Zeta

HDFC Bank Turns to Zeta to Power its Credit Line on UPI Offerings

HDFC Bank Turns to Zeta to Power its Credit Line on UPI Offerings
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Zeta
  • Next-generation banking technology company Zeta has partnered with India’s HDFC Bank to power its Credit Line on UPI (CLOU) solutions.
  • The bank will leverage Zeta’s Digital Credit as a Service technology, which enables banks to manage a credit product from origination through processing without requiring multiple integrations.
  • Zeta won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at our all-digital fintech conference in 2020.

Banking technology provider Zeta has inked a partnership with India’s HDFC Bank to power its new Credit Line on UPI (CLOU) solutions. Announced by India’s National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2023, the CLOU scheme will make it easier for individuals to access credit and help banks leverage the UPI ecosystem to reach a significantly wider audience. HDFC’s partnership with Zeta will enable the bank to use the CLOU scheme to launch a range of new credit products by connecting pre-approved credit lines to the UPI user base.

Zeta Co-Founder, Global CTO, and CEO APAC Ramki Gaddipati referred to CLOU as “a credit superhighway.” He added, “Our solution is architected to leverage its innovative capabilities across the entire credit distribution lifecycle spanning underwriting, origination, distribution, usage, repayments, collections, and more.” Gaddipati emphasized that Zeta’s solution was built to fit the new technology, saying it would deliver a “UPI-first, mobile-first, and cloud-native credit products ecosystem.”

HDFC’s CLOU offerings will be powered by Zeta’s Digital Credit as a Service (DCaaS) solution. Unveiled earlier this year in India, Zeta’s technology enables banks to manage a credit product from origination to processing–as well as rewards, customer services, and more–without having to integrate multiple software packages and services. DCaaS also provides specific product blueprints to streamline the development of different types of credit lines on UPI products.

The technology was developed as Zeta recognized that the growing popularity of UPI was putting a strain on core banking systems–and that this strain could impact credit lines on UPI, as well. The company believes that CLOU will become a $1 trillion opportunity for banks by 2030.

The CLOU announcement is only the latest achievement of the partnership between Zeta and HDFC Bank. This spring, the bank announced that its PayZapp mobile app–developed in partnership with Zeta–had won the Celent Model Bank Award 2024. The app notched more than seven million customers since its launch in March 2023, and is among the top-rated apps in the Finance section on Indian app stores.

“We are glad to develop the Credit Line on UPI offering with Zeta enabling our customers to enjoy the benefits of an affordability program combined with the ease of doing a UPI transaction,” HDFC Bank Sr. EVP Rajanish Prabhu said.

HDFC Bank offers a wide range of banking products and solutions, including consumer, commercial, private, and investment banking; investment, asset, and wealth management; insurance; credit cards; and more. As India’s leading private sector bank, the Mumbai-based institution is the 10th largest bank by market capitalization ($145 billion), and the 16th largest employer in India.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Zeta won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at our all-digital conference in 2020. The company returned the following year to demo its modern, cloud-native, omni stack banking platform at FinovateFall 2021. Zeta achieved unicorn status that year courtesy of a $250 million round led by SoftBank.

Photo by Mitchell Ng Liang an on Unsplash

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Zeta and Featurespace Partner to Combine Card Processing with Fraud Detection

Zeta and Featurespace Partner to Combine Card Processing with Fraud Detection
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, Featurespace, Zeta
  • Zeta and Featurespace are partnering to create a solution that combines credit card processing and fraud detection.
  • The new offering will be made available to U.S. credit card issuers.
  • The solution will be available out-of-the-box and will enable issuers to test and launch features in days, rather than weeks or months.

Modern core banking technology provider Zeta and fraud prevention company Featurespace are joining forces today. Under the partnership, the two are offering U.S. credit card issuers a solution that combines credit card processing and fraud detection.

Zeta was founded in 2015 to offer modern card processing for banks and embeddable banking for fintechs. The company’s Tachyon Credit offers banks modern credit card programs and spending tools to help boost engagement, increase scale, and decrease fraud. Additionally, Zeta enables fintechs to offer their own credit cards with spending controls and multi-factor authentication.

Zeta CEO and Co-founder Bhavin Turakhia described the company’s issuer clients as “demanding,” and said the company is enabling issuers to iterate on their credit card products faster to test and launch features in a matter of days. “With this solution available out-of-the-box to our clients,” said Turakhia, “their credit card holders will be protected against existing and future fraud attempts seamlessly while reducing the number of genuine transactions declined.”

U.K.-based Featurespace will offer its fraud detection engine that combines AI, behavioral networks, and rules-based decisioning to help organizations identify fraud without negatively impacting the customer experience. Featurespace’s flagship solution, the ARIC Risk Hub, secures more than 50 billion transactions per year across 500 million consumers located in 180 countries.

Combined, the two companies will unlock a range of capabilities for credit card issuers, including out-of-the-box availability, pre-built workflows, real-time transaction authorization, custom decision rules based on risk scores, real-time access to all transaction fraud events, and more.

Zeta was voted Best of Show at FinovateWest Digital 2020 and has more than 1700 employees and contractors located across the U.S., U.K., Middle East, and Asia. The company’s 35+ customers have issued more than 15 million cards on its platform. The California-based company has raised $280 million and last year was valued at around $1.5 million.

Featurespace has more than 70 clients, including HSBC, TSYS, Worldpay, RBS NatWest Group, Danske Bank, ClearBank, and more. Founded in 2005 by a university professor and his PhD student, Featurespace has raised $108 million, including its most recent investment of $37 million received in 2020.

“The partnership between Zeta and Featurespace brings together two of the most capable solutions across the industry in each’s segments,” said Carolyn Homberger, President of Americas at Featurespace. “We are very impressed with the way Zeta is rethinking the issuer processing stack from the ground up, utilizing modern and flexible architecture to provide outstanding new capabilities to Issuers. We’re extremely excited to bring our joint solution to market in the U.S.”

Photo by Joshua Woroniecki

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Zeta Appoints FIS Veteran Karla Booe as Chief Compliance Officer

Zeta Appoints FIS Veteran Karla Booe as Chief Compliance Officer
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, Zeta
  • Modern core processing provider Zeta appointed FIS Veteran Karla Booe as Chief Compliance Officer.
  • Booe has spent more than 27 years working at FIS, where she served as Deputy Chief Compliance Officer.
  • Zeta was voted Best of Show at FinovateWest Digital 2020.

Modern core processing provider Zeta is introducing a fresh face this week. The California-based company recently brought on FIS Veteran Karla Booe as Chief Compliance Officer.

Booe will drive regulatory compliance programs for Zeta’s U.S. based clients from her office in Little Rock, Arkansas. She has spent the past 27+ years working at FIS, where she most recently served as the company’s Deputy Chief Compliance Officer. 

Commenting on Booe’s appointment, Zeta CEO and Cofounder Bhavin Turakhia said, “She will further our already strong commitment to regulatory risk and compliance.”

“There has been little-to-no tech innovation with regard to the management of regulatory risk compliance for credit cards in the last decade,” said Booe. “I am excited to help drive that change for Zeta’s clients. Zeta’s mission to provide next-gen capabilities to banks so they can launch products, programs, and innovations faster are underscored by a technology framework and by design principles that will completely change the processing landscape.”

Zeta, which was voted Best of Show at FinovateWest Digital 2020, offers modern core and processing for banks and embeddable banking for fintechs. Earlier this year, Zeta received $30 million in new funding, bringing its valuation to $1.5 million.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash

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Berlin’s Solarisbank Launches Women’s Network; Hamburg’s Express Group Secures $27 Million Investment

Berlin’s Solarisbank Launches Women’s Network; Hamburg’s Express Group Secures $27 Million Investment
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global, ThetaRay, Zeta

Solarisbank Launches Women’s Network to Fight Fintech’s Gender Gap

As part of an effort to close the gender gap in the fintech industry, Berlin, Germany-based banking-as-a-service platform Solarisbank has launched a new “women’s network” called Futura. Part of the company’s holistic Nature, People, Business (NPB) framework, Futura is currently organizing events such as discussion panels and training sessions for women looking to enter the fintech industry.

Futura also has a “heal thyself” component. The company has overhauled its recruitment process to be more inclusive, changing language and encouraging recruitment agencies to reach out to more female applicants. Solarisbank has pledged to reach at least 30% female representation by 2024.

“At Solarisbank, we decided to take a deliberate stand to improve gender equity in our industry,” Futura initiator and VP of Onboarding and Integration, Alex Gessner said. “We launched Futura to make fintech more inclusive for everyone – women, men, and non-binary people. It’s encouraging to see so much support for our initiative, and the market response to our first activities has shown the need for such a network.”

German fintech Express Group raises €25m in Series A funding

Express Group, a Hamburg, Germany-based startup dedicated to making tax preparation easier for working and middle class families, has secured $27 million (€25 million) in Series A funding. The investment round was led by Insight Partners and Project A Ventures. The funds will be used to help grow Express Group’s business internationally as well as to fuel future product launches.

ExpressSteur, the initial product from Express Group, leverages AI to enable accounting companies, tax consultants, and lawyers to process tax cases in minutes. The solution brings machine learning and automation to a process that is typically manually-dominated, making the tax preparation process easier, faster, and more accurate. The product helped the company grow to a Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) run rate of more than $49 million (€45 million) in less than 12 months.

Express Group was founded in 2019 by Maximilian Lambsdorff, Dennis Konrad, Konstantin Loebner, Mehdi Afridi, and Andreas Santoro.

New partnership marries recurring payments and subscription management

Dutch payment processor Mollie has announced a collaboration with U.S.-based subscription management platform Recharge that will offer an end-to-end, one-stop solution for managing recurring payments and subscriptions. The partnership will make it easy for users to leverage Recharge’s APIs to integrate recurring payments into Magento, WooCommerce, or other standalone webshop. The integration will also support deploying and managing subscriptions, as well as offer a retention suite to automatically retry payments in the event of failure, an enhanced self-serve customer experience with personalized transactional notifications, and real-time insights into revenues, customers, and subscriptions.

“We’re really excited to be able to offer merchants the opportunity to implement fully powered subscriptions with Recharge easily,” Mollie CCO Ken Serdons said. “Seamless effortless payments brought to recurring ecommerce means an increase in lifetime value and average order value, and at a time of unprecedented ecommerce growth and ambition, we’re able to meet and surpass customer expectations.”

Headquartered in Amsterdam, Mollie is one of Europe’s fastest-growing payment service providers (PSPs). Founded in 2004, the company this year has forged partnerships with WooCommerce and carmaker Mazda. Mollie launched its SaaS payment platform in March.

Recharge was founded in 2014 by Oisin O’Connor (CEO) and Mike Flynn (CTO). Today, the company powers subscriptions for more than 15,000 merchants serving 50 million subscribers, and has processed more than $10 billion in transactions. In May of last year, the Santa Monica, California-based firm secured a Series B investment of $277 million in growth capital, giving the company a valuation of $2.1 billion.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Asia-Pacific

Sub-Saharan Africa

Central and Eastern Europe

Middle East and Northern Africa

Central and Southern Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

Photo by Pixabay

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Card Processor Zeta Secures $30 Million in New Funding

Card Processor Zeta Secures $30 Million in New Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Funding, Zeta
  • Finovate Best of Show winner Zeta announced a new partnership with Mastercard.
  • The five-year collaboration included an investment of $30 million from Mastercard and other investors.
  • The funding gives Zeta a valuation of $1.5 billion.

Zeta, which won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateWest Digital 2020, has announced a five-year global partnership with Mastercard. The collaboration, which also featured an investment of $30 million from Mastercard and other investors, will enable the two companies to jointly launch credit cards via Zeta’s full stack, cloud-based, API-ready card processing platform. The two firms plan to issue between 30 and 40 million debit and credit cards over the course of the partnership and process $60 billion in total payment value.

“With Zeta’s next-gen credit card processing platform, we are fundamentally rewiring how issuers launch credit card programs by offering new paradigms over legacy mainframe systems,” Zeta co-founder and CEO Bhavin Turakhia said. He noted that Zeta enables issuers to increase their lending books, reduce costs with pay-as-you-go SaaS billing, improve customer engagement and satisfaction, and leverage the platform to launch new solutions and iterate faster.

The funding gives the San Francisco, California-based fintech a valuation of $1.5 billion, further solidifying the company’s unicorn status it achieved last May when Zeta scored $240 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

Zeta’s flagship solution, Tachyon, is a modern credit processing stack that provides integrated credit and loan processing. The platform spans the entire credit card lifecycle from issuance, core, and payments to BNPL loans, fraud and risk monitoring, rewards, and more. Zeta’s APIs enable issuers to create new revenue lines as BIN/balance sheet sponsors by providing co-brands, fintechs, and affinity partners with a complete banking-as-a-service and embeddable banking platform. The company also provides a suite of managed services including servicing, collections, and more.

Mastercard EVO for Products and Innovation Sandeep Malhotra underscored the capabilities of Zeta’s platform. “By deploying Zeta’s credit processing stack, issuers will have an opportunity to grow their user base, drive higher usage, and enter new geographical markets while accelerating the cashless revolution around the world.”

The relationship between Zeta and Mastercard extends back to 2018, when Zeta entered Mastercard’s Start Path engagement program. More recently, Zeta joined the Mastercard Developers Partner Network, Engage, which will give the fintech access to the Mastercard network. This will enable Zeta to pre-integrate or bundle solutions such as Mastercard’s Digital First and Fintech Express progams that support customer KYC and verification operations, as well as instant digital card issuance and provisioning.

Founded in 2015, Zeta began this year with the announcement that its card processing business grew to more than 10 million cards with more than 300 million transactions a year globally.

Photo by Diego Madrigal from Pexels

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FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Zeta

FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek: Zeta
By oliver Posted on
Categories: Finovate, FinovateFall 2021, FinovateFall 2021 Sneak Peek, Zeta

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateFall on September 13-15, 2021. Register today and save your spot.

Zeta is a banking tech company that provides modern, cloud-native, fully integrated solutions for FIs. Globally more than six issuers use Zeta to power 10+ million cards.

Features

  • Fully integrated credit solution – mobile app, processing, core, payments, and backoffice
  • 100% API coverage – supports open banking and BaaS
  • Ability to launch programs rapidly in weeks

Why it’s great
Zeta allows FIs to launch feature-rich credit programs rapidly, cost-effectively, and with increased income from these offerings.

Presenter

Bhavin Turakhia, Founder
Turakhia, serial entrepreneur and billionaire, is the founder of Zeta, Nova, and Radix. He has been building successful bootstrapped businesses since 1997.
LinkedIn

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How Zeta Became 2021’s Latest Unicorn

How Zeta Became 2021’s Latest Unicorn
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni profile, Zeta

Banking technology startup Zeta dominated the fintech headlines yesterday. The company raised $250 million, which boosted its valuation up over $1.45 billion.

The funding round was led by Softbank with participation from Sodexo. This is Zeta’s third investment round since it was founded in 2015. Notably, the cash brings the company into unicorn status.

So what is it about Zeta that has struck a chord in the fintech industry? The company offers a full-stack, cloud-native, API-ready core banking and transaction processing platform. The tools enable legacy banks to issue credit, debit, and prepaid offerings and provide modern fintech products to both retail and commercial clients.

In addition to its credit, debit, and prepaid card processing capabilities, Zeta’s products include:

  • Zeta Tachyon Loans – a BNPL and personal loan management platform
  • Zeta Tachyon Deposits – a modern core for DDA, checking accounts, savings accounts, and deposits
  • Zeta Tachyon Mobile – a ready-made, customizable mobile app for credit cards, checking accounts, prepaid, loans, BNPL, personal finance management, and more

Zeta’s tools help traditional banks compete with the onslaught of digital banks that are bringing consumers fresh new products and services to today’s digital-first customers. Those tools also help fintechs stay competitive in a world of super-apps by focusing on their core competencies.

“Most banks are using decades old software built at a time when Mainframes and Cobol were in vogue. As a result they have been slow to innovate and provide poor user experiences,” said Zeta CEO Bhavin Turakhia. “With Zeta, FIs can leverage a modern, cloud native platform and improve speed to market, agility, cost to income ratio and user experience.”

Turakhia showcased Zeta’s capabilities at FinovateWest 2020 last fall in his Best of Show-winning demo.

Zeta counts 10 banks and 25 fintechs across eight countries among its customers. The company plans to use the new funding to boost its growth in the U.S. and Europe by scaling its operations, team, and platform.

Photo by De’Andre Bush on Unsplash

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FinovateWest Digital 2020 Sneak Peek: Zeta

FinovateWest Digital 2020 Sneak Peek: Zeta
By oliver Posted on
Categories: Finovate, FinovateWest 2020, FinovateWest 2020 Sneak Peek, Zeta

A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring Digital on May 10 through 13, 2021. Register today and save your spot.

Zeta‘s Tachyon is an integrated, modular, cloud-native stack with a white labeled mobile app. FIs can build next-gen digital banking and payment experiences for their customers.

Features

  • Mobile first onestack
  • Embeddable banking
  • Launch new products in weeks

Why it’s great
Disrupt the disruptors by fast forwarding your digital services with Zeta’s cloud native, vertically integrated platform to preserve and grow your customer base at higher efficiency ratios.

Presenter

Bhavin Turakhia, CEO & Co-Founder
Turakhia is driven by a passion for problem-solving and maximizing efficiency through tech-led innovations. Today, along with Zeta, he is also heading Radix and Flock.

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