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Payoneer Partners with Etsy to Streamline Payments to Sellers in Emerging Markets

By David Penn Posted on October 26, 2023
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Payoneer

Payments platform Payoneer has collaborated with Etsy’s seller offering, Etsy Payments.
The partnership will enable Etsy to streamline payments to sellers, empowering entrepreneurs in emerging markets.
Payoneer made its Finovate debut ten years ago at FinovateAsia 2013.

Etsy Payments has a brand new partner. The company, the bespoke seller offering from global online marketplace Etsy, has announced a collaboration with payments platform Payoneer. The partnership will help Etsy streamline payments to sellers. It will also give entrepreneurs in emerging markets better opportunities to grow their businesses. This includes the ability to offer a broader range of services and to make payouts to sellers in their preferred currency.

The collaboration will launch in the Ukraine and Thailand initially. By the end of the year, the service will be live in India, Japan, Argentina, Chile, and Peru, as well.

“Through this partnership, we are able to leverage Payoneer’s global reach and world-class payment technology to bring efficiencies at scale and provide seamless payouts to sellers in their local markets and the currency of their preference,” Etsy VP & GM Payments and Risk, Chirag Patel said.

Founded in 2005 and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, Etsy launched its Etsy Payments service in 2017. The option was previously called Direct Checkout and payments were processed by PayPal rather than Etsy. Etsy Payments enables sellers on the marketplace to offer buyers a wide range of payment options. These choices include Visa, PayPal, and Mastercard, as well as ApplePay, GooglePay, and Klarna, and buyers can transact in local currencies.

“This collaboration will help create opportunities for the often-underserved sellers in emerging markets, giving them better access to global demand,” Payoneer SVP Americas Ya Wen explained.

New York-based Payoneer made its Finovate debut in 2013 at FinovateAsia. The company returned to the Finovate stage two years later to present its technology at our developers conference FinDEVrNewYork. In the years since, Payoneer has grown into an international business payments platform with millions of customers, support for 70 currencies and 22+ languages, and coverage of more than 190 countries.

Payoneer began 2023 with a new Chief Financial Officer, Bea Ordonez. A few months later, the company introduced a new Chief Executive Officer, John Caplan, as well. So far this year, Payoneer has forged partnerships with software company Zoho, remote work outsourcing platform INSIDEA, Egyptian marketing firm Stllr, and cryptocurrency startup belo. The company acquired Israel-based data platform Spott in August and, in September, expanded its long-term relationship with Airbnb.

Payoneer is a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ exchange under the ticker PAYO. It has a market capitalization of $2 billion.

Photo by Oleksandr P

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Conversations on Core Banking, Automation in Lending, Innovations in Fraud Prevention

By David Penn Posted on October 26, 2023
Categories: Speaker series

When it comes to Finovate conferences, our Streamly Video Series might be the next best thing to being there.

Today we’re featuring a trio of conversations from our FinovateFall conference in September, captured by our Streamly Video Team.

How is bank modernization enhancing the customer experience? How are the best lenders in financial services leveraging enabling technologies like AI? How is automation revolutionizing the fight against financial crime? Check out our Streamly interviews with:

Emily Steele, President and COO at Savana

David Snitkof, SVP of Growth at Ocrolus

Devon Anderson, Account Executive, Mid-Market at Quavo

Photo by Donald Tong

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Remembering Fintech Ghosts: Four Companies That Haunt Our Memories

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 25, 2023
Categories: List series

Halloween is less than a week away, and with the scariest night of the year on the horizon, we wanted to settle in and tell some fintech ghost stories. These ghosts won’t be too spooky– they are more like a walk down memory lane than a visit to a haunted house.

Here’s a look at four fintech ghosts that have come and gone, but still haunt our memories:

Coin

Coin was founded in 2012, offering consumers a single, electronic payment card where they could store their multiple debit, credit, gift, loyalty, and membership card numbers. For $50, users could sign up for the waitlist, but many who paid upfront never received their card.

What happened

Coin had a very long waitlist, and while there was much initial excitement about the card, the enthusiasm faded for many after realizing they may never receive their card. The real death knell for Coin was that it only worked 80% to 90% of the time. As Finovate Founder Jim Bruene pointed out in his post about the card, “… no one wants to be that guy holding up the checkout line with his fancy black card.” Coin closed in 2016.

BillGuard

BillGuard suffered a slower death than most fintech ghosts. Founded in 2010, the company offered consumers a mobile app to access spending analytics, credit scores, payment details, transaction maps, and data breach alerts.

What happened

The functionality BillGuard offered was perfectly suited for fintech’s personal financial management (PFM) era. The company had kept up with evolving consumer expectations of the time, adding fraud alerts and personalized offers. When peer-to-peer lending company Prosper acquired BillGuard for $30 million in 2015, the fintech community had high hopes for the tie-up, thinking Prosper would add PFM capabilities and become a Credit Karma competitor. Two years later, however, after rebranding the BillGuard app to Prosper Daily, Prosper shut down the financial wellness app, shuttering all of its potential and erasing users’ history.

iQuantifi

iQuantifi was founded in 2009 to enable financial institutions to offer a virtual financial advisor, adding wealth management to their offerings. In 2014, the company launched a consumer-facing virtual financial advisor tool to help users identify, prioritize, and achieve their financial goals with a personalized plan. The company had raised $3.7 million.

What happened

iQuantifi showed plenty of promise. The company had formed an aggregation partnership with MX to offer millennial users a lower-cost option to managing their finances. iQuantifi even earned a spot to participate in the Plug-and-Play fintech accelerator. In 2019, however, the company was charged with selling unregistered securities to investors that were ineligible to purchase shares in the offering. Between 2013 and 2019, iQuantifi raised $3.5 million from over 50 unaccredited investors. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ordered iQuantifi and its founder to cease and desist from committing violations and pay a $25,000 civil penalty. The company closed in 2019.

ZELF

ZELF was launched in 2019, right as the digital banking craze was taking off. The fintech was geared toward serving millennial and Gen Z users in the E.U. and U.S. ZELF billed itself as the “Bank of the Metaverse” where users could bank their gaming coins, NFTs, and fiat– all anonymously with no social security, ID, or selfie required.

What happened

ZELF is a good cautionary tale of what happens when you combine crypto, fiat, the metaverse, and anonymity. Because of blatant KYC and Patriot Act violations, the company’s partner bank, Evolve Bank & Trust, pulled the plug on ZELF a day-and-a-half after its official launch day. ZELF closed down in December 2022.

Photo by Daisy Anderson

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Praxent Partners with WealthBlock to Build Digital Experiences for Capital Raises

By David Penn Posted on October 25, 2023
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Praxent

Digital design, engineering, and implementation specialist Praxent has teamed up with WealthBlock.
Via the partnership, the two companies will build digital experiences to facilitate capital raises for venture fund and crowdfunding managers.
Praxent demonstrated its technology at our developers conference, FinDEVr 2021.

A partnership between Praxent and WealthBlock will bring custom digital experiences to venture fund and crowdfunding managers to help facilitate the capital raising process.

WealthBlock offers a white label platform for private asset management firms and crowdfunding portals. The company’s technology streamlines investment presentation, investor onboarding and document e-sign, as well as investor reporting. The partnership will empower clients to build and launch customized digital journeys that will engage investors and boost conversions.

Praxent CEO and founder Tim Hamilton praised WealthBlock as an industry leader in the investor management technology space. “WealthBlock is powering the future of funding deals,” Hamilton said. “Together, we are creating and integrating bespoke, secure user experiences that drive revenue and growth for companies looking to raise capital.”

WealthBlock CEO Trilliam Jeong underscored the importance of self-service in the capital raising space, calling it critical to success. Additionally, Jeong credited Praxent’s experience in financial services – and with the company’s platform – for making Praxent “the ideal partner.” He added, “By joining forces, we enable clients to accelerate the secure launch of custom experiences that allow them to more effectively onboard and serve investors.”

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Praxent helps financial services companies develop differentiated fintech solutions that yield quantifiable results. The company has assisted more than 400 organizations as they enhanced their customer relationships via a combination of human-centered design, front-end engineering, and product integration.

Founded in 2000, Praxent made its Finovate debut at our developers conference, FinDEVr, in 2021. In August of this year, the company announced partnerships with Insurance Systems Inc. and small business lender NEWITY. In September, Praxent introduced new Chief Revenue Officer Robin Smith. Smith previously served as Vice President of North America for Finovate alum Mambu.

Photo by Scott Webb

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U.S. Bank Launches Avvance, a Point-of-Sale Lending Tool

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 25, 2023
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, U.S. Bank

U.S. Bank launched Avvance, a point-of-sale lending tool for merchants.
Avvance allows merchants to offer installment loans on purchases ranging from $300 to $25,000.
U.S. Bank also offers a consumer-facing BNPL tool, ExtendPay, which it launched in 2021.

U.S. Bank launched an embedded point-of-sale lending solution this week. The new buy now, pay later (BNPL) tool, Avvance, helps businesses give shoppers options to finance their purchase during checkout after filling out a quick application.

Avvance is embedded into the checkout process and shows the buyer multiple personalized loan options, offering them the ability to pay over time. U.S. Bank backs the loans and doesn’t require the merchant to manage the payments after the sale is complete.

“Our point-of-sale lending product allows business owners the ability to offer affordable financing while they receive full payment at the time of sale,” said Executive Vice President of Buy Now, Pay Later and Point-of-Sale Lending at U.S. Bank and Elavon Mia Huntington. “U.S. Bank, the primary source of the consumer loans, manages all aspects from application to servicing, so business owners can focus on what they do best — running their business.”

Customers can use Avvance installment loans to finance purchases between $300 to $25,000. The financing terms range from 0% to 24.99% APR with repayment plans that range from three to 60 months. When a customer uses the tool to finance a purchase, U.S. Bank offers the merchant the full payment within 48 hours. While Avvance is free for merchants to offer, U.S. Bank charges a merchant discount rate fee for each Avvance loan that it processes.

Avvance’s benefits are similar to those of other BNPL tools on the market. It can encourage the customer to make a purchase they otherwise would not, increase their purchase amount, and help reduce cart abandonment. “With Avvance, business owners have the ability to attract new customers while increasing their buying power, resulting in increased sales,” Huntington explained.

Interestingly, U.S. Bank is marketing Avvance as a point-of-sale financing tool, rather than a BNPL tool. This may be because it wants to target an older generation than BNPL typically reaches. Avvance also differentiates itself from typical BNPL tools when it comes to the base purchase amount required. While customers must spend at least $300 with Avvance, many BNPL tools have no minimum purchase requirement.

Avvance isn’t U.S. Bank’s first BNPL tool. The bank launched ExtendPay in 2021– the height of fintech’s BNPL craze– to offer its credit card holders a way to split purchases over $100 into a series of fixed payments ranging from three to 24 months. U.S. Bank doesn’t charge interest on ExtendPay purchases, but it does charge a fixed monthly fee.

Photo by Mikael Blomkvist

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Finovate eMagazine: The Bright Future of Fintech

By Lili Nguyen Posted on October 25, 2023
Categories: Finovate eMagazine, Marketing

Insights from FinovateFall 2023

It’s no secret that we’re facing many challenges right now. Declining VC investment, rising interest rates, and the looming threat of a recession are all obviously significant obstacles that must be overcome, but we’re also seeing a surge of innovators tackling real-world challenges head on.

At FinovateFall, we’ve seen exciting automation and AI use cases, including generative AI! We also heard financial institutions talk about their digital transformation journey and how they’ve applied technology to improve their processes and enable their businesses to grow. Plus, we met with industry agnostic experts who inspired us to be better leaders and innovators and who helped us think about a future with AI and a future in the metaverse.

Fill in this form to read this eMagazine and find insights from:

The Finovate audience – we share the polling results from FinovateFall 2023, and find out what trends the industry is excited about
Azriel Chelst at FIS, who shares his fintech survival kit for the current challenging economic environment
Our partners and demoers, who talk about applications of AI and automation, and innovations in customer experience and business strategy
Fintech founders, who share their funding experience
Financial institutions (SVB, Truist Financial Corporation, OMB Bank), and find out about their digital transformation journeys

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Former JP Morgan Exec Launches Refunds-as-a-Service Startup

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 24, 2023
Categories: Daily news

TodayPay, a new “refunds-as-a-service” startup, has launched out of stealth mode this week.
TodayPay is founded by former JP Morgan executive Jeremy Balkin.
TodayPay’s technology decouples the refund from the return logistics to pay customers their refund instantly in their TodayPay mobile wallet.

Jeremy Balkin is leveraging his expertise in the financial services industry to launch a new fintech. The former JP Morgan executive announced this week that TodayPay, what he is calling a “refunds-as-a-service startup,” has exited stealth mode.

At its core, TodayPay helps merchants give their customers instant refunds when they initiate a return. The service also offers the customer multiple options of how they want to receive the funds instead of simply defaulting back to the original payment method.

“I built TodayPay because I’ve seen firsthand how the speed of a payment can change somebody’s life,” said TodayPay Founder Balkin. “There’s over a trillion dollars of value exchanged every year in the form of refunds, yet there’s been almost zero innovation improving the refund customer experience.”

TodayPay offers four main products:

Better Refund, an API that decouples the refund from the return logistics to pay customers their refund instantly, while allowing merchants seven days to pay.
Refund Now Pay Later, which provides merchants with a pre-qualified credit line of up to $300,000 with up to 90 days to repay the funds. TodayPay takes on the risk of the return so that the merchant can focus on their working capital.
instarefund, a consumer facing widget embedded into a merchant’s existing return flow that helps them control the customer experience.
Management Portal, a merchant-facing dashboard to help businesses manage all transactions in one place and automate refunds and returns management.

These products may improve the returns experience for merchants, however, TodayPay adds a bit more friction onto the customer experience. That’s because customers receive their refund payment in a TodayPay digital wallet. While the digital wallet is already set up via the customer’s phone number, they still have to log into their TodayPay digital wallet to choose how they’d like to redeem their refund– into their bank account, onto their debit card, or via a gift card.

While TodayPay was in stealth mode, it built relationships to be integrated into Shopify, BigCommerce, Woo, and Magento. The company is backed by Soma Capital, and is working with Astra, Marqeta, and Visa for the digital wallet piece.

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

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Featurespace Launches GenAI-Powered Financial Crime Fighting Model, TallierLTM

By David Penn Posted on October 24, 2023
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, Daily news, Featurespace

Featurespace unveiled its generative AI-powered, Large Transaction Model (LTM), TallierLTM, this week.
The technology uncovers hidden transactional patterns typically undetected by current methods that may be indicative of criminal activity.
Featurespace made its Finovate debut in 2016, appearing at both FinovateEurope and FinovateFall that year.

Fraud and financial crime prevention company Featurespace unveiled its Large Transaction Model (LTM), TallierLTM, this week. A foundational technology for payments in specific and the financial services industry in general, TallierLTM is a large-scale, self-supervised, and pre-trained model built to power the next generation of AI apps to protect consumers from financial crime.

The technology marks the first time financial professionals in the fraud fighting space have been able to leverage a generative Large Transaction Model. Featurespace noted in a statement that TallierLTM has provided improvements of as much as 71% in fraud value detection compared to the industry standard.

“What OpenAI’s LLMs have done for language, TallierLTM will do for payments,” Featurespace founder David Excell said. “There is widespread concern about how deep-fakes and generative AI have been used to deceive consumers and our financial systems. We plan to reverse this trend by utilizing the power of generative AI algorithms to create solutions that protect consumers and make the world a safer place to transact.”

Connecting to FIs via its enbedding API, TallierLTM analyzes billions of transactions, identifying hidden transactional patterns that current methods often cannot detect. The technology’s insights are based on time sequencing, discovering unusual spending patterns over a short period of time, for example, or between a consumer and a merchant. This increased ability to distinguish legitimate activity from potentially criminal behavior will not only enable data scientists to improve their model’s performance faster, Featurespace Chief Innovation Officer Dr. David Sutton said. It will also allow institutions to “realize the value of machine learning investments more quickly.”

“We know that smarter technology helps financial institutions better understand their consumers,” Sutton added. “We have taken this to the next level by pairing cutting-edge generative AI algorithms with huge volumes of data, enabling a machine to efficiently comprehend the relationships between different customer transactions.”

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., Featurespace made its Finovate debut in 2016, appearing at both FinovateEurope and FinovateFall. An innovator in adaptive behavioral analytics and automated deep behavioral networks for risk management, Featurespace serves more than 80 direct customers and 200,000 institutions. In recent months, the company announced partnerships with digital payment platform Clip and fellow Finovate alum Zeta. In August, Featurespace launched its ARIC Scam Detect solution to help protect financial services companies and their customers from scams – especially Authorized Push Payment (APP) scams – in real-time.

“As scammers become increasingly sophisticated in their tactics, with the use of Generative AI and machine learning, FIs need an adaptive solution that can protect from changing scam types in real time and monitor both inbound and outbound payments,” company Chief Product Officer Pat Hinchin said.

Featurespace has raised nearly $108 million in funding from investors including Chrysalis Investments, MissionOG, and Insight Partners.

Photo by cottonbro studio

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Switzerland’s Coop Partners with additiv to Launch New Superapp Coop Finance+

By David Penn Posted on October 24, 2023
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news

Swiss retailer/wholesaler Coop has turned to embedded finance company additiv to launch its new superapp, Coop Finance+.
Coop Finance will go live initially with banking services, payments, and pension solutions.
Headquartered in Switzerland, additiv most recently demoed its technology at FinovateAsia in 2017.

One of the largest retailer/wholesaler companies in Switzerland, Coop, has turned to embedded finance company additiv to power the launch of its new app, Coop Finance+.

A financial services superapp, Coop Finance+ initially will go live with banking services, payments, and pension solutions. Hypothekarbank Lenzburg will power banking services. Vanguard, OLZ, Liberty Vorsorge and Glarner Kantonalbank will support the app’s pension solutions. App users can open accounts with debit cards, make online payments, and invest in Pillar 3a retirement programs.

“At additiv, we believe that embedding financial products into everyday consumer channels will help improve convenience and financial inclusion,” additiv founder Michael Stemmle said. Company CEO Nils Frowein, who joined additiv in June, praised the new offering as a “transformative project” that will have a “profound impact on the user experience of Coop customers.”

Coop Finance+ offers competitive terms, above-average interest rates on retirement accounts, and loyalty benefits. Additionally, the superapp provides access to free cash withdrawals at all 1,000 Coop supermarkets and Coop City warehouses. The launch of Coop Finance+ makes Coop the largest provider of free cash withdrawals in Switzerland.

“At Coop, we are committed to providing our customers with digital services that are tailored to their needs,” Coop Head of Digital/Customer Thomas Schwetje said. “With Coop Finance+, we are expanding this strategy to offer straightforward and easily accessible account and payment solutions, household budget management, and pension solutions.”

A Finovate alum since 2013, additiv most recently demoed its technology at FinovateAsia 2017 in Hong Kong. In the years since, additiv has grown from a software development firm into a major digital investment and financial solutions platform and finance-as-a-service provider. A leader in orchestrated finance, additiv has offices in Zurich, Frankfurt, Dubai, and Singapore and 300 employees worldwide.

Earlier this month, additiv announced a strategic partnership with SELISE. The collaboration will enable additiv to leverage the company’s expertise in software management to enhance its wealth platform. In June, additiv was named a leading AI innovator within AI Fintech100’s 2023 roster.

Photo by H. Emre

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New Startup Showcase: Warp Takes on Payroll

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 23, 2023
Categories: Startups

I’ve always loved following innovations in the payments space. It is the one fintech sub-sector that touches everyone– regardless of net worth, social standing, or geography. And when it comes to payments, there is plenty of room for disruption, especially in payroll.

In this month’s new startup showcase, I’m taking a closer look into Warp, which was launched earlier this year by Ayush Sharma. At its core, Warp is seeking to help founders run their startups by offering them a way to outsource payroll operations– and the headaches that go along with payments and tax compliance.

At the root of the problem Warp is trying to solve is the wide variety of tax laws, both across the globe and within the U.S. These laws make it difficult for founders to navigate payroll for their remote workforce, especially when employees are located across multiple U.S. states or international boundaries. Because each region has different tax laws, founders can spend hours navigating poorly designed government websites to ensure they are complying with local laws.

A 2023 Y Combinator alum, Warp currently offers full-service payroll for U.S. employees and files and pays all federal, state, and local taxes. The company also helps startups pay contract workers and generates 1099 end-of-year paperwork. For domestic payouts, Warp automates payroll registrations and monitors for compliance. Companies that need to send payment across international borders can use Warp to pay contractors in more than 150 countries, with tools that generate compliant contract agreements in seconds.

Beyond payments, the New York-based company even does some light lifting when it comes to HR tasks. The company’s technology provides healthcare options with automated payroll deductions, generates offer letters, onboards new employees, approves invoices and reimbursements, and helps startups track PTO and time submissions.

Warp offers three pricing options from $49 per month (plus $20 per person) to $99 per month (plus $35 per person). Among the company’s competitors are Gusto, Rippling, and Deel.

Warp has received a total of $2.7 million in funding. The company received $500k from Y Combinator and $2.2 million from Abstract Ventures, HOF Capital, Shrug Capital, and others.

Photo by Jan Van Bizar

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Marqeta Introduces Embedded Credit Experiences

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 23, 2023
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Marqeta

Marqeta launched a new credit card issuing platform to help brands offer embedded credit programs.
Using the new tool, fintechs and non-financial services companies can launch both consumer and commercial credit programs.
Marqeta’s new card program will allow brands to own the entire customer experience without having to send the customer to a bank website to access card information.

Card issuer Marqeta unveiled its new credit card issuing platform today. The new offering serves as a one-stop shop to help companies launch embedded card programs for both consumer and commercial users.

Marqeta’s new credit platform helps brands promote customer loyalty by enabling personalized rewards and can support any card type and any format. According to Marqeta CEO Simon Khalaf, the new platform will help brands “reimagine what a credit card can be” and engage with consumers “in a whole new way.”

As part of that reimagining, Marqeta’s new platform serves as a single location where fintechs and non-financial services companies can build a credit product that suits their consumers’ unique needs and embed the experiences within their existing app. Specifically, brands can own the entire customer experience and won’t need to send cardholders to a bank’s website to access card information.

The credit platform also provides a rewards engine that helps brands build reward programs that adapt to cardholder needs and preference. Additionally, Marqeta offers brands access to real-time customer data to help further customize cardholder products and– for commercial cardholders– provides a range of flexible funding models such as Net 30 Charge Cards, Receivables Purchase, and Revolving Credit.

“The possibility is huge,” Khalaf added, “but the incumbent solutions are simply not giving consumers what they need. We want our credit card platform to completely change the consumer experience and the brand loyalty equation.”

Today’s development comes courtesy of Marqeta’s January 2023 acquisition of Power Finance for $275 million. Power Finance was founded in 2021 to offer brands a credit card program management service. Power Finance’s platform allowed companies to outsource credit card management, customer experience, application decisioning, transaction processing, and more.

Founded in 2010, Marqeta enables clients to manage their own card programs and banking tools. The company offers configurable and flexible payment tools and customizes payment cards for their end customers. Marqeta is a publicly traded company listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker MQ. The company has a market capitalization of $2.83 billion.

Photo by Cup of Couple

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ebankIT Teams Up with Finotta to Deliver Personalized Financial Guidance

By David Penn Posted on October 23, 2023
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, ebankIT, Finotta

Embedded finance company Finotta has teamed up with banking software provider ebankIT.
The partnership will integrate Finotta’s Personified Personalized Financial Guidance platform with ebankIT’s digital banking solution.
Both Finotta and ebankIT are Finovate alums. ebankIT most recently demoed its technology at FinovateEurope in March. Finotta made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022.

Embedded finance company Finotta has forged a new partnership with omnichannel banking software firm ebankIT. The partnership will integrate Finotta’s Personified platform with ebankIT’s digital banking solution in order to deliver better financial wellness tools and Personlized Financial Guidance (PFG) to customers worldwide.

Finotta’s Personified platform provides an automated and personalized mobile banking experience. Personified includes a financial coach, a financial health leveling system, automated financial guidance, predictive product referrals, digitized relationship building, the ability to make internal and external transfers, and more. The suite of solutions helps financial institutions address customer needs and respond to them from within the digital banking platform.

Personal finance is often treated as a local concern. However, Finotta founder and CEO Parker Graham put this week’s integration in an international context. “Financial wellness is a global imperative that transcends borders, affecting individuals and communities everywhere,” Graham said. “In partnering with ebankIT, we’re not just future-proofing financial institutions, we’re elevating the financial well-being of users and underscoring innovation as the bedrock of customer loyalty.”

ebankIT CEO Renato Oliveira said that delivering “humanized, personalized, and accessible digital experiences” is a priority for ebankIT “from day one.” He added, “At ebankIT, we recognize that the future of digital banking hinges on seamless omnichannel capabilities and enriched user experiences.” Oliveira called the partnership with Finotta “an extension of that commitment.”

Founded in 2014, ebankIT is headquartered in Portugal. The company has been a Finovate alum since winning Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2015. The company most recently demoed its technology at FinovateEurope earlier this year. At the conference, ebankIT introduced a new range of features on its digital banking platform. Among these features was a tool to help banks and credit unions better anticipate customer needs.

Over the summer, ebankIT announced a strategic partnership with digital transformation and cybersecurity consultancy, Online Business Systems. More recently, the company teamed up with Home Trust. Via the partnership, ebankIT helped the Canada-based mortgage broker launch its new digital banking platform.

Founded in 2018, Finotta is a newcomer to the Finovate stage. The Overland Park, Kansas-based company made its debut last year at FinovateFall 2022. Finotta announced in August that its Personified platform increased user engagement to an average of 13 minutes per month. Graham credited the difference between Finotta’s Personalized Financial Guidance platform and traditional personal finance management solutions.

“To better capitalize on existing digital banking investments and increase share of wallet all while lowering acquisition costs, banks need to shift their focus away from PFMs and instead embrace Personalized Financial Guidance,” Graham said. “By focusing on guiding customers through their financial journey, they increase the amount of time users spend in the app.”

Photo by Daniel Frese

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