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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Barcelona, Spain-based Strands and Singapore’s credolab announced a partnership this week that will give banks a new solution to help their customers make better decisions with their finances. The collaboration will embed credolab’s credit scoring technology into Strands personal finance management platform, giving banks the real-time ability to obtain relevant customer insights with embedded risk assessments.
“Strands’ expertise in developing customizable digital money management solutions for banks will add great value to our clients globally,” credolab founder and CEO Peter Barcak said. “We are confident that our embedded technology will help Strands develop solutions to promote a more delightful way of banking that empowers customers with meaningful interactions, and makes them happier, more loyal, and more profitable.”
In their joint statement, Strands and credolab noted that retail banks often face challenges when it comes to improving customer engagement and providing long-term value to their customers. They blame a lack of relevant data, as well as the inability to generate significant insights into customer behavior and preferences. The integrated solution will serve as a “one-stop shop” for banks to realize new potential revenue sources by helping their customers be smarter with their money.
“By partnering with credolab, Strands is in a stronger position to deliver state of the art financial management solutions to banks worldwide,” Strands CEO Erik Brieva said. “This collaboration will allow us to embed next generation scoring technology into our AI-driven product suite, meeting financial institutions’ increasing demand for smart, highly customizable, and scalable FinTech white-label solutions.”
Credolab demonstrated its CredoScore technology at FinovateAsia 2018. This spring, the company has announced a collaboration with regional credit risk and decision analytics company Qarar to help the UAE-based company enhance its credit risk scoring processes.
Strands made its most recent Finovate appearance last month at FinovateAsia Digital. Teaming up with Tearsheet to publish its guide to “Banking as a Service,” in May, Strands began the year with news that CEO Brieva had been named to Analytics Insight’s Top 10 Most Inspiring CEOs.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Asia-Pacific
Voyager Innovations, the company behind Filipino-based payments app PayMaya, secured $167 million in funding to support the launch of a digital bank.
Vietnamese investment app Infina raised $2 million in seed funding from investors headquartered in Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, the U.S., and South Korea.
Brazilian cryptocurrency exchange Mercado Bitcoin raised $200 million in funding from the SoftBank Latin America Fund. The investment is the largest Series B round in Latin American history.
“Visa is committed to doing all we can to foster innovation and empower consumers in support of Europe’s open banking goals,” Visa CEO and Chairman Al Kelly said. “By bringing together Visa’s network of networks and Tink’s open banking capabilities we will deliver increased value to European consumers and businesses with tools to make their financial lives more simple, reliable and secure.”
Tink will retain both its brand and its current leadership team, and will remain headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden. The company is integrated with more than 3,400 banks and financial institutions, enabling millions of bank customers across Europe to benefit from aggregated financial data and smart financial services.
“Joining Visa, we will be able to move faster and reach further than ever before,” Tink co-founder and CEO Daniel Kjellén said. “Visa is the perfect partner for the next stage of Tink’s journey, and we are incredibly excited about what this will bring to our employees, customers and for the future of financial services.
Another alum from Europe that made fintech headlines late in the week was Meniga. The company, which demoed its Carbon Insight solution at FinovateEurope Digital earlier this year, has teamed up with Länsförsäkringar, one of Sweden’s largest financial institutions, to help the firm launch its new personal finance management solution. Specifically, Länsförsäkringar will use Meniga’s data management platform to enable the new offering to provide customers with access to real-time spending data.
“We are extremely excited about joining forces with Länsförsäkringar,” Meniga co-founder and CEO Georg Ludviksson said. “Partnering with such a reputable bank will no doubt prove instrumental in further cementing our position as the go-to digital banking solutions provider in the Nordics. Having worked assiduously with Länsförsäkringar to create an outstanding and first-class personal finance management experience for their customers, we are also very pleased to have been able to assist them during a time when so many people are in need of support and looking to take control of their finances.”
Be sure to check out our interview with Pablo Viguera, co-founder and co-CEO of Open Finance innovator – and “Plaid of Latin America” – Belvo.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
As Finovate Global has chronicled, the boom in fintech investment in Latin America is one of the most interesting trends in global fintech right now. From challenger banks to MSME lenders, a growing number of entrepreneurs and businesses in Latin America are bringing innovative, digital solutions to problems of financial opportunity and financial inclusion.
We caught up with Pablo Viguera, co-founder and co-CEO of Belvo in the wake of the company’s $43 million Series A round announced earlier this month. Dubbed “the Plaid of Latin America” by TechCrunch, Belvo offers an open finance API platform that facilitates data connections between apps, banks and other financial institutions, gig economy companies, and more.
What does this new investment mean to Belvo?
Pablo Viguera: We are extremely proud of this milestone and believe that it’s the result of the rapid growth our company has experienced during the last year – underpinned by the continued and unprecedented expansion of fintech in Latin America in the last 18 months.
The funding demonstrates that open finance represents a truly transformational opportunity for Latin America’s financial sector in the next decade. Investors believe that Belvo is poised to continue building category-defining infrastructure and API tools to power the next generation of financial services in the region.
The newly raised funds will help us scale and enhance our product offering, continue expanding our geographic footprint, and double the size of our team.
What is the distinction between open banking and open finance?
Viguera: Open finance is the next step after open banking. If the first aimed to make banking data available to third parties through APIs, this new model extends its scope to financial data from other sources beyond banks.
This is particularly important in regions where a big percentage of the population is still unbanked or underserved, such as Latin America. In these cases, the more financial data sources you have on your platform, the better it is for companies building innovative financial services or innovative apps on top of it.
One example of how this works is the use of financial data from gig economy platforms such as Uber and Rappi in Latin America.
Thanks to open finance APIs, companies can access one-of-a-kind financial data from these alternative sources, not accessible anywhere else, to build new and more inclusive financial services. It’s the case for Minu, a startup offering financial services for gig workers in Mexico, that uses our platform to connect their app with financial data from one of the largest delivery companies in Latin America.
What is driving the embrace of open finance in Latin America?
Viguera: One of the keys to our growth lies in our nature as an infrastructure company that offers its services to the rapidly expanding fintech sector. As this sector grows, as has been the case in recent years (and even more so since the onset of the pandemic, which has accelerated the adoption of digital financial services), we grow as well.
The trend that this sector is experiencing in Latin America is a tailwind for us. If only 12 months ago we had a handful of clients, today we have over 70, and we see that demand continuing to grow.
What are some of the chief obstacles to the broader adoption of open finance?
Viguera: Probably the biggest challenge today is the fact that we operate in a market where open finance is still a young concept and relatively unknown to many. There is still a lot of work to be done to make visible the benefits it offers, both to the companies that implement it and to its end users, in order to increase adoption.
However, we believe that this is the direction in which the market is heading. As has happened in other regions such as Europe and the United Kingdom, this aspect will improve as regulations progress.
Where do you see the greatest untapped opportunities right now?
Viguera: Latin America is possibly the most exciting and dynamic place to be in right now, given the exponential growth that the fintech sector is experiencing. It is also a great place to build infrastructure for the next generation of financial products for a huge market.
We believe it’s only going to get more exciting over the next decade as open banking and open finance will continue to be a key transformational driver for the entire region.
What can we expect to see from Belvo over the balance of 2021?
Viguera: This year we will focus on continuing to scale our product development efforts to meet rapidly increasing market demand and support its exponential customer growth. Our focus will be on expanding our offering of data enrichment solutions (beyond our income verification product) across markets and launch our bank-to-bank payment initiation offering in Mexico and Brazil.
In addition, this year will continue to explore opportunities to expand our open finance platform to new countries within the Latin American market. We expect to double our existing financial data providers’ connection coverage, reaching over 80 integrations by the end of the year.
The new funds will also be used to strengthen our team across functions and locations. We currently employ 70 people and we plan to double our headcount by the end of the year. As part of this plan, we will be hiring more than 50 engineers in Mexico and Brazil in the upcoming months.
The fact that venture capital has been pouring into Latin America of late has been hard to ignore. This week’s news that Kredi, a Mexican company that hopes to become the “Rocket Mortgage” of Latin America, had raised $3.1 million in funding was a reminder that fintech funding in the region is as diverse as is it abundant.
With many investment dollars in Latin America flowing toward everything from digital banking to cryptocurrencies, the fundraising success of a company like Kredi, which seeks to make it easier for the average, middle-class Mexican family to own a home, suggests a healthy fintech market is continuing to develop in the country. Mortgage-related fintechs are not as common in Mexico as fintechs involved in SME financing, digital banking, cross-border fund transfer, and even financial inclusion. Adding a mortgagetech like Kredi to the country’s ranks of funded fintechs could open the door for other entrepreneurs to innovate in the space.
Founded by Javier Aldape, Fernando Nader, Hernán Belden, and Juan Carlos Mercado, Kredi provides Mexican homebuyers with a marketplace where they can find the financing product that suits their needs best. The company sees itself as part of the trend toward greater digitization in financial services in general, as well as a way to help overcome the inefficiencies and expense of mortgage financing in Mexico in specific.
Finovate alums in a number of countries made the news this week. In the U.K., digital wealth management company Nutmegagreed to be acquired by JPMorgan. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a “source close to the transaction” said that Nutmeg was valued at more than $972 million. On the other side of the world, OCR Labs, an identity verification specialist based in Australia, announced that it has secured an investment of $15 million in a round led by Turkish firm Oyak Group. OCR Labs is an alum of both our developers conference, FinDEVr, and our fintech conference FinovateAsia, where it took home a Best of Show award for a demonstration of its technology.
Another Finovate Best of Show winner from outside of the United States made fintech headlines this week. Conversational AI specialist Finn AI, headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, announced a set of new additions to its platform to give banks and credit unions greater flexibility in their embrace of chatbot technology. Salt Edge, a Finovate alum that specializes in open banking APIs that also hails from Canada, announced this week that it would help Cyprus based electronic money institution (EMI) OROPAY become PSD2 compliant.
Also too: Be sure to check out our latest guest post from Adam Goulston of Scize Group. Goulston looks at recent fintech trends in Asia and projects what those trends mean for fintech in the region going forward.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Two of the biggest news items in international fintech this week also reflect two of the biggest trends in the industry in recent years: interest-free retail financing and the rise of digital assets.
With regard to the first, Stockholm, Sweden-based Klarna announced this week that it hauled in a whopping $639 million in new funding in a round led by SoftBank. The investment gives the company a valuation of $46 billion and makes it the most highly-valued fintech company in Europe.
“Consumers continue to reject interest- and fee-laden revolving credit and are moving toward debit while simultaneously seeking retail experiences that better meet their needs,” Klarna founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said. “More transparent and convenient alternatives align with evolving global consumer preferences and drive worldwide growth.”
The other major trend in fintech relates to the boom in cryptocurrencies. El Salvador, a small nation in the middle of Central America, announced earlier this week that it will recognize bitcoin as legal tender – the first country in the world to do so.
The move came as the result of a 62-22 vote in the Salvadoran Congress, which overwhelmingly backed the initiative proposed by President Nayib Bukele – whose party controls the legislature. After the vote, Bukele tweeted that the move would be a boon for the country “bring(ing) financial inclusion, investment, tourism, innovation, and economic development.” The law would require companies to accept bitcoin as payment for goods and services, as well as enable citizens to pay their taxes using bitcoin. Bukele further directed the country’s state-owned geothermal power company LaGeo to develop a strategy to leverage the power of El Salvador’s volcanoes to power bitcoin mining.
Skeptics of the move range from those who point to the country’s economic assistance program with the International Money Fund as a potential complication, to others who simply have no idea what bitcoin is and can’t imagine using it. “How am I going to agree with this? I haven’t seen it even in photos.” Reuters quoted one El Salvadoran shopper speaking in response to the news. “I know nothing about it. You need to understand your currency.”
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Central and Southern Asia
Indian personal finance startup Index agreed to be acquired by digital banking company Niyo.
BharatPe made its first acquisition, purchasing loyalty program Payback India from American Express and ICICI Investments Strategic Fund.
MatchMove Pay, an embedded finance company based in Singapore, secured $100 million in funding from Nityo Infotech Corp to fuel international expansion.
It’s a good week to be a fintech in Latin America. Uruguay-based fintech dLocal made its Nasdaq debut, raising more than $617 million in an IPO that gave the firm a valuation of $6 billion. The company, founded five years ago, offers a payments platform that enhances the ability of global merchants to operate in emerging markets. With customers ranging from Amazon.com to Uber, dlocal will use the capital from the IPO to add new features to its platform as well as enter new markets, according to an interview with Reuters.
Also this week, Latin American open finance API platform Belvo announced that it had secured $43 million in Series A funding. The round featured participation from new and existing investors – including investment angels like David Vélez, founder and CEO of Brazilian fintech Nubank. Belvo will use the new capital to “scale and enhance” its data enrichment solutions in particular, as well as launch its bank-to-bank payment initiation offering in both Mexico and Brazil. Adding to its 70-person workforce is also part of the company’s plans, with a goal of doubling headcount by the end of the year and “hiring more than 50 engineers in Mexico and Brazil in the coming months.”
Elsewhere in Latin America, Mexican payment gateway Prosa is reportedly considering a sale that could bring the company a valuation of more than $1 billion. The firm is one of the region’s biggest payment processors, facilitating more than 4.5 billion transactions in 2020. Also this week, EVO Payments announced that it had agreed to acquire Chilean e-commerce payment gateway Pago Fácil.
As Angela Strange and Matthieu Hafemeister noted this spring in their report Latin America’s Fintech Boom, “there is an enormous amount of untapped opportunity in Latin America for financial services of all types.” The authors cite five reasons to be optimistic about the demand for financial services, factors ranging from the region’s size to the opportunity to replace largely cash-based systems, as well as four reasons why Latin American fintech may be at a “tipping point.”
“As is often the case,” the authors wrote, ” growth appears gradual for a long while, then happens suddenly, seemingly all at once. Latin America is currently experiencing an explosion in fintech activity, and this is just the beginning.”
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Pakistani fintech Tag raised $5.5 million in pre-seed funding; the company also announced that it will join the Summer 2021 cohort of the Y Combinator accelerator.
“China-backed and Africa-focused” is a way to describe much of the investment that has poured into sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. This week’s news that African-based fintech platform OPay is in the process of raising $400 million in new funding – giving the firm a valuation of $1.5 billion – is the latest example of this trend.
OPay is a mobile money platform launched in Nigeria by popular internet search engine Opera back in 2018. The funding report, which was published in The Information, noted that the capital would be used to fuel the company’s geographic expansion, having gone live in Egypt earlier this year. With Chinese investors maintaining a majority stake in the company, OPay had raised more than $170 million to date from investors including Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital, Source Code, GSR Ventures, Meituan-Dianping, and parent company Opera.
The company said that it processed $1.4 billion in payments in October alone, a sum that increased to $2 billion by December. Much of this can likely be attributed to COVID-19. In a country where cash is still king, the onset of the global pandemic made in-person, cash-based transactions problematic. Digital payment options like those provided by OPay have soared in popularity; Forbes took a look at the boom in Africa’s mobile money business back in December, noting investments in sub-Saharan payment innovators like Paystack (also of Nigeria) and Chipper Cash, a San Francisco based P2P payments company that serves customers in seven African countries.
That said, OPay is looking to leverage its pedigree as a payments solution to offer additional products including debit and credit cards. Earlier this month, OPay launched its USSD withdrawal service to make it easier for Nigerians to access cash at OPay merchant stores – without needing a debit card. Also this month, the company introduced version 4.0 of its super app. OPay 4.0 now makes it easier for users to connect with friends and family, add contacts, make quick payments for frequently used services, and more.
Interestingly, OPay is the most successful of the ventures Opera has tried to spin off. These efforts include ORide, a bicycle-sharing service that was shut down after the Nigerian government banned the business; a similarly shuttered bus-booking solution, OBus; a logistics delivery service OExpress; a B2B e-commerce platform OTrade; and a food delivery service called OFood.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
In a round featuring new investors Saints Fund and Eric Benhamou of Benhamou Global Ventures, cross-border transaction monitoring solution provider ThetaRay has raised $31 million in new funding. Led by JVP and BGV Funds, the investment round also featured participation from current investors OurCrowd, Bank Hapoalim, SBT, and others. The funding takes the Israel-based company’s total capital to more than $90 million and will be used to help ThetaRay bring its cloud-based, transaction monitoring solution to new markets.
“We are on the verge of a real revolution in securing the global financial system,” ThetaRay CEO Mark Gazit said. “During this period, when the cross-border payment network has become the lifeblood of the world trade infrastructure, ThetaRay is here to instill certainty and reduce risks in secure, cross-border payments.”
ThetaRay’s announcement comes as the governments of both Nigeria and the Ukraine have implemented ThetaRay’s technology to protect cross-border payments from financial crime. The cross-border payments market, estimated at $25 trillion a year, increasingly has been targeted by financial criminals in the post-COVID environment. Unfortunately, the response to this threat has involved tightened controls and enforcement that have resulted in challenges – from slow service to outright blockages – for many of those businesses and banks that need to make legitimate cross-border payments.
To this end, ThetaRay’s SaaS offering analyzes SWIFT traffic, risk indicators, and data from clients, payers, and payees to spot patterns and anomalies that are indicative of suspicious activity – including money laundering and terrorist financing. The technology leverages a proprietary approach to machine learning called “artificial intuition” which simulates the decision-making aptitude of human instinct and subjectivity. Referred to as the “fourth generation of AI,” artificial intuition is being applied to help financial institutions spot large-scale, more sophisticated cybercrime strategies by analyzing the various parameters of the massive number of individual transactions that may make up a given fraud attempt.
“This revolution will enable many organizations and people around the world to transfer money faster, more securely, and with far fewer fees and stops along the way,” JVP founder and chairman Erel Margalit said. “What Swift did to the banking world 25 years ago, ThetaRay will do to the banking world in the next ten years.”
Founded in 2013 and making its Finovate debut two years later at FinovateFall, ThetaRay launched its cloud-based, anti-money laundering (AML) solution for cross-border payments last month. Also in April, the company appointed former Fundtech/Finastra Payments executive Dagan Osovlansky as its new Chief Product Officer. ThetaRay also won the Transaction Security Innovation Award this spring from the FinTech Breakthrough Awards program.
Finovate Global extends a special thanks to the demoing companies, keynote speakers, and attendees that joined us for FinovateSpring this week via our digital platform. On Demand video from the conference will be available soon.
And for Finovate Global readers with an interest in innovators from outside of the U.S., here are some of the companies to look out for when the On Demand video is made available in the coming days.
Aisot Technologies (Switzerland) with its technology that provides next-generation, real-time analytics and forecasts, allowing financial services to enhance returns, reduce risks, and increase efficiency.
Coconut Software (Canada) with its customer engagement platform for financial institutions that want to improve their digital and physical engagements.
DigiShares (Denmark) with its white-label platform for tokenization of real estate to provide automation and liquidity to the real estate markets.
Dreams (Sweden) with its technology that leverages cognitive and behavioral science to help banks increase their end users’ financial wellbeing and engagement, and attract new audiences. Best of Show winner.
Flybits (Canada) with its customer experience platform for the financial services sector, delivering personalization at scale.
FormHero (Canada) with its SaaS solution that enables rapid creation of digital front-end experiences to solve for complex data collection needs.
How have financial services companies coped with the rising challenge of cybercrime in the Work From Anywhere era? We caught up with Tamas Kadar, co-founder and CEO of SEON, a cybersecurity startup based in Hungary, to learn how the company – featured in Forbes’ Hottest Young Startups in Europe – helps firms meet regulatory obligations and better defend themselves against fraud.
Tell us about SEON. When was the company founded and what problem was the company founded to solve?
Tamas Kadar: Founded in 2017, SEON was born out of necessity. Prior to its launch, co-founder Bence Jendruszak and I owned a budding crypto exchange, which was repeatedly hit by instances of fraud. We urgently needed a solution that would help us resolve the problem, but found that there were none on the market suitable for our business structure.
The problem was that most anti-fraud solutions in the industry had long integration times, lengthy contracts, and different packages for different sized businesses. We needed a solution that was more flexible and could be integrated and functional almost immediately. So we took matters into our own hands and developed a solution that would meet these needs. This later became SEON.
SEON’s services remove the barriers to fraud prevention that many companies face today. The solution can be integrated into business structures in minutes – a far cry from the usual weeks it takes for many mainstream solutions. It is suitable for businesses of any size, has a free trial period, and works on a rolling monthly contract, meaning that businesses can cancel and take up our services without being bound by long contracts – much like a Netflix for fraud prevention.
What in your background gave you the confidence to tackle this challenge?
Kadar: Having studied Deep Info Comms at the elite Corvinus University, where Bence studied General Management, we both had the knowledge needed to get SEON off the ground. It was there that I learned about the fraud tactics being used to get around the latest fraud prevention strategies. Having this insight, along with my technical know-how and Bence’s managerial skills, we had the confidence to move forwards with SEON.
It was clear that there were some pain points in the fraud prevention industry that needed addressing. We felt that we were the right people to do so.
Who are your primary customers in financial services and how do their needs differ from those of your customers in other industries?
Kadar: Neo banks, traditional banks, PSPs, buy now pay later (BNPL) and other fraud tech companies, account for about 25% SEON’s portfolio. The rest is made up of a whole range of different industries, including some of the most high-risk. Other sectors we serve include iGaming, eSports, cryptocurrencies and online trading, and travel.
The services we provide to financial institutions differ from others as they focus more on regulatory compliance, reducing cost when it comes to Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, and preventing money laundering. We also protect account openings, reduce customer acquisition costs, decrease bonus abuse, and flag fraudulent merchants using stolen credit cards.
By contrast, other industries use us to protect themselves against fraudulent activity such as account takeover, while we mitigate chargebacks for ecommerce merchants. We also prevent fraud surrounding ticketing in the airline industry.
Tell us a little bit about the technology behind your solution. What are the most effective tools for combating cybercrime?
Kadar: SEON has a number of solutions that are highly beneficial for helping businesses prevent fraud, including the SEON Sense Platform and Intelligence Tool. We draw on data from across the internet to establish customers’ digital footprints, weaning out false accounts and actively preventing fraudulent transactions from taking place.
Driven by transactional data, the SEON Sense Platform provides a comprehensive end-to-end solution for fraud managers that can be tailored to the individual needs of a company.
Meanwhile, our Intelligence Tool increases fraud detection accuracy with just one click. Users can simply enter an email address, IP address, phone number or location into the browser extension to get background information, which then enables fraud managers to see complete user profiles and flag suspected fraudulent ones. As a result, companies can detect fake accounts with ease.
These solutions address a number of problems in the fraud prevention industry. They can be integrated via a Google Chrome link or API within minutes, and as they work in entirely in the back-end, there are no added layers of friction for consumers.
In addition, our solution acts as a marker for the move away from the industries overreliance on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) alone. AI and ML are often seen as a magic pill that will solve all of a business’ fraud woes and are left to resolve issues without the proper supervision. This impacts reportability because it isn’t always easy to establish the reason for certain decisions that a solution has made. Instead, our solutions are based on a supervised learning approach, giving fraud managers the information needed to make effective decisions.
How has COVID-19 impacted your company and its customers? What are your biggest takeaways from the experience?
Kadar: The flexibility of our solution has meant that we have been able to easily adapt to changes imposed by the pandemic. One of the largest changes we’ve seen in terms of fraud is the amount that is taking place. Many businesses moved into the online space in order to survive lockdowns and social distancing measures. The problem is that online fraud grows in line with online activity, so the amount of fraud that is taking place there has rapidly grown. As a result, our main focus has been on industries that have felt these changes the most – especially high-risk industries such as iGaming and eSports.
The solutions developed by SEON have made an enormous impact on the way our customers can manage, monitor, and mitigate fraudulent activity. Key to our ability to provide such solutions has been our open lines of communication with our customers. It’s important that newly digitised businesses understand that fraud prevention is an evolving practice and their feedback is vital to its success.
For example, our customers know they are encouraged to contact us whenever something changes within their business, be that a release of a new software update or simply a realisation that their customers often use other social registries that we haven’t been monitoring. With this knowledge, we can quickly begin developing new lines of defence.
What is the most important thing about the technology scene in Hungary that many people outside of the area might be surprised to learn?
Kadar: Setting up SEON wasn’t all plain sailing. Bias can often hamper the growth of startups outside of traditional European hubs such as London and Munich, meaning it’s difficult for businesses to secure the investment needed in order to scale.
This is especially true for Central Europe. Bence and I found this out the hard way. When getting SEON off the ground, we found that many European investors were skeptical when it came to startups from Central and Eastern Europe.
Still, we see launching SEON in Hungary as not only a blessing, but an advantage when it came to creating a unique product that the fraud prevention industry was desperately in need of. Being outside a typical startup hub has resulted in the company being more creative, more agile and, contrary to many seed level businesses, more resilient.
Establishing SEON in Hungary also greatly reduced our outgoings, allowing us to use the initial investment we secured to grow. This is because the talent pool in Eastern Europe met the needs of the business. It’s naturally abundant in people with mathematics, computer science, and AI-based skills, which has provided us with the human capital necessary to develop and maintain our fraud solution, without initially having to set up offices elsewhere.
You recently received a major investment – the biggest Series A round in Hungarian history. How important was this funding and what will it enable SEON to do?
Kadar: As part of the funding round, which was led by leading European early-stage investor Creandum, we secured €10 million (USD 12 million) in series A investment. This is a pivotal point in our company’s growth and will drive us in our mission to democratize fraud prevention by removing the barriers that many companies face.
With the investment, we plan to expand our presence in the U.S. and U.K., with the aim of having our London headquarters account for more than 30% of our revenue. We will also be shortly announcing the launch of our new U.S. office, along with our plans for the region.
In all, this investment will take our company to the next level, enabling us to not only better serve our existing customers but also provide our services to even more businesses across the globe.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
From U.K.-based Standard Chartered to Germany’s Deutsche Bank, banks around the world are adapting to the post-COVID world with fewer branches. In separate announcements only a few days a part, two of the globe’s bigger banking presences (Standard Chartered is the 44th biggest bank in the world by total assets; Deutsche Bank is ranked 21st) have signaled that hybrid workplaces will join digital transformation as defining aspects of banking operations in the future.
Standard Chartered’s announcement comes as the firm reports better-than-expected profits for the first quarter. The bank plans to reduce the size of its branch network to 400 – and move to a hybrid remote working setup – as part of a cost-cutting maneuver. Standard Chartered also announced that it will look to automation to “enable the re-shaping of the workforce.” Standard Chartered has a strong presence in Asia, Africa, and the MENA.
As for Deutsche Bank, company CEO Christian Sewing cited fewer branch customers and a growing preference for digital options among the reasons driving the move toward a hybrid model. Deutsche Bank expects to close 150 Deutsche Bank and Postbank branches this year with an additional 50 Postbank branches to be closed in 2022. At the same time, the company said it will introduce a hybrid workplace model for its employees that will allow them to work remotely up to three days a week.
Hybrid workplaces aren’t the only things that financial services workers will be getting used to in 2021. If the new employee training initiative from Spain-based BBVA is any indication, bank workers may find themselves being reskilled and upskilled just by playing a game.
BBVA has announced a new global reskilling and upskilling experience, The Camp, that is designed to enhance the employability of its professional workers. Part of BBVA’s learning model, Campus BBVA, the new experience focuses on 14 strategic skills that are taught using a digital, gamified environment in which the workers are the primary actors who determine their own development.
“The challenge of ensuring the survival of organizations entails adapting and being flexible enough for teams to be able to navigate this uncertainty and constantly incorporate the skills that are needed to promote the strategy,” Global Head of Learning at BBVA Pilar Concejo said.
Each of the 14 strategic skills has a different training itinerary. And each itinerary has three levels of specialization that uses a mountain-climbing analogy to assess the employee’s progress. Starting out as a metaphorical hiker, the employee advances from the valley (basic level) to the mountain (intermediate level), earning status as an “explorer.” Successfully advancing from the mountain to the summit (expert level) gives the employee the rank of “alpnist” – the highest level of specialization in the knowledge category.
“Gamification is a very important element at Campus BBVA, and now also at The Camp, as it allows us to design experiences in which employees feel much more identified and increase their level of commitment to the learning process,” Concejo said. “In the end, we try to ensure that the employee is motivated enough to move forward with their development in a continuous and sustainable manner over time.”
Here is our weekly look at fintech innovation around the world.
Washington, D.C.-based digital banking infrastructure company Securrency announced plans to expand in the UAE in the wake of its $30 million fundraising.
Financial Times featured Fusion Microfinance, a company that specializes in providing microloans of between Rs10,000 ($136) and Rs60,000 ($816) to poor women in India.
In a round led by Prosus Ventures and Tencent, Amsterdam-based fintech BUX has secured $80 million in funding that will fuel both international expansion and new product development. The investment also featured a change in the leadership ranks at the company, with founder Nick Bortot handing over the CEO reins to COO Yorick Naeff.
“With this new funding round, BUX will continue to spearhead innovation by implementing advanced features to further shape the future of how Europeans invest,” Naeff said. We are extremely grateful to have top tier investors like Prosus Ventures and Tencent onboard to support us in our mission.”
With half a million customers in the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, France, and Germany, BUX enables investors to buy and sell shares and exchange-traded funds (ETFs), without having to pay commissions. Dubbed the “Robinhood of Europe”, BUX is a response to what Naeff said is a growing awareness of the importance of investing by younger Europeans. Naeff underscored financial uncertainty as a major concern among the younger generation and credited them for realizing that investing is “one of the few viable ways left” to manage that uncertainty. The self-directed nature of investing on BUX’s platform – for shares and ETFs, as well as cryptocurrencies on its BUX Crypto app, and CFDs on its BUX X solution – is another appealing aspect, Naeff said.
“Traditional financial market investing comes with a lot of friction and we firmly believe in the democratization of access to financial services for the next generation of investors,” Head of Europe Investments for Prosus Ventures Sandeep Bakshi said. “The existing solutions are expensive, complex and not designed for younger generations.” Alex Leung, Assistant GM at Tencent, Strategic Development, noted that Bux’s business model does not depend on some of the revenue-raising strategies that have been criticized at rivals like Robinhood. “BUX is the only neo-broker in Europe that offers zero commission investing without being dependent on kickbacks or payments for order flow,” Leung said. “This ensures that its interests are fully aligned with its customers.”
No valuation information was provided as part of the funding announcement. The company noted that its signature BUX Zero solution “has more than doubled its assets under management” in the past three months.
Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world.
Central and Southern Asia
Revolutappointed Paroma Chatterjee as its new CEO for India.
