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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Trucking industry software platform Trucker Pathannounced this week it has tapped online lending marketplace Lendio to embed small business lending tools within its mobile app.
Lendio, will offer Trucker Path’s community of one million users a range of financing services, including asset or revenue-based financing, debt financing, lines of credit, and equipment financing.
“Lendio brings much needed capital to trucking businesses, who have traditionally been underserved by banks,” said Trucker Path CMO Chris Oliver. “Their loan products, which are tailored for transportation businesses, can be used to buy, upgrade or repair equipment, invest in technology to gain a competitive advantage, and expand operations or add staff.”
Lendio has already funded over $330 million for trucking businesses, and will now offer a range of its financing services to the Trucker Path community of users.
Trucking businesses can access Lendio’s financing tool within the Trucker Path mobile app. Users can apply for financing from Lendio’s network of lenders in as little as 15 minutes via a process that will not impact the applicant’s credit score. Lendio makes the capital available as quickly as 24 hours. Lendio offers applicants access to a dedicated expert who can discuss their needs and help them decide on the most suitable financing option for their particular situation.
“With Lendio’s Embedded Lending, Trucker Path users will now have faster access to financing from a variety of lenders that best meet their business’ needs,” said Lendio CEO and Co-Founder Brock Blake. “We know access to capital can be a big roadblock for many small businesses, and our marketplace has helped hundreds of thousands of businesses with this – including many in trucking and transportation – over the past decade. This partnership aligns perfectly with our mission to create a world where small businesses survive and thrive, and we’re so excited to work with Trucker Path.”
Since its 2011 launch, Utah-based Lendio has functioned as a matchmaker between small businesses and lenders. Businesses seeking funding can submit a single application to Lendio, tapping into its network of over 75 lenders. The platform then pairs each business with a suitable lender from the company’s in-house network.
The company positions itself as a mission-driven organization, and lives up to its word. When the coronavirus hit in 2020, the U.S. Small Business Administration passed the CARES Act and Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), and Lendio became a critical resource for merchants across the nation. The company saw that many small businesses were experiencing mass confusion around different types of relief programs, and quickly created a COVID-19 Relief Hub on its website to educate business owners, help them apply for funding, and match them with one of its lender partners. Additionally, for every new marketplace loan Lendio facilitates, Lendio Gives—an employee-contribution and employer-matching fund, in partnership with KIVA–provides a microloan to low-income entrepreneurs around the world, continuously re-investing the fund.
Lendio, backed by the likes of Runa Capital and Comcast Ventures, has secured over $108 million in funding. Most recently, the company took in $31 million in a 2020 round led by Mercato Partners. Lendio has made three acquisitions, most recently purchasing online lending platform QuarterSpot in 2021 for an undisclosed amount.
Automated identity verification specialist Onfido announced the launch of its Compliance Suite.
The Compliance Suite features qualified electronic signatures, one-time passwords, and no-code compliance workflows.
Onfido made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2018.
Automated identity verification specialist Onfido unveiled its Compliance Suite this week. The new offering helps companies meet the regulatory requirements for customer onboarding as they expand into new markets.
Compliance Suite brings qualified electronic signature (QES) and One-time Password (OTP) functionality, as well as no-code compliance workflows, to Onfido’s Real Identity Platform. QES offers a digital signature solution that relies on signals unique to the signer. The technology is also backed by a qualified digital certificate that provides a reliable way to confirm the identity of the individual associated with the signature.
Along with the company’s AI for fraud prevention and global document coverage, the result is a fully customizable identity verification solution that enables businesses to manage both local and global compliance needs under a single provider and control center. Compliance Suite has successfully passed its conformity assessment board checks and will be deployed by Onfido customers across Europe.
“Onfido’s Compliance Suite eases the regional compliance headache and delivers a one-stop-shop compliance offering that allows leaders to focus on their expansion, register customers faster, and remain agile to future regulatory demands,” Onfido Chief Product Officer Yuelin Li said. “With Compliance Suite, we now have the most comprehensive verification offering in the market, making Onfido the go-to scaling partner for globally trusted institutions.”
Onfido made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2018 and returned to the Finovate stage later that year for FinovateFall. The announcement of Compliance Suite follows news last month that Onfido had teamed up with digital investment platform InbestMe. The partnership made InbestMe the first roboadvisor in Spain to integrate identity verification technology as part of its onboarding process.
Headquartered in London, Onfido has raised more than $182 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Crane Venture Partners and TPG Growth are among the firm’s most recent investors. Mike Tuchen is CEO.
Interested in demoing at FinovateEurope in London next month? Applications are still being accepted from innovative companies with new solutions that are ready to show. Visit our FinovateEurope hub today to learn more.
The partnership between core banking platform, 10x Banking, and mortgage origination platform, Mast, will enable real-time connectivity between the two systems. This connectivity will be a boon for lenders, who will benefit from streamlined data exchange. It will also deliver the kind of real-time mortgage servicing that eliminates the need for – and potential complications of – manual data entry between multiple systems.
“This partnership represents a key milestone in how we support the transformation of the UK mortgage and building societies market,” 10x VP and Global Head of GTM and Partnerships Frederico Venturer said. “This integration will enable customer-facing innovation that rethinks the mortgage lifecycle using cloud-native tools, unlocking new growth opportunities for our clients.”
The collaboration comes with an API integration guide on 10x Docs. The guide gives mortgage lenders in the UK a fast and straightforward integration path. The guide includes a number of different integration scenarios that are particularly germane to UK’s mortgage market. These scenarios include product creation and account onboarding.
“We are thrilled to collaborate with 10x and provide seamless integration for UK mortgage institutions,” Mast CEO Joy Abisaab said. “Together, we empower UK lenders to unlock new levels of operational efficiency and enable the delivery of exceptional customer experiences.”
London-based Mast offers cloud-native mortgage technology infrastructure that enables lenders to boost capacity, lower costs, and enhance operational controls. The company has helped clients reach more than 20% increases in conversion from Decision in Principal (DIP) to completion. Mast’s technology has also facilitated a more than 70% increase in lending for its customers – without adding operational capacity.
Founded in 2016, 10x Banking won Best of Show in its Finovate debut last year at FinovateEurope. In its live demo, the company demonstrated its 10x SuperCore Cards solution. This innovation enables banks to leverage the 10x Bank Manager interface to build a card proposition in minutes.
10x Banking’s partnership news comes shortly after the company announced a collaboration with B2B lend tech company Trade Ledger. A real-time API connection between Trade Ledger’s data platform and 10x Banking’s SuperCore platform will allow banks and alternative lenders bring complex working capital solutions to market quickly. These solutions include invoice, receivables, and supply chain finance products.
10x Banking also teamed up with compliant open banking API technology provider Ozone API late last year. The integration will enable banks to combine real-time banking capabilities with a solution that helps them take advantage of open banking. Ozone API co-founder and CEO Huw Davies praised the way the partnership will “make it easier for banks to reduce complexity in their tech stack, allowing banks to comply with any global open banking standards, so they can focus on accelerating growth and value creation.”
10x Banking has raised more than $252 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The company’s investors include BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase.
Interested in demoing at FinovateEurope in London next month? Applications are still being accepted from innovative companies with new solutions that are ready to show. Visit our FinovateEurope hub today to learn more.
Last month we shared the first round of demoing companies to make the cut for FinovateEurope 2024. With more names on the way, we wanted to take a moment to highlight the return of three alums who will be demoing their latest fintech innovation live on stage in London next month, February 27 through 28.
NayaOne: De-risking innovation and facilitating partnership
A Best of Show winner in its Finovate debut last year, NayaOne offers a secure, Digital Sandbox platform that helps banks take the risk out of innovation, integration, and partnership with fintechs. Financial institutions that use NayaOne’s platform gain single key access to more than 350 technology vendors that are being actively evaluated by banks, a secure digital sandbox environment, and 2.5 billion datapoints to facilitate evaluation and review of new technologies.
NayaOne’s approach allows banks to review multiple vendors simultaneously. This helps them get their proofs-of-concept evaluated faster, saving money and enabling greater integration-induced productivity with less integration-related risk.
Among the company’s 2023 highlights are, most recently, its partnership with market network and technology platform PIMFA WealthTech. NayaOne teamed up with the wealthtech firm last fall to launch a client analytics and profiling tech sprint. The goal of the tech sprint was to explore how both unstructured and alternative data can be used to identity and attract potential clients. The sprint also examined use cases for Large Language Models in client services, such as pre-onboarding.
The partnership with PIMFA WealthTech came in the wake of NayaOne’s securing of the Digital Sandbox tender from the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority last spring. “We believe that our digital transformation platform and synthetic data technology will be a valuable asset in helping fintech companies to develop and test their products more efficiently and effectively,” NayaOne CEO Karan Jain said in April.
NayaOne also announced partnerships with Polymesh, which joined the NayaOne Network in June, and Valley National Bank, which deployed its innovation platform – powered by NayaOne – the previous month.
Headquartered in London, U.K., NayaOne was founded in 2019. The company most recently demoed its technology at FinovateFall in September.
NF Innova: Turning traditional banks into digital leaders
NF Innova will return to the Finovate stage next month at FinovateEurope. The company made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in 2014 and was among the alums to participate in FinovateAfrica in Cape Town four years later.
Headquartered in Vienna, Austria, and founded in 2013, NF Innova demoed its FINTENSE Omnichannel Digital Banking Platform at FinovateEurope 2023. At the conference, the company showcased its innovation in personal finance management, leveraging augmented reality to enable users to see their financial data in a new and compelling way.
In addition to augmented reality, NF Innova’s platform automates a number of customer-facing processes, including account opening. In fact, the company notes that firms using its technology have experienced efficiency increases of up to 600% thanks to NF Innova’s end-to-end automation of five different customer facing digital products.
NF Innova also reports faster times in completing common operations ranging from credit card payments to loans, as well as greater efficiency when it comes to orchestrating digital channels and segmentation.
In August NF Innova announced a strategic partnership with proactive mobile app security company Promon. The alliance will integrate Promon’s state-of-the-art technology to enhance security for users of NF Innova’s FINTENSE platform. NF Innova began 2023 by opening the doors on new offices in Čačak, Serbia, to provide workspace closer to where a number of its employees live.
Realmonitor: Helping banks benefit more from the homebuying process
Proptech innovator Realmonitor offers a white-label, AI-based property discovery mobile app designed to help address the specific pain points of the real estate market in Central and Eastern Europe. Because of the way properties are advertised in the CEE, there are often pricing discrepancies and anomalies that make the market difficult for home sellers, buyers, and agents.
Realmonitor brings transparency to this market by featuring all listings on the market from listing sites, Facebook Marketplace, Groups, and other locations. The technology conducts price comparisons to identify the best offers for advertised properties and provides instant push notifications when opportunities arise.
At the same time, banks benefit from an increase in mortgage loan prospects, as well as early engagement insofar as prospective homebuyers have used their whitelabled solution to find their properties.
Last month, Realmonitor won recognition as the most promising Hungarian fintech and Beyond Banking Solution of the Year at the FinTechShow. In its seventh year in 2023, the FinTechshow is an opportunity for fintechs and financial services companies in the country to “discuss digital transformation directions, new technological trends, and challenges.
“The application helps users throughout the entire journey of searching for, buying and selling real estate, and in relation to renovations and maintenance, with a specialist search engine,” Realmonitor founder Péter Faragó said upon receiving the award. “The greatest value of the application is that it helps save time for the user, who can handle everything related to the purchase, renovation, and maintenance of a home in one place, through one platform.”
Interested in demoing at FinovateEurope in London next month? Applications are still being accepted from innovative companies with new solutions that are ready to show. Visit our FinovateEurope hub today to learn more.
Agency execution specialist Liquidnet has turned to investment technology company bondIT to give new tools to traders on its Fixed Income electronic trading platform. Liquidnet will leverage bondIT’s Scorable Credit Analytics to help traders better anticipate market trends. The technology will also help them mitigate credit risk and make more informed decisions quicker.
“With this integration, our goal is to give access to crucial information to investment firms of all sizes,” Liquidnet Global Head of Fixed Income Product and Partnership Programs Nicholas Stephan explained. “Our members will have seamless access to a wide range of credit data giving them an extra edge ahead of making their trading decisions.”
Scorable Credit Analytics leverages data science, Explainable AI, and machine learning to help fixed income investors anticipate changes in credit ratings and spreads. The solution predicts downgrade and upgrade probability for 3,000+ rated corporate and financial issuers worldwide. Using insights such as these, traders can spot investment opportunities earlier and outperform peers. Courtesy of explainable AI, Scorable ensures transparency and allows users to understand the reasons behind the predictions. The integration will benefit Liquidnet’s 700+ member firms that access the platform’s primary and secondary market trading protocols for corporate bonds.
“Bonds are back, but so is risk,” bondIT Head of Global Client Business Dr. David Curtis said. “Technology becomes an ever more important ally in this dynamic financial landscape. The synergy between bondIT’s AI-driven Scorable Credit Analytics and Liquidnet’s platform empowers traders with actionable insights, enabling them to stay ahead in today’s volatile markets.”
Founded in 1999, Liquidnet is an institutional trading network headquartered in New York. More than 1,000 institutional investors in 49 markets across six continents use Liquidnet’s technology. Interdealer broker TP ICAP acquired the company in 2021 for $700 million.
Note that Liquidnet is not the first company this year to deploy bondIT’s Scorable solution. Wealth management solution provider First Rate announced a strategic partnership with bondIT in June. The Arlington, Texas-based firm integrated Scorable Credit Analytics into its own AI-driven reporting tool.
bondIT made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in 2016. In the years since, the Israel-based fintech has grown into a 50+ person team, and partnered with some of the world’s leading asset managers, banks, and technology firms. In addition to Scorable Credit Analytics, bondIT offers two other solutions: Frontier and Embedded. Frontier provides data-driven, personalized, fixed income portfolio management. Embedded is bondIT’s end-to-end, integrated portfolio construction, research, and trading solution.
Risk management and compliance solutions provider Ncontracts has acquired Quantivate this week. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Quantivate, which provides governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions for banks and credit unions, was founded in 2005. Quantivate’s flagship offering is its Business Continuity Software. Today, the company has a suite of governance, risk, and compliance management solutions, including ERM Intelligence, Compliance, Operational Resilience, IT Risk, Procurement, Audit, and more.
“Quantivate has always believed in the power of innovative technology and exceptional people to help banks and credit unions thrive,” said Quantivate Founder and CEO Andy Vanderhoff. “Ncontracts shares this mission, and I’m excited to watch as the strength and experience of our united teams take risk management solutions to the next level.”
With today’s acquisition, Ncontracts aims to position it as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) and knowledge-as-a-service (KaaS) leader. Quantivate’s GRC solutions and broader suite covering areas like ERM Intelligence, Compliance, IT Risk, and more, strengthen Ncontracts’ portfolio by enhancing its capabilities in addressing the complex needs of financial institutions.
This acquisition not only expands Ncontracts’ workforce to 350 employees and customer base to 4,000 financial services companies, but it also emphasizes the industry’s increasing reliance on sophisticated risk management solutions.
Ncontracts was founded in 2009 and specializes in risk, vendor, and compliance management software for financial services companies. The company currently serves more than 4,000 financial services organizations, including Tinker Federal Credit Union, Columbia Bank, Security Bank of Kansas City, and more. Earlier this fall, Ncontracts teamed up with fellow Finovate alum True Digital to enhance banks’ vendor data.
Ncontracts most recently demoed at FinovateFall 2022 where the company debuted Nrisk, an online risk management solution that strengthens compliance controls in real time. Tools like these are especially imperative to financial services firms in today’s regulatory environment in which regulators have increased their scrutiny of enterprise risk management practices.
“We are thrilled to join forces with Quantivate,” said Ncontracts founder and CEO Michael Berman. “We are both mutually committed to helping financial institutions reduce risk, improve compliance, and control costs, so combining our resources empowers us to be an even better provider of software and services for our customers and the financial industry.”
Qatar’s leading digital bank, Qatar Islamic Bank (QIB) has teamed up with Visa and sustainability-as-a-service innovator ecolytiq to help customers better understand the environmental impact of their financial activity.
“This partnership marks a monumental shift in the market,” ecolytiq co-founder and Managing Director Davis Lais said. “Climate engagement in banking is coming to Qatar.”
Courtesy of the partnership, QIB will integrate a new Carbon Emission Tracker feature into its mobile app. The tracker will help foster environmental awareness among banking customers and encourage climate-friendly spending behavior and consumption habits. The technology will also enable QIB to determine the carbon footprint created from its retail banking customers spending activity and use that data to refine both specific transactions as well as customer profiles.
Lais added, “Our innovative work with QIB and Visa is giving banking customers in Qatar more transparency and choice to live sustainably. We are proud to have been chosen to help QIB guide their customers through the complexity of the environmental crisis by making this a fundamental part of QIB’s banking experience. QIB has decided to embrace the future of banking by being a part of it.”
The new partnership follows the release of QIB’s third sustainability report. The report articulated the bank’s sustainability initiatives, noting progress in steps taken to manage climate-related risks. This includes QIB’s adoption of the Equator Principles, making ESG concerns a part of the bank’s risk management process.
This month, QIB was named “2023 Bank of the Year in Qatar” by The Banker magazine, a Financial Times publication. In accepting the award, QIB Group CEO Bassel Gamal referenced the banks efforts toward greater sustainability. “We have assumed a substantial role in championing the shift towards a more sustainable economy, incorporating ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) factors in our credit assessment and risk management processes, thus promoting sustainable practices among our corporate borrowers.”
Established in 1982, Doha, Qatar-based, QIB reported total assets of more than $4.6 billion (QAR 187 billion) this year. The bank has 23 branches, more than 170 ATMs, and approximately 36% of the total assets of domestic Sharia-compliant banks.
ecolytiq’s partnership with QIB is the fintech’s second big win in MENA in as many months. In November, ecolytiq – along with Visa – worked with Dubai-based Mashreq to facilitate the launch of the bank’s climate banking platform. The platform overlays carbon emissions calculations onto transaction data, and leverages advanced carbon footprint analytics to personalize climate insights.
Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Berlin, Germany, ecolytiq introduced itself to Finovate audiences at our developers conference, FinDEVR 2021. In addition to its bank partnerships, ecolytiq also has teamed up with a number of fintechs. These include partnerships with fellow Finovate alums Mambu in July and Tink in June. Mambu will make ecolytiq’s sustainability-as-a-service solution available via its marketplace that serves more than 100 million end users. The Tink partnership will embed ecolytiq’s carbon tracking services and other sustainability features into its open banking platform.
“Pairing open banking with sustainable banking is good news for financial institutions looking to make a difference,” ecolytiq co-founder and Managing Director Ulrich Pietsch said.
Digital identity verification company Mitekannounced a new partner today. The California-based company has teamed up with compliance, credit risk, and lending solutions company Abrigo to help the firm’s bank clients access technology to help protect themselves against financial crime.
Specifically, Abrigo is seeking to mitigate check fraud, which is not only prevalent among banks, but is also costly. While the technology behind paper checks seems antiquated, fraud techniques for the payment method are not. According to FinCEN, check fraud suspicious activity report (SAR) filings increased 94% over the course of 2021. Last year, the number of SAR filings exceeded 680,000. “The sophistication of fraud and synthetic checks has never been more concerning,” explained Mitek SVP and GM Michael Diamond.
Abrigo will offer its bank customers access to Mitek’s Check Fraud Defender to help them stop fraudulent activities around checks. Mitek’s Check Fraud Defender uses imaging science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze the images of the checks and verify authenticity to reduce fraud losses.
“By combining Mitek’s cutting-edge technology with Abrigo’s industry-leading platform, we can provide our 2,400 customers with a powerful solution to help protect their institutions and customers from financial crimes,” said Abrigo CEO Jay Blandford.
Mitek was founded in 1986 and offers technology for mobile check deposit, new account opening, identity verification, and more. The company’s solutions are used by more than 7,900 organizations and its mobile check deposit and account opening tools reach more than 80 million consumers. Mitek is publicly listed on the NASDAQ under the ticker MITK and has a current market capitalization of $517 million.
Earlier this fall, Mitek partnered with Equifax to advance the company’s biometric authentication and liveness detection capabilities.
What are the biggest challenges facing banks when it comes to modernization and digital transformation? We checked in with Charbel Safadi, President, Modernization and Transformation, with Zafin, to hear his thoughts on what banks and other financial institutions are doing to future-proof their businesses and better serve their customers.
Zafin made its Finovate debut in 2017 at FinovateFall. The company offers a cloud-based product and pricing platform that simplifies core modernization for the world’s biggest banks. Zafin’s platform enables business teams to collaborate in the design and management of pricing, products, and packages. At the same time, the platform empowers technology teams to streamline core banking systems.
Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, and founded in 2002, Zafin includes Wells Fargo, HSBC, and CIBC among its customers.
When you look at the current landscape for banks, what is their biggest technological challenge right now?
Charbel Safadi: The predominant technological challenge facing banks in the current landscape is the accumulation of legacy technology platforms that impede adaptability and innovation. These platforms, built over several decades, create a significant tech debt, hindering banks from promptly responding to changing market demands. This stands in contrast to agile fintech startups, unburdened by such legacy systems.
For banks, the challenge lies in modernizing these deeply entrenched platforms to enable transformative experiences and stay competitive in the rapidly evolving financial landscape. Despite significant time and financial investments, the traditional “rip and replace” approach has proven unsuccessful. This tech debt, rather than a lack of inherent competitiveness, is the primary obstacle for banks in delivering compelling value propositions, necessitating a forward-looking, progressive modernization strategy.
You just recently joined Zafin and are part of the company’s new transformation and modernization division. Tell us about why you joined the company and what this new division is all about.
Safadi: Zafin’s mission is to empower banks in reshaping their business models and updating technology platforms. As a leader in our organization, my role is to align our vision with clients’ business goals, fostering a cohesive team that mirrors banks’ transformation strategies. With a background in financial services consulting and experience with global banks, I recognize the market’s strong focus for the next decade and Zafin’s potential impact.
Being part of Zafin’s journey excites me, given its pivotal role in contributing to clients’ transformation agendas. Zafin’s strategic position emphasizes technology and business platforms, distinguishing it in the market. This allows us to provide significant value, aiding clients in kickstarting technology modernization while transforming their business models.
I am confident in our ability to guide clients through this journey, making a substantial impact and offering the necessary tools for success. Zafin’s forward-thinking strategy, coupled with our cohesive team and inclusive culture, solidified my decision to be part of this transformative organization.
Tell us about the launch of Zafin Studio. What challenge will it help Zafin customers resolve?
Safadi:Zafin Studio represents a significant advancement in the modernization of technology platforms, specifically addressing the challenge of crafting forward-looking propositions tailored to each client’s unique values and needs. Unlike existing solutions in the market, Zafin Studio adopts a comprehensive approach to banking propositions. Leveraging the Product and Pricing Index (PPI) tool, it rapidly gathers, filters, and segments data and insights for analysis from leading global banks, bridging a crucial market gap. This empowers various stakeholders within a bank, from business users to product managers and department heads.
Our goal is to equip them with the tools to comprehend market dynamics, enabling swift research on top banks worldwide and insights into their product designs and rate structures. The collected information is entirely external and does not involve customer data. Through Product Explorer, Zafin Studio unravels the intricacies of product offerings, merging external market research with an internal product explorer. The drag-and-drop feature of Proposition Canvas in turn empowers banks to seamlessly design and implement cutting-edge functionalities. Essentially, Zafin Studio acts as a governing methodology and framework, revolutionizing banks’ transformation approaches. We eagerly anticipate our clients utilizing Zafin Studio to elevate co-created value propositions to new heights.
Zafin is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. What are some of the top concerns for Canadian banks that might differ from those of banks in the U.S., the U.K., or Europe?
Safadi: In Canada, the banking landscape differs significantly from the U.S., U.K. and Europe due to population size and the number of institutions. Canadian banks are primarily concerned with population dynamics, competition, and the regulatory framework. The evolving regulatory landscape indicates that open banking is on the horizon in Canada. This, combined with the rise of innovative fintech firms free from legacy technology constraints, compels banks to prepare for the coming years.
While fintech companies lack the technological burdens of traditional institutions, they also lack the established customer base of incumbents. To capitalize on this, banks must pivot towards a more horizontally aligned approach to product development and proposition modeling. This involves adopting a holistic view of the Canadian customer, encompassing their entire financial journey and value chain. By consolidating data from diverse systems, including mortgages, lending, and deposits, banks can craft compelling value propositions that genuinely resonate with consumers. Prioritizing strong relationships over sheer customer volume is crucial. This means tailoring pricing, offers, and incentives to match the customer’s entire banking journey. This forward-thinking approach ensures sustained delivery of substantial value and the preservation of loyalty within the existing client base, thereby upholding a competitive edge rooted in customer trust.
Speaking of international activity, Zafin recently announced a new operational center in Dubai and the upcoming release of various AI-based solutions for the Middle Eastern market. Tell us about some of the top trends in fintech in the Middle East?
Safadi: Zafin is making significant investments in Generative AI, with Zafin Copilot serving as a central component in our technology portfolio. This tool is pivotal for both external client interactions and internal team processes. We’ve dedicated significant efforts to explore how AI can enhance product and pricing modeling, effectively harnessing continuously generated data, including customer details, transactions, and relationship data. We’ve made it a priority to equip our clients with the technological capabilities needed for full access to the rich data set within our platform.
Globally, AI forms a fundamental part of our strategy, with a notable emphasis on the Middle Eastern marketplace. This region’s substantial investments in AI makes it an ideal ground to explore dynamic pricing, especially in comparison to markets with stricter pricing regulations.
Our core principles of trust, transparency, and fairness in banking guide all AI development initiatives. We ensure strict adherence to regulatory frameworks across global markets. AI is viewed as an intrinsic element of our entire platform, offering benefits to our customers, end consumers, and internal teams while aligning with our commitment to ethical and regulatory standards.
What trends in fintech and financial services are currently being underestimated in terms of their potential impact in the next few years?
Safadi: Many organizations are considering the adoption of Generative AI technologies. The central question revolves around how AI can effectively be utilized to reassess and improve product design, customizing offerings for each individual. This transition not only poses a challenge but also presents an opportunity. AI has the potential to centralize and grant access to the everyday data encountered by most organizations. The focus should now pivot towards creating dynamic product offerings that align with the unique value of each individual, taking into account the customer’s current life stage, priorities, and preferences.
In addition to well-explored areas like AI, another crucial emphasis lies in the design of the next-generation product architecture. Through global discussions and collaborations with banking clients, trailblazing organizations such as Zafin are actively shaping a horizontal model for the next generation of product architecture in financial institutions. This architecture should span the entire spectrum of banking, delivering a tailored and dynamic experience precisely meeting the customer’s needs at any given moment. Banks should persist in prioritizing depth and loyalty in customer relationships, recognizing their significance in the forthcoming years.
What can we expect from Zafin over the balance of 2023 and into 2024?
Safadi: Zafin is firmly dedicated to executing its strategy, aiming to provide substantial value to our clients. This dedication empowers them to not only modernize their technology platforms but also to transform their business models. Our intense focus revolves around delivering the essential technology, capabilities, and skills required for both these endeavors. Through robust partnerships within our deep ecosystem, our goal is to offer comprehensive customer modernization journeys.
We strive to spare our clients from spending excessive time — potentially three to four years or even longer — struggling to overhaul their technology landscape without having the capacity to contemplate new product architectures and business models. Everything we undertake is geared towards facilitating a low-risk approach to modernize their technology platforms, unlocking the potential to construct next-generation product architectures promptly.
Simultaneously, we remain committed to upholding trust, transparency, and fairness in how our clients deliver products and services to their client base.
Digital asset infrastructure platform AlphaPoint announced a partnership with Coincover.
A blockchain protection firm, Coincover will provide enhanced security for AlphaPoint customers.
AlphaPoint made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in 2015 and returned to the Finovate stage two years later for FinovateFall.
AlphaPoint, a digital asset infrastructure platform, has turned to blockchain protection firm Coincover to provide its customers with enhanced security. Courtesy of the partnership, AlphaPoint customers will be able to access Coincover’s Asset Protection solution which helps mitigate a variety of security threats including hacking, human error, and scams.
Coincover secures its clients against hacking and theft by proactively screening and protecting transactions. The company’s crypto threat intelligence and machine learning models continuously monitor activity across millions of digital wallets and transactions, flagging potentially malicious behavior. Coincover’s technology delivers proactive alerts that enable users to take action when abnormal patterns are spotted. The company has more than 300 partners worldwide, protects five million crypto wallets, and has checked $30 billion in transactions. David Janczewski is co-founder and CEO.
“By collaborating with Coincover, a top innovator in asset protection, we’re providing our customers with leading-edge insurance to safeguard their assets,” AlphaPoint CEO and co-founder Igor Telyatnikov said. “This partnership demonstrates our commitment to delivering complete peace of mind through institutional-grade security and infrastructure.”
AlphaPoint made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in 2015. The company returned to the Finovate stage two years later for FinovateFall in New York. In the years since then, AlphaPoint has grown into leading digital asset infrastructure company with more than 150 customers in 35 countries. The company’s platform supports more than 10 million registered accounts, more than one trillion in trading volume, and billions in assets. AlphaPoint counts CME Group and XP Securites among its clients. El Salvador chose AlphaPoint to operate its Chivo Bitcoin wallet in 2022 as part of the country’s experiment in mass bitcoin adoption.
Earlier this month, AlphaPoint launched AlphaPoint Labs. The new entity provides advisory, development, and implementation services for FIs, exchanges, and businesses seeking to integrate digital assets and blockchain technology. This spring, the company forged a new partnership with cryptoasset risk management company Elliptic. Over the summer, AlphaPoint teamed up with verification platform Sumsub.
AlphaPoint is headquartered in New York. The company has raised more than $23 million in funding.
Featurespace unveiled its generative AI-powered, Large Transaction Model (LTM), TallierLTM, this week.
The technology uncovers hidden transactional patterns typically undetected by current methods that may be indicative of criminal activity.
Featurespace made its Finovate debut in 2016, appearing at both FinovateEurope and FinovateFall that year.
Fraud and financial crime prevention company Featurespaceunveiled its Large Transaction Model (LTM), TallierLTM, this week. A foundational technology for payments in specific and the financial services industry in general, TallierLTM is a large-scale, self-supervised, and pre-trained model built to power the next generation of AI apps to protect consumers from financial crime.
The technology marks the first time financial professionals in the fraud fighting space have been able to leverage a generative Large Transaction Model. Featurespace noted in a statement that TallierLTM has provided improvements of as much as 71% in fraud value detection compared to the industry standard.
“What OpenAI’s LLMs have done for language, TallierLTM will do for payments,” Featurespace founder David Excell said. “There is widespread concern about how deep-fakes and generative AI have been used to deceive consumers and our financial systems. We plan to reverse this trend by utilizing the power of generative AI algorithms to create solutions that protect consumers and make the world a safer place to transact.”
Connecting to FIs via its enbedding API, TallierLTM analyzes billions of transactions, identifying hidden transactional patterns that current methods often cannot detect. The technology’s insights are based on time sequencing, discovering unusual spending patterns over a short period of time, for example, or between a consumer and a merchant. This increased ability to distinguish legitimate activity from potentially criminal behavior will not only enable data scientists to improve their model’s performance faster, Featurespace Chief Innovation Officer Dr. David Sutton said. It will also allow institutions to “realize the value of machine learning investments more quickly.”
“We know that smarter technology helps financial institutions better understand their consumers,” Sutton added. “We have taken this to the next level by pairing cutting-edge generative AI algorithms with huge volumes of data, enabling a machine to efficiently comprehend the relationships between different customer transactions.”
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Cambridge, U.K., Featurespace made its Finovate debut in 2016, appearing at both FinovateEurope and FinovateFall. An innovator in adaptive behavioral analytics and automated deep behavioral networks for risk management, Featurespace serves more than 80 direct customers and 200,000 institutions. In recent months, the company announced partnerships with digital payment platform Clip and fellow Finovate alum Zeta. In August, Featurespace launched its ARIC Scam Detect solution to help protect financial services companies and their customers from scams – especially Authorized Push Payment (APP) scams – in real-time.
“As scammers become increasingly sophisticated in their tactics, with the use of Generative AI and machine learning, FIs need an adaptive solution that can protect from changing scam types in real time and monitor both inbound and outbound payments,” company Chief Product Officer Pat Hinchin said.
Featurespace has raised nearly $108 million in funding from investors including Chrysalis Investments, MissionOG, and Insight Partners.
Is there a subsector of fintech that is more eager to adopt AI than the world of investing and asset management? From the burden of ever-growing amounts of potentially valuable data to the demands of managing risk to the challenge of generating alpha and producing above market returns, there are many ways that wealth management will benefit from innovations in AI – and the people involved in wealth management know it.
Founded by a team of former ETH Zurich researchers, aisot is one of the companies that is dedicated to helping asset and wealth managers make the most of the AI opportunity. The Swiss startup, launched in 2019 and headquartered in Zurich, leverages generative AI and access to market and alternative data sources, to deliver analytics, forecasts, and actionable insights to traders, business analysts, data scientists, and other financial services professionals.
“Information moves markets,” aisot co-founder and CEO Stefan Klauser said at the beginning of his Finovate demo in 2021. “At aisot we give you specialized market insights and full costs. (Our technology) reduces forecasting errors by up to 50%, and can enhance your returns. Whether you are a machine learning expert, a quant, or someone that has not had a systematic approach to data before, aisot’s services are always easy to use.”
aisot co-founder and CEO Stefan Klauser demoing his company’s technology at FinovateSpring 2021.
aisot launched its AI Insights Platform earlier this month. The cloud-based solution enables asset managers and wealth managers to offer their clients personalized investment portfolios at scale. The platform consists of three components: the AI Insights Dashboard, the Custom Feature Suite, and the Product Launch Pad. Via the Dashboard, users can investigate multiple market scenarios and fine-tune investment strategies. Dashboard features include an integrated portfolio builder, an optimizer to analyze historical data and market trends, and a statistical toolkit to enable users to review and evaluate portfolio performance. The platform’s Custom Features Suite allows users to vote on future platform enhancements and additions. The Product Launch Pad gives users the ability to launch structured notes, transforming investment strategies into tradable and liquid securities.
Klauser put the new offering in the context of the company’s overall philosophy as a “digital-first company.” He explained, “We conscientiously push technological boundaries while upholding core principles and stringent controls. Our relentless focus remains on our customer, shaping the platform based on their evolving needs in terms of performance, personalization, and scalability.”
The new product launch comes in the wake of aisot’s rebrand in July. In addition to a preview of the company’s AI Insights Platform and a new website, aisot also shared information about aisot Labs, the firm’s AI engine, as well as the company’s new investment products. These include aisot’s AI Balanced Digital Assets. An Actively Managed Certificate that enables investors to participate in the performance of an underlying investment strategy, AI Balanced Digital Assets is a long only, AI-driven, crypto portfolio built to match the volatility of a Bitcoin or Ethereum tracker while at the same time maximizing performance.
aisot has raised a total of $2.5 million (CHF 2.3 million) in funding, most recently securing $2 million (CHF 1.8 million) in seed capital this spring. The round was led by Haute Capital Partners, with angel investors, including members of the Swiss ICT Investor Club (SICTIC), also participating. The investment will enable aisot to add to its team, drive continued product development, and support the company’s growth projects.
Haute CEO and Chairman Thibault Leroy Bürki praised aisot as “a leading provider of AI solutions for asset and wealth management.” He added, “We chose aisot for their innovative approach to wealth management, advanced AI engine, and ability to generate alpha in real-time … aisot’s AI engine provides clients with the amazing ability to adjust customized portfolios to market trends in real-time while generating alpha.”
