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Take Two: Toshl Launches Version 2.0 for iOS and Web

By David Penn Posted on December 18, 2015
Categories: Toshl

Toshl Finance is calling version 2.0 of its popular personal finance management app a “major upgrade” as well as a “rethink and rebuild” of its previous offerings.

The company says the new features of the upgrade are too numerous to mention. But Toshl is highlighting enhancements like the ability to manage multiple financial accounts, new data visualizations, and a better system of organizing categories, tags, and accounts.

Talking about the changes in a post at the Toshl blog, the company notes that the majority of enhancements came from suggestions from Toshl users. And while the company recognizes that some users will be happier with the changes than others, Toshl plans a full suite of tutorials to help users get acquainted with Toshl 2.0.

From left: Toshl Finance CTO Miha Hribar and CEO Matic Bitenc demonstrated their platform at FinovateEurope 2014.

“We are thrilled to have the new apps finally released,” the company announced on its blog. “This is a new solid foundation we can build on to bring improvements at a much greater speed and quality than before.” Currently available only on iOS and the web, Toshl plans to provide Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry 10 versions of the platform in the first half of 2016.

Download Toshl Finance 2.0 for iOS.

Toshl was listed in Benzinga’s list of top 10 PFM apps for teens and young adults in July, and in June was highlighted in Money Under 30’s look at top personal finance apps. Liverpool Echo added Toshl Finance to its list of “must-have apps” for busy moms in January.

Founded in April 2012, Toshl Finance has offices in both Kranj, Slovenia, and Mountain View, California. The company made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2014, winning Best of Show honors. Matic Bitenc is CEO.

Join us in London 9/10 February 2016 for FinovateEurope 2016! Stop by our registration page today and pick up your tickets to our first fintech event of the new year.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on December 18, 2015
Categories: Azimo, Bento for Business, Braintree, Caaapital, Dwolla, Fastacash, FIS, Green Dot, Karmic Labs, Moven, PayPal, Prosper, Ripple, Silanis Technology, Toshl, TransferWise, Twilio

On Finovate.com

“Take Two: Toshl Launches Version 2.0 for iOS and Web”

“Ripple Technology Drives Invoice Trading Platform”

“Moven to Forgo Username, Password for 80% of Mobile Account Interactions”

Around the web

FIS launches new fintech accelerator in collaboration with Arkansas-based Venture Center.

Prosper Marketplace taps Kunal Kaul as its new EVP of Operations.

Newsfactor Business Report looks at prepaid debit cards for businesses offered by Green Dot, Karmic Labs, and Bento for Business.

eSignLive from Silanis Technology named a leader in digital transaction management by Aragon Research.

Azimo and TransferWise featured in The Telegraph as safe ways to give money during the holidays.

The Asset highlights Fastacash in a review of how fintech is changing finance in Asia.

Twilio Video now available to everyone in public beta.

PayPal’s Braintree now powers Facebook payments.

Dwolla introduces Dwolla.js javascript library that allows platforms to verify bank accounts and transfer funds without storing sensitive information.

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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FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Ledger

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 17, 2015
Categories: FinovateEurope 2016, FinovateEurope 2016 Sneak Peek, Ledger

A look at the companies demoing live to 1,500 fintech professionals. Get your tickets to join us in London!

Ledger Blue is a personal handheld device that secures payments and smart contracts for bitcoin and blockchain-based applications.

Features:

Secure: based on banking standards with a trusted screen—what you see is what you sign
Open: API to build custom applications for industry needs
Ubiquitous: BLE/NFC/USB connectivity

Why it’s great
A bank-grade security device built on open standards to secure critical assets and transactional flow for fintechs and financial institutions.

Presenter: Eric Larcheveque, CEO
Serial entrepreneur since 1996, Larcheveque has founded several companies in Europe. Respected member of the bitcoin community, he launched La Maison du Bitcoin, a French Bitcoin center, before founding Ledger.
LinkedIn

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FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: meetinvest AG

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 17, 2015
Categories: FinovateEurope 2016, FinovateEurope 2016 Sneak Peek, meetinvest AG

A look at the companies demoing live to 1,500 fintech professionals. Get your tickets to join us in London!

meetinvest AG will present its expert-based and algorithm-driven, single-stock robo-adviser as a white-label solution that targets the mass affluent and retail investors worldwide.

Features:

A role-model approach towards stock investing
Successful recipes of 30+ top stock-investment experts (Buffett, Templeton, etc.)
Algorithmic-driven portfolio management

Why it’s great
Any investor can now be empowered to invest like a pro by using a toolkit that employs proven expert recipes with state-of-the-art portfolio management techniques.

Presenter: Michel Jacquemai, CIO and Co-founder
Jacquemai has 22 years of experience in asset management, primarily in equities and hedge funds. He co-founded meetinvest to combine his know-how with the best expert strategies available worldwide.
LinkedIn

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Finovate Debuts: DAVO Automates Sales Tax

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 17, 2015
Categories: DAVO Technologies, Finovate Debuts

DAVO debuted DAVO Sales Tax at FinovateFall 2015 in New York. The system works on retailers’ behalf by daily impounding sales tax from the merchant’s point-of-sale system. The Maine-based company then automatically files and pays their monthly taxes. This helps retailers whose struggles with cash management often mean trouble in paying sales taxes owed to the state government at the end of the month.

Company facts:

Founded 2011
Launched with First Data as channel partner in February 2015
$2.2 million in funding
6 employees
231 merchants on platform

To get started, merchants download DAVO from their point-of-sale provider’s app store. Here’s DAVO in Clover’s app market:

The application process is simple. Since 95% of the fields are prefilled from data sourced from the merchant’s point-of-sale records, the merchant needs only to enter their banking information.

DAVO uses the merchant’s API code to track daily sales and sales tax. The company uses ACH rails to daily impound the sales tax due. This removes the temptation for the merchant to use their sales tax revenue for operating expenses. DAVO also helps merchants who owe back taxes by establishing a back-payment plan.

Using the impounded funds and information from the POS, DAVO files and pays the retailer’s tax return on a monthly basis and supplies the records needed for them to file their annual report.

The merchant portal offers insight into daily sales, sales tax, and item-return data. To complement this dashboard, DAVO sends an email summarizing the total amount of sales tax to be debited from the retailer’s account.

The company also offers DAVO FranchisePay, a service that automatically collects and remits royalties and advertising fees from franchisees.

What’s next

DAVO’s ultimate goal is to shift its business model, offering the sales-tax solution for free to small merchants, and charging state governments instead to white-label the platform.

DAVO is a graduate of the Six Thirty fintech accelerator. The company’s CEO Owen Brown, COO Terry Sutton, and Chairman David Joseph debuted DAVO Sales Tax at FinovateFall 2015:

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FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Scalable Capital

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 17, 2015
Categories: FinovateEurope 2016, FinovateEurope 2016 Sneak Peek, Scalable Capital

A look at the companies demoing live to 1,500 fintech professionals. Get your tickets to join us in London!

Scalable Capital is a digital investment manager that creates personalized, globally diversified portfolios. Scalable is dynamically optimized with a primary focus on cutting-edge risk management.

Features:

Personalized, globally diversified portfolios
A unique, dynamic risk-management technology
No hidden fees, and a total cost of 0.75% p.a.

Why it’s great
Scalable Capital is not just using technology to solve a distribution problem. It gives private investors access to investment technology previously reserved for institutional investors.

Presenters

Erik Podzuweit, Founder and Co-CEO
Podzuweit combines extensive capital market experience with online expertise. An ex-Goldman Sachs banker, he was also co-CEO at Westwing Germany.
LinkedIn

Adam French, Founder and U.K. Managing Director
French spent the last eight years working at Goldman Sachs in London as an executive director of commodities trading and in derivatives trading.
LinkedIn

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PaySwag Helps Cloud Lending Solutions Go Mobile

By David Penn Posted on December 17, 2015
Categories: Cloud Lending, PaySwag

Debt repayment app PaySwag will integrate its mobile technology with Cloud Lending’s lending platform courtesy of a partnership announced today. The white-label solution enables Cloud Lending customers to view, pay, and refinance their loans by mobile device. Customers also will have access to the full suite of PaySwag rewards, credit education and gamification features.

“We are thrilled to introduce PaySwag with Cloud Lending,” PaySwag CTO Mark Miller said. “When progressive companies come together, we can disrupt traditional business models.”

PaySwag’s white-label mobile app combines rewards, education, and feedback engines to make the debt repayment process easier for both borrowers and creditors. By rewarding on-time repayments and providing education, PaySwag helps the underbanked and those with poor credit histories overcome common hurdles to improving their credit standing.

The relationship between the companies goes back to 2014. PaySwag was developed by auto lender and servicer Car Loans Inc., which saw a way to provide credit services—mobile access, flexible repayment plans and cash payment alternatives—to subprime borrowers. The company, which had been using the Cloud Lending Solutions platform to manage loans, saw a 50% decrease in “seriously delinquent loans” when the two platforms were integrated.

“Through the synergy between our companies, we’ve greatly reduced our default rates,” Car Loans Director of Operations Barbara Mearse said. “(We) are confident other Cloud Lending clients will leverage this technology to do the same.”

Founded in November 2012 and headquartered in San Mateo, California, Cloud Lending Solutions provides SaaS applications to help financial services companies manage loan portfolios. Native to Salesforce, the company provides solutions for microfinance, traditional, equipment, and online lending, as well as commercial and consumer finance. Cloud Lending Solutions demoed CL Exchange at FinovateSpring 2015, and raised $8 million in funding in September, taking its total capital to more than $10 million. Snehal Fulzele is CEO.

Customer Engagement Technologies introduced PaySwag at FinovateFall 2015. The company is based in Reno, Nevada, and was founded in October 2014. Max Haynes is CEO.

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FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Nexmo

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 17, 2015
Categories: FinovateEurope 2016, FinovateEurope 2016 Sneak Peek, Nexmo

A look at the companies demoing live to 1,500 fintech professionals. Get your tickets to join us in London!

Nexmo is a global cloud communications platform with APIs and SDKs for SMS, voice and mobile verification. Nexmo Verify SDK enables phone verification for password replacement, 2FA, and more.

Features:

Securely verify and authenticate users to prevent SIM swap
Send unlimited push verifications with subscription pricing
Minimize design and development resources with preintegrated verification workflow

Why it’s great
Mitigate fraud and bypass common security challenges like SIM swapping by using phone number verification and unique device identifiers to increase security, significantly decrease fraud and protect users.

Presenter: Parth Awasthi, Product Lead
Awasthi is a product lead for Nexmo. Prior to Nexmo, Parth spent over a decade leading technology teams building communication and productivity software for the cloud at Microsoft.
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FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: PaySend

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 17, 2015
Categories: FinovateEurope 2016, FinovateEurope 2016 Sneak Peek, PaySend

A look at the companies demoing live to 1,500 fintech professionals. Get your tickets to join us in London!

PaySend is leveraging Visa and MasterCard networks to help banks and schemes facilitate an efficient remittance network, all important for meeting global financial inclusion goals.

Features:

Simplifies remittances by using payment cards
Tokenizes card data in demand for social-based transfers
Leverages global partnership network for decreased cost of sending money

Why it’s great
PaySend offers fast international money transfers using global Visa and MasterCard networks—all for  1% + 1 Euro available through a dedicated app or your favorite instant messenger.

Presenter: Daniel Gusev, Co-founder, User Experience and Product Engineering
Gusev is an ex-banker in charge of successful innovation programs at leading banks in Russia. He is a reformed international fintech entrepreneur in payments and contextual finance, blogger, tinkerer and amateur father.
LinkedIn

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FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Passport

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 17, 2015
Categories: FinovateEurope 2016, FinovateEurope 2016 Sneak Peek, Passport

A look at the companies demoing live to 1,500 fintech professionals. Get your tickets to join us in London!

Passport is an urban mobility platform helping cities improve their transportation options. The company will be demonstrating its multimodal plan, track, and pay mobile application.

Features:

Trip planning to improve navigation
Transit tracking to better understand the urban ecosystem
Mobile ticketing to make transit riding more convenient

Why it’s great
Passport’s enterprise platform empowers cities to transform mobility through innovative mobile applications, providing secure platforms to better manage their system and easy-to-use apps for riders.

Presenters

Khristian Gutierrez, CBDO
Gutierrez is the CBDO at Passport and a former investment banker. He earned his master’s of science in finance from the graduate school of business at the University of Florida, along with his bachelor’s degree in business administration.
LinkedIn

Bob Youakim, CEO
Youakim is the CEO at Passport and former VP in investment banking. He earned an MBA from Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management and his bachelor’s of science from the University of Illinois.
LinkedIn

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FinovateEurope Sneak Peek: Capitalise.com

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 17, 2015
Categories: Capitalise, FinovateEurope 2016, FinovateEurope 2016 Sneak Peek

A look at the companies demoing live to 1,500 fintech professionals. Get your tickets to join us in London!

Capitalise.com takes the hassle out of funding searches. Using behavioral analytics, its online platform matches and ranks finance providers, making it easy for businesses to select the right lender.

Features of Capitalise:

Save time with lenders
Enjoy a faster approval and funding process
Ease cashflow and achieve growth

Why it’s great
Capitalise believes every SME should have access to finance. It empowers businesses to find, compare and select the right lender. Businesses using Capitalise are twice as likely to get funded.

Presenters

Paul Surtees, Managing Director and Co-founder
With 15 years’ banking experience, Surtees served as executive director on the Goldman Sachs interest-rate trading floor. He started Capitalise to help SMEs gain easy access to lenders.
LinkedIn

Ollie Maitland, Product Director and Co-founder
Maitland is a serial tech-startup product lead. He’s worked alongside VCs, technologists, service design experts and business minds to build market-leading digital products in start-ups to multi-nationals.
LinkedIn

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Mark Shifke Named Green Dot CFO After Interim Term

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 17, 2015
Categories: Green Dot

Prepaid card company Green Dot announced yesterday it has appointed Mark Shifke as CFO.

Shifke had been interim CFO for the California-based company since May 2015, when prior CFO Grace Wang began a new role as SVP of corporate finance and business intelligence.

During those eight months, Green Dot expanded its CFO search outside the company; however, after reviewing the applicants, Green Dot CEO Steve Streit said it became “clear that the best candidate was already serving in the role as our interim CFO.”

Before joining Green Dot in 2011, Shifke served as VP at Goldman Sachs and managing director at JP Morgan Chase.

Founded in 1999, Green Dot launched GoBank at FinovateSpring 2013. GoBank is a mobile-first bank that offers a debit card, bill pay, and access to 40,000 free ATMs. With no overdraft fees or minimum balance requirements, it targets the underbanked population.

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