First Wave of FinDEVr Silicon Valley Presenters Revealed

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Early this summer, we started reviewing applications from companies excited to present their latest fintech tools, technologies, APIs, platforms, case studies, and tutorials at FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016. Today, we’re excited to announce the first wave of presenters that will take the stage at the Santa Clara Convention Center this October.

To watch all 50+ companies present live, make sure to buy your ticket. Early-bird tickets expire soon, so these are your final days to save.

We’ll announce the remaining stealth companies over the next two months. In the meantime, get to know the innovative and established and startup organizations below:

1787fp’s mobile financial app helps millennials and young professionals track their finances and manage investments through one unified financial planning tool.

Aerospike uses a distributed, key-value database designed for Flash to help organizations make decisions in real-time.

Apex Clearing’s suite of APIs facilitates real-time onboarding, account management, and cash management for broker dealers and registered investment advisors.

AutoGravity helps digitally minded customers looking to finance a car embrace the full potential of the smartphone through its mobile-first digital marketplace for auto financing.

BankGuard’s SuperMatrix SDK and SuperMoney system offer a low-cost, biometric identification solution.

BBVA’s API Market helps developers access and build on core banking services for the digital ecosystem.

Blend’s digital mortgage-lending platform uses a human-centric design coupled with data science to make the mortgage application process less opaque and time-consuming for both homebuyers and lenders.

Castle uses behavioral analysis in its security API to help online businesses avoid account takeover.

Cognitect’s Datomic distributed database unlocks disparate data for financial services organizations, top 10 banks, and startups using a built-in audit trail and real-time analytics.

DefenseStorm seeks to alert companies storing data in the cloud of potential cyber threats through its lighting fast, easy-to-set-up, unified security platform.

Devexperts helps brokerages, traders, banks, and market makers analyze and play back historical market data using domain-specific compression for high performance.

Digital Business Art’s Digital Banking Platform leverages its own research and cutting-edge Oracle technologies to help retail banks make a permanent service more available.

Entrust Datacard’s IdentityGuard Mobile Soft Token saves users from having to manually enter a one-time password for online banking and ecommerce transactions.

Envestnet Yodlee offers a new, quick-start registration and API solution to make the registration and development process easy for engineers, developers and business entrepreneurs.

Exeria’s Algorithmic Robot Platform uses drag-and-drop bot building and automatic visualization to simplify investing for both B2C and B2B applications.

Expensify’s distributed database technology solves WAN-based geo-redundancy problems for secure, cloud-services businesses using a novel, high-performance replication protocol.

Finaeos helps enterprises and emerging single solution companies find better solutions for legacy providers using its Programmable.Cloud deep rapid application development that leverages CORE.Cloud Connection R.A.D. Gadget and process stack.

Financial Apps uses an API-led development platform that helps fintech companies achieve rapid scale.

Hyperwallet offers a toolkit of REST APIs, SDKs, JavaScript Widgets, and Webhooks to serve payout needs for high-growth, two-sided marketplace companies by using a global financial network and integrated payments platform.

IdentityMind Global solves fraud and regulator compliance issues for fintech companies, traditional banks, and online merchants by leveraging eDNA – Trusted Digital Identities within its on-demand identity-management platform.

Kyckr’s suite of API’s uses automated, real-time, primary source data to manage onboarding and resolve KYC bad data problems for banks and corporate customers globally.

Lleida.net acts as a trusted third party by generating evidence for companies that need to proof the acceptance.

Marqeta’s open API issuer processor platform creates payment infrastructure for commerce innovators.

ModoPayments’ Digital Payments Hub uses its COIN technology to connect sources of value to diverse destinations for financial companies.

MX’s easy-to-use, fast-to-implement financial data API provides fintech developers with clean and usable transaction data.

NuData Security uses passive biometrics and analytics as a multi-layered solution to identify good users for top 100 e-commerce and financial institutions.

OCR Labs combats risk and fraud for banking, financial, insurance, telco and government through its OCR, FR and verification technology.

Personal Capital uses customers’ financial data to overcome the cumbersome process of opening investment accounts.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) seeks to resolve inefficiencies for trade finance (Standby Letters of Credit) using “blockchain-as-a-service.”

Smartwave’s platform-as-a-service helps financial, telco, transportation, consulting, and retail businesses digitally transform their businesses.

SpeechPRO has developed a new customer onboarding solution to solve KYC identity and verification with multichannel access for CTO’s, developers and other technologists.

Tango Card’s simple technology and expert support in its RaaS API helps anyone looking to engage employees or consumers through a large-scale reward program.

Totum Wealth’s digital client engagement analytics tool helps financial advisers and individual investors improve risk assessment questionnaires by using interactive visualization of portfolio performance.

UCX’s centralized and transparent exchange allows CIOs, CFOs, and CTOs to compare cloud offerings using a single standardized unit of measure.

WiseBanyan uses Airflow (open source of AirBnB) to collect data to better serve its clients.

Wisdom Design Associates uses policy-based authorization technology to help compliance-reliant companies maintain fine-grained control of complex processes.

WooTrader helps everyone from first-time investors to financial institutions leverage predictive analytics models in stock research.

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Uniken

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Uniken

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FF2016-Logo-wdate-largeA look at the companies demoing live to 1,500+ fintech professionals on 8/9 September 2016. Register today.

Uniken is a game-changing cybersecurity firm that makes connecting safe, simple, and scalable through a patented, relative-identity (REL-ID) and mutual authentication protocol (REL-IDverify). No VPN, SSL, or OTP required.

Features:

  • Seamless user experience for login, verification, and authentication
  • Multifactor authentication that’s behind-the-scenes and out-of-the-box
  • Significant reduction in attack surface (MITM, HEIST, etc.)

Why it’s great
Our innovative REL-IDverify product allows mobile, out-of-band authentication for any omnichannel transaction—all protected by the integrated REL-ID identity, authentication, and secure channel solution.

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Bimal Gandhi, CEO
Gandhi has two decades of global experience across management consulting, technology, and financial services industries within the U.S., U.K. and India.
LinkedIn

UnikenPresenter2Robert Levine, Global VP Business Development
Levine is an established cyber security “insider” having built and exited two firms focused in the sub-field of identity and access management. He has 20 years of focused cyber-security experience.
LinkedIn

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Featurespace

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: Featurespace

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FF2016-Logo-wdate-largeA look at the companies demoing live to 1,500+ fintech professionals on 8/9 September 2016. Register today.

Featurespace is the world leader in adaptive behavioral analytics delivered via ARIC Fraud Hub, a real-time, machine learning, fraud management system that understands individual behaviors.

Features:

  • Monitor real-time digital customer behavior across the end-to-end lifecycle
  • Improve fraud detection during onboarding, account activity, transactions
  • Increase revenue acceptance from genuine customers by 70%

Why it’s great
ARIC Fraud Manager’s new In-Session Behavior online monitoring enables financial institutions to protect their customers across the end-to-end lifecycle, while accepting more revenue.

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Presenter: Matt Mills, Commercial Director
Mills is responsible for the commercial team at Featurespace. He is the former global head of partnerships and innovation at Aurasma, where he previously worked with Martina King (Featurespace CEO).

TransferWise Launches TransferWise for Business to the Public

TransferWise Launches TransferWise for Business to the Public

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Foreign currency-exchange platform TransferWise today announced it has released a new segment out of beta. The London-based company launched TransferWise for Business to the public, offering businesses access to international money transfers.

The beta test of the new offering began in May, just after the company closed a $26 million round. Since then, after working “closely with businesses to create a product that meets their needs,” TransferWise has helped business customers transfer more than $1.3 billion using the platform. According to the website: “Businesses can now use TransferWise to pay suppliers or employees overseas, request payments from customers, and transfer funds between their own accounts in different countries.”

Following its ethos, TransferWise does not charge businesses to sign up and there are no monthly fees. By leveraging the ability to transfer money within its network of banks, the company makes sending money abroad up to 7x cheaper than using a business bank account. For bulk overseas payments, TransferWise launched Mass Pay (not to be confused with Dwolla’s MassPay), a batch-payment solution that lets businesses send and track large numbers of payments. Mass Pay is available as an API or on the web interface, which allows for one-by-one or bulk file uploads via CSV.

TransferWise demoed at FinovateEurope 2013. The company, founded in 2010, now boasts 1 million customers and more than $116 million in funding.

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: BondIT

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: BondIT

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FF2016-Logo-wdate-largeA look at the companies demoing live to 1,500+ fintech professionals on 8/9 September 2016. Register today.

BondIT drives fixed-income sales by empowering advisers with data-driven recommendations generated by machine-learning algorithms. It is proven to increase revenues and client satisfaction.

Features:

  • Create algo-optimized, personalized portfolios instantly
  • Rebalance and improve portfolios with various optimization targets: sharp, yield, or risk
  • View advanced analytics and set intelligent alerts

Why it’s great
Optimization solutions for equities can, for the first time, be applied to bonds. BondIT is your way to harness powerful machine-learning to boost your sales!

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Presenter: Eran Nachshon, Chief Operating Officer
Nachshon served seven years as an IDF computer officer and seven years at Barclays as a trader and technology project manager. He holds an MBA from New York University.
LinkedIn

RealtyMogul.com to Raise $50 Million with New REIT, MogulREIT I

RealtyMogul.com to Raise $50 Million with New REIT, MogulREIT I

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Real estate crowdfunding for the retail investor? The new, non-trading REIT (real estate investment trust) launched by RealtyMogul.com is designed to provide just that. Called MogulREIT I, the REIT takes advantage of Regulation A+ in Title IV of the JOBS Act and will be used by RealtyMogul.com to raise up to $50 million. Most interestingly, unlike the crowdfunding platform itself, nonaccredited investors will be able to invest in MogulREIT I.

“We’ve made it our mission to introduce a fair and simple way to invest in real estate,” CEO and founder Jilliene Helman said in a video explaining MogulREIT I. “The launch of our REIT is another step towards making real estate investing accessible for more and more people across the country.”

MogulREIT I is built to provide investors with consistent cash distributions as well as capital preservation and appreciation. The REIT charges no sales commission, and only a 3% organization and offering expenses fee (typically, for non-traded REITs, these sums are 7% sales commission and as much as 15% in organization and offering expenses.) The savings come courtesy of RealtyMogul.com’s decision to directly offer the REIT via its own website “eliminat(ing) the traditional, manpower-intensive distribution channels and the high expense load that comes with them.”

The REIT invests in apartment buildings, industrial parks, office complexes, retail centers, and self storage facilities. No “ground-up construction or land development” properties will be invested in by the REIT, which pledges to rely on established and experienced real estate companies and professionals, as well as communities “with strong economic fundamentals.” Funds can be withdrawn on a quarterly basis and the minimum investment is $2,500. Read the offering circular for more information.

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Los Angeles, California, RealtyMogul.com demonstrated its crowdfunding tool for real estate at FinovateSpring 2014. More than 80,000 individual investors have joined RealtyMogul.com since its inception, with more than $200 million in debt and equity invested through its platform. Investors have received more than $40 million in payouts.

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: RightCapital

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: RightCapital

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FF2016-Logo-wdate-largeA look at the companies demoing live to 1,500+ fintech professionals on 8/9 September 2016. Register today.

RightCapital provides a Department of Labor, fiduciary-focused, financial planning solution that digitizes and redefines the financial planning experience for financial advisers and their clients.

Features:

  • Innovative and integrated financial planning and tax planning
  • Department of Labor, fiduciary-focused, solution
  • Significantly reduces time and cost of creating a plan and improves user experience.

Why it’s great
RightCapital is all about “financial planning done just right.”

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Presenter: Shuang Chen, CEO and Cofounder
Chen has more than 15 years of experience in investment and retirement. Prior to RightCapital, Chen was a senior vice president at Prudential Financial. Shuang mholds a masters in business administration and is a CFA, FisSA.
LinkedIn

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: iBank Marketing

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: iBank Marketing

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FF2016-Logo-wdate-largeA look at the companies demoing live to 1,500+ fintech professionals on 8/9 September 2016. Register today.

iBank Marketing offers a new experience driven by combining financial/nonfinancial services to retail customers and new marketing opportunities to corporate customers.

Features:

  • Support to achieve savings via goal deposit function
  • Capture consumers’ behavior and identify customer preference
  • Create ecosystem with partners to develop and expand cross-industry business

Why it’s great
Covers the business cycle: identifies customer preferences; stimulates customer needs; provides financial support; and stimulates purchasing behavior.

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Kenichi Nagayoshi, CEO
Nagayoshi is CEO of iBank Marketing and has over a decade of experience in the corporate-planning division of a regional Japanese bank. In 2014, Nagayoshi established iBank Marketing to build a financial services platform.

Masato Kubota, Senior Manager

Teppei Fujiwara, Manager

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • TransferWise Launches TransferWise for Business to the Public
  • RealtyMogul to Raise $50 Million with New REIT, MogulREIT I

Around the web

  • ACI Worldwide integrates Ethoca Alerts into its UP eCommerce Payments solution.
  • Trulioo announces enhancements to the global AML watchlist capabilities of its GlobalGateway platform.
  • Realty Mogul launches REIT investments.
  • Two credit unions select Fiserv’s OnCU for core account processing.
  • Payoneer releases automated tax-form service to its mass payout offering.
  • D+H brings on 100+ new lenders to its MortgagebotLOS solution after signing reseller agreement with DocMagic in October of 2015.
  • FT.com looks at Quantopian in a feature on DIY algorithmic trading.
  • Jumio VP of Product Philipp Pointner writes about digital ID verification in AltFi News.

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.

Bento For Business Unveils New Mobile App

Bento For Business Unveils New Mobile App

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Bento for Business has released its new mobile app. The solution makes it easier for employees to review their business’s debit-card balances, tag and annotate expenses for simpler reporting and reconciliation, as well as attach receipts to individual transactions using the smartphone’s camera. Optimized for use with smartphone rather than tablets, the Bento mobile app is available for free on both iOS and Android.

“Employees rejoice! Bento’s mobile app is here,” Bento for Business wrote in tweeting the news this afternoon. “Check balances on-the-go. Smart #expense #management is here.”

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Bento for Business specializes in providing solutions to help small business owners better manage expenses. With its Bento Prepaid MasterCard, the company offers employers a way to empower their employees to make necessary, work-related purchases while ensuring employers have maximum spending visibility and control. Bento also provides businesses with an analytic dashboard that provides a wholistic view of spending, as well as per-card information as to transaction type, location, employee, etc. “We want to work with banks, with service providers,” Bento for Business CEO Farhan Ahmad said during his Finovate demonstration in the spring of 2015, “to curate and build beautiful, simple—and most of all, useful—products that are built just for small businesses.”

Founded in 2014, the San Francisco-based company demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2016. Bento for Business picked up a $7 million investment in a Series A round led by Comcast Ventures and featuring the participation of Anthemis Group, Blumberg Capita, and Lionbird. Individual investor Dan Henry, former NetSpend CEO, also participated. Read more about Bento for Business in our Finovate Debuts feature.

Envestnet | Yodlee’s Terry McKeown on Thin Files, Fintech, and the Foundation of Credit

Envestnet | Yodlee’s Terry McKeown on Thin Files, Fintech, and the Foundation of Credit

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What are reliable credit assessments made of? These days the answer could be anything from FICO scores to feedback from social media activity on LinkedIn or Facebook. And while Terry McKeown, practice manager of credit analytics at Envestnet | Yodlee, finds some of the newer approaches to risk and credit assessment novel—and in some instances worth pursuing—his expert opinion is to to keep all eyes on the prize: the borrower’s ability to repay the amount borrowed and a track record of making those payments consistently.

Yodlee_TerryMcKeown“I’m a big fan of the foundations of credit,” McKeown said in a telephone conversation last week, harkening back to the days when lending discussions took place over a desk in an office rather than over the internet. Besides traditional credit-bureau data, he sees interesting potential in alternative and nontraditional data such as checking-account transactions and utility-bill payments when it comes to risk assessment, especially for those with short or even nonexistent credit histories. Populations with slim to invisible histories include millennials, immigrants, the elderly, the unbanked and underbanked. McKeown also sees value in examining traditional data in nontraditional ways, such as using checking account or mobile wallet payment data as a guide to a borrower’s consistency when it comes to paying bills. “This data can show both income stability as well as income verification by way of direct deposit,” he explained.

Other data alternatives he finds interesting include using LinkedIn to verify employment history and patterns, reviewing milestones in a Facebook profile for potential life changes, or perusing the Yelp reviews of a small business person seeking a loan. That said, McKeown sees many of these alternative metrics as still works-in-progress, saying that while they are “incredibly insightful,” many of these approaches are still very much “in early stages from an analytic standpoint.”

The interest in alternative credit and risk assessment becomes more important as the availability of new forms of data (including new technologies to access that data) converges with financial institutions determined to “catch up” with their increasingly mobile, increasingly young, potential customer base. “It’s been very much an education,” McKeown said, pointing out that millennials have different needs compared to, for example, those of gen-Xers when they were the same age.  The upshot: Traditional credit-bureau data becomes less relevant owing to data viewed at a summarized level and not being updated daily as is the transaction-level data that Envestnet | Yodlee provides.

So what’s the solution? McKeown points to two key dynamics: creative engagement and higher expectations. For McKeown, millennials—and to an extent other underbanked communities—”want a partner in their finances that thinks and behaves like them.” This means everything from meeting the customer on their channel (or channels) of choice to greater flexibility and understanding when it comes to matching customers with products. This also means that FIs need to be ready to do more to meet the changing expectations of their potentially less patient, more technologically savvy clientele. “Millennials expect to have real-time pricing information based on real-time data available at the click of a mouse or via their mobile device,” McKeown said. “They expect an intuitive, simplified application process, whether it is delivered in person or over the Internet, or through a phone app.”

That said, the key to attracting and better engaging with millennials is less a technological challenge and more a cultural one, as McKeown sees it. “Problems with accurately credit-scoring people in their 20s and early 30s [are] nothing new,” he says. What is new is a generation that is simultaneously more free and more connected than its predecessors, giving financial services professionals both new challenges and new opportunities when it comes to engaging both “America’s largest generation” and the underbanked alike.


About Envestnet | Yodlee

Envestnet acquired multiple Best of Show winner Yodlee for $680 million almost one year ago. The company announced a strategic partnership with United Capital earlier this month, in which the company’s data-aggregation technology will support United Capital’s FlexScore solution. FlexScore, a Finovate alum, was acquired by United Capital in February. More than 1,000 firms, including more than half of the 20 biggest banks use Envestnet | Yodlee’s platform to drive apps for millions of customers around the world.

CardFlight to Power EMV Mobile Processing for BluePay

CardFlight to Power EMV Mobile Processing for BluePay

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Mobile payment infrastructure startup CardFlight announced that it is collaborating with merchant account provider BluePay. Illinois-based BluePay will leverage CardFlight’s point-of-sale solution SwipeSimple to facilitate the launch of its EMV mobile processing offering.

CardFlight’s SwipeSimple mobile processing platform offers cloud-based inventory and item tracking as well as a reporting portal that helps companies manage their business. It also comes with an EMV chip reader to help merchants reduce card-fraud losses.

Tim Trench, BluePay’s EVP of product, said that the company selected SwipeSimple because it is the company’s “top priority to provide the most advanced payment-security methods to maintain trust and business.”

Headquartered in New York and founded in 2013, CardFlight’s SDK works with its hardware EMV and magstripe card-readers to help developers build card-present mobile payments into their own apps. At FinovateSpring 2013, CardFlight debuted its developer dashboard. The company showed off its SDK for mobile payments at the inaugural FinDEVr Silicon Valley in 2014. Tickets to this year’s FinDEVr developers conference are on sale now. Check out the event to learn more and register today.