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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Open banking platform TrueLayer recently landed $70 million in Series D funding.
The investment, which brings the London-based company’s total funding to $142 million, was led by Addition, with contributions from all major existing investors, as well as new investors including Visionaries Club, Surojit Chatterjee, Zack Kanter, Daniel Graf, and David Avgi.
TrueLayer’s mission is to open up finance with its open banking network that connects payments, data, and identity to help people spend, save, and transact more freely online.
The funding comes at a time of major growth in the open banking scene in the U.K. The nation has seen more than three million open banking users and if the growth curve continues, 60% of the U.K.’s population will be using open banking by the end of 2023.
Founded in 2016, TrueLayer now processes more than half of the open banking volume in the U.K., Ireland, and Spain. Much of this growth has come over the course of the past year during which time the company has grown by 600x and expanded across 12 markets.
As for what’s next, TrueLayer will launch new open banking capabilities this year. The company will also expand its network, which will in turn add more account connectivity for consumers.
“We believe that open banking is reaching maturity in several markets and the next phase is about solving bigger, more complex problems for our customers – layering value on top of the raw infrastructure,” said TrueLayer CEO and Co-Founder Francesco Simoneschi. “You’ll see us building more and more in this direction.”
TrueLayer’s clients number in the hundreds and include fintechs such as Revolut, Nutmeg, Trading 212, Stake, and Payoneer.
Here’s an idea: a corporate card that incentivizes spending less rather than rewarding you for spending more.
Ramp, a New York-based fintech launched by Eric Glyman, Gene Lee, and Karim Atiyeh, has raised $115 million in Series B funding to power this approach to business expense management. Taking Ramp’s total capital to $320 million, the investment gives the company a valuation of $1.6 billion.
“Co-founding a fintech unicorn was never my plan,” Ramp CEO Glyman wrote on the company’s blog in a funding announcement, “and almost feels crazy given my job 12 years ago was selling t-shirts and jeans.”
The round was led by D1 Capital Partners and Stripe. Joining them were Founders Fund, Coatue Management, Thrive Capital, Redpoint, and Box Group. Ramp also announced that it had received a $150 million line of debt financing from Goldman Sachs. “During our next phase of growth,” Glyman added, “we plan to expand our efforts to bring the value of Ramp to more businesses in more places and to transform the way more companies do business.”
Ramp offers a corporate card with unlimited 1.5% cash back on every transaction, 10x to 20x higher limits and no fees, and both smart virtual and physical cards with built-in spend management controls. An integration with Slack makes it easy for managers to get alerts, approve expenses in real-time, and respond to issues from within the business communication platform.
Ramp says that it has identified more than $10,000,000 in annualized savings for 1,000+ customers, with the average Ramp customer saving in excess of $100,000. Companies using Ramp’s spend management platform range from startups to corporations, and include technology innovators in their own right such as Clubhouse and Finovate alum Marqeta. The technology is integrated with popular accounting platforms such as Netsuite, Sage Intacct, Xero, QuickBooks, and more than 100 others.
Onboarding its first company in 2019 and launching publicly one year later, Ramp has experienced 4x growth over the past six months. Glyman said the company is approaching annualized transaction volume of more than $1 billion.
Online lending platform Avant is building out the breadth of services for its underbanked clients this week. The Illinois-based company acquired Zero Financial and its neobank Level for an undisclosed amount.
Level is built on the premise of helping users attain financial freedom. To differentiate itself from traditional financial services offerings, the digital bank offers cash back rewards on debit card purchases, a competitive APY on deposits, early access to paychecks, and no hidden fees.
As a result of today’s deal, Avant will be able to offer its 1.5 million customers access to Level’s digital banking services to augment its existing personal loan and credit card products. The additional banking products will also offer Avant access to more customer data which, in the end, will help in its underwriting process.
Avant CEO James Paris describes the move as “an important element” of the company’s strategy that involves providing underbanked consumers with financial products. “Expanding our product portfolio allows us to serve even more people, offering every consumer access to innovative and rewards-based products to simplify and improve their financial journey,” he added. “We’re looking forward to building on this acquisition and continuing to bring new products to our growing customer base.”
Current Level customers will still be able to make purchases, earn rewards, receive direct deposits to their account, and earn interest. While new customers cannot sign up for a Level account, they are able to join the wait list for Avant’s newly-branded banking product.
Avant was founded in 2012 and has since connected customers with more than $7.5 billion in loans and 400,000 credit cards. The company has raised more than $600 million in equity from investors including JP Morgan Chase and Hyde Park Venture Partners.
Digital financial solutions provider SoFi is getting into the vehicle loan refinance game. The online lender formed a partnership with MotoRefi to offer users yet another reason to use its services.
Founded in 2016, MotoRefi connects users with lenders and manages the back-end documentation process with each state’s motor vehicle department.
According to SoFi Executive Vice President Jennifer Nuckles, the addition of an auto loan refinancing tool was a logical one since many of the company’s users carry large balances on their auto loans.
Additionally, the nation is an increasingly fertile ground for a car loan refinancing tool. In the past decade, the number of vehicle loans has grown by 41%. Today, auto loans account for 9% of all household debt, with 114 million Americans carrying a total of $1.37 trillion in auto loans.
Through today’s partnership, MotoRefi will have access to SoFi’s two million customers via an integration on SoFi’s website. MotoRefi is banking on this increase in exposure; the company expects to process $1 billion in loans this year after handling $250 million last year.
Overall, the addition of the new service is another step toward making SoFi into a more “bank-like” environment. The California-based company, which originated in student loan refinancing, has since expanded to offer personal loans, home loans, investing tools, a checking account, rewards, budgeting tools, and more.
Launched last month, SoFi’s latest tool offers investors early access to IPOs. Users with at least $3,000 in their account can purchase shares of companies as they go public. This type of access to IPOs, which is generally not available to individual retail investors, will help SoFi reach the new generation of traders that have entered the stock market since the pandemic hit last year.
Fintech connoisseurs may notice the irony in SoFi’s new IPO investment tool. The company itself recently eschewed a formal public listing for a SPAC merger with Social Capital Hedosophia Holdings.
New York City-based Rho Technologies has inked a partnership with Sterling National Bank, the principal subsidiary of Sterling Bancorp that specializes in serving small-to-medium sized businesses as well as consumers. Sterling will leverage Rho’s digital Banking-as-a-Service platform, Rho Business Banking, to support its customer growth and expansion objectives.
Sterling National Bank’s Matthew Smith, Executive Managing Director for Direct Banking and BaaS, called the partnership “an important step” in expanding its portfolio of BaaS arrangements, as well as speeding up the bank’s “organization-wide digital transformation to offer customer-centric, digitally-enabled solutions to the marketplace.”
The Rho Business Banking platform combines collaborative finance software and commercial-grade banking in a single solution. Relying on a unified platform, team members can take advantage of integrated, intelligent solutions for A/P, budgeting, data automation, and accounting integrations. Rho offers no-fee global payments, up to 1.5% cash back on all spending, and access to its team of “world-class bankers.”
“Rho is thrilled to collaborate with Sterling National Bank,” Rho Technologies CEO and co-founder Everett Cook said. “We spent a lot of time seeking a partner that had the capabilities and scale that our current and future customers need. We look forward to working with Sterling in supporting our future product and service offerings.
With more than $30 billion in assets, Sterling National Bank made fintech headlines earlier this year when it announced a partnership with Google Pay to offer digital checking and savings accounts through the Google Pay platform. Headquartered in New York, Sterling National Bank also teamed up with Goalsetter during African American History Month to provide seed funding for a program to support financial inclusion and literacy among students in underserved communities.
“This critical initiative reinforces Sterling’s commitment to financial education and empowering young people to reach financial independence,” Smith said. “Black History Month provides an important opportunity to celebrate and promote Black achievement. We are excited to play a part in supporting these inspiring young men to become the next leaders, savers, and investors.”
Rho Technologies began the year with news of a $15 million investment courtesy of a Series A round led by M13 Ventures. The funding, which took the company’s total capital to $19.9 million according to Crunchbase, enabled Rho to launch an integrated accounts payable platform as part of an expansion of its flagship Business Banking offering.
“We’ve developed the modern commercial banking platform built around the way companies operate today: distributed, team-oriented, transparent, and built for scale,” Cook said when the funding was announced in January. “AP is the next step on our mission to help teams work better together with money.”
Digital Onboarding, a company that offers solutions to enable banks and credit unions to better engage their customers, has announced a partnership with Small Business Resources (SBR). The company, which helps banks acquire small business deposits, and provides treasury management and lending services, will use Digital Onboarding’s platform to help its client banks boost engagement and increase revenue.
Specifically, the collaboration will enable Small Business Resources to offer a new branded solution, SBR FullWallet, to better serve the 42% of SMEs that, according to research from Accenture, believe that alternative providers can do a better job than traditional banks when it comes to serving small and medium-sized businesses.
“For banks, small businesses are significantly more profitable than consumers, but a large percentage of small business customers are unengaged and at risk,” Digital Onboarding CEO Ted Brown explained. “I am thrilled to partner with Small Business Resources to help regional and community banks deepen their business relationships and better compete in today’s marketplace.”
The challenge of new rivals was top of mind for Small Business Resources CEO Robert Boorin, as well. “Banks are facing stiff competition from fintechs and Neobank providers that are investing heavily to attract small and medium-sized business banking customers,” Boorin said. “Business banking relationship managers struggle to build deep relationships with all of the customers in their portfolios. SBR FullWallet will enable our Partner Banks to deliver timely and highly personalized communications that make it easier for small businesses to adopt additional products and digital banking services.”
Launched in 1998, SBR was founded to bring small business marketing solutions to institutions in financial services, insurance, and other strategic industries. With services ranging from customer acquisition and engagement to cross-selling and onboarding, SBR blends traditional and digital media services to ensure that financial institutions have multi-channel access to SMEs.
Digital Onboarding most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall in 2018. At the event, the company showed how its platform gives banks and credit unions the email and marketing automation resources to create personalized digital journeys that educate and engage their customers. More recently, Digital Onboarding has announced partnerships with a sizable number of regional banks and credit unions including American Bank of Commerce, New York University FCU, Pacific Service Credit Union, Spirit FCU, and Southwest Financial FCU – all in the first quarter of 2021.
Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Digital Onboarding was founded in 2015. The company has raised more than four million dollars in funding from investors including FINTOP Capital, Detroit Venture Partners, and Jack Henry & Associates. Digital Onboarding’s most recent financing came in August of last year; the amount of the investment was not disclosed.
Online insurance company for the self-employed Next Insurance just closed a $250 million investment round. The funding marks the company’s second $250 million investment received in the past seven months.
Investors include FinTLV Ventures and Battery Ventures, which led the round, with participation from CapitalG, Group 11, Zeev Ventures, Founders Circle, and G Squared.
With its total funding now at $881 million, Next Insurance’s valuation now sits at $4 billion. This figure is double the $2 billion valuation assigned to the company last September.
The valuation boost is well-deserved. In the past six months, Next Insurance announced two acquisitions, added new strategic partners, and doubled its gross written premium (for those not in the insurance industry, gross written premium is essentially the total amount customers pay for insurance coverage).
Since it was founded in 2014, Next Insurance has boosted its client base to more than 200,000. The company leverages machine learning and a purely digital approach to drive costs down by up to 30% in comparison to traditional policies.
“This latest round of financing is a validation of our vision which is to make it dramatically easier for small business owners to get the insurance coverage they need by removing friction from the customer experience,” said Next Insurance Co-founder and CEO Guy Goldstein. “It starts with developing a comprehensive digital product portfolio under one roof, continues with leveraging technology that improves the customer experience, and ends with a network of integrated partnerships that bring policy purchasing to the customer within the systems they already use.”
A partnership between digital identity company Signicat and German software solution provider Cryptshare soon will bring to market a new B2B identity verification solution. The new offering marries platform-independent email encryption and secure file transfer technology with trusted sender and recipient identities to ensure secure business communication as well as legal proof of the sender and recipient. With a broad range of use cases in both retail and enterprise markets, the companies anticipate making the new solution available in the third quarter of 2021.
In their partnership announcement, the companies highlighted both the centrality of email as a communication channel for both personal and business use. Despite the rise of alternative forms of communications including text messaging, email is still embraced by 87% of all citizens in the U.K. Businesses can take advantage of the popularity of email, Signicat and Cryptshare assert, if they are willing to take the necessary steps to ensure both security and traceability. Today’s announcement integrates the two companies’ technologies so that Cryptshare’s services can be accessed using eIDAS-compliant secure authentication.
Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Trondheim, Norway, Signicat made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in 2017. At the event, the company demonstrated its rapid onboarding and digital signing solutions Signicat Assure and Signicat Sign. Acquired by Nordic Capital in the spring of 2019, the company has since appointed a new CEO in Asger Hattel, acquired Dutch identity verification specialist Connectis, collaborated with fellow Finovate alums like Mambu, and was named one of the fastest growing companies in Europe by The Financial Times.
“We live in a society where now more than ever we must ensure trust between businesses and consumers online,” Hattel said when the announcement in the FT was made. “In Signicat, we are building a progressive digital trust company that both embraces innovation and business needs in this area. We have a decade’s worth of experiencing building the tools, so we are ideally placed to address this growing market opportunity.”
Signicat partner Cryptshare is headquartered in Freiburg im Breisgau in Southern Germany. Founded in 2000, the company has four million users of its technology in 30 countries around the world, including 2,000 corporate customers. Dominik Lehr is CEO.
Global payments platform Paysafe is making the move to the New York Stock Exchange this week. The London-based company is going public via a merger with Foley Trasimene Acquisition Corp. II, a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) set up by billionaire business executive Bill Foley.
After the deal, which values Paysafe at around $9 billion, was approved on March 25, Paysafe began trading on the New York Stock Exchange today under the ticker symbols “PSFE” and “PSFE.WS.” The combined company now operates as Paysafe Limited.
“The closing of this transaction and our listing on the New York Stock Exchange is a huge milestone for Paysafe and getting to this point today is testament to the hard work and dedication of our team around the world,” said Paysafe CEO Philip McHugh. “We’re excited to be embarking on the next stage of our growth journey as a public company.”
Founded in 1996, Paysafe enables businesses and consumers to connect and transact using its payment processing, digital wallet, card issuing, and online cash solutions. The company has completed 11 acquisitions, most recently purchasing Openbucks last July.
Paysafe’s suite of brands includes Income Access, Paysafecard, Skrill, and Neteller. In an interview with CNBC, Foley described Paysafe’s solutions as “ubiquitous,” adding, “It’s just everywhere in terms of the gaming world and digital wallets, e-cash solutions.”
With 3,400 employees in more than 12 offices across the globe, Paysafe helps businesses and consumers transact across 70 payment types in 40+ currencies.
Digital banking services company Spiral picked up a $14 million investment this week. The New York-based company will use the capital to fund its new app that makes it easy for users to donate to the charity of their choice.
“The future belongs to socially-conscious brands that care as much about giving back to society as they do about generating profits and growth,” Spiral CEO and co-founder Shawn Melamed said. He explained that the company’s goal is to create a new solution to serve an ecosystem of millions of charitable givers and more than one million non-profit businesses.
“People are increasingly supporting brands that align with their values,” Spiral President and co-founder Dan Blumenfeld added. “And they expect a simple and effortless user experience. Spiral will offer customers both a personalized banking experience and a deeper connection to the charities they support.”
Currently in beta, Spiral boasts that it offers account holders 15x more than the national average in savings and cash bonuses. No minimum balance is required and no fees are charged for active accounts or for transferring money by ACH. Spiral provides donation matching of up to $150 per year to more than one million charities and nonprofits ranging from the David Ortiz Children’s Foundation to the Cerebral Palsy Research Alliance Foundation. Automatic donation reports for tax returns are provided, and the company’s deposit accounts are issued by nbkc Bank of Overland, Kansas, and are FDIC-insured up to $250,000.
The funding round was led by Team8 and featured participation from Communitas Capital, Phoenix, Nidoco AB, and MTVO. Melamed and Blumenfeld founded Spiral after Melamed served as Managing Director of Morgan Stanley’s Technology Business Development and Innovation Offices and Blumenfeld served as Head of Product and Growth at Skype.
It’s getting hard not to wonder if Plaid is better off as a bachelor …
Last week, we highlighted how the financial data connectivity platform rebounded from its failed union with Visa to launch a range of new initiatives including new offerings (new income verification solution Plaid Income), new partners, and a diversity-oriented accelerator program, FinRise.
Today brings news that Plaid has teamed up with global brokerage infrastructure platform – and fellow Finovate alum – DriveWealth. Courtesy of a single API integration, customers of both firms will be able to streamline and simplify the online investment account funding process for their clients.
“The combination of DriveWealth and Plaid to enable anyone from fintechs and banks to investment advisors and RIAs to quickly and securely add investment capabilities to their current offerings, via a simple API, will give more consumers equal access to investing in the U.S. markets,” DriveWealth CEO Bob Cortright said.
The integration will enable customers of both DriveWealth and Plaid to authenticate end user bank accounts using Plaid’s technology, and leverage tokenization to provide fast and secure verification of bank funding sources using DriveWealth’s API. The combination not only improves the ACH success rate, it also boosts transparency into the fund transfer process while safeguarding client data.
Plaid Head of Revenue Paul Williamson credited the wealth management industry for its advances in technology in recent years. But he pointed out that there is still more friction in the process than there needs to be. “Companies like DriveWealth are changing that and this partnership combines to power of Plaid with DriveWealth to make digital investing experiences even easier,” Williamson said.
In addition to this week’s partnership with DriveWealth, Plaid also announced that it is working with Dun & Bradstreet to bring the benefits of alternative data to small business credit risk analysis. The new integration will enable small business owners to safely share financial account information and potentially improve their credit profile with the commercial credit reporting agency.
“Small businesses need all the support they can get, and this integration makes the process of creating and building a business credit profile secure and simple, which can lead to better access to financing and more business opportunities,” Global Head of Policy at Plaid John Pitts said.
And by the way, Plaid is not the only fintech in today’s partnership announcement that is populating the headlines of late. DriveWealth began 2021 with the acquisition of institutional broker dealer Cuttone & Company. The deal will bring additional market and regulatory expertise to the Chatham, New Jersey-based brokerage infrastructure API provider – as well as a network of institutional trading partners.
More recently, DriveWealth teamed up with Aghaz to support the Seattle-based roboadvisor’s investment app for Muslim customers, partnered with cross-border roboadvisor Hemista to bring fractional share investing in both U.S. and Indian stocks to Indian ex-pats, and collaborated with GenZ-focused investment app Alinea.
PayPallaunchedCheckout with Crypto today. The new development enables users with cryptocurrency holdings to seamlessly transact using crypto at the online point of sale. Starting today, U.S. shoppers can make purchases using crypto at millions of online businesses.
The new Checkout with Crypto payment option will automatically appear in U.S. users’ PayPal wallets at checkout when they have a cryptocurrency balance of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, or Bitcoin Cash that will cover an eligible purchase. Because PayPal makes money when users buy and sell cryptocurrencies on its platform, it is not charging additional transaction fees.
“As the use of digital payments and digital currencies accelerates, the introduction of Checkout with Crypto continues our focus on driving mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies, while continuing to offer PayPal customers choice and flexibility in the ways they can pay using the PayPal wallet,” said PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman. “Enabling cryptocurrencies to make purchases at businesses around the world is the next chapter in driving the ubiquity and mass acceptance of digital currencies.”
Essentially, Checkout with Crypto works behind-the-scenes of a transaction to help customers sell cryptocurrency through the PayPal platform. PayPal then uses it to pay a merchant, who receives U.S. dollars in exchange. Because of the embedded nature of the tool, the process happens in one seamless flow at checkout.
There are a few restrictions around Checkout with Crypto. First, the tool is only available to U.S. users. Second, purchases must be eligible. Finally, users can’t split the payment among currency types. In other words, in order to make a purchase in cryptocurrency, they must have a sufficient balance of a single cryptocurrency.
In the coming months, PayPal plans to expand the service to its full list of 29 million online merchant clients across the globe.
This move expands PayPal’s previous cryptocurrency capabilities. In partnership with Paxos, PayPal began enabling users to buying, selling, and holding crypto last October.
