Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • “The Way to San Jose: FinovateSpring Has Sprung!”

Around the web

  • CFO interviews Michael Levine, Payoneer‘s Chief Financial Officer.
  • The Ruby Rogues talk with Ruby-developer Greg Baugues of Twilio.
  • Entrust Datacard announces EMV instant-issuance milestone of more than 10 million cards issued in the U.S. in one year.
  • Benzinga interviews Justin Zhen and Gregory Ugwi, Thinknum co-founders.

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.

TransCard Brings on New CFO Ahead of FinovateSpring Demo

TransCard Brings on New CFO Ahead of FinovateSpring Demo

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HaddockPayment solutions company TransCard has brought on John Haddock as its new chief financial officer today. Haddock is a graduate of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and previously served as EVP and CFO for First Security Group and FSG Bank.

TransCard also expanded its leadership team by recruiting Ed Kelley as VP of financial institutions and Ann Evans as VP of corporate solutions.

Greg Bloh, president of TransCard, says of the appointments: “The wealth of knowledge John, Ed and Ann bring to the team puts TransCard in a great position to grow and expand our footprint within the financial and corporate disbursement industries.”

TransCard’s Paynuver simplifies payment disbursement by offering multiple payout options through a digital account. Its self-service portal and multiple payout options place the work into the hands of the recipient. The Tennessee-based company will debut Paynuver at FinovateSpring next week. Register today to be among the first to watch the live demo.

Finovate Alumni News

Around the web

  • Blooom CEO Chris Costello participates in a discussion on youth and savings.
  • NCR partners with Huntington Technology Finance, providing lease financing for NCR ATMs. See NCR in San Jose next week at FinovateSpring.
  • Crowdfundinsider features an interview with Cloud Lending CEO Snehal Fulzele.
  • PaySimple teams up with Fundera, a small-business-lending marketplace.=
  • Xero and Expensify form partnership.

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.

The Art of Mobile Banking Engagement

The Art of Mobile Banking Engagement

Customer engagement word cloudIt’s been fascinating to watch mobile banking take hold. The path has been much the same as online (desktop) banking a decade earlier, but at about double the pace (at least in the parts of the world that are highly banked).

Modern online banking started 21 years ago this month, when Wells Fargo began web banking in May 1995. It took 12 years before Mint came along and made it all look good and introduced the masses to more advanced concepts such as account aggregation, goal-oriented online budgeting, and expense tracking.

Mobile banking, which got its start in the post-iPhone App Store era (2008), took only about five years before it was “Minted” by Simple and then others. And in fewer than eight years mobile banking is already far better than desktop by almost every measure. From touchID access, to location awareness, to that very useful camera for depositing checks, there is just no way desktop online banking can compete.

But we have just barely scratched the surface of its biggest advantage: the always-on, always-with-you benefits. Account and transaction security is one of the first features having huge impact both on consumers (peace of mind, less hassle) and financial institutions (fewer false negatives, lower fraud costs, less customer-service expense).

Another area where huge benefits exist? Proactive communications about finances. Simple, Moven and Capital One’s Level Money are on the forefront with tools that help mobile customers know where they stand BEFORE they drop another $12 for a fancy cocktail or $35 on Uber.

And while monitoring spending in real-time has big theoretical benefits, it’s universally loathed by most consumers as the ultimate buzz-kill, kind of like having your parents hovering over you at point of sale. A more exciting always-on benefit is guidance to achieve bigger aspirations, like replacing your aging vehicle, trading up from your dinky apartment, or buying a house.

Take home buying. Many of our readers have been through this multiple times. But do you remember how little you knew about it back in the day? It’s a daunting task today even forHip_Pocket_Art0 the financially savvy.

That’s why I love tools that help people understand all aspects of the home-buying process: the mortgage, the purchase, and dealing with all of the ancillary expenses. We’ve seen a number of companies working on various aspects of the mortgage process. And next week at FinovateSpring, you’ll be treated to demos by two of the new breed of mortgage startups: Blend Labs which powers mortgage processing on the back-end and Roostify which helps consumers through the process.

And as luck would have it, last week Mark Zmarzly from Hip Pocket visited Seattle to present at a CU event, and was able to spare a few minutes to meet me for coffee. Mark wowed the crowd when he demo’d at FinovateSpring last year. Hip Pocket’s first product is a mobile app that allows anyone to input mortgage rate and monthly payment to see how their company stacks up against its peers (see inset).

The Hip Pocket mortgage app is a compelling value-prop for users, and potentially a great lead-gen tool for banks and credit unions. While Hip Pocket has had some great traction since then, it is still looking for additional seed funding to build more tools and fine-tune its customer-acquisition model. Hip Pocket is in a sweet part of the market—mobile mortgage (MoMo)—and is at a point in their company arc where relatively small dollars can make a big impact. They are a great candidate for “bank strategic seed funding.”

Finovate Debuts: myInvenio Turns Data Analysis into Process Intelligence

Finovate Debuts: myInvenio Turns Data Analysis into Process Intelligence

myinvenio_homepage_May2016

With its first product, myInvenio, Cognitive Technology brings the blessings of big-data visualization to the banking industry.

myInvenio analyzes the structured and unstructured data that financial institutions already have in their logs to help managers uncover inefficiencies and discover roadblocks. Leveraging Cognitive Technology’s talents in process intelligence, big data analytics, and data mining, myInvenio enables CIOs to analyze, monitor, and optimize banking processes.

“With myInvenio you can analyze the past, the present, and you can predict the future of your processes, providing the banking organization with a perfect solution for the process and operations governance,” says Massimiliano Delsante, myInvenio’s CEO.

Like most data-visualizing technologies, seeing is believing. So be sure to check out myInvenio’s demo video from FinovateEurope for the full effect. The technology uses color, arrows, and even animated images to automatically visualize—and in some instances dramatize—business activities such as loan issuance. Accessing different views via an analytics dashboard allows managers to spot areas of potential non-compliance or to drill down to determine which processes are the most time-consuming and inefficient.

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Pictured (left to right): Cognitive Technology’s Modesta Jonauskyte, sales and marketing, and CEO Massimiliano Delsante demonstrated myInvenio at FinovateEurope 2013 in London.

“Imagine how much time you would spend to get this kind of information using a traditional business-process-analysis approach,” myInvenio’s Modesta Jonauskyte said from the Finovate stage in London. “Instead of hiring a consultant, taking weeks or even months to interview all of the resources involved in the process, here you have myInvenio immediately indicating to you the most critical activities and resources involved.”

Managers can take advantage of the cloud-based, responsive technology to track process performance remotely via iPad, as well. The Performance View allows users to run an animation that follows a timeline of the various processes. KPIs, waiting times, waiting queues, resource allocation, and more.

myInvenio_CrossPlatform

myInvenio integrates with BPM and BI platforms and is fully compatible with BPMN2.0 and XPDL2.1. And courtesy of the myInvenio Connector for Qlikview and Qlik Sense, users of this popular business-intelligence solution now have access to myInvenio’s data-visualization technology, turning “data analysis into process analysis.”

Company facts:

  • Founded in 2013
  • Headquartered in Sliema, Malta
  • More than 200 registered users
  • Employs 14
  • Launched myInvenio in January 2015

We spoke with Delsante and Jonauskyte about myInvenio on rehearsal day during FinovateEurope in February 2016. We followed up by email.

Finovate: What problems does myInvenio solve?

Massimiliano Delsante: Nowadays, organizations need a solution to quickly react to the fast-paced financial market. myInvenio is a Process Mining and Operational Intelligence solution that allows you to manage your financial process transformation by automatically reading the data and analyzing banking/financial processes. myInvenio constantly monitors your banking processes, performances, and compliance. It identifies bottlenecks, critical activities and resources, as well as suggests the improvements and transformations needed in order to anticipate the trends of the market.

Finovate: Who are your primary customers?

Delsante: Although business-process analysts can be advantageous optimizing any business process, so far myInvenio solution has been successfully implemented within financial, automotive and manufacturing industries. These industries remain at the top of myInvenio priority.

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Finovate: How does myInvenio solve the problem better?

Delsante: myInvenio is a disruptive solution to automatically analyze your banking processes, identifying your process behaviour, compliance, performances, the resources involved and the resource collaboration. It provides advanced analytics features to constantly monitor process deviation, KPIs alignment, and the bottlenecks of resources, and activities.

Also, myInvenio is a cross platform, multi-user solution that is available to be used on any device. It is flexible and scalable. You can either start analyzing a single area of your organization’s data using myInvenio cloud online version covering your overall banking processes, or you can move to the on-premise solution when in need to manage big data analysis.

myInvenio has a very friendly user interface, so finance analysts without technical IT backgrounds can quickly get a grip of myInvenio features and to analyze their organization’s processes. It has a well-defined dashboard that ensures 100% analytics reliability besides reducing banking process analysis time and costs.

myInvenio_ActivityMap

Finovate: Tell us about your favorite implementation of myInvenio.

Delsante: myInvenio was implemented within a large-scale banking organization, Credem, that has a wide banking network in Italy. Credem used myInvenio to optimise their loan application process and to later constantly monitor the process performance following the events happening in real time.

The bank is moving toward the adoption of myInvenio as the solution for banking process governance and operational intelligence.

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

Delsante: myInvenio team benefits from 20 years of experience in process management and analysis across banking, automotive, and fashion industries. Working with many customers and helping them tackle process-management issues, the development of an effective and easy-to-use Process Mining solution became a necessity.

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

Delsante: Following the success of Finovate, myInvenio is being presented at many other events and conferences with the focus on financial industries and digital business transformation. On 5th of May, myInvenio will be present at FinTechStage hosted in Milan and the 7th of June, myInvenio success stories in automotive industry will be presented at Ferrari headquarters in Maranello by Ferrari CIO and other important representatives.

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

Delsante: myInvenio’s main goal remains to meet the highest expectations of its customers as well as to become a standard solution for the business process digital transformation in financial, automotive, and manufacturing industries.


Check out myInvenio’s demonstration video from FinovateEurope.

From Billpay to Blockchain: The Themes of FinovateSpring

From Billpay to Blockchain: The Themes of FinovateSpring

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What’s changed between last year and the themes that are dominating FinovateSpring 2016?

“Mobile,” “Payments,” “Banking,” “Apps,” and “Investing” are key concepts again this year. But there may be no better metaphor for the changing landscape of fintech than the fact that “Billpay,” one of the larger themes of 2015, is out and “Blockchain” is in.

FS2016_Theme_Cloud_FinalThat said, there’s more to 12 months of fintech innovation than the spread of distributed-ledger technologies and the mainstreaming of personal finance (note that “PFM” failed to make FinovateSpring’s theme-cloud for the second year in a row). “Voice” appears for the first time as a significant theme in our cloud as more companies explore voice technologies as a solution for everything from authentication to customer engagement. And the rise of artificial intelligence is revealed by new themes, such as “Predictive,” as in Predictive Analytics, or “Cognitive,” as in cognitive computing, and even “Workflow,” which recognizes the way AI and machine learning are combining to automate and improve business processes for banks and other financial institutions.

This is the kind of peek into the future of fintech that FinovateSpring provides. Join us next week in San Jose as 72 companies from around the world take the stage for two days of innovation and high-caliber networking. Tickets are on sale now, so be sure to register today and join more than 1,500 fellow fintech professionals, our biggest Bay Area event ever, at one of the key events in the fintech calendar.

And if your appetite needs further whetting, here’s an updated look at the innovators that will be demoing their technologies live on stage May 10 & 11.

We hope we’ll see you there! In the meanwhile, learn more about the companies that will be on stage in our FinovateSpring Sneak Peek series, and please visit our FAQ or email us at spring@finovate.com with any questions.


FinovateSpring 2016 is sponsored by The Bancorp, AccentureAssociation for Financial Technology, Cyberport/InvestHK, FT Partners, Greater Zurich Area/Swiss Business Hub,  Hudson Cook, KPMG, and Leverage PR.

FinovateSpring 2016 is partnered with Acuity Market IntelligenceAite Group, American Bankers AssociationBank Innovators CouncilBankersHubBankless TimesBayPay Forum, Bitcoin MagazinebobsguideBreaking Banks, Byte AcademyCalifornia Bankers AssociationCanadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelentCointelegraphDigital Currency CouncilEbankingNews, FemTechLeadersFilene Research Institute, The Fintech TimesIDC Financial InsightsJavelin, Juniper ResearchKorea FinTech ForumMercator Advisory GroupPayments & Cards NetworkThe Paypers,PitchBookPlug and PlaySME Finance Forum, and Western Independent Bankers.

Money Transfer Company Azimo Pulls in $15 Million in Strategic Funds from Rakuten

Money Transfer Company Azimo Pulls in $15 Million in Strategic Funds from Rakuten

AzimoHomepage

Digital money-transfer network Azimo added $15 million to its $25 million in VC funds today, bringing the London-based company’s total to around $40 million.

The strategic investment was led by Japanese fintech services company Rakuten, the organization that owns messaging service Viber. Existing investors—eVentures, Frog Capital, Greycroft, Accion and MCI Capital—also participated in the round.

The funds will be used to integrate Azimo’s money-transfer services into messaging apps and fuel the company’s expansion into Asia, which is home to seven of the top 10 remittance-receiving countries. Azimo already offers its services in a small portion of Asia. While 30% of its total transfers are sent to the region, the expansion efforts will enable more outbound remittances from Asia.

Michael Kent, CEO and founder of Azimo, explains:

While we weren’t actively looking for additional capital, the approach from Rakuten really appealed because of their presence in markets core to our long-term ambitions. They have a huge presence in Asia, they really understand consumer financial services, and, as owners of Viber, are a significant player in the social messaging market. The partnership will accelerate our Asian expansion and assist in our aim of developing ever deeper social network integrations.

Azimo is not disclosing its valuation but TechCrunch estimates it to be $100 million with the prospect of raising a bigger round of funding next year. Founded in 2012, the company operates in 190+ countries and 80+ currencies. Its network connects half a million people and has the potential to reach up to 5 billion people across the globe.

Founder and CEO Michael Kent and CTO Marek Wawro, co-founder, debuted Azimo’s social remittance network at FinovateEurope 2013.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • “Money Transfer Company Azimo Pulls in $15 Million in Strategic Funds from Rakuten”
  • “From Billpay to Blockchain: The Themes of FinovateSpring”
  • “Finovate Debuts: myInvenio Turns Data Analysis into Process Intelligence”

On FinDEVr.com

  • “GreenKey Technologies Names Richard Garnier as Chief Revenue Officer”

Around the web

  • Klarna moves beyond ecommerce to service brick-and-mortar retail shops.
  • CSI GlobalVCard partners with Cambridge Global Payments for x-border payment solution.
  • Pershing selects Invesco-owned Jemstep, SigFig as roboadviser partners.
  • OurCrowd interviews BioCatch CEO Eyal Goldwerger. Check out OurCrowd at FinovateSpring next week.
  • OnDeck, Kabbage, and CAN Capital team up to form the “Innovative Lending Platform Association.”
  • Misys wins Best Portfolio Management Software Provider in HFM European Services Awards for 2016.
  • Thomson Reuters unveils new version of its ONESOURCE tax solution for companies doing business in Brazil.

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.

A Topological Look at Next Week’s FinovateSpring Presenters

A Topological Look at Next Week’s FinovateSpring Presenters

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Next week at this time we’ll be in San Jose watching the first demo session of FinovateSpring 2016 unfold (register here). That means it’s time to take a look at the 72 presenting companies that will step up to the stage of San Jose’s City National Civic on May 10 & 11.

There are a few things you can do to learn more about the presenting companies and what they plan to demo:

  1. Check out our FinovateSpring Sneak Peek series on the blog
  2. Visit presenting company websites on the FinovateSpring homepage
  3. Take a look at the presenter map below that details each company’s headquarters location:

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FinovateSpring will showcase 17 companies from the Bay Area; 36 companies from elsewhere in the United States; and 19 from other countries. Presenters from VIX Verify have the longest commute; they’ll be flying in from Australia.

For last-minute questions about the event, check out the FAQ section of the FinovateSpring homepage or email spring@finovate.com. We’ll see you next week!


FinovateSpring 2016 is sponsored by The Bancorp, AccentureAssociation for Financial Technology, Cyberport/InvestHK, FT Partners, Greater Zurich Area/Swiss Business Hub,  Hudson Cook, KPMG, and Leverage PR.

FinovateSpring 2016 is partnered with Acuity Market IntelligenceAite Group, American Bankers AssociationBank Innovators CouncilBankersHubBankless TimesBayPay Forum, Bitcoin MagazinebobsguideBreaking Banks, Byte AcademyCalifornia Bankers AssociationCanadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelentCointelegraphDigital Currency CouncilEbankingNews, FemTechLeadersFilene Research Institute, The Fintech TimesIDC Financial InsightsJavelin, Juniper ResearchKorea FinTech ForumMercator Advisory GroupPayments & Cards NetworkThe Paypers,PitchBookPlug and PlaySME Finance Forum, and Western Independent Bankers.

FinDEVr APIntelligence

FinDEVrSV16-LogoV2(wdate)Our FinDEVr New York developer showcase last week was a success! FinDEVr Silicon Valley will be held October 18 & 19 in Santa Clara. Register today and save.

On FinDEVr.com

  • “What’s in a Name? Plaid Earns “Cool Vendor” Status from Gartner”
  • “Chain Launches Open Source Blockchain Protocol”

The latest from FinDEVr New York 2016 presenters

  • PayPal’s Venmo processed $3.2 billion in total payments volume in Q1 2016, an increase of 154% year-over-year.
  • Infosys Finacle teams up with Samsung SDS to give mobile banking customers better authentication technology.
  • A look at APIs in the robo-adviser industry by Bank Innovation underscores the role played by Xignite.
  • PYMNTS interviews Hyperwallet CEO Brent Warrington.

Alumni updates

  • Bluefin Payment Systems integrates Visa Data Secure Platform into its portfolio.
  • Xero for Payroll goes live in Pennsylvania, making the technology available in a total of 22 states.

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

mCASH Pivots to AUKA, Launches Mobile Payments Services Across Europe

mCASH Pivots to AUKA, Launches Mobile Payments Services Across Europe

AukaHomepage

Mobile payments platform Auka launched its services in Europe after pivoting* from mCASH earlier this year.

Auka has built a payment infrastructure entirely on the Google Cloud Platform and is the first fully licensed and regulated financial company to do so. The company’s platform-as-a-service model takes only three months for a bank to integrate. The payments infrastructure connects banks to consumers and merchants with white-labeled P2P payments, POS solutions, and merchant services.

This news comes just after the European Parliament approved the Payment Service Directive and Access to Accounts initiative, which will require banks to make their APIs available to third parties, thus opening the once-restricted payment system to the open markets. This means it’s in a bank’s best interest to offer an easy-to-use API to avoid losing out on transaction revenue. Auka CEO Daniel Döderlein explains:

Banks need to be prepared to use the Access to Accounts (XS2A) provision within the new regulations to its full extent. It’s not just about complying with requests to provide their API, but building the kind of sticky, high-frequency use services that they can then plug their rivals’ APIs into, ensuring that they are the brand that customers have facetime with.

Auka launched as mCASH in 2014 and has 17 bank customers with thousands of merchant clients. The Norway-based company debuted at FinovateFall 2014.

Google Cloud Platform presented its Big Data secret at FinDEVr San Francisco 2014.


*Auka is the parent company of mCASH, which was acquired by the second largest bank in Norway. mCASH kept the rights to all IP outside of Norway and rebranded that company to Auka.

Brett King and the Disruptions of the Augmented Age

Brett King and the Disruptions of the Augmented Age

Augemented_BookCoverWhat does it take to thrive in a world of rapid technological change?

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lanethe new book by Moven founder and CEO Brett King, marks the latest addition to a growing literature of futurism and prognostication on technology. And while King calls himself “ultimately an optimist,” Augmented threads the needle between the tech utopianism of a Ray Kurzweil, and the more anxious voices (at least where technologies like artificial intelligence are concerned) of visionaries ranging from Elon Musk to Neil Bostrom.

Augmented puts the current boom in the context of previous periods of rapid technological change. King dissents from the view that our current wave pales in comparison with other eras. Instead, he refers to the impact of the smartphone on personal finance (“Only 40% of the world had access to banking before mobile,” he points out) and talks about the transformative power of innovations like 3D printing in medicine and meta-materials in energy.

These innovations will force people to ask new ethical questions, such as “Should it be legal for a person to have an otherwise healthy limb amputated in favor of an enhanced prosthetic one?” But many of the thorniest questions in King’s view will revolve around what to do with all those workers displaced by increasingly productive “labor-saving” solutions. Augmented features a sobering table of jobs likely to survive the transition he believes is already underway, and those that are not. “Every business with a traditional business model that has resisted technological change has failed,” King says.

Augmented_BrettKingSo what are 21st century technological revolutions made of? King sees four key disruptors that will define the way we will live in the decades to come: artificial intelligence, smart infrastructure, healthcare technology, and what he calls embedded and distributed experiences. This last category includes the sort of virtual technologies that companies like Facebook have made major investments in, as well as the “Internet of Things” concept that King describes as a world in which “everything is able to give feedback.”

And while there will be some who will have none of this noisy, intrusive world, King is betting that most of us will find our place in it. Consider his take on privacy. For King, social media like Instagram and LinkedIn (to say nothing of  what we’ll have by mid-century) provide something equally as valuable in the augmented age: validation. “Lack of a digital identity may make you less trustworthy in the new world,” King suggested. In a world in which privacy and security remain important—if not even more so than today—the ability to quickly and accurately establish identity also becomes important, even if all that means is having an accurate and up-to-date Facebook page.

The inevitability of change is a key takeaway. And the irony may be that the technology will be the easy part. “There will have to be a mindset shift from the traditional values of baby boomers to the acceptance of change-mentality of millennials,” King says. And it is his own generation X, currently entering middle age, that will be key in making that transition happen.

Much of King’s message, however, is that as inevitable as the discomfort of disruption is, we’ve been through this before and tended to like what we found on the other side. “It is important to help people get ready for this,” he said, summing up his reason for writing Augmented. And to the extent his predictions prove prescient, forewarned is forearmed.


Meet Brett King in San Jose next month as his company, Moven, demonstrates its latest technology live on stage at FinovateSpring, May 10 and 11.