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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring Digital on May 10 through 13, 2021. Register today and save your spot.
ArnexaBinbox is the world’s first secure messaging platform that is phishing-free.
Features
Zero phishing engenders greater trust and engagement amongst users
End-to-end encryption
Simple APIs for easy sending and receiving of messages
Why it’s great Arnexa Binbox achieves zero phishing without content scanning and analyzing sender attributes. It uses unique signals that enable it to sift phishing messages cleanly, easily, and correctly.
Presenter
Sridhar Ramakrishnan, CEO & Founder Ramakrishnan is a long-time entrepreneur having worked in several startups. He serves on the board of CA Jump$tart, an organization dedicated to youth financial literacy. LinkedIn
Heading into the new year, many fintech observers believed that customer experience would be as big a theme in 2020 as it was in 2019. And while the specific circumstances of that bigness (i.e., a generational global health crisis) were not anticipated by anyone, the importance of the customer remain as key theme this year as many thought it would be – if not more so.
This makes our upcoming conversation at FinovateWest Digital about the customer experience in 2020 and beyond so compelling. Joining us on Day Two of our all-digital, fintech conference next month are Sunil Dixit, Managing Director at BBVA, and Jeremy Balkin, Head of Innovation with HSBC. The two will take on the topic of how to create a customer experience that goes beyond insights to actually “surprise and delight” consumers.
Sunil Dixit leads the delivery of digital transformation of the consumer/retail bank for BBVA’s Global Client Solutions division. Based in Madrid, Spain, Dixit joined the company in 2017 after a tenure at Barclays where he led on strategy, embracing disruptive technologies, and the start-up ecosystem. Most recently, he has led development of BBVA’s open banking strategy and governance worldwide.
No stranger to Finovate audiences, Jeremy Balkin is Head of Innovation with HSBC Bank USA. The New York-based analyst serves on the bank’s retail bank management committee and manages the fintech innovation and exponential growth strategy for North America. Balkin is also the author of Investing with Impact: Why Finance is a Force for Good and Millennialization of Everything: How to Win When Millennials Rule the World.
Together Dixit and Balkin will address how financial services companies can avoid the dead-end of price competition and instead add new services, products, rewards, and benefits to differentiate their offering and improve the customer experience. They will look at how COVID-19 has impacted consumer preferences and what data science and other enabling technologies can be employed to help firms gain and act on insights into their customers’ preferences.
Learn more about our upcoming presentation on Customer Experience in the Post-COVID era. And visit our FinovateWest Digital hub to register today and save your spot.
When it comes to foreseeing the future, nobody gets things 100% right. However, Strategic Futurist at TEDx Curator Nancy Giordano is poised to come pretty close with her predictions.
Giordano is a keynote speaker at FinovateWest Digital, a online event hosted November 23 through 25. At her presentation, Just One Percent In – Learning to Navigate the Next Economy, Giordano will discuss how we are only 1% into this new technological era and what that may mean for your five-year, 10-year, and 50-year outlook. She will detail four massive shifts in human awareness and behavior that are reshaping the understanding of business, society, technology, and ourselves, and will offer hope for the days ahead.
Giordano is a 10-year TEDx curator in Austin. Described as endlessly optimistic, she is a strategic futurist with a drive to help enterprise organizations and visionary leaders transform to meet the escalating expectations ahead. With growing conviction of what will (and needs to) shift, executives value Giordano’s unique abilities to sense and synthesize the terrain ahead, and guide those ready to build more relevant and sustainable solutions.
Don’t miss Nancy Giordano’s presentation at FinovateWest Digital on Monday, November 23, 2020 at 1:20 pm. If you still haven’t registered for FinovateWest Digital, book now to get the best discounts.
The big changes we are seeing in the realm of customer engagement have to do with inevitable trends becoming immediate demands. Whether the need is reaching customers over the digital channel for the first time or automating and streamlining processes to improve efficiency and maximize productivity, the global health pandemic has been the midwife – if not the mother – of the fast-changing technology landscape we live in today.
“Meeting customers where they are” has been a rallying cry for customer engagement specialists for years. And as the number of channels grows, more companies are offering new solutions that provide easy-to-use, secure, and compliant ways for businesses to more comprehensively engage with their customers and clients.
One company in this space is Revation Systems. A Minneapolis, Minnesota-based firm, founded in 2003, Revation recently partnered with fintech and regtech solution provider Computer Services Inc. (CSI), who will offer Revation’s LinkLive Banking platform to community banks. LinkLive Banking provides regional and community banks, as well as credit unions, with key capabilities such as digital messaging, AI-powered chatbots, voice and video communications, and the ability to move seamlessly between physical and digital channels.
“Given the remote work demands of COVID-19, LinkLive Banking empowers our banks to provide a world-class customer experience while taking precautions to protect the health and safety of their employees and customers,” CSI Group President of Enterprise Banking Giovanni Mastronardi said. “Together with Revation Systems, we’re providing the innovative technology necessary to increase customer satisfaction and reduce friction in the customer journey.”
In addition to its messaging, chatbot, voice, and video functionalities, the platform also provides secure desktop sharing and encrypted email. LinkLive Banking leverages AI to power service chatbots with keyword recognition and the ability provide fast, automated responses to common banking queries. The video banking capabilities, announced in August, are the most recent addition to the platform.
“We are extremely excited about utilizing LinkLive’s video banking features as we seek to improve our member experience,” United Educators Credit Union CTO Dennis Griesgraber said. He noted that the new feature integrated not only with the LinkLive contact center the credit union used, but also with the institution’s digital banking platform. John Eyre, Assistant VP of Information Technology at TAPCO Credit Union underscored the technology’s value for enhancing communications among employees, as well. “LinkLive’s video banking feature will not only enhance the interactions between our members and representatives, but will also help improve communication among our own staff internally,” Eyre said.
Active in the healthcare vertical as well as financial services, Revation has more than 400 customers using its LinkLive Banking platform, representing more than 100 million digital banking customers. Adding the video banking component, Revation notes, requires only a few configuration changes to the LinkLive platform, and does not require the customer to download an app or manage a separate communications account to participate in video banking.
Perry Price, Revation CEO, echoed the now-common wisdom that the pandemic has accelerated pre-existing, if not inevitable technology trends. He noted that while adoption of video banking before COVID-19 had been a “long-term goal,” the onset of the crisis had turned those goals into “urgent” priorities.
Featured in CIOReview’s Most Promising FinTech Solution Providers for 2020 this spring, Revation is scheduled to make its Finovate debut next month at FinovateWest Digital. To learn more about our upcoming, all-digital event and how to watch Revation’s technology in action, visit our FinovateWest Digital hub.
When it comes to leveraging technologies like machine learning and artificial intelligence to enhance processes and improve business operations, many financial services firms know what they want but, to steal a line, “just don’t know how to go about getting it.”
One of the keynote presentations at the upcoming FinovateWest Digital conference in November is designed specifically to address this problem. Jeff Fried, Director of Product Management for InterSystems, will provide a address titled The 7 Steps to Using Machine Learning to Improve Your Business that will give stakeholders key insights into the steps they can take to get their machine learning- and AI-based projects underway.
“Continued advancements in ML and AI have huge potential in many domains,” he wrote in a blog post titled Maximize Today’s Downtime to Train ML Models for Tomorrow in August. “The key is to surface low-risk, high reward business solutions to ensure your organization continues to thrive, while also weathering the effects of an economic downturn.”
Specifically, Fried is cautioning companies against treating any COVID-induced slowdown in business activity as “downtime.” Encouraging companies to not let “the crisis go to waste,” Fried sees this year as a unique opportunity for companies to hone in and test out some of their ML-oriented projects. This is because while he considers machine learning and AI to be “high promise” technologies, the time and energy required to test and implement these initiatives is often hard to find when the usual, every day business concerns are often more “urgent and immediate.”
One factor in favor of companies looking to innovate using machine learning and artificial intelligence is that while there is a high demand for talent in these areas, the actual technologies themselves require relatively modest capital investment. This, at a time of heightened financial risk aversion by most businesses and combined with new tools that are making machine learning technologies more accessible to data scientists (and even those who aren’t data scientists), further argues for companies to make the most of the current moment when it comes to pursuing their more ambitious technology projects.
A self-described “long-standing data management nerd” and a former Chief Technology Officer for BA Insight, Empirix, and Teleoquent, Fried joined InterSystems in 2018 and is passionate about helping people build powerful data-driven applications. Learn more about Fried and his upcoming presentation at FinovateWest Digital in November.
This November, 20+ startups and established organizations will demo their latest technology virtually at FinovateWest Digital. In these 10-minute showcases, you’ll have the chance to see how these services and solutions work and how they can benefit your business. Need to know more? All demoers will be available at virtual booths for Q&A and 1-to-1+ meetings.
Here’s a look at those already confirmed to demo from across the US and beyond:
The themes, trends and technologies from these companies encompass the new state of financial services in 2020:
Risk management connected to financial wellness, SMB financing, and intelligent data
Customer experience connected to call center contact, collaborative engagement, digital development, and balancing remote versus in-person support
Financial planning connected to fluctuating portfolio performance, employer benefits, and unemployment
Financial crime connected to growing corona opportunists
And much more. Click here to learn more about how their technology can help you spot opportunities for growth in your organization and run with that potential.
See these companies live in November! Book this week for $795.
Fintech has always had a digital backbone. Cashless payments. Security tokens. Robo advisors. Invoice financing. Mobile banking. And hundreds of other connectors, all building the path for a digital future, a future where companies are growing and innovating faster than ever.
From a buyer side, companies need technology to digitally do business. From a seller side, companies have to deliver these services and solutions. And all sides need confidence that Finovate’s fall events are going to run successfully to help them achieve their business needs. With all of that in mind, we’re embracing digital.
Now that the events have been moved online, you know FinovateFall Digital and FinovateWest Digital will take place. You can plan with 100% confidence, see more solutions, expand your reach, and access highly curated and produced content. These are all things Finovate is already known for.
Because of Finovate’s quality standards, these won’t be like any other digital events you’ve seen before. Live and on-demand content will put your finger on the pulse of the industry. Live Q&A and polls will ensure you can engage directly with speakers. And 24/7 networking and an app packed with fintech enthusiasts will make it easy to start a conversation with the right person.
Demos will be live streamed throughout the events, plus available on-demand to 1,000+ senior fintech leaders. All demo companies will have virtual booths for Q&A, deeper product dives, and 1-to-1 meetings. Plus, we’ll deliver leads to everyone participating. Visit the event websites above for more information.
The future of fintech is digital, and we hope to see you digitally this fall.
As Finovate events return this fall, dozens of companies are getting ready to showcase their latest financial services technologies this September and November. And not surprisingly, many of these innovations are part of larger stories related to COVID-19.
As a sneak peek, we recorded an early digital demo interview with Momentifi, who will also demo at FinovateWest. Along with Finovate VP of Strategy, Greg Palmer, Momentifi explores its CRM and sales system for remote workers. The company’s technology will continue to be pivotal as many regions still face stay-at-home orders and companies will not see offices at full capacity for many months.
To join Momentifi and other companies demoing this fall, visit the FinovateFall and FinovateWest (formerly FinovateSpring) websites. Hope to see you apply!
As Finovate events return this fall, dozens of companies are getting ready to showcase their latest financial services technologies this September and November. And not surprisingly, many of these innovations are part of larger stories related to COVID-19.
As a sneak peek, we recorded an early digital demo interview with WealthConductor, who will also demo at FinovateWest. Along with Finovate VP of Strategy, Greg Palmer, WealthConductor explores the retirement income crisis, now more dire than ever when unemployment is at an all-time high.
To join WealthConductor and other companies demoing this fall, visit the FinovateFall and FinovateWest (formerly FinovateSpring) websites. Hope to see you apply!
What have the companies that demonstrated their latest technologies at our west coast fintech conference last spring been up to in the months since then?
We’ve moved the event later in the year in 2020 due to the public health concerns over the coronavirus pandemic. But we still wanted to check in on these innovators from our most recent spring show, and take note of their accomplishments since we last saw them on the Finovate stage. Here’s what we found:
Bringing in the Big Money
Anti-fraud solutions provider – and Best of Show winner – Arkose Labsraised $22 million in a round led by Microsoft’s VC arm, M12. The company won its first Best of Show award at our west coast conference last spring after demonstrating its authentication system.
Voca.ai, a three-time Best of Show winner, secured funding from American Express Ventures.
Digital platform banking solution provider Agorasecured $2 million in funding as it announced the opening of new headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia.
Cinchy won $500,000 cash prize in 2019 VentureClash competition.
ClickSWITCHraised $13 million in Series B funding.
SheerIDlanded $64 million investment in round led by CVC Growth.
Strandsagrees to be acquired by credit management solutions specialist CRIF.
YSEOPraises $9.3 million investment from NextStage.
Making Friends in High Places
BlueRush, which picked up a Best of Show win last year at our west coast conference, sealed an IndiVideo deal with Nikia Dix, and forged a strategic partnership with InfoSlips.
Best of Show winner Neener Analyticsgraduated from 2019 FIS Fintech Accelerator program.
ALTRpartnered with fellow Finovate alum Q2 to leverage blockchain technology to improve data security.
Cinchy earned a spot in the 2020 MassChallenge FinTech program.
doxo teamed up with fellow Finovate alum Plaid to bring overdraft protection to billpay.
A new partnership has broughtClickSWITCH’s account switching technology to customers of fellow Finovate alum Finastra. ClickSWITCH also announced a partnership with digital bank Current.
EVERFIcollaborates with Zelle to support youth financial literacy.
Faradayintegrated with growth marketing platform Iterable bringing AI-generated predictions to Iterable’s workflows.
Fortress Identityworked with Visa to bring biometric authentication to cardholder transactions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The company also partnered with Zenus Bank, helping the Puerto Rico-based institution securely onboard new accounts.
RightCapitalentered into a strategic partnership with the International Association of Registered Financial Consultants, and teamed up with wealth manager CircleBlack.
Terafinapartnered with Alabama’s Listerhill Credit Union and empowered small business onboarding for PlainsCapital Bank.
Earning R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Arkose Labsearned a spot in CNBC’s 2019 Upstart 100. The company’s VP of Marketing and Strategy Vanita Pandey and Senior Producer Hedda Peters win Women in Cybersecurity honors from the Cyber Defense Global Awards.
Neener Analyticswon Rising Star in India recognition in the India FinTech Forum’s IFTA 2019 awards.
Gliapicked up top honors at the CUNA Operations & Member Experience Council and Technology Council Conference Speed Rounds competition.
Invest Sou Sou was selected to participate in Halcyon Incubator for startups in the Washington, D.C. area.
GoBankingRates featuredCalcXML in its roundup of top free online financial calculators.
Cinchynamed a finalist in Connecticut Innovations’ 2019 Global Venture Challenge.
EVERFI recognized in the Deloitte 2019 Technology Fast 500.
Flybitsearned a spot in the 2020 Fintech Power 50, and was named to Digital Finance Institute’s list of Top 50 Fintech Companies in Canada for 2019. Horizn and Responsive AI also earned recognition from the Digital Finance Institute in this roundup.
Launchfire’sLemonade training platform named to 2019 Top Training Companies roster for gamification companies.
Finovate events have always been celebrations. Celebrations of innovation, celebrations of technology, celebrations of industry. But this spring was not a time for celebration, and our thoughts are with every single person and company impacted throughout the community.
As heard from our followers and in news recently, we are turning a corner and seeing the light. The fall season has always been a big time for product launches, and these will be more important now than ever as companies reemerge. And that’s something to celebrate.
This fall for the first time, Finovate hits both coasts: FinovateFall in September in New York and FinovateWest (formerly FinovateSpring) in November in San Francisco. And we’re accepting applications from companies interested in demoing their technology at each.
Showcasing products and solutions – not just talking about them – is the best way to do business. It allows 1,000+ potential buyers, partners and investors to see how your technology works and how it can benefit them. Not convinced? Hear from some of our alums:
It’s one of the leading fintech conferences around the world, so there’s no better place to launch a product. With any conference, it’s about the return on investment — you never know if you’ll meet one person of five, but we’ve already met 10 potential partners that I’m really excited to work with.
Dana Budzyn, CEO & Founder, UBDI
It’s been successful here! We’ve already had around 30 to 40 people visit our booth and 15 requests from people saying, “Can you come and show us your technology?”
Ned Phillips, CEO & Founder, Bambu
I think we’ll be here every year – we met 90% of our clients at Finovate. We meet our clients; we meet our prospects. If you’re a bank or fintech and want to know about the trends and get a sneak peek into the future, this is the place.
Uday Akkaraju, CEO, Bond.AI
Finovate is the best place for our startup to get exposure to potential clients and investors, all under one roof!
Emil Tarazi, Chief Data Scientist & Founder, ETFLogic
Finovate is a great way to meet the right people at the right organizations! It was really exciting to have them approach us after seeing our demonstration on stage!
Mark Friedenthal, CEO & Founder, Tolerisk
For more information on demoing this fall, visit the FinovateFall and FinovateWest websites. Hope to see you apply!
In order to reflect the new timeline of the event, we have changed the name from FinovateSpring 2020 to FinovateWest 2020. The show will take place November 23 through 24 at the Hilton in San Francisco’s Union Square. Registration is now open (if you were already registered for the event our team has been in contact with you via email).
Over the past 12 years, many of you have come to feel like family to us, and we hope you are all doing what is needed to keep yourselves and your family safe.
As part of an effort to keep everyone safe, and to comply with current governmental recommendations surrounding COVID-19, we have rescheduled FinovateWest 2020 to take place November 23 through 24.
The venue will remain the same at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square. Attendees who have booked as part of Finovate’s room block will not incur any cancellation fees from the hotel. The hotel is in the process of moving attendees in our block to the new dates and attendees will receive a confirmation when the move has been completed. If you need to change your new reservation, please contact the hotel directly.
We will be in touch with respective parties – speakers, sponsors, and demo companies – with more detailed information about arrangements for the new dates. If you have any questions please contact us to discuss further.
We remain grateful for your continued support and understanding and very much look forward to welcoming you in November.
In the meantime, please let us know if there is anything we can do to foster innovation and community in the fintech sector. Our industry was created to fulfill unmet needs of society. We know that in these crucial months ahead, innovators in this space will continue to do so.
We’re all in this together, and we each have a role in continuing the heartbeat of fintech across the globe.
