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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
New Finovate alum Hawk AI announced a collaboration with Diebold Nixdorf.
The partnership will facilitate the distribution and implementation of Hawk AI’s AML Surveillance and Fraud Prevention suite to banks.
Hawk AI made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateSpring in San Francisco.
Hawk AI, a fraud-fighting and AML platform based in Germany, announced a new partnership with fellow Finovate alum Diebold Nixdorf. Together, the two companies will collaborate to distribute and implement Hawk AI’s AML Surveillance and Fraud Prevention suite in banks to enable them to combat financial crime more effectively. The initial focus on the collaboration will be in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and will make it easier for Diebold Nixdorf customers in particular to access Hawk AI’s financial crime fighting technology.
Hawk AI CEO and co-founder Tobias Schweiger said that the willingness of financial institutions to adopt technology like Hawk AI’s AML Surveillance and Fraud Prevention suite is due to both “operational considerations” as well as the demands of regulatory authorities, which are “starting to ask for answers to fast-changing financial crime trends which no longer can be addressed with old technology and too much labor.” Instead, Schweiger said, Hawk AI’s partnership with Diebold Nixdorf helps alleviate one of the critical problems to answering these regulatory queries; namely the challenge of implementing newer, better financial crime fighting technology. Schweiger credited Diebold Nixdorf for having the “strong know-how, and professional services capabilities” to make implementation easier and less risky for customers.
“We’re thrilled to work with Hawk AI, a pioneer in explainable AI-powered AML and modern fraud prevention,” Diebold Nixdorf Director Solutions DACH Walter Gries said. “While combating new fincrime techniques is urgently needed, financial institutions must ensure a transparent process where frontline workers, auditors, and regulators trust the results. Hawk AI’s systems provide this trust, and we look forward to bringing the technology to new financial institutions together.”
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Munich, Germany, Hawk AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring earlier this year. At the event, the company demoed its technology that combines AI with traditional, rule-based strategies to monitor financial transactions in real-time. When suspicious activity is observed, the platform sends alerts to financial crime specialists for further investigation. This helps limit the amount of false positives that can weigh-down the effectiveness of a financial crime solution and create unwanted friction for customers.
Hawk AI’s partnership with Diebold Nixdorf comes just one month after the German company reported that it was working with KYC and customer onboarding specialist Ondato. Announced last month, Hawk AI and Ondato have teamed up to offer an integrated KYC validation process that features AML transaction monitoring and behavioral analysis. Ondato CEO and co-founder Liudas Kanapienis highlighted this aspect of the partnership in his statement, noting that the collaboration will enable Ondato to “expand client onboarding and compliance management towards behavior monitoring.”
Also in August, Hawk AI teamed up with Aux, a credit union service organization (CUSO) that serves more than 200 credit unions in the U.S. The partnership will make it easier for credit unions to access Hawk AI’s financial fraud and AML solutions. Aux VP of Compliance Services Gaye DeCesare praised Hawk AI’s technology as “easier to use and more cost effective than other legacy products on the market today.” DeCesare also underscored the fact that HAWK AI’s technology is “enhanced with new features and functionality” on a regular basis.
UBS and Wealthfront have mutually terminated a $1.4 billion acquisition announced earlier this year.
Despite the call-off, UBS has given Wealthfront $69.7 million in financing at a $1.4 billion valuation.
The termination of the deal comes after a significant decline in fintech valuations.
No matter the circumstances, breakups are always hard. Just ask financial services firm UBS and roboadvisor Wealthfront.
After agreeing to acquire Wealthfront in a deal valued at $1.4 billion in January, the two announced last week that the deal was off. Prior to last week, the acquisition was expected to close in the second half of this year. However, the two parties cited “unspecified regulatory concerns” as a reason for the deal collapse.
Purchasing Wealthfront, a roboadvisor headquartered in California, would have helped Switzerland-based UBS grow in the U.S. market and also would have offered access to Wealthfront’s digital wealth management tools and user-friendly technologies.
In January, Wealthfront had 470,000 clients and a total of $27 billion in assets under management. The company was founded in 2008 by Andy Rachleff and Dan Carroll as KaChing, and rebranded under the Wealthfront name in 2010. The company is known for it user-friendly, automated investing tools. Last year, Wealthfront added to its reputation by creating a Socially Responsible Investing Portfolio that is designed around sustainability, diversity, and equity.
“We are continuing to explore ways to work together in a partnership and UBS has given us $70 million in financing at a $1.4 billion valuation,” said Wealthfront Chief Executive Officer David Fortunato. “With this fresh round of funding under our belt along with the ability to begin self-funding the business, we are committed to building a lasting company that positively impacts the lives of our clients for decades to come.”
UBS has offered the new investment, which totals $69.7 million, via notes that can be converted into Wealthfront shares. “That protects other investors in Wealthfront from potentially having to mark down their stakes in the companies,” explained the Wall Street Journal
It is worth noting that the call-off of the acquisition comes after a significant decline in fintech valuations. If the deal was to have gone through, UBS would have likely overpaid for Wealthfront. It will be interesting to see if the Swiss bank will acquire a cheaper U.S.-based roboadvisor as a replacement now that valuations have decreased.
This is a sponsored post by Strands, Gold Sponsors of FinovateFall 2022.
Nowadays, personalization has become a must in all sectors that affect consumers’ daily lives. Companies such as Netflix and Amazon have already been able to create totally customized and customer-centric experiences thanks to advances in technology, data, and analytics. Digital Banking has also faced these expectations, demanding personalization for different user bases, needs, and underserved segments. With a focus on financial wellness, banks can generate cross-selling opportunities and create personalized journeys according to the interests of their customers.
Technology advancements have enabled companies to collect, analyze, and use data from a variety of sources, including internal and external channels, enabling banks to make better decisions, offers, and actions than ever before. Unfortunately, most banks still struggle to know their customers or to interact with them timely and relevantly – to provide the right offers at the right time to the right customers.
This is what customer centricity means, which is vastly different from product or brand centricity. When a financial institution has a deep understanding of its customers, it can provide solutions that are tailored to meet their specific needs, life stages, values, and interests beyond their typical sociodemographic information.
As part of this approach, extra data sources are tapped, such as third parties, in addition to what’s available within core banking as open banking data, surveys, social media, and other data sources consented by the customers, integrating machine learning, categorized transactional data, and other customer experience solutions that can enrich the available raw data.
How to derive and use such insights is now the question. In the first stage of data enrichment and analysis, core application data can be used to understand how the customer interacts with the bank, the recency, frequency, channels, etc. Through this information and analytical models, it is possible for financial institutions to predict proactively what the customer is likely to want or need in real time.
Tampere, Finland-based ReceiptHero is on a mission to make meaningful interactions from every day transactions.
The company’s platform combines digital receipts with loyalty programs and benefits to give merchants new ways to engage with their customers. Consumers benefit from an integrated solution that relieves the burden of paper and email receipts, as well as the hassle multiple loyalty cards and apps.
We caught up with Chris Moore, Chief Operating Officer with ReceiptHero, to talk about how far the company has come since its Finovate debut in 2020, and the role ReceiptHero plays in the emerging data economy. We also talked about the company’s recently announced partnership with Ingenico.
You made your Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2020 in Berlin, Germany. What was that experience like?
Chris Moore: Wow, that feels like a decade ago! Back then we were a very small team and had just released our Nordea bank integration. We had also started to systematically onboard our first batch of Finnish merchants to the platform. The feedback we got from the demo was fantastic; it really felt like we were solving a global problem and not just something we had been talking about here in Finland. You could argue pitching at FinovateEurope was the catalyst to where we are today.
Later that year you secured two million dollars in seed funding. What did that investment say about your company at the time and how did you put the capital to work?
Moore: The seed funding also solidified we were fighting a problem big enough. We picked some great Nordic investors and they’ve provided more than just capital since the investment. Essentially, the funding was to grow the platform and increase our sales efforts in the Nordics, but also to (expand) into other markets, such as Switzerland and the U.K. and put capital towards our POS integrations which are a key part of getting the receipt data flowing from the retailers.
Last fall ReceiptHero partnered with Mastercard and Visa. How did these partnerships come about and what was accomplished through them?
Moore: These partnerships came quicker than we expected. To partner with both Visa and Mastercard at the seed stage was a huge milestone for us. But we also knew that tackling the digital receipt problem would only happen if we had global partners such as the two major card schemes. The partnership with both Visa and Mastercard allows us to move into new markets in Europe with less dependence on local payment providers and therefore fewer integrations before being able to launch our solution. So it was a really big win with regards to scaling the platform and providing confidence at the highest level to support our objective of removing paper receipts as the main method of proof of purchase. I don’t think these partnerships would of been possible without our great development team building out a PCI DSS compliant platform, emphasizing our commitment to safeguarding cardholder data and providing the best possible receipt platform on the market today.
Speaking of Visa, you’ve recently strengthened your relationship with the company. How so?
Moore: Visa has seen increased client requests and interest in digital receipting over the last 18 months and, for a while, they have been trying to find a European partner who can enable such a solution. Building on the technical partnership from 2021, this new agreement puts us in the shop window as an approved partner for Visa’s clients and partners. We are already seeing the benefits of being involved in Visa’s Fintech Partner Connect program and we hope we can announce something soon off the back of this strengthened relationship.
You have talked about the idea of the data economy. In what way is ReceiptHero a part of this data economy – and what role does it play within it?
Moore: We are surrounded by data in our daily lives, most of it is unstructured and in hard to reach places. Receipts printed on paper are just that: unstructured and, as a customer, it’s hard to apply that purchase data to good use. Part of my opening remarks at FinovateEurope was that we are showered by amazing digital payment innovations and sadly the post purchase experience has mainly been left to stay in the analog world. Purchase data is core to building a strong data economy, as this data has so far been siloed and in a format that is hard to receive in real-time. It’s not really been leveraged or valued as it should be. ReceiptHero is breaking down those silos and enabling a world where a consumer can have this data instantly in their banking app or in an approved service where the data is used to better the customer experience.
Part of our unique role in fighting for digital, structured receipts is that we have a fiduciary duty to the data that flows through our platform to use it in a way that benefits all ecosystem stakeholders. We have no ulterior motive here; we are not a bank, a large retailer nor the cash register or payment provider enabling the sale. This allows us to act with the best interest of all stakeholders and help everyone to better utilize this new found digital data for the cardholder and the merchant.
ReceiptHero also plays a role in the trend toward sustainability and responsible consumption. How important has this been to you and to your customers?
Moore: For large retailers that print hundreds of thousands of receipts a day, what happens when you turn off all the receipt printers in your stores nationwide and only send customer receipts via digital channels? What are the impacts to your business from a cost perspective – but also the environmental repercussions? Simply put, less trees get turned into wood and then into paper, which then would have found their short existence as thermal receipts that sadly cannot be recycled due to the harmful chemicals on the paper. Take that scenario and then multiply it across thousands of retailers right across Europe (and, at some point, globally). That becomes a significant change in our fight for sustainability and better digital experiences.
What can you tell us about the fintech industry in Finland that those outside of the country – and the region – might be surprised to hear?
Moore: Well, I have personally been in Finland for 10 years now and I’ve seen the fintech space grow year over year. Sweden has always been a few steps ahead with regard to fintech unicorns, but Finland has now quickly caught up. We have a great ecosystem here where banks seek to innovate and look for fintechs to speed up those embedded features. Now we have unicorn successes such as Enfuce and AlphaSense in Europe. I also think the VC space is heating up with regards to fintech funding, with lots of appetite for investments in young ambitious fintech companies.
You introduced a loyalty rewards solution this summer. Why this move now – and how has the early reception to the new feature been?
Moore: Distributing digital receipts in real-time is the very foundation of what can be built with this data. What we wanted to prove is what happens in adjacent segments when you get this data and wrap a lightweight loyalty solution around it. We’ve started to onboard our SME merchants onto the rewards program, and so far it looks like we’re able to provide even more value to the merchant and the cardholder. For larger retailers where they might already use a loyalty platform, we can enable real-time card-linked receipt data to give them better visibility over repeat spend, lifetime loyalty, and average basket size.
You’ve also announced that you will be joining Ingenico’s new PPaaS platform. What can you tell us about this partnership?
Moore: We’ve announced this week that we’ve signed a partnership with Ingenico, one of the world’s largest payment terminal providers and now part of the Worldline group. PPaaS is Ingenico’s new payment platform that enables a “one-to-many” integration for us, so we can enable our digital receipt solution for thousands of acquirers, another partnership that supports us to scale across Europe. What’s exciting about this partnership is that we can onboard cardholders from the payment terminal, allowing another entry point to receive digital receipts for customers.
What else can we expect to hear from ReceiptHero over the balance of 2022 and into 2023?
Moore: Well, we’ve got some important retailers coming to the platform over the next six months so we’re really excited to announce those in due course. These are retailers that operate across multiple markets and more signs of us expanding further into Europe. There will be some bank partnership news too, but I wont give anymore away on that just yet!
New York-based identity decisioning platform Alloy has raised $52 million in funding at a valuation of $1.55 billion.
Alloy will use the additional funding to help it respond to global demand in the wake of its recently announced international expansion.
Alloy made its Finovate debut at FinDEVr Silicon Valley in 2016.
Alloysecured $52 million in new funding today. The identity decisioning platform for banks and fintechs announced that the investment, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Avenir Growth, gives the New York-based company a valuation of $1.55 billion. The capital will help Alloy respond to growing global demand for its fraud prevention solutions.
Existing investors Canapi Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Avid Ventures, and Felicis Ventures also participated in the funding. This week’s investment comes almost one year after the company raised $100 million at a valuation of $1.35 million.
“We feel incredibly lucky to have partners that not only understand the impact of our investments into our platform and in expanding globally but also proactively come to the table to support them,” Alloy co-founder and CEO Tommy Nicholas said when this week’s investment was announced. “With this newest investment we’ll be able to accelerate our growth and better address the global fraud challenges that companies are facing.”
Alloy demonstrated its technology at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016. At the event, the company discussed how its technology enables businesses to build fully-customizable APIs for customer identification and compliance. In the years since then, Alloy has grown into a fraud-fighting unicorn with more than 300 companies using its API-based platform to automate identity decisions during the account origination process and monitor those decisions on an ongoing basis. Leveraging more than 160 data sources, Alloy enables institutions and companies to pull customer, credit bureau, and alternative data through a single point of integration to help them find and onboard good customers without increasing their exposure to potentially fraudulent activity.
Over the past 12 months, Alloy has experienced revenue gains of more than 2x. Processing more than a million decisions daily, Alloy includes Ally Bank, Ramp, and Evolve Bank & Trust among its customers. The company was named to the seventh annual Forbes Cloud 100 last month, a roster of the world’s top private cloud companies. In August, Alloy also announced that its fraud and risk decisioning platform is now officially available in 40 countries in North America, EMEA, Latin America, and APAC.
“We’ve identified a clear need in the global market for Alloy, particularly with the recent rise in fraud, fines for poor implementation of regulatory requirements, and the growth of embedded finance,” Alloy Head of Global Edwina Johnson said. “We’re excited to bring Alloy’s unique platform, and team, to companies operating worldwide.”
Yesterday we shared the announcement that FinovateFall 2022 is on track to be our biggest event to date. Today we have great news from the other side of the Finovate stage: fully 50% of the speakers at FinovateFall in New York next month will be women.
“This definitely contributes to our DEI initiatives and effort to inject diversity into our events and portfolio as a whole,” Finovate Brand Strategy Director Adela Knox said.
Here are just a few of the women who will share their insights into fintech and the future of financial services at FinovateFall, September 12 through 14.
Remember that early-bird savings for FinovateFall 2022 end soon! Be sure to stop by the FinovateFall registration hub today to take advantage of special discounted ticket prices through Friday, September 2nd.
SC Moatti
SC Moatti will deliver a keynote address titled: Winter Is Coming: Now’s the Time to Hire That Chief Product Officer. Moatti is the founding Managing Partner of Mighty Capital; and the founding CEO of product acceleration platform, Products That Count.
In her address, Moatti will explain the consequences of not heeding the “product call” and why, if there’s one role companies should keep on their list of new hires this season, then it should be a Chief Product Officer.
As part of FinovateFall’s Payments stream, Wells Fargo Head of Enterprise Payments Ulrike Guigui will give a keynote address, Has the Pandemic Changed Payments Forever? 90% of Bank’s Useful Customer Data Comes from Payments – How Can They Ensure They Stay in the Game?
Alyson Clarke
Also in our Payments stream, Bernadette Ksepka, AVP and Deputy Head of Product Development, FedNowSM Service, Federal Reserve System, will sit down with PayGen co-founder and Chief Product Officer Robin LoGiudice to discuss The Continued Evolution of Faster, Cheaper, and Better Payments – Where Next with Instant Payments.
Alyson Clarke, Principal Analyst with Forrester, will deliver a keynote address titled Hybrid Banking – Why the Future is a Blend of Physical and Digital, as part of our Customer Experience stream.
Also in our Customer Experience stream, Symend co-founder and Chief Impact Officer Tiffany Kaminsky will share her insights in an address titled Upping the Ante: Using the Science of Decision-Making for Effective Customer Engagement.
Fintech-as-a-service innovator Solid raised $63 million in Series B funding this week.
Solid offers a platform that enables businesses to build and scale embedded fintech products into their own solutions.
The company, which made its Finovate debut in 2019 as “Wise,” will use the investment to accelerate its expansion into “fintech-ready” verticals such as travel, health care, and the gig economy.
Fintech-as-a-service company Solid has raised $63 million in Series B funding. The company offers infrastructure to enable companies to launch and bring to scale embedded fintech solutions. The round was led by FTV Capital. Existing investor Headline also participated.
“We built the most comprehensive fintech infrastructure from the ground up, so others don’t have to,” Solid co-founder and CEO Arjun Thyagarajan said. “Now, any company can quickly spin up bank accounts, crypto wallets, send payments, and issue cards to their end users, right into their product experience, while Solid does the heavy lifting of building and maintaining compliant fintech infrastructure.”
Solid made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2019 as “Wise.” At the conference, the company demonstrated its small business banking-in-a-box offering that included a checking account, payments, invoicing, cards, and point-of-sale solutions. The company rebranded as Solid last year as part of a pivot to highlight the modern banking platform they had used to launch their Wise business banking solution.
“We went from powering the Wise app to powering other products and ecosystems,” Thyagarajan and company co-founder and President Raghav Lal wrote at the Solid website last spring. “Along the way, we realized our brand and our positioning needed to change, too. And today, we are making the change and excited to share that Wise is now Solid.”
Solid will use the new capital to help fuel the company’s accelerated expansion into what it calls “fintech-ready” verticals like travel, construction, healthcare, and the gig economy. The company’s fully abstracted fintech-as-a-service platform gives developers the tools they need to easily embed fintech products into their offerings. Solid reports that fintech programs that build and launch on its platform own the experience and have little or no regulatory overhead. Solid’s technology also leverages modern APIs and a minimal-code approach to make integration easier. Companies that have used Solid’s platform include fellow Finovate alums like Paystand, as well as SaaS companies such as Everflow and emerging startups like Starlight.
Founded in 2018, Solid is headquartered in San Mateo, California. This week’s investment brings the company’s total funding to more than $80 million according to Crunchbase. Solid reported a 10x growth in revenues, customer base, and transactions processed last year. More than 100 fintech programs and $2 billion in transactions have been processed on the company’s infrastructure year to date.
FinovateFall 2022 in New York next month is on pace to be the biggest Finovate conference to date.
The Finovate team got the word early Tuesday morning: 1600+ registered attendees for FinovateFall. And counting …
“That’s huge!!” said Finovate VP, podcast host, and conference Master of Ceremonies Greg Palmer. “Biggest show in a long time!”
And with less than two weeks to go before the curtain goes up on our fall fintech conference, there’s every chance that the biggest Finovate in a long time is going to get even bigger.
Early-bird discounts end this week, so today is a great time to swing by our FinovateFall registration page and save your spot as Finovate’s return to live events continues. From September 12 though September 14, FinovateFall 2022 will feature three days of live fintech demoes, insightful main stage keynotes on critical fintech topics, as well as fan favorites like our Analyst All Stars Panel, Fintech Fight Club, all-day networking opportunities, and more.
Darlington Building Society has partnered with LexisNexis Risk Solutions to enhance its financial crime prevention strategy.
The U.K.-based financial institution will deploy LexisNexis Risk Solutions’ RiskNarrative platform which features integrations with more than 50 third party data sources.
Darlington Building Society was named Building Society of the Year in 2021 for its work with Finovate alum ieDigital.
U.K.-based Darlington Building Society has partnered with LexisNexis Risk Solutions to upgrade its financial crime prevention capabilities. The Society, founded more than 160 years ago, will deploy the company’s RiskNarrative platform, which will also enhance the Society’s online member portal and customer onboarding experiences.
Using a single API and integrations with more than 50 third party data sources, RiskNarrative gives companies the ability to better identify risk and detect fraudulent activity. The platform will enable Darlington Building Society to orchestrate document verification, PEP and sanctions monitoring, identity and address verification, and risk ratings of applications, as well as creating and managing internal watch lists.
“The partnership with LexisNexis Risk Solutions demonstrates the Society’s commitment to improving application processes for our members,” Darlington Building Society Chief Operating Officer Chris Hunter said. “The rollout of Digital ID&V, as part of the RiskNarrative implementation, is a step forward in simplifying customer account opening and reducing paper usage.”
Darlington Building Society will use technology from LexisNexis to digitize and streamline its onboarding journeys for both mortgage and savings applicants, Darling Building Society Chief Risk Officer David Bews added. Bews said the platform will also enable the Society to “future-proof” its financial crime prevention strategy, by helping the Society adjust its criteria to mitigate future risk as well as react to current threats.
Founded in 1856, Darlington Building Society supports nine branches across the North East, County Durham, and North Yorkshire. The Society offers savings accounts and mortgages, as well as service via its online banking resource, Darlingtononline. As a membership-owned and run mutual financial institution, Darlington Building Society turns its profits into lower mortgage rates, higher savings rates, and support for local charities. The company was namedBuilding Society of the Year in 2021 for its work with U.K.-based digital experience platform provider – and Finovate alum – ieDigital.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions is an international data and analytics company dedicated primarily yo predictive insights and fraud prevention. Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Alpharetta, Georgia, the company serves customers in a wide range of industries including financial services and insurance, healthcare, government, and public safety.
LexisNexis Risk Solutions includes multiple Finovate alums among its recent acquisitions. The company purchased BehavioSec earlier this year, TruNarrative in 2021, Emailage in 2020 and ThreatMetrix in 2018.
These nine fintechs wowed our FinovateFall audiences last year with their innovations in embedded finance, payments, wealth management, and more. To whet your appetite for FinovateFall next month, September 12 through 14, here’s a look at what our FinovateFall 2021 Best of Show companies have been up to since taking home Finovate’s top prize last fall.
Launched docuseries, Behind the Robo. Named a major player in the robo-advisory market by The Business Research Company. Worked with Standard Chartered Bank Kenya to help them launch their new money market fund offering.
Dreams
Won Best of Show for its engagement banking platform that offers a unique way to engage customers and responsibly expand revenues. Awarded Best of Show at FinovateSpring 2021. Founded in 2014. Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden.
Partnered with fellow Finovate alum ebankIT to support financial institutions undergoing digital transformation. Powered the new digital learning platform launched by Pacific Western Bank. Awarded Best of Show at FinovateSpring 2022.
Infocorp
Won Best of Show for its Mobile Native app that brings hyper-personalized experiences for every user in one single bank app. Founded in 1994. Headquartered in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Partnered with TESOBE to help banks in Latin America leverage open banking to build better, more customer-centric apps and services.
Long Game
Won Best of Show for its gamified finance app that helps banks acquire new customers and increase engagement with their Millennial and Gen Z customers. Headquartered in San Francisco, California. Founded in 2015.
Won Best of Show for its intelligent automation technology that transforms documents into data analytics, helping lenders make timely, high quality credit decisions. Founded in 2014. Headquartered in New York City.
Raised $80 million at a valuation of $500 million. Partnered with fellow Finovate alum Blend to bring automation to the mortgage process.
PwC
Won Best of Show for its Customer Link solution that turns customer data into smarter action and provides a 360 degree view of your customers. Founded in 1845. Headquartered in New York City.
Who will take home the trophies this year at FinovateFall 2022? Join us in New York next month as we showcase upwards of 60 innovative fintech companies – all vying for the title of Best of Show.
Truist Wealth unveiled a pair of new investment solutions this week: a roboadvisor Truist Invest and a hybrid investment platform Truist Invest Pro.
Truist Invest provides a personalized investment portfolio based on the user’s goals, risk tolerance, and current investments. Truist Invest Pro adds access to a team of financial advisors.
Truist Wealth is a division of Truist Financial Corporation, a top ten U.S. with $545 billion in total assets.
Truist Wealth, a division of Truist Financial Corporation, announced the launch of two new investment solutions this week: roboadvisor Truist Invest and hybrid investment platform Truist Invest Pro, which blends automated investing with access to human financial advisors.
Both solutions were developed by a cross-functional team of designers, engineers, innovators, and product managers who co-created the new offerings in client journey rooms at the Truist Innovation and Technology Center. A combination of agile work strategies, direct client feedback, and iterative product design enabled the team to optimize both solutions ahead of their launch this year.
“Investors want digital solutions that are secure, intuitive to use, and able to help meet their needs whether they are a new or experienced investor,” Truist Wealth SVP of Digital Investing Kacy Howard said. “Truist Invest and Truist Invest Pro can help give clients control and confidence in their portfolio whether they choose a fully digital or hybrid solution to invest in their future.”
Truist Invest gives customers a tailored portfolio recommendation based on their goals, risk tolerance, and current investments. Truist Invest provides a daily portfolio analysis and supports both automated rebalancing and tax loss harvesting. A hybrid investment solution, Truist Invest Pro provides both the digital capabilities of Truist Invest as well as access to a team of financial advisors who can help customers build a personalized investment portfolio and provide ongoing investment advice. Accounts for both offerings can be opened with as little as $5,000. Truist Invest charges an annual fee of 0.50%, with Truist Invest Pro costing users 0.85%. Both fees are based on the assets under management, with a $90 per account annual minimum,
Truist Chief Wealth Officer Joseph M. Thompson put the new offerings in a broader context of the company’s goal of providing its customers with personalized service that maximizes the opportunity of digital technology in the investing space. “Digital investing solutions are an example of Truist’s T3 strategy which combines the client’s preferred level of personalized touch and innovative technology to create trust,” Thompson said. “Truist Invest and Truist Invest Pro provide simple and secure access to a portfolio that is purpose-built to help an investor achieve their goals and is backed by our investment expertise that can help individuals and families build better lives.”
A division of Truist Financial Corporation, Truist Wealth serves affluent, high, and ultra-high net worth individuals, families, and business owners in the U.S. and around the world. The firm’s services range from investing and retirement, trust and estate planning, and lending, to banking and risk management. Parent company Truist is a top 10 U.S. commercial bank with $545 billion in total assets, and 15 million clients across the U.S.. The bank recently announced the acquisition of Zaloni’s Arena platform, which will help Truist enhance its data governance, metadata management, advanced analytics, and AI/ML programs.
We spoke with Truist Financial’s Chief Retail & Small Business Banking Officer Dontá Wilson earlier this year at FinovateSpring about the pace of digital transformation in financial services and the importance of building a culture of innovation.
It’s been nearly five years since Hong Kong-based Chekk made its Finovate debut at FinovateAsia. The company, co-founded by CEO Pascal Nizri, is a B2B2C digital identity ecosystem that shifts ownership of personal data from businesses to individuals as part of its strategy to provide better, more seamless identity verification services.
“We all know how reluctant Internet users have become to share personal data online,” Chekk co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Benjamin Petit said from the Finovate stage during his company’s demo. “On the other side regulators are forcing banks and financial service providers to collect an increasing amount of data for compliance reasons. And this done during lengthy and painful KYCs that are costly for banks.”
Via a mobile app, Chekk empowers individuals to own their own personal data and control how much of their data they share. At the same time, businesses get access to a secure online or API-based platform that enables them to make data requests and conduct other customer interactions – from onboarding due diligence and ID verification to secure messaging for chats and statements – seamlessly.
Chekk’s SaaS solutions help the company’s retail, private, and corporate customers manage a range of digital identity and data portability challenges and operations. These include multi-language AML checks, including Arabic, Russian, and Chinese, as well as identity verification for more than 200 countries, biometric digital signatures, tools to create and maintain digital forms, a secure encrypted data wallet, and global connectivity to more than 400 million business data sources.
Bain Capital is the latest financial institution to choose Chekk as its partner when it comes to digital identity verification. With $155 billion in assets, the Boston-based alternative investment firm announced in July that it will leverage Chekk’s technology to provide KYB verification for businesses, merchants, and third parties, as well as KYC for individual customers.
The Bain partnership news comes in the wake of Chekk’s announcement of a significant investment (described as “multi-million dollar”) in a round led by HSBC Alternatives, a wing of HSBC Asset Management. The funding builds on previous funding from investors such as SOSV and LeFonds, a pair of venture capital firms, as well as individual investor David Gurle, founder of Symphony Communications Services.
“Thanks to its founders’ hands-on experience, Chekk is building a suite of services that extends well beyond compliance-driven KYC/KYB and puts commercial relationships at the core of its value proposition,” HSBC Asset Management Head of Venture and Growth Investments Remi Bourrette said. “This resonates with our fintech fund’s themes of improving access to financial services while managing the risks arising from criminal activities.
Have we arrived at a reckoning for Hong Kong-based fintech? While the clamp down on Big Tech in China has gotten most of the attention from international technology analysts and observers, the impact on fintech developments in Hong Kong have been relatively overlooked. A recent survey conducted by Google and financial consultancy Quinlan & Associates suggests that the fintech industry in Hong Kong could be in for challenging times.
Specifically, the survey revealed that 60% of the 120+ C-suite executives from early- and late-stage private fintechs contacted felt that Hong Kong was “relatively uncompetitive compared to other fintech hubs.” Among the reasons cited were the city’s regulatory environment, which was viewed as “costly, complex, and time-consuming,” as well as a “talent gap” that had been made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. This talent gap extends beyond technical and product innovation roles to include sales and marketing talent, as well.
Hong Kong has been responsive to these challenges, according to a report from South China Morning Post. The city’s central bank, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, unveiled a four-year plan in June – the Greater Bay Fintech Talent Initiative – that included a pledge to “groom all-round fintech talent” and to provide greater funding assistance for fintech projects. The initiative will feature the support of 20 financial institutions including HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Hong Kong’s stock exchange. Tech giant Ant Group will also participate in the initiative — the only tech-based company to take part.
“While nurturing local fintech talent has been one of Ant Group’s key missions for years,” Ant Group EVP for strategy development and government affairs Jennifer Tan said, “it’s the group’s honor to join partners from various aspects in cultivating tech talent through the Greater Bay Fintech Talent Initiative.”
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Sub-Saharan Africa
QED Investors invests more than $50 million in Nigerian fintech TeamApt that specializes in business payments and banking platforms.
