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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
TSYSpartners with Virgin Money to provide consumer credit processing services for UK customers.
Cachet Financial Solutionsappoints Darin McAreavey as EVP and CFO.
Prosperto cross the $1 billion mark in personal loans originated through its platform next week, hosts giveaway.
Tech Zulu interviewsTrustev after the company’s win at SXSW Accelerator.
Jumio to help form Identity Security Network with eight leading Bitcoin exchanges.
InComm’s corporate B2B store enables retailers to streamline management of corporate gift card sales.
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.
FinovateSpring 2014 is only five weeks away and the event is on pace to be the largest Finovate event to date. After our sold-out London event in February, we are projecting over 1,400 innovators will descend on Silicon Valley on April 29th and 30th to watch the future of financial and banking technology debut live!
If you would like to join that audience and discover the latest fintech innovations before your competition does, please register before this Friday March 28th in order to lock in your seat AND the early-bird discount.
If it makes it any easier to commit, here is a small sample of the amazing organizations that will be in attendance:
Altimeter Group
American Savings Bank
ATB Financial
Bank of the West
Bankers Trust
BBVA Ventures
Bessemer Venture Partners
BlackRock
C1 Bank
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
Capital One
Celent
Celtic Bank
Charles Schwab
Chase Paymentech
CIBC
Citi Ventures
City National Bank
Commerce Bank
Commonwealth Bank
Consulate General of Canada
CFPB
Credit Suisse
Credit Union Times
Digital Insight
Discover
E*TRADE
EverBank
Experian
Federal Reserve System
Fidelity
Filene
First Data
First Republic Bank
FirstBank
FIS
Fiserv
Foundation Capital
FTV Capital
Fujitsu Research
General Atlantic
H&R Block
Hyundai Capital
IBM
Intel Capital
Intuit
Jack Henry
Jyske Bank
Lazard
Lexis Nexis
Lightspeed Venture Partners
MassMutual
Mastercard
Maybank
McKinsey & Co
Mergermarket
Mohr Davidow
Moody’s Analytics
Morningstar
Mountain America CU
NCR
NEA
New York Life
North Hill Ventures
U.S. Dept. of Treasury
Oracle
PNC Bank
Principal Financial
Sberbank Venture Capital
Scotiabank
Silicon Valley Bank
Stanford University
Swedbank
TD Ameritrade
The Vanguard Group
TowerGroup
Transamerica
TransUnion
U.S. Bank
USAA
VentureBeat
Visa
Wells Fargo
West Point Bank
Western Union
Please don’t delay! Tickets are selling fast so please be sure to register now to make sure you get a seat!
FinovateSpring 2014 is only five weeks away and the event is on pace to be the largest Finovate event to date. After our sold-out London event in February, we are projecting over 1,400 innovators will descend on Silicon Valley on April 29th and 30th to watch the future of financial and banking technology debut live!
If you would like to join that audience and discover the latest fintech innovations before your competition does, please register before this Friday March 28th in order to lock in your seat AND the early-bird discount.
If it makes it any easier to commit, here is a small sample of the amazing organizations that will be in attendance:
Altimeter Group
American Savings Bank
ATB Financial
Bank of the West
Bankers Trust
BBVA Ventures
Bessemer Venture Partners
BlackRock
C1 Bank
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce
Capital One
Celent
Celtic Bank
Charles Schwab
Chase Paymentech
CIBC
Citi Ventures
City National Bank
Commerce Bank
Commonwealth Bank
Consulate General of Canada
CFPB
Credit Suisse
Credit Union Times
Digital Insight
Discover
E*TRADE
EverBank
Experian
Federal Reserve System
Fidelity
Filene
First Data
First Republic Bank
FirstBank
FIS
Fiserv
Foundation Capital
FTV Capital
Fujitsu Research
General Atlantic
H&R Block
Hyundai Capital
IBM
Intel Capital
Intuit
Jack Henry
Jyske Bank
Lazard
Lexis Nexis
Lightspeed Venture Partners
MassMutual
Mastercard
Maybank
McKinsey & Co
Mergermarket
Mohr Davidow
Moody’s Analytics
Morningstar
Mountain America CU
NCR
NEA
New York Life
North Hill Ventures
U.S. Dept. of Treasury
Oracle
PNC Bank
Principal Financial
Sberbank Venture Capital
Scotiabank
Silicon Valley Bank
Stanford University
Swedbank
TD Ameritrade
The Vanguard Group
TowerGroup
Transamerica
TransUnion
U.S. Bank
USAA
VentureBeat
Visa
Wells Fargo
West Point Bank
Western Union
Please don’t delay! Tickets are selling fast so please be sure to register now to make sure you get a seat!
When we first started Finovate in 2007/2008, during the depths of the financial-services sector collapse, there were maybe a half-dozen major venture fintech fundings per quarter. In comparison, yesterday (25 March 2014), in a single day, 10 fintech fundings were announced totaling nearly $60 million (according to Crunchbase).
Yes, you read it right. TEN in 24 HOURS! And that doesn’t even include ThreatMetrix, whose latest $20 mil round didn’t make it into the database by today’s noon (Eastern Time) cutoff.
What are the drivers? As you can see from the list below, the digital currency craze attracted nearly half the amount, with $23.5 million sent to three companies. Crowdfunding and other alt-lending has been absorbing large amounts of capital of late, and yesterday pulled in another $20 million in three fundings. The other four ran the gamut from $12 mil into a prepaid card company and $1+ million each in insurance, healthcare payments and stock analysis.
Is it 1999 again? That’s not for me to say. I hope not (obviously). But it’s hard to believe that there is enough revenue to sustain even a small portion of these startups. Clearly investors believe there are major disruptions ahead in all things financial.
miiCardbringing its ID verification technology to eMerchantPay.
WTOP News asks: is the credit card with keypad from Dynamics is the “card of the future”?
MasterCardselects Anna Yip as head of Hong Kong and Macau.
Digital Insight to expand online banking portfolio to include shared access and small business payments. Come see Digital Insight demo at FinovateSpring next month.
Kraken, the digital currency exchange platform used by Fidor Bank, raises $5 million.
ZipZappauses UK cash-to-bitcoin transfers through its platform.
Bokupartners with sunhill technologies to enable direct global carrier billing for sunhill’s services.
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.
The northern hemisphere’s first day of spring last week can mean only one thing: FinovateSpring 2014 is just around the corner. To help you prepare for the upcoming onslaught of innovation, we’ll be dishing up bite-sized pieces of some of the companies you’ll see in San Jose on April 29 and 30.
ChiaraMail offers the first technology to protect your customers from becoming victims of e-mail address spoofing, while providing them unprecedented e-mail privacy without the use of encryption.
Features:
Eliminates spoofing and the resulting identity theft.
Ensures in-transit privacy.
Adds critical functionality such as changing e-mails after sending, and improved mail network efficiency.
Why it’s great:
ChiaraMail technology assures your customers that a message that claims to be from you is actually from you.
Robert Uomini, CEO/President
Uomini is founder of ChiaraMail and inventor/developer of the patented technology behind ChiaraMail. He has been developing disruptive technologies for many years.
Head is a senior marketing and sales executive with more than 20 years of experience in enterprise and start-up companies bringing game-changing technologies to market.
Dealstruck is a web-based peer-to-peer lending company that offers a suite of financing products to small business borrowers designed to progressively graduate them toward conventional financing.
Features:
Real-time access to borrowers and deals
Ability to manipulate data from Dealstruck loan packaging to augment underwriting/yield
Opportunity to participate alongside others or take down full loans
Why its great:
Dealstruck provides the most complete suite of financing options for business borrowers and investment opportunities for lenders.
Ethan Senturia, co-founder and CEO Senturia is Wharton Business School graduate who previously ran Internet marketing for a lead generation startup, Ampush Media, and in distressed credit at Lehman Brothers.
McLoughlin, co-founder and CTO, is a B.S./M.S. who has worked at the Biodefense Knowledge Center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and at Google Machine Translation and Apple.
Digital Insight’sPromotion Suite for mobile reaches the right customers on their mobile device with the right offers at the moment of truth.
Features:
Brings personalized, relevant cross-sell offers from financial institutions to their customers.
Engages consumers in their moment of need anywhere, anytime and on any device.
Why it’s great:
Provides personalized engagements and enhanced communications to connect financial institutions with their customers like never before.
Karishma Anand
Anand is the director of product management for Digital Insight. She is responsible for driving product strategy, execution for digital banking and payments solutions. LinkedIn
Marshall Yuan
Yuan is a senior product manager at Digital Insight. In this role, he oversees the strategy and go-to-market plan for Android banking applications. LinkedIn
ID.me verifies attributes of a consumer’s identity and ties them to a payment medium
Features:
CRM, Offers, Loyalty and Authentication via a payment medium
Elimination of physical credentials needed at checkout
Fraud prevention for high-value transactions via authentication
Why it’s great:
User-centric digital identity, attribute verification and a mobile device enables the holy grail of marketing: personalization
Blake Hall
Hall is a former Army Ranger and Harvard Business School graduate. Thanks to The Economist, he is the first Google result for “muscly entrepreneur.”
Matthew Thompson Thompson is a former Army Ranger and a decorated combat veteran. He co-founded ID.me while attending Harvard Business School. LinkedIn
LendingRobot automates loan selection and investment in Peer Lending.
Features:
Fully automates investment in LendingClub and Prosper
Submits orders within one second after new loans appear
Automated definition of investment strategies
Why it’s great: LendingRobot makes investing in Peer Lending simple and efficient, and allows individuals to compete with institutional investors.
Gilad Golan, CEO
Golan shipped almost every product he ever built (and he built a lot of them). LinkedIn
Emmanuel Marot, President
Marot uniquely mixes backgrounds in both user experience design and quantitative finance.
Verde International’sVerde Aurora is a next-gen automated loan-underwriting optimization engine satisfying customers, shareholders, regulators, dealers, and other stakeholders, instantly.
Features:
The best possible decisions and counteroffers, delivered in seconds
Loss models that outperform industry leading models by fourfold
Scalable deployment that any financial institution can afford
Why it’s great: Verde Aurora obsoletes today’s decision systems by integrating behavioral models, DCF analysis and MPP-driven optimization for perfect instant offers, pleasing customers and shareholders alike.
Patrick Reily, CEO and Co-Founder Verde International
Reily’s multidisciplinary approach to strategic planning and business development is the result of 25 years of experience in banking and financial services.
The team at SmartAsset, a company that aims to answer consumers’ complex financial questions, has been busy lately. Not only are they preparing their 7-minute demo for FinovateSpring next month, they also recently launched a retirement planning tool, and this week announced they just closed on $5.2 million.
The Series A financing round was led by Javelin Venture Partners. Denis Grosz, SV Angel and Brendan Wallace, founder of Identified, also contributed.
SmartAsset plans to use the round to grow its New York-based team by around a dozen new employees and expand its platform’s capability to give users more control of their financial future.
Top Image Systems’eFLOWto process the digital census of a country in EMEA in a deal worth more than $1 million.
Place2GivereleasesGIVE-API to provide access to its database of charities as well as its payment processing tech.
SmartAssetraises $5.2 million in series A funding. Come see their live demo at FinovateSpring next month in San Jose.
Netherlands Queen Maxima visitsEntrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) to see its psychometric credit scoring methodology in action.
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.
In an era when the Internet of Things is becoming wildly popular, POS financing provider Financeit has opened up a communications channel in the analog world of print.
The Canadian-based company announced today that its users now have the option to order printed materials, such as:
Brochures detailing Financeit and its benefit to customers
Price tags that help highlight monthly prices
Posters and window displays
Stickers for front window and cash register
These printed materials not only let shoppers know that instant financing is available in the store, but also help to educate them about the merchant’s payment plan options through Financeit.
Users can order these items in the Library section of their account.
The votes are in. The judges have decided. And 11 Finovate alums have earned awards at the 2014 PYMNTS.com Innovation Project, including three gold medals.
Finovate alums won awards in a diverse range of categories, from “B2B Innovation” to “Best Comeback Story.” Areas where alums dominated included “Best Credit Innovation,” where Credit Karma, Lending Club, and Klarna swept the field, as well as “Best Innovation via ACH” and “Best Check Innovation.”
The Innovation Project is “powered by PYMNTS.com,” a joint venture between BusinessWire and Market Platform Dynamics. The event is in its second year, and was again held at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A total of 49 awards were presented. Gold, silver, and bronze in fifteen categories, plus singular Catalyst, Women Driving Innovation in Payments, Lifetime Achievement, and Best in Show awards.
Also announced were three inductees to the Payments Hall of Fame.
See how the rest of the Finovate family fared below.
Oanda announces integration of Currensee’s Trade Leaders platform to support social trading.
TransferWiserecognized as “boldest small company” in winning FT’s Boldest in Business award for 2014.
BBVA follows Simple acquisition with launch of new digital banking unit.
Currency Transferfeatured in Wired UK as Startup of the Week.
BillGuardinvites beta testers to try its new Android app.
Mail Tribune highlights the importance of Credit Karma and Credit Sesame.
Ping Identitypurchases Accells Technologies to make mobile devices into a tool for logging you in to all of your cloud-based services in one shot.
BellaDatilaunches the next level of visual data discovery with new release.
Matt Turck examines opportunities for Kensho and Quantopian in a Bloomberg-dominated world.
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.
Players in the crowdfunding space have a lot of headaches in order to maintain compliance, especially since the SEC requires that parties who invest in offerings on crowdfunding platforms must be fully accredited. That is, they must meet one of the following two requirements:
1) Have earned $200,000/ year in both of the past two years (or $300,000 with spouse) and expect to earn the same next year
2) Have a net worth of $1 million (excluding primary residence)
BancBox, a company known for its money-moving APIs, is seeking to remove this barrier for players in the crowdfunding industry with its new API that will verify the accreditation of investors.
The API is a part of the BancBox Invest service. It will enable crowdfunding platforms to determine if their investors are accredited and legally allowed to invest in the platform. In order to comply with the SEC’s 506(c) standard, the new API will:
1) Verify income. This includes a review of the investor’s IRS documents (W-2s, 1099s, K-1s, 1040s) for the past two years and an additional confirmation that they expect to qualify in the current year.
2) Have a third party verify income (releasing in April): Third party verification must be received from a CPA, attorney, broker dealer, SEC-registered investment advisor or an equivalent entity.
3) Verify assets (releasing in May): An investor must have a net worth of at least one million dollars, excluding the value of their primary residence.
Combined with other features that the Invest service offers, the API will give private placement and equity/debt-based crowdfunding platform owners a full suite of solutions.
TSYS partners with Virgin Money to provide consumer credit processing services for UK customers.
ProfitStars’ Gladiator 
