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Innovations at FinovateEurope 2014: Part 2

By David Penn Posted on December 16, 2013
Categories: Luxoft, Matchi, Meniga, Mobino, Money on Toast, MyOrder, myWishBoard, NF Innova, Nostrum Group, Nous.net, payworks, PhotoPay, Pixeliris, Plutus Software, SaaS Markets, Smart Engine, SoftWear Finance, SQLI, Temenos, The Moneyer, Tink, Tootpay, Top Image Systems, Topicus, Toshl, Truephone, Trustev, Yseop

A week ago we introduced you to half of the companies that will be demoing their technologies on stage for FinovateEurope 2014.

Today we’re providing the second half of our scheduled roster for February.

For more information, and to get your tickets, visit our Finovate Europe 2014 page here.

Luxoft’s iStockTrack is an innovative iPad solution providing mobile banking services for private and premium banking clients.

Matchi is an innovative matchmaking platform for banks and innovators to establish collaborative relationships that deliver increased ROI for innovators and banks alike.

Meniga is Europe’s leading white-label PFM provider. The company helps banks improve their businesses through data-mining, cross-sales, and improved retention.

Mobino enables mobile payments for 5 billion people, from any phone, no credit card required.

The Moneyer is the future of online Personal Finance Management.

Money on Toast delivers independent and whole of the market, FCA-regulated financial advice online via its algorithm-powered adviser.

MyOrder provides a m-commerce mobile app that serves businesses in parking, catering, and entertainment.

myWishBoard is the first crowdfunding platform for personal dreams and wishes.

NF Innova’s Personal Experience Module, a part of iBanking product suite, enables banks to offer their customers a truly unique and tailored user experience.

Nostrum Group has built a virtual collection product that automates and optimizes the delinquency management process.

Nous.net’s Spark Feed is a real-time financial data service that helps you understand and predict the markets.

payworks is the provider of a mobile POS, Software-as-a-Service platform that lets developers quickly build payment functionality into their shopper and merchant apps.

PhotoPay’s technology allows users to extract data from any document, paper or electronic, enabling billpay on mobile devices.

Pixeliris’s CopSonic is the first universal contactless mobile payment system powered by our unique technology based on sonic communication.

Plutus Software’s KreditAja credit scoring system is designed to better serve the unbanked and underbanked in Asia.

SaaS Markets is an enterprise cloud marketplace company whose MarketMaker platform helps FIs deploy their own branded, cloud-based business app store.

SmartEngine stands for personalization and target marketing. As pioneers in the field of customer loyalty, Smart Engine is a driver of innovation and a leader in personalized target marketing.

SoftWear Finance’s HACU PLATFORM enables banks to provide customers with the best possible user experience on any platform or device.

SQLI’s Augmented Banking is a new take at Online Banking. It is aimed at positioning a bank at the very center of people’s digital lives.

Temenos’s Treasury Management Dashboard tablet app has been developed for Microsoft Windows 8 and enables the transformation of treasury operations.

Tink is a free personal finance service that allows you to follow your money, where ever you are.

Tootpay’s solution is a mobile financial solution for payments, banking, telecommunications, and remittance industries.

Top Image Systems has leveraged its deep recognition and imaging expertise to develop a powerful suite of image processing applications for mobile devices.

Topicus Finan is a software vendor specializing in enterprise-level financial analysis. Its solution enables banks to provide self-service business lending processes for SMEs.

Toshl Finance is a personal finance manager made fun. Find out where your money is going, keep on top of bills and spending, and set up budgets.

Truphone, the innovative mobile operator, introduces the only global network-based recording solution for the Financial Industry.

Trustev provides a new approach to fraud prevention through a real-time, online identity verification platform, which ensures that merchants know exactly who they are selling to.

Yseop Sales Force Productivity Suite and its email writing application (YseMail) support financial advisors through the entire sales cycle.

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Finovate Alumni News– December 16, 2013

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 16, 2013
Categories: Biometric Signature ID, Bright Funds, FutureAdvisor, Kasasa, MoneyDesktop, Personal Capital, SecondMarket, SocietyOne

MoneyDesktop to power Kasasa 360 Financial Management Platform.

SF Gate reports: SecondMarket allows IRA investment in Bitcoin.

Crowdfund Investor features SocietyOne’s P2P Lending platform.

Digital Journal promotes Personal Capital and FutureAdvisor.

Biometric Signature ID profiled in Huffington Post column on identity proofing.

San Francisco Business Times’ Bay Area BizTalk features Bright Funds.

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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Finovate Alumni News– December 13, 2013

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 13, 2013
Categories: Blackhawk Network, EyeVerify, MasterCard, MoneyDesktop, Tradeshift

Blackhawk Network partners with Opengate to Launch New Prepaid Content in South Africa.

Tradeshift unveils Oracle Gold partnership & supply chain connectivity solution for the Oracle E-Business Suite.

MasterCard launches recruitment drive for e-commerce tech lab in New York City.

EyeVerify featured in KCUR.org column on the “benefits and disadvantages of launching a startup in Kansas City.”

New MoneyDesktop Website Wins Multiple W3 Awards.

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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Bank Opportunity #307: Online/Mobile Gift Cards

By Jim Bruene Posted on December 13, 2013
Categories: Fee Income, Prepaid/gift cards

Regardless of the form factor, a favorite holiday gift is money. Some people like to give crisp 20s, the hand-written check still has a certain charm (as long as the recipient has mobile deposit capture), but the biggest growth area has been the plastic gift card (note 1).

Banks should have owned this trend, at least in the United States. Those 100,000 branches would have been good distribution points (note 2), a place that you trust far more than the express checkout lane at Safeway. But alas, that ship has sailed.

The good news? Financial institutions still have an opportunity to be major players in digital gift car distribution, especially mobile. Here’s why:

Purchase time is reduced to seconds, since you already know the customer
Customers trust you to deliver a valid gift card, and if there is a problem, it’s relatively easy to find someone to help them
Buyers are already logged in to your site; it’s super easy to get a promo in front of them
Funding the card has almost zero cost with “on-us” funds transfers
You can sell a mix of real and/or electronic (see note 3) store cards, prepaid/reloadable Visa/MasterCard/Amex
You can save previous info (recipient name, address, birthday, etc.) so customers can purchase again and again with a single click
Knowing the user’s location and spending patterns, you could deliver targeted card offers
Electronic cards can be stored in the bank’s mobile wallet and used at the POS

A gift card program is not without costs and risks. But you can choose to outsource most of that by working with third-parties such as the Blackhawk Network (see 2012 Finovate demo; Gift Card Mall screenshot below), CardLab (screenshot below), or others.

Bonus #1: For extra credit, you could get into the gift card exchange game, facilitating the buying and selling of preloaded cards. While a unique and potentially valuable service, it has more customer education, service, and fraud issues. See CardPool screenshot below.

Bonus #2: Distribute thin gift cards through ATMs, see Better ATM Services (FinovateSpring 2013 demo).

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CardLab offers hundreds of gift card choices at GiftCard.com (13 Dec 2013)
Note: “Design your own” option mid-page

Blackhawk’s GiftCardMall.com

Cardpool gift card exchange for buying and selling

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Notes:
1. See our July OBR report on prepaid card opportunities (subscription) for more info.
2. Though labor costs would have killed profitability, unless branches invested in POS technology to automate the checkout process
3. GiftCard.com offers the option of printing out a facsimile of an e-card to wrap up for a real-world gift.
4. See our September OBR report (subscription) for another 499 bank opportunities.

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MoneyDesktop to Power Kasasa 360 Financial Management Platform

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 12, 2013
Categories: BancVue, Kasasa, MoneyDesktop

BancVue’s Kasasa 360 Financial Management platform received a bit of a upgrade recently, thanks to a partnership with PFM expert, MoneyDesktop.

By bringing together MoneyDesktop’s expertise in PFM with Kasasa’s national brand of rewards checking and savings, the two hope to drive account acquisition, account retention and increase cross-selling opportunities.

This union of two Finovate Best of Show-winning companies will give Kasasa 360 users the ability to track their finances across different financial institutions in one place and enable them to view their rewards tied to their Kasasa checking and savings accounts.

To get a better idea of the what each company has to offer, check out the live demo videos. Bancvue demonstrated Kasasa at Finovate 2009 and MoneyDesktop last demonstrated at FinovateFall 2013.

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FinovateAsia 2013 Best of Show: Kofax

By David Penn Posted on December 12, 2013
Categories: FinovateAsia 2013, Kofax

Best of Show: Kofax

Turning smartphones and tablets into “powerful customer engagement platforms” is the project of mobile capture specialist, Kofax.

It is also the technology for which the company was awarded its first Best of Show trophy at FinovateAsia in Singapore in November.

Kofax Mobile Capture puts the company’s innovations in image perfection, data extraction, and validation technology to work at what the company calls the “point of origination.” By leveraging the camera technology on the average smartphone or tablet, Kofax empowers users to capture a diverse range of documents and data – including photographs – and transmit them securely and safely to business apps and workflows.

To see Kofax’s Best of Show winning demo, click here.

Why They Won:

In an era of shoppers taking photographs of newly-empty cans and jars instead of scribbling out an old-fashioned grocery list, audiences see Kofax Mobile Capture and they get it. Finding new ways to put our precious smart devices to use will be a winning plan for innovators in the fintech space for some time.

Bottom Line:

The big question for Kofax is how will they continue to leverage the functionality of smartphones and smart devices to make information and data travel more efficiently for consumers and businesses. Fortunately, the company provided a few clues in their demo – and a few more in our interview below.

Interview with Drew Hyatt, Senior Vice President, Mobility, Kofax

Finovate: Why do you think Kofax won Best of Show at FinovateAsia 2013?

Drew Hyatt: Kofax Mobile Capture technology won because it’s a very unique solution that gives consumers the ability to turn the cameras on their smart phones into advanced, real-time scanning/input devices.

This was the first time the solution was shown to the financial community in Asia and the response was incredibly positive. Attendees were very impressed with how the solution can scan a driver’s license or other forms of ID and documents, extract that data, send it back to consumers for validation, and then insert it into the systems of record or whatever type of workflow the financial institution is using. Once they saw the entire process in action, it all made sense.

Finovate: One of the concepts emphasized from the stage in Singapore was the idea of the expanding capabilities of smart devices, especially smart phones, as a key innovation driver, from document capture to authentication. Is there smart device functionality that has been overlooked and has yet to be tapped into?

Drew: Yes. What we’ve developed is still in the very early stages of implementation. Right now the camera is primarily being used to get information from documents and IDs. But in the future, we’ll be able to capture and extract critical data from images of objects and goods and services.

We’ll also see more applications evolve as the processors in the mobile device become more powerful. Essentially everyone will have a very powerful laptop or server in their hands, which will enhance the types of features that financial institutions are able to offer customers.

Finovate: From the stage in Singapore, you teased a few features that you were not able to demo in the allotted time. Can you elaborate on some of those features and use cases?

Drew: One of those use cases was giving customers the ability to pay bills or enter bill information into the bank’s payment system. There’s a growing segment of consumers who don’t like to type information on computers and who just want to tap on options on their mobile devices.

Kofax is eliminating the need to read, copy and type information from bills and enter data manually into fields. The technology is enabling consumers to automate the process and save time by simply capturing and extracting the information with one photo.

Finovate: What can we look forward to from Kofax over the next 3-6 months?

Drew: Kofax has a wide range of products it will be introducing in the near future. Most of these innovations center around expanding the use of consumers’ cameras to make their lives easier while making data capture and data management processes for financial institutions shorter, more efficient and more cost effective.

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Finovate Alumni News– December 12, 2013

By David Penn Posted on December 12, 2013
Categories: BrightScope, Heckyl Technologies, Kony Solutions, MasterCard, MiiCard, Mitek, Striata, Taulia

MasterCard collaborates with Samsung, Commonwealth Bank of Australia to enable contactless payments via NFC.

Heckyl Technologies announces more than $3.5 million raised in Series B funding.

NetBanker: Mobile payments specialist Loop raises $10 million in Series A round.

Striata announced as a finalist in the Best Use of Technology category at 2013 Debt Collection Awards.

miiCard to help power ID verification for myrentalcv’s tenant screening platform.

Spend Matters features Taulia.

Updated Advisor Pages platform from BrightScope drops charge for online profile maintenance.

Mitek and Kony collaborate to Deliver Mobile Photo Bill Pay With Mitek MiSnap Automatic Image Capture.

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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Mobile Payments Specialist Loop Raises $10 Million in Series A

By David Penn Posted on December 11, 2013
Categories: Loop

“We want to simplify things for the user. Loop is a secure, mobile wallet solution accepted nearly everywhere on day one.”

I’m near the end of my briefing with Damien Balsan. Damien is COO for LoopPay, a mobile payments company that is leveraging its expertise in magnetic secure transmission (MST) technology to make it easier for consumers to pay with their mobile devices.

We aren’t talking about the company’s upcoming announcement of a $10 million Series A, an oversubscribed round with participation from a number of undisclosed angel investors. And unlike everybody else in the city, we are also not talking about Seattle’s unseasonably frosty December (then again, LoopPay is a Boston-based startup…no weather sympathy there.)

What we are talking about, though, are things like the looks on the faces of the baristas as Damien pays for his latte with a wave of his smartphone. “It’s not just kids,” he said when I suggested that the excitement for the product among the under 30 set was a good sign. “Even the 70 year old clerk at the hardware store was amazed.”

Damien shows me his wallet, which like the wallets of most people is about the size of a Big Mac sandwich. This is Loop’s Public Enemy #1. And in its place Loop offers a way to load identification, credit, debit, gift, and other cards into a handful of alternative devices, from a finger-drive sized fob (Loop’s first “Appcessory”) now shipping to a variety of charge cases expected to be available in the first quarter of 2014.

It’s worth underscoring that “mobile” does not only mean “mobile phone.” Loop’s technology involves a secure chip, located in the Loop fob or the charge case. This gives the user further options to pay: with the phone in hand, or simply via the fob. “At a restaurant,” Damien said, “you could simply give the fob to the waiter” and your phone stays at the table with you.

There are a number of compelling features that are likely to help Loop stand out in the increasingly crowded mobile payments space. But the company’s technology breakthrough: the ability to project a short-term magnetic field that impersonates the action of swiping a mag stripe through a card reader, appears likely to deliver on the contactless promise of NFC without the hardware adoption headaches of NFC.

And NFC isn’t the only payments-related acronym Loop is challenging. Will Loop’s technology survive the transition to the EMV standard in a few years?

EMV stands for “Europay MasterCard Visa” and is a technology standard commonly used in Europe. EMV swaps out the kind of magnetic stripes Loop’s technology has mastered for a chip-and-PIN approach to initiating transactions (and, arguably, doing a better job at reducing fraud).

While not overly specific, Damien suggested that Loop is already looking at a number of solutions, including the use of a more dynamic field that would be compatible with the EMV standard (cards are typically held in the reader in the EMV case, rather than quickly “swiped” through).

Loop’s business plan is largely B2C, though the company is looking to build relationships with phone makers, and to have those manufacturers include Loop in their units.

The company was founded by Will Graylin and George Wallner, both long-time veterans of the payments industry. Will was previously founder and CEO of ROAM Data, a mobile POS and mobile payment solutions provider bought by Ingenico. George had founded and served as CEO of Hypercom, a leading global POS provider eventually acquired by VeriFone.

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Lending Club to Sell Loaning Through Community Banks

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 11, 2013
Categories: Lending Club

P2P lending network, Lending Club, is changing the way it is viewed by traditional banks.

Now Lending Club is trying to cultivate another corner of the traditional financial industry by selling its loans to community banks that need to diversify their asset portfolios. It has agreements with seven small banks who buy loans that Lending Club originates and services, and who now account for almost 10% of its financing. The company is also working with some of those banks to make personal loans to their customers — a service that Lending Club and its partners see as an opportunity to compete with bigger banks like Citigroup (NYSE:C) and JPMorgan Chase (JPM) that dominate the credit card market.

One such institution using the new service is MainStreet Bank, which has been buying Lending Club loans since August. The bank, which has $272 million in assets and 5 branches, has purchased more than $7 million in loans from Lending Club, at $2 million in assets per month.

As of this month, the San Francisco-based company has made $3 billion in loans and is planning to expand into small business loans.

Lending Club demonstrated at the very first Finovate in 2007 and at Finovate 2008. The company plans to go public next year.

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Heckyl Announces More Than $3.5 Million in Series B Funding

By David Penn Posted on December 11, 2013
Categories: Heckyl Technologies

In a round led by IDG Ventures India, Heckyl Technologies raised more than $3.5 million in new capital. Also participating in the round were Seedfund Advisors, a previous investor, and angel investor, Rajiv Dalal. The company’s total funding now stands at $4.75 million.

Heckyl Technologies provides real-time financial information and analytics for researchers, traders, and investors. Their platform includes news, market, sentiment, and predictive data analysis, covering more than 35,000 companies and more than 3,500 non-listed entities around the world.

The company made headlines earlier this year for taking first place at the UK Trade & Investment contest in June. Heckyl also was named the fastest growing enterprise startup in the Indian brokerage industry.

Founded in 2010, Heckyl Technologies demoed its FIND 2.0 (Financial In News & Data) technology at FinovateEurope 2013. See the company in action here.

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Finovate Alumni News– December 11, 2013

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on December 11, 2013
Categories: BehavioSec, Cachet Financial Solutions, Doxo, Lending Club, NICE Systems, SAGE SA, TSYS

DMG Consulting ranks NICE as the speech analytics market share leader for the fifth consecutive year, and as the contact center WFO market share leader for the first half of 2013.

Cachet Financial Solutions partners with YellowPepper to bring mobile deposit technology to Latin American Marketplace

Midway Sewer District launches on doxo; more than 8% of customers go paperless in the first 90 days.

See BehavioSec’s Best of Show winning demo from FinovateAsia 2013.

Pymnts.com talks with Jonathan Hancock of TSYS on curbing card-not-present fraud.

Sage adds daily spending limits, funding rules to their Business Prepaid Visa Card mobile app.

American Banker reports: Lending Club Targets Small Banks with Personal-Loan Push http://bit.ly/19CcyQq

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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FinovateAsia 2013 Best of Show: BehavioSec

By David Penn Posted on December 10, 2013
Categories: BehavioSec, FinovateAsia 2013

Best of Show: BehavioSec

“Nice! BehavioSec is the most interesting bit of fintech so far today, but the day is still young! #finovateasia”

–Paul A. Chapman via Twitter (@pchap10k)

In winning Best of Show for a second time (the first was at FinovateSpring 2012 in San Francisco), Neil Costigan’s BehavioSec revealed that it has plenty to show – and tell.

As a specialist in the field of biometric authentication, BehavioSec has leveraged its “continuously authenticating” algorithms to provide security solutions for e-merchants and mobile commerce.

And as a crowd-pleasing presentation of security technology, BehavioSec’s keystroke and gesture pattern-based authentication demonstrates just enough of the “wow” factor to make audiences feel they are seeing tomorrow’s technology today.

To see the video of BehavioSec’s Best of Show winning demo, click here.

Why They Won:

Removes friction from the end user’s experience
Uses biometrics in a practical way that doesn’t require expensive, additional hardware
Adds a layer of security that transcends beyond the traditional PIN

Bottom Line:

BehavioSec emphasizes removing the burden of security from the shoulders of end users, and gives technology the ability to improve over time due to continuous authentication provide a unique solution in the security space.

Interview with Neil Costigan, CEO, BehavioSec

Finovate: When you won Best of Show at FinovateSpring 2012, you said the single most compelling benefit of BehavioSec’s mobile security solution was “transparency” and a “fantastic user experience.” What has been the most significant development in BehavioSec that has led to winning Best of Show again a year later?

Costigan: I think our success in the market throughout 2013 has led to a “feedback loop” where we have really gained customer suggestions to enhance the technology.

I think it shows that we listen and improve, and that we speak more from real world experience now.

Finovate: Also a year ago you talked about how your technology helped “identify abnormal behavior” and that you hoped to expand the solution by offering to help customers decide “appropriate next steps aligned with the level of risk.” Have you continued down this path?

Costigan: Yes, we’ve opened up our APIs and formats and added the idea of policy triggers. We’ve also integrated more with the ecosystem that is around us.

Finovate: A point of emphasis for BehavioSec seems to be removing the burden of security from the shoulders of the end user. Why is this important?

Costigan: In security, the ‘user’ is actually the weak link. Make the security too much of a burden and the end user tends to ignore it, or subvert it for their own convenience. Think of password managers being like the user propping up a big safe door with a chair. The user expects the bank, payment service, or eCommerce site to solve the security issue, not be a part of it.

Finovate: What are some of the advantages of innovating in a country like Sweden? In what ways are Northern European markets different from those in other parts of Europe when it comes to security issues?

Costigan: Actually it can be a burden!

I’m not from the Nordics myself. I’m Irish. So I find this new market fascinating, how different it is from the rest of Europe.

What I have picked up over the last few years is that there is little to no fraud here. Hard to be selling anti-fraud solutions to people who don’t need them! I am half-joking.

The Internet removes these barriers. I believe this Northern European market is a trendsetter for a technology update. What works here tends to mirror what will happen elsewhere. Our references here are taken as a good bellwether of what will happen in other markets.

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