Finovate Alumni News– December 16, 2013

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
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
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
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…

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MoneyDesktop to Power Kasasa 360 Financial Management Platform

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
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
Categories: FinovateAsia 2013, Kofax
Best of Show: KofaxTurning 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…

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Finovate Alumni News– December 12, 2013

By David Penn Posted on
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
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…

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Lending Club to Sell Loaning Through Community Banks

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
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…

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Heckyl Announces More Than $3.5 Million in Series B Funding

By David Penn Posted on
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
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/19CcyQqThis 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
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 experienceUses biometrics in a practical way that doesn't require expensive, additional hardwareAdds a layer of security that transcends beyond the traditional…

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Flint Raises $2 Million from Verizon Investments

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Flint Mobile
Add another $2 million in funding for mobile payments startup, Flint Mobile.The company said on Tuesday that Verizon Investments was contributing to Flint's Series B round of funding. The additional capital from Verizon Communication's investment division boosts Flint's total funding for this round to $8 million.Flint also announced integration with Apple's Passbook. According to Flint CEO Greg Goldfarb, the idea is to "enable little businesses that don't have a lot of technology resources and no cash register to act with the efficiencies of bigger businesses." The Passbook integration will allow coupons and offers to be added to digital receipts, which can be sent via email or stored in Passbook. Users will also be able to manage payments, send invoices, and receive payments online.Flint offers iOS and Android compatible mobile payments systems that requires no additional hardware or card reader. The technology makes it easier for smaller and nontraditional businesses to…

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