Interactions Names New CFO

Interactions Names New CFO

Interactionshomepage

InteractionsCFOVirtual assistance and customer-care company Interactions recently appointed Jason Bristow as new CFO.

Bristow (pictured) comes to Interactions having served as VP of finance and treasurer at Amazon for 10 years, helping to grow the company’s revenues from $5 billion in 2003 to $89 billion in 2014. He most recently served as CFO of Code42 Software, a SaaS data-security provider.

Interactions CEO Mike Iacobucci says, “Jason will play a vital role in sustaining our record growth and will help guide our strategy for continued innovation in speech and natural language technologies that are fundamentally changing the customer care market.”

Interactions is a two-time Best of Show winner, having taken home awards at both FinovateFall 2013 and FinovateSpring 2014 where the company debuted conversational solutions which offer callers access to balance, transaction history, and account information. In April, Interactions teamed up with Arise Virtual Solutions as a distribution partner.

Fidor Bank Opens its Doors in Dubai; Ge Drossaert Tapped as Managing Director

Fidor Bank Opens its Doors in Dubai; Ge Drossaert Tapped as Managing Director

Fidor_homepage_June2016

Munich-based Fidor Bank is expanding to Dubai. The move will enable the bank to better serve companies outside of Europe, and comes less than a year after the innovative FI opened offices in the U.K. Fidor CEO Matthias Kröner called the expansion “only a matter of time” given the growing number of inquiries he says his bank has received from companies in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. “The Dubai Silicon Oasis is an ideal location for this project, because it’s one of the biggest free zones in Fidor_GeDrossaertthe Middle East, with more than 1,000 companies already installed,” he said.

To lead operations in Dubai, Fidor Bank has hired Gé Drossaert (pictured) to serve as managing director. Drossaert comes to Fidor with more than 20 years’ experience in finance and IT, having worked as CTO of banking and capital markets for Asia, Middle East, and Africa for Computer Sciences Corporation, and as head of transformation and change at Saudi Hollandi Bank.

Fidor Bank received its banking license in 2009 and demonstrated its FidorPay-Account at FinovateEurope 2011. One of the world’s more innovative banks when it comes to technology, Fidor Bank was the first bank to deploy the Ripple protocol back in 2014, and was a winner of the Bank Innovation Award in 2013. More recently, Fidor teamed up with Telefonica Germany to launch a mobile bank account, O2 Banking, and earned a spot in The FinTech50’s Inaugural Hall of Fame. Fidor Bank presented “No Stack Banking” at our developers conference, FinDEVr San Francisco 2015, and “How to Start Your Digital Bank—Mobile Apps and APIs Included,” at FinDEVr New York 2016 this spring.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • “Interactions Names New CFO”
  • “Fidor Bank Opens its Doors in Dubai; Ge Drossaert Tapped as Managing Director”

On FinDEVr

  • “BlockCypher to Developers: Your Ethereum Toolkit is Ready

Around the web

  • CU Times’ white paper features IDology.
  • Crowdfund Insider interviews Zopa CEO Jaidev Janardana.
  • Bank of Newington and Cleveland State Bank deploy Core Director platform from Jack Henry.
  • Narrative Science partners with client reporting and communications software company, Vermilion Software.
  • Pirean opens local support centre for the Australia and New Zealand markets.
  • Insuritas to power insurance agency for Community Resource Credit Union.
  • VoicePIN opens U.S. office.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You an also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

Ripple Receives BitLicense to Sell XRP

RippleHomepage

After New York State began requiring companies to carry a license to engage in virtual currency activity, Ripple has received a BitLicense from the New York Department of Financial Services today. This marks the first New York BitLicense for institutional use of digital assets.

The San Francisco-based company, owner of a distributed ledger and host of the digital currency XRP, will leverage the license to gain footing into New York banks. As CEO Chris Larsen says, “With the BitLicense in hand, we look forward to working with our New York bank customers seeking to use XRP for liquidity and cost savings.” XRP offers banks access to a global payments infrastructure that increases transaction speed, certainty of settlement, and lowers the costs related to treasury operations, payment processing, liquidity and compliance.

The company launched the Ripple Network at FinovateSpring 2013 and recently announced a new initiative to help banks test Ripple integration without disrupting their operations. Early this year, Ripple partnered with SBI Holdings to boost interest in the ASEAN region.

2016 CNBC Disruptor 50 Features Klarna, Kabbage, Twilio, and Motif Investing

2016 CNBC Disruptor 50 Features Klarna, Kabbage, Twilio, and Motif Investing

CNBC_Disruptor2016

What does it take to win a spot on the 2016 CNBC Disruptor 50? Ask alternative online broker Motif Investing. They’ve done it three times in a row.

“We’re very proud to be continuously recognized by CNBC for our hard work and commitment to making smart investing easy,” Motif founder and CEO Hardeep Walia said. “The CNBC Disruptor list is a well-respected industry benchmark and we’re honored to be ranked on the list for the past three years.”

Or ask cloud communications and authentication specialist Twilio, a FinDEVr alum (FinDEVr San Francisco 2015) enjoying its third consecutive year on CNBC’s Disruptors List of companies “whose innovations are revolutionizing the business landscape.”

Sponsored by Nasdaq, the CNBC Disruptor 50 for 2016 was released last week. And among some of the easy-to-call favorites like Uber and SpaceX and Snapchat, there are additional familiar faces, especially to fans of Finovate and financial technology. This year more than 750 companies competed for the 50 spots in CNBC’s Disruptor roster. Combined, the 50 companies in this year’s roster have raised more than $40 billion in venture capital and have an implied market valuation of $242 billion. Joining Motif Investing and Twilio in this year’s roster are alums Klarna at #8 and Kabbage at #35. This marks Klarna’s second year in a row on the list, and Kabbage’s first.

Klarna was featured earlier this month in PYMNTS.com in a look at the tech scene in Stockholm and, in May, the company’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski was interviewed in BankNxt. In April, Klarna announced a partnership with U.K. e-commerce provider EKM. CNBC Disruptor 50 newcomer Kabbage just reached $2 billion in loans underwritten last month. Also in May, Kabbage announced a partnership with fellow Finovate alums OnDeck and CAN Capital to launch a pair of new initiatives: the Innovative Lending Platform Association and Smart Box. Both projects are geared toward improving transparency among online lenders and borrowers. In April, Kabbage teamed up with Santander to bring same-day financing to small businesses in the U.K.

Here’s a quick look at Finovate alums that have made the CNBC Disruptor 50 in years past.

  • 2015 CNBC Disruptor 50 featured alums TransferWise, Personal Capital, Motif Investing, Zen Payroll, Coinbase, Klarna, Wealthfront, Betterment, Twilio, Narrative Science
  • 2014 CNBC Disruptor 50 featured alums Motif Investing, TransferWise, Personal Capital, Wealthfront, Lending Club, Coinbase, Bill.com, Nexmo, Betterment, Twilio
  • 2013 CNBC Disruptor 50 featured alums Boku, Lending Club, Twilio, Wealthfront

Motif Investing demoed its Advisor Platform at FinovateSpring 2014. At FinDEVr San Francisco 2014, Twilio discussed the challenges of multifactor authentication in its presentation, “Authy 2FA in 20 Minutes.” Klarna demonstrated its e-commerce solution at FinovateSpring 2012. And Kabbage demoed its small business line of credit, the Kabbage Card, at FinovateSpring 2015.

Ping Goes the Blockchain: Partnership Brings Consensus, Kill Switch with New Platform

Ping Goes the Blockchain: Partnership Brings Consensus, Kill Switch with New Platform

PingIdentity_homepage_June2016

Just days after being acquired by Vista Equity Partners, Ping Identity has introduced a new identity-management app that could pave the way for a seamless and secure user experience referred to as “continuous authentication.”

The announcement from Ping Identity came as part of the launch of distributed app platform designer Swirlds (as in “Shared Worlds”), which emerged from stealth last week and unveiled its hashgraph-distributed consensus platform. Swirlds enables developers to create distributed apps—permissioned and non-permissioned—with high throughput, fairness, and community consensus. The Swirlds platform differs further from the blockchain in that it has the ability to provide a timestamp of events as well as an evidentiary record. This functionality, which goes beyond what is available via the bitcoin blockchain, enables the platform to support a wide variety of transactional applications ranging from banking and trading markets to gaming and identity apps to cryptocurrencies and public ledgers.

Swirlds_homepage_June2016

Swirlds CEO Leemon Baird said, “Nobody is talking about building a stock market on Bitcoin blockchain, but you could do it on Swirlds.” Baird added that Swirlds could serve as a standard for distributed session management. Here is a detailed overview of Swirlds’ “fair, fast, provable, Byzantine, ACID compliant, efficient, inexpensive, timestapped, DoS resistant and optionally non-permissioned” technology.

What Ping Identity adds to the Swirlds platform is a way to manage identities across sessions and apps. Essentially, the technology keeps identity session databases synced to facilitate global session logout. The technology could be used, for example, to do away with the notion of “logging in” to a specific app or session. Instead, the user’s identity could follow them across apps and sessions, creating a better user experience while maintaining a high level of security. “The reason for application sessions is we don’t have continuous authentication,” Mance Harmon told ZDNet’s Identity Matters: “If the identity in the session goes away, you need a kill switch that works across client types.” Harmon is Ping’s senior director of architecture and labs.

In addition to the technical partnership, Ping Identity has invested capital in Swirlds, as well. “Swirlds represents a huge technological breakthrough that can change the way distributed-consensus communities function across a myriad of industries and use cases,” Patrick Harding, Ping’s Identity CTO, said. Calling it “the new identity standard,” Harding said the technology “solves the major challenges that identity professionals face in conducting and verifying session logout.”

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Ping Identity demonstrated PingFederate, Cloud Identity Connectors, and integration with third-party products at FinovateEurope 2012. The company announced new features to its PingFederate security solution in February, adding elastic scalability and contextual multifactor authentication. Named one of the top-100 tech companies in Colorado in 2015 by Built in Colorado, Ping Identity was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in June.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • “2016 CNBC Distruptor 50 Features Klarna, Kabbage, Twilio, and Motif Investing”
  • “Ping Goes the Blockchain: Partnership Brings Consensus, Kill Switch with New Platform”
  • “Ripple Receives BitLicense to Sell XRP”

Around the web

  • FICO launches its Academic Engagement Program, helping business students get hands-on experience with analytic software.
  • Mashable features Dashlane in its list of “7 can’t miss apps.”
  • Ping Identity partners with blockchain innovator, Swirlds.
  • Braintree announces new integrations with Demandware and Netsuite.
  • Top Image Systems earns spot in the Russell Microcap Index.
  • Bloomberg Businessweek profiles TransferWise, ‘London’s Lonely Unicorn.’
  • The economist looks at Strands and Entrepreneurial Finanace Lab’s roles for businesses in developing countries.
  • Unicredit launches Appathon powered by Open Bank Project.
  • Crowdtrader looks at C.K. Mack’s new take on crowd-sourced real estate investing.

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 Banks $7 Million in New Investment

Bento for Business Banks $7 Million in New Investment

bentoforbusiness_homepage_June2016

In a round led by Comcast Ventures, Bento for Business has raised $7 million in new funding. The Series A also featured the participation of existing investors from Anthemis Group, Blumberg Capital, and Lionbird, as well as new investor Dan Henry, former CEO of NetSpend. The investment takes Bento’s total capital to $9.5 million.

The company, which has seen 170% quarter-over-quarter growth since launching 13 months ago, says the funds will be used to add management talent, develop new features, and pave the way for expansion into new verticals. Dave Zilberman, managing director at Comcast Ventures, will join Bento’s board of directors as part of the deal.

Bento_stage_FS2015

Pictured (left to right): Bento for Business co-founders Farhan Ahmad, CEO, and Sean Anderson, CPO, demonstrated their technology at FinovateSpring 2015.

Bento for Business provides small businesses with solutions to help them manage expenses better. The company’s first offering was the Bento MasterCard, a prepaid card that employers can give to their employees to make qualified purchases.  Business owners can easily set usage rules for the card based on spending amount and spending category, as well as set spending time limits. Owners also can turn the cards on or off with a single click. Bento provides a dashboard that enables the commercial card owner to see which cards are being used and how, as well as track expenses by location, employee, and type.

“Banks want to service small businesses, but it’s been profitable not to,” Ahman explained during a conversation at FinovateSpring last year. “We want to work with banks, with service providers … to curate and build beautiful, simple and most of all useful products that are built just for small businesses,” he said. Read more about the company in our Finovate Debut feature.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Bento for Business demonstrated its platform at FinovateSpring 2015. The company was profiled by Newsfactor Business Report in its look at prepaid debit cards for businesses back in December, the same month Bankless Times featured the company and its employee-spending controls solution. PYMNTS.con also took a look at Bento last fall.

 

 

FT Partners New Research Report on Digital Wealth Management Features a Dozen Finovate Alums

FT Partners New Research Report on Digital Wealth Management Features a Dozen Finovate Alums

FTPartners_logo_2The new research report on digital wealth management from Financial Technology Partners is a timely reminder of just how deep the firm’s dedication to, and insight into, the fintech world goes (that the report features a dozen Finovate and FinDEVr alums is pretty neat, too).

FT Partners’ report “Are the Robots Taking Over? The Emergence of Automated Digital Wealth Management Solutions” looks at the different platforms and business models used by digital wealth management companies, as well as the response by industry incumbents. The 140+ page report also features interviews with CEOs from leading major digital wealth-management companies such as Betterment, Nutmeg, and SigFig.

Writing about this FT Partners’ report on digital wealth management for Bloomberg View, columnist and money manager Barry Ritholtz noted:

“For those of you who may not have thought much about how technology might affect Wall Street, the work you do each day, and how you do it—not to mention what it means for your careers—this report is invaluable.”

Ritholtz outlined how his own experience as a money manager had been shaped by the rapidly changing technology landscape (“My office is small, but thanks to technology, and fintech in particular, we are able to be very productive with just 14 people,” he wrote). He also admits this productivity comes at a cost for some. “Those people who don’t adapt will find themselves with limited career options,” Ritholtz writes.

So who are the disruptors in the digital wealth management space of whom both FT Partners and Ritholtz speak?

Betterment_logo

 

dyme

 

 

 

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HedgeableLogo

 

 

iQuantifiLogo_FF2014

 

 

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  • Founded in 2008
  • Headquartered in Los Altos, California
  • Kevin Cimring and Michael Blumenthal are joint CEOs
  • Acquired by Invesco, January 2016
  • FinovateSpring 2013

LearnVest_logo

 

 

  • Founded in 2009
  • Headquartered in New York, New York
  • Alexa von Tobel is CEO and founder
  • Acquired by Northwestern Mutual, March 2015
  • FinovateFall 2013

MotifInvesting_logo_150x

 

 

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Personal-Capital-Logo

 

SigFig_logo

 

 

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  • Founded in 2005
  • Headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida
  • Donato Montanaro is CEO
  • Acquired by Ally Financial, April 2016
  • FinovateSpring 2008

 

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • “Bento for Business Banks $7 Million in New Investment”
  • “FT Partners New Research Report on Digital Wealth Management Features a Dozen Finovate Alums”

Around the web

  • Daily Fintech profiles Kreditech in a feature on the future of consumer banking.
  • CNN features Betterment, Wealthfront, and StockTwits in a list of the 10 best investing apps.
  • Spend Matters takes a look at the latest investment in Tradeshift and what it means for innovation in the procurement industry.
  • Oren Levy, Zooz CEO, writes in mobile payments today about the rising deployment of mobile wallets in developing markets.
  • Baseventure wins Red Herring Top 100 North America award.

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.

Mobile: One-Size-Fits-All vs. Niche Banking Apps

Mobile: One-Size-Fits-All vs. Niche Banking Apps

us bank itunes iphone apps

US Bank’s iOS app lineup 

 

Early on in the smartphone era there was a debate as to whether native apps or the mobile web would carry the day. As an early iPhone user, I was solidly in the native apps camp. Some day there will be a better interface, but until then it’s an app world (though not every headline writer agrees). And now the question for financial institutions is not whether you need a native app, it’s how many do you need?

Until recently, most financial institutions hoped to have a one-size-fits-all mobile app, just like on the desktop. That’s the option that lowers development costs, simplifies tech support, and makes digital banking easier to manage. But since most financial institutions serve many customer segments, bundling too many features into one UI really gums up the overall experience.

So we are seeing more and more financial companies developing multiple native apps to support distinct business groups, customer segments, and even charitable activities. The most prolific? US Bancorp with 43 iOS apps alone, 28 of which are white-labeled for its affinity credit-card customers (see screenshot above).

Delving deeper, let’s look at the 25 most-popular free finance apps in the U.S. Apple App Store (data is from mid-March, when I started this post). The 13 financial institutions in that group have a combined 123 apps, for an average of nearly 10 per bank. However, excluding US Bank’s 28 white-label apps, the total is 93, or 7.2 per FI.

Bottom line: You may not need 7 or 8 apps, but it’s clear that multiple apps optimized for individual use have an advantage in usability and focus (ROI is a much more difficult question of course). In addition to a core mobile-banking app, most mid-size and larger FIs should evaluate dedicated apps for the following segments:

  • Youth
  • Small businesses
  • Mobile wallet/cards (credit/debit/prepaid)
  • Saving/budgeting/personal finance
  • Home buyers/mortgage/home equity
  • Car buying/auto loans
  • College financing/student loans
  • Retirement/wealth management/investing
  • Optional: Insurance, HSA, any other stand-alone business line

——————–

Table: Number of iOS apps per financial services provider

Banks & Card Issuers: Total of 123 apps across 13 financial institutions

  • US Bank: 43 (14 branded, 28 white-labeled affinity partners, 1 nonprofit)
  • PNC Bank: 14 (all branded)
  • Chase: 11 (6 Chase branded, 5 JPMorgan branded)
  • American Express: 10 (8 branded, Plenti, Expert Care)
  • Citibank: 10 (all branded)
  • Bank of America: 9 (4 BofA branded, 5 Merrill Lynch branded)
  • Capital One: 8 (7 branded, 1 CreditWise)
  • Wells Fargo: 5 (all branded)
  • TD Bank: 3 (all branded)
  • Discover: 3 (1 branded, 2 Diners Club)
  • Navy FCU: 2 (all branded)
  • BB&T: 2 (all branded)
  • USAA: 2 (1 branded, Savings Coach)

Payments: 15 apps across 4 companies

  • PayPal: 9 (7 branded, Venmo, Xoom)
  • Square: 4 (all branded)
  • Western Union: 1
  • Google Wallet: 1

Insurance: 2 apps from 2 companies

  • Progressive: 1
  • Geico: 1

Personal finance/investing: 18 apps across 6 companies

  • Intuit: 13 (12 branded, Mint)
  • Credit Karma: 1
  • Digit: 1
  • Acorns: 1
  • Prosper: 1
  • Robinhood: 1

Dyme Unveils Prototype of Facebook Savings Chatbot

Dyme Unveils Prototype of Facebook Savings Chatbot

Dyme_homepage_June2016

With all due respect to the blockchain, 2016 may well be the year of the bot.

Bank Innovation reports that Finovate Best of Show winner Dyme has unveiled the first Facebook financial chatbot. The savings-related chatbot comes in a trio of tones (including the ever-popular “terrible parent” option) and while it is essentially the same as Dyme’s text-based savings solution, the company told Bank Innovation that the chatbot is part of the company’s plan to create a comprehensive set of messaging apps and services. Bank Innovation’s JJ Hornblass also praised the speed with which Dyme was able to put the chatbot app together, given that Facebook made specs available in April.

Dyme_stage_FF2015

Pictured: Dyme founder Joseph Prather demonstrated his company’s text-message-based savings solution at FinovateFall 2015 in New York.

What exactly is a chatbot? A chatbot is a software program that communicates in text form with human users; as machine learning and artificial intelligence play a greater role on the back end, many of these technologies are being deployed on the front end. With chatbots, businesses are able to perceptively receive queries and deliver information to busy consumers through popular, recognizable formats and channels. The technology has its detractors who decry the lack of human contact in commerce, and is still very much a work-in-progress when confronted with real-world externalities as Microsoft learned with its embarrassing Tay experiment this spring. But there’s no doubt that the convergence of technology and convenience will drive innovation in chatbot development as it has in mobile banking, biometric authentication, and other areas.

Writing about the relationship between chatbots and financial services in March, our own Jim Bruene noted that while the technology is very effective in self-service applications, chatbots are also capable of handling transactions in general and the “repetitive routine ones typical of online/mobile banking sessions” in particular. “If you think of online banking via a PC as digital banking 1.0, and mobile as digital banking 2.0, then the upcoming invisible UI … using chatbots, AI and machine learning could very well be version 3.0,” Bruene wrote.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in San Francisco, Dyme demoed its text-message-based savings technology at FinovateFall 2015. The company was featured in Benzinga’s “3 Ways Fintech Companies Can Help You Save” and is currently in the spring cohort of the fintech accelerator of Bank Innovation INV.