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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
For all the excitement about challenger banking ex-U.S., there may be more going on in the alternative banking scene in America than many think.
Mobile banking company Varo Money, for example, announced this week that it has received approval for deposit insurance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). This is a significant step on the company’s journey toward obtaining a national bank charter and moves Varo to the final stage of the approval process, the company said in a statement.
Varo Money CEO Colin Walsh said that the goal of earning a license to operate nationally was “part of Varo’s vision from the very beginning.” Walsh noted that the bank charter would help Varo also meet its goal of boosting financial inclusion. “Becoming a fully chartered bank will give us greater opportunity to deliver products and services that positively impact the lives of everyday people around the country,” he said.
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Varo Money offers a mobile banking account with high-yield savings, direct deposit, and no account fees. The company had a big 2019 – forging partnerships with Galileo Processing, Socure, Cachet Financial, Bancorp Bank, and iHeartMedia in the second half of the year alone. Varo also raised a significant chunk of change in 2019 – picking up a $100 million investment from Warburg Pincus, Gopher Asset Management, and The Rise Fund that drove the company’s total capital to more than $178 million.
En route to earnings its national banking charter, Varo still needs to complete certain organizational requirements, as well as meet terms of both the OCC’s (Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) and the FDIC’s Federal Reserve membership. The company said that once it earns its charter it will expand its offerings to include products like credit cards, loans, and savings solutions.
Top U.K.-based challenger bank Starling Bank raised $77.5 million (£60 million) from existing investors Merian Global Investors and JTC.
Today’s investment brings Starling’s total funding to $417 million (£323 million).
“The support of our existing investors represents a huge endorsement of our business strategy, as we continue to ramp up our growth,” said Anne Boden, Starling Bank founder and CEO. “We’re constantly innovating and have big ambitions to turn Starling into a world-leading digital bank.”
Starling will use the funding to support “rapid expansion” efforts and to create products and services that compete with traditional financial institutions. Helping motivate its employees to push for this expansion, the bank is awarding shares to its staff.
“We could not do this without the support of our 800 employees, who work so hard to provide a better banking experience for our customers, giving them more control over their finances. So I’m thrilled to be giving shares to them,” said Boden.
Since launching its banking app in 2017, Starling has amassed 1.25 million accounts and holds $1.61 billion (£1.25 billion) in assets under management. The bank was founded in 2014 and is headquartered in London with offices in Southampton, Cardiff, and Dublin.
Blockchain-powered payments platform Paystand has raised $20 million in Series B funding. The investment, which the company will use to grow its products and services, as well as sales, marketing, and engineering teams, featured the participation of both new and existing investors.
“We made a promise to reboot commercial finance because it’s insecure, inefficient, and built on trustless networks and technology,” Paystand CEO Jeremy Almond said. “Today markets another step towards realizing that vision and transforming enterprise finance.”
Paystand seeks to do for complicated commercial payments what Venmo has done for P2P transactions. By digitizing and automating a company’s cash cycle, Paystand’s payments-as-a-service platform helps businesses become more capital efficient, streamlines back office operations, and allows them to offer innovative payment experiences.
Paystand participated in our developer’s conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, in 2014. With offices in both Scotts Valley, California, and Guadalajara, Mexico, the company has added 80 new large enterprise customers in the last 24 months.
Last week we shared news of FinovateEurope alum Opentech and its partnership with Mastercard.
Now we can add that Swiss Bankers Prepaid Services has teamed up with Opentech to launch its latest money sending service, Send. The new offering is based on Opentech’s OpenPay Send solution which, as we learned last week, leverages the Mastercard Send platform to give users a convenient, “use-case agnostic” way to transfer money to locations around the world.
Swiss Bankers’ Send can be readily activated after a quick KYC process that only takes a few minutes via the mobile app. The solution is is available to all Swiss citizens who are Swiss Bankers cardholders.
Highlighting the rise of P2P payments as a preference for both domestic and international payments, Swiss Bankers CEO Hans-Jorg Widiger praised the partnership with Opentech. “Seizing this opportunity is a crucial step for us to remark and consolidate our positioning as a customer-driven, trustable and innovative company,” he said. “With Send we faced this challenge, relying on our long-dated partnership with Mastercard and Opentech to provide our customers with a distinctive solution in line with our quality standards.”
Fiserv Partners with Hong Kong Digital Bank Pioneer ZA Bank – ZA Bank, will use the company’s VisionPLUS global payment software, which supports the entire card payment lifecycle from origination and issuance to settlement and customer service.
Worldline to Acquire Ingenico in $8.6 Billion Deal – The combination of Worldline and Ingenico will create the world’s fourth largest payment services provider with 20,000 workers in 50 countries serving nearly one million merchants and 1,200 financial institutions.
Also on Finovate.com
Everything Fintech at Davos 2020 – We combed through the agenda to bring you a view of the discussions through a fintech lens. Here’s a summary of some of the most interesting fintech-related topics covered at the global event.
Finovate Launches New Gender Diversity Stream at FinovateEurope – FinovateEurope is innovative for us in a number of ways. This year we will debut our Women in Fintech stream.
Fintech and the Case for Senior-Based Solutions – Ensuring that the online and mobile worlds are a safer place for seniors is one of the important contributions that technology can make.
Can Amazon Help Goldman Sachs Get its Groove Back? – According to reporting in both the Financial Times and on CNBC, Amazon and Goldman Sachs are discussing a partnership that would enable the investment bank to offer loans directly to merchants via Amazon’s platform.
Business spending and expense management platform Divvy is opening up new financing possibilities this week for its business clients with the launch of Divvy Capital.
The new funding option is done via invoice financing. Divvy enables its business customers to “float” their invoices for terms of one, two, or three months. Repayment is straightforward and there is a single, flat fee with APRs ranging from 10.8% to 11.4%.
The Utah-based company describes the new offering as a “flexible, lightweight” funding option that is separate from the Divvy Credit Card, which gives businesses both a physical and virtual Mastercard that offers 1% cash back plus 15% to 50% off select travel expenses.
https://youtu.be/2yVnRpFNrmo
Since all of Divvy’s current business clients are automatically pre-approved, there is no need to wait on credit approvals and funds are disbursed in near-real time. The company has been testing the new financing model for the last six months and it is now opening it up to its wider customer base.
“Divvy Capital is our most important public move in that direction,” the company stated in its press release, adding, “but stay tuned—2020 is full of many more big announcements to come.” A look at the Divvy Capital page reveals that the company is planning to launch short-term loans of up to $50,000 for terms of up to 12 months and and option that allows businesses to float a portion of their credit card balance for a fixed fee.
Hong Kong’s first digital bank will use payment technology from Fiserv. The firm, ZA Bank, will use the company’s VisionPLUS global payment software, which supports the entire card payment lifecycle from origination and issuance to settlement and customer service. ZA Bank will leverage Fiserv’s suite of APIs to ensure fast and seamless app development and integration.
“We are pleased to partner with Fiserv as we embark on a journey to shift the lifestyle of future banking users,” ZA Bank CEO Rockson Hsu said. “With our companies’ combined knowledge and expertise in banking and technology, we are well-placed to respond fast to the ever-changing market with an agile product development approach.”
Licensed in March of last year, ZA Bank launched as a pilot in December with 2,000 retail customers. The pilot enabled the challenger bank to test services such as remote onboarding, time deposit, and facial recognition. ZA Bank offers 6% interest on three-month deposits of up to $25,000 (HK$200,000). Established by ZhongAn Technologies International Group, ZA Bank emphasizes a “community-driven approach” that seeks to match innovative technologies with the changing lifestyles of its customers.
“Ultimately, we want to offer superb user experiences via a robust and secure platform,” Hsu said. “I am confident that with the support of Fiserv, ZA Bank will be well-positioned to deliver relevant, convenient, and excellent service to our users.”
A long-time Finovate alum, Fiserv demonstrated its technology on the Finovate stage most recently at FinovateSpring 2018. The Brookfield, Wisconsin-based company, founded in 1984, acquired fellow Finovate alum First Data last year, and began 2020 with news of a pair of new credit union partnerships.
Speaking for Fiserv on the ZA Bank partnership, company EVP and head of Asia Pacific Ivo Distelbrink, put the collaboration in the broader context of financial innovation taking place in the region. Distelbrink called the launch of ZA Bank “an important milestone” for financial services in Hong Kong, and praised the firm as a “modern banking option aligned to the changing way people want to move and manage money.”
Financial services startup SoFi is partnering with The Bancorp to serve as the company’s backend banking provider and card issuer for SoFi Money.
The company launched SoFi Money last year to serve as an alternative banking product. SoFi’s challenger bank features include spending and budgeting tools, billpay, remote deposit capture, peer-to-peer payments, and a high interest cash management account.
Accountholders also have access to SoFi’s flagship borrowing products such as student loan refinancing, private student loans, personal loans, and home loans. As a competitive edge, SoFi also offers member benefits such as career coaching and VIP access to the SoFi Stadium, courtesy of last month’s partnership with Mastercard.
A rendering of the SoFi Stadium, set to open this summer in Inglewood, CA
The Bancorp is one of the top private-label debit and prepaid card issuers in the U.S. for Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and UnionPay. The company has more than 75 million prepaid cards in distribution and processes 1.1 billion transactions each year.
“As a true pioneer in the fintech space, SoFi has been setting and surpassing industry standards by providing outstanding products and services to its members,” said Damian Kozlowski, President and CEO of The Bancorp. “We are incredibly proud to be selected as a key partner that will support SoFi’s mission to deliver innovative products and services to new and existing members.”
The collaboration could begin as soon as March. Amazon has not commented on the report either, other than to affirm that lending is one of the services it provides to its merchant partners. In a statement, the company praised its merchants for “account(ing) for more than half of everything sold in Amazon’s stores.”
Goldman’s potential alliance with Amazon follows news of the investment bank’s 2019 partnership with Apple and Mastercard as part of the Apple Card launch. It also comes as the firm makes a number of moves that suggest it is serious about financial technology. Financial News London noted that in addition to partnership changes in recent years that have led to fewer traders and more investment bankers, Goldman Sachs is also “clearing out space for leaders in the new consumer business (it) is building.” The article highlights a pair of new Goldman Sachs partners – the founder of PFM app Clarity, which Goldman acquired in 2018, and the CEO of United Capital, a recent wealth management acquisition – as evidence of this trend.
Another example of Goldman Sachs interest in fintech, of course, is its digital bank offering, Marcus, launched in 2016. At the company’s first investor day last week, Goldman affirmed its commitment to Marcus, pledging to add a digital wealth management component and a checking account to the platform in 2021. Goldman also unveiled a new mobile Marcus app that enables accountholders to check balances, schedule transfers, and make loan payments. As reported in the company’s fourth quarter results, Marcus has $60 billion in consumer deposits.
A possible partnership with Amazon is not the only fintech headline Goldman Sachs has picked up this week. Yahoo Finance is reporting that Goldman may seek to build its own financial services cloud platform as part of a “transformational, multi-decade effort.” The report quotes Goldman Sachs co-Chief Information Officer Marco Argenti who suggested that the company would leverage it own “core technology services” for external uses in the same way that Amazon has with its Amazon Web Services platform, and potentially provide a significant new revenue stream.
The actual scope of Goldman’s initiative is what has most observers and analysts buzzing. Does the company’s stated “transformational, multi-decade effort” essentially mean Goldman-Sachs-as-a-Service? Or a full-fledged AWS competitor? Bank of America and IBM announced their intention to develop a financial services public cloud platform last fall. It will be interesting to see if Goldman’s ambition is to meet, or exceed, that goal.
Sequoia Capital has led a $35 million funding round for payments infrastructure specialist Finix. The investment, which also featured participation from Acrew Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Activant Capital, and Inspired Capital, takes Finix’s total funding to more than $55 million. The Series B will enable the company to further grow its product and engineering teams, as well as accelerate innovation in its payments-infrastructure-as-a-service offering.
Finix’s goal is to help companies “own their payment stack” which enables them to create the payment experience that best fits their customers and business. From enhancing the merchant onboarding experience to managing the flow of funds, Finix sees control over the payment process as a “strategic imperative” that companies should not relegate to third party payment service providers. In the same way that companies like Marqeta and Plaid have made it easier for businesses to issue cards and access financial information, Finix sees itself as empowering businesses to own payments.
“Every day, our customers prove to us they are able to build superior product experiences that delight both consumers and merchants when they have full control over their payment stacks,” Finix CEO Richie Serna said.
Finix also differentiates itself by the way it charges for its service. Instead of taking a cut from each transaction, Finix opts for a fixed pricing model plus a sliding scale fee based on the number of payments processed. Finix notes that companies can go live with its system in as few as two months and at a significant savings compared to building their own in-house solution.
“Historically, software companies have had two options: either take (the) pain and integrate payments into your software, or give it to your customers in the form of a disconnected experience,” Sequoia partner Pat Grady explained. Instead, he said, companies can use Finix’s “developer-friendly building blocks” to create an integrated, seamless payment experience for customers while adding payments as a new source of revenue.
Finix was founded in 2015 and is based in San Francisco, California. The company’s customers include Passport Labs, a mobility management platform, retail POS company Lightspeed POS, and small business financing and cash flow solution provider Kabbage.
Opentech has leveraged Mastercard Send APIs to offer a new solution, OpenPay Send, that will give financial institutions across Europe powerful money transfer capabilities.
“Opentech’s mission is to be the enabler of digital payments
for banks, leveraging state-of-the-art infrastructures to build highly reliable
and flexible solutions, ready to be deployed to the end user,” Opentech CEO Stefano
Andreani said. “The partnership with Mastercard and the integration with their worldwide
network is a perfect fit to our strategy, bringing a great value and
convenience to our customers.” Andreani called OpenPay Send “an important
addition to our offering.”
OpenPay Send will also enable firms to offer a broad range of services – from remittance and micropayments to insurance claim distribution and real-time P2P payments. Available via a single integration, the solution helps institutions transfer money to more than 100 corridors – including as many as three billion bank accounts – as well as mobile wallets, payment cards, and cash-out locations worldwide.
The new technology gives banks and other FIs the flexibility to tailor its offering, specifying which countries and sending channels to be activated, and at what costs. OpenPay Send also features a customizable UI for both mobile and web, as well as an administrative portal. Opentech will demo OpenPay Send later this month at FinovateEurope in Berlin, Germany.
Mastercard’s Arne Pache, VP of Digital Payments and Labs, praised the collaboration as an example of how the Mastercard Send platform improves the process of global money transfer. “(We) designed the Mastercard Send platform envisioning a better, faster, and smarter way to send money all over the world in multiple ways by leveraging our expertise and the existing relationships with our customers.” Pache added that the partnership with Opentech and launch of OpenPay Send “brings this vision to life.”
Opentech demonstrated its white-label mobile app, OpenPay for Business, at FinovateEurope 2018. The company is headquartered in both Italy and Switzerland.
Here is our weekly roundup of the latest news from our Finovate alumni:
Revolutoffers free airport lounge access to users if their flight is delayed by more than one hour.
Billtrust’s Business Payments Network is now integrated with Corporate Spending Innovations to enable their customers to automate supplier payment delivery.
Voleotaps Glen Wilson as its interim CEO. Company founder Thomas Beattie will remain as Voleo CCO.
Xignite now available in Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Jack Henrylaunches core-agnostic banking platform.
DefenseStormreports zero attrition and 50% customer growth in 2019.
FISpartners with alternative SMB funding company LiberisFinance.
Pacific Service Credit Union selectsDigital Onboarding to enhance member onboarding.
Quidmerges with social media analytics company NetBase.
ndgit and Konsentuspartner for PSD2 compliance. This week, ndgit also released version 2 of its API platform.
Arxan Technologiesrecorded 30% subscription growth in 2019.
Here’s How Far We’ve Come with Voice AI in Customer Service – When it comes to customer service, even in-person interactions can be unpleasant. And doing business over the phone is usually markedly worse, especially if there is a bot involved. There is one fintech fighting that stereotype, however.
Currencycloud Raises $80 Million in New Funding – B2B cross border payments innovator Currencycloud has locked in $80 million in new funding.
Citi Unveils Digital Investment Platform Powered by Jemstep – Launched by Citi last week and powered by Jemstep, Citi Wealth Builder is the latest addition to the world of digital investing platforms.
LendUp Tops $2 Billion in Consumer Loans Mark – Since its launch in 2011, socially responsible lender LendUp has surpassed $2 billion in consumer financing via its digital lending platform.
FICO Suite 10 Brings New Precision and Flexibility to Credit Scoring Decisions – The new technology from FICOleverages trended credit bureau data to boost its predictive power, enabling lenders to make more precise decisions on credit risk.
Splitit Taps Stripe to Facilitate Merchant Onboarding for Payment Installments – The agreement makes Stripe the payment facilitator for all new merchants who onboard with Splitit.
Also on Finovate.com
PSD2 Turns Two: Where Do We Go From Here? – Break out the PSD2 birthday cake! On January 13 the Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2)– what we now generally think of as open banking– turned two years old.
Digital Dollars and E-Euros: The Case for National Digital Currencies – In recent weeks and months, we’ve heard news of a growing number of central banks investigating the pros and cons of digitizing their money supply.
Stop Looking at Your Customer Base as a Faceless Mass – f you ask Balázs Vinnai, president of W.UP, one size does not fit all when it comes to banking. In fact, his company’s entire premise is built around creating a personalized user experience.
Follow the Money: FinovateEurope’s VC All Stars Talk Fintech Investment in Europe – This year at FinovateEurope, we’ve added a panel called Investor All Stars. It’s stacked with investors who will offer up their take on the top topics for venture capital funding in fintech.
Token issuance and asset servicing platform TokenSoft announced the launch of TokenSoft Investment Accounts today. The new accounts offer financial institutions a way to give their clients who invest in security tokens self-managed investment wallets.
“We’re excited to bring a multi-signature wallet security packaged in a self-controlled, easy to manage brokerage-style experience to the over 100,000 investors using our platform,” said TokenSoft CEO Mason Borda.
The new investment accounts offer investors a more traditional, brokerage-style experience; access to dividend distributions; and automated reinvestment. Additionally, issuers will receive support for compliant security token standards and integrated reporting and disclosures.
“The ability for non-technical individuals to self-custody is going to change the way assets under management models work in traditional finance,” said Jordan Davis, VP of Business Development at TokenSoft. “Wallets like TokenSoft Investment Accounts will put pressure on financial institutions to provide better client servicing, value-add services, and investment management tools to earn investors’ business. People will be able to add or remove service providers from accessing their assets the same way you can add or remove profiles from your Netflix subscription.”
TokenSoft’s mission is to accelerate the adoption of the blockchain in financial markets. The company launched its white-label token securities issuance platform in 2017 to help companies tokenize their assets in an economy that does not have the infrastructure to support such transactions. Below are a few use case scenarios:
Venture capital firms can tokenize portions of their limited partnership interest
Banks can tokenize their assets under management, creating a stablecoin
Startups can tokenize their equity to offer investors and employees fractional ownership
Among TokenSoft’s clients are Andra Capital’s Silicon Valley and Arca Investment Management Firm. The company was founded by James Poole and Mason Borda and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Since its launch in 2011, socially responsible lender LendUp has surpassed $2 billion in consumer financing via its digital lending platform. This represents 6.5+ million loans, with an average loan value of $300.
“We’re very proud of this significant lending accomplishment, the progress we’ve made in driving disciplined, profitable, and sustainable growth, and our role as a standard bearer for responsible and inclusive lending and banking,” LendUp CEO Anu Shultes said.
One of the fintechs to embrace early the concept of financial wellness, LendUp combines access to financing via its short-term installment loans. The company offers financial education and a specific-but-personalized strategy to help consumers improve their credit, the LendUp Ladder. This resource uses gamification, education, and good borrower behavior to enable borrowers to earn points that allow them to apply for larger loan amounts at better rates. The company notes that its customers have taken more than two million financial education courses via its platform.
“Through our lending, education, and savings programs, we’ve helped customers raise their credit profiles by hundreds of thousands of points cumulatively and saved them hundreds of millions of dollars in interest and fees from much higher cost products,” Shultes explained. She added that the $2 billion mark was a “real testament to the impact that financial service providers like LendUp can and should have on the market.”
It’s worth noting that this week’s announcement comes on the one-year anniversary of Shultes’ appointment as CEO; Shultes took over the company last January from co-founder Sasha Orloff. Shultes was formerly LendUp’s GM and has been credited for helping grow the company’s loan originations to more than 5.5 million.
LendUp demonstrated its financing platform at FinovateSpring 2014. The San Francisco, California-based company has raised more than $360 million in funding from investors including PayPal Ventures and Victory Park Capital. The company spun-off its credit card business, Mission Lane, as a stand-alone entity a year ago, which has allowed LendUp to focus on its lending and financial wellness businesses.
Blockchain-based financing company Figure announced today it has scooped up Asiff Hirji, former COO of Coinbase, as its new President.
In his tenure at Coinbase, Hirji helped the company grow its revenue to more than $1 billion and boost its valuation to $8 billion. He also served as Operating Partner at Andreesen Horowitz and was COO at TD Ameritrade. Prior to those positions, he held senior leadership roles at TPG Capital, Saxo Bank, HP, and Bain Capital.
“Asiff has already been a critical advisor to me on how we manage the growth of Figure in order to drive the transformation of financial services across categories and around the world,” said CEO Mike Cagney. “His deep experience in the financial services industry and his long history of helping companies drive and manage growth are both going to be important to the growth of Figure and the creation of our new merchant bank.”
Figure was founded in 2018 by former SoFi Founder and CEO Mike Cagney. The company provides direct-to-consumer solutions to help consumers optimize their finances via three products, a home equity line of credit, mortgage refinance, and student loan refinance. The company leverages the blockchain to process the loans and offers a simple application process to provide funds in a matter of days, not weeks.
In his new role, Hirji is responsible for building a new bank division that will enable banks to leverage Provenance, Figure’s blockchain-based transactions platform.
“Blockchain will crash the costs of financial services, making products more affordable and available to all. Figure is one of the very few companies actually turning that promise into reality,” said Hirji. “The opportunity now is to scale to more financial products and open this capability to all financial institutions. I feel fortunate to be able to help make the promise of blockchain a reality.”
Since the company’s launch, Figure has now become the fourth largest originator of HELOC loans in the U.S. The company has raised $1.2 billion in combined debt and equity and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
