FinovateFall Sneak Peek: ebankIT

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: ebankIT
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ebankIT, FinovateFall 2015 Sneak Peek

ebankit_homepage_Aug2015

The Sneak Peek series looks at the innovators demoing live on stage at FinovateFall 2015. Pick up your tickets to our annual autumn conference here, and we’ll see you in New York!

ebankIT_logoebankIT is an omnichannel banking software company, providing innovative solutions with multi-core integration and centralized management, allowing banks to communicate more efficiently with their clients.

Features of omnichannel and social banking:

  • Provide seamless access to financial products and services
  • Allow banks to extend its customers network
  • Works on any device and wearable technology

Why it’s great

Omnichannel and social banking provides a consistent experience across channels, providing customers with seamless access to financial products and services.

Presenters

ebankit_JoaoPintoJoao Lima Pinto, Director
Pinto is ebankIT’s director, with nearly 20 years of solid experience in the financial sector, actively participating in the design and implementation of innovative omnichannel solutions.
LinkedIn

 

 

ebankit_silviabarbosaSilvia Barbosa, Market Manager
Barbosa is the market manager and omnichannel specialist at ebankIT, having several years of experience in consulting and business analysis in the financial sector.
LinkedIn

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FinovateFall Sneak Peek: PaySwag

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: PaySwag
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateFall 2015 Sneak Peek, PaySwag

 

PaySwag_homepage

The Sneak Peek series looks at the innovators demoing live on stage at FinovateFall 2015. Pick up your tickets to our annual autumn conference here, and we’ll see you in New York!

PaySwag_logoPaySwag is the white-labeled mobile app that brings a playful approach to the collections process through its cash or card payment, reward, education, and feedback engines.

Features:

  • Includes educational videos, games, and payment reminders
  • Users are rewarded for paying on time and communicating
  • Users can pay by cash at more than 17,000 locations

Why it’s great

PaySwag provides the tools for timely payments through mobile access and cash options. Using gamification to transform collections, payments become more accessible, rewarding, and likely.

Presenters

PaySwag_MHaynesMax Haynes, Founder and CEO
Haynes has spent more than two decades disrupting traditional financial models to accelerate opportunities in the lending, real estate, banking and private finance sectors.
LinkedIn

 

 

PaySwag_MMillerMark Miller, Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Miller oversees the platform’s global development team and translates the corporate vision into a product that delivers on the promise of empowering underbanked customers.
LinkedIn

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FinovateFall Sneak Peek: RMS

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: RMS
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateFall 2015 Sneak Peek, RMS

RMS_homepage

The Sneak Peek series looks at the innovators demoing live on stage at FinovateFall 2015. Pick up your tickets to our annual autumn conference here, and we’ll see you in New York!

RMS_logoRMS is an engagement solution provider focused on acquisition, cross-sell, rewards and referral marketing solutions for financial institutions. Our featured referral solution is presently YAP.

Features

  • YAP supports one or all lines of business simultaneously
  • Real-time performance analytics provide your performance impact
  • Leverages incentives of any type and price, per tier

Why it’s Great

RMS’s referral solution YAP delivers an engaging way for financial institutions to reward accountholders while generating valuable leads, saving up to 35% on acquisition costs.

Presenters

Baron Unbehagen, CEO
Unbehagen is behind RMS’s product strategies and overall vision. Previously, he spent over 20 years working with financial services companies in self-service channels and payments.
LinkedIn

Matt Domanico, SVP, Marketing
Domanico heads up marketing, program management, and product design. He brings 20 years experience in the financial services industry driving successful marketing and product strategies.
LinkedIn

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FinovateFall Sneak Peek: North Side

FinovateFall Sneak Peek: North Side
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateFall 2015 Sneak Peek, North Side

NorthSide_homepage

The Sneak Peek series looks at the innovators demoing live on stage at FinovateFall 2015. Pick up your tickets to our annual autumn conference here, and we’ll see you in New York!

NorthSide_logoNorth Side enables customers to use their own words (speech or typing) to access your applications and information. Customers can clarify their intent naturally, using conversation.

Features:

  • Customers get precise, cost-effective, self-help online
  • Mobile and web transactions transacted through speech or typing
  • Know your customers better and sell them what they need.

Why it’s great

VerbalAccess enables customers to access your products and services conversationally, get precise answers to questions, and conduct transactions easily, using their own words.

Presenters

This is #1 !Eugene Joseph, CEO
Joseph has developed intuitive person-computer interfaces for the last 30 years: Natural Language Understanding tech at North Side and interactive dynamics graphics software at Virtual Prototypes.
LinkedIn

 

Christian Lemieux, Technology Evangelist
With a strong background in linguistics, Lemieux works on various facets of the North Side NLU pipeline and semantic databases, and occasionally presents them publicly.

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Finovate Alumni News

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: AcceptEmail, Betterment, Fidor Bank, Klarna, MX, Nous.net, On Deck Capital, Ripple, TIO Networks, TSYS, WePay, Zopa

On Finovate.com

  • “Four Finovate Alums Land on Inc. Magazine Top 100″

Around the web

  • Check out Utah Business’s video interview of Ryan Caldwell, MX CEO, honored as one of Utah’s Fast 50. Come see what MX has for developers at FinDEVr this October.
  • Silicon Republic names WePay, Betterment, and OnDeck as companies to follow on Twitter.
  • Pymnts examines how Ripple Labs’ partnership with Earthport enables payments between global trading partners in real time.
  • TSYS hires Patricia Watson as Senior EVP and CIO.
  • Finovate, FinDEVr alums make Let’s Talk Payments’ list of payment companies raising money in 2015.
  • Waters Technology looks at the use of sentiment analysis by investment-oriented startups like Nous and Market Prophet.
  • BankNXT profiles the partnership between two disruptive businesses, Uber and Zopa.
  • Klarna valued at more than $2.25 billion after secondary offering.
  • Fidor Bank CEO Matthias Kroner calls bitcoin a “natural part of the digital lifestyle.”
  • TIO Networks initiates a non-brokered private placement of up to 2.1 million Common Shares priced at $1.08 CAD per share.
  • AcceptEmail names Ron Averett as president and CEO for U.S.A. and Canada.

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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Four Finovate Alums Land on Inc. Magazine Top 100

Four Finovate Alums Land on Inc. Magazine Top 100
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Cardlytics, Kabbage, Prosper, WePay

Inccollage

Last week, Inc. Magazine published its annual ranking of private American companies based on 3-year revenue growth.

Four out of the top 100 companies are Finovate alums:

KabbageLogo2015Kabbage, provides working capital to small businesses online:

WePayLogoWePay, payment technology provider for online platforms and marketplaces:

ProsperLogoProsper, online P2P lending platform:

CardlyticsLogoNewCardlytics, a card-linked offers platform that provides big-data insights to financial institutions

Further down this year’s list are Payoneer, ranked 1976; CAN Capital, ranked 3206; Forte Payment Systems, ranked 4,466.

Having four alums among the 100 fastest-growing companies is a testament to fintech’s recent growth spurt. Last year, only two—Lending Club (ranked 248) and OnDeck (ranked 726)—made the top 1,000. Since both went public in late 2014, neither qualified for this year’s list.

The increasing number of Inc.’s 500 fintech companies is partially fueled by the swell in funding over the past few years. Inc. Magazine noted this trend in its recent article, Why Fintech Is One of the Most Promising Industries of 2015. It primarily focuses on WePay’s achievements but also highlights growth and success stories throughout the industry.

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Mobile Monday: Turning Spending Management Into a Positive Experience

Mobile Monday: Turning Spending Management Into a Positive Experience
By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Deposits, Checking, Savings, CDs, Mobile Banking, Moven, SmartyPig, Social Money

moven_wheelMany people closely track their spending because they have to. They live paycheck to paycheck and there is no choice. A few track it because they are masters of control, and they love the sense of order that results from processing each transaction. But almost no one tracks spending for fun or fulfillment.

If a bank, card issuer, or fintech startup cracks that barrier into entertainment, they would surely be en route to fame and fortune (or at least a demo slot at Finovate). If I knew how to make expense tracking fun, I wouldn’t be writing about it here. I’d turn it into a startup, or at least a consulting practice.* So for what it’s worth, here’s my five-point plan for making banking fun.**

1. Go all-in on mobile
This is probably obvious to most readers. But I still encounter people who still believe that money management is best done on a desktop. True, it’s easier to design for the big screen, and real keyboards are nice, but it’s just NOT how people interact with digital providers today. For example, 76% of Facebook’s and 88% of Twitter’s ad revenue last quarter was on mobile (source). What more do you need to know?

2. Remove the login
You cannot engage mobile users multiple times per day with a standard username/password system. Thankfully, logging in via fingerprint is becoming a handset standard. Bank of America said last week it was about to adopt TouchID on iOS, so the log-in problem should eventually be going away. And for non-biometric handsets and/or users, a 4-digit PIN entry is a pretty good workaround.

3. Stream the transactions
Users should not have to do any work to see each new transaction in reverse chronological order. It should be just like an email system showing new transactions at the top. Unread ones should be super-easy to identify by staying boldface until viewed. For extra credit, adopt the gmail standard, identifying Priority transactions at the top of the stream.

4. Gamify the spend
Once you’ve laid the groundwork with #1, #2 and #3, it’s time to do the tough part of making tracking fun, or at least interesting enough to hook users. I look to Fitbit and Starbucks for inspiration. I probably look at my Fitbit app 7 to 10 times per day to see how I’m doing against my weekly goals; in comparison, I probably open a mobile banking app about 1 or 2 times per month. Why does Fitbit get 20x the engagement? Because it’s a POSITIVE experience. Every time I open it up I’m literally steps closer to my goal. That’s positive reinforcement. In comparison, every time I look at my banking app, I’m one more step removed from my goal of spending less. That’s a negative.

Banking is never going to be as fulfilling as step tracking, but it doesn’t have to be a downer at every login. FIs need to provide positive reinforcement instead of negative. Moven does as good a job as any along these lines by showing a red/yellow/green color-code rating on each expenditure to help users instantly understand what they are doing. And there are lots of ways to begin quantifying spending once users stop being afraid to log in for fear of always getting bad news.

5. Reward the save
Once users start seeing tracking as a positive experience, positive behaviors can be rewarded. Starbucks does a great job getting me to change my behavior by delivering custom offers and rewards to the mobile app. Before the mobile app, and more importantly, mobile ordering, I was a once-or-twice per-month customer. Now, it’s my seventh day in a row inside a store in order to win “14 bonus” stars (value about $7 if I use them to score a sandwich).

Until interest rates get back to something that you can actually measure, financial institutions need to overhaul their rewards programs to provide incentives for beginning savers. I realize how challenging that is based on the near-zero margins currently in the deposit and debit-card business. But there are ways to do this, such as providing retailer discounts when savings goals are reached. See SmartyPig/Social Money (post) or Finovate demo.

—–
*Just kidding, Finovate employees do not invest in or advise fintech startups (outside the Finovate event-coaching process).
**By “fun,” we are not saying money management will compete with television or Facebook. The aim is to make banking useful on a daily basis, perhaps the equivalent of checking the weather forecast.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Betterment, Blockchain, PayPal, Prosper, SigFig, Top Image Systems, Zopa

Around the web

  • Zopa CEO Giles Andrews quoted in The Financial Times column on the growth of P2P lending in Asia.
  • Daily Fintech looks at SigFig and its turn toward a B2B business model in the wake of the Yodlee acquisition.
  • Consumer Reports calls Betterment a “top 5” in customer service.
  • Top Image Systems announces “multiyear, multimillion” deal with a “top 5 U.S. bank”
  • Hot Topic names multiple Finovate and FinDEVr alum leaders in its list of top 100 in the industry.
  • Blockchain achieves 4 million bitcoin wallets.
  • Prosper moves into new headquarters after growing from 88 to 500 employees since 2013.
  • PayPal ranks in the top 5 of payments companies based on market cap.

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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Fintech Fundings: 27 Companies Raise $345 Million Week Ending 14 August 2015

Fintech Fundings: 27 Companies Raise $345 Million Week Ending 14 August 2015
By Jim Bruene Posted on
Categories: Funding

pig_money_beachDo VC investors slow down in the summer? Not this year. Since 1 June 2015, we’ve seen 189 fintech deals globally raising a total of $3.1 billion.

And this week was no different, with the highest number of funded companies since we began tracking a year ago. In total, 27 companies raised $345 million ($257 million equity; $88 million in debt). It was another stellar week for Finovate alums with 6 fundings totaling $123 million, including: Money-transfer service Payoneer ($50 mil); AI innovator Kensho ($33 million); tax specialist VATBox ($24 million); cash-back specialist Mogl ($7.9 million); mobile security provider Tyfone ($6.6 million); digital payments provider Digital Retail Apps ($770,000); and StockViews ($16,000 check from London-based accelerator, Startupbootcamp). Finally, Finovate charter-alum Yodlee received a buyout bid in excess of $660 million from Envestnet.

———

Fintech Unicorn Watch: Along with Yodlee’s near-unicorn exit, another apparent fintech unicorn was crowned when London-based Skrill (formerly Moneybookers) was acquired by Optimal Payments for a reported $1.2 billion. We’ll add it to our full unicorn list when we receive confirmation.

——–

Here are the deals in order of size between 8 Aug and 14 Aug 2015:

Prodigy Finance
Loan marketplace for graduate students
HQ: London, England, United Kingdom
Latest round: $100 million ($87.5 million Debt; $12.5 million Equity)
Total raised: $100 million($87.5 million Debt; $12.5 million Equity)
Tags: Lending, credit, crowdfunding, P2P, student loans, investing
Source: Crunchbase

Payoneer
International money transfers
HQ: New York City, New York
Latest round: $50 million
Total raised: $90 million
Tags: Payments, p2p, remittances, mobile, Finovate alum
Source: Finovate

Maestro Health
Health insurance solutions for the enterprise
HQ: Highland Park, Illinois
Latest round: $35 million
Total raised: $35 million
Tags: Insurance, self-insurance, enterprise
Source: Crunchbase

PokitDok
Healthcare and insurance APIs
HQ: San Mateo, California
Latest round: $34 million
Total raised: $46.2 million
Tags: Insurance, payments, healthcare, enterprise, SMB
Source: Crunchbase

Kensho
Artificial intelligence technology
HQ: New York City, New York
Latest round: $33 million Series A
Total raised: $58.3 million
Tags: Analytics, AI, business intelligence, BI
Source: Finovate

VATBox
VAT tax refund solution
HQ: Tel Aviv, Israel
Latest round: $24 million
Total raised: $24 million
Tags: Taxes, compliance, SMB, accounting, governance, Finovate alum
Source: Finovate

eShares
Equity management system
HQ: Mountain View, California
Latest round: $17 million
Total raised: $25.8 million
Tags: Investing, trading, stock shares, enterprise, compliance
Source: Crunchbase

Tyfone
Mobile security and payments
HQ: Portland, Oregon
Latest round: $6.6 million
Total raised: $12 million
Tags: Mobile, payments, security, authentication
Source: Finovate

Mogl
Online cash-back services for restaurants
HQ: San Diego, California
Latest round: $7.9 million
Total raised: $45.2 million
Tags: Payments, POS, SMB, acquiring, merchants, FinovateFall 2015 presenter
Source: FinovateFall 2015

OneAssist Consumer Solutions
Mobile and payment security
HQ: Mumbai, India
Latest round: $7.5 million
Total raised: $11 million
Tags: Mobile, security, payments, insurance
Source: FT Partners

Cloudability
Cloud-based spending management
HQ: Portland, Oregon
Latest round: $5.9 million
Total raised: $15.8 million
Tags: Accounting, enterprise, financial management, SMB
Source: NW Innovation

NUMONI
Micropayments
HQ: Singapore
Latest round: $4.8 million Series B
Total raised: Unknown
Tags: Payments, underbanked, unbanked, mobile
Source: The Paypers

bitFlyer
Bitcoin exchange
HQ: Tokyo, Japan
Latest round: $4.0 million
Total raised: $6.9 million
Tags: Cryptocurrency, virtual cash, payments
Source: Crunchbase

Scripbox
Online mutual fund investment platform
HQ: Bangalore, India
Latest round: $2.5 million Series A
Total raised: $ million
Tags: Investing, wealth management
Source: Crunchbase

CASHBOARD
Online investment management
HQ: Berlin, Germany
Latest round: $2.2 million
Total raised: Unknown
Tags: Investing, wealth management, personal finance
Source: EU Startups

Avalon Solutions
Payment processing solutions
HQ: Damascus, Maryland
Latest round: $2 million
Total raised: $5 million
Tags: Payments, acquiring, SMB, merchants, point-of-sale, POS
Source: FT Partners

PaidEasy
Mobile payments at the point-of-sale
HQ: New York City, New York
Latest round: $2 million Seed
Total raised: $2 million
Tags: Payments, point-of-sale, merchants, POS, mobile, SMB, acquiring
Source: Crunchbase

Stash
Digital investment adviser
HQ: New York City, New York
Latest round: $1.4 million Seed
Total raised: $1.4 million
Tags: Investings, savings, mobile
Source: Crunchbase

Invesdor
Equity crowdfunding platform
HQ: Finland
Latest round: $1.1 million
Total raised: $2.1 million
Tags: P2p, investing, peer-to-peer, SMB
Source: EU Startups

ToneTag
Mobile payments via audio waves
HQ: Mumbai, India
Latest round: $1 million
Total raised: Unknown
Tags: Payments, POS, point-of-sale, acquiring, merchants, SMB, contactless
Source: NFC World

Vendorin
Enabling electronic payments in B2B commerce
HQ: Omaha, Nebraska
Latest round: $900,000
Total raised: $4.9 million
Tags: Payments
Source: FT Partners

Digital Retail Apps
“Self-pay” mobile payments in-store
HQ: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Latest round: $760,000 Seed
Total raised: $760,000
Tags: Payments, mobile, POS, point-of-sale, acquiring, SMB, merchants, Finovate alum
Source: Finovate

Money Clouds (aka Quemulus)
Goal-based savings
HQ: Bellevue, Washington
Latest round: $380,000
Total raised: $700,000
Tags: Personal finance, consumer, mobile
Source: Geekwire

Xfers
Payments platform for Southeast Asia
HQ: Singapore
Latest round: $120,000
Total raised: Unknown
Tags: Payment processing, online, mobile, merchants, SMB, API, Ycombinator (YC S15)
Source: YC

Second Measure
Applying consumer spending data to investment analysis
HQ: San Mateo, California
Latest round: $120,000
Total raised: $120,000
Tags: Y-Combinator (YC S15), investing, metrics, analytics, valuation
Source: YC

StockViews
Social investing platform
HQ: London, England, United Kingdom
Latest round: $16,000 Accelerator
Total raised: Unknown
Tags: Investments, social network, crowdsourcing, trading
Source: Finovate

SABR
Crypto-currency tracking
HQ: New York City, New York
Latest round: Unknown
Total raised: Unknown
Tags: 500 Startups (accelerator), bitcoin, security, regulation
Source: VentureBeat

—–
Image: 123RF

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LoopPay-powered Samsung Pay Launches

LoopPay-powered Samsung Pay Launches
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Loop

LoopPay_homepage_2015

Move over, Apple Pay. Featuring technology from Finovate Best of Show winner LoopPay, Samsung’s Samsung Pay mobile payment service is on its way. We spotted founder Will Grayling on the CBS Evening News last night demoing the technology at a Manhattan retailer.

Samsung’s decision to acquire LoopPay in February for $250 million clearly signifies that Samsung is stepping up to the challenge of Apple’s mobile payment technology, Apple Pay. Samsung has since announced its unique take on mobile payments will launch in South Korea on 20 August and in the United States on 28 September. Next up: Launches in Spain and China.

Samsung Pay will be preloaded on Galaxy S6 Edge+ and Galaxy Note 5. The technology will be available for free download on Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge.

Loop_stage_FS2014

CEO Will Graylin demonstrated LoopPay’s mobile payment technology at FinovateSpring 2014 in San Jose.

LoopPay’s magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology enables mobile devices to communicate with the mag-stripe readers of point-of-sale payment terminals. By placing the mobile device near the reader, consumers can pay for purchases with a variety of stored credit and debit cards (although LoopPay is quick to point out that due to tokenization, no credit or debit information is stored on the device or actually transmitted during the transaction).

Authentication comes courtesy of either fingerprint, or pass-code. MST technology—being compatible with much of the existing POS technology—differentiates it from Apple Pay which relies solely on near field communication (NFC) to transmit information; Samsung Pay uses both NFC and MST.

Read more about the differences between Apple Pay and Samsung Pay (with Android Pay thrown in for good measure) here.

Talking about his company’s acquisition by Samsung shortly after the announcement, LoopPay CEO Will Graylin pointed out that Apple Pay wasn’t in mind when his company and Samsung began working together.

“A lot of the focus was really ‘How do we solve a bigger problem, which is consumer adoption,'” Graylin said in an interview with USA Today. “Consumers are not going to adopt if they can’t use a vast majority of their cards at a vast majority of merchants.”

LoopPay was founded in August 2013 and, post-acquisition, remains headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. The company won Best of Show at FinovateSpring 2014 for its demonstration of Loop and LoopWallet.

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Finovate Alumni News

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Betterment, Encap, Loop, mShift, PayPal, Realty Mogul, SocietyOne, ThreatMetrix, Xero

On Finovate.com

  • “LoopPay-powered Samsung Pay Launches“

Around the web

  • MSN Money interviews Betterment CEO Jon Stein on the relationship between Baby Boomers and robo-advisors.
  • Xero announces plan to help SMEs get bank loans.
  • Jessica Ellerm talks with Mitchel Harad, SocietyOne CMO.
  • Discussion on multifactor authentication features insights from Thomas Bostrom Jorgensen, CEO of Encap Security.
  • Fox News looks at Realty Mogul in a feature on real estate investing for non-millionaires.
  • Blackberry selects PayPal for its P2P Payments provider.
  • ThreatMetrix appoints Armen Najarian as chief marketing officer.
  • Team One Credit Union and Mshift expand pilot tests of MShift’s AnyWhereMobile by bringing more merchants on board.

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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Payoneer Pulls in $50 Million

Payoneer Pulls in $50 Million
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Funding, Payoneer

PayoneerHomepage2

PayoneerPlacedMobileCross-border payments platform Payoneer closed its eighth round of funding yesterday, a $50 million investment from seven contributors.

Financiers include new investors Greylock, Secondary Market, and Wellington Management. Existing investors Carmel Ventures, Nyca Partners, Ping An, and Susquehanna Growth Equity also contributed.

The new installment brings the company’s total funding to $90 million. While shares were purchased from existing investors, all of Payoneer’s major shareholders retained the majority of their holdings.

Payoneer’s money-transfer solutions enable small businesses and professionals to receive funds in 150 currencies and withdraw the money to their local bank account in their own currency. It also facilitates mass payouts for businesses looking to transfer money internationally, a service that supports companies such as newegg, airbnb, and fiverr.

The New York-based company has 500 employees in offices across Silicon Valley, Europe, and Asia.

Payoneer debuted its commercial account capability at FinovateAsia 2013. Check out the live demo video below:

 

 

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