Finovate Debuts Archives - Page 8 of 11

Finovate Debuts: DarcMatter Shines a Light on Alternative Investing

By David Penn Posted on November 12, 2015
Categories: DarcMatter, Finovate Debuts

For Sang Lee, co-founder and CEO of DarcMatter, capital markets are one of only a few areas to have avoided disruption. Every industry has been disintermediated except for capital markets,” he explained. “No one has ‘flung open the gates’.”

Gate opening for DarcMatter means building an online, institutional-grade investment platform that gives investors transparent access to investments in venture capital, private equity, and hedge fund products.

And more than just access, DarcMatter uses a self-learning algorithm to help investors find investments that are tailored to their needs. “Recommendations shouldn’t come from intermediaries, but from your behavior,” Lee said. He said that DarcMatter is less a traditional robo-adviser and more a platform that “streamlines the process to display the opportunities that would be best.”

Company facts:

Headquartered in New York
Founded November 2014
Provides $1.5 billion in alternative investment opportunities
Supports investment minimums of $25,000
Clients include:
- Antecedent Ventures
- Eagle’s View Capital Management
- Exbury Capital Management
- White Star Capital
Sang Lee is CEO and founder

From left: DarcMatter founder and CEO Sang Lee and CTO Stan Solodkyy demonstrated the DarcMatter platform at FinovateSpring 2015.

How it works

DarcMatter is currently available only to accredited investors. The kinds of investments available through the DarcMatter platform include:

commercial debt offerings
hedge funds
private company equity offerings
private equity funds
startup offerings
venture capital funds

How does an investor interact with the platform? Qualified investors register and log in to the platform where they see detailed information about the various investments that are available. Investors can search through the listings by industry, offering type and subtype (for example, “managed funds” and “private equity”) and region.

When investors find what interests them, they can dig deeper and conduct the necessary due diligence. DarcMatter provides information on everything from the capital-raise goal, amount available for investment, management and performance fees, information about the management team (including founders) and more. The platform also includes a secure data room where the owner of the offering can control access to any and all documentation.

Once the investor decides to invest in a given opportunity, DarcMatter’s “Invest Now” button allows them to seamlessly and instantly reserve his or her investment without having to leave the platform.

For asset managers, after a short application process, the dashboard enables them to see all the investment offerings they have listed. The dashboard shows a variety of statistics, importantly including how many people have viewed the offering, as well as the amount of capital up for investment. Owners of the offering can adjust the amount of information to be displayed, varying the privacy setting, as well as track the behavior of interested investors. They can find out which have added the offering to be tracked, which have conducted due diligence, and so on.

For DarcMatter, this represents the kind of transparency between owners of offerings and investors—particularly in cutting out the middlemen—a transparency that Lee says has helped shape other industries in fintech for the better. Investors not only benefit from the transparency of the platform, but also the opportunity to improve their portfolio diversification through investments in alternative financial products, especially those with low correlations to systematic market risk.

At the same time, DarcMatter offers asset managers a broader range of potential investors, including family offices and individual accredited investors. Capital-raising costs are lower, investor logistics easier to manage, and the platform provides fully integrated tools to ensure regulatory compliance.

The future

DarcMatter is one of the first movers in the market to make alternative investments available to investors. Lee sees it as a matter of being “at the right time with the right idea at the right place.” He credits his experience in investment banking as alerting him to the possibilities of making a difference for those interested in participating in alternative investments.

“Coming from investment banking,” Lee said, “you figure there must be a better way, a streamlined way, without middlemen.” All that was necessary was a platform to deliver the information that investors need, and the technology to make everything happen in a transparent, efficient, cost-effective and compliant way.

Lee says while it’s critical to be on the right side of regulations, he yet understands that the “biggest disruptions (will) have you running along the edge of the regulatory line.” Regulators are often confused by new, innovative ideas and technologies, Lee said, and that can actually represent an opportunity for startups. “Incumbents are often hamstrung by regulation,” he added, saying that startups can gain an edge “by develop(ing) best practices early on.”

Lee is optimistic about the future of alternative investments and the prospects for DarcMatter. “Capital markets is the last frontier in financial innovation,” he said. “It’s the hardest and biggest to move and will take the longest.” But when innovation in capital markets gets going, he added, “it will develop efficiencies like we’ve never seen.”

Check out our video of DarcMatter’s live demonstration at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

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Finovate Debuts: Sliced Investing Provides Advisers with Access to Alternative Investments

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on November 9, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, Sliced Investing

In the past few years there has been much disruption in the wealth management space especially with the influx of robo-advisers. Sliced Investing takes a different approach, offering registered investment advisors access to alternative investments.

Company facts:

Launched 2014
$20+ million invested through the platform
Headquartered in San Francisco
8 employees

At FinovateFall 2015, Sliced debuted its offering for institutional investors. Sliced not only enables investors to deploy strategies in minutes, but also offers access to hedge funds and private equity funds with $10,000 minimums. These capabilities enable advisers to diversify clients’ portfolios by adding alternative investments.

How it works

Browse

Browse and filter alternative investments to find those that suit client preferences.

View performance

Review and compare fund performances. Sliced offers institutional-quality analytics and risk management tools.

Deploy

Once an adviser finds a suitable strategy, they deploy it in minutes by sending their client an agreement and digital paperwork directly from within the Sliced platform.

Client overview

Advisers see an overview of all investment activity and have access to client documents.

The Sliced platform can be white-labeled for family offices, brokers, pension funds and endowments.

What’s next?
Sliced is working on a robo-adviser for alternative investments and a set of algorithms to help advisers compete against robo-advisers. The company is also building tools to offer a single sign-on to eliminate password confusion.

Co-founders of Sliced Investing, CTO Akhil Lodha and CEO Mike Furlong, debuted Sliced Institutional at FinovateFall 2015:

http://finovate.wistia.com/medias/lkvw07jlkl?embedType=api&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=800

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Finovate Debuts: LiquidLandscape’s Visualization Solves Scattered Data

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 22, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, LiquidLandscape

LiquidLandscape offers banks a risk-visualization workspace. The startup’s LiquidLandscape Notebook is a collaborative space where banking executives view and interact with data on a map and communicate with each other about the correlations.

Company facts:

Barclays tech-accelerator alum
3 employees
Headquartered in San Francisco
Founded 2013

All financial services firms must communicate about data, but it is not always easy to understand how the data-points relate, or what potential issues the correlations may indicate. LiquidLandscape helps solve this issue of scattered data.

CEO Margit Zwemer describes the product as instant replay for financial services’ data that creates a “tube map” to show data-bottlenecks. The LiquidLandscape dashboard can map the data in an intelligible way, making it easy for employees to zoom in, at any level, to help answer the questions:

What is the problem?
What data indicate the issue?
What decision was made?

In the screenshots below, the user is examining capital flow among major countries.

After the user selects their desired specifications, type, and ranges, LiquidLandscape maps the data. In the screenshot below, the user has drilled down to examine Hong Kong’s trades with China, Japan, and the United States.

The platform also facilitates communication. Rather than require employees to email data back and forth, LiquidLandscape creates efficiency by enabling users to comment within the platform on specific data-points.

The screenshot below shows the discussion log on the right panel that creates a history of the chat-log around data. All comments are tied to the data, and users can respond to comments, making it easy to keep communication threads organized.

It is easiest to understand the power of LiquidLandscape’s platform through examples. Using various types of big data, the dashboard helps analyze:

Fund flows between ETFs
Risk-limit breaches between individual traders and the risk department’s requirements
Connections between different parts of an organization
Mortgage applications completed online vs. in-app
Audit trails for compliance
Consumer credit qualification

LiquidLandscape is secure and fully compliant. And while there are essentially no limits on what its engine can help visualize, the startup is currently focused on helping financial services companies understand and mitigate risk. LiquidLandscape does, however, have future plans to broaden its focus in the upcoming years.

What’s next?
This fall, LiquidLandscape launched in beta. The company is in the middle of fundraising and plans to grow its three-person team.

Here is the LiquidLandscape team debuting at FinovateFall 2015:

http://finovate.wistia.com/medias/2lffbvq11o?embedType=api&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=800

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Finovate Debuts: LendKey Enhances Lending-as-a-Service for Local Banks & Credit Unions

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 20, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, LendKey

Having positioned itself as a lending-as-a-service provider, LendKey’s online lending platform connects thousands of banks and credit unions with consumers in a single loan marketplace.

Company facts:

Used by 310+ lending institutions
Raised more than $800 million in funding for loans to 35,000+ borrowers
Raised $23.5 million in equity
Has 100+ full time employees
Headquartered in New York City

Using the LendKey Network, borrowers submit a single credit application that reaches multiple lending institutions, resulting in a single hard-credit inquiry into the borrower’s credit score, thereby saving time. In real time, users receive multiple offers for consumer loans. LendKey makes it easy for them to sort and apply for the offers, without ever leaving the platform.

The LendKey Network currently focuses on:

Student loans
Auto loans
Home-improvement loans

Choosing an offer

Using a student-loan-refinance example, the user enters the amount of their loan, current monthly payment, credit score, ZIP code, and school attended. Using those pieces of information, LendKey lists loan offers from local, community lenders that they may be eligible for.

1) Browse

Lenders show estimated monthly payment, term, and rate, based off the five data points the user furnished. To narrow down the number of offers, the user enters additional information, citizenship status, degree level, graduation date, and income. As additional data is added, the list of offers becomes more customized. This helps consumers get a better understanding of what factors affect their eligibility.

2) Customize

If the user sees an offer they like, they enter additional personal information. LendKey then performs a soft credit-check, which further customizes the rates offered.

Two aspects make this process unique:

Transparent: User sees all loans and rates for which she is eligible in a single place
Educational: User sees which personal factors affect the offers extended

3) Compare

After the soft credit-pull, users can narrow down offers by rate, payment amount, loan term, and type of rate (variable or fixed), and determine if they want a co-signer. Once all fields are entered and the user selects an offer they like, they are ready to apply.

4) Complete

For a seamless experience, the entire loan-application process takes place inside the LendKey site. Here’s the process:

Fill out application
Review application
Answer KDA questions to confirm identity
Prove graduation and income
Select which loans to refinance
Set up ACH payment authorization
Esign disclosures

Once these steps are finalized, LendKey pays off the user’s existing loans, and the debtor enters into the repayment phase.

Banks and credit unions receive a turnkey online lending solution that broadens their portfolio by reaching new borrowers across multiple asset classes. While the bank sets the underwriting rules, LendKey holds the paper on the loan.

Many lenders affiliated with LendKey are new to online lending. LendKey facilitates the lending institutions’ involvement by using in-house expertise to adapt their underwriting for the online audience.

What’s new and next
LendKey expects plenty of future growth in student lending. While the company plans to continue in that space, it recently began offering home improvement and auto loans. It sees lots of room for expansion in all verticals.

In April, LendKey signed Navy Federal Credit Union to power student loan consolidation and private student loan offerings for its members.

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Finovate Debuts: Hip Pocket Generates Qualified Mortgage Leads While Boosting Engagement

By David Penn Posted on September 8, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, Hip Pocket

Hip Pocket is a web-based app that helps consumers compare their mortgage rate with that of their peers and the bank’s current rate. The white-label solution leverages the popularity of financial calculators and other interactive financial tools to give potential borrowers the best chance at securing a mortgage that is right for them.

For Mark Zmarzly, CEO and founder, the average person’s spirit of competition and sense of fairness are powerful tools to encourage people to look for better financial opportunities. And Zmarzly believes that banks and credit unions that provide these tools will build trust with new and existing customers alike over the long run.

From left: Todd Cramer, Hip Pocket’s head of design, and Mark Zmarzly, CEO, founder, demonstrated their Mortgage Comparison Software at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

“Of the hundreds of banks we talked to,” Zmarzly said, “all said they want more online engagement, they want lead gen, and that their online calculators were one of their most powerful and most-visited tools on their website.” The problem? All of the calculators were self-service.

Hip Pocket eliminates that pain-point, he explained, automating the self-service calculators and providing the user with personalized, custom savings “without making them work for it.” And with version 1.0 launched in July 2014, Hip Pocket came to San Jose this spring to debut Version 2.o of this mortgage-comparison solution.

Company facts:

Founded in June 2013
Headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska
Raised $110,000
Has three employees

How Hip Pocket works

Zmarzly says his experience years ago in auto financing helped tip him off to the idea that educating borrowers on their rate options is not only a good service, but also can be part of an effective customer-engagement strategy. “I used to look for people who were overpaying,” he explained. “But there was no practical way to provide rate-comparisons for thousands of borrowers via direct mail.” It was something, however, that could be done digitally, and that was where the idea of Hip Pocket was born.

Hip Pocket lets users compare their current mortgage with both the mortgage products offered by the hosting bank or credit union, as well as with “a unique, unbiased, peer group” based on age, location, marital status, and credit rating.

After entering that demographic information, users add their current rate, value of their home, loan balance, and number of years left on the mortgage. Zmarzly says that with these eight data points, Hip Pocket is able to provide peer and product comparisons, as well as overall market intelligence when the anonymous data is aggregated.

Hip Pocket also achieves low abandonment rates. “Keeping the process simple at just eight data points, yields a nice 84% completion ratio once someone starts the engagement,” Zmarzly said.

Hip Pocket uses natural conversational language and social comparisons to encourage users to action. Messages such as “More than 7 out of 10 people have a better deal than you” and “You pay $10,629 more interest than your peers” are designed to appeal to the user’s sense of both competition and fairness. Zmarzly says this combination allows people to “apply an emotional reason (to) back up a logical reason.”

“Fairness is a big emotion,” he said. “It’s a reason why people make decisions, especially financial decisions.”

Hip Pocket then lets the user see how much he or she could save per month, per year, and over the life of the loan if they refinance with the hosting bank or credit union. This is followed by a specific offer with the rate, a call to action, and preferred contact method.

Users who learn that their rates are better than their peers, are encouraged to share their good fortune with their peers via social media. Zmarzly said that even if this does not result in a new refinancing, it helps build the kind of trust he fears banks and other FI’s have lost in recent years.

The technology is relatively straightforward. The calculator, Zmarzly said, is a “super-simple java script that goes right on the website.” He says the simplicity is all by design: “We wanted easy and fluid so they can make changes later.” The data is available instantly via API. “No uninstall process if they want out,” Zmarzly said.

The future

As one FinovateSpring observer suggested, the challenge for Hip Pocket may be the willingness of lenders to actively compete on rates. To this end, Zmarzly intends to keep the app both diversified and FI-plentiful. “The more data we get, the more we’ll be able to maximize the flow of what goes through,” he said. “More institutions (means) more data.” Currently targeting community banks, especially at the $5 billion-and-above mark, Zmarzly is also keen to partner with credit unions and even PFM partners. “Distribution is our focus,” he said.

Looking forward, Zmarzly envisions companion products such as the retirement-comparison solution the company launched shortly after Hip Pocket’s Finovate debut. The key is a relationship in which both the consumer and the bank gain. “Consumers need context for (banks) to establish value and trust,” he said. He cited a recent survey in which 69% of respondents said that when banks asked for personal data, it was for the bank’s benefit, and never delivers value to the consumer.

Zmarzly said, “That is where Hip Pocket can help.”

Check out the FinovateSpring 2015 demo video for Hip Pocket below.

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Finovate Debuts: DoubleNet Pay Puts Payday at the Center of Financial Planning

By David Penn Posted on August 31, 2015
Categories: DoubleNet Pay, Finovate Debuts

Brian Cosgray, co-founder of DoubleNet Pay, finds it interesting that employers have gotten into the business of helping their employees with everything from health care to family leave and day care. “But on the other hand,” he says, “employers have not contributed much to helping workers to better manage their day to day finances.”

DoubleNet Pay fills that void, introducing a PFM solution that starts with payday and lets the rest of the budget almost automatically build itself. Through a partnership with ADP, DoubleNet Pay records actual take-home pay, then automatically pays whatever bills have been entered into the system. The platform allows users to set savings goals that receive automatic contributions, as well.

DoubleNet Pay co-founder Brian Cosgray demonstrated his company’s technology at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

The result, Cosgray explained, is the consumer’s “net net” pay – or double net pay: the disposable income available after regular expenses and savings are subtracted from wages. According to Cosgray, this will help consumers, especially those living “paycheck to paycheck,” avoid what he calls the “too much month at the end of the money” problem.

DoubleNet Pay was founded in December 2013 and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

How it works

Cosgray correctly notes that one of the biggest hurdles for PFM adoption is data entry, and much of DoubleNet Pay’s functionality is designed to make the app as easy to start “as Uber.”

Users have three different ways to enter billing information. First, users can scroll through DoubleNet Pay’s set of more than 16,000 preloaded billers and simply click on their own billers in the lineup. Second, for billers not on DoubleNet Pay’s listing, users can leverage DoubleNet Pay’s partnership with another Finovate alum, Mitek, to take a photograph of the bill to extract the relevant information.

For those more informal or irregular billing situations, e.g., the babysitter or the landlord, the user can manually enter the information. For connected billers, “we automatically pull up amounts and dates due, so you never have to touch a paper statement again,” Cosgray said. Manual payees receive paper checks.

DoubleNet Pay is built to help consumers manage savings as well as spending. Users can set savings goals to set aside a pre-set amount on a regular basis. This helps users “pay themselves first.”

Funds can be transferred from account to account free of charge (for example, from an emergency savings account to a vacation savings account or a checking account). And users always have the ability to preview an upcoming pay period and make changes to payment dates, payment amounts, and so on before the payment goes out.

The future

Much of Cosgray’s insight into the personal finance challenges of the paycheck-to-paycheck community comes from his experience with in-house financing at a consumer goods retailer. He noticed that borrowers who paid their bills on pay day were good credit risks. Hence the idea to automate the process and build a PFM solution with pay day at the center.

“We’re working daily with employers who see the benefit of tools that automate short-term cash-flow management and savings,” Cosgray wrote in a column for Employee Benefits News last month. “Employees lead busy lives, juggling multiple work and family priorities. They need tools that make managing their daily finances and saving easier.”

Right now, DoubleNet Pay is focused on moving beyond its current partnership with ADP to work directly with payment processors, banks, and other FIs. “Our goal is to be as upstream in the flow of money as possible,” Cosgray said.

Check out DoubleNet Pay in its FinovateSpring 2015 demo video below.

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Finovate Debuts: WealthForge is a Private Placement Compliance Engine Wrapped in Technology

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on August 26, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, WealthForge

WealthForge’s online platform provides an efficient way for companies to raise private capital. It seeks to make the process faster, cheaper, and more compliant.

At FinovateSpring 2015, WealthForge launched its Invest Button, technology that compliantly processes private placements, which companies can then incorporate into their website.

WealthForge vitals:

Founded 2011
Headquartered in Richmond, Virginia
Infographic below shows stats from the WealthForge platform:

Investor experience

After clicking the Invest Button, investors are routed to a white-labeled page hosted on WealthForge’s servers, which are fully encrypted and secure.

The investor, whether individual or institutional, fills in their desired investment amount, along with other information such as employment, accreditation, and suitability. To remain compliant, WealthForge stores investor information for up to seven years.

For every piece of investor information entered, WealthForge conducts third-party due diligence and bad-actor checks. Since WealthForge tracks investor keystrokes throughout the process, they ensure all necessary steps are taken and have visibility to any fields the investor may have failed to fill out or review.

For fund transfers, WealthForge supports:

ACH
Wire transfer
Check
Self-directed IRA transfer

Once financing is confirmed, the investor e-signs the multiple federal and state-required documents, which are customized for each deal. After all documents are signed, WealthForge’s team of experts begin compliance verification of each offering and issuer.

Compliance

FINRA and SEC regulations are a large part of WealthForge’s platform.

Instead of using technology to circumvent regulation, WealthForge embraces it by increasing engagement with regulators and compliance measures. The company has scaled its technology to deal with increased regulation, and undergoes audits twice a year, exceeding regulators’ guidelines.

WealthForge keeps all the compliance, tracking, legality, and regulation verification in the background. WealthForge co-founder Mat Dellorso says its technology acts as a buffer that saves the client and their investor from having to “see how the sausage is made.”

Check out WealthForge’s live demo from FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

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Finovate Debuts: INETCO Analytics Helps FIs Leverage Transaction Data

By David Penn Posted on August 26, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, INETCO Systems

For financial institutions, there may be no more valuable information than real-time transaction data. And that may be why a company like INETCO, which has competed in more than one tech-rodeo since its 1984 founding, has developed technology to put real-time transaction data right where bank CMOs want and need it.

“Often this kind of software is very general,” INETCO’s VP of Product Marketing Marc Borbas explained to me in a conversation during FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose. “We flipped that on its head. ‘You’re a channel manager,’ we asked. ‘How do we provide you with the things you need to do well?'”

From left: Dallas Pretty, CFO, and Marc Borbas, vice president of product marketing, demonstrated INETCO Analytics at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

INETCO demonstrated its solution, INETCO Analytics, in its Finovate debut in San Jose, Calif., this past spring. The technology has been on the market since January 2015, and it functions as a self-service analytics application for channel managers. The ATM deployment of the technology was on display in San Jose, but Borbas says that other channels are just a matter of time. The point, he emphasized, was the fundamental shift away from focus on the device (i.e., the ATM, the POS terminal), and more focus on the customer and their actual interaction with the network.

“We ask all these questions about what the device is doing, whether it has paper, whether it has cash, how available it is,” Borbas said. “What if we looked instead at how customers are actually using it? And what if we did this not just for the ATM channel, but for any channel, mobile, online, branch, IVR, you name it … that’s what we’re doing with INETCO Analytics.”

Company facts:

INETCO was founded in June 1984
Headquartered in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Produced more than 100% revenue growth annually since 2012
Serves more than 150 banking, retail, telecommunications, and payment-processing customers in more than 50 countries.
Bijan Sanii is CEO

How it works

The special sauce at the heart of INETCO Analytics is how the technology is able to pull transaction data from the network, and the plaform’s ability to package that data into “role-specific” solutions. INETCO manages to pull this off with a patented set of technologies (seven of them, to be specific) that do not rely on agents on the ATM—no changes to the transaction switch or host, no data warehouse or data mart in the FIs environment is touched.

“What’s nice is that you don’t have to change your app,” Borbas said. “It’s a very light way to get at that data.”

INETCO Analytics currently provides ATM content managers with essential information about where their customers are, which ATMs are being used most frequently and when, whether there are competing ATMs in the area, and more. The technology even lets channel managers know who their best customers are, as revealed by ATM-usage data, at least, as well as cash-utilization rates and levels.

“You can see if there are cash dispensers, or other banks, and use that to refine your placement strategy,” Borbas said. He also talked about how the solution could help ATM channel managers see just how efficiently their machines are working. “When you run a large ATM estate,” he explained, “you want to know where do you have lineups building, where are you disappointing customers, where is someone hitting the end of a queue and leaving because they don’t want to do business with you.”

Borbas says INETCO can see the transactions not only as they happen, but also how frequently those transactions occur. “It’s the next best thing to having a college intern sitting by the machine watching people go by,” he says.

INETCO’s role in bringing big (transaction) data to banks comes after three decades of experience producing network software. Borbas said while building network software has been good for the company, there was a realization that much might be gained by turning the equation around.

“IT people were saying that the transaction data flowing through the channel would be valuable to marketing folks,” Borbas said. So now, instead of focusing on software that runs networks, INETCO is making sure the “network is monitoring the software.”

The future

INETCO has had a busy 2015. In addition to launching Analytics at the beginning of the year, and demonstrating the technology at Finovate in the spring, INETCO in May forged a partnership with Mexico’s Edenred, a corporate services provider with more than 2 million users, and inked a deal with BECU (Boeing Employees Credit Union; $12 billion in assets) to deploy its Analytics platform with the 850,000+ member credit union.

“It’s no secret that omnichannel is big with bankers,” Borbas said, adding that the next step for INETCO Analytics will be to take the technology beyond ATMS to channels such as mobile and POS. He says that 2015 is an ideal time for the channel expansion, and that it’s “just a matter of deciding which one.”

INETCO will be guided by what Borbas called “the pain-point story.” The company made the bet that somewhere in the bank the data exists and that it’s just hard to get. The issues with ATMs in terms of time lags made it a first choice, but the company is looking for the next best way to deploy the technology. “Who is going through the most pain to get the information they need?” Borbas said, framing the question. “We have the aspirin.”

Check out the FinovateSpring 2015 demo video for INETCO below.

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Finovate Debuts: Slice Introduces Intelligent Shopping Assistant API

By David Penn Posted on August 25, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, Slice

It is no exaggeration to say that when it comes to providing consumers and FIs with unprecedented insight into consumer spending, Slice truly takes it to another level.

And that level is Level 3: the item level data of what is actually purchased rather than what is called Level 1 data that simply tells you where you spent money. The difference between Level 1 data and Level 3 data, explained Karen Chu, Slice’s Director of Business Development, is the difference between knowing that you spent $200 at Macy’s on something last month, and knowing that you bought a cashmere sweater, two shirts, and a few pair of socks.

Traditionally, FIs only have access to Level 1 data. But the growing use of electronic receipts both online and offline has enabled technology companies like Slice to leverage the data in these e-receipts to give consumers new tools to manage their financial life, and to provide FIs with new ways to engage and market to their customers.

Pictured: Harpinder Singh, CEO and co-founder of Slice, demonstrated the Slice Platform API at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

“We have built an absolutely world-class extraction-and-categorization technology,” said Slice co-founder and CEO Harpinder Singh from the FinovateSpring stage. “We extract information from electronic receipts, categorize it, and make it available via a white label API.”

Company facts:

Founded in 2010
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California
More than 2 million users

How it works

Slice works by scanning the data in e-receipts in your email inbox, and extracting the level-3 or item-level information. The technology works with the vast majority of email types, according to Singh, and the applications of the data range from package tracking to building more exacting PFM apps to helping FIs better target and customize offers and rewards.

Scanning item-level detail makes budgeting more accurate for the consumer, and can provide more flexibility in setting spending controls. The item-level detail also includes warranty information and can be used to alert the purchaser in the event of a product recall or even a subsequent price drop.

Combining credit-card information with the item-level detail from Slice can also be used as an anti-fraud tool. Slice can alert the consumer, for example, when a card charge does not have an accompanying electronic receipt. Small businesses can take advantage of the technology to track expenses and tax deductions for employees.

A perfect example of the technology at work was Citibank’s trial-use of Slice’s prototype—an app called Citiscape—as part of the Citi Mobile Challenge last year (Slice was a finalist). Citiscape combined the transactions Citi sees on credit cards with the e-receipts Slice sends to the e-mail inbox. “We know what you actually bought at Amazon,” Chu said. “Not just ‘Travel,’ but where. Not just ‘Baby Products’, but which ones.”

“Data enrichment enables a lot of wonderful things,” Singh concluded from the Finovate stage this spring. “People are more engaged with your apps. They are spending more time looking at their purchases and tracking what they bought. And with the item-level information you can today monetize these users much better than the banks can.”

The future

Slice came to Finovate to make offers/deals with companies, as well as meet with bank-data aggregators and companies looking to provide personalized experiences. “Finovate provides a wide playing field,” Chu said. “Not just traditional financial service companies, but up and comers, as well. There’s a breadth and depth.”

For Slice, this includes talking with everyone from the Yodlees of the world to the Plaids (both Finovate and FinDEVr alums). The variety of use cases for the technology gives both established banks and startups different opportunities to leverage Slice’s item-level data.

“We built the API for various spaces,” said Chu. “Fintech, commerce—we don’t want to be siloed. We are agnostic as to what partners have.”

Try Slice on iOS here. Or Slice for Android users here.

Check out the FinovateSpring 2015 demo video for Slice below.

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Finovate Debuts: How DRAFT Offers Transparency into Investment Performance

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on August 24, 2015
Categories: DRAFT, Finovate Debuts

For average investors, understanding asset allocation, fees, and risk is cumbersome; but ignorance can be costly. DRAFT seeks to change that by offering a transparent, read-only view of existing investment funds. Its mobile app crowdsources data from other investors to empower users to make better decisions by better understanding their accounts.

Draft facts:

Raised $1 million seed funding
10 employees
Waitlist of 9,000
Headquartered in Austin, Texas
Founded 2014

DRAFT’s mobile app targets millennials with $100,000 to $1 million to invest and are underserved by traditional financial advisers.

After connecting to bank and investment accounts, the overview screen compares their risk profile and equity positions against top-performing accounts (pictured right). Accounts can be toggled on and off to view risk and equity by account or as a group.

Why it’s great

1) Uncover fees
Most people are aware of investment account fees, but not everyone grasps exactly how much they are paying. DRAFT makes it easy to discover the percentage and dollar amount paid.

2) Benchmark and compare
Users benchmark their accounts’ historical performance, allocation, and fees graphed alongside the top 10% of performers. They can also compare their metrics with those of an index fund.

3) Build rapport between client and adviser
The app’s Blueprint option shows where accounts fall short. Using the in-app sharing capability, users can send results to financial advisers to hold them accountable.

What’s next?

DRAFT plans to launch a B2B, white-label version of its app for advisers to brand and distribute to clients, enabling advisers to increase communication, transparency, and trust.

Additionally, by gaining visibility into their clients’ entire portfolio, advisers may discover assets they aren’t currently managing.

DRAFT debuted is mobile app at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose.

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Finovate Debuts: FundAmerica Helps Crowdfunders Stay Compliant

By David Penn Posted on August 21, 2015
Categories: Finovate Debuts, FundAmerica

Ask FundAmerica founder and CEO Scott Purcell what his company’s services are and who they are for, and his answer is refreshingly simple: “Anyone raising money online needs to use our services,” Purcell says with a smile. “We’re the guys that keep you from going to jail.”

Put a little less colorfully, FundAmerica provides an API- and browser-based compliance platform for crowdfunders. FundAmerica’s back-end compliance solutions include everything from AML and escrow services, to payment processing and state dealer representation; in short, all that is needed by investment advisers, broker-dealers and others to raise capital pursuant to 506(c), 506(b), Reg A+, and rule 4(a)(6) crowdfunding regulations.

FundAmerica founder and CEO Scott Purcell demonstrated FundAmerica’s API for crowdfunding platform compliance at FinovateSpring 2015.

At FinovateSpring 2015, FundAmerica demonstrated its API for crowdfunding platform compliance. Purcell noted that in a few years “every business, every real estate developer, anyone looking for capital will be doing so online. And that presents a very complex set of problems so it can be done effectively and safely.”

Fortunately for crowdfunders, there’s FundAmerica.

Company facts:

Founded in November 2011
Headquartered in Las Vegas, Nevada
Raised $2.25 million in angel investment
Signed 125 crowdfunding platforms
Opened more than 40 escrows in the first three months
Scott Purcell is founder and CEO

How it works

FundAmerica’s platform ensures that crowdfunders are doing everything correctly and in a compliant manner. This begins with collecting issuer information, and associated persons such as executive officers, directors and major shareholders. This ensures that the AML process is off to a compliant-start, including background “bad-actor checks” with the SEC.

Details of the offering can be recorded on the platform for ready provision to the registered transfer agent. This takes account of both basic information, legends or restrictions, as well as whether the offering is equity or debt.

Once all the information is entered into the system, the subscription and escrow agreements are generated for investors to sign. At this point, Purcell explained, “The transaction is in the system, it’s registered, AML has been run, due diligence has been looked at. Everything is ready for this issuer to now conduct a compliant online fund-raise—either by themselves or through a crowdfunding platform.”

Potential investors visiting the crowdfunding platform see information about the company, its leadership, background, metrics, and so on. The difference is that with FundAmerica, each offering will include an “Invest Now” button that, when pressed, fast-tracks the process.

A pop-up menu allows investors to enter in their name, contact details, amount of investment and payment method. Then, relevant documents to facilitate the transfer, such as an electronic ACH debit-authorization form and a substitute 1099 form, appear automatically for completion and electronic signing.

All completed documents are stored online for compliance and emailed to the investor for their records.

“The idea is to make it as easy and as friction-free as possible for the issuer to get the money into escrow,” said Purcell. “For the back-end service providers to do the AML checks [necessary] on the issuer; to [ensure] the funds that are going to transfer, are settled and cleared; and that all of the blocking and tackling on the banking ecosystem is able to happen.”

On the issuer side, the system provides an alert that lets him or her know both when new funds have been pledged as well as when they actually arrive in escrow. Simultaneously, the back-end processes ensure everything is happening in the proper sequence: AML is conducted before the securities are actually sold, and funds are settled and cleared before anything is released from escrow and transferred to the issuer.

“That’s what FundAmerica does,” Purcell said. “We package the ecosystem—the plumbing—for the crowdfunding industry.”

The future

“People are excited that someone is doing what FundAmerica is doing,” Purcell said. “There’s no one else doing it.” FundAmerica combines technical knowledge with a strong compliance-oriented management team, a good place to be “when a company’s security attorneys come to us,” Purcell says. “We’re good, authoritative people for them to talk to. We give out a lot of free advice.”

Since its Finovate debut, FundAmerica launched its “flex” payment-processing feature, which allows platforms to separate their share from an issuer payment and forward the rest to investors. The feature is available through both the online portal as well as the API, and serves as a boon for platforms that earn revenues from the difference between the rate a sponsor or developer pays and the rate paid out to investors.

June 2015 marked the month FundAmerica unveiled its FundAmerica Stock Transfer (“FAST”) service, a registered transfer agent for Reg A+ and 506b/c. Using RESTful APIs to make it easy to integrate into crowdfunding platforms, FAST helps with investor records management and other tools to manage changes in ownership, payment histories, vesting details, and more.

New initiatives aside, FundAmerica has just begun a Series A funding round, so the company is actively looking for and talking with investors. Beyond that FundAmerica is eager to make strategic partners. “We are the Intel Inside for crowdfunding platforms,” Purcell said. “We build solutions to help crowdfunders conduct a compliant operation with the least amount of investor friction.”

Check out the FinovateSpring 2015 demo video for FundAmerica below

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Finovate Debuts: Emailage Detects Fraud Through Users’ Email Address

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on August 20, 2015
Categories: Emailage, Finovate Debuts

Emailage is a unique fraud prevention company. Its global risk assessment service helps companies underwrite risk simply by analyzing email addresses, with no further personal information required.

Emailage facts:

Saved companies over $140 million last year
Is used on every continent except Antarctica
Has offices in Sao Paulo, Brazil and London

Emailage has access to more than 4 billion email addresses, 25 million of which are associated with fraud. If an email address in a client’s list is associated with fraud, Emailage flags it and assigns a risk score.

The company’s fraud-prevention solution applies to any situation where an email address is provided. Examples include:

Account onboarding
P2P money-transfer
Account maintenance for existing customers
Ecommerce transactions

Additionally, Emailage has partnered with other fraud-prevention solutions to provide an added layer of protection.

How it works

1) Receive email addresses
Clients upload batches of email addresses to check for fraud. Multiple ways to upload include:

Browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer
Rest API
Web portal
Batch processing
Secure file transfer protocol (SFTP)
URL/ HTTP Get calls

2) Evaluate risk
Emailage validates the emails and collects data associated with them. In real time, its algorithm alerts clients of any fraudulent activity associated with the addresses. It uses machine learning, so fraud alerts improve with every use.

3) Assign risk score
Emailage sends clients a risk score for each email address, along with the data, such as domain information, accompanying each.

The fraud-risk output is easy to understand. Businesses can customize the data by adjusting the scoring system to suit their preferences. Emailage’s algorithm detects 50% of all fraud problems with a 30% hit ratio. Its scoring system ranges from 1 to 1,000:

In January, Forbes listed Emailage as one of 100 of America’s most promising companies of 2015.

Emailage debuted its browser extensions at FinovateSpring 2015 in San Jose. Check out the demo video below.

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