Exclusive Interview with Harborx’s CEO, Wissam Sabbah

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO of one of the presenting companies, Harborx. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with Harborx’s promo code Harborx20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Wissam Sabbah, CEO of Harborx:


Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Sabbah: I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and an associate degree in Finance from the American University of Beirut. I worked as a developer, and after a year, entered the field of corporate banking. I fell in love with currency trading and had a blast as a dealer. But banking and trading are too traditional of an industry, so while I loved what I did, I didn’t enjoy much the corporate environment and craved for a change.

In the early 2010s, startups were happening everywhere, so this idea of taking currency trading, shaking it up and making it accessible to everyone in the form of a game-like mobile app came around, although, having a fully-mobile trading platform with no desktop version was unheard of at the time. I am passionate about trading, global markets and technology, and I was lucky enough to connect with Harborx co-founder and good friend Cyrus Wen, who shared my vision. Cyrus and his partners helped assemble a team of talented developers who loved our idea. This is how Harborx was born.

Every day, we learn from each other how to combine the best of both worlds – the drive and fun of the ever-moving financial markets with development solutions to build our own trading platform. Basically, we have developed a mobile app that we ourselves would like to play and learn something new every day.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Sabbah: Traditional forex brokers use a tried and tested third-party desktop-first solution which is reliable but lacks flexibility. It couldn’t work for us since we’re a fully mobile-oriented trading platform. Thus, to support the gaming features, we leverage the actor pattern (Scala/Akka) to build a distributed trading system of our own. Thanks to our decoupled architecture, which was developed in-house, we were able to adapt faster. Our event-driven programming paradigm allows us to decouple the core trading functionality from the gaming features through internal Remote Procedure Calls (RPC) and Publish/Subscribe patterns.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Sabbah: I love the Leaderboard, one of our latest features. This is an ongoing competition where app users are ranked based on their trading success. The Leaderboard makes Harborx an addictive app and users are ranked in real time as they trade in real time.

In addition to being a competitive mobile app, Harborx is a live trading environment, where you have lightning-speed price feeds and extremely low latency. While the speed is a must-have for most games these days, this requirement increases tenfold when people trade with their real funds. At Harborx, we stream price feed data to our users by leveraging the power of Message Queue Telemetry Transport, aka MQTT, i.e. the same technology behind Facebook Messenger.

The Leaderboard is the project where the live trading environment weaves with a live game, a synthesis of everything we’ve learned over the years. The team worked hard on the Leaderboard, and we are happy with the result.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Exclusive Interview with Streamdata.io’s CEO, Eric Horesnyi

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO of one of the presenting companies, Streamdata.io. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with Streamdata.io’s promo code Streamdata.io20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Eric Horesnyi, Streamdata.io’s CEO:


Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Horesnyi: I started my career as a developer for a B2B ISP in France then coded a (back then) high bandwidth (384kbps!) Internet access layer for a US ISV. After a database experience in Mexico and B2B data architecture for multinationals, I joined the founding team of Radianz to run our midmarket and exchange business in the US, as part of the Flashboy team depicted by Michael Lewis. We sold Radianz to British Telecom, and this first step in the cloud industry allowed me to get a clear view of the path technology and finance were taking together, especially with the rise of the API economy.

When I joined Streamdata.io as CEO back in 2014, there was already a very skilled and gifted team in charge of developing our product. All this knowledge allowed me to easily interact with them and start working on the SaaS solution I had the feeling the market was waiting for.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Horesnyi: If I was to think about one thing and one thing only, I think I would talk about time-to-market. Nowadays, the pace of innovation is so fast that there’s no longer room for a company to waste time developing everything on its own. With our solution, any API provider can save a year of development (and associated costs) to implement real-time features. And for developers consuming API data, it’s just a matter of minutes for them to transition from polling data to taking advantage of real-time data flow.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Horesnyi: I really like what Xignite did with its CloudStreaming solution. Through a partnership between our two companies, Xignite’s CloudStreaming solution leverages our unique technology to deliver streaming market data directly to millions of devices and apps. For us, working with such a player in the financial data industry is a great way to demonstrate how robust and efficient our product is.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Exclusive Interview with eWise’s CTO, Allan See

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CTO of one of the presenting companies, eWise. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with eWise’s promo code eWise20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Allan See, eWise’s CTO:


Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of
your company?

See: I started out as junior developer in a startup consulting company in the Philippines. Our main clients back then were other startups that built their business around open source technologies like Maestro for Maven. That’s where I immersed myself with open source technologies and how to navigate through its communities, including with people all around the world from Australia to Asia, Europe and America.

A few years later, I started working for a Japanese company specialized in internet ad marketing – like what Google Adwords does but for the Japanese market. That was my first experience with a massive scale application handling 4TB of data, 1M partner relationships generating 200M page views, 3M clicks and 100k transactions a day. After this experience, I started to work in the banking software space. I joined a fortune 500 company that provides online banking solutions and was managing their channel division. That’s when I heard of eWise and all the great things the FinTech company was doing, which made me decide to join eWise.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

See: When I joined eWise, I had the mission to reengineer entirely eWise Aegis, our patented core technology platform that allows safe and secure financial account aggregation. Aegis is ground breaking in the sense that it flips an old idea on its head. When given the task to attain data from several sources, a typical approach would be to check whether those sources have APIs that can be used for data retrieval. If the APIs do not exist, then comes in the hard decision for technical leaders, whether or not they want to opt for the HTML parsing/screen scraping approach. This is usually a hard decision to make because it’s not a matter of whether they can do it but rather, can they maintain it and what would be the cost of maintaining those. And if they do decide to opt for the approach of screen scraping, there’s the matter of accessing data through a secured means. Meaning, they would also have to get access to their users’ financial accounts credentials and store them securely on their servers, so that when they execute their screen scrapers, they can use those credentials to access the user’s data on behalf of that user. Of course, engineering and security teams would always be familiar in how to secure those data from a technical standpoint to a process one, but it would continuously be an arm’s race preventing a possible breach/leak. The risk of losing those data is just too high.

eWise’s Aegis, though, manages all those risks. The platform allows the user to save and store all of their financial accounts credentials (login and password) in the Personal Data Vault installed on their own device, and no one else than the user can access these credentials. Neither the service provider (the bank using eWise Account Aggregation service) nor eWise are storing the user’s credentials, which considerably reduces the risk of being hacked.

That is, Aegis technology allows us to connect both to direct channels like PSD2 APIs and to indirect channels via HTML parsing. Aegis also manages all the complexity of creating and maintaining these connectors by investing in internal tooling to allow us to maintain those connectors the most effective and automated way. And with Aegis’s patented technology, the risk of having all your eggs (i.e. credentials) in one basket (i.e your server) is gone because Aegis connectors run in the client side – i.e. the end user’s device like his laptop or phone. That means eWise’s clients (financial institutions, fintechs, etc.) would just have to provide their users the Personal Data Vault which they install on their laptops or phones, and the Aggregation will be performed from the user’s device. Instead of sending credentials to the server side where aggregators are running, they will send it to the locally installed Personal Data Vault, which means the end user’s credentials never leave their device.

To summarize, what’s ground breaking about eWise’s technology is that it allows data aggregation both via direct channels (APIs) and indirect channels (HTML parsing for non payment accounts – not included into PSD2 scope), and it allows the end users to be the custodian of their own data, not the aggregation provider.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

See: We have launched many cool implementations lately. One of the latest ones will be the launch of a challenger bank mobile app, and Account Aggregation is at the core of their app. “First, with the app, you can view your current bank accounts, transfer money instantly, and we’ll save you thousands of pounds a year by analyzing your data and figuring out how we can improve your finances. A central objective is not trying to make customers shift bank accounts – rather, adding loads of value up front,” said their CEO. They are launching a lifestyle focused banking portal, regardless of banking relationships.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Exclusive Interview with LeanXcale’s CEO and Co-Founder

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO & Co-Founder of one of the presenting companies, LeanXcale. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with LeanXcale’s promo code LeanXcale20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Dr. Ricardo Jimenez-Peris, LeanXcale’s CEO & Co-Founder:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Jimenez-Peris: For 25 years, I have devoted my career to resolving the main bottleneck of operational databases — transactional processing — in my position as director of Distributed Systems Laboratory at the Technical University of Madrid (UPM). Additionally, I am the CEO and Co-Founder of LeanXcale and the technical director of the international projects CoherentPaaS, LeanBigData and CloudDBAppliance.

During my scientific career, I have been a co-author of over 100 publications in international conferences and journals, co-author of a book on database replication, as well as the manager of large international research projects, such as Adapt, Stream, and CumuloNimbo. The projects included teams between 20 to 50 people and involved 6 to 11 companies and research organizations, receiving public grants amounting to over 6 million euros. In addition, I am a co-inventor of 2 patents and 1 additional patent application. The research of my laboratory resulted in technology transfers to big international companies such as Ericsson, Telefonica, and Bull.

In March 2015, I quit my scientific career to launch LeanXcale. The idea behind the business was to commercialize an ultra-scalable database and the technology at the core of LeanXcale attracted much attention in Silicon Valley. Ten top tech companies — Twitter, Salesforce, Cloudera, HortonWorks, Pivotal, Heroku, HP, and Microsoft — invited me to speak at their headquarters.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

LeanXcale has developed an Ultra-Scalable SQL Operational & Analytical database using unique scalability to solve the lack of real-time big data support for financial organizations.

Jimenez-Peris: My favorite features of the LeanXcale platform are

  • The scalability of the operational database to millions of transactions per second and 100s of nodes
  • The combination of operational and analytical capabilities in a single database system
  • The elasticity of the database, which enables the provisioning and decommissioning of new nodes as needed in a totally non-intrusive way.
  • The polyglot integration with other NoSQL data stores enabling queries across SQL and different NoSQL data stores.
  • The efficiency of the storage engine in multi-core and NUMA architectures, as well as its hardware acceleration by means of vectorial processing and the acceleration, thanks to its hybrid columnar storage.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Jimenez-Peris: Operational database for fintech, either on premise or in the cloud, with capabilities to perform analytical queries over operational data.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Exclusive Interview with eSignLive’s Developer Community Manager

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the developer community manager of one of the presenting companies, eSignLive by VASCO. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with eSignLive’s promo code eSignLivebyVASCO20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Michael Williams, eSignLive’s Evangelism & Developer Community Manager:


Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Williams: My career started as a Technical Evangelist at Actuate Corporation (now OpenText Analytics), a data analytics company. My role there was to build an online community of developers and support them through the delivery of a wide range of tools and documentation. It was an extremely successful model and one that I implemented when I joined eSignLive over two years ago. Today, my team of technical evangelists and I support prospects, customers and partners that use the eSignLive API and SDKs through our online developer community. It has become THE place for developers to find information about how to integrate e-signatures into their web and mobile apps. We’ve developed quick start guides, tutorials, an online forum to enable peer-to-peer conversations, and a code share section where developers can post and find code examples to facilitate rapid integration. A huge success that I am personally very proud of.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Williams: Electronic signature as a whole is game-changing technology because it allows organizations to fully automate businesses processes – processes that would normally fall to paper whenever a signature or approval is required. Taking away the paper problem improves operational efficiencies and helps deliver an exceptional customer experience that can drive high adoption and completion rates. One of the biggest advantages of e-signature technology, and with eSignLive in particular, is the ability to use the same code no matter the deployment type (e.g., public cloud, private cloud or on-premises), device or channel. This can all be done without investing in the test infrastructure for the solution and without costly install periods or developer licenses.

E-signature technology also provides direct visibility into how and when the transaction took place. You can track who signed, in what order, when and where – something that simply isn’t possible in the paper world. Coming from a data analytics background, the more data the customer can gather from a transaction the better. This information is not only beneficial from an audit and compliance perspective but can also help glean insights into the customer journey – enabling organizations to measure the effectiveness of the customer experience and pinpoint areas of drop-off or confusion.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Williams: The analyst firm, Celent, recently published a case study about BMO (Bank of Montreal) and their digital transformation initiative in personal banking. BMO implemented an enterprise-wide eForms and eSignature shared services platform in order to provide a contextual and responsive digital user experience across its mobile account opening process. Partnering with software companies, GMC Software and eSignLive by VASCO, BMO delivered a straight-through digital on-boarding process – enabling customers to open an account using their smartphone in less than 8 minutes. A fantastic customer success story that is helping the bank save $98 million (U.S.) annually.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Exclusive Interview with aixigo’s Head of Portfolio Management Systems

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the speaker for one of the presenting companies, aixigo. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with aixigo’s promo code aixigo20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Marcus Gruendler, aixigo’s Head of Portfolio Management Systems:

51388110_marcus_grndler_jax_finance_2016
Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Gruendler: I am a technical consultant and software architect at aixigo AG in Germany. Having more than 15 years of expertise in developing and managing international software projects for financial services, I’m currently actively developing high performance portfolio management software.

My focus is combining software engineering skills with the ability to bridge technical and business backgrounds. These skills are based upon the experiences from software projects in the european banking sector such as Citigroup, Commerzbank, DAB Bank, Cortal Consors and several more.

My current field of interest focuses on delivering digital wealth management software solutions at retail scale.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Gruendler: With aixigo’s Digital Portfolio Management solution we offer you high performance services for complex portfolio data. So that you can not only provide high speed responses for human speech interaction but can also perform mass calculations for millions of portfolios within a few minutes. With this technology, we bring new business models (for example Wealth Management) to the retail market that have only represented a conceivable opportunity for high value clients so far.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Gruendler: The core component of our portfolio management system is a high performance in-memory-engine. Current programming models waste performance speed due to slow memory access. Our new stream oriented computing engine optimizes data access in a way that enables the CPU to perform operations 100-200 times faster than classic algorithms can. This high performance engine allows for the provision of complex functionalities for a large set of clients, as well as allowing for such a provision in low latency scenarios (e. g. analytics, monitoring or rebalancing). It is even possible to use our services with human speech interactions (such as Amazon Alexa) or AI interactions (IBM Watson).


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Exclusive Interview with CASHOFF’s CEO, Dmitry Gorkov

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO of one of the presenting companies, CASHOFF. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with CASHOFF’s promo code CASHOFF20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Dmitry Gorkov, CASHOFF’s CEO:51388110_27953524624_b415afcb11_o


Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Gorkov: I studied at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, at the department of Mechanics and Mathematics. Studying at one of the most famous and oldest universities in Russia, under the guidance of the best professors, helped me form my personality and gave me a push of inspiration.

Of course, I didn’t start my own start up right after graduation. It took me a while to master my tech skills in practice. After graduation, I worked at a major Russian company engaged in e-banking software development, where I implemented about 50 projects, which turned out to be a success. That’s when I decided to create my own product in this sphere, which could combine all the financial data and data from receipts in order to use it in mobile banking applications.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Gorkov: CASHOFF is a cloud-based service, which collects not only the transaction data from banks but also the lists of items from shop receipts in one mobile banking application. This information describes the consumer the best and opens wide opportunities for analysis of his/her buying behavior and obtaining the most relevant insights. The technology helped us to conquer the Russian market. Currently, we are observing the European market, so that our product could meet new standards of quality and become popular abroad.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Gorkov: When we launched our PFM service in banks and they saw its value, we started to think about how to make our service more convenient for the clients. So we developed a mobile version of CASHOFF and deployed it inside the VBRR Bank (top-30) mobile application. The mobile version of the service possesses the features of the web one, but it is adapted for mobile devices. We got fivefold increase in activity at distant channel and positive feedback from the bank’s clients. Another remembered implementation was in one of the best mobile banking application in Europe – Tinkoff Bank. Now we are working in collaboration with the global Citi bank. Both projects gave us a very good experience that would help us in future developments.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Exclusive Interview with ISARA’s CEO, Scott Totzke

Exclusive Interview with ISARA’s CEO, Scott Totzke

We have a great speaker lineup for FinDEVr London which will take place on June 12 & 13. As part of our FinDEVr Feature series, which highlights some of the speakers you will see on stage at the event, we recently interviewed the CEO of one of the presenting companies, ISARA. You can save 20% on your FinDEVr ticket when you register with ISARA’s promo code ISARA20LD17.

Here’s our interview with Scott Totzke, ISARA’s CEO:

 

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

Totzke: I started my career 30 years ago in a small agricultural company. The amount of technology and sophisticated data analysis we need to make industries we think of as ‘conventional’ operate is amazing. There is a level of technical sophistication required to ensure that everything gets from the farm to your table properly. We were already dealing with mobility, real-time data updates, and big data analytics before many of these concepts became part of the technical lexicon, and to this day, that grounds my view of how technical change can directly shape the lives of so many people.

When I moved into the mobile communications and cybersecurity fields, that early experience kept me focused on how our technology needs to be impactful but not disruptive. I’ve spent the last 17 years being driven by that mandate, and it’s especially necessary when building security solutions for a wide range of implementations, whether we’re talking about sprawling IT infrastructure or constrained mobile environments. At ISARA, we’ve done our job right when we have delivered transformative cybersecurity technology that is largely transparent to the end user and extremely cost-effective for our customers.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Totzke: Globally, there is a race to develop the next generation of computing and innovation platform-large-scale, ‘universal’ quantum computers. These computers will solve a variety of complex problems that are beyond the capabilities of transistor-based supercomputers. While most of the industry is focused on how quantum computers will accelerate innovation in areas where we are simply unable to focus today, ISARA is looking at the key problem of how quantum computers will be disruptive to the established standards for information security. As an industry, we have relied on RSA-based public key cryptography for 40 years, and that has become a foundation for almost every online transaction. Signing on to check your bank balance, buying something online, getting a software update for your phone – public key cryptography is ubiquitous and we all use it thousands of times a day without thinking about it. We need to preserve this same ubiquitous use of public key cryptography in a post-quantum world so that our information and our customer’s information is properly protected.

ISARA’s focus is on building that next generation of encryption and authentication technology to protect our customers from the quantum threat. So, while billions of dollars are invested in quantum information science to build the next computing platform, we are completely focused on building secure, optimized, high performance solutions that allow the world to benefit from these advancements without being exploited by them. Without quantum-safe security solutions, advancements in quantum technology may present too great a security risk for anyone to benefit from them.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

Totzke: One of the benefits of working in such a new field is that much of the work you do on a daily basis is ground-breaking. Early on, we learned that, in order to provide a smooth transition to quantum resistant cryptography for the ICT industry, we needed to solve some very complex migration problems around how we think about and manage digital identities. The first time that we were able to demonstrate a quantum safe browser prototype, a web server that was simultaneously classically safe using current state-of-the-art technology and quantum-safe using our implementation, was eye-opening.

Breakthroughs like that prototype get us closer to providing practical implementations for our customers who need large-scale migration of critical infrastructure without having to move all of their users at once. The ability to create hybrid environments, where they can upgrade servers to quantum-safe technology while supporting quantum-safe clients and legacy clients, is one of those essential building blocks that makes deployment of our solutions as efficient and cost effective as possible for our customers. We solve complex problems in such a way that our customers may not even realize how transformative the solution actually is.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

FinDEVr Feature — Kontomatik

See Kontomatik and the rest of the FinDEVr London speaker lineup on June 12 & 13. Register and save 20% with their promo code Kontomatik20LD17.

Interview with Piotr Włodarek, Kontomatik’s CTO:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

I started programming in 1995 and professional career around 1998, while in high school. I am a computer science graduate from Warsaw University of Technology. Before co-founding Kontomatik, I worked at European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, Switzerland).

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Multiple companies provide programmatic access to banking data (topic known as banking APIs or banking data aggregation). Kontomatik banking API is uniquely praised for reliability and speed. Reliability is achieved, among other things, by extreme analytics-driven approach to maintenance. Speed is achieved by uniquely working in a lower layer of the technology stack – pure Java – instead of relying on heavy “cows” like headless browsers.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

One of our major clients uses Kontomatik in 5 countries across 3 continents – ranging from Mexico to Russia – and is consistently over-performing competition thanks to massive volumes of clean data provided by Kontomatik.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

FinDEVr Feature — IdentityMind Global

See IdentityMind Global and the rest of the FinDEVr London speaker lineup on June 12 & 13. Register and save 20% with their promo code IdentityMindGlobal20LD17.

Interviews with IdentityMind Global’s Chief Marketing Officer & CTO.

Interview with Jose Caldera, Chief Marketing Officer:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

I started in a small services startup integrating network security products into financial institutions. Then went to Carnegie Mellon University for a master’s program on information networking, which is a mix between computer science and business. From there, I started to work as a consultant for assessing application and network security. Then as a security development engineer, and then moved to product management and have been doing product management and marketing since.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

Since the very beginning we started building digital identities to solve risk problems in the digital financial ecosystem. The notion of understanding digital identities was a game changer; the market is now understanding it. As we understand more about the use of digital identities, we are bringing innovative aspects into the analysis and exposing it through APIs to make it accessible to every one.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

We have a client that has been able to grow their customer base to millions of consumers and has been able to keep their compliance and risk team of the same size. They started with us when they were on-boarding only hundreds of customers a month. Now they are growing by tens of thousands per month, and their on-boarding is highly automatized. They have passed all regulatory compliance audit with flying colors, almost zero fraud, and still the same three people that were in their team when we started working together almost two years ago.IdentityMind Global

Interview with Kieran Sherlock, CTO:

Where did you start your career and how did you gain the experience needed to run the tech side of your company?

A 30 year series of startups, always staying long enough to learn from the hard times.

From a technologist’s perspective, what’s unique and game-changing about your technology?

The ability to embed examination of a user’s history and relationships (across our client base) into your transaction and account creation decisioning process.

Tell us about your favorite implementation of your solution/technology.

A large online retailer embedding our technology into their workflows to firstly reduce the number of transactions that require manual review, and secondly to expedite the decisioning of transactions that do require review.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

FinDEVr London @ London Tech Week

FinDEVr London @ London Tech Week

We’ve joined London Tech Week to kick off the first international FinDEVr event this June!

FinDEVr London combines finance + developers. It showcases the latest enabling technology – APIs, SDKs, cloud services and more – that developers will use to create their next innovation.

If you’re working on the tech side of financial services, you’ll find both friends and influential connections in the room on June 12 & 13. Buy your attendee ticket by this Friday save £200 with early-bird rates!

London Tech Week is a festival of events across the city, showcasing and celebrating the best of tech, making it a great partner for FinDEVr. Network, learn, and find new business opportunities! Check out the innovation, security, startup, etc. events and how to register for them here.

This Friday is the final early-bird ticket deadline before the event, so get your ticket here. And save an additional 10% with the promo code FinDEVrBlog.


FinDEVr London 2017 is sponsored by TestDevLab.

FinDEVr London 2017 is partnered with Aite Group, Banking TechnologyBayPay Forum, BiometricUpdate.com, Brave New CoinBreaking Banks, Byte Academy, The Canadian Trade Commissioner ServiceCelent, Cointelegraph, Colloquy, Cooper Press, DistributedEconomic Journal, Empire Startups, Femtech Leaders, Finmaps, Fintech Finance, Global DataHarrington Starr, Holland FintechLevel39, London Tech Week, Mapa ResearchMercator Advisory Group, The Paypers, Plug and Play, SecuritySolutionsWatch.com, SME Finance Forum, StartupbootcampSwiss Finance + Technology Association, and Women Who Code.

Photo by Erika Sanchez

FinDEVr in the Springtime: Wrapping Up New York & Kicking Off London


It’s a wrap for FinDEVr New York! If you would like to revisit your favorite presentations (or the audience’s favorites) or weren’t able to attend and want to see what you missed, videos of all presentations are available in our video archives. Sit back, relax, and make sure to grab the popcorn.

Even as FinDEVr New York winds down, FinDEVr London is heating up. Kick off summer by attending this debut international event on June 12 & 13 at London’s historic and unique Tobacco Dock. With many innovative presenting companies already on board, the content is sure to rival what was seen on stage last month.

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Save big on tickets when you register by this Friday, April 7. And use the promo code “FinDEVrBlog” to save an additional 10%. See you in June!