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–Walter Brooke, The Graduate
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“There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?”
–Walter Brooke, The Graduate
The Finovate Debuts series introduces new Finovate alums. Today’s feature is SAS Games, which demonstrated its TiViTz College $avings Game-a-thon at FinovateFall 2014.
SAS Games’ TiViTz College $avings Game-a-thon offers a way for kids to save for college tuition by playing fun, math-based games.
The game-a-thon works similar to a walk-a-thon. Kids ages 6 to 18 solicit pledges from friends and family, whose total contribution is based on the child’s performance. To redeem the pledges and add the money to their college savings account, the child is challenged with TiVitz math games online.
Aside from bolstering funds in existing accounts, the games encourage families without a college savings fund to open one.
Stats:
How it works:
1) Kids set up their TiViTz account online
The registration process requires student and parent information, along with a $10 annual registration fee.
2) Link an existing college savings account or establish a new one
Through SAS Games’ partnership with TrustEgg, parents of children without a savings account can open one in minutes (watch TrustEgg’s debut at FinovateSpring 2013).
3) Request pledges from friends and family
Kids set up their own personalized pledge page and send the link to friends and family. They may also send donation requests via email, text, social media, and printed flyers.
4) Play the game
In the TiVitz game, kids challenge each other or a computer. The difficulty of the game scales for grade levels 1 to 12.
Players customize their avatar and choose among 7 themes, such as Safari or Baseball. Once the game has ended, they tally their score by computing the equations on the board.
5) Collect pledges
When the child finishes the required number of games, TiVitz automatically invoices the friends and family members who pledged. Occasionally, companies and financial institutions match donations to help kids reach their goals faster.
6) Track college savings
The dashboard displays the total amount raised from friends and family, along with matched charity contributions. From the home screen, kids can personalize their pledge page, view the number of pledges requested and received, and more.
The TiVitz online Game-a-thon is held once a year, around the holidays. Kids play 5 to 16 games each, depending on the amount of their pledges. Other activities around the TiVitz game include:
Benefits
For families and children:
For banks:
SAS Games demonstrated its TiVitz College $avings Game-a-thon at FinovateFall 2014.
You met them as IT Sector Group. Now say hello to the company’s very own multichannel banking solution provider, ebankIT.
Monitise announced a deal with Virgin Money that will bring a host of mobile banking solutions to the UK-based retail bank.
Australian P2P lending company, SocietyOne, closed a Series B funding round this week. The amount is officially undisclosed, but according to the Australian Financial Review, the round totals $20 million ($25 million AUD). This new installment comes just 10 months after it closed an $8.5 million round.
Contributors to the new round include Consolidated Press Holdings (CPH), News Corp Australia and Australian Capital Equity. Reinventure, the Westpac-funded venture capital manager that took a $5 million equity stake in SocietyOne in February, also helped furnish the round. Reinventure contributed another $5 million to this week’s Series B round.
The funding comes amid the buzz surrounding Lending Club’s IPO. The California-based company is expected to start trading on the NYSE next week at $10 to $12 per share valuing it at more than $4 billion (see our previous coverage here).
Lending Club’s success bodes well for SocietyOne. James Packer, a representative from SocietyOne’s new investors states, “We have seen first-hand the power of technology in reshaping the media industry and I am excited about the potential of technology, led by the team at SocietyOne, to help reshape the financial services industry in Australia.”
SocietyOne’s ClearMatch technology uses risk-based pricing to offer borrowers a rate that is up to 5% lower than bank loans. It debuted ClearMatch at FinovateAsia 2012 where it won Best of Show.
The Finovate Debuts series introduces new Finovate alums. CrowdFlower won Best of Show in its Finovate debut last September at FinovateFall 2014. The company’s platform automates the management of online data workers, making it easier and faster for data scientists to maintain quality control over both the process and the result.
CrowdFlower is a data-enrichment platform that enables data scientists to easily and accurately collect, clean, and label data from an online workforce.
Virtual financial planning innovator and self-described “robo-advisor” iQuantifi has raised $1 million in its angel round. CEO and founder Tom White said that the investment represents a major show of support for his company’s technology.
“iQuantifi helps users identify, prioritize and achieve their financial goals, via real-time, dynamic advice,” he said. “We are very excited to have raised this angel round and we see the investor interest as validation of our cloud-based, robo-planning software platform.”