Alumni News

How Digital Identity Tech Helps Businesses Fight Deepfakes and Battle Bots

How Digital Identity Tech Helps Businesses Fight Deepfakes and Battle Bots
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Jumio, Thought Leadership
Photo by asim alnamat from Pexels

Digital identity technology plays an increasingly large role in financial services, and the current global public health crisis has accelerated this trend.

We spoke with Dean Nicolls, VP of Marketing for Jumio, to learn what the digital identity innovator is doing to help banks and other enterprises leverage this technology for their businesses. We also take a look at how the technology has been deployed to help deal with with coronavirus pandemic.

Finovate: Jumio announced that it is providing free identity verification services for organizations involved in COVID-19 relief. Which organizations qualify and why is Jumio launching this effort?

Dean Nicolls: Jumio launched Jumio Go for Good in March 2020 to help organizations involved in relief and assistance during this global health crisis quickly and accurately identity proof their patients, students and workers to ensure critical services can be delivered and trusted. Powered by AI, Jumio Go provides enterprises with a real-time, secure and reliable way to verify remote users, ensuring the person enrolling or logging in is who they claim to be online. 

Jumio Go is becoming increasingly important in helping organizations across a wide range of industries reliably onboard and serve a number of important use cases (e.g., new account onboarding, fraud detection, AML/KYC compliance), where verification speed is critical. With Jumio Go, identity verification decisions are rendered in seconds, not minutes or hours, which translates to significantly higher conversions, lower fraud rates, and improved customer satisfaction.

Through September 30, 2020, Jumio will provide free identity verification services via its AI-powered, fully automated solution, Jumio Go, to any qualifying organization directly involved in helping with COVID-19 relief including (but not limited to): healthcare, online learning, and the general population.

Finovate: What services are included in this offering?

Nicolls: Jumio Go For Good is powered by Jumio Go, the only fully automated digital identity verification solution on the market capable of defending against bots, advanced spoofing attacks and sophisticated deepfakes, which are often leveraged for fraud.

By leveraging AI, Jumio Go works to prohibit bad actors from fabricating online accounts. As deepfakes, bots, and sophisticated spoofing attacks continue to rise, Jumio has integrated certified liveness detection to detect when photos, videos or even realistic 3D masks are used instead of actual selfies to create online accounts. Additionally, Jumio Go provides organizations with a real-time, secure, and reliable way to authenticate remote users, ensuring the person enrolling into a new service is who they claim to be in the real world. 

Finovate: Identity verification has become an issue for small businesses seeking COVID-19 relief-related funding. What is the specific problem these businesses are facing and how can digital identity verification solutions help?

Nicolls: Small businesses across America are feeling the financial stress from shelter-in-place restrictions that have millions of people taking refuge from the outbreak by staying at home and working remotely. Recent changes have brought about a new question for the financial industry: how can lenders properly evaluate small businesses when they can’t physically walk into their office? For reference, SBA lenders are those who work with the Small Business Administration and provide financial assistance to small businesses through government-backed loans. The implementation of online identity verification solutions helps SBA lenders vet small business owners to ensure they follow compliance mandates (KYC/AML) by verifying their digital identities. Instead of requiring small-business owners to visit a local branch office, they can verify their online identity from the safety of their home, allowing lenders to effectively manage the influx of requests, and small-business owners the peace of mind knowing they’re being supported at this time.

In the future, identity verification solutions will become crucial for SBA lenders to establish trust remotely with an increasing number of remote users who simply do not want to visit a branch office. Jumio Go verifies government-issued IDs and ensures that the individual in the selfie matches the picture on the ID. A biometric-based approach to authentication helps expedite onboarding while also deterring  fraud by as much as 90%.

As the number of SBA lenders continues to increase, online identity verification will rapidly become a vital competitive advantage in terms of quickly distributing capital to small-business owners and nonprofits on the front lines, while also preventing cyberattacks.

Finovate: What are the key technologies behind identity verification solutions such as those offered by Jumio? AI? Advanced machine learning? What capabilities do these technologies enable that would not be possible otherwise?

Nicolls: Jumio launched Jumio Go, the company’s first real-time, fully automated identity verification solution, in November 2019. It is designed to remove friction from the user onboarding process, while preventing online identity fraud and meeting AML and KYC compliance mandates. Jumio leverages the power of informed AI and equips modern enterprises with instant online identity verification that delivers a simple and intuitive experience for good customers. 

There are three critical ingredients to informed AI:

  • Data Breadth: Jumio has verified 250 million digital identities to date. This gives Jumio a big leg-up in developing smarter algorithms. Not only is the data set very large, but it’s also very deep. Jumio’s database has seen large volumes of each one of the more than 3,500 ID document types/subtypes from more than 200 countries and territories.
  • Ground Truth: Jumio has leveraged supervised AI from the very beginning. This means Jumio employs identity verification experts who tag every identity verification based on an analysis of the security features and physical characteristics of an ID and selfie. These verification experts have spent thousands of hours reviewing and verifying government-issued IDs from all over the world which helps train our algorithms and make them iteratively smarter. 
  • Production Data: Jumio’s AI algorithms are trained on real-world production data, not purchased data sets. Jumio AI models are trained on images of ID documents and selfies where the images may be blurry, dimly lit, or have excessive glare which means our models are more robust and scalable than models trained on perfectly captured photos. This also helps us avoid bias since the data has been tagged by trained verification experts. 

Finovate: Where is adoption of identity verification technology most robust? Are there industries where the technology would be especially valuable, but adoption rates have been slower than expected? If so, which industries and what challenges to adoption are they facing?

Nicolls: Traditional banks have been surprisingly slow to adopt online identity verification and take digital transformation seriously. When you’re talking about traditional banks, there are numerous divisions including retail banking, private banking (for high net worth individuals), business banking and brokerage accounts. While all banks need to comply with KYC/AML checks when new accounts are created and have defined customer identification programs (CIP) in place, the methods they employ to establish a consumer’s digital identity are varied. Many traditional banks leverage non-documentary approaches to corroborate identity and this often involves pinging third-party databases or credit bureaus based on self-reported information from the consumer (e.g., name, address and date of birth). 

Unfortunately, these methods are not overly reliable. In fact, Gartner recommends that identity proofing solutions that rely on shared secret verification, such as out-of-wallet knowledge questions, or memorable personal data, be phased out. The concept of high-memorability, low-availability data has become archaic since the rise of social media and the subsequent plethora of breached data available through underground organizations. By requiring a picture of a government-issued ID, and pairing it with a corroborating selfie (which should include an element of liveness detection), banks can have much higher levels of identity assurance than traditional approaches and can deter as much as 90% of attempted fraud.

Finovate: Lastly, are there any upcoming announcements or initiatives coming in the next few weeks that we should be looking out for?

Nicolls: Jumio is launching a new suite of address services that can be used to validate and corroborate addresses with independent, third-party sources. Historically, Jumio has only relied on the ID document itself and a corroborating selfie as the fraud signals. Jumio Address Services actually consist of two distinct services:  

  • Jumio Address Validation: Determines if the address extracted from a government-issued ID (e.g., passport, driver’s license, ID card) exists in the real world.
  • Jumio Proof of Residence: Checks to see if the person being verified actually lives at the physical address extracted from their ID document. In the U.S., if the user moved, we would return whether the address provided matches the most recent address on file.

With these new add-on features, customers can use this data as additional fraud signals that help enterprises know if the person creating a new account is in fact who they claim to be. These services will be sold with our current identity verification solutions to provide a more holistic picture of an online user. 

Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Jumio has been a Finovate alum since its debut at FinovateFall in 2013. In the company’s most recent appearance on the Finovate stage at FinovateAsia in 2018, Jumio demonstrated how its Netverify Identity Verification solution used liveness detection to prove an individual’s physical “presence” at the moment of the transaction.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Voice Authentication Specialist Illuma Labs Secures New Investment

Voice Authentication Specialist Illuma Labs Secures New Investment
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Funding, Illuma Labs
Photo by Mirza Causevic from Pexels

Illuma Labs, creator of the real-time audio authentication platform for secure voice communications, Illuma Shield, has received a joint investment from The Veridian Group (a CUSO of Veridian Cedit Union) and Texas Dow Employees Credit Union (TDECU). Terms of the funding were not disclosed.

The investment comes as a result of Illuma Labs’ participation in VentureTech, an annual program that helps fintechs seeking funding to secure investment opportunities from within the credit union industry. Illuma was part of VentureTech’s 2019 cohort, which also featured fellow Finovate alums Wizely Finance, Terafina, Plinqit, and Pinkaloo. VentureTech was launched by The Veridian Group, Open Technology Solutions, and CUNA Strategic Services in 2018, and will hold its third event this fall.

“Instead of waiting for technology to come to market, VentureTech allows the credit union industry to be proactive in building its competitive advantage in the digital space,” President of The Veridian Group, Nick Evens explained at last year’s conference, which saw Illuma Labs take home top honors. “By recognizing and investing in promising fintech, we’re providing innovative, digital-first solutions that will drive the Movement forward.”

Iowa-based Veridian Credit Union, the FI served by The Veridian Group, has more than 244,000 members and $4.5 billion in assets. Texas Dow Employees Credit Union, with $3.7 billion in assets and more than 263,000 members, is the biggest credit union in the Houston, Texas area, and the fourth largest CU in the state.

Founded in 2016 and making its Finovate debut last year at FinovateSpring, Illuma Labs provides real-time voice authentication for customers around the world. With a technology that has its origins in R&D projects with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, the company’s solutions support secure communications in verticals ranging from financial services and insurance to e-commerce. Illuma Shield, the company’s flagship solution, leverages signal processing, machine learning, and AI to offer call centers a real-time voice authentication solution that analyzes voices in natural conversation and provides a high authentication accuracy rate in a short period of time.

Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Illuma Labs was founded in 2016 by Milind Borkar (CEO) and Jeremy Whittington (CTO).

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

ThetaRay Brings AML Solution to Banco Santander

ThetaRay Brings AML Solution to Banco Santander
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, ThetaRay
Photo by Logan Kirschner from Pexels

A newly announced partnership between ThetaRay and Banco Santander will enable correspondent banks to better defend themselves against cybercrime.

Specifically, Banco Santander will use ThetaRay’s anti-money laundering technology to detect activity in SWIFT traffic, risk indicators, and KYC data that may be indicative of money laundering. Banco already has begun deploying ThetaRay’s anomaly detection solution and anticipates a full global rollout “over the next months.”

“We are proud that a financial institution as universally respected as Santander Bank has chosen our AML solution for correspondent banking,” ThetaRay CEO Mark Gazit said. “Recent progress with Partnerships Unit makes me feel Santander is the best financial platform to partner with.”

ThetaRay leverages big data analytics and machine learning algorithms to provide organizations with automatic, real-time detection of suspicious behavior. This enables firms to move faster to address potential threats and to initiate early remediation efforts sooner. ThetaRay’s Investigation Center, designed specifically for the needs of correspondent banking, gives Santander complete access to the data lineage, as well, enabling the bank to conduct extensive forensic investigations to understand the reasoning behind every warning generated by the system.

“ThetaRay’s solution will further improve our ability to detect the earliest signs of money laundering and uncover unknown originating risks,” Santander Global VP for Global Transaction Banking CIB, Carlos Gutierrez said.

ThetaRay demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall in 2015, showing how its fraud and anomaly detection solution helps increase the efficiency and accuracy of cybersecurity systems. Last month, as part of the company’s effort to help financial institutions manage new cybersecurity challenges during the coronavirus crisis, ThetaRay launched FAST START. The new offering packages ThetaRay’s financial crime technology into a cloud-deployable solution that banks can get up and running within 30 days. FAST START is available in three different packages – AML Alert Triage, AML Detection and Monitoring, and Enterprise Fraud Prevention -geared toward the specific kinds of cyberthreats FIs are dealing with.

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in both Israel and the U.S., ThetaRay has raised more than $66 million in funding from investors including ABN AMRO Ventures and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Digital Banking Solution Provider Meniga Raises $9.4 Million in New Funding

Digital Banking Solution Provider Meniga Raises $9.4 Million in New Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Funding, Meniga
Photo by Niki Nagy from Pexels

As a company, the only thing better than a customer that loves your services and solutions is a customer that wants a piece of the action as well. That’s the happy situation digital banking solution provider Meniga finds itself in; the multiple-time Finovate Best of Show winner has just secured a $9.4 million (€ 8.5 million) strategic investment from current customers Grupo Credíto Agrícola, UniCredit, and Groupe BPCE, which led the round.

The investment, which takes Meniga’s total equity funding to more than $43 million, will help fuel the company’s R&D activities, as well as bolster its sales and service teams. Also participating in the round were current investors Velocity Capital, Industrifonden, and Frumtak Ventures.

Having Groupe BPCE, the second largest banking group in France, as both a customer and an investor is no accident. “Partnering closely with our customers is a key part of our strategy to be the preferred digital innovation partner to our clients,” Meniga co-founder and CEO Georg Ludviksson explained. “An equity relationship is an excellent way to strengthen such partnerships and we appreciate the continued vote of confidence and growing business we have with our impressive global client base.”

Meniga’s funding announcement comes amid a flurry of activity worldwide from the London-based company. In April, Meniga partnered with UniCredit to offer an enhanced version of its smart banking app in the Czech Republic. Also that month, Meniga teamed up with payments and transaction services firm Worldline to help boost digital customer engagement via personalization. Opening a new office in Warsaw, Poland in March, Meniga began the year by receiving its AISP license from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the U.K.

“The FCA license is an important milestone for Meniga,” Ludviksson said when the license was granted this February, “We will now be able to test new innovations against the Open Banking APIs and with real use cases, which will help us develop products of outstanding quality.”

Meniga’s technology is used by more than 90 million digital banking customers in +30 countries. Founded in 2009, the company most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall in 2019.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

FIS Unveils Portal to Help SMEs Access PPP Loan Forgiveness

FIS Unveils Portal to Help SMEs Access PPP Loan Forgiveness
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, FIS
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

There may be no second acts in politics. But with the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) rolling out the next phase in its loan forgiveness initiative for SMEs, it’s good to see that the economic rescue plan has another shot at getting it right.

We chronicled some of the challenges that PPP 1.0 faced. Fortunately, this time around, many of the cooperating financial institutions, financial services companies, and fintechs are in a better, more informed position to help make sure the businesses that need the help actually get the help.

One example of this is the new portal powered by the FIS Real-time Lending Platform. This portal, available to FIs and merchants participating in the SBA’s PPP, automates and streamlines the process of applying for loan forgiveness under the provisions of the new program.

“As a critical infrastructure provider, FIS is focused on making it as easy as possible for small businesses and merchants to complete the loan forgiveness process and help them get back to business as soon as possible,” FIS Head of Global Core Banking and Channels Rob Lee said. “Our new portal uses advanced automation technology to handle the entire process, reducing the time and complexity for businesses in getting forgiveness of the essential loans that are critical to their business.”

Using pre-filled applications and documentation uploads for efficiency, the portal figures loan forgiveness amounts, and allows FIs to review and e-sign the requests. The document packages are sent to the borrower and bank for e-signing and then, via the portal, the materials are submitted to the SBA for validation. The portal is 100% digital and can be easily deployed by banks who can get started by uploading a file of eligible loans from their current PPP customers. FIS notes that via its Real-Time Lending Platform, it has facilitated “billions” in PPP loan funds through lenders to SMEs whose businesses have been affected by the COVID-19 crisis.

A Finovate alum since 2013, FIS made fintech headlines last month when the company unveiled a new venture arm and a plan to invest $150 million in fintech startups. Last year, FIS was part of fintech’s biggest transactions of 2019 with its $34 billion acquisition of fellow Finovate alum Worldpay.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Ephesoft Brings Power of Context to Accounts Payable with Semantik Invoice

Ephesoft Brings Power of Context to Accounts Payable with Semantik Invoice
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Ephesoft
Photo by Kevin Ku from Pexels

The new data acquisition solution from Ephesoft will bring 97% accuracy and 30% cost-savings to companies looking for ways to enhance their accounts payable processes.

“With more than half of invoices still processed manually and taking on average 8.5 days, AP processing is ripe for innovation,” Ephesoft founder and CEO Ike Kavas explained. “(T)here is a market need for solutions that are highly scalable and have a quick time to value.”

Semantik Invoice, unveiled today, is an out-of-the-box, cloud-based platform that leverages AI and automation to extract critical information from invoices – regardless of format. The solution imports the data into the user’s existing workflow and business systems – Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), or other tools – for processing. Semantik Invoice recognizes and analyzes critical data fields including dates, rates, IDs, amounts due, and more, providing businesses with a low-code, no-code option that can be quickly set up and started in a production capacity.

Kavas added that the technology also helps businesses future-proof their AP processes. “During times of uncertainty and budget tightening, companies should be asking themselves if the products they are investing in will integrate with future products and solutions,” he said. “Ephesoft has designed this SaaS-based solution to leverage the power of context in accounts payable with scalability and agility for future innovations.”

Ephesoft most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring (now FinovateWest) in 2018. The company showed how its technology uncovers business intelligence for mortgage document processing by leveraging data mining and analytics.

Ephesoft began this year partnering with Toyota Finance New Zealand to accelerate loan application and settlement processing. In the months since, the company has launched a new protocol, Context Driven Productivity, that transforms flat data – information that is stored in traditional formats like PDFs, emails, and spreadsheets – into contextually enriched semantic data. This discipline was implemented in the company’s Ephesoft Transact 2020 platform.

Ephesoft also bolstered its executive ranks this spring, appointing Doug Lee to the post of Chief Revenue Officer. Lee arrived at the company after holding executive sales positions as SaaS companies such as Puppet, PatientPop, and Smarsh.

Founded in 2010 and based in Irvine, California, Ephesoft has raised $15 million in funding from investors including Mercato Partners.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Eltropy and Prisma Campaigns Help Credit Unions Better Engage Members

Eltropy and Prisma Campaigns Help Credit Unions Better Engage Members
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Eltropy, Prisma Campaigns
Photo by Sam Nam from Pexels

Text messaging platform Eltropy and omnichannel marketing innovator Prisma Campaigns have teamed up to help credit unions communicate more effectively with their customers. The new solution, which integrates technologies from both companies, will enable credit unions to leverage online banking, mobile banking, text, and SMS channels to launch targeted marketing campaigns.

“Increasingly, credit unions are hearing from members that they want (to use) text messaging to communicate,” Global Solution Manager at Prisma Campaigns Gastón Vizziano said. “Prisma Campaign’s omnichannel approach and ease-of-use of Eltropy’s platform make this new partnership a powerful value proposition for credit unions.”

Eltropy offers financial services companies a secure and compliant way to engage with their customers on the messaging platforms they prefer such as iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat. Demonstrating its technology at FinovateSpring (now FinovateWest) in 2018, Eltropy leverages AI to analyze 24 data points within message conversations in order to provide behavioral analytics that can guide institutions when marketing products and services to their customers.

Prisma Campaigns CEO Felipe Gil praised Eltropy’s ability to “give credit unions exactly what they want – personalized communications capabilities, in a way that is uncomplicated, secure, and compliant.” Founded in 2017, Prisma Campaigns leverages customer data to enable financial services companies to build and launch targeted, personalized marketing campaigns on both digital and non-digital channels. The Boston, Massachusetts-based company, which made its Finovate debut in 2018, partnered with fellow Finovate alum Jumio last month to empower credit unions to adopt automated digital ID verification technology.

Eltropy was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Milpitas, California. Last month, the company announced that it had inked agreements with 12 credit unions ranging in size from $11 million Paducah Teachers Federal Credit Union to $3.92 billion BCU. Company CEO and co-founder Ashish Garg credited Eltropy’s relationship with the Credit Union National Association (CUNA) for its ability to secure the trust of these smaller, community-oriented financial institutions.

“We have been signing an average of two credit unions a week for the last seven weeks,” Garg said. “Team Eltropy is thankful for its partnership with CUNA and state leagues across the country who have helped accelerate our business by spreading awareness of our product throughout the industry.”

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Currencycloud and Carta Worldwide Power Real-Time FX at the Point of Sale

Currencycloud and Carta Worldwide Power Real-Time FX at the Point of Sale
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Currency Cloud, Daily news
Photo by Ithalu Dominguez from Pexels

B2B cross-border solutions provider Currencycloud is teaming up with Canadian transaction processor Carta Worldwide to bring transparency, accuracy, and cost-competitiveness to international transactions.

“This is an exciting partnership and the first of its kind, combining our respective skills sets to drive innovation and give customers further transparency on their international card payments,” Currencycloud co-founder and Head of Strategic Partnerships Steve Lemon said. He noted that the partnership would put customers “at the center of the offer” and enable issuers to offer real-time foreign exchange rates at the point of sale to fintechs and challenger banks.

The two companies said in a statement that they are presently in the development phase of the collaboration. Their first joint offering is expected in the second half of 2020.

“We are very excited about this partnership,” Carta Worldwide Managing Director EMEA Richard Wray added. “Carta’s innovative processing capabilities collaborating with one of the most reputable platforms in the industry will enable us to deliver some real change to customers across the world.”

Named one of Canada’s top fintechs by the Digital Finance Institute, Carta Worldwide specializes in processing mobile and prepaid transactions. Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Ontario, Canada, and London, U.K., the company includes Vodafone, Westpac NZ, and Novum Bank among its customers.

Offering 85 APIs across four modules – Collect, Convert, Pay, and Manage – that support the full, B2B cross border payments workflow, Currencycloud provides enterprise-grade payments solutions to partners such as Visa and Starling Bank. Headquartered in London and founded in 2012, Currencycloud is regulated in the U.K., the E.U., the U.S., and Canada. The company began the year with an $80 million Series E fundraising round that featured participation of new backers such as Siam Commercial Bank, SBI Group, and Visa – whose SVP and Treasurer Colleen Ostrowski joined Currencycloud’s board of directors.

More recently, Currencycloud announced a partnership with Derivative Path to enable community and regional banks to offer more FX and interest rate derivative trading options to customers. The company has been a Finovate alum since 2012, and demonstrated its Global Collections solution at our west coast conference in 2018.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Bento for Business Names New CEO; Partners with San Francisco Achievers

Bento for Business Names New CEO; Partners with San Francisco Achievers
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Bento for Business, Daily news
Photo by Kaboompics .com from Pexels

Small business expense management platform Bento for Business has a new man at the top. The company announced today that Guido Schulz will join the company as its new CEO. Schulz will team up with co-founder Farhan Ahmad who will remain as chairman of the company’s board of directors.

“Bento for Business has built an incredibly intuitive product that directly addresses the core cash flow and operational problems faced by the businesses that drive much of our economy, create jobs, and help build our communities,” Shulz explained. He called expense management “the single largest area of opportunity” for small businesses.

Founded in 2014, Bento for Business provides expense management solutions that are designed specifically for small businesses and nonprofits. Bento offers business debit cards with spending controls – including virtual cards that can be issued and used instantly – as well as Bento Pay, a B2B digital payments service that only requires the fund recipient’s email address in order to send money. Bento made its Finovate debut at our west coast conference in 2015.

“As we’ve reached a new phase of growth ourselves, bringing on Guido is an important step for delivering the same exceptional experience to businesses as Bento’s footprint continues to expand,” Ahmad said. He praised Schulz’s record in scaling companies and said he looked forward to working together to “deliver a healthy bottom line for businesses through unprecedented visibility and control over monthly expenses.”

Schulz comes to Bento from global hospitality payment gateway provider Merchant Link, where he was Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer. The company was acquired by Shift4 last August. Previously, Schulz worked for Bluefin Payment Systems, where he was also Chief Commercial Officer and, before that, at AFEX as Global EVP and Chief Strategy Officer. He was educated at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and was a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame.

Bento’s C-suite addition comes almost a year after the company bolstered its executive ranks with the addition of Paula Bachman as Chief Financial Officer. The news also arrives as the company announces a partnership with San Francisco Achievers, a youth development program that is using the Bento for Business app to manage scholarship funds and learn responsible budgeting habits.

“We have an orientation for our scholarship students,” Duane Wilson, the program’s Executive Director explained. “For some of them, this is their very first card. It allows them to have the experience.”

Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Bento for Business has raised $18.5 million in funding. The company includes Edison Partners, Anthemis Group, and Comcast Ventures among its investors.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Post-Compromise Fraud Specialist Breach Clarity Partners with Xtensifi

Post-Compromise Fraud Specialist Breach Clarity Partners with Xtensifi
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Breach Clarity, Daily news
Photo by FOX from Pexels

A collaboration between fraud prevention and detection company Breach Clarity and digital consulting firm Xtensifi will bring additional machine learning technology to bear in the battle against cybercrime in financial services. The new integration will enable the company’s Breach Clarity Premium for Financial Services platform to empower banks, credit unions, brokerage firms and insurance companies to address the impact of data breaches – from financial losses to identity theft – after they happen.

“We sought out a company we knew would execute our vision and provide us with the knowledge and expertise to get these entirely new products to market,” Breach Clarity CEO Jim Van Dyke said. He credited Xtensifi not only for helping develop the new platform, but also for giving the company the ability to market its technology to a new client base: financial services companies. “Initially consumer focused, we are now able to provide financial institutions with hyper-personalized, customer-level breach risk intelligence, capable of making a measurable difference in a variety of areas – from customer engagement to fraud loss mitigation,” Van Dyke explained.

Founded in 2019 and based in Walnut Creek, California, Breach Clarity analyzes more than 1,000 elements to gauge and score the risk level of a data breach. The company’s proprietary, machine learning algorithm analyzes 50 data breaches a week on average, and Breach Clarity said that it has 4,000+ such incidents in its database. This resource is maintained by the Identity Theft Resource Center.

“Breach Clarity is working to revolutionize the fraud detection, prevention, and mitigation landscape by providing a greater degree of transparency into breaches and their effects,” Xtensifi CEO George Kelley said. “Providing the industry with more clarity, confidence, and direction around breaches will ultimately result in stronger consumer financial health and safety.”

Like a number of companies in the fintech space, Breach Clarity is making its services easier to access during the COVID-19 crisis. More than a month ago, the company announced that it was waiving per-user costs for financial institutions using its Breach Clarity Premium for Financial Services solution for six months.

Breach Clarity co-founder and COO Al Pascual underscored the value of these services at a time when shifting computer use patterns – from business offices to private homes – during the global pandemic have given rise to a shifting set of risks. “As cybercriminals experiment with new forms of cyber scams,” Pascual said, “newly remote workers and the systems to which they are attached will be a high value target.”

Breach Clarity demonstrated its consumer-facing solution last year at FinovateFall. A specialist in post-compromise fraud, Breach Clarity enables users to search any publicly-reported data breach and receive a fraud risk rating, a list of top identity-holder risks, and a set of action steps ranging from freezing credit to modifying alerts to limit exposure to potential identity theft and related cybercrimes.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Mambu Teams Up with Tide; Europe’s Top Regtechs; Buy Now Pay Later Goes Global

Mambu Teams Up with Tide; Europe’s Top Regtechs; Buy Now Pay Later Goes Global
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Apiax, Daily news, Fenergo, Finovate Global, Mambu, NetGuardians, Onfido

Mambu, the cloud-based banking platform based in Germany, is partnering with U.K. business banking platform Tide to power the company’s revolving credit facilities and overdrafts for small businesses.

“There is a need to be flexible, agile, and customer-centric in the design of financial products,” Managing Director of Mambu EMEA Eelco-Jan Boonstra explained. “Legacy technology constraints can undermine even the best innovation strategy.”

The collaboration will enable Tide to overhaul its product suite in order to better serve customers in a number of locations around the world. This includes offering larger overdrafts, credit cards, and invoice financing, as well as enabling Tide members to lend to each other leveraging solutions managed by Mambu.

“When today’s customers evaluate financial institutions, they no longer compare different banks, they compare experiences,” Boonstra said. “We see this partnership approach as the future of banking technology.”

Regtech is all the rage in fintech these days. From helping businesses negotiate a wave of new regulation – from GDPR to PSD2 – to empowering firms to combat fraud, companies involved in developing technologies to ensure that businesses are getting and staying compliant are enjoying rare attention from the rest of the industry.

A recent review of top regtech startups in Europe in Fintech News was an example of the light increasingly shining on these companies and their vital role in supporting a fintech industry that a growing number of financial services customers – and other businesses – are relying on.

The review cited research from KPMG that anticipates regtech spending in 2022 climbing to $76 billion. Analysis from XAnge, a European VC firm, finds approximately 140 regtech startups in the E.U., divided fairly equally between compliance management, KYC/AML, and risk management solutions.

We were especially please to see that, of the ten regtech startups highlighted in the feature, four of the companies are Finovate alums. Apiax and NetGuardians, which most recently demoed at FinovateEurope and at FinovateAsia respectively, both hail from Switzerland. Apiax, recently profiled here on the Finovate blog, offers a comprehensive compliance solution that leverages APIs to integrate its compliance rules into digital processes. NetGuardians focuses on Big Data and uses it to help banks fight fraud and automate compliance.

Also earning recognition on the top European regtech list was Ireland’s Fenergo. The company, founded in 2009 and having made its Finovate debut back in 2012, specializes in client onboarding and account opening solutions for banks and financial services companies. Just this week, Fenergo announced that it was launching a new remote account opening solution in both the EMEA and APAC regions.

Half of the companies on Fintech News’ regtech roster are from the U.K. The Finovate alum among this group, Onfido, leverages automated machine learning, optical character recognition (OCR), and other technologies to provide identity verification to combat fraud. Demoing its technology at both FinovateEurope and FinovateFall in 2018, the company earlier this month announced a major $100 million fundraising that brought the company’s total capital to more than $182 million.

“We’ve naturally chosen the grow-fast path because we strongly feel that the time to solve the digital access problem is overdue, and urgently needs to be solved, for good,” Onfido CEO and co-founder Husayn Kassai said. “We didn’t fundraise to just get to the next milestone, we need the funding as we’re changing the world.”

The Buy Now Pay Later Revolution is sweeping the world. Check out Finovate Senior Research Analyst Julie Muhn’s coverage of Tencent’s $300 million investment in Australia-based Afterpay this week:

Tencent’s move comes shortly after its rival Ant Financial took a minority stake in Afterpay competitor Klarna. Afterpay has 3x the web traffic of Klarna and 1.5x the traffic of its other major competitor Affirm.

The buy-now-pay-later segment of fintech has been heating up this year, despite– or perhaps because of– the current economic and health crises.

Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world.

Asia-Pacific

  • V Capital, and advisory firm based in Malaysia, and U.S.-based Cross River Bank partner to apply for a digital banking license in the country.
  • Hong Kong-based Oriente, a fintech that provides digital infrastructure for financial services, secures $50 million in its still-open Series B round.
  • South Korean cryptocurrency startup Childly teams up with blockchain analysis company Chainalysis.

Sub-Saharan Africa

  • Nigerian fintech startup Okra, which facilitates the exchange of real-time financial between banks, customers, and apps, locks in $1 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by TLcom Capital.
  • Flutterwave, based in San Francisco, California and Lagos, Nigeria, introduces new portal for African e-commerce merchants.
  • Visa and Kenya’s Pesapal team up to support connected digital payments.

Central and Eastern Europe

  • Resistant AI, a cybersecurity startup based in the Czech Republic, raises $2.75 million in funding.
  • Azer Turk Bank (ATB), based in Azerbaijan, deploys technology from Lithuania’s Ashburn to manage EFTPOS networks.
  • Germany’s Celonis leverages its process mining platform to develop new AI-powered accounts payable solution.

Middle East and Northern Africa

  • Egypt’s Commercial International Bank acquires 51% stake in Kenya’s Mayfair Bank.
  • BenefitPay, Bahrain’s national electronic wallet, announces 1257% increase in remittance volume in March.
  • Tata Consultancy Services to launch a digital only bank in Israel.

Central and Southern Asia

  • Indian cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX announces trading availability of two native tokens from Crypto.com, MCO and CRO, on its platform.
  • Amazon launches new credit service, Amazon Pay Later, in India.
  • India-based ecommerce firm Paytm unveils contactless dining solution for restaurants in the coronavirus era.

Latin America and the Caribbean

  • paysafecard brings its payments platform, Paysafe, to Paraguay.
  • Latin Post looks at the use of fintech apps in Mexico.
  • Financial markets solutions provider Calypso Technology inks partnership agreement with Colombia-based consultancy Sophos Solutions

Top image designed by Freepik

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Finovate Alums Earn Top Honors in Wealthtech 100

Finovate Alums Earn Top Honors in Wealthtech 100
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: 3rd-eyes, additiv, aixigo, Alumni News, Avaloq, Award winners, Finantix, Finhorizon, ForwardLane, Moxtra, TelosTouch, Wealth Wizards, Xignite

More than ten Finovate alums have earned spots on Fintech Global’s second annual Wealthtech 100 roster. The collection of companies is meant to represent the most innovative businesses operating in the wealth and asset space worldwide.

Companies were evaluated based on a variety of criteria ranging from industry significance and technological innovation to growth in capital raised and the ability of the company to save clients money, boost revenues, or increase efficiency. More than 1,200 companies were provided by Fintech Global to its judging panel of fintech analysts and industry experts.

Here are our winning Finovate alums:

“We’re thrilled to have made the WealthTech 100 list from Fintech Global,” Wealth Wizards said on Twitter after the news was announced. “There are some brilliant U.K. firms included.” Finantix and additiv also tweeted about the announcement this week.

See the full WealthTech 100 roster.

Headquartered in London, U.K., Fintech Global provides comprehensive data, insights, and analytical tools on fintech around the world.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook