FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Lexmark

FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Lexmark

LexmarkHomepage

FEU2016_logo_withdateA look at the companies demoing live to 1,500 fintech professionals. Register today.

Lexmark’s latest innovation in customer onboarding is a voice-driven, customer experience incorporating mobile capture, authentication, workflow, instant decisioning, and digital signature capture.

Features:

  • Fast and simple mobile onboarding
  • Convenience of voice-driven activation
  • Collaborative eSign video session

Why it’s great
Lexmark delivers a mobile onboarding experience driven by interactive and instructive natural voice recognition with a virtual collaboration session to eSign an application instantly.

LexmarkPresenter1Presenters

Darren Collins, Global Director, Financial Services and Insurance
Collins is responsible for strategy and providing thought leadership to global organizations in financial services. He assists organizations by mapping technical solutions to key business problems.
LinkedIn

LexmarkPresenter2Chris Edgington, Global Industry Solutions, Financial Services
Edgington provides industry knowledge, thought leadership and operations-technology expertise for banking industry-specific solutions.
LinkedIn

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • “Finovate Debuts: Alerts from Ethoca Foils Fraudsters”
  • “BBVA Compass to Leverage BlackRock-owned FutureAdvisor”

Around the web

  • Fenergo forges strategic partnership with Markit and kyc.com, bringing its client lifecycle management solution to FIs.
  • Union Bank & Trust to leverage Digital Payments Guardian from Prairie Cloudware to power its new bank-branded mobile wallet.
  • SunTrust Bank selects the Enterprise Risk Case Management (ERCM) solution from NICE Actimize.
  • Former FDIC chair Sheila Bair gives Blooom a “ringing endorsement” during a recent visit.
  • Jack Henry & Associates promotes former president David Foss to CEO; Jack Prim transitions to executive chairman of the board.
  • Emailage and Quatrro Processing team up to provide end-to-end, anti-fraud and chargeback-management solutions to merchants.
  • Pymnts talks to Kashoo about connecting with SMEs that procure through Amazon Business.

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.

BECU Helps Parents Teach Savings Ethic with 6.17% APY

BECU Helps Parents Teach Savings Ethic with 6.17% APY

smartypig_retailgiftcardBack when my kids were able to save—both are in college now, so that’s not happening—ING Direct and others offered interest rates that actually created an incentive to save. My oldest even enjoyed 5% rates for a while, quite helpful in showing how the “free” $5 to $10 per month he earned at the bank grew his total over time.

But today’s middle-schoolers and younger teens have come of age in an absurdly low interest-rate environment (see note 1), with little chance to experience the joy of compound interest. SmartyPig (inset, note 2) and others have created savings bonuses centered around merchant gift cards. That’s a clever way to add value, but it can also send a mixed message, “Hey Junior, save $250 and you’ll get an extra $5 if you spend the whole thing at Best Buy.” For parents who’d like their kids to hold onto that cash (at least until college), few options exist, other than bribing your kids with parent-funded bonuses.

But a few financial institutions have addressed the forlorn kiddos and their disappointed parents by dramatically boosting the rates paid on the first few hundred of a balance. For example, in the greater Seattle area, BECU pays 6.17% on the first $500 deposited in its Early Saver account (see screenshot below). Granted, the rate reverts to pretty much zero (0.1%) after that, but kids at least get enough interest every month ($2.50/mo on $500 balance) to make it feel like it’s worth holding the money at the credit union (note 3).

Bottom line: Your customers’ children are your future. It’s worth investing in services to keep them at your FI for the next decade or six. If the $30 annual subsidy is beyond your budget, enable parents to pay for the rate bonus. Let parents “boost” the interest paid on their child’s account as much as they want. To provide an extra incentive, you could match parental contributions up to a certain point (e.g., $10/year).

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BECU Youth Savings landing page (link, 11 Jan 2016)
Note: BECU has elevated Youth Banking to one of six choices on its Everyday Banking primary navigation item.

becu_kidssave

 

 

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Notes:
1: For example, Bank of America currently offers 1 basis point interest on a child’s account, which means your child’s $1,500 average balance earns 1 cent per month!
2. Social Money, owner of SmartyPig, was acquired by Q2 Holdings last month (Dec 2015).
3. BECU offers a similar boost for the first $500 banked by 18+ year-old members as well, but the rate is only 4%.
4. Off topic: BECU has done a great job optimizing its homepage for responsive design. Open it in your browser and then shrink the window and watch how it resets. Very nice!

Mambu Pulls in $8.7 Million to Replace Core Banking

Mambu Pulls in $8.7 Million to Replace Core Banking

MambuHomepage

Mambu, creator of a cloud-based SaaS banking platform, raised $8.7 million (€8 million) this week. Combined with the $1.5 million the company picked up in February 2013, its funding now tops $10.6 million.

The round was led by Acton Capital Partners and CommerzVentures; existing investors also contributed.

Mambu CEO Eugene Danilkis speaks to the purpose of the new investment:

We are building out the product and onboarding customers in multiple geographies. We are excited that this new capital will allow us to deploy faster, and to better support our global client base as we continue to enable the next generation of banking service providers.

In more specific terms, Mambu plans to use the funds to:

  • Expand its commercial team
  • Increase investment into the platform
  • Open additional offices to support growth in Asia and the Americas

The Berlin-based company showcased its core banking application at FinovateAsia 2013, highlighting its holistic approach that helps banks of any size create and service loan and deposit products. Founded in 2011, Mambu seeks to replace core banking by offering faster access to technology at a lower cost.

Over the past year, Mambu has added 30+ new customers and has added support for P2P and SME lending methods.

Rage Frameworks Launches LiveWealth Intelligent Agent Platform

Rage Frameworks Launches LiveWealth Intelligent Agent Platform

RAGEFrameworks_homepage_Jan2016

Rage Frameworks unveiled its LiveWealth Intelligent Agent platform this week. The technology, powered by Rage’s aggregation engine, extracts and interprets data from paper and electronic sources and uses semantic intelligence to read both structured and unstructured data. This enables wealth managers to better monitor and act on information that might affect client portfolios.

Rage Frameworks CEO Dr. Venkat Srinivasan called the platform a “pioneering innovation” saying it “delivers the cognitive intelligence and automation capabilities wealth managers require, enhancing their ability to service their institutional and high-net-worth clients.”

RAGEFrameworks_stage_FS2015

From left: Rage Frameworks’ Nick Adams, VP banking solutions, and Aashish Mehta, SVP banking solutions, demonstrated at FinovateSpring 2015.

LiveWealth Intelligent Agent aggregates data from all U.S. and most international custodians, and normalizes it to client-specified formats. The technology is highly configurable, and provides managers with a wall-to-wall audit trail. In addition to a variety of analytics tools, LiveWealth’s Portfolio Analytics engine enables dynamic rebalancing and attribution, including portfolio modeling, multi-asset classification, and benchmark comparisons. The platform can be deployed alongside existing infrastructure without additional coding.

Rage Frameworks was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in Dedham, Massachusetts, with offices in Pune and Belgaum, India. Its LiveCredit platform was demoed at FinovateSpring 2015. In November, Rage Frameworks announced a partnership with Genpact, combining artificial intelligence technology with business process automation. In August 2015, the company launched its Real Time Intelligence (RTI) platform for capital markets.

Finovate Debuts: Capriza Makes Enterprise Apps Uber-Easy

Finovate Debuts: Capriza Makes Enterprise Apps Uber-Easy

Capriza_homepage_Dec2015

Nobody needs a manual to use FaceBook, or a handbook to guide them through an Uber app. Why should enterprise software be any different?

Capriza turns complicated business processes into efficient, secure, mobile apps designed around the user’s workflow, not the other way around. The “mobilization” process, as the company calls it, can be finished “in a matter of days” and does not rely on coding, APIs, or integration to turn both packaged and custom solutions into technologies accessible via mobile device as readily as the desktop.

Capriza_stage_FF2015

Capriza VP of Regional Business Development Ivan Prafder demonstrated Capriza at FinovateFall 2015.

“We think of this efficiency that users have come to expect as the ‘one-minute experience,’ Ivan Prafder, Capriza VP of regional business development, said. “By this we mean those who can deliver necessary information in one minute are the winners in today’s technology economy.”

“Examples of this at the retail level abound,” he continued. “But no company today really focuses on enterprise software with this perspective in mind: an SaaS platform that enables businesses to deliver these one-minute experiences,” Prafder said. Until now.

Company facts:

  • Founded in July 2011
  • Headquartered in Palo Alto, California
  • Raised more than $53 million in funding
  • Maintains offices in North America and Europe
  • Yuval Scarlatt is CEO and co-founder

How it works

Capriza_art_1Capriza considers simplicity, personalization, and intelligence to be key factors in building the enterprise software of the future. Pointing out that training on enterprise software often takes a month or more, Capriza rejects the idea of having to “train” users to operate the software.

The technology also should be personal. “No more one-size-fits-all,” says Prafder. “SAP has 15,000 different business processes. Salesforce has 2,000,” he explained. “But in terms of the actual workflows people use, there are probably only fifteen or twenty different processes.” For Capriza, personalization is about “extracting and delivering” the workflows that are relevant to end-users.

“We all use the same app. But we use it differently and rely on different metrics,” Prafder explained. “We allow end-users to determine the metrics that matter to them.”

And finally, Prafder says, the technology has to be smart. “Legacy applications are like having to press refresh over and over just to see if you’ve got new email.”

Capriza_art_2

During their Finovate demo, Capriza Senior Solutions Engineer Stephen Insdorf showed how a CEO or manager of a business could use a Capriza-powered app to perform executive functions like requisition approval by mobile device. But the majority of the company’s presentation was dedicated to proving how easy and quick it was to build, test, and deploy a “mobilized app” with Capriza.

Insdorf showed how, with a simple combination of pull-down menus and drag-and-drop options, a designer creates features like login and approval pages. Capriza’s real-time access allows designers to work on both sides of the screen for speed and accuracy. Designers can select and automate processes on a single page as well as across pages, and individual records can be used to quickly build a template or to set fields for the entire dataset.

Capriza_art_3

“Having the functionality is great,” Insdorf said. “But delivering a crisp experience for the user is essential.” To that end, Insdorf showed how the platform’s style-tools enabled him to reconfigure data and tables in order to create different user experiences. “However you want to curate this ability for the user, you are absolutely within your capability to do this quickly and easily with our platform,” Insdorf said. Designers test their completed apps on the platform for quality assurance before using the platform to distribute it to users.

The future

Capriza has enjoyed “enormous traction” in financial services, banking, and insurance. They credit this mostly to the strict regulatory environment and the shift away from both cash and brick-and-mortar. In the first case, Capriza helps financial service professionals operate more efficiently by reducing complexity. In the second case, Capriza helps FIs and other businesses take advantage of the growth of the mobile channel and the willingness of consumers to deal more directly with technology. “In the last five to seven years, users have become true information consumers who want to interact directly with the software—without a middleman,” Prafder said.

Over the last quarter, Capriza has signed 12 customers in the financial services industry. One company in Europe has a “$3 billion transformation agenda” for which Capriza is a “key piece.” A variety of other industries have also shown interest in the technology, including government and technology, media, entertainment, and hospitality.

Capriza_art_4

Prafder said the company’s vision for the future remains centered around “delivering user-centric apps for the enterprise” without making dramatic asks on enterprise IT structure. “It’s a huge win for them,” he said. “The pain of migration isn’t there. No rip and replace.” According to Prafder, Capriza sits on top of the enterprise-application stack, focused on the 5% of critical workflows that can drive 80% to 85% of missed productivity gains. He added that Capriza is helping enterprises “leverage the richness they have already built.”


Check out Capriza’s demo video from FinovateFall 2015

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Rage Frameworks Launches LiveWealth Intelligent Agent Platform”

Around the web

  • Top Image Systems secures $100,000 contract with major Israeli B2B e-commerce provider.
  • Kasasa by BancVue forms strategic investment partnership with The Riverside Company; rebrands as Kasasa.
  • EconoTimes Business highlights Betterment in a look at the way the low fees of robo-advisers benefit retirees.

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.

Finovate’s 2015 Best of Show Winners Give Something to Tweet About

Finovate’s 2015 Best of Show Winners Give Something to Tweet About

BestofShowIMG

2015 was quite a year for the 800+ Finovate alumni. From acquisitions to IPOs, and everything in between, there was plenty to tweet about. Here are the highlights from the 2015 Best of Show winners:

FinovateEurope 2015

Avoka demoed a three-minute loan application that delivers a fast onboarding experience.

CoinJar showed a technology that enables consumers to buy, sell, and use digital and traditional forms of currency any way they choose, from dollars to bitcoins.

ebankIT demoed its omnichannel and social banking solution that maximizes interaction between FIs and clients.

eToro showed its innovations in social trading and investing for generation Y.

Jumio demoed credentials-management technology Netverify that turns mobile devices into ID document-scanning terminals.

mBank & i3D demoed their interactive, digital retail-branch concept.

Meniga showed off Market Match, its transaction-data analytics and enrichment engine.

FinovateSpring 2015

Alpha Payments Cloud demoed AlphaHub, its omnichannel access platform that helps banks, merchants, MSPs, and ISOs gain access to any solution provider in the world.

Avoka (see above)

Money Amigo showed technology that brings financial services to the underbanked and underserved, delivering traditional banking products in an innovative way.

Moven launched Moven Financial Health Platform that provides real-time contextualized notifications and interactions that create “gamified money moments.”

NAMU Systems demoed “Joyful Banking” which uses new and intelligent behavior modeling to focus on customer behavior and digital experiences to create a new standard in mobile banking.

Shoeboxed.com showcased its Receipt Capture for Banks, a solution that boosts functionality of online and mobile banking apps while providing fraud protection.

Stratos demonstrated its dynamic Stratos Bluetooth-connected card and digital card issuance platform that analyzes card-usage trends and interactively engages card members.


FinovateFall 2015

Blockstack.io launched technology that enables financial services and other enterprises to set up and build applications on a private, hosted blockchain.

Dyme showcased its innovative method for helping people start a savings habit and fund their lifestyle using text messaging.

Dynamics demoed fully programmable interfaces (stripe, EMV, NFC) for use in next-generation payment cards.

Finanteq launched its SuperWallet that helps banks take full advantage of their potential by integrating m-commerce and remote services with mobile banking.

Hedgeable: demoed its private banking platform for millennials.

HelloWallet showed its Retirement Explorer solution, an approachable and actionable online planning tool that helps employees model and work toward specific retirement outcomes.

SaleMove demoed its Engagement Platform and Omnicall technologies that enable online consumers to engage live with businesses as if they were face-to-face.

Soundpays showed its app that recognizes ultrasonic and sonic waveforms even in extremely noisy environments.


Want to see more award-winning demos of the newest fintech ideas? Pick up your ticket FinovateEurope 2016 and we’ll see you in London.

CUneXus Raises $1 Million, Signs Partnership with Edmunds.com

CUneXus Raises $1 Million, Signs Partnership with Edmunds.com

CUneXusHomepage

EdmondsHomepageCUneXus, developer of sales and marketing technologies for lenders, raised $1 million in new equity funding from an unnamed strategic partner. Combined with a 2013 seed round, the company’s total funding stands at $1.7 million.

The California-based company plans to use the funding to support a number of initiatives, including a product launch with newly signed partner, Edmunds.com, an online resource for car buyers and sellers.

While the details of the project are still under wraps, CUneXus plans to unveil the new product this spring.

At FinovateSpring 2014, CUneXus debuted cplXpress, a suite of lending-automation tools that offer perpetual, pre-approved loan offers across multiple products. With cplXpress, financial institutions send customers personalized offers via the channel that best fits their preferred communication method.

CUneXusProducts

A recent case study from Harland Clarke cited a credit union that achieved 700%+ ROI during a nine-week campaign using technology powered by cplXpress. The 36,000 members responded at a rate of 2.5%, more than 2x the typical rate, and booked loans at a rate of 2.2%. At the end of the nine-week period, the credit union grew loan balances by $6.2 million.

In October 2015, CUneXus partnered with Digital Insight and will leverage the partnership to resell CUneXus’ cplXpress to its financial institution customers.

CplXpress integrates with a number of financial technologies, including those offered by FIS, Digital Insight, D+H, MeridianLink and more.

CUneXus unveiled new online and mobile interfaces, mobile document delivery, e-signature, and point-of-sale lending capabilities at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose. The company is based in Santa Rosa, Calif., and Dave Buerger is CEO.

 

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • CUneXus Raises $1 Million, Signs Partnership with Edmunds.com”

Around the web

  • Tradeshift brings its procure-to-pay solution to Zurich Insurance Group.
  • Suffolk Country National Bank to deploy Fiserv technology to improve customer experience.
  • FIS joins the CardLinx Alliance.
  • Signifyd adds Bill McKiernan, founder of CyberSource, to its board.
  • Shoeboxed earns a spot on NerdWallet’s list of must-have apps for entrepreneurs.
  • Trade IT named runner-up in Wealth Management category of the Fin Track Awards for its Trading Ticket solution.
  • Nostrum Group CEO Richard Carter featured on the cover of the Yorkshire Business Insider.
  • Topicus Finance mentioned in Banken.nl column on the rise of crowdfunding in the Netherlands.
  • Simon Cadbury of Intelligent Environments writes about digital-only banks for TechWeek Europe.
  • “European Breakout List for 2016” features several Finovate alums.

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.

 

FinovateEurope Early Bird Discount Extended!

FEU2016HomepageBanner

2015 is officially behind us, and FinovateEurope 2016 is on pace to be our largest European event yet. A huge number of people registered in advance of the early bird ticket deadline back in December, but if you were out of the office and missed the deadline, no worries! We’ve extended the early-bird sales to this Friday, 8 January, to give everyone one more chance to save £100 on the cost of their ticket.

Finovate’s unique mix of live demos (no slides allowed!) and high-impact networking sessions offers an incredibly efficient way to stay up to speed on the fast-moving world of European fintech. This is your chance to connect with the influential innovators defining the future of finance and see the best of what the industry has to offer. Seating is limited, so lock in your spot (and the £100 discount) today!

FEU15Networking

Check out the FinovateEurope homepage for more information, including a list of confirmed presenters. Also, our Sneak Peek blog series details what our presenters will show off on stage. For any other questions, email us at [email protected].

Gem Raises $7 Million in Series A

Gem Raises $7 Million in Series A

Gem_homepage_FinDEVr2015

In a round led by Pelion Venture Partners, blockchain technology specialist and FinDEVr alum Gem raised $7.1 million in funding. Also participating in the Series A were:

  • Amplify.LA
  • Blockchain Capital
  • Danmar Capital
  • Digital Currency Group
  • Drummond Road Capital
  • KEC Ventures
  • RRE Ventures
  • Tamarisk Global
  • Tekton Ventures

Angel investor James Joaquin also participated in the financing, which takes Gem’s total capital to $12 million, according to Crunchbase. Ben Dahl of Pelion Venture Partners and Bitium CEO Scott Kriz will join Gem’s board of directors.

Gem_stage_FinDEVr2015

Gem CEO and founder Micah Winkelspecht spoke on “Redefining Banking from the Ground Up” at FinDEVr 2015 in San Francisco.

In a statement at the Gem blog, the company highlighted its vision for distributed ledger technology as part of a “‘blockchain economy’ that forms the underlying architecture of our daily lives: from capital markets to patient care, supply chains to logistics, property rights to digital rights management.”

Gem makes it easier for companies to use blockchain technology by turning complex processes into modular, bitcoin APIs and then leveraging its platform to scale and automatically deploy. Gem recently developed a multi-signature bitcoin API for developers, and is currently building a “modular platform for blockchain applications” that has broad-use cases for many different industries.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Venice, California, Gem debuted at FinDEVr 2015.