Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Betterment, Concur, Cortera, Dashlane, Geezeo, Hedgeable, Infosys, Kasasa, Kensho, Ledger, Ripple, SocietyOne, ThetaRay, Wealthfront

On Finovate.com

  • “Hedgeable Helps Investors Add Venture Capital Exposure with New Fund”
  • “Finovate Debuts: Ledger’s Blue Smartcard Mitigates Phishing & Malware Attacks”

Around the web

  • Ripple reports that banks can save more than 40% on payments by using distributed ledger technology.
  • PFM technology from Geezeo now available to customers of Access Softek, courtesy of new partnership.
  • Concur Technologies teams up with CTI, a travel management specialist.
  • Dashlane adds YubiKey support.
  • Nerdwallet profiles robo-advisors Betterment and Wealthfront.
  • ThetaRay launches its Detection Center, the “visual results module,” for its new UI.
  • Britain’s Bank Leumi to deploy e-banking technology from Infosys Finacle.
  • Cortera releases 10 new modeling-attribute families to help commercial lenders improve their risk and response analytics.
  • Kasasa enhances online marketing platform FIRSTBranch to improve the UX by creating a website that drives traffic online and in-branch.
  • The Australian Business Review features SocietyOne.
  • The New York Times publishes extensive feature on Kensho.

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.

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Live from London: FinovateEurope 2016 Demo Videos Now Available

Live from London: FinovateEurope 2016 Demo Videos Now Available
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: FinovateEurope 2016

DemoVids

Earlier this month, we filmed 70 fintech companies as they showed off their newest innovations in front of a record-breaking audience at FinovateEurope in London.

Today, you can view the full 7 minutes of each video for free in our video archives. That’s 8-plus hours of fintech.

If you don’t know where to start, grab some popcorn and a frothy beverage and tune into the six Best of Show winners from the event:

Capitali.se

DriveWealth

EyeVerify

IDScan Biometrics

SwipeStox

Valuto

For more coverage of the event, read the FinovateEurope Twitter highlights and check out a roundup of the press coverage.

Thanks again to all the companies who demoed and to all who attended!

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Trusted Knight Lands Series B Funding, Acquires Sentrix Web Technologies Assets

Trusted Knight Lands Series B Funding, Acquires Sentrix Web Technologies Assets
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Trusted Knight

TrustedKnightHomepage

Data security company Trusted Knight closed a Series B financing round this week. The amount of the funding was undisclosed, and specific investors were not named.

SentrixLogoThe Maryland-based company will use the funds to expand sales and marketing efforts and accelerate product development.

In addition to the funding, Trusted Knight announced it has acquired Massachusetts-based Sentrix, a company that aims to protect against vulnerability exploits and DDoS attacks. The acquisition brings Sentrix’s Cloud-DMZ, a solution that offers an alternative to a web-application firewall.

TrustedKnightKlotniaThe acquisition was finalized in December.

Also this month, Trusted Knight hired Doug Klotnia (pictured) as COO. Klotnia is an industry veteran with 15 years of experience operating and leading businesses. Prior to joining Trusted Knight, he was president of vPromos, a card-connected loyalty and mobile-marketing company.

Trusted Knight launched its Protector Crime Software at FinovateSpring 2013. Protector blocks malware to prevent criminals from getting to sensitive data. The company was founded in 2010. Joseph L. Patanella is CEO.

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TransferWise Partners with Germany’s Number26 Bank Account

TransferWise Partners with Germany’s Number26 Bank Account
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: TransferWise

TransferWise_homepage_Feb2016

In its second partnership of 2016, TransferWise has teamed up with Berlin-based Number26, a mobile-first bank. Through the collaboration, TransferWise will power an international money-transfer option to Number26 account holders.

The functionality is already in place with updated Number26 apps available for both iOS and Android.

“We’re very excited that Number26 customers can now access the TransferWise experience without leaving their banking app,” TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus said. “This is a great step toward consumers having a wider choice of financial service providers and getting the best service for them.”

Number26_homepage_Feb2016

For now, Number26 customers will be able to transfer euros into eight different currencies including the U.S. dollar, British pounds, Swiss francs, Indian rupees, Australian dollars, Polish zloty, Swedish krona, and Hungarian forints; additional currencies are on the way.

Quoted in VentureBeat, Number26 co-founder and CEO Valentin Stalf sees this partnership with “one of the world’s best fintechs” as part of his strategy of “creating a fintech hub inside the Number26 app.” Number26 is a “full-fledged” bank account with Wirecard Bank, and features “all benefits and securities of a German bank account.” The account can be set up in just eight minutes, and comes with a free Number26 MasterCard debit card accepted at 450,000 locations in Germany and 36 million locations around the world. The Number26 app provides balance and transaction information, as well as real-time notification of account activity.

Number26 also features Cash26, a technology that allows customers to use their mobile devices to withdraw or deposit cash at any one of the company’s 6,000 partners.

The Number26 news comes a few weeks after TransferWise announced its first bank partnership, teaming up with the largest domestic bank in Estonia, LHV. The partnership also marked the launch of TransferWise’s FinTech API, which the company says will enable it to work with  “additional modern banks, messaging applications, marketplaces, and mobile carriers.”

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in London, TransferWise demoed its platform at FinovateEurope 2013.

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Ping Identity Launches New Features, Multi-factor Authentication API

Ping Identity Launches New Features, Multi-factor Authentication API
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Ping Identity

PingIDHomepage2.16

Identity security company Ping Identity launched improvements to one of its solutions this week.

PingFederateThe enhancements are for Ping Federate, which offers banks an omnichannel authentication and access-management solution that uses multi-factor authentication (MFA), single sign-on, and limited access security.

The Colorado-based company launched two upgrades:

  1. Elastic scalability:
    Uses IT rules to dynamically grow and shrink AWS and OpenStack environments to lower costs while ensuring services remain available.
  2. Contextual MFA:
    Allows administrators to require MFA when users log in under certain circumstances, for example, when accessing apps from outside their network, from public wi-fi or after hours if coming in from an unmanaged device.

Additionally, Ping Identity released an API to allow companies to integrate MFA directly into their web and mobile app authentication flow.

Ping Identity launched in 2003 and now secures access for 1.3 billion identities across 1,500 enterprises. Currently, the company is experiencing record growth of more than 40% YOY and in 2016 expects to achieve $100+ million in annual recurring revenue. Andre Durand is CEO.

At FinovateEurope 2012 Ping Identity debuted secure social networking login for financial institutions.

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Signifyd Raises $20 Million in Series B Led by Menlo Ventures

Signifyd Raises $20 Million in Series B Led by Menlo Ventures
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Fundings, Signifyd

Signifyd_homepage_Feb2016

Along with participation from Allegis Capital, IA Ventures, QED Investors, and individual investors, Bill McKlernan and Tim Eades, anti-fraud specialist Signifyd has raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Menlo Ventures.

“We’re saving our customers millions of dollars in revenue, and merchants of all sizes are taking note,” Signifyd’s CEO and co-founder Rajesh Ramanand said in a statement about the funding. He pointed out that the Series B round is coming only seven months after the company’s successful Series A round as evidence of the company’s growing traction, adding, “We believe the technology we’re applying to e-commerce is the technical foundation for the next generation of insurance products.”

The funding takes Signifyd’s total capital to $31 million.

Signifyd_stage_FS2013

Rajesh Ramanand, Signifyd co-founder and CEO, demonstrated his company’s Guaranteed Payments solution at FinovateSpring 2013 in San Francisco.

Signifyd will use the new funding to drive growth, scale infrastructure, and “continue to expand its team of world-class fraud experts.”

Signifyd helps e-commerce merchants fight fraud with a tool called the Social Graph. The Social Graph helps merchants determine whether or not the person behind an online transaction is who they say they are. The technology provides merchants with a clear “Accept/Decline” determination on the online customer’s identity, and Signifyd agrees to accept any liability in the event that an “Accepted” transaction is discovered ultimately to be fraudulent. Signifyd calls it “insurance for e-commerce.”

The funding news comes just days after Signifyd announced that it was extending its integration with Shopify Plus. Earlier this month, the company was honored as a finalist in the 2016 BIG Innovation Awards sponsored by the Business Intelligence Group.

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Signifyd made its Finovate debut at our spring conference in 2013.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BBVA, Geezeo, Gro Solutions, NICE Systems, Open Bank Project, Ping Identity, Signifyd, Stockpile, Top Image Systems, Trusted Knight

On Finovate.com

  • “Signifyd Raises $20 Million in Series B Led by Menlo Ventures”
  • “Ping Identity Launches New Features, Multi-Factor Authentication API”
  • “Trusted Knight Lands Series B Funding, Acquires Sentrix Web Technologies Assets”
  • “Live from London: FinovateEurope 2016 Demo Videos Now Available“

Around the web

  • Minnesota-based Wings Financial Credit Union to deploy account opening technology from Gro Solutions.
  • NICE Systems announces strategic partnership with The Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
  • Cisco to serve as the “priority technology partner” to BBVA in new strategic alliance.
  • NYMBUS teams up with Geezeo, adding white label PFM technology to its full-stack, core banking platform.
  • Xerox enters into global reseller agreement with Top Image Systems.
  • Emirates NBD Group and the Open Bank Project launch a global competition for fintech startups.

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.

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Cardlytics Takes Advantage of its Massive Amount of Customer Spend Data

Cardlytics Takes Advantage of its Massive Amount of Customer Spend Data
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Cardlytics

CardlyticsHomepage

Cardlytics, a company that harnesses the power of customer purchase data, has introduced the first major product outside of its flagship native banking channel, Cardlytics Direct.

Dubbed Platform Solutions, the new offering is decidedly more creative than the product name itself and is broken down into three services:

  1. Cardlytics Audiences:
    Targets customers using campaigns across a variety of media types that leverage past purchase data to predict future spending behavior.
  2. Cardlytics Measurement:
    Helps marketers measure and optimize marketing strategies by using actual customer purchase data across 1500 financial institutions.
  3. Cardlytics Insights:
    Helps businesses understand customer spending behavior across all brands to help make strategic business decisions pertaining to marketing, merchandising, real estate, etc.

The Atlanta-based company got its start with a card-linked offers solution, Cardlytics Direct. This flagship product allows financial institutions to provide merchant-funded rewards within its online or mobile banking application to boost customer loyalty. Big-name financial institutions such as Bank of America, PNC, MasterCard, and Fiserv are already using Cardlytics Direct.

While Cardlytics is primarily promoting Platform Solutions to retailers and marketing agents, the company also sees opportunity for financial services to use the new offering, stating on its website:

“Whether banks want to leverage Cardlytics Direct to provide a rewards-based loyalty solution, or they want to use Cardlytics Platform Solutions to improve their marketing of other bank products and services, Cardlytics can help.”

Cardlytics has been using customer spend data for a few years already (watch the company’s FinovateFall 2013 demo), but today’s launch is the first focused product offering leveraging customer data.

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Xendpay Brings its Money Transfer Service to Tanzania, Burkina Faso

Xendpay Brings its Money Transfer Service to Tanzania, Burkina Faso
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Xendpay

Xendpay_homepage_Feb2016

Via strategic partnerships with mobile network operators M-Pesa-Vodafone of Tanzania and Air Tel Money of Burkina Faso, online money-transfer specialist Xendpay is expanding its services in Africa to the east and west at the same time.

The goal, according to Xendpay CEO Rajesh Agrawal, is to make transferring money into and out of Africa “easier, more transparent, and cost-effective.” Talking about money remittance and its impact on developing economies, Agrawal suggested that services like Xendpay can help drive economic growth, and promote political stability in emerging nations. “[Remittance] is a key tool for international development,” he said.

Additionally Xendpay will add Nigeria’s currency to its new currencies portfolio. The company currently serves more than 170 different countries and more than 45 different currencies.

Xendpay_stage_FEU2013

Xendpay CEO Rajesh Agrawal demonstrated his company’s online money transfer service at FinvoateEurope 2013.

Xendpay’s “pay what you want” approach makes the company unique among the growing field of international remittance companies. Xendpay recommends an amount for customers to pay for each money transfer to help cover costs. But the company stands behind its “no compulsory fees” business model, its emphasis on cash-to-cash transfers, and its commitment to spanning not just geography, but the generational distance between Xendpay customers, as well.

“Often there is a gap between [sender and receiver], and that gap is not just geographical, but generational, economical,” Agrawal explained during his company’s appearance at FinovateEurope: “Somebody like myself sending money back to my parents: I cannot use a company like PayPal, like eWallet. My father doesn’t even know how to operate a computer,” he said.

“We designed Xendpay to be so simple that our first-ever customer was a 76-year-old English lady living in France who was using Xendpay to transfer money from her U.K. bank account to her French account,” Agrawal added.

Xendpay accounts are free to open, and offer competitive exchange rates, online checks, and the ability to pay by bank transfer, credit or debit card, as well as Sofort. Transfers involving euros, pounds, and American dollars are typically sent the same day as funds received. For other countries such as Vietnam, Mexico, and Egypt, two-to-three working days is standard.

Xendpay was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in London. A member of the Rational Group of companies and a sister company to RationalFX, Xendpay demonstrated its money-transfer technology at FinovateEurope 2013.

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Spreedly Secures $3 Million Financing Round

Spreedly Secures $3 Million Financing Round
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Spreedly

SpreedlyHomepage

Payments software startup Spreedly closed a $3 million round of funding this week.

Contributors to the round include existing investors, along with Belgian venture fund Emerge, and Harold Mechelynck, a new investor.

The North Carolina-based company, which prides itself on concentrating solely on software for payments, now boasts a total of $5.5 million in funding since it was founded in 2008. The company plans to use the new funds to expand operations, accelerate product development, and introduce new features.

Along with the increase in its venture capital investments, Spreedly has grown as well. On an annualized basis, the company handles a total of $3 billion in transactions, up from $1 billion in June 2015. Spreedly CEO Justin Benson comments on the company’s growth:

Since focusing our business on creating new opportunities for merchants, platforms and payment providers to work together, we’ve substantially increased our customer base, the number of transactions we conduct, and our future potential.

Originally focused on subscription-based payments, Spreedly pivoted in 2013 to launch a credit card vault in the cloud. The new platform enables businesses to securely tokenize client credit card information for repeat transactions across any of the 100+ payment gateways it supports, all while remaining PCI compliant. The company handles 1+ million transactions every month for its 300 clients.

At FinovateSpring 2014, Spreedly’s CEO Justin Benson and Business Development Brendon Prebble showed off the company’s new payment-distribution method and card-on-file updater.

Most recently, at FinDEVr San Francisco 2015, Spreedly CTO Nathaniel Talbott explains how Spreedly’s APIs help navigate the payments ecosystem.

https://finovate.wistia.com/medias/6bzxyw48uo

For more developer-focused presentations, check out our FinDEVr developer showcase in New York on March 29 & 30, 2016. Register by Friday to save on early bird price and lock in your spot.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Cardlytics, Check Point, Encap, Ethoca, i-exceed, Linkable Networks, Moven, Ripple, Signifyd, Spreedly, Taulia, Temenos, TIO Networks, TSYS, Xendpay

On Finovate.com

  • “Spreedly Secures $3 Million Financing Round”
  • “Xendpay Brings its Money Transfer Service to Tanzania, Burkina Faso”
  • “Cardlytics Takes Advantage of its Massive Amount of Customer Spend Data”

Around the web

  • Encap Security unveils version 3.1 of its Smarter Authentication platform, including support for Android fingerprint API.
  • Canada’s digital-first EQ Bank goes live with RetailSuite from Temenos.
  • TSYS and Ethoca team up to fight CNP fraud with the TSYS Transaction Recovery Network.
  • i-exceed technologies earns recognition in Gartner’s 2016 look at MADP vendors around the world. See i-exceed at FinDEVr 2016 in New York in March.
  • WSJ builds article on Cardlytics data.
  • Pymnts highlights cost savings from using the Ripple network.
  • Payments Source features Linkable Networks.
  • Signifyd extends integration with Shopify Plus.
  • Moven partners with Freelancers Union.
  • Check Point and IBM Security to share threat intelligence, announce product integrations.
  • TIO Networks ranks 2nd in top 10 tech companies on the 2016 TSX Venture 50.
  • Taulia launches global partner community, announces new partnerships.

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

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Open API! Shamir Karkal to Head BBVA’s New Developer Platform

Open API! Shamir Karkal to Head BBVA’s New Developer Platform
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: BBVA, Simple

BBVA_API_Market_homepage_Feb2016

Former CFO and co-founder of Simple, Shamir Karkal, has joined BBVA in a new role: head of Open APIs.

In a blog post discussing the move, Karkal described his vision for BBVA’s Open APIs to Amazon Web Services, using the concept of an “AWS of banking.” Pointing out that Amazon had built “the world’s fastest-growing technology business” in AWS by granting third-party access to its platform, Karkal posted:

BBVA has a huge opportunity to do the same—open up our core platform and services—and in turn enabling others to build companies on top of these and thereby helping us build a new business.

BBVA_ShamirKarkalKarkal credits BBVA’s current initiatives in this direction, both its Open Talent hackathons and collaborations with companies like Dwolla. To get the Open APIs project underway, BBVA has set up a closed group of partners to build new applications before opening up the project to outside developers. Check out BBVA’s invite-only Alpha.

Karkal co-founded Simple in 2010 along with CEO Josh Reich and CTO Alex Payne. The company, which previewed its technology as Bank Simple at FinovateFall 2011, was acquired by BBVA in February 2014. Prior to Simple, Karkal was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. With a background in software engineering, he has an MBA in Finance from the Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

Known as one of the more technically innovative banks in Europe, BBVA was founded in 1857 and is headquartered in Madrid, Spain. The company has more than 117,000 employees in more than 30 countries, and more than 47 million customers. At FinovateEurope 2013, BBVA demonstrated Stockbuzz, its stock market sentiment-analysis technology.

 

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