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PwC and Microsoft Tap FintechOS for Digital Banking

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on May 31, 2022
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, FintechOS, Microsoft, PwC

Financial services firm PwC and tech giant Microsoft are leveraging digital banking solutions provider FintechOS to create a digital banking solution.
The group aims to help banks adapt and modernize their operations to fit into the digital-first era.
“This will drive a massive improvement in time-to-value, and the extensibility of digital banking growth and expansion,” said PwC Partner Akhilesh Khera.

In the fintech industry, third party partnerships are king. So it’s not surprising to see the news that financial services firm PwC and tech giant Microsoft are tapping into the expertise of digital banking solutions provider FintechOS.

The trio announced their partnership, which will leverage FintechOS’ expertise, PwC’s digital banking prowess, and Microsoft’s Cloud for Financial Services technology to create a digital banking solution aimed at helping financial institutions adapt and modernize their operations to fit into the digital-first era.

For its part, FintechOS will be crucial in providing banking and investment, customer management, and integration and orchestration services. “We are delighted to be playing a key role in this ground-breaking initiative, as it demonstrates both the market-leading capability of our high-productivity fintech infrastructure and the strength of our relationship with PwC,” said FintechOS VP of Ecosystem Sales at EMEA Todi Pruteanu. “We are excited about the opportunity to work closely with and actively support PwC as this proposition revolutionizes banking across the globe.”

PwC Partner Akhilesh Khera said that the firm selected FintechOS for the company’s high-productivity infrastructure. “This will drive a massive improvement in time-to-value, and the extensibility of digital banking growth and expansion,” explained Khera.

U.K.-based FintechOS was founded in 2017 to help companies quickly launch and manage products and services across lending, savings, insurance, investment, and embedded finance. By helping financial services companies replace their core banking infrastructure operations, FintechOS also helps companies reduce costs, modernize operations, and deploy modern customer journeys that meet today’s standard expectations of great customer experience.

In March of this year, FintechOS launched a pair of accelerators to help financial institutions support their small business clients. Earlier this month, the company unveiled its spring release, which contained a digital retail mortgage and BNPL features. FintechOS demoed Sunglow, a banking super app at FinovateFall 2021. Teo Blidarus is co-founder and CEO.

Photo by Miriam Espacio

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BigTech, Partnerships, and the Evolution of the Fintech Ecosystem

By David Penn Posted on October 22, 2020
Categories: FinovateFall 2020, Microsoft, Speaker series

The growing presence of BigTech in the fintech ecosystem is one of the stories of 2020 that will likely be among the top stories of 2021, as well. As companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft look to fintech for new markets and opportunities to innovate, how will their relationship with the fintech ecosystem evolve and change?

For a few answers to this and other questions, check out our interview with Microsoft’s Sandeep Mangaraj and Tom Feher, industry executives, Digital Transformation, Financial Services. Both Mangaraj and Feher participated in our all-digital fintech conference, FinovateFall Digital, in September.

What is the value of partnership as BigTech becomes more involved in fintech?

Mangaraj: Microsoft leads with partners. That’s been true throughout our history and especially given what we are facing now, all the uncertainty and challenges that our partners are facing. I don’t see that changing. Our partners were quick to respond to what happened with COVID. They leveraged the power of our platform, and they were there immediately with creative and innovative solutions.
That has been the story of Microsoft. What is it that we provide? We have a secure, compliant, scalable platform that they can innovate on, and we are here to help them and support them, and make sure that they take advantage of the full power of what we offer, what they offer, and what our other partners offer, to take to their clients.

Feher: Partners are key to our success. We have several programs to help incubate and expand our fintech ecosystem. This includes everything from Microsoft for Startups, a program that assists startups in building solutions on our platform, to our M12 Ventures program that invests in a portfolio of fintechs in the industry. We also have our worldwide partner organization that focuses on strategic alliances and partnerships with fintechs that enable us to bring net new solutions to market on our platform that accelerate our clients’ innovation and well as helping them drive business outcomes.

Watch the rest of the conversation. And for more from our FinovateFall Digital speakers, check out our Finovate TV YouTube playlist.

Photo by Hung Tran from Pexels

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FinovateFall Digital 2020 Sneak Peek: Microsoft

By oliver Posted on August 25, 2020
Categories: Finovate, FinovateFall 2020, FinovateFall 2020 Sneak Peek, Microsoft

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateAsia Digital on June 22, 2021. Register today and save your spot.

Microsoft’s Power Platform solution protects your teams and streamlines your return to the workplace by equipping leaders with tools to make informed decisions to safely reopen locations.

Features

Prepare locations for reopening
Ensure safety of employees and customers
Ongoing management and prevention

Why it’s great
With the Power Platform, you’re not just investing in today, you’re investing in your future. Stay agile and innovative by creating intelligent, custom apps and automating processes with low-code solutions.

Presenter

Thymio Barbatsis, Senior Technical Specialist
Barbatsis has spent the last 20 years implementing Microsoft technologies and services. He is helping customers to focus on capabilities to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.

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Extreme PFM: Bundle Launches Restaurant Recommender and Move-O-Matic

By Jim Bruene Posted on December 16, 2010
Categories: Citibank, Microsoft, Personal Financial Management

Once upon a time, personal financial management (PFM) software was used only by those with complicated finances (usually with lots of business expenses to keep track of) or those who made a hobby out of tracking their money.

This was enough to support Intuit’s Quicken, but every other software solution either lost money, remained small, or folded.

Then along came Web 2.0, and it looked like that might change. Dozens of online PFM providers launched, gained some early traction, then hit a wall, requiring them to fold (Wesabe, Rudder), re-focus on white labeling (Geezeo, Strands), or stay small. Only Mint.com (now owned by Intuit) was able to make it as a major PFM destination riding a wave of publicity generated by being a tech darling.

So where does that leave us now? There are several obvious opportunities for personal finance companies:

Small businesses willing to pay for tools that save time and/or help them run their business better (Outright.com, Kashoo, Xero and many others)
Tools that satisfy specific needs with almost immediate time savings (Expensify for expense reports)
Tools that watch over your accounts to make sure you are not defrauded, cheated, or billed in error (in development at a number of companies)

And then there’s the avenue that Bundle is working on:

Using the aggregated data to provide spending insights for everyone

Bundle’s new tools
This week, Finovate Fall Best of Show winner (video), Bundle, released two new tools under the tab, Everybody’s Money (as opposed to the other option, My Money)

Restaurant Recommender (see below)
Move-O-Matic: Clever name and revamped interface for a feature Bundle has been delivering since it launched a year ago (previous post) that provides spending comparisons between various cities (see note 1)
Restaurant Recommender is brilliant and could be a useful tool for anyone who eats out often (a much, much bigger audience than those that track their spending closely). It only works for NYC and LA right now, but more cities are in the plans.

Here’s how it works:

Type in a restaurant name (I chose Balthazar, a place my parents treated me to on a recent birthday; see first screenshot)
Click the green Find Restaurants button
Bundle returns a list of other restaurants that Balthazar customers frequent, complete with a “loyalty score” that quantifies how much customers spend at each restaurant along with a confidence measure on the recommendation (second screenshot)

And because the startup uses actual spending data from 20 million cards in its algorithm, the recommendations are based on real data, not the sometimes biased results of online review and popularity sites. As Bundle puts it, users “vote with their dollars.”

If Bundle and Yelp make APIs available, it would be great to see a mashup of Yelp reviews augmented with Bundle spending data. And it’s yet to be seen if they can convert casual drive-by data traffic into hardcore PFM users. But for now, Bundle is a great discovery tool, if you live in NYC or LA.

Bundle Restaurant Recommender (16 Dec. 2010)

Results for NYC search on “Balthazar”
Note: Bundle increased the transparency of the recommendation by disclosing how many transactions were used to derive the correlation. In the case of the Balthazar Bakery, the choice was based on more than 87,000 transactions. Bundle also provide a measure of how confident they are in the recommendation (the blue bar).

———————————————————————————————————-
Notes:
1. Regarding Move-O-Matic. Here’s my original footnote followed by the correction (in italics):
Unfortunately, when you drill into the data, the results sometimes seem strange. Does anyone really think the highest income folks ($125k+) in NYC really spend $230 less per month than those in Seattle excluding housing costs (see inset)? Granted, we spend a lot more on coffee; still, not sure I buy this result.
(Update 17 Dec. 2010: Looks like this was user error in part aided by the tool’s autofill which suggested NYC, which includes all 5 boroughs, when I typed N. If I’d have input “Manhattan” instead of NYC the results would be much different. The tool says I spend $1,500 more per month in Manhattan, that sounds much more realistic. My apologies.)
2. Bundle is backed by Citibank, Microsoft, and Morningstar
3. See Xero at FinovateEurope, Feb. 1.
4. For more on online personal financial management (OFM), see our recent Online Banking Report.

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Citibank, Microsoft Join Forces with Bundle, a Personal Finance Site with a Data Bent

By Jim Bruene Posted on January 29, 2010
Categories: Citibank, iPhone, Launches, Microsoft, Personal Financial Management

I had been intrigued about rumors that Microsoft and Citibank were partnering on a joint personal-finance venture called Bundle. I was hoping for the financial services version of an Apple launch.

OK, that’s a little too high of a bar to set. I was really just hoping for the next Mint or at least something we hadn’t seen before. To some extent, Bundle delivered, with Mint-like attention to design and deeper data than we’ve seen previously. But in other ways it’s just a me-too personal finance site, FiLife 2.0. Bottom line, Bundle has been open only a week so it’s way too early to predict where it’s going or how it makes money.

Bundle is a personal finance startup backed by Citibank, Microsoft, and Morningstar. Two of the key execs, including CEO Jaidev Shergill, are from Citi Growth Ventures, the group charged with commercializing products and ideas that have bubbled up within the banking giant. The startup also enlisted professional journalists, including Janet Paskin who’s written for Dow Jones’s SmartMoney Magazine among others.

Given that pedigree, the new site is kind of a SmartMoney Magazine meets your credit card statement with some social networking thrown in the mix.

What distinguishes it from most personal finance content providers is that Bundle showcases proprietary data, sourced from Citibank’s massive card-spending warehouse. The site gives center stage to data and shows household spending personalized to your specific location.

There’s also professional personal finance advice mixed with stories and comment from the community. Even the articles use the database to illustrate points (screenshot 3).

Naturally, it’s well-integrated to Facebook. You cannot even comment unless you log in via Facebook Connect. You can follow Bundle on Twitter, of course, but surprisingly there is no blog or RSS feed.

And Bundle already has its own iPhone app called Vice Tracker (iTunes link) that makes shopping for non-essentials into a tongue-in-cheek game. The unique app was added to the store two weeks ago in the Lifestyle category.

According to the FAQs, Bundle’s business model is advertising, but there are no ads on the site yet, other than the logos of the backers (Microsoft is using its MSN Money brand). Presumably, they are looking for financial advertisers, but the Citibank connection might make that a harder sell.

Analysis
I like what Bundle is doing, creating a consumer-facing company around Citibank’s cardholder data. But I can’t figure out who they are targeting. Maybe they haven’t decided yet.

If they want to attract data junkies like myself, the data needs to be more transparent and they need more robust tools to play with it. I enjoyed being able to compare the spending of my Seattle neighbors against that of my home town in Iowa (it’s surprisingly similar). But I was left with a number of questions:

Where does the spending data come from? The FAQs are vague on saying that it comes from Citibank card data, government sources and “other third parties.”
If it’s primarily Citibank card data, is it really representative of the entire town or just the people that hold Citibank cards? For example, Bundle tells me (screenshot #3) that the average dining out expense in Seattle is $115 and the most common spot is Starbucks followed by McDonalds. Something seems wrong with that.
And furthermore, are these estimates of all spending or just that on Citibank cards? And which Citi portfolios are included? What about business cards?
The graphical bubbles are nice, but I like to view data in tables, especially when trying to drill down and do meaningful analysis. Is there some way to see the underlying numbers?

On the other hand, if Bundle is trying to attract readers looking for personal finance advice and discussion, the data is kind of in the way, more window dressing than anything else.

Final thoughts
The graphics are great and the spending data is interesting. But why would I come back? There’s only so many times in one’s life that you want to compare the shopping habits of your city vs. somewhere else.

Presumably, future versions will allow you to compare your actual spending to the Bundle averages using account-aggregation technology. This is a popular feature of Wesabe, and is one of the major tenets of what we’ve called “social personal finance” (note 1, 2).

I also expect they’ll integrate Bundle into the Citibank cardholder site so its customers can do online comparisons while they are checking their statement online. If Citi can document a spending lift from bundled Bundle, then the startup has proven its value. Armed with that success, it could be licensed to other big card issuers, increasing the value of the Bundle data for all users, attracting more users and more advertisers. The network effect. Perhaps that’s the end game here.

#1: Main Bundle page after selecting “Seattle” as location to show spending (29 Jan. 2010)

#2: Main page after drilling down through the “Food & Drink” bubble (link)
Note: Top five restaurants for dining out in Seattle are Starbucks, McDonalds, Subway, Red Robin and Cheesecake Factory. That sounds possible, but then the average purchase size is listed at $115. That’s a lot of lattes or Big Macs.

#3: The ever-present “spending balls” hover above an article by Bundle Managing Editor Janet Paskin’s short post. The balls compare the spending in Brooklyn with her hometown Seattle
Note: Brooklyn comes out cheaper, see the solid circles (Brooklyn) in front of the cross-hatched ones (Seattle).

Notes:
1. See our previous reports on Social Personal Finance (2007) and Online Investment Communities (2008).
2. Wesabe would seem to be a great acquisition if Bundle wants to add the aggregation technology piece and jump-start its user base. Blippy-like features would also make the site more sticky.
3. For more background on the software tools being used, see the article on Bundle in Microsoft’s Financial Services publication published 22 Nov. 2009.

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Microsoft to discontinue selling Microsoft Money immediately, end online service in two years

By Jim Bruene Posted on June 10, 2009
Categories: Intuit, Microsoft, Personal Financial Management

Microsoft will stop selling its Microsoft Money packaged personal finance management (PFM) software at the end of this month (FAQ here). Online services will expire Jan. 31, 2011, or earlier depending on when users activated their program.

The company will continue its online-only account management and bill pay services at MSN Money. Banks supporting direct downloads to the program, such as US Bank and Wells Fargo, will have to migrate users to other options, most likely Intuit’s Quicken.

For me, it’s an end of an era. The main reason I became involved in the online banking industry was to participate in a four-bank group that worked with Microsoft to add online banking and bill pay to Microsoft Money 3.0 (note 1), released in Feb. 1994 (see inset). It was an industry milestone and a major coup for the company at the time, bringing online banking to its PFM more than two years ahead of Quicken.

So, after 15 years of using the program, I’ll finally have to make the long overdue move to QuickBooks to manage our company finances. But to be safe, I’m going with QuickBooks online, which I’m guessing will not become obsolete in my lifetime.

Microsoft Money Plus page announces the end of the line (link, 9 June 2009)

Notes:
1. According to Wikipedia, Microsoft Money is currently on version 17.

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Bank of America Integrates Small Business Financial Services into Microsoft’s Startup Center

By Jim Bruene Posted on June 25, 2007
Categories: Bank of America, MasterCard, Microsoft, Small Business

It's extremely difficult to win the transaction accounts of small businesses. By the time you know of their existence, they already have their bank accounts in place. And most small businesses are too busy to bother switching accounts to save a few bucks a month, or even to get better products or services.

One way to grab market share is to find businesses when they are in the pre-startup phase, before they've set up banking accounts. In pre-startup, the prospective business owner is in pure research mode, spending little or no cash. To find these businesses, you need to offer online information that startups value and can find at your site, such as new-business planning advice. Then entice the owner to establish bank accounts with a package of services that appeal to a new business owner.

Bank of America is on the right track with its sponsorship of Microsoft's new Startup Center <startupcenter.com>. It's more like a product placement than a "banner ad" sponsorship. The BofA logo is never even seen in the main content area.

However, the bank's content is tightly integrated throughout, especially in the Finances area. For instance, if a business owner wants to "set up a checking account," the links to detailed information such as "compare now," "get a recommendation," and "get a business check card" all link directly to content housed on Bank of America's website (see screenshot below).

MasterCard is also a primary sponsor, but its content is less integrated. The third core sponsor is Startup Nation.

Analysis
It makes sense for Bank of America to be involved in Microsoft's Startup Center, a beautifully designed tool all decked out in "Web 2.0" colors and graphics. The content seems appropriate and useful for a startup. However, it will be a challenge for the area to gain traction with actual startups, who are unlikely to be looking to Microsoft for assistance, unless they are software developers.

But you don't have to be a mega-bank or mega-software company to provide valuable services to startups. Financial institutions can partner with local professional service firms such as accountants, consultants, and attorneys, to create content for startups such as Webinars, and in-person seminars. A well-priced package of banking services, positioned and priced for startups, will help you grab new business in the startup sector.

Examples of startup products and services at financial institutions:

CIBC startup area
Lloyds TSB Business Extra package for startups
Bank of Montreal business startup package
Simply Startup Business Checking from First Light Federal Credit Union

For more information, see our Online Banking Report on Small and Microbusiness Online Banking (here). Thanks to Payments News for the link.

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NY Times Reviews Citi Mobile

By Jim Bruene Posted on May 24, 2007
Categories: Cingular, Citibank, Firethorn, Microsoft, Mobile Banking

The May 24 New York Times contains a generally favorable review of Citibank's new mobile phone service (article here). Writer John R. Quain also touches briefly on Bank of America's WAP service and gives Firethorn's application a spin via BancorpSouth's mobile service.

For followers of the space, there's not much new information here. But a 1,200-word article in the NY Times is significant for the mere fact that the editor's found the subject newsworthy.

The only downside cited, and it's a HUGE one, is the cost from the carrier. In the author's test, it cost him $2.59 in data charges for what sounded like a single Citi Mobile banking session (he did not have a data plan). Ouch.

Here's the exact passage near the end of the article:

For example, checking my balances, making a transfer and confirming a few payments totaled 244 kilobytes, plus one text message, on Citi Mobile. Total charges from AT&T: $2.59.

Update: Drew Sievers, CEO of mFoundry, the vendor powering Citi Mobile, emailed to say that the data charges cited in the NY Times article included the initial download. Subsequent sessions, would cost just pennies each, even without a data plan. He also said that the typical user attracted to mobile banking will already have a data plan, making mobile banking essentially free, at least from the carrier.

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