This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.
Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Credit Karma has agreed to acquire technology and assets from Zendrive, a mobility risk intelligence provider.
Credit Karma has also brought on certain Zendrive employees, including the company’s CEO Dennis Ellis and its Co-founder and CTO Pankaj Risbood.
Terms of the deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter, were not disclosed.
Intuit’sCredit Karmaannounced today that it has agreed to acquire technology, assets, and select employees from mobility risk intelligence provider Zendrive. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Credit Karma will use the new technology to accelerate development and adoption of its auto insurance product, Karma Drive. Launched in December of 2020, Karma Drive leverages Zendrive to offer customers a telematics-powered, usage-based insurance savings opportunity based on their driving habits. After a 30-day driving trial, during which users receive continuous real-time feedback on their driving, they are offered a potential discount on a new policy from one of Credit Karma’s auto insurance partners.
Since launch, more than 6 million members have enrolled in the Karma Drive program, which has extended more than 4 million discounted policy offers from Credit Karma’s insurance partners.
“We see opportunities to improve traditional telematics practices that lock consumers into a policy and track driving behaviors in a way that can potentially increase policy costs,” said Credit Karma’s Rory Joyce in a blog post announcement. “We have redefined and simplified consumers’ access to insurance discounts based on mobile telematics data. Karma Drive users can see if they can qualify for a discount from carriers without having to buy a policy or even engage directly with the insurer.”
As part of today’s deal, which is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year, Credit Karma has acqui-hired certain Zendrive employees, including the company’s CEO Dennis Ellis and its Co-founder and CTO Pankaj Risbood. Credit Karma anticipates the new talent will help it to scale its telematics experience.
QuickBooks launched QuickBooks Bill Pay to bring accounts payable automation and processes to small business clients.
The new product is integrated into the QuickBooks platform and aims to help users manage bill payments to vendors and contractors.
The announcement comes after the company ended a long-standing relationship with Bill.com.
Intuit’s QuickBooks unveiled QuickBooks Bill Pay today to bring accounts payable (AP) automation to its business users.
Aimed at small-to-mid-sized businesses, the new bill pay tool will help Quickbooks’ clients track and automate their bill payments within its platform. The new tool also includes a suite of financial and accounting tools such as digitized record-keeping, vendor management, and advanced controls with customizable permissions for teams.
By integrating a bill payment tool into its existing platform, the company makes it easier for business users to manage bill payments to vendors and contractors. Additionally, by bringing AP processes into a single solution, businesses will have better cash flow and money movement visibility and may mitigate missed and late payments.
“Across the QuickBooks platform, we’re revolutionizing money movement to improve the number-one problem small businesses face – cash flow – which impacts their success rates,” said Intuit Senior Vice President of the QuickBooks Money Platform David Talach.
With Bill Pay, businesses can:
Set permissions and rules to customize the bill approval process for different team members
Import vendor invoices and to automatically create a bill
Keep digital records of bills and payments in one place
Send electronic payments or paper checks without issuing and mailing them
View and file 1099s for vendors
“QuickBooks Bill Pay is a key addition to our ecosystem as we aim to deliver a singular, end-to-end financial solution for small businesses to manage their money. Integrating Bill Pay with our other money offerings enables our customers to leverage game-changing automation capabilities and have the visibility and clarity they need when it comes to their finances,” added Talach.
QuickBooks has a three-tiered pricing plan for the Bill Pay tool, ranging from free to $45 per month. The base level includes five free ACH payments per month while the upper tiers include more ACH payments per month, custom bill approval workflows, unlimited 1099s for vendors, and predefined team permissions.
Founded in 1983, QuickBooks is one of the oldest fintech solutions for small businesses. The company has undergone recent friction when it comes to integrated bill pay, having leveraged a partnership with Bill.com for several years, and later ending that relationship in favor of a partnership with Melio.
QuickBooks is owned by Intuit, a public company that trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker INTU and has a current market capitalization of $151 billion.
An integration between two of Intuit’s top acquisitions, consumer financial technology platform Credit Karma and TurboTax tax management software, will help put the former’s new U.S. checking account – Credit Karma Money Spend – in the hands of more consumers.
The integration will provide a seamless process for getting refunds to eligible taxpayers when they file their taxes with TurboTax – and then turn those taxpayers into Credit Karma checking accountholders. Filers on TurboTax will have the ability to open a Credit Karma Money Spend account and have their refund sent directly to that new checking account. Users then can access the full Credit Karma Money experience – for example, setting up direct deposit and adding debit cards to their digital wallets – from within TurboTax. The checking account’s Instant Karma feature also encourages users to make payments with their Credit Karma Money Spend accounts by offering monetary rewards for actions like on-time credit card bill payments and automating direct deposits.
“We believe consumers should have a checking account that helps them make financial progress, which is why we created Credit Karma Money Spend,” Credit Karma founder and CEO Kenneth Lin explained. “We’re starting 2021 off by leveraging our relationship with Intuit to bring Credit Karma Money to millions of tax filers this tax season.” Lin referred to tax refunds as “the biggest paychecks” many Americans receive, and added that getting taxpayers the refunds they are owed and helping them put that money to work “(maximizing) their day-to-day spending and billpay” is a critical role the new integration will play.
Acquired by Intuit in a deal just completed in December, Credit Karma is among Finovate’s earliest alums, demonstrating its consumer credit score monitoring platform back in 2008. Now with more than 110 million members in the United States, Canada, and the U.K., Credit Karma offers a wide range of financial wellness solutions for individuals including identity monitoring, credit cards and loan shopping, insurance, high-yield savings accounts and, most recently, its new checking accounts backed by bank partner MVB Bank.
The integration news comes in the wake of a flurry of recent criticism that Credit Karma’s credit scores varied from what users were expecting when engaging with credit card companies or prospective lenders. The differences have since been explained – Credit Karma uses a credit score model, VantageScore 3.0, that not only examines factors other than those traditionally considered for FICO scores, but also can weigh like factors differently. But the issue may reflect a growing trend of popular annoyance with some of the ways fintechs are able to provide the services they do. This “Robinhood Syndrome” is a challenge that is only likely to grow as more customers – with varied expectations and financial sophistication – continue to migrate to fintech platforms.
With its announcement today, intelligent enterprise payment solutions provider Plastiq becomes the first company to fully integrate QuickBooks Online into its payments platform. The integration will enable businesses to take advantage of an automated payments reconciliation system that cuts costs, saves time, and eliminates the burden of manual data entry.
“Time and again, we’ve heard from our customers how crucial QuickBooks is to their record-keeping, but as a small business ourselves, we also recognize how time-consuming and error-prone it can be to manually maintain accurate QuickBooks records,” Plastiq co-founder and CEO Eliot Buchanan said. “By integrating QuickBooks into Plastiq, we’re giving businesses back vital time and resources while greatly reducing the chances of human error, enabling businesses to keep their eyes on innovating and propelling growth.”
The integration with QuickBooks will enable Plastiq users to import invoices directly, accelerating the process of identifying and populating essential data elements including vendor name, amount due, and more. After invoices have been paid via Plastiq, the payment information is exported back to QuickBooks to ensure accurate record-keeping for monthly reporting, tax returns, audits, and other compliance-related matters.
The full integration gives Plastiq an advantage over other platforms, whose partial integrations with QuickBooks still leave room for error, especially in the import/export process. This often means returning to manual data entry to make corrections, which not only takes up additional time and resources, but also re-opens the process to the potential for human error. With Plastiq’s full integration, by contrast, companies’ QuickBooks entries are “completely and accurately” updated to ensure both day-to-day accuracy as well as error-free monthly reconciliations and tax reporting.
Founded in 2012, San Francisco, California-based Plastiq ended 2020 with the launch of its new cash payments offering. The new feature enables businesses to pay all of their bills via their linked bank accounts, credit cards, or debit cards. Company Chief Product and Technology Officer Stoyan Kenderov said the addition provided a “fully integrated, intelligent payments solution that serves as a one-stop shop for all of businesses’ payment needs.”
Last fall, Plastiq’s Head of People, Angela Loeffler, was named to The Financial Technology Report’s 2020 Top 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology roster. The company has raised more than $141 million in funding, most recently securing $75 million in a Series D round last spring led by B Capital Group.
From in-house innovation to outright acquisition, businesses have myriad paths to consider when looking to expand their product portfolios. We learned late last week that mobile payments company Square has taken one of the less flashy routes to growing its offerings: paying $50 million in cash for Credit Karma’s tax business. Square will add the service’s DIY tax filing functionality to its own Cash App.
The free tax filing option will be featured along with the app’s other financial tools, including P2P payments, Cash Card, direct deposit, and the ability to make fractional investments in stocks and bitcoin. Cash App was launched by Square seven years ago as a P2P money transfer service and has grown into an integrated financial ecosystem with more than 30 million monthly active customers as of June 2020.
“We created Cash App to provide more access to the masses of people left out of the financial system and are constantly looking for ways to redefine our customers’ relationship with money by making it more relatable, instantly available, and universally acceptable,” Cash App lead Brian Grassadonia said.
One in two tax filers – a total of 80 million taxpayers – prepared and filed their own Federal income taxes electronically in 2020, according to the IRS, and the trend is expected to accelerate. Credit Karma Tax Director of Engineering Patrick Fink underscored this point, noting that despite the “challenge” of filing taxes, more customers are transitioning toward filing taxes on their own. “Credit Karma Tax provides a seamless, mobile-first solution for individuals to file their taxes at no cost,” Fink said. “We’re excited to be joining an entrepreneurial team and continue to build simple, innovative tools for Cash App customers.” Credit Karma tax processed more than two million tax filers last year.
The acquisition is expected to close by the end of 2020 and is subject to customary closing conditions.
Square’s investment in its Cash App is timely. At the beginning of the month, the company noted in its third quarter financial reporting that Cash App had generated more than $2 billion in net revenue and $385 million of its gross profit for the quarter. The performance reflected gains of 5.74x and 2.12x, year over year, respectively.
The timeliness of the transaction also has a lot to do with Intuit’s acquisition of Credit Karma, which was cleared by the U.S. Department of Justice last week. Announced at the beginning of the year, the $7 billion deal is Intuit’s largest acquisition to date, and by shedding Credit Karma’s tax business, an obstacle to the union between the two companies has been removed. Intuit is the developer of it own online tax filing service, TurboTax.
“We are very excited to reach this important milestone today,” Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi said. “This brings us one step closer to transforming personal finance by making it simpler for consumers to find the right financial products, put more money in their pockets, and provide financial expertise and advice.”
The Credit Karma Tax announcement also comes one month after Square announced a $50 million investment in bitcoin, a sum the company said represented “approximately one percent” of the firm’s total assets as of the end of Q2 2020. Bitcoin trading has been available on Square’s Cash App since 2018 and, as of 2019, the company’s Square Crypto team has been contributing to bitcoin open-source efforts.
“We believe that bitcoin has the potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future,” Square Chief Financial Officer Amrita Ahuja said. “As it grows in adoption, we intend to learn and participate in a disciplined way. For a company that is building products based on a more inclusive future, this investment is a step on that journey.”
There’s no denying that challenger banks are one of the hottest things in fintech right now. The coronavirus has accelerated the need for a purely digital banking solution and this boost in demand has spurred an increase in the number of players in the space.
The newest challenger bank to enter the ring is Intuit-owned QuickBooks. The 28-year-old company is launching a business bank account called QuickBooks Cash. The new account will be promoted to QuickBooks’ existing user base of over seven million small businesses. The accounts boast a business bank account, debit card, an envelope budgeting tool, and cash flow management tools that work seamlessly with QuickBooks existing products, including payroll, payments, and accounting tools.
“QuickBooks Cash delivers what current business accounts don’t — a banking experience that enables small businesses to accept payments, pay teams and vendors — with automatic reconciliation for easy financial management,” said Rania Succar, Senior Vice President of QuickBooks Capital and Payments at Intuit. “Combining QuickBooks Cash with the powerful insights and financial management platform powered by QuickBooks, we are building a tool that accelerates the growth of small businesses. Companies that have more working capital can take advantage of more opportunities.”
QuickBooks Cash accounts will be backed by FDIC-insured Green Dot Bank and feature no balance requirements, a high-yield interest rate of 1%, billpay capability, cash flow planning tools, and more. Unlike most challenger banks which offer unlimited free ATM withdrawals, however, QuickBooks only allows four free withdrawals per month.
The new account, along with the corresponding tools, will roll out over the course of the next several weeks.
The number of women in technology in general, and fintech in specific, is growing. That’s the good news.
As Julie Bort and Rachel Sandler wrote in their 2018 feature on female engineers for Business Insider, “for all the arm waving about the lack of women in STEM professions, the truth is, there are some powerful role-model female engineers having fabulous careers and creating tech used by millions, if not billions of people everyday.”
A report from consulting firm Korn Ferry supports this. The study, conducted last year and looking at the top 1,000 U.S. companies by revenue, noted an increase of 2% in the number of women who held the role of CIO or CTO last year. “The industry with the highest percentage of women CIOs/CTOs,” the report noted “is financial at 25%.”
By comparison, the number of women fulfilling the role of Chief Technology Officer within the tech industry remains fewer, maybe even far fewer, than you might suspect. By industry, Korn Ferry ranked technology behind financial, healthcare, retail, and consumer, besting only the services industry.
Women like Padmasree Warrior, who served as Cisco Systems’ CTO between 2007 and 2015 and, before that, as CTO for Motorola for four years, have been among the relatively few women at the top tier of technology leadership – especially at the largest tech companies. Elissa Murphy, at GoDaddy, Selina Tobaccowala at SurveyMonkey, and Raji Arasu at StubHub are just a few of the female CTOs in charge of technology at some of our economy’s newer, most innovative companies.
Pamela Rice, former SVP of Technology at OnDeck and current CTO of Earnest, during her presentation at FinDEVr Silicon Valley.
Turning to fintech – and our own experience at Finovate – a woman like Pamela Rice comes to mind. The former Senior Vice President of Technology at OnDeck who represented the company at our developers conference FinDEVr, Rice is currently Chief Technology Officer for Earnest. The San Francisco, California-based company she joined in 2019 provides consumer financing options for underbanked populations including recent college graduates. Last summer, she participated in a company-hosted, Tech Meet-Up on Diversity and Inclusion, sharing her thoughts on the value of making diversity “part of the DNA of everything you do.”
We took a look at how the fintech industry was faring in terms of female representation at the CTO level. There is still a great deal of progress to be made. Here is a sample of the women who are increasingly providing technical leadership for fintechs large and small.
Marianna Tessel – Intuit – With more than 20 years experience as a VP of Engineering for companies like Ariba, Docker, and VMWare, Tessel took the helm as Intuit’s Chief Technology Officer in January 2019.
Educated at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and the Weizmann Institute of Science – and having served as a captain in the Israeli Army – Tessel was praised by new Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi as a “transformational change agent” who has created “an engineering culture that has accelerated innovation.”
At Intuit, Tessel is responsible for leading the company’s product engineering, data science, information technology, and information security teams around the world. She first joined Intuit in 2017, leading product development for the firm’s Small Business and Self-Employed Group, including the company’s QuickBooks product family.
Rija Javed – MarketFinance (formerly MarketInvoice) – After more than four years as an engineer for Wealthfront, including roles as Director and Senior Director, Javed joined U.K.-based MarketFinance as the company’s Chief Technology Officer in 2018. This made her one of the first female fintech CTOs in the country.
“Having Rija on board underlines our focus on hiring the best talent and building innovative technology to deliver business finance solutions,” MarketFinance CEO and Co-founder Anil Stocker said. “It’s the foundation we’ll use to help thousands of business(es) access funding quickly and easily.”
While at the Wealthfront, Javed built the company’s first mobile app. Transitioning to the company’s investment products platform, she helped scale Wealthfront’s offerings including the development of a new brokerage and banking platform. With degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto, Javed is also a mentor for the New York Academy of Sciences.
Ekate Kuznetsova – Token Transit – Sometimes the only way for a woman to make sure that there’s a woman’s place at the tech table is to build the table herself. That’s the approach of Kuznetsova, who parlayed her experience in software engineering at Akamai and Google into launching a fintech startup of her own. Token Transit, for which Kuznetsova is founder, CEO, and Chief Technology Officer, provides mobile ticketing and payment verification solutions for public transportation.
Launched in 2016 and available in more than 75 cities in the U.S. and Canada, Token Transit enables people to pay for fares and passes with their credit, debit, or commuter benefits card and provides them with a digital ticket that is stored on their smartphone.
Kuznetsova earned her Bachelor of Science degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she studied Mathematics and Computer Science.
While the ranks of female CTOs in fintech remains modest, it should be mentioned that there are women – from VPs of Engineering to Chief Scientists – who are not only currently leading tech teams, but also are likely among the CTOs of tomorrow. For a peek at one shortlist, check out Angie Chang’s spotlight on 21 female executives who could become one of the Fortune 100’s next CTOs.
Know a woman who’s driving technology innovation at one of your favorite fintechs? Send us a note at research@finovate.com!
How’s $7 billion for good karma? One of Finovate’s earliest alumsCredit Karma is reportedly the target of what would be Intuit’s biggest acquisition to date. According to The Wall Street Journal, the cash and stock deal could be announced as early as Monday.
Credit Karma will continue to function as an independent company with founder and CEO Kenneth Lin at the helm. The acquisition gives Intuit, maker of online tax filing service TurboTax, another contact point with the online personal finance world. Credit Karma provides its members with access to their credit scores and borrowing histories, helps them monitor their accounts for security breaches and, perhaps most relevantly, has offered a free online tax preparation service since 2017.
If the deal holds up, Intuit will be paying a significant premium for Credit Karma. The personal financial wellness company was last valued at $4 billion, based on a 2018 private market transaction.
With another Finovate conference in the books, our Finovate Best of Show ranks has a new set of members. Congratulations to Dorsum, Glia, Horizn, iProov, Sonect, and W.UP for taking home top honors earlier this month at FinovateEurope!
The victory may have been especially sweet for Sonect, whose Best of Show award-winning demo was also the company’s Finovate debut. The Switzerland-based start-up offers what it calls “the world’s first social cash network” that enables consumers to access cash without having to visit a bank branch or ATM. Sonect offers merchants the ability to grow their business via increased traffic and gives financial institutions a way to extend their ATM networks without the cost of additional hardware.
The Best of Show win was also a first for Horizn. The company, which made its Finovate debut three years ago at FinovateEurope, offers a platform that helps employees and customers maximize the opportunities of digitized financial services. Horizn uses simulator microlearning, as well as gamification and advanced analytics, to promote digital adoption across channels.
And last but not least, a special tip of the hat to Dorsum, Glia, iProov, and W.UP, all of whom won Best of Show honors at FinovateEurope for a second year in a row.
Here’s a round up of recent news from our Finovate alumni.
Larkyenters reseller agreement with Access Softek.
Bison Bank in Lisbon, Portugal selects PSD2-ready software from ndigit.
OurCrowdexpands focus on growing early stage tech companies.
Finovate Alum Features and Profiles
eToro’s Evolution – Social trading and investment platform eToro has never been one to stand still for very long. The company’s development cycle is fast enough to make even the most sprightly fintech jealous.
Lending Club Snaps Up Radius Bank for $185 Million – When Lending Club was founded in 2007, the startup aimed to serve as a place to help borrowers avoid dealing with banks. In a somewhat ironic move today, that same startup is becoming a bank itself.
Best of Show Winner Voleo to Help Drive Social Trading in Europe.
FI.SPANRaises $4 Million for U.K. and Australia Expansion.
Around the web
Sberbankoffers clients new strategies for investment life insurance.
PaySendlaunches transfers to bank accounts and Napas cards in Vietnam.
Anorakearns a spot in FinSMEs’ Top 10 U.K. Insurtech Startups to Watch in 2019 roster.
Intuitrelaunches its redesigned ProAdvisor program in the U.S., Canada, and Australia.
DataSine and FinovateFall Best of Show winner Goldenjoin the Envestnet | Yodlee Incubator’s latest cohort.
API platform provider for banking and insurance NDGITannounces strategic partnership with Synpulse.
James Finance, Ocrolus, Hydrogen, and iProov shortlisted for India FinTech Awards 2018.
PYMNTS highlightsWePay Co-founder Rich Aberman in its latest podcast.
Jack Henry & Associatesintroduces a voice-driven consumer billpay solution.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
What do you get when you combine Intuit, Lending Club, and Wealthfront? We’re about to find out, thanks to Intuit’s announcement today that it is making user data available to third party providers.
California-based Intuit partnered with P2P lending company Lending Club and roboadvisor Wealthfront this week. These partnerships are fueled by Intuit-owned Turbox, leveraging the more than 80,000 data fields on the TurboTax return, including income, employment, housing, etc. With one click, TurboTax users can save time during LendingClub’s loan application process by importing their data. Similarly, shared TurboTax and Wealthfront clients can open an account much faster and receive more personalized financial advice based on their tax return data.
Lending Club noted the capability will do more than just speed up the application process. Cole Gillespie, Vice President and Head of Business Development at LendingClub, said that the TurboTax data will “unlock the access to credit for customers that ordinarily we might not be able to serve… this partnership is a step in leveraging alternative data sources to help us increase the speed and access to credit.”
Andy Rachleff, CEO of Wealthfront said that partnering with a company like Intuit is “a dream come true.” He explained, “They don’t just pay lip service to caring about the client. They constantly challenge themselves to provide more value. Integrating with TurboTax data that customers agree to provide will allow Wealthfront to continue to raise the bar on what it means to deliver accessible, convenient, and deeply personalized financial planning. We can’t wait to do more together.”
Intuit is also leveraging the data to pre-fill applications within PFM platform, Mint; financial recommendations site, Turbo; and existing external Intuit partners. By combining household data to give lenders a view of shared household income, credit score, and debt, Intuit offers a fuller picture of total borrowing and savings power. The company estimates pre-qualification leveraging TurboTax data generates a conversion rate of up to 9x in offer performance.
“With more than 25 million users and rich insights into their financial profile, Mint and Turbo are uniquely positioned to deliver value to both consumers and strategic partners,” said Varun Krishna, VP of product management for Intuit’s Consumer Division. “Using machine learning, we are able to provide consumers a comprehensive view of their finances and highlight relevant opportunities to save time and money and generate unique value to our partners.”
Best known for its Quickbooks accounting software, Intuit most recently demoed at FinovateFall 2009. The company has 20 locations across 9 countries and employs 9,000 people. Founded in 1983, Intuit went public 10 years later and today has a market capitalization of $54.6 billion.
Founded in 2006, Lending Club demoed at FinovateSpring 2009 and at the inaugural Finovate in 2007. Earlier this summer, the company appointed Ronnie Momen as Chief Lending Officer. Lending Club went public in 2015 and today the company’s market capitalization sits at $1.54 billion.
Wealthfront debuted as KaChing at FinovateSpring 2009. The company began 2018 by landing $75 million in funding, bringing its total raised to $205 million. A few weeks later, the company launched a home ownership planning tool.
Tinkoff Banklaunches Tinkoff Junior mobile app for children and teenagers.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
