Finovate Alumni News

On the web

  • Zopa Tests Savings Product Before Full Launch.
  • Starling Bank Offers Income Protection Insurance Via Anorak Partnership.
  • Q2 Closes Acquisition of PrecisionLender.

Around the web

  • Revolut unveils metal cards in silver and space grey.
  • Chief Administrative Officer of the Royal Bank of Scotland interviews BioCatch CEO.
  • ITSector inaugurates 6th Software Development Center that will focus on the financial sector, AI, and 5G.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Scalable Capital Raises $28 Million.
  • Finicity Launches Student Loan Account Verification.

Around the web

  • Splitit announces partnership with music software provider Ableton.
  • Jack Henry reports partnerships with 57 community financial institutions in fiscal 2019.
  • Western Union deploys customer journey optimization solution, Nexidia, from Nice Systems.
  • Venmo launches instant transfers to bank accounts.
  • Quadient unveils new archived document and data retrieval solution.
  • Euromoney features BioCatch in its look at the fintech scene in Israel.
  • SuperMoney tops $2 billion in loan requests via its online lending marketplace platform.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

BioCatch Brings on New Chief Revenue Officer

BioCatch Brings on New Chief Revenue Officer

Behavioral biometrics expert BioCatch brought on a new team member today. The company appointed Bill Sytsma as Chief Revenue Officer.

Bill Sytsma

Sytsma is a 20-year veteran of the software and security industry. Most recently, he served as a vice president of sales at ThreatMetrix. In addition to that role, Sytsma has worked at Emulex, iPass, Aveksa, Lumigent Technologies, and EMC.

“As we accelerate our plans for growth, Bill is the ideal person to lead the effort,” said BioCatch CEO Howard Edelstein. “He has vast experience as well as a proven ability to scale global sales efforts, secure new client relationships and drive revenue, exactly what is needed to enhance the results generated by our seasoned and talented team to date.”

The appointment of Sytsma is the latest in a recent string of C-level appointments for Israel-based BioCatch. Last year, the company named Gadi Mazor COO and Paul Mattison CFO.

BioCatch’s technology works by embedding what the company calls Invisible Challenges into online and mobile user experiences. The challenges are a set of subtle tests that the user subconsciously responds to. The user’s responses help to distinguish themselves over a fraudulent person or bot without interrupting the user experience.

BioCatch has raised $41.6 million since it was founded in 2011. At FinovateFall 2014, the company’s cofounder Uri Rivner demoed how some of the Invisible Challenges work.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate

  • Holvi Expands to Five New European Markets.
  • Artivest Inks Deal with Institutional Investment Manager LaSalle.
  • BioCatch Brings on New Chief Revenue Officer.
  • Yseop Pairs Up with Larsen & Toubro Infotech.

Around the web

  • Inc. names Blend, Kabbage, Lendio, Plaid, Pendo, Signifyd, and Ripple among the best places to work.
  • Alt Coin Magazine interviews Steven Parker, Crypterium CEO.
  • Interactions‘ IVA was named the top virtual assistant in Speech Technology Magazine’s 2019 People’s Choice Awards.
  • Salt Edge Open Banking API now supports eIDAS PSD2 certificates.
  • NIIT Technologies launches Cognitive Service Desk Audit, a tool to help applications understand and interpret user needs through natural communication.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Simple’s Payments Go Analog with Paper Checks.
  • Fenergo Supports Bahrain’s Blockchain-Based KYC.
  • Flywire Offers Chinese Students and Patients Discounted FX Rates.
  • doxo and Plaid Team Up to Bring Overdraft Protection to Billpay.

Around the web

  • ACI extends partnership with Vocalink into Saudi Arabia to facilitate the adoption of real-time payments through ACI’s UP Real-Time Payments solution.
  • First National Bank selects ProfitStars’ Commercial Lending Center Suite.
  • Centrale Kredietverlening selects nCino for its Bank Operating System.
  • Wipro develops blockchain-based solution with R3 to power digital currency transactions for Thailand banks.
  • Klarna and Stripe partner to offer Klarna’s Pay in 3 to Hideout festivalgoers through ticketing platform Kaboodle.
  • Forbes highlights BioCatch’s behavioral biometrics fraud prevention technology.
  • Insuritas and Tower Hill Specialty partner to bring Tower Hill’s property products to market through Insuritas’ bank partner network.
  • NIIT Technologies partners with Blue Chip to bring its wealth management application to Blue Chip’s IBM POWER.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • BlueVine and GovQuote Team Up to Fund SMEs.
  • Bpm’online Focuses on Customization, Clean Data in Latest Update.

Around the web

  • Sberbank Croatia chooses Token for PSD2 compliance.
  • Silicon Canals highlights Meniga in its list of 10 Cool Icelandic Tech Startups to Work for in 2019.
  • MX wins a 2019 Utah Genius award.
  • U.Today features Stash and Crealogix in its roundup of Top 12 FinTech Companies to Watch in 2019.
  • Xignite earns spot on the WealthTech 100.
  • Lendio franchise opens in Erie to expand access to capital for local businesses
  • InComm’s Alder API wins award from the Innovative Payments Association.
  • BioCatch’s behavioral biometrics-based digital identity solution now available on the ForgeRock Marketplace.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

BioCatch Teams Up with Entersekt

BioCatch Teams Up with Entersekt

A new partnership between behavioral biometrics innovator BioCatch and fintech solution provider Entersekt will help financial services companies offer more secure digital banking and payment experiences for their customers. With options like passwordless login and enhanced remote user registration, the collaboration will give clients a “one-stop-shop” for continuous and multi-factor authentication.

Entersekt SVP for North America Sherif Samy called BioCatch’s technology “an exciting alternative” to the biometric-based security solutions already provided on its platform. “It will add value for our customers, especially in usability, by helping to determine when step-up authentication is really required and when we can safely leave the user to go about their business uninterrupted,” Samy said.

BioCatch analyzes the interactions between users and their devices to reduce fraud and provide online identity verification. The partnership means that when BioCatch’s biometric behavioral technology identifies anomalous behavior, it sends an alert to Entersekt’s security platform for an out-of-band, multi-factor authentication (MFA) via device validation.

“Our combined approach with Entersekt answers the call,” Avi Turgeman, BioCatch founder and CTO said of the challenge of simultaneously providing a seamless customer experience and strong online security.” The collaboration, he said, joins “(b)ehavioral biometrics as ‘who you are,’ the mobile device as ‘what you have,’ and the additional elements required to step up a transaction in real time if there is a problem.”

BioCatch demonstrated its Passive Biometrics technology at FinovateFall 2014. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Israel, the company announced earlier this month that it was adding touchscreen pressure to its set of behavioral biometrics. At the beginning of the year, BioCatch unveiled a new solution designed to help fight “vishing,” a form of automated push payment fraud.

With investors including Blumberg Capital, OurCrowd, and Maverick Ventures Israel, BioCatch has raised $41.6 million in funding.

South Africa-based Entersekt presented Securing Mobile Applications Through Transport Layer Diversity at our developers conference, FinDEVr SiliconValley in 2014. The company’s technology is deployed in 45 countries around the world, and defends 150 million transactions a month from cyberfraud.

Last month, Samy was recognized by One World Identity (OWI) as a top influencer in the field of digital identity. Entersekt began 2019 with a number of major hires, bringing on digital identity and business development specialist Jennifer Singh, as well as adding a country manager for South Africa and a VP of engineering services.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • eToro Buys Blockchain Company Firmo.

Around the web

  • ING Belgium and ING Netherlands invite Minna Technologies to participate in the ING FinTech Village accelerator.
  • Tink delivers split transactions feature.
  • Pitchbook ranks OurCrowd as most active Israeli VC firm in terms of the number of deals.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • PayActiv and Visa Help Workers Access Earned Wages Earlier.
  • Temenos Drives Digital Transformation for Africa’s Vista Bank.
  • iSignthis Inks Banking and Payments Deal with Ibanera.

Around the web

  • BioCatch adds touchscreen pressure as a new behavioral biometric value.
  • NCR, Bluefin, and Powertranz team up to support POS card processing for Caribbean quick serve restaurants.
  • Experian launches Singapore-based incubator, Experian X Labs.
  • ETFLogic unveils ETFLogic Pages, a new platform for analyzing exchange-traded funds.
  • Minna Technologies and Exate earn spots in the fourth edition of ING’s FinTech Village.
  • BlueRush deploys its Individeo platform with a large Colombian bank courtesy of a partnership with Bee Concept.
  • Inspire Federal Credit Union goes live with NYMBUS.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

New Threats, New Solutions: BioCatch Joins Anti-Vishing Fight

New Threats, New Solutions: BioCatch Joins Anti-Vishing Fight

Vishing, a type of authorized push payment (APP) fraud, just gained a new enemy. Behavioral biometrics innovator BioCatch has unveiled a new solution to help fight what the company called “the fastest growing and hardest-to-detect” fraud of its kind in the U.K.

Avi Turgeman, CTO, VP of Business Development, and founder of BioCatch, explained why vishing – in which fraudsters impersonate bank or law enforcement officials in order to fool victims into transferring funds – is so difficult to stop.

“It’s essentially a person defrauding him or herself while under the influence of a con artist,” he said. “Traditional fraud detection measures do not work in this instance – the real person is logging in from their own device at the correct location conducting a fully authorized transfer.”

BioCatch’s new solution focuses on subtle behavioral changes that indicate that the user may be under the influence of a vishing type scam. Turgeman said that the offering analyzes more than 2,000 behavioral parameters in real time to determine if the user’s behavior is being directed by a fraudster – all without interrupting the user journey.

Aite Group analyst Julie Conroy praised this aspect of the technology, noting that it is effective in preserving customer engagement, as well as in catching fraudsters. “The BioCatch approach works particularly well in the case of vishing because it relies on subconscious user behaviour that divulges whether a person is under the influence of a fraudster,” Conroy said. She added, “(The) technology is great for banks because it maintains a frictionless online experience for their customers.”

Vishing scams were responsible for £36.6 million in losses in the first half of 2018 alone, according to a UK Finance report. The 3,866 confirmed vishing cases cost those affected an average of £9,000 each.

Founded in 2011 and based in Tel Aviv, Israel, BioCatch demonstrated its Passive Biometrics/Invisible Challenges technology at FinovateFall 2014. More recently, the company partnered with fellow Finovate alum ACI Worldwide, teamed up with seven tier-one Latin American banks, and joined the ForgeRock Trust Network as a Principal Partner, providing its technology  as an integrated module to the ForgeRock platform.

With $41.6 million in funding, BioCatch includes Blumberg Capital, OurCrowd, and Maverick Ventures Israel among its investors.

Finovate Alumni News

On Finovate.com

  • Women in Fintech: “Pursuing Growth and Pursuing Profits Are Not Mutually Exclusive.”
  • New Threats, New Solutions: BioCatch Joins Anti-Vishing Fight.

Around the web

  • Clinc partners with Ford to bring voice recognition to its automobiles.
  • B2B digital marketing executive Nicky Senyard joins Voleo’s board of directors.
  • CSO Online reviews enterprise email security platform GreatHorn.
  • Coinbase offers cross-border wire transfer service to high-volume customers to help them fund their accounts.

This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.

BioCatch Brings Behavioral Biometrics to ACI Worldwide

BioCatch Brings Behavioral Biometrics to ACI Worldwide

A new partnership between real-time electronic payment and banking solutions provider, ACI Worldwide, and behavioral biometrics specialist, BioCatch, will deliver better online and mobile fraud prevention to banking customers. Along with the advanced analytic capabilities of ACI Worldwide’s UP Payments Risk Management, BioCatch’s behavior assessment technology will help institutions better defend themselves and their customers from a growing variety of cyberthreats.

“As online and mobile banking proliferates, fraudsters are consistently finding new ways to infiltrate banks’ systems, creating havoc for consumers and businesses alike,” BioCatch CTO and founder Avi Turgeman said. “By using behavioral data to distinguish between a genuine customer and a fraudster – whether human or non-human – we are able to detect fraudulent activity in real-time and protect consumers.”

ACI Worldwide global director for Payments Intelligence & Risk Solutions Cleber Martins pointed to threats like account takeover, social engineering, and bots as the main obstacles for institutions that are attempting to provide “enriched customer experience(s).” He praised the way BioCatch offers “cost-efficient access to behavioral biometrics” solutions to enable banks to “further promote safety and loyalty through the online relationship with their clients.”

BioCatch demonstrated the Passive Biometrics/Invisible Challenges mechanism of its cognitive behavioral biometrics technology at FinovateFall 2014. The mechanism injects a dynamic, cognitive challenge during the user’s interaction with an app. The challenge is so subtle that the user responds to it without being aware that the challenge has occurred. This response helps define the user’s relationship with the app, providing a unique user profile that reduces vulnerability to a variety of cyber threats.

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Israel, BioCatch has raised $41.6 million in funding, and includes Blumberg Capital, OurCrowd, and Maverick Ventures Israel among its investors. In October, the company announced that it was partnering with seven, tier-one Latin American banks in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Earlier this year, BioCatch teamed up with ForgeRock, offering its behavioral biometrics solution as an integrated module to ForgeRock’s platform.

ACI Worldwide powers electronic payments for more than 5,000 institutions globally, including more than 1,000 of the world’s largest financial institutions and service providers. The company participated in our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016, presenting Simple, Global, and Secure eCommerce Payments with ACI Worldwide’s Next-Generation API. The discussion focused on the technical challenges of payments integration and the value of using an end-to-end solution with integrated real-time fraud prevention.

Founded in 1975 and based in Naples, Florida, ACI Worldwide trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker ACIW, and has a market capitalization of $3 billion.