought about by great design and tightly coupled integration” that increasingly will set FIs apart. “ORB gives banks and credit unions a competitive advantage by placing strong emphasis on delivering the ultimate digital banking experience,” Bohanon said.
Also on the Fintech Forward 20 Companies to Watch list were:
Autobooks
Kasisto
ClickSWITCH
Built
BookingBug
Lenndo
Supipay
Self Lender
Private Wealth Systems
Yantra Financial Technologies
Fintech Forward is a collaboration between American Banker and BAI that combines research, media, and event hosting into a single professional, educational enterprise. In addition to its Fintech Forward 20 “Companies to Watch” list, Fintech Forward also publishes a Top 100 Companies and Top 25 Enterprise rankings.
While the terms of the deal were not disclosed, Akamai describes the purchase price as “immaterial” for the company. California-based Soha, which offers secure access-as-a-service for enterprises, has raised almost $10 million since it was founded in 2013. Under the acquisition, Akamai will use Soha’s services to extend its portfolio of Cloud Networking Solutions and to “simplify and improve remote and mobile access to enterprise resources, while at the same time minimize the exposed attack surface.” In a press release, Robert Blumofe, EVP, Platform, and GM, Enterprise and Carrier Division, said, “By adding Soha’s secure access technology to our cloud networking solutions, we believe we are well positioned to help our customers take full advantage of the key trends, cloud and mobile, driving enterprise computing.”
The deal comes less than a week after the company’s announcement of its acquisition of Concord Systems, an IoT company. In fact, Akamai has been on an acquisition spree of security companies; recent deals include Bloxx in November 2015 and Prolexic in 2013. According to TechCrunch, Akamai is bolstering its security to become more appealing to potential, large acquirers, such as Google or Microsoft.
Akamai presented at FinovateEurope 2015 in London where it debuted its Client Reputation Service, designed to help FIs forecast security issues and protect against DDoS attacks, web attackers, screen scrapers, and scanning tools. The company most recently released the Akamai Bot Manager to mitigate screen scraping, automated clicks, and illegitimate transactional activity.
Akamai was founded in 1998 and is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Tom Leighton is CEO.
This new round doubles the New York-based company’s previous funding amount, bringing its new total to $270 million. Payoneer CEO Scott Galit said the company will use the funds for further expansion, as Payoneer receives 250,000 business applications per month. While Galit would not comment on Payoneer’s valuation, Business Insider estimates that it is “likely in the billions.”
Payoneer has 800 employees across the globe; it recently opened offices in India, Japan, and the Philippines. According to TechCrunch, today’s round is the company’s last before it will begin seeking an IPO.
At FinovateAsia 2013, Payoneer launched a commercial account that offers businesses the ability to receive funds from a global network. Payoneer’s money-transfer solutions process “many billions of dollars a year” in 150 currencies for small businesses and professionals. The money-transfer solutions enable clients to withdraw the money at their local bank account in their own currency. The company also facilitates mass payouts for businesses looking to transfer money internationally, a service that supports companies such as Newegg, Airbnb, and Fiverr.
So much of day-to-day banking is either negative or at best, incredibly boring. I spent too much, my payment is late, I can’t remember where that last $40 from the ATM went, and so on. No wonder consumers are less than enthusiastic with their banking relationships.
What to do about it? For one, when you have good news, CELEBRATE! And one of the easiest ways to do that is when a merchant refund appears on a credit or debit card account. For example, Discover does a great job with its email. It’s personalized, and clearly shows the date, credited amount and merchant name (including hyperlink to Netflix). And there is a huge button at the bottom to check out the transaction online (not that you’d really need to).
But after clicking through the email, the user experience (UX) gets a bit gummed up. The first webpage displayed is the main secure homepage (first screenshot below). That makes sense since the email button says See Transactions. However, since my statement cycled since the refund was processed, the $15.34 Netflix credit is nowhere to be seen. (Granted, had I clicked on the message when it first came in, the transaction would have been listed on the lower portion of the screen.)
But now I have to play “guess where to click” with the Discover site in order to find my transaction on the previous statement. Not rocket science, but also not super-intuitive either. The obvious starting point is the big orange “recent transactions” button in the middle. But again, that leads only to the current statement. Astute users will find the link to the previous statement (ambiguously called Current Statement) at the bottom of the page. Clicking that leads to a page with the desired transaction, though it’s not particularly called out, appearing in a slightly different font shade and a Payments and Credits description (third screenshot below).
Bottom line: The email is fantastic (A+). The website has a great layout and look (go, orange). But insisting on displaying transactions on a monthly statement basis is so last decade. For the most part, users want to consume transaction data like email. Make it easy to see everything by paging through them and let me flag, pin, label, and mark as unread, significant transactions. For extra credit, put the most important ones on top like Priority Mail (Gmail) or Focused (Outlook Mobile).
1. Discover card home page (displayed after clicking on link in email above)
2. Discover Card transaction page (displayed after clicking “Recent Activity” on homepage).
Finovate Alums Earn Spots in FinTech Forward 20 “Companies to Watch”
Around the web
IBMannounces $200 million investment in its Watson IoT business in Munich. See IBM at FinDEVr Silicon Valley, October 18 & 19.
Novum Bank choosesNetverify from Jumio to speed client onboarding. Be sure to check out our recent interview with Jumio CEO Stephen Stuut.
Thomson ReuterslaunchesONESOURCE InDirect Tax Development Partner Program.
Top Image Systemswins $450,000 deal with U.S. government to deploy eFLOW.
BankNXT interviewsDwolla’s Jordan Lampe about real-time ACH.
PaySimpleintroduces an online store built specifically for service providers.
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.
highlight companies presenting new developer tools, platforms, and integrations at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016, October 18 & 19. Tickets are on sale now. Visit our registration page and save your spot today.
