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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
This week brings May Day, a day to celebrate the halfway point between spring and summer, and in the world of fintech, there are also exciting developments to mark the start of a new month. Check back for real-time updates on how the fintech landscape evolves this week.
UniWyo Credit Union tapsJack Henry to help with merger with Reliant Federal Credit Union.
Digital Banking
Core banking platform provider Finxact and SaaS core modernization and transformation solution provider for banks Zafinannounced a new collaboration.
Expense Management
Financial management superapp for expenses and corporate cards Expensifyunveils its New Expensify platform geared toward the global self-employed market.
Payments
Fintech infrastructure solution for branded customer wallets, Ansa, secures $14 million in Series A funding.
TreviPayunveils new self-financing option and enhanced payment application features for B2B net terms program.
Stripedecouples payments from the rest of its products stack.
Till Financialpartners with EF Educational Tours and EF Explore America to facilitate cashless payments for traveling students.
Anti-fraud and financial crime software company Feedzaiintroduces new Chief Financial Officer David Larson.
Featurespacejoins The Knoble, an alliance of financial service professionals, law enforcement, regulators, and NGOs committed to fighting financial crime.
Anti-fraud platform Feedzai has teamed up with account-to-account (A2A) platform Form3.
Courtesy of the partnership, Feedzai will power Form3’s new authorized push payment fraud (APP) fraud prevention solution.
Founded in 2011, Feedzai made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in 2014.
Anti-fraud and financial crime software company Feedzai will power the new authorized push payment fraud (APP fraud) prevention solution from account-to-account (A2A) platform Form3. Built with supervised machine learning, the new offering from Form3 takes advantage of collaborative intelligence to determine the risk of a payment in real-time by understanding the behavior of both the sender and the recipient.
The technology acknowledges that understanding the recipient of a payment is just as important as understanding the sender when it comes to preventing fraud, particularly APP fraud. This is because APP fraud involves fraudsters tricking legitimate accountholders into sending payments to illegitimate accounts owned or accessed by the fraudster.
Feedzai CPO Pedro Barata explained that both regulation and emergent fraud threats are driving innovation in the payment fraud space. Barata noted in particular new regulations later this year that will mandate reimbursement for victims of APP fraud. He underscored that this would provide additional incentive for banks to embrace new anti-fraud technologies. “By combining the expertise of Feedzai and Form3, we can drastically reduce the level of vulnerability in the payment process and give our customers the real-time intelligence that they need to stop fraudsters in their tracks.”
The innovations in fraud prevention are also being driven by positive developments in fintech like real-time payments. As more fraudsters see real-time payments as a potential way to target consumers, businesses need to respond with technologies and anti-fraud solutions that close security gaps and respond to emerging threats like APP fraud.
“The best way to tackle the rise of APP fraud is the use of collaborative intelligence and cutting edge technologies that allow the real-time identification of scams within the payment message,” Form3 CEO Mike Walters said.
A Finovate alum since its debut at FinovateEurope in 2014, Feedzai today counts 80% of the world’s Fortune 500 among its customers. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Mateo, California, Feedzai now has more than 600 employees, maintains 10 offices around the world, and supports operations in 190 countries. The risk management tool provider has raised more than $277 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. Nuno Sebastiao is CEO.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) unveiled its Fintech Promotion Roadmap today. The goal of the document is to provide a strategic outlook for the coming year to promote fintech adoption and innovation across Hong Kong’s diverse financial services ecosystem.
The top takeaways? The Roadmap highlights three business verticals: wealthtech, insurtech, and greentech – as primary. The planning document also underscores both artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed ledger technology (DLT) as a pair of enabling, if not revolutionary, technologies that will play a major role in future innovation in financial services.
Critically, the Roadmap shows the eagerness of the HKMA to take a proactive, hands-on approach to fintech adoption and innovation in Hong Kong. To this end, the HKMA has announced a range of initiatives it plans to adopt over the next 12 months. These efforts include a fintech knowledge hub; sponsored events, roundtable discussions, and dialogues to foster collaboration; as well as seminars and training sessions to provide cross-sectoral information exchange and the opportunity for continuous learning. The HKMA will also facilitate educational content creation, including use-case videos and research reports, to help broaden understanding of the opportunities of fintech adoption.
HKMA Deputy Chief Executive Arthur Yuen called the Roadmap “a beacon for the entire financial services industry.” He added, “We’re looking beyond banking, casting a wide net to encompass sectors like insurance, wealth management, and capital market activities. Through synergies with our financial regulators and continuous engagement with stakeholders, our vision is a resilient, inclusive fintech ecosystem for Hong Kong.”
Yuen said that the underpinning philosophy of the Roadmap is “collaboration”.
The Hong Kong Monetary Authority is the region’s central banking institution. Founded in 1993, the HKMA is the product of the merger between two agencies – the Office of the Exchange Fund and the Office of the Commissioner of Banking. A key enabler of innovation in fintech and financial services in the region, the HKMA developed and launched a Faster Payments System in 2018 and began offering virtual banking licenses in 2019. Eddie Yue Wai-man was appointed Chief Executive in that year; he is the third CEO in the HKMA’s 30-year history.
In more good news for the region, Hong Kong has a new fintech unicorn. Micro Connect, a fintech that facilitates institutional investments in Chinese micro- and small businesses, raised $458 million in funding earlier this month. The Series C round gives the startup $578 million in total capital raised, and a brand new valuation of $1.7 billion.
Micro Connect’s statement did not list the investors involved in the funding. However, according to Forbes Asia, Baillie Gifford – a Scottish investment company – as well as returning investors Sequoia China, Lenovo Capital, Vectr Fintech, and Dara Holdings, were among those who participated.
Micro Connect will use the capital to enhance the market structure of its Micro Connect Financial Asset Exchange (MCEX) platform. MCEX leverages blockchain technology to enable small businesses to access financing in return for an agreed-upon percentage of the business’s daily revenue over a specified period of time. The scheme helps growing businesses secure the capital they need without having to take on additional debt. MCEX is scheduled to go live in August.
Micro Connect has facilitated investment in more than 2,400 stores and 169 brands across China. Charles Li (Chairman) and Gary Zhang (CEO) founded the company in 2021.
Finovate has brought its international fintech conference to Hong Kong three times: in 2016, 2017, and 2018. Here are some of the local companies that demoed their technology live on stage at FinovateAsia in Hong Kong.
AApay Technology
Chekk
Peakford Electronics
Proximiti
Velotrade
That said, Finovate has been hosting fintech conferences for audiences in the region since 2012. Here are a few more Hong Kong-based Finovate alums that demoed at our FinovateAsia events in Singapore and online.
Advanced Merchant Payments
Matchi.Biz
Mobexo
Modtris
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Middle East and Northern Africa
Mastercard and Checkout.com teamed up to bring instant wallet top-ups to UAE-based Careem Pay.
Brazil-based Dock selected Feedzai to provide fraud prevention tools for its customers.
Dock will primarily leverage Feedzai’s RiskOps Platform, and will also use the company’s AML and behavioral biometrics tools.
Dock counts 70 million active accounts and powers over seven billion transactions each year.
Brazil-based payments technology player Dockannounced this week it has selected risk management tool provider Feedzai to provide new fraud prevention tools for Dock customers.
Founded in 2014, Dock offers card issuing and core banking services to help organizations bring new card digital payments and banking services to their existing operations. The company’s microservices architecture can be tailored to suit a multitude of rules, and can operate in any country, currency and banking system. The company counts 70 million active accounts and powers over seven billion transactions each year.
By partnering with Feedzai, Dock is giving its clients access to Feedzai’s RiskOps Platform, a tool that helps uncover criminal activity by standardizing processes. Feedzai launched RiskOps in 2021 to tackle fraud, money laundering, compliance, and enhance risk policies. The platform’s Financial Intelligence Network (FIN) database contains over one trillion data points, sessions, and profiles of good and bad actors. Dock also plans to integrate Feedzai’s behavioral biometrics module as well as money laundering prevention tools to offer customers a view of risks in real-time.
“We are providing our customers with another cloud-first technology solution that delivers a personalized approach to cyber threat detection and assessment, based on machine learning models and supported by Dock’s expertise,” said Dock Risk Director Armando Junior. “This partnership is aligned with our Latin American expansion strategy. The new feature makes it possible for us to understand even better the needs of our customers throughout the region.”
Feedzai was founded in 2011. The company offers tools ranging from KYC, AML, watchlist screening, transaction fraud monitoring, and more to help companies fight fraud in more than 190 countries. In 2021, Feedzai was valued at more than one billion dollars after receiving a $200 million funding round that boosted its total funding to $277 million. There is no word on an updated valuation.
Feedzai has partnered with Novobanco to offer the bank’s clients protection from financial crime.
Novobanco wil leverage the Digital Trust (DT) and Transaction Fraud for Banking (TFB) solutions within Feedzai’s Risk-Ops.
Novobanco anticipates the new technology will enhance trust, optimize customer engagement, and ultimately boost customer satisfaction.
Feedzaiinked a partnership with Portuguese bank Novobanco this week. The risk management and fraud prevention company has agreed to protect the bank’s clients from financial crimes while not detracting from the customer experience.
Specifically, Novobanco will leverage the Digital Trust (DT) and Transaction Fraud for Banking (TFB) solutions within Feedzai’s Risk-Ops, a platform that helps firms protect users from financial crime. The tool is embedded into firms’ existing workflows to help uncover hidden criminal activity while not disrupting the customer experience.
“The Digital Trust and Transaction Fraud for Banking solutions which are part of our RiskOps platform will empower Novobanco to further enhance its fantastic service whilst providing the highest level of financial security for its customers,” said Feedzai Global Head of Sales Nuno Pires.
With 1.5 million clients and $47.8 billion (€43.8 billion) in assets, Novobank is the 4th largest bank in its domestic market. The bank maintains a customer-centric culture by offering an omnichannel customer experience and transparent, simple products.
Novobanco anticipates that DT and TFB will enhance trust, optimize customer engagement, and ultimately boost customer satisfaction. Combined, the two solutions will help Novobank analyze and understand customer behavior, flag security threats, and block fraud attempts in real time.
Also based in Portugal, Feedzai was founded in 2011. The company’s solutions help fight fraud in more than 190 countries. In 2021, Feedzai was valued at more than one billion dollars after receiving a $200 million funding round that boosted its total funding to $277 million. There is no word on an updated valuation.
Feedzai unveiled ScamPrevent capabilities that will help banks protect their end customers from a variety of financial scams.
The new tools will be added to Feedzai’s RiskOps platform.
The Federal Trade Commission reports that between 2021 and 2023, losses from scams increased by 30% in the U.S.
Risk management and fraud prevention tool provider Feedzai is enhancing its RiskOps platform.
The Portugal-based company announced that its new ScamPrevent capabilities will be added to the RiskOps platform. The new tools aim to help banks protect their customers from a variety of financial scams.
“In this environment of faster payments and more sophisticated scams, banks should look at proactive strategies to protect their customers from financial crime,” said Feedzai CEO Nuno Sebastiao. “We believe that banks which embrace a comprehensive RiskOps approach will outperform in customer satisfaction and retention, while minimizing losses from financial crime.”
By improving its Feedzai AI engine, the company leverages its experience across multiple geographies and financial institutions to enable improved scam detection with fewer false positives.
ScamPrevent includes other customizable capabilities, as well. Firms can add bank-specific scam detection rules and thresholds, leverage features that help banks identify signals from pre-transaction patterns such as behavioral biometrics that indicate a customer could be a scam victim before they authorize the payment, add customizable scam classification, view performance metrics, and generate reports.
The Federal Trade Commission reports that between 2021 and 2023, losses from scams increased by 30% in the U.S. According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), this percentage may be an underestimate, as only 7% of scams losses are reported across the globe.
“The human impact of scams is particularly high as scammers tend to target vulnerable groups – the elderly, the economically disadvantaged, immigrant communities, and youth,” said Feedzai Chief Product Officer Pedro Barata. “As it becomes faster and easier to make payments, there is a growing need for new solutions that enable scams to be detected and intercepted before any money moves. With our new ScamProtect™ features, Feedzai delivers the industry’s most comprehensive approach to scam prevention.”
Feedzai was founded in 2011 and helps companies fight fraud in more than 190 countries. The company has raised more than $277 million, having pulled in its largest round of $200 million in 2021 that valued Feedzai at more than one billion dollars.
Dynamic Planner, a risk-based financial planning firn based in the U.K., has secured what the company is calling a “significant investment” from private equity growth firm FPE Capital. Terms of the investment were not disclosed, but the additional funding is designed to help accelerate Dynamic Planner’s expansion plans in the U.K. and Europe.
Dynamic Planner CEO Ben Goss praised FPE Capital for not only for backing successful software companies in the past and helping them scale their businesses, but also for sharing values that Dynamic Planner holds dear. “They also share our vision for solving our industry’s major challenges through technology such as process digitization, customer experience, investing sustainably for future generations, and omni-channel financial planning in a post-pandemic world,” Goss said.
Making its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in London earlier this year, Dynamic Planner offers a single platform that enables financial advisory firms to match clients with investment portfolios that meet their individual needs and goals. The company’s technology provides client profiling to ensure that client preferences are accurately assessed and reflected in the portfolio composition process. Dynamic Planner also offers whole-of-market fund research, cash flow modeling, and pre-populated reports to make it easier for advisors to provide holistic, compliant investment portfolio reviews and reports. Via its SaaS platform, Dynamic Planner serves nearly 40% of wealth advice firms in the U.K., and more than 150 asset managers representing $300 billion (£250 billion) in assets. The company is on pace to surpass $12 million (£10 million) in annual recurring license revenues in 2022.
In addition to making its first appearance on the Finovate stage earlier this year, Dynamic Planner also launched its Client Access solution. Unveiled in March, the new offering leverages psychometric risk and sustainability profiling to make remote financial advice more precise and engaging.
“While remote advice is here to stay, it can be a challenge for advisors to make the process engaging or easy to understand for clients, as well as build deep relationships which ultimately result in better outcomes,” Dynamic Planner Sales & Marketing Director Yasmina Siadatan explained. Siadatan called the new solution “a fundamental piece of the hybrid advice puzzle.”
Headquartered in Reading, Berkshire, Dynamic Planner was founded in 2003. The company was named “Adviser Technology Provider of the Year” at the Money Marketing Awards in 2021 and, that same year, won top honors as the “Leading Independent Planning Tool Provider” at the Schroders U.K. Platform Awards.
Speaking of fintech in the U.K., a hearty congratulations to Starling Bank, the pioneering U.K.-based digital bank launched in 2014 by CEO Anne Boden. The bank announced this week that it had achieved its first full year of profitability, delivering a pre-tax profit of $38.4 million (£32.1 million). The news represents a major milestone for the company, which produced a pre-tax loss of $37.7 million (£31.5 million) the previous year.
“With our first full year of profitability, we’ve placed ourselves firmly in a category of one,” Boden said in a statement. “As an innovative digital bank with a sustainable business model and a strong balance sheet, we are generating our own capital and we stand apart from both the old banks and other challengers.”
A fully-licensed and regulated bank, Starling Bank offers personal, business, joint, euro and dollar current accounts, as well as a card for youth. Headquartered in London and maintaining offices in Southampton, Cardiff, and Dublin, Starling Bank also offers a B2B banking-as-a-service and software-as-a-service proposition, leveraging the same proprietary technology Starling uses to power its own operations.
Earlier this month, Starling Bank unveiled its Bills Manager solution for small businesses. The new feature gives small businesses greater flexibility when making Direct Debit or standing orders by taking funds from money set aside in one of their available Savings Spaces rather than from the business’ main account. The solution helps small businesses streamline their finances by making budget forecasting and cost management easier. Bills Manager seamlessly integrates with popular accounting platforms such as Xero and FreeAgent – both of which are available via the Starling Marketplace – as well as with Starling’s own bookkeeping solution I.
“Our small business customers requested this feature, so we’ve delivered,” Starling Bank Chief Banking Officer Helen Bierton said. “Uptake of Bills Manager has been strong among our personal current account customers and we’re confident it will help hundreds of thousands of small businesses better manage their money, too.”
Check out our conversation with Starling’s Boden moments after she delivered her keynote address at FinovateSpring in May.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Brazilian fintech Neon secured $80 million for its first Credit Right Investment Fund.
YAP Pakistan announced a strategic partnership with Faysal Bank in the wake of securing in-principle approval for an Electronic Money Institution license.
Financial crime fighter Feedzai has secured a growth investment of $200 million. Product development, partner strategy, and global expansion are three Feedzai priorities that will be accelerated by the new investment.
The Series D round was led by KKR, and featured participation from existing investors Sapphire Ventures and Citi Ventures. The company’s total capital now stands north of $277 million, having most recently raised $50 million in a 2017 Series C round.
“This new investment delivers on our mission to keep commerce safe by further developing our single machine learning cloud platform for all four stages of the customer risk journey: prevention, detection, remediation, and compliance,” Feedzai CEO Nuno Sebastiao wrote on the company blog this week. “Focusing on the entirety of the risk lifecycle,” he added, “allows us to partner with financial services in a radically new way at every step of the journey.”
The funding also gives the risk management platform a valuation “well over $1 billion” the company noted in its funding announcement.
Partnered with some of the largest financial institutions in the world – including four of the five largest banks in North America, Feedzai leverages its risk management platform to monitor activity at companies with more than 800 million customers in 190 countries. The firm’s platform leverages machine learning and AI to help companies defend themselves from financial crimes including money laundering, detecting fraud in less than three milliseconds.
A Finovate alum since 2014, Feedzai unveiled its Feedzai Fairband solution earlier this month. Feedzai Fairband is an AutoML algorithm-based technology that automatically discovers less biased machine learning models while increasing model fairness by as much as 93% on average. Dubbed “the world’s most advanced AI fairness framework,” Feedzai Fairband enables financial institutions to accommodate their customers fairly and without the bias that even the most carefully-designed AI models may still hold.
“Feedzai Fairband is one of the biggest milestones in the financial services industry as it presents a low-cost, no-friction framework to address one of the biggest problems of our era – AI bias,” Feedzai Chief Scientist Dr. Pedro Bizrro said. “By creating the most advanced framework for AI fairness, Feedzai is allowing financial institutions to incorporate a critical piece of technology that addresses a problem under close public scrutiny with proven damaging effects across the globe. Building accurate and fairer models will be less challenging from now on.”
Named to Techround’s roster of the top 50 fintech companies in the U.K. in February, Feedzai highlighted the “skyrocketing” rise in fraud attacks in 2020 in its Financial Crime Report Q1, 2021, released earlier this month.
“2020 was a year of rapid growth in financial crime. Fraudsters tried to take advantage of the convergence between a fast-paced digital environment and a new wave of inexperienced consumers to perpetrate a multitude of attacks that created a significant uptick in fraud,” Jaime Ferreira, Senior Director of Global Data Science at Feedzai said in the report. “Financial institutions need to further invest in technologies to protect their customers while developing educational approaches. Robust technology and informed consumers are a powerful combination when fighting financial crime.”
Feedzai began the year with an announcement that Latin America’s largest investment bank, BTG Pactual, will implement Feedzai’s financial crime management technology.
What are the biggest fraud challenges to emerge during the COVID-19 era? According to a new report from Feedzai, card cloning tops the list of major indicators for fraud in both financial services and e-commerce.
With card cloning, criminals copy stolen credit or debit card information and transfer it to a new card. Also known as “skimming,” card cloning is a big business on the dark web, where fraudsters – “carders” – buy and sell stolen payment card data.
But card cloning is not the only danger highlighted in the report. High speed ordering with bot attacks that move quickly and can last for hours is another fraud threat in financial services, as is what Feedzai refers to as “High risk merchant category code (MCC).” Businesses that earn this designation from their bank are typically those with above average chargebacks, as well as a higher risk of fraud potential.
Within ecommerce, the report found that in addition to card cloning, both account takeover (ATO) and suspicious email are among the top three indicators for fraud. With an ATO attack, the criminal uses bots to access an unsuspecting individual’s bank or e-commerce account. This enables a bad actor to access that account and make fraudulent and unauthorized transactions from it. Suspicious email is a broader category that includes common but effective tactics like phishing, and as well as fake emails and email domains.
“It wasn’t just consumers who met the call to digitally transform,” Feedzai’s Quarterly Financial Crime Report reads. “Fraudsters, ever technologically savvy and opportunistic, made the most of the shift.”
Feedzai’s report on financial crime puts current trends in the context of a society that is embracing digital channels at a rapid pace. It notes significant increases in the dollar amounts and value, as well as the number of ecommerce transactions processed between May and September of 2020 compared to the same period last year. Unfortunately, the report also noted a dramatic increase in network fraud this year. “The realignment of holiday shopping trends was also an early gift for fraudsters,” the report reads.
What can financial institutions do to help fight financial crime?
Monitor Card Behavior: Multiple transactions in a short period of time, unusually high dollar amounts per transaction, and a sizable number of merchant codes within a relatively short period time are all potentially indicative of payment card fraud. Leveraging machine learning and AI-powered algorithms to accurately identify these patterns is an optimal way for businesses to keep up pace with the speed and complexity of this kind of fraud.
Track Suspicious Email Domains: High-risk domains, invalid emails, and unconfirmed email addresses are all potential sources of fraudulent activity. Companies can use both software and the services of security specialists who maintain up-to-date information on domains and email addresses that may be used by fraudsters.
Know Your Customer: Knowing what “normal” looks like is the first step to identifying abnormal behavior. By developing an accurate customer profile that takes into account such factors as a customer’s typical log-in times, devices, and time spent on different platforms, businesses can more readily spot behavior that is exceptional, and take further steps to determine whether or not that fraudulent activity is taking place. Feedzai refers to these as “hypergranular risk profiles.”
“COVID has created a big disruption in the banking, payments, and e-commerce sectors with multiple impacts all over the world,” Feedzai Senior Director of Global Data Science Jaime Ferreira said. “Feedzai is in a good position to add clarity to this debate and help financial institutions to understand these complex shifts and how to better protect their customers.”
Feedzai’s Quarterly Financial Crime Report for Q4 2020 leverages Feedzai’s data from more than four billion global transactions from March 20 through September of this year. The report also features information from consumer research surveys of “nearly 2,200 account-holding U.S. consumers.”
Above-target growth and a pair of C-suite appointments characterize the first half of 2020 for risk management platform Feedzai. The company announced this morning that it has recorded H1 growth of 44% and negotiated “multiple multi-year enterprise contracts” during the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic and related market uncertainty. This, along with new leadership in the CFO and CMO roles, enabled the company to have what co-founder and CEO Nuno Sebastiao described “one of the best quarters ever” despite the pandemic.
“This simultaneously shows that our technology is mission-critical, and our business is crisis resilient,” Sebastiao continued. “I’m confident that our next phase of growth will benefit from market conditions in which digital transformation will play a larger than ever role, and from a set of strategic decisions we’ve made in the last 9 months.”
SafetyPay, Credorax, and PayU are among the companies that have teamed up with the San Francisco, California-based risk management platform this year. And joining Feedzai’s executive ranks are Amaury Dauge, former Euronext CFO, who will take over as the company’s new Chief Financial Officer, and Varun Kohli, who has been appointed Chief Marketing Officer.
Founded in 2008 and a Finovate alum for six years, Feedzai leverages artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning to analyze 30 million transactions valued at $5 billion every day. The company’s technology is used by 10 of the world’s largest 25 banks, and has been recognized as “Best in Class” by Aite Group.
Financial crime has taken on new significance during the global health crisis. With more individuals working remotely, and more companies accessing new channels and agents in search of financial assistance, there has been a significant rise in the number of ways criminals can take advantage of the uncertainty of the current environment. Feedzai, in its statement, highlighted mule accounts, phishing attacks, and employer fraud, among the top three types of financial crime that have increased during the pandemic.
“Fraudsters thrive on periods of confusion and chaos,” Aite Group Research Director Julie Convoy said, “and this pandemic represents fertile breeding ground.”
This week for Finovate Global, we caught up with Mohammed Aziz, co-founder and CEO of Dapi, a fintech startup that offers a suite of open banking APIs to help connect customer bank accounts, initiate payments, and access data in real-time. Founded in 2019, the company currently operate in six countries in the Middle East and Africa, and is headquartered in both San Francisco, California, and the UAE.
We talked about the opportunity for open banking to fuel innovation in financial services in emerging economies, as well as the overall environment for fintech innovation in the MENA region. We also discussed the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on pre-existing trends such as digitization.
Finovate: Dapi is the third company you’ve founded, but your first fintech. What made you want to focus on the opportunities in this industry? What do you bring to fintech from your experience in other areas?
Mohammed Aziz: Dapi was the result of a problem that I personally faced when trying to build “Spendy” a hybrid between a peer to peer payment application and a personal financial management app. We were unable to build out Spendy for most emerging markets due to the lack of bank connectivity which got us super keen to build out the underlying infrastructure that would power the future of fintech in these markets.
Finovate: Tell us about Dapi. What problem does your company solve and who are your primary customers?
Aziz: Dapi’s mission is to provide the building blocks for a thriving fintech ecosystem in emerging markets around the world. Our API serves as the bridge between financial applications and banks, empowering developers to create digital wallets, budget trackers, investment applications and more. Our clients are developers working on fintech applications, businesses hoping to include financial services in their mobile and web offerings, and anyone that wants to include bank functionality within their digital offerings.
Finovate: Your business strategy relies on an embrace of open banking in the MENA region. How strong is the movement toward open banking there?
Aziz: The MENA region is a very exciting space to be operating in right now. Fintech is only beginning to develop here and the market is pretty much untapped, so we are hoping to serve as an influence towards the region embracing open banking and all the opportunities that come with that. I would also like to point out that we are able to activate and build connectivity regardless of open banking being present or not. We like to take the approach that companies like Plaid in the US or Truelayer in the UK did, whereby they were connected to banks despite frameworks and regulation being in place.
Finovate: Aside from open banking, what are some of the other exciting trends in the fintech industry in the Middle East/Abu Dhabi right now?
Aziz: There’s a general trend of growing interest for the kinds of applications that financial technology empowers, from digital wallets and peer to peer applications to investment platforms and digital banks. The market is new and rapidly evolving.
Finovate: We talk about the Middle East and North Africa as a region. But there is a great deal of variation among countries in MENA. How does this impact your ability to market your technology in the area?
Aziz: Beyond market considerations, the regulation surrounding the use of APIs in financial applications varies greatly from country to country. This is a new and mostly unregulated space, but we have had to consider completely separate approaches to integrating our services in the UAE as opposed to KSA, for example. Culture is also another important factor, as it varies between countries and impacts the products that you would want to launch along with the go-to-market approach.
Finovate: How has COVID-19 impacted the fintech industry in the region? Early in the crisis, we heard news from countries like Iran, but not as much since. How are businesses, especially fintech businesses, faring?
Aziz: The COVID-19 pandemic and its push towards social distancing and remote work has actually increased interest in digitization of financial services. For example, there have been a number of announcements within the UAE that the country will be moving towards enabling more online payments and other financial services without the need to physically go to a bank.
Finovate: You participated in the Y Combinator program. What was that experience like? What advice do you have for startups with the opportunity to pursue a similar path with a top-notch accelerator?
Aziz: Y Combinator has been a phenomenal experience for us. It really put us out there on the map and helped expand our network in silicon valley. From our experience, investors and VCs in the US are not usually convinced about investing in early stage MENA startups, but YC really helps establish that credibility.
Finovate: Tell us about your experience of setting up your business in Abu Dhabi.
Aziz: Abu Dhabi is an exciting place to work, since it is a rapidly growing and developing market, as mentioned above. Furthermore, we have received a lot of support from our involvement in ADGM and Hub71, which provided resources for us to establish and grow our operations in these beginning stages.
Finovate: What can we expect from Dapi over the balance of 2020 and beyond?
Aziz: We are very excited to continue growing and expanding into a variety of developing markets, beyond the UAE. At the same time, we have a number of exciting partnerships in our sights for the UAE, which we hope will bring our vision of a strong fintech ecosystem in the MENA region closer to reality.
Here is our look at fintech around the world.
Asia-Pacific
Singapore-based MatchMove launches cross-border remittance platform for businesses.
Clik, a payment aggregator and merchant acquirer based in Cambodia, raises $3.7 million in seed funding.
Leading Asian financial services platform GoBear teams up with UnionBank to launch lending-as-a-service solution in the Philippines; announces new Chief Financial Officer.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Fiservinks partnership with Absa Regional Operations (ARO) to enhance credit card management and processing in nine African countries.
Ecobank Group unveils the finalists for its fintech challenge, now in its third year. Ten African startups from seven different countries made the cut out of an applicant pool of more than 600.
Salaam Gateway looks at the development of Islamic fintech in Kenya.
Central and Eastern Europe
Onfido to streamline digital identity verification for Poland’s Alior Bank.
Russia’s Tinkoff Banklaunches new charitable program, Cashback to Give Back.
Austrian regtech kompany lands $7.14 million in funding.
Middle East and Northern Africa
Salt Edgepartners with Jordan Ahli Bank Cyprus, making it one of the first banking groups in Cyprus to achieve PSD2 compliance.
Israeli fintech Approve.com raises $5 million in seed funding for its technology that automates the procurement process.
Infosys Finacle to deploy its Liquidity Management platform with National Bank of Bahrain.
Central and Southern Asia
Uzbekistan’s People’s Bank partners with Finastra to automate its risk management business.
TerraPay collaborates with Bank Alfalah to enable instant money transfers to Pakistan.
Indian B2B fintech Signzy announces plans to hire “close to 70” employees over the next six moths in response to increased demand.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Feedzaiexpands partnership with PayU, enabling the company to enhance its fraud prevention capabilities in Latin America and the EMEA region.
TechCrunch profiles Mozper, a digital banking service based in Latin America that caters to parents and Gen Z kids.
MercadoLibre announces plans to launch branded credit cards in Brazil and Chile “in the near future.”
Of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in North America right now, how many have demonstrated their technology live on the Finovate stage?
The answer, courtesy of Deloitte’s just-released 2019 Technology Fast 500 ranking, is a full, baker’s dozen of thirteen innovative firms that have introduced their solutions to Finovate audiences. Update: 11/13: Make that 14 companies!
“This year marks the 25th anniversary of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500, so we are especially pleased to announce and congratulate the 2019 winners,” Deloitte Vice Chairman Sandra Shirai said. “Once again, we saw innovation across the board, with software companies continuing their dominance of the top ten. It’s always inspiring to see how the Fast 500 companies are transforming business and the world we live and work in.”
Making the top 20 of Finovate alums making the cut was Unison, which made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring in 2017, winning Best of Show. Unison’s HomeBuyer and HomeOwner solutions help make homes more affordable and home equity easier and less expensive to access.
Also notable on Deloitte’s list is the appearance of two of our newest alums – SheerID and EVERFI – which demonstrated their solutions earlier this year at FinovateSpring.
Check out all the Finovate alums that made the list below. We’ve included their Technology Fast 500 rank, three-year revenue growth rate, headquarters location, and a link to the company’s most recent Finovate demo video.
