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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Identity verification, risk assessment, and compliance solutions company Jumio has announced an expanded strategic partnership with NextWealth.
A data services provider, NextWealth will provide identity verification services and manage back office operations for Jumio.
A Best of Show winner and Finovate alum since 2013, Jumio has processed more than one billion transactions spanning 200+ countries and territories.
Identity verification and compliance solutions provider Jumio has expanded its strategic partnership with data services provider NextWealth. The move comes as the risk assessment company seeks to add to its ability to combat increasingly sophisticated fraud and financial crime challenges. Via the enhanced relationship, NextWealth will provide identity verification services for Jumio. This will include taking the lead role in back office operations for Jumio as the company looks to scale its business, while providing the same level of secure service.
“Now more than ever, when our automation and quality rates have reached record levels, partnering with NextWealth enables us to focus on our core business and technology objectives and support our customers wherever they do business across the globe,” Jumio Chief Technology Officer Stuart Wells explained.
NextWealth CEO Mythily Ramesh said that the expanded partnership would “further cement our position as one of the largest, pure play, AI/ML-driven data services players in the country.” Founded in 2009, the Bengaluru, India-based company serves businesses in fintech, e-commerce, healthcare, and other verticals. With seven centers in four states, NextWealth delivers more than 300 million data transactions.
A Finovate Best of Show winner and long-time alum, Jumio has processed more than one billion transactions from 200+ countries and territories. With its Jumio KYX Platform, the Sunnyvale, California-based company offers advanced identity proofing, risk signals, and compliance tools that help businesses establish and maintain customer trust. Jumio leverages a wide variety of enabling technologies – including automation, biometrics, AI, machine learning, liveness detection, and no-code orchestration – to enable its clients to better deal with the evolving nature of financial crime.
Last month, Jumio was named a Representative Vendor in the Gartner Market Guide for Identity Verification for a fifth consecutive time. Earlier this year, the company forged partnerships with Philippines-based Java developer Exist Software Labs, and composable frontend platform company Modyo.
Denmark-based Subaio announced this week that it was teaming up with fellow Danish fintech – and fellow Finovate alum – Aiia. Subaio will leverage its partnership with Aiia to better assess creditworthiness for its new white label offering. The collaboration will streamline creditworthiness assessment through a combination of Aiia’s access to financial data and Subaio’s recurring payments detection technology.
“To create automation and a product that works for solid credit scoring across industries, we need as solid and deep quality of data as possible to label the transactions and categorize them afterwards,” Subaio Chief Commercial Officer Soren Nielsen said. “That’s why we chose Aiia to help us bring this next exciting step in the Subaio journey up to speed.”
In some ways, partnerships like this are being encouraged by regulatory decisions. The EU’s revised Consumer Credit Directive of 2021 mandates that financial services firms document customer income and recurring expenses before offering financing to help lower the number of non-performing loans.
“With Aiia, Subaio will be able to offer their customers a hassle-free, cost-efficient and data-driven solution to assess creditworthiness,” Aiia SMB & Fintech Director Tanya Slavova said. “With our high quality data in mind, this open banking empowerment will grant borrowers better loan assessments based on the accurate overview of the consumer’s actual financial situation.”
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Denmark, Subaio made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2020 in Berlin. At the conference, the company demoed its white label subscription management service, which gives customers a comprehensive overview of their recurring payments, helps them cancel unwanted subscriptions, and provides notifications to enable customers to avoid “subscription traps.” The company returned to the Finovate stage two years later for FinovateEurope 2022 in London with a demo of its automatic creditworthiness assessment solution.
Subaio has raised $4.9 million in funding from investors including Global PayTech Ventures. Thomas Laursen is CEO.
Making its Finovate debut at our all-digital FinovateEurope 2021 conference, Copenhagen, Denmark-based Aiia was launched in 2017. A leading open banking platform in Northern Europe, the company demoed its account-to-account payment services at FinovateEurope 2021, showing how the technology facilitates everything from one-off payments for ecommerce to bulk payments for SMEs using a single API. Aiia was acquired by Mastercard in the fall of 2021 for an undisclosed amount. Rune Mai is CEO and co-founder.
In other fintech news from the Nordics, Boost.ai, a Finovate alum from Norway, announced that it will bring its conversational AI technology to Nordic bank DNB. Specifically, DNB will use Boost.ai’s technology to automate more than half of the bank’s chat traffic with its Aino virtual agent. Aino presently automates upwards of 20% of the bank’s customer service requests. According to DNB, more than one million of its customers have interacted with Aino.
Boost.ai VP of EMEA Sanjeev Kumar praised DNB has “one of the many forward-thinking organizations that are reaping the benefits of embracing a conversational AI solution.” Kumar highlighted the fact that conversational AI helps free up staff to enable them to focus on higher-order and more complex customer service tasks. Headquartered in Oslo, DNB is the largest financial services group in Norway. DNB offers a full range of financial services, including loans and savings, insurance and pension products, as well as advisory services for both retail and corporate customers.
“Artificial intelligence is an important part of our digital strategy,” DNB SVP and Head of IT Emerging Technologies Jan Thomas Lerstein said. “In leveraging AI, our aim is to revitalize our value chains, creating better service for our customers and, of course, value for the bank.” Lerstein added that DNB is evaluating other AI-enabled solutions including voice APIs to help the bank reach “higher levels of personalization.”
Boost.ai made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall in New York in 2019, demoing its virtual agent technology. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Sandnes, Norway, the company introduced a new CEO – Jerry Haywood – in the fall of 2022. Haywood took over the position from founder and previous CEO Lars Selsås, who will focus on product development and innovation going forward.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Middle East and Northern Africa
UAE-based Careem Pay teamed up with Lulu Exchange to offer international remittances.
American Express agreed to acquire Israel-based B2B payments automation company Nipendo.
Digital identity solutions company Jumioannounced yesterday that Singapore car-sharing company GetGo has selected its technology to help onboard new drivers.
As one of the largest car-sharing services in Singapore, GetGo seeks to offer a user-friendly online ecosystem that promotes shared and sustainable mobility. The company was founded in 2020 to help users rent and share cars, enabling users to book a car using their mobile phones. GetGo focuses on simplicity, flexibility, and accessibility. These three attributes add up to one thing– customer centricity.
In order to help drivers onboard to the GetGo platform, GetGo will leverage Jumio’s identity verification tools that leverage biometrics and AI to automatically authenticate GetGo users. Jumio will help GetGo protect its fleet of 1,700 vehicles against theft by requiring drivers to provide a valid government-issued ID and a selfie. The partnership will reduce the time it takes GetGo customers to onboard down to minutes.
“Jumio’s facial verification technology allows GetGo to simultaneously raise its trust and safety standards while enhancing its customer onboarding experience,” said GetGo Product Lead Lionel Fong. “GetGo looks forward to a long-term partnership with Jumio in pushing the boundaries on bringing a reliable and frictionless verification experience to the masses.”
Jumio was founded in 2010 and came close to collapse when it filed for bankruptcy in 2016. After restructuring, Jumio sold to Centana Venture Partners, which acquired the company for $850,000 two months after its bankruptcy filing.
Jumio has come a long way since its dip in 2016. The company has processed over one billion transactions from over 200 countries and territories. What’s more, Jumio acquired KYC and anti-fraud solutions company 4stop in 2021 and compliance firm Beam in 2020. The company’s most recent funding round took place in March of 2021 when it closed a $150 million round from Great Hill Partners, bringing its total funding to $255 million.
In the biggest fundraising for an identity verification company to date, Jumio has locked in an investment of $150 million. The funding comes courtesy of Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in investments in “high-growth, disruptive companies.” The investment takes Jumio’s total funding to more than $255 million, according to Crunchbase.
“Jumio’s innovations helped establish the identity verification market, and the need to establish someone’s digital identity remotely has never been greater,” Jumio CEO Robert Prigge said. The company plans to use the new capital to automate its identity verification solutions, expand the breadth of its Jumio KYX Platform, and further build out the platform’s suite of AML compliance solutions.
As part of the investment, Great Hill Partners’ Nick Cayer and Matt Vettel will join Jumio’s Board of Directors. Cayer, who has been with Great Hill since 2006, praised the company as “the de factor global leader in online identity verification, fraud detection, and compliance.” He added that given the mandate many institutions have to digitize processes such as onboarding and KYC monitoring, firms like Jumio can play a key role in helping them keep pace with the growing volume of digital and mobile-based transactions.
Making its Finovate debut in 2013 and being acquired by Centana Growth Partners in 2016, Jumio has verified more than 300 million identities issued by 200+ countries and territories since inception in 2010. With customers and partners in a wide range of verticals – from financial services and the sharing economy to retail, travel, and online gaming – Jumio leverages AI, biometrics, machine learning, and certified liveness detection to help ensure that customers are who they claim to be. Jumio’s KYX Platform, launched last fall, provides organizations with an end-to-end identity verification and eKYC solution that enables them to onboard new accounts safely and accurately, keep existing accounts secure, and meet their compliance obligations with regards to KYC, AML, and GDPR.
“Digital transformation is more than a buzzword. It’s today’s business imperative,” Prigge said. “To succeed, organizations must transform quickly and do it in ways that build trust, security, and satisfaction. Businesses can tailor the Jumio KYX Platform to fit their unique needs and risks and tap into services that accelerate digital transformation without sacrificing security and convenience.”
Learn more about how Jumio fights deep fakes and bots in our interview from last summer featuring company VP of Marketing, Dean Nicolls.
Day Five of FinovateFall Digital featured our Power Panel: Latin America – The Future of Fintech and the Dawn of a New Opportunity. Participating in the conversation were Christopher Carmine, Director of Development, FinTech Connector; Laura González-Estéfani, founder and CEO of TheVentureCity; and Manuel Silva, Partner and Head of Investments for Santander InnoVentures.
The panelists, led by moderator Greg Palmer, discussed the biggest opportunities in Latin America presently, emphasizing that fintechs should focus on local issues rather than on big technology themes. They noted that Latin America has a great deal of variation and that it is problematic to discuss the region without focusing on the differences between nations as well as within nations. They also pointed to the low number of “banked” Latin Americans (approximately 30%) and examined ways to bring this number up.
Among the areas of opportunity, the panelists underscored remittances – noting that the corridor between the U.S. and Mexico is one of the biggest in the world. Helping small businesses get their operations running with sound basic business management services was also talked about, as was the challenge of overcoming outdated financial infrastructure. “If you understand the particularities of the market, and understand that it is a work in progress,” González-Estéfani said, “it is a land of opportunity, indeed.”
Turkey is the King of Cryptocurrencies in the Middle East according to a report from Chainalysis. The 2020 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report, published this month, noted that Turkey has the highest total transaction volume in cryptocurrencies in the MENA region. The report cites volatility in the country’s currency, the lira, as helping encourage more savers to adopt cryptocurrencies as an option to maintain their wealth.
The cryptocurrency market in the Middle East is not large. In fact, it is the smallest in the world second only to Africa’s. And while Turkey tops the list in MENA, it ranks 29th out of 154 countries in the Global Crypto Adoption Index. The report notes that Turkey currently has no cryptocurrency regulations, although the country’s Capital Markets Board is developing a framework.
Pakistan introduces online banking solution for expatriates, the Rohsan Digital Account.
Indian e-commerce deals website CashKaro raises $10 million in Series B.
Dialog Axiata, a mobile operator based in Sri Lanka, adopts the country’s national QR code to enable payments at more than 50,000 merchants.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Digital identity leader Jumiobrings its identity verification technology to Latin American delivery startup Rappi.
Oyster founder and CEO Vilash Poovala makes the case for a fintech operating system for Mexican SMEs. The company raised $14 million in seed funding this week.
dlocal, a cross-border payment solutions provider based in Uruguay, becomes the region’s latest unicorn courtesy of an $200 million investment round led by General Atlantic.
Asia-Pacific
U.S. and Vietnam-based fintech Fvndit raises $30 million in debt financing to support its P2P lending company, eLoan.
Malaysia’s Merchanttrade acquires digital remittance service provider Valyou.
Philippines-based fintech JazzyPay secures $500,000 in seed funding.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Nigeria’s OPay partners with WorldRemit to offer mobile money transfers.
TechCabal looks at the relationship between the growing influence of China on sub-Saharan Africa’s fintech industry.
Disrupt Africa profiles Kenyan fintech startup Zagace, which offers business management solutions via API to micro-businesses.
Central and Eastern Europe
Polish e-commerce platform Allegro readies for the country’s – and the region’s – biggest IPO.
Digital identity technology plays an increasingly large role in financial services, and the current global public health crisis has accelerated this trend.
We spoke with Dean Nicolls, VP of Marketing for Jumio, to learn what the digital identity innovator is doing to help banks and other enterprises leverage this technology for their businesses. We also take a look at how the technology has been deployed to help deal with with coronavirus pandemic.
Finovate: Jumio announced that it is providing free identity verification services for organizations involved in COVID-19 relief. Which organizations qualify and why is Jumio launching this effort?
Dean Nicolls: Jumio launched Jumio Go for Good in March 2020 to help organizations involved in relief and assistance during this global health crisis quickly and accurately identity proof their patients, students and workers to ensure critical services can be delivered and trusted. Powered by AI, Jumio Go provides enterprises with a real-time, secure and reliable way to verify remote users, ensuring the person enrolling or logging in is who they claim to be online.
Jumio Go is becoming increasingly important in helping organizations across a wide range of industries reliably onboard and serve a number of important use cases (e.g., new account onboarding, fraud detection, AML/KYC compliance), where verification speed is critical. With Jumio Go, identity verification decisions are rendered in seconds, not minutes or hours, which translates to significantly higher conversions, lower fraud rates, and improved customer satisfaction.
Through September 30, 2020, Jumio will provide free identity verification services via its AI-powered, fully automated solution, Jumio Go, to any qualifying organization directly involved in helping with COVID-19 relief including (but not limited to): healthcare, online learning, and the general population.
Finovate: What services are included in this offering?
Nicolls: Jumio Go For Good is powered by Jumio Go, the only fully automated digital identity verification solution on the market capable of defending against bots, advanced spoofing attacks and sophisticated deepfakes, which are often leveraged for fraud.
By leveraging AI, Jumio Go works to prohibit bad actors from fabricating online accounts. As deepfakes, bots, and sophisticated spoofing attacks continue to rise, Jumio has integrated certified liveness detection to detect when photos, videos or even realistic 3D masks are used instead of actual selfies to create online accounts. Additionally, Jumio Go provides organizations with a real-time, secure, and reliable way to authenticate remote users, ensuring the person enrolling into a new service is who they claim to be in the real world.
Finovate: Identity verification has become an issue for small businesses seeking COVID-19 relief-related funding. What is the specific problem these businesses are facing and how can digital identity verification solutions help?
Nicolls: Small businesses across America are feeling the financial stress from shelter-in-place restrictions that have millions of people taking refuge from the outbreak by staying at home and working remotely. Recent changes have brought about a new question for the financial industry: how can lenders properly evaluate small businesses when they can’t physically walk into their office? For reference, SBA lenders are those who work with the Small Business Administration and provide financial assistance to small businesses through government-backed loans. The implementation of online identity verification solutions helps SBA lenders vet small business owners to ensure they follow compliance mandates (KYC/AML) by verifying their digital identities. Instead of requiring small-business owners to visit a local branch office, they can verify their online identity from the safety of their home, allowing lenders to effectively manage the influx of requests, and small-business owners the peace of mind knowing they’re being supported at this time.
In the future, identity verification solutions will become crucial for SBA lenders to establish trust remotely with an increasing number of remote users who simply do not want to visit a branch office. Jumio Go verifies government-issued IDs and ensures that the individual in the selfie matches the picture on the ID. A biometric-based approach to authentication helps expedite onboarding while also deterring fraud by as much as 90%.
As the number of SBA lenders continues to increase, online identity verification will rapidly become a vital competitive advantage in terms of quickly distributing capital to small-business owners and nonprofits on the front lines, while also preventing cyberattacks.
Finovate: What are the key technologies behind identity verification solutions such as those offered by Jumio? AI? Advanced machine learning? What capabilities do these technologies enable that would not be possible otherwise?
Nicolls: Jumio launched Jumio Go, the company’s first real-time, fully automated identity verification solution, in November 2019. It is designed to remove friction from the user onboarding process, while preventing online identity fraud and meeting AML and KYC compliance mandates. Jumio leverages the power of informed AI and equips modern enterprises with instant online identity verification that delivers a simple and intuitive experience for good customers.
There are three critical ingredients to informed AI:
Data Breadth: Jumio has verified 250 million digital identities to date. This gives Jumio a big leg-up in developing smarter algorithms. Not only is the data set very large, but it’s also very deep. Jumio’s database has seen large volumes of each one of the more than 3,500 ID document types/subtypes from more than 200 countries and territories.
Ground Truth: Jumio has leveraged supervised AI from the very beginning. This means Jumio employs identity verification experts who tag every identity verification based on an analysis of the security features and physical characteristics of an ID and selfie. These verification experts have spent thousands of hours reviewing and verifying government-issued IDs from all over the world which helps train our algorithms and make them iteratively smarter.
Production Data: Jumio’s AI algorithms are trained on real-world production data, not purchased data sets. Jumio AI models are trained on images of ID documents and selfies where the images may be blurry, dimly lit, or have excessive glare which means our models are more robust and scalable than models trained on perfectly captured photos. This also helps us avoid bias since the data has been tagged by trained verification experts.
Finovate: Where is adoption of identity verification technology most robust? Are there industries where the technology would be especially valuable, but adoption rates have been slower than expected? If so, which industries and what challenges to adoption are they facing?
Nicolls: Traditional banks have been surprisingly slow to adopt online identity verification and take digital transformation seriously. When you’re talking about traditional banks, there are numerous divisions including retail banking, private banking (for high net worth individuals), business banking and brokerage accounts. While all banks need to comply with KYC/AML checks when new accounts are created and have defined customer identification programs (CIP) in place, the methods they employ to establish a consumer’s digital identity are varied. Many traditional banks leverage non-documentary approaches to corroborate identity and this often involves pinging third-party databases or credit bureaus based on self-reported information from the consumer (e.g., name, address and date of birth).
Unfortunately, these methods are not overly reliable. In fact, Gartner recommends that identity proofing solutions that rely on shared secret verification, such as out-of-wallet knowledge questions, or memorable personal data, be phased out. The concept of high-memorability, low-availability data has become archaic since the rise of social media and the subsequent plethora of breached data available through underground organizations. By requiring a picture of a government-issued ID, and pairing it with a corroborating selfie (which should include an element of liveness detection), banks can have much higher levels of identity assurance than traditional approaches and can deter as much as 90% of attempted fraud.
Finovate: Lastly, are there any upcoming announcements or initiatives coming in the next few weeks that we should be looking out for?
Nicolls: Jumio is launching a new suite of address services that can be used to validate and corroborate addresses with independent, third-party sources. Historically, Jumio has only relied on the ID document itself and a corroborating selfie as the fraud signals. Jumio Address Services actually consist of two distinct services:
Jumio Address Validation:Determines if the address extracted from a government-issued ID (e.g., passport, driver’s license, ID card) exists in the real world.
Jumio Proof of Residence: Checks to see if the person being verified actually lives at the physical address extracted from their ID document. In the U.S., if the user moved, we would return whether the address provided matches the most recent address on file.
With these new add-on features, customers can use this data as additional fraud signals that help enterprises know if the person creating a new account is in fact who they claim to be. These services will be sold with our current identity verification solutions to provide a more holistic picture of an online user.
Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Jumio has been a Finovate alum since its debut at FinovateFall in 2013. In the company’s most recent appearance on the Finovate stage at FinovateAsia in 2018, Jumio demonstrated how its Netverify Identity Verification solution used liveness detection to prove an individual’s physical “presence” at the moment of the transaction.
With FinovateEurope kicking off this week in Berlin, Germany, we thought it would be fun to check in with FinovateEurope Best of Show winner and Central and Eastern European fintech innovator Dorsum.
How are the social and technological changes in Europe influencing the way fintechs and financial services companies build, pilot, and market their solutions? We reached out to Dorsum’s Senior Innovation Expert, Greg Csorba, to find out how the company is meeting these challenges and more.
Finovate: As a European fintech, what is the most exciting thing about fintech inEurope right now, and how is Dorsum taking advantage of this opportunity?
Greg Csorba: In the next 10 to 15 years a significant amount of wealth will pass from the Baby Boomer generation to the Y (Millennial) and Z generations. This will, among other things, change the service model expected of investment service providers. This multigenerational wealth transfer will present a real challenge for every player in the market to adapt to the digital expectations of the new generation, which could bring significant business benefits in the coming years.
Finovate: Dorsum won Best of Show at FinovateEurope last year. What does that accomplishment mean for the company on the eve of your return to FinovateEurope?
Csorba: We were very honored to have won the award last year at FinovateEurope. It confirms that our solutions represent what the industry demands. Every year we are working on understanding our clients better to create new, innovative products, answering their needs. This mindset lead us to create the subject of this year’s show as well, our Wealth Management Communication HUB. We do hope that it will win over the audience as well.
Finovate: For those unfamiliar with Dorsum, can you tell us a little bit about the company and the work it does?
Csorba: Dorsum is an investment software provider company, based in Hungary with two other subsidiaries in Romania and Bulgaria. Since our foundation in 1996, we became a leading software company in the CEE region. Our investment software family offers versatile solutions to players in the capital and wealth management markets. We are especially proud of our innovation team who always keeps one step ahead of the market for the company to continue creating industry-leading solutions.
Finovate: What are some of the key enabling technologies used by your platform? Do machine learning, AI, and other new technologies play a major role in powering your offerings?
Csorba: Yes, we always looking at new technologies and new ways to empower our customers. AI and machine learning are used in our Botboarding chatbot engine, our client-facing investment app My Wealth, and the new Communication HUB. As for the future, we are looking into innovative ways of using and applying information from Big Data databases, which has yet to make a notable change in the lives of wealth managers and investors. For example, we are excited to work on a project aiming to profile users based on their everyday interactions with other digital services – which could reflect their attitude towards risk taking and provide personalized product recommendations.
Finovate: Dorsum is known for its work in the Central and Eastern European markets. How is the company’s growth in this region going and are there any significant plans for expansion beyond the CEE?
Csorba: This year one of our greatest achievements was to win BNP Paribas and their Polish subsidiary as one of our customers and we are working on new deals to continue this growth in the future. In 2020 we are mainly focusing on the CEE market as our main target group. To this end, it’s important for us to have a constant presence in the most prestigious Europe-wide conferences such as Finovate.
Finovate: Dorsum uses a hybrid model combining traditional and digital advisory processes. Why do you think this is a winning strategy for you and your clients?
Csorba: We see that new digital technologies in wealth management and the private banking industry are always welcome, but clients still need and rely on the advice of their advisor. This type of advice however can be managed in innovative ways on digital platforms. This is why we created a hybrid advisory model where digital meets the personal touch. Clients can manage their portfolio on their own, but if they need, they can learn from an AI-driven chatbot or reach their personal advisor through an app and real-time chat.
Finovate: What does Dorsum have in store for 2020? Can you give us a little preview of what you’ll be presenting at FinovateEurope next week?
Csorba: We are presenting new communication features for our wealth management applications, referred to collectively as the Wealth Management Communication HUB. The HUB connects advisors and clients through notification sending and real-time chat. This GDPR- compliant, secure communication module is superior to non-binding e-mail chains, and includes automated notification sending, paperless document underwriting and even an integrated educational chatbot. The HUB represents our hybrid advisory vision, as it allows banks to reach the mass affluent and well as the private banking segments with digital products, saving time and money through efficiency.
Watch Dorsum demonstrate its latest technology live at FinovateEurope in Berlin, Germany, February 11 through 13. Tickets are still available.
Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world
Sub-Saharan Africa
Nigerian fintech Wallets Africa unveils its new Wallets for Developers offering.
ITWeb’s Samuel Mungadze looks at how a pair of South African fintechs – Meerkat and Spoon Money – are “redesigning financial services.”
Nigeria’s The Guardianprofiles African fintech pioneer, Segun Aina, on his 65th birthday.
Central and Eastern Europe
Hamburg, Germany-based digital debt servicing platform Receeve raises 4 million euros in seed funding.
Analysis from Sberbank shows that for the first time, Russian made more digital payments than cash payments in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Varengold Bank announces plans to open a fintech hub in Berlin.
Middle East and Northern Africa
Morocco’s Bank Assafa goes live on Path Solutions’ iMAL core banking system.
National Bank of Kuwait announces availability of Fitbit Pay.
Entrepreneur.com lists “4 Things to Know About the Middle East Fintech Industry.”
Central and Southern Asia
Freelance Wallet, the product of a new partnership between Paystand and JS Bank, enables freelancers in Pakistan to receive payments via smartphone.
PayU co-founder Shailaz Nag raises $8 million in seed funding for his finech startup, Dot.
State Bank of India partners with BEP Systems for mortgage origination.
Latin America and the Caribbean
The Mexico City-based Startupbootcamp Fintech accelerator run by Finnovista reports that four of the 20 fintechs in its latest graduating cohort have female leadership.
Born2Invest examines the state of Chile’s fintech sector.
Mexican digital banking startup Stori locks in $10 million in funding.
Asia-Pacific
Jumioteams up with CIMB Bank Phillippines to bring its digital onboarding and AI-enabled identity verification to Filipino customers.
Fiservpartners with Hong Kong digtal bank pioneer ZA Bank.
As Finovate goes increasingly global, so does our coverage of financial technology. Finovate Global is our weekly look at fintech innovation in developing economies in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and Central and Eastern Europe.
The newly-released Fintech Power 50 for 2020 features ten Finovate alums. The roster is produced every December and bills itself as “meant to be controversial and provoke debate” while at the same time providing “inspiration to the rest of the industry.”
“Throughout its first year the Fintech Power 50 has seen consistent success for our members and we are very proud of the opportunities that being a member of the Power 50 has offered the companies involved,” Fintech Power 50 Managing Director and co-founder Jason Williams said. “We look forward to continuing the traction we have made this year with the 2020 cohort, with a more ambitious and exciting programme.”
The Fintech Power 50 aims to help fintechs reach a broader audience around the world. Over the course of 2020, the program will offer media partnerships and networking, business development and branding support, and investment and talent acquisition. This year marks the third edition of the program; coincidentally, the 2019 Power 50 featured ten Finovate alums, as well.
“We’re incredibly excited at this announcement, which is clear recognition of Keepabl’s value to customers, and to trusted advisers alike, and our potential to keep disrupting compliance-as-a-service,” wrote Keepabl CEO Robert Baugh in an email.
CREALOGIX CEO David Joyce added that he was “looking forward to exchanging ideas with the renowned digital leaders in this unique group.” He praised the way the roster reflected “the breadth, diversity, and creativity of the global fintech scene.”
The Fintech Power 50 2020 also features ten fintech thought leaders whose names will be familiar to Finovate veterans. Nine of the ten – David Birch, Ghela Boskovich, Theo Lau, Brett King, Jim Marous, Devie Mohan, David Parker, and Ruth Wandhofer – have made major contributions to our Finovate conferences since we expanded our format in 2017. We’ll have to get Mr. Lawrence Wintermeyer, co-founder of Global Digital Finance and the tenth thought leader on this year’s Fintech Power 50, to a Finovate stage sooner than later!
Identity verification innovator Jumio is working with Philippines-based remittance provider I-Remit to help the company enhance both digital onboarding and KYC. I-Remit is the largest Filipino-owned non-bank remittances provider and will leverage technology from Jumio to provide identity verification for its IREMITX money transfer platform.
“It’s imperative that the remittance industry, and the financial services world at large, streamlines the digital onboarding process for customers,” Jumio vice president for Asia Pacific Frederic Ho said. “Jumio is happy to partner with I-Remit in order to create an intuitive and secure digital experience for their global customer base, offering bank-grade security, dramatically faster verification, and increased conversions.”
Jumio combines face-based biometrics, certified 3D liveness detection, and selfie-based authentication to provide enterprises with a secure and seamless way to verify the real-world identities of their customers. The company’s trusted-identity-as-a-service solutions leverage augmented intelligence and machine learning to help companies boost conversions, prevent fraud and account takeover, and meet key compliance needs and directives from AML and KYC to GDPR and PSD2.
I-Remit EVP of International Treasury Ron Benito credited Jumio’s technology for addressing two of the company’s biggest challenges: onboarding scalability and customer experience. “Jumio saves us money and time, provides eKYC speed and precision, and the customer onboarding experience is superior,” Benito said.
Founded in 2001, I-Remit has a network of 1,000+ subsidiaries, branches, and agents in 23 countries and territories in Asia, North America, Europe, and the Middle East. In addition to working with Jumio, I-Remit has partnered with Finovate alum Ripple, making it the first Filipino-owned company to leverage blockchain technology to conduct cross-border money transfers.
Teaming up with I-Remit is the latest international collaboration for the Palo Alto, California-based company. Over the summer, Jumio partnered with BTG Pactual, helping the Brazilian investment bank improve its onboarding processes. The company also collaborated with Bahrain-based Bank ABC, one of MENA’s leading international banks, to provide identity verification for the mobile-only bank.
Jumio’s partnership news comes less than a month after the company announced the beta release of its first, real-time, automated identity verification solution, Jumio Go. The technology gives companies a secure and reliable method of verifying remote logins. Company president Robert Prigge indicated that offering a fully-automated identity verification solution had always been a matter of “when, rather than if” for Jumio and highlighted the role of certified liveness detection to provide a higher level of defense against deepfakes and other spoofing attacks. “Jumio Go prevents bad actors and bots from creating fake accounts thanks to our embedded liveness detection,” Prigge said, “which is a powerful deterrent for fraudsters and cybercriminal.”
Jumio demonstrated its Netverify identity verification solution at FinovateAsia last year. The technology establishes that the person behind a transaction is both present and who they say they are by comparing a selfie to the photograph on government-issued ID. Netverify uses liveness detection to ensure “presentness” and verifies the authenticity of the ID document, as well.
Founded in 2010, Jumio was acquired by Centana Growth Partners in 2016. Since inception, Jumio has verified more than 200 million identities issued by more than 200 countries and territories for real-time mobile and online transactions.
JumioPartners with Philippines Remittance Provider I-Remit
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