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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
A pair of Finovate alums have joined forces to help a leading financial platform in Asia launch a lending solution as part of its planned expansion in the region.
German cloud banking platform provider Mambu and alternative credit score provider CredoLab have announced a partnership with GoBear, a financial services platform based in Singapore. The company, founded in 2015 as a metasearch engine and now operating as a financial services platform that has served more than 55 million consumers, plans to expand into the Philippines later this year. Technology from Mambu will power the core system in GoBear’s lending architecture, with CredoLab’s credit scoring helping ensure the company is able to bring financing to those communities that need it most – and often struggle to secure it.
“Having access to responsible credit should be a financial right for all,” GoBear Chief Lending Officer Mike Singh said. “Tapping into fintech solutions like Mambu’s and CredoLab’s brings us one step closer to making this a reality for the region’s 296 million unbanked or underbanked.”
The tripartite partnership was the result of a pair of relationships; Mambu and CredoLab have been long-time partners, while CredoLab and GoBear collaborated as recently as November 2018, when the two companies worked together on a credit solution for the underbanked.
“In less than five years of operation, GoBear has built a stellar reputation as a leading financial services platform and we envisage great things for the company as it continues to build its lending business,” Mambu Managing Director for APAC Myles Bertrand said. He pointed out that the company’s technology would enable GoBear to readily add new products while maintaining a high level of customer service.
CredoLab CEO Peter Barcak pointed to his company’s SDK, API, and alternative credit score – which leverages metadata from smartphone usage – as powerful tools for companies like GoBear that are trying to serve a broader array of customers. “Our ability to generate a credit score for customers who cannot prove their creditworthiness in the conventional financial system makes us uniquely positioned to support GoBear as they diversify their business and move into lending in a controlled way.”
Finovate alums since 2013 and 2018 respectively, both Mambu and CredoLab made their Finovate debuts at FinovateAsia events. Mambu demonstrated its technology the year we held our Asian conference in Singapore. CredoLab unveiled its CredoScore the year we held FinovateAsia in Hong Kong.
Speaking of FinovateAsia, remember that our new, all-digital FinovateAsia conference begins next week. Check out our FinovateAsia hub for more details!
Predictive analytics innovator Stratyfy is one of ten companies selected to participate in the incoming cohort of FIS’ 2020 Fintech Accelerator program.
“The ten companies selected for the fifth year of FIS’ Accelerator program bring a wealth of promising ideas and technologies,” FIS Chief Growth Officer Asif Ramji said. “We look forward to working with these firms to bring their ideas to life.”
Joining Stratyfy in the program are:
Cirrus Secure
Cobbler Technologies
Dasceq
Mall IQ
Sequretek
Silot
Surfly
TrustStamp
XpenseOne
Seven of the companies in the cohort have headquarters in the United States. Of the others, Sequretek is based in Mumbai, India; Silot in Singapore; and Surfly in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. And after four years in operation, the accelerator, in partnership with The Venture Center, will conduct its fifth program virtually due to the challenges of the global public health crisis.
In addition to being entirely virtual, this year’s program will run for 18 weeks instead of the usual 12 weeks to allow for increased mentoring and training time. The program will culminate with a Demo Day technology presentation on October 14th. Participating startups will also receive a monetary investment; the amount was not disclosed.
Executive Director for The Venture Center, Wayne Miller, pointed to the program’s success in empowering startup companies and helping improve access to financial services and technology. “With our partners at FIS and the State of Arkansas, we’re honored to be a part of bringing cutting-edge technologies to the places and people who need them, particularly in this moment of monumental technological advancement,” Miller said.
The news comes in the wake of Strayfy’s announcement of a new strategic partnership with Innovesta Technologies. The two companies are collaborating on a machine learning solution that will help businesses better measure the risk of and opportunity in non-public companies. The partnership combines Stratyfy’s decision engine and advanced machine learning technology with Innovesta’s comprehensive data assets to deliver real-time insights into the forces that impact business performance.
“Models built from historical data offer little help during an unprecedented health and economic crisis like the current global pandemic,” Stratyfy co-founder and CEO Laura Kornhauser said when the partnership was announced in May. “Achieving an inclusive global financial recovery requires robust risk management strategies, and those strategies necessitate an understanding of the unique challenges being faced by every business. Stratyfy’s decision management solutions will leverage Innovesta’s trustworthy data to directly address this need.”
Founded in 2016, Stratyfy is headquartered in New York City. The company was named one of the world’s 100 most promising startups to watch last year by CNBC.
Women-focused wealthtech firm Ellevest unveiled its newest offering today. The company, which was founded by former Merrill Lynch CEO and former Citigroup CFO Sallie Krawcheck, has expanded its online investing platform to launch banking services.
“At Ellevest, our mission is to get more money in the hands of women+ — because we know that everyone deserves the opportunity to build wealth, and that nothing bad happens when women have more money,” the company announced in a blog post. “Today, we’re launching the first-of-its-kind money membership designed to get more money in the hands of women+.”
The new banking services are available with an Ellevest membership, which ranges from $1 per month for the Essential plan to $5 per month for the Plus plan, and $9 per month for the Executive plan. All membership options include banking services, investing opportunities, and educational resources. Other services include personalized retirement recommendations and multi-goal investment accounts.
Ellevest’s fashion-forward debit card
Members can access two accounts– one for spending and one for saving. The checking account comes with a World Debit Mastercard connected to an FDIC-insured account. The accounts boast no hidden fees, no minimum balance requirements, no transfer fees, no overdraft fees, and ATM fee reimbursements.
In the competitive world of challenger banks, none of these features stand out. However, Ellevest has created a bit of a cult following with its women-focused approach and content generation. The company has 180,000 followers on Instagram, which is 10x the number of followers that BBVA-owned Simple has, and more than Revolut, Monzo, and N26.
Ellevest’s gender-filtered approach further differentiates it when it comes to investing. The company’s personalized investment portfolio “includes a gender-aware investment algorithm that factors in important realities like pay gaps, career breaks, and average lifespans.”
Today’s announcement isn’t the first time a wealthtech platform has broadened its offerings to become a challenger bank. Betterment, Wealthfront, SoFi, M1 Finance, and Personal Capital all offer online-only checking accounts.
Ellevest was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in New York. The company has raised $77.6 million.
In a brief statement shared on Monday, the Wilmington, North Carolina-based company reported that it had publicly filed a registration statement on Form S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for their proposed initial public offering. nCino made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in 2017.
The company’s announcement did not disclose the number of shares to be offered, nor the price range of the offering. Renaissance Capital reported that nCino is seeking to raise $100 million. The company expects to trade on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker “NCNO.”
Underwriting the IPO are Bank of America Securities, Barclays, KeyBanc Capital Markets, and SunTrust Robinson Humphrey.
nCino’s Bank Operating System, built on the Salesforce platform, provides financial institutions of all sizes with an end-to-end banking solution that enables them to deliver the kind of digital experience banking customers have come to expect. The platform combines customer relationship management, loan origination, workflow, enterprise content management, as well as business intelligence and reporting, all in a single, secure, cloud-based environment. On average, financial institutions using nCino’s Bank Operating System have enjoyed a 40% decrease in loan closing time, a 92% reduction in servicing costs, and a 127% increase in account opening completion rates.
Founded in 2012, nCino has raised more than $213 million in funding. The company reported revenue growth of almost 50%, reaching $44.7 million, for the quarter ending in April. nCino also reported revenue of $138.2 million in its most recent fiscal year, ending in January. This year, the company has forged partnerships with Alterna Bank, a subsidiary of Alterna Savings and Credit Union Limited, and with Swedish SME lender Yourban. Additional partnerships announced in the first half of the year include collaborations with Fulton Bank and Black Hills FCU. Pierre Naudé is President and Chief Executive Officer.
Six companies that have demonstrated their fintech innovations on the Finovate stage have been recognized this year by CNBC as part of their Disruptor 50 roster for 2020.
This year’s list, the eighth in the series, is marked by the high number of billion-dollar companies, or “unicorns.” Fully 36 of the firms in the 2020 CNBC Disruptor 50 have reached or surpassed the $1 billion valuation mark. Combined, the 50 companies have raised more than $74 billion in VC funding and achieved an implied market valuation of almost $277 billion.
The companies making the cut range in industry from cybersecurity and healthcare IT to education and, of course, fintech. In fact, the top-ranked company in the 2020 Disruptor 50 is none other than Stripe, the $36 billion payments platform founded in 2010. Stripe earned a #13 ranking in last year’s Disruptor 50 roster, and likely owes its first place appearance this year to a major $600 million funding raising – the company’s largest to date – and the economic and social consequences of the global health crisis.
“With many people throughout the world under lockdown to prevent the spread of Covid-19,” CNBC’s capsule on the company noted, “the move to shopping online has never been greater. That’s good news for digital payments platform Stripe.”
Stripe was not the only fintech to earn high marks from the 2020 Disruptor 50’s methodology. In addition to the half dozen Finovate alums below, some of the other fintechs on this year’s roster include:
Virtual bank WeLab (Hong Kong)
Digital mortgage company Better.com (New York City)
“Buy now pay later” e-commerce company Affirm (San Francisco, California)
Challenger bank Chime (San Francisco, California)
Banking app Dave (Los Angeles, California)
Microfinancier TALA (Santa Monica, California)
Trading and investing platform Robinhood (Menlo Park, California)
Also earning spots in this year’s list were a pair of insurtech companies, Lemonade and Root Insurance, as well as cybersecurity and biometric authentication firms SentinelOne and CLEAR, respectively.
Here’s a look at the Finovate alums that made this year’s list.
Expense management platform Expensifylaunched its latest solution today. The offering, Concierge Travel, is a virtual travel assistant that makes it easier for travelers to build their itineraries and plan their excursions in the COVID-19 era.
“While most of us are avoiding travel right now, there are still essential workers whose trips can’t be cancelled or postponed,” Expensify CEO and founder David Barrett explained. “We want to help them travel in the safest possible way.”
Concierge Travel is available to Expensify cardholders and can be used to book flights, make hotel reservations, reserve rental cars and more – free of charge. All bookings via Concierge Travel also feature complimentary safety alerts and travel risk advisories from Global Rescue. The free Global Rescue membership offers a range of services for travelers including transportation to the cardholder’s hospital of choice in an emergency, as well as health and security assessments and entry and exit requirements for international travelers.
“With Concierge Travel, your free Global Rescue membership provides world-class safety and medical services,” Barrett added. “On top of that, Concierge lets you know about any COVID-related travel restrictions in advance, including specific stay-at-home orders in place, social distancing measures, and other info on the city you’re visiting.”
A Finovate alum since 2009, Expensify demonstrated the technology behind its expense management platform at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, in 2016. The company introduced its corporate card last fall, offering spending controls and expense management in a single solution that in some ways harkens back to the firm’s origins more than a decade ago.
“Expensify started as a corporate card way back in 2008 before we decided to focus on expense,” Barrett said when the card was launched, “so it’s fun to see the product come full circle with a card that naturally extends our existing platform.”
Founded in 2008 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Expensify has raised $38.2 million in funding according to Crunchbase. The company includes Redpoint Ventures, OpenView, PJC, and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) among its investors.
Digital identity verification specialist Socure has introduced a new solution to help accelerate and scale customer acquisition. Intelligent KYC, launched last week, leverages advanced graph analytics, unsupervised machine learning, and a sizable volume of data sources to give businesses higher auto-approval rates compared to legacy identity verification systems, as well as fewer manual reviews.
“In the digital-first world, compliance teams need hyper-accuracy in their use of KYC tools without introducing more friction for customers or costly reviews for their operations teams,” Socure CEO Tom Thimot explained. “Intelligent KYC is the industry’s most sophisticated KYC solution and will push our clients far beyond check-box compliance.”
Available as both an individual solution as well as part of an end-to-end integrated, identity fraud engine, Intelligent KYC is especially suited for institutions serving underserved populations – from millennials with thin credit files to newly-arrived immigrants with no domestic credit record. Intelligent KYC leverages machine learning to access more than 310 million entities and three billion records from a wide variety of authoritative sources including credit header and inquiry, utility and telecommunications companies, and more.
Writing about the concept of Intelligent KYC on the Socure blog, privacy, data security, and fintech attorney and company advisor Annie C. Bai noted the emphasis that Socure’s solution places on precision accuracy in the initial phases of the KYC process. This accuracy, Bai explained, “is not only valuable for initial results but has downstream benefits as the cornerstone of understanding the customer.” Bai highlighted diversity in data, automated analytics, and user empowerment as three key differentiators between traditional legacy KYC and Socure’s latest offering.
“Socure’s market-leading identity fraud scores, (enable) an automated 90% customer acceptance rate, a 95% fraud capture rate, a 10% reduction in false positives, and over 50% reduction in manual reviews,” Bai wrote.
Founded in 2012 by Sunil Madhu, Socure most recently demonstrated its digital identity verification and fraud protection solution, Socure ID+, at FinovateFall in 2017. Recognized in March as one of America’s Best Startup Employers by Forbes, and named to Inc. Magazine’s Best Workplaces 2020 roster in May, Socure was also recently featured as a Gartner Cool Vendor in Artificial Intelligence for Banking and Investment Services.
Headquartered in New York City, Socure has raised nearly $62 million in funding from investors including ff Venture Capital, Scale Venture Partners, Commerce Ventures, and Flint Capital.
“As a matter of fact, I went to the doctor and he said that I was above normal. Or, as he put it, ‘abnormal.'” Andrew “Squiggy” Squiggman, Laverne & Shirley, 1976.
Whether you consider yourself “above normal” or just another banking consumer with unique needs, Arival Bank, which launched in 2018 as a spin-off venture from Life.SREDA, has you covered. The bank announced today that it is launching its Arival beta account to provide banking services to “abnormal customers.”
“Too many clients today are rejected by traditional even digital banks because they are viewed as ‘abnormal’, ‘too risky,’ or ‘unusual,” Arival Bank COO Jeremy Berger noted in a blog post announcing the beta launch. “International startups, new tech ventures, crypto-related businesses, investment funds, e-residency businesses, freelancers, charities, expats, digital influencers, bloggers, gamers and streamers, and many others are rejected by traditional and even digital banks. It’s only a matter of time (before) the demand from abnormal customers will outgrow that of traditional customers.”
Arival is introducing an online bank account that is tailored to the needs of businesses and entrepreneurs like these. The company is opening the beta release to 3,000+ early signups from its waiting list. Arival will be adding a business bank account and an individual bank account soon, and said that it is already accepting applications for both accounts. Beta participants also will get an early look at Arival’s banking platform, ArivalOS, with no fees for the first 90 days.
A Best of Show winner in its Finovate debut at FinovateAsia in 2018, Arival was founded to help underbanked businesses maximize the opportunities of digital banking. Powered by open API fintech banking, the company’s ArivalOS provides a digital banking platform that integrates a comprehensive suite of third-party fintech solutions and services geared toward the needs of SMEs and entrepreneurs. Headquartered in Singapore and co-founded in 2017 by Vladislav Solodkiy (CEO) and Igor Pesin (CFO), Arival raised more than $2.3 million in its equity crowdfunding campaign last fall, earning a pre-money valuation north of $14.8 million.
Wealth management technology provider Finantix announced today that it has appointed Christine Ciriani as its new CEO. Company co-founder and former CEO Ralf Emmerich will transition to the role of Executive Chairman.
“I am delighted to take up this leadership position at Finantix,” Ciriani said in a statement. She praised the company’s “award-winning” solutions for wealth managers, banks, and insurance companies, as well as Finantix’s “client-first culture” and strong teams. She pledged to continue working “to ensure that both our integrated and point solutions are rapidly adopted in the market to deliver the data-enabled, digitally-connected, and content-rich services today’s clients demand.”
Ciriani will continue to serve as the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, a position she has held since the fall of 2019. The wealth management and professional services veteran came to Finantix in February of that year, joining Finantix’s board of directors as a non-executive director as part of the Motive Partners investment in the company. During her time at Finantix, Ciriani has helped drive talent acquisition, commercial strategy, and market positioning, overseeing expansion in Switzerland, Japan, and Australia. She also has been praised for her role in the company’s acquisition of AI and data science-based solution provider InCube earlier this year.
“Under Christine’s leadership and working with our management team, we have successfully accelerated the process of expanding our extensive portfolio of innovative products,” Emmerich said. He added that the leadership shift would enable Finantix to maximize the next phase of its evolution as a leading provider of technology solutions for the wealth management, banking, and insurance industries.
“Now is the ideal time for me to hand over the reins to Christine so she can continue to build on the strong foundations we have created.” Emmerich said.
The C-suite news follows the launch of Finantix’s latest Digital Collaboration Hub. A client servicing solution, the Hub enables institutions to establish omni-device, multi-media collaboration channels with virtual private lounges that can be used to digitally enhance client interactions. Market updates and advisories, as well as onboarding and document exchange are among the client-oriented activities possible via the Hub. Banco Itaú International is one of the FIs that has deployed the technology, offering the Hub to its U.S. and Swiss clients.
A Finovate alum since 2011, when the company debuted at FinovateEurope, Finantix was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Venezia, Vento, Italy. Acquired by Motive Partners in December 2018, Finantix wonBest Front Office Solution at the WealthBriefing Swiss Awards 2020 in February.
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.
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).
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).
