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Santander Partners with Rocket Mortgage to Provide Digital Home Loan Experience

Santander Partners with Rocket Mortgage to Provide Digital Home Loan Experience
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Daily news
  • Santander Bank has selected Rocket Mortgage to provide its clients an online mortgage lending tool.
  • Rocket Mortgage will offer Santander clients exclusive discounts and resources to help them in their home buying journey.
  • Rocket Mortgage was among the first to offer a fully digital mortgage lending experience when it did so in 2015.

A partnership between Santander Bank and Rocket Mortgage is taking off today. Santander has selected online mortgage lending company Rocket Mortgage to serve as the as the exclusive preferred mortgage provider for its customers.

Santander will leverage Rocket Mortgage to offer its two million clients exclusive discounts and resources to help them in their home buying journey. The collaboration enables users to interact independently online or speak to a home loan expert via a phone call, email, or online chat.

“At Santander, we place the customer at the center of our business, and I’m pleased to be working with Rocket to deliver a convenient and simplified digital mortgage experience for our customers,” said Santander Bank Head of Consumer and Business Banking Patrick Smith. “Our relationship with Rocket Mortgage is another example of how Santander Bank is evolving our business and continuing to pursue opportunities for our customers to save, invest and manage their money at Santander.”

Santander is able to use its scale to secure discounts on loan costs and closing costs for its clients. Santander Private Clients and employees who close loans with the new platform can benefit from enhanced discounts.

Formerly known as Quicken Loans, Rocket Mortgage was a pioneer in digital mortgage lending. The company was among the first to offer a fully digital mortgage lending experience when it did so in 2015. The company closed $351 billion of mortgage volume across every U.S. state in 2021.

Photo by Kindel Media

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BlackRock Taps Coinbase to Facilitate Bitcoin Purchases

BlackRock Taps Coinbase to Facilitate Bitcoin Purchases
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Coinbase, Daily news
  • BlackRock has selected Coinbase to help its clients buy and sell bitcoin.
  • Under the partnership, clients of BlackRock Aladdin will benefit from Coinbase Prime.
  • Partnering with Coinbase will help BlackRock add digital currencies as an asset class for the first time.

Coinbase is partnering with BlackRock to help some of the asset manager’s institutional clients connect to Coinbase Prime, making it possible for them to buy and sell bitcoin.

Under the agreement, common clients of Coinbase and BlackRock’s end-to-end investment management platform Aladdin, will benefit from Coinbase Prime, a full-service platform to access crypto markets at scale. At the outset, Aladdin clients will be limited to using Coinbase Prime to buy and sell bitcoin.

With $10 trillion in assets under management, BlackRock offers clients a range of investment strategies, including alternative assets, sustainable investing, factor-based investing, systematic investing, and now digital assets. The company has 8,000 employees across the U.S. and works with more than 190,000 financial advisors to help build client portfolios.

The move adds cryptocurrency as an asset class for BlackRock clients for the first time. “Our institutional clients are increasingly interested in gaining exposure to digital asset markets and are focused on how to efficiently manage the operational lifecycle of these assets,” said BlackRock Global Head of Strategic Ecosystem Partnerships Joseph Chalom. “This connectivity with Aladdin will allow clients to manage their bitcoin exposures directly in their existing portfolio management and trading workflows for a whole portfolio view of risk across asset classes.”

BlackRock and Coinbase will roll out functionality in phases to interested clients.

Coinbase was founded 2012 and went public late last year. The company trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker COIN. The news of a new client for Coinbase Prime has given Coinbase a boost this week after the recent crypto winter took its toll on the company, which announced a hiring freeze and layoffs earlier this summer. Coinbase’s market capitalization currently sits at $19.74 billion.

Photo by Alesia Kozik

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OCR Labs Brings its Digital ID Verification Technology to Bloom Money

OCR Labs Brings its Digital ID Verification Technology to Bloom Money
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, OCR Labs
  • London’s OCR Labs announced a partnership with Bloom Money, a company that seeks to enhance financial wellness for immigrant communities.
  • Bloom Money will leverage OCR Labs’ technology to provide biometric and document verification during its onboarding process.
  • OCR Labs won Best of Show at FinovateAsia in Hong Kong in 2017.

London-based digital ID verification innovator – and Finovate Best of Show winner – OCR Labs has teamed up with Bloom Money, a platform that is geared toward helping diaspora communities in Europe better manage their finances. Bloom Money will use OCR Labs’ technology to conduct automated biometric verification, document verification, and reauthentication during the onboarding process for new customers.

Bloom Money bases its offering on what it calls “tried and tested” methods of money management – whether they are called contributions, ajo, hagbad, or pardna – used by communities around the world. The company decided to partner with OCR Labs to help it handle the challenge of working with diverse communities with a wide variety of identity documents to be accounted for. “OCR Labs Global is the only vendor who could accurately recognize people of different ethnicities and do liveness verification,” Bloom Money co-founder Nina Mohanty explained. Mohanty reflected on her own experience with the limitations of identity verification technology, saying that OCR Lab’s ability to verify more than 16,000 documents from more than 230 countries and territories is “critical” to the service Bloom Money offers.

“Bloom Money is building an app that is going to make the management of a rotating savings club far simpler and transparent for many communities,” OCR Labs General Manager International Russ Cohn said. “At OCR Labs Global, we are also making verification simple and transparent for the businesses we partner with. We believe that proving who your customers are shouldn’t be a barrier to scale.”

Founded in 2014 and launching its first solution in 2018, OCR Labs leverages optical character recognition technology, advanced facial matching technology using liveness detection and biometric digital verification to verify identity documents and provide highly accurate authentication. The company’s technology covers more than 16,000 identity documents in more than 140 languages, and provides a face matching accuracy of 99.997%. Making its Finovate debut at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, in 2016, OCR Labs earned a Best of Show award a year later upon its return to the Finovate stage for FinovateAsia in Hong Kong.

OCR Labs began the year with news of an investment of $30 million in Series B funding. The funding was led by Equable Capital, a New York-based family office, and will be used to help OCR Labs expand its team in both North America and EMEA. The financing takes the company’s total funding to $46 million.

Photo by ThisIsEngineering

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Innovation in a Risk Management Business: A Conversation with Piermont Bank Founder and CEO Wendy Cai-Lee

Innovation in a Risk Management Business: A Conversation with Piermont Bank Founder and CEO Wendy Cai-Lee
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: CEO Interview, FinovateSpring 2022, Interview, Speaker series, Women in Fintech

FinovateSpring provided us with a great opportunity to sit down for an informative chat with Wendy Cai-Lee, founder and CEO of Piermont Bank.

Launched in 2019, Piermont Bank aims to blend the best of modern banking and agile fintech. Piermont Bank’s peer banking approach provides customers with technology-enabled, human-delivered solutions, opting for dedicated bankers over “1-800 numbers or chatbots.”

Last month, Piermont Bank celebrated three years of innovation. The woman-founded and entrepreneur-led financial institution currently has more than $420 million in total assets, and offers an end-to-end, digital banking-as-a-service platform with more than 40 fintech clients already onboard. More than 50% of Piermont’s loans since inception have been made to low- and moderate-income communities, as well as women- and minority-owned businesses.

Below are a few excerpts from our conversation with Ms. Cai-Lee at FinovateSpring in San Francisco in May.

On the decision to launch Piermont Bank

The genesis of building Piermont was actually really simple. A lot of entrepreneurs would tell you they had this grand vision. For me, it was actually just very two practical reasons. The first was seeing the impact and the speed of impact that fintechs were making on consumer banking … The second reason was: I’ve been in banking for 26, 27 years. (And I’ve seen) the same pain points repeatedly from both the customer (side) as well as internally as an operator … So basically I said, “Okay if I could start with a blank slate, how would I build this? How would I build a fully digital-native, totally tech-enabled bank to do commercial banking faster and more efficiently?

On the evolution of financial services in recent years

My industry, historically, doesn’t change. It doesn’t go that fast. These days, I say that if the CEO is still working off their three-year strategic plan, if it’s in their third year, the board should fire that person. I mean, are you still even relevant in terms of your products (or) the way that you’re delivering these products? So I think the biggest change is just the speed, the speed of change, the speed of innovation.

I was taught and it’s still true banking is a risk management business. So it’s a little bit counter-intuitive if you think about it, this so-called “innovation.” But you absolutely can innovate in a risk management business.

On the advancement of women into leadership roles in financial services

I find myself able to make the biggest impact in the day-to-day: hiring based truly on skill sets and meritocracy, being gender-blind, age-blind … I know that sounds weird but, as an executive, as somebody who is doing the hiring, as somebody who’s doing the promotion, if I can just say, is this person the best person for the job? That’s more than half the game. I know that doesn’t sound very inspiring or trailblazing, but it is actually the day-to-day that makes a huge difference. Empower women, give them the job opportunity, give them the opportunity to rise to the occasion. That’s how we get there.

Check out the complete interview on FinovateTV.

Photo by Alex Azabache

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Thoma Bravo Scoops Up Ping Identity for $2.8 Billion

Thoma Bravo Scoops Up Ping Identity for $2.8 Billion
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Mergers & Acquisitions, Ping Identity
  • Thoma Bravo is acquiring Ping Identity in an all-cash deal for $2.8 billion.
  • The acquisition will take publicly held Ping Identity into the private markets.
  • Thoma Bravo’s other recent fintech acquisitions include Bottomline Technologies, Digital Insight, and Ellie Mae.

Cloud-based identity software provider Ping Identity has agreed to be acquired by private equity firm Thoma Bravo. The all-cash deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter of this year for $2.8 billion.

“We are pleased to partner with Thoma Bravo, which has a strong track record of investing in high-growth cloud software security businesses and supporting companies with initiatives to turbocharge innovation and open new markets,” said Ping Identity CEO Andre Durand.

Ping Identity was founded in 2002 and has since made seven acquisitions of its own, including passwordless identity verification company Singular Key, bot prevention and fraud intelligence firm SecuredTouch, intelligent authorization company Symphonic, blockchain-based identity startup ShoCard, AI-powered security company Elastic Beam, customer identity solution UnboundID, and Accells Technologies.

Ping Identity has leveraged this acquired expertise, in addition to its own in-house knowledge, to help enterprises remove passwords, prevent fraud, support Zero Trust. The company offers a no-code, drag-and-drop user interface to make its seemingly intimidating offerings more approachable for non-technical staff.

After the deal closes, Ping Identity, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of $2.38 billion, will transition to a privately held organization. Before the company’s debut onto the public markets, Ping Identity was majority-owned by Vista Equity, which now owns 9.7% of shares in the Denver, Colorado-based company.

“Ping Identity is a leader in intelligent identity solutions for the enterprise and is well-positioned to capitalize on the significant opportunities in the $50 billion Enterprise Identity security solutions area,” said Thoma Bravo Partner Chip Virnig. “Our shared commitment to growth and innovation, combined with Thoma Bravo’s significant security software investing and operational expertise, will enable Ping Identity to accelerate its cloud transformation and delivery of industry leading identity security experiences for the customers, employees and partners of large enterprises worldwide.”

Today’s purchase marks Thoma Bravo’s 91st acquisition. The firm takes a buy-and-build approach in which it acquires similar companies and consolidates them to create synergies and develop companies with greater scale, scope, and broader service offerings. Among the Illinois-based company’s most recent fintech purchases are Bottomline Technologies, Digital Insight, and Ellie Mae.

Photo by Fábio Lucas

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Finovate Awards Finalists Unveiled: Meet the 129 Finalists Across 23 Categories

Finovate Awards Finalists Unveiled: Meet the 129 Finalists Across 23 Categories
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Finovate Awards

The third annual Finovate Awards ceremony is taking place next month, which means our panel of 20 judges has carved down the list of nominees in 23 categories down to just 129 finalists. As always, competition this year was steep, so the finalist title is well-earned.

Congratulations to everyone who made it to the finalist round! The winners will be announced at the 2022 Finovate Awards ceremony on September 13 at the Edison Ballroom in New York City. Register now to secure your seat or table at this year’s celebration.

Best Alternative Investments Solution

Finalists:

  • ToroAlerts
  • Concreit
  • CAIS
  • 21Shares
  • Moonfare
  • Yieldstreet
Best Back-Office/Core Services Solution

Finalists:

  • Pismo
  • Built
  • Maxwell Financial Labs
  • Coveo
  • FIS
  • Rippleshot and Fiserv
Best Consumer Lending Solution

Finalists:

  • Novo Banco
  • Tricolor
  • Wisetack
  • Upgrade
  • LendingPoint
Best Customer Experience Solution

Finalists:

  • Spire Novo Banco
  • BTG
  • UOB
  • Jack Henry
  • Bank of Montreal
  • Siam Commercial Bank
Best Digital Bank

Finalists:

  • BTG
  • UOB
  • Grasshopper
  • Oxygen
  • Oportun
Best Embedded Finance Solution

Finalists:

  • Piermont Bank
  • GlossGenius
  • Helix by Q2
  • Wise
  • Bond.ai
  • Grabango
Best Enterprise Payments Solution

Finalists:

  • Airbase
  • Xendit
  • Paystand
  • DailyPay
  • Branch
  • Modern Treasury
Best Financial Mobile App

Finalists:

  • Zenus Bank
  • Deserve
  • UOB
  • Brex
Best Fintech Accelerator/Incubator

Finalists:

  • Q2 Innovation Studio
  • BMO InnoV8
  • ING Labs RegTech Accelerator
  • BNY Mellon Accelerator Program
Best Fintech Partnership

Finalists:

  • Numerated and Five Star Bank
  • Raistone and Mastercard
  • Standard Chartered and Moneythor
  • ZEscrow Development Group
  • TAB Bank and Bumped
Best ID Management Solution

Finalists:

  • Hamilton Reserve Bank
  • Jumio
  • Norbloc
  • BNY Mellon
  • Experian
  • ViewTrade
Best Insurtech Solution

Finalists:

  • Cowbell
  • Trellis
  • Spott Insurance Services
  • bolttech
  • Afficiency
  • Parametrix
Best Mobile Payments Solution

Finalists:

  • TravelBank
  • Papara
  • Relay Payments
  • BNY Mellon
  • Car IQ
  • Chipper
Best RegTech Solution

Finalists:

  • Ayasdi
  • Duality
  • ING
  • Theta Lake
  • Socure
  • Zenarate
Best SMB/SME Banking Solution

Finalists:

  • Novo Banco
  • Cora
  • Autobooks
  • QuickFi
  • Mastercard
Best Wealth Management Solution

Finalists:

  • BlockFi
  • RBC Black
  • Q.ai
  • Titan
  • Cy
Excellence in Financial Inclusion

Finalists:

  • Tricolor
  • Bond
  • Gusto
  • Lean
  • Zirtue
  • Kueski
Excellence in Sustainability

Finalists:

  • Aspiration
  • Access Softek
  • Oportun
  • Seeds Investor
Executive of the Year

Finalists:

  • Travis Holloway, SoLo Funds
  • Wendy Cai-Lee, Piermont Bank
  • Michele Romanow, Clearco
  • Dan O’Malley, Numerated
  • Chase Gilbert, Built
  • Tanya Ward, Cape
  • Prashant Fuloria, Fundbox
  • Johnny Ayers, Socure
Innovator of the Year

Finalists:

  • Reena Raichura, Glue42
  • Daniela Binatti, Pismo
  • Glenn Elliott, Practifi
  • Jason Gardner, Marqeta
  • Jesse Chenard, MonetaGo
  • Sarah Walker, RibbonHub
  • Silvana Hernandez, Mastercard
  • Stephen Mathai-Davis, Q.ai
Top Emerging Fintech Company

Finalists:

  • Gr4vy
  • Highnote
  • Justt
  • Cape
  • Imprint
  • Flock Homes
Best BNPL Solution

Finalists:

  • ChargeAfter
  • Wisetack
  • equipifi
  • Kueski Pay
  • FIS
Excellence in Decentralized Finance

Finalists:

  • SoLo Funds
  • Conduit
  • Cion Digital
  • Amun Tokens

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Best of Show Winner BOND.AI Launches Embedded Finance Solutions Network for Banks and Businesses

Best of Show Winner BOND.AI Launches Embedded Finance Solutions Network for Banks and Businesses
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Bond.AI, Daily news
  • Arkansas-based fintech BOND.AI recently unveiled its latest offering, The Bond Network.
  • The technology enables financial institutions and businesses to add modern financial health solutions to their platforms.
  • BOND.AI won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2018 in New York.

BOND.AI has launched The Bond Network, which leverages open banking to enable banks, credit unions, and businesses of all sizes readily access contemporary financial health solutions.

“There is nothing like The BOND Network in the market today that combines the utility of modern financial technology with the life-changing benefit of financial health,” BOND.AI CEO Uday Akkaraju said. “Our Empathy Engine and The BOND Network together will connect the dots between financial institutions and employers to get them back at the heart of peoples’ financial lives and spark a mutually prosperous relationship between them.” Akkaraju called the new offering “the next revolution in embedded finance.”

Headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas and founded in 2016, BOND.AI demonstrated its Empathy Engine at FinovateFall 2018. The technology, which consists of three components – holistic analyzer, conversational intelligence, and path automator – helps financial institutions better understand customer behavior, provides an “age-agnostic” user experience, and meets the needs of both front-end users and back office workers.

Firms partnering with The BOND Network will get access to BOND.AI’s advanced Empathy Engine, as well as a curated set of solutions from selected fintechs. Financial institutions benefit from the ability to bring greater personalization to their banking customers as well as increase profitability. BOND.AI claimed that FIs can earn “at least one percent of their asset size” in greater revenues and savings. Employers embracing the technology can use it to embed AI-enabled banking and financial solutions, which enables them to better understand the financial health of their employees and devise strategies to increase productivity, boost engagement, and keep retention high.

Unveiled in June, the initiative went live with 16 financial institutions and employers as founding members. BOND.AI anticipates that the network will have “at least 50 partners” by the end of this year.

BOND.AI has spent much of 2022 adding talent to its team. In February, the company announced that Yogesh Asudani had joined BOND.AI as Executive Vice President of Partnerships. A month later, the company announced a pair of new hires – Kent Llewelyn and Amit Dhongde – to serve as Chief Technology Officer and Head of Technology, respectively.

Speaking of partnerships, BOND.AI also in March made fintech headlines for its collaboration with earned wage access and financial inclusion specialist GoDo. The company, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, offers a mobile app and debit card to enable employers to offer their employees real-time earned wage access. GoDo CEO James Ray said that the partnership with BOND.AI and access to its Empathy Engine will provide the kind of “intelligent coaching” that is “critical in helping people improve their financial lives and for solving the financial equity issues plaguing our country.”

BOND.AI has raised $5.2 million in funding. The company’s investors include FIS and Fund for Arkansas’ Future.

Photo by Evie Shaffer

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Pennsylvania-Based Fintech Savana Scores $45 Million in New Funding

Pennsylvania-Based Fintech Savana Scores $45 Million in New Funding
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Daily news, Funding
  • Savana, a fintech headquartered in Pennsylvania, raised $45 million in new funding.
  • The new capital consists of a combination of equity and debt. Canadian investor Georgian led the equity component of the funding.
  • Savana will use the funds to fuel the continued growth of its Digital Delivery Platform.

Pennsylvania-based fintech Savana has secured $45 million in new funding. The capital infusion includes $10 million in debt financing. The Series A round was led by Toronto, Canada-based investor Georgian, and also featured participation from Fiserv – which also announced that it would expand its reseller agreement with Savana. The company will use the funds to power the growth of its Digital Delivery Platform, boost go-to-market activities, and accelerate its new capabilities roadmap.

“The banking industry is going through an incredible transformation,” Savana CEO, founder, and Chairman Michael Sanchez said. “This funding round will help support the growth of our digital delivery platform to enable any bank, whether new or going through transformation of existing technology infrastructure, to speed time to market of new products and services, support continuous digital innovation, and drive significant operational efficiency.”

Savana’s Digital Delivery Platform offers channel and product agnostic customer engagement, account servicing, and automated bank operations. The platform works with both new Gen3 cores as well as traditional core banking systems to provide universal digital delivery across all bank-assisted and consumer-direct channels. API-based and cloud-native, Savana’s Digital Delivery Platform gives financial institutions the ability to automate servicing for bank and credit union teams, as well as for customer-originated requests. The result is faster time-to-market and a more friction-free and consistent experience for customers and members, regardless of channel.

Founded in 2009, Savana is headquartered in Malvern, Pennsylvania, a township 25 miles west of Philadelphia. Last fall, the fintech announced that Live Oak Bank had converted its legacy bank operations to Savana’s process orchestration platform. A digital, cloud-based bank that serves small business owners in 50 states, Live Oak Bank was the leading SBA and USDA lender by dollar volume in 2020. Excluding PPP funds, Live Oak Bank has total assets of more than $6.9 billion.

“Our goal was to re-define what banking could become when we embarked on our transformation journey,” Live Oak Chairman and CEO Chip Mahan said. “We knew that the only way to create a more compelling customer value proposition was to lead with technology that enabled innovation, convenience, and speed of delivery from the core to the customer. Savana is a key component of our end-to-end solution.”

Photo by 김 대정

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American Express Unveils Cross-Border Payments Tool for Businesses

American Express Unveils Cross-Border Payments Tool for Businesses
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, American Express, Daily news
  • American Express is launching American Express Global Pay, a cross-border payments tool for U.S. small businesses.
  • Businesses can use American Express Global Pay to pay suppliers in more than 40 countries and in 12 currencies.
  • American Express did not disclose exact fees, but said that it will display the fees when the business is creating the payment.

American Express is helping small businesses keep up with global competition with its launch of American Express Global Pay, a new cross-border payments tool for small businesses based in the U.S.

American Express Global Pay allows U.S. businesses to make domestic and international B2B payments to suppliers in more than 40 countries and in 12 currencies using the mobile-optimized website. Eligible customers can earn one Membership Rewards point for every $30 in equivalent foreign exchange payments.

“Businesses today start, grow and compete on a global scale,” said American Express Executive Vice President of Global Commercial Services Dean Henry. “Our U.S. Small Business Card Members told us they want an international payment solution focused on simplicity, convenience and the chance to earn rewards – so we built American Express Global Pay to enable these businesses to easily and effectively manage their B2B payments globally on a secure platform, backed by the trusted service and unique benefits of American Express Membership.”

Available to eligible U.S. American Express Small Business Card Members, American Express Global Pay enables users to access the cross-border tool in the same location they manage their American Express Business account and offers same-day delivery of funds in select countries.

While American Express has not disclosed exact fees, the company said that it will display the fees when the business is creating the payment. “In addition to these fees, we also make money from the purchase and sale of foreign currency,” American Express said. “Recipient banks or intermediary banks may charge their own fees, which can reduce the amount delivered to your recipient.”

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Matching Passions and Maximizing Engagement with Pinkaloo’s Modern Giving Technology

Matching Passions and Maximizing Engagement with Pinkaloo’s Modern Giving Technology
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni profile, Mergers & Acquisitions, Pinkaloo

Last week, we looked at Finovate alums that are leveraging their technologies to help employers help their employees achieve financial wellness and greater financial inclusion. Today we are highlighting a Finovate alum – and Best of Show winner – that is using its innovation to facilitate charitable giving in the workplace.

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland, Pinkaloo made its Finovate debut two years ago at FinovateFall. At the conference, the company demonstrated Modern Giving, its white-label charitable giving platform. The technology gives individuals a centralized account to use for their charitable giving, learn about other charities that match their values, and collaborate on philanthropic efforts with others. Modern Giving enables businesses to maximize engagement with their employees and customers, helping promote and drive charitable giving in their communities.

“Pinkaloo’s white-label Modern Giving offers an opportunity to attract new banking customers and members, as well as more deeply connect with your current customers around an area that they are deeply, deeply passionate about and truly care about strongly,” Pinkaloo founder and CEO Gideon Taub told our FinovateFall audience. “At the same time, your banking institution can make more money and hit your KPIs while directly powering the charitable giving of your customers and members.”

Left to right: Pinkaloo’s Daniel Gardner (COO) and Gideon Taub (CEO & Founder) delivering the company’s Best of Show winning demo at FinovateFall 2019.

The company’s demonstration was impressive enough to earn Pinkaloo a Best of Show award in its first Finovate appearance. And it looks as if our Finovate audience was not the only one paying attention to Pinkaloo’s achievements. Less than two years after its award-winning appearance on the Finovate stage, the company announced that it had agreed to be acquired by Ren (formerly RenPSG), a leading independent philanthropic solutions provider. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Founded in 1987 and headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana, Ren supports more than $20 billion in assets. The firm partners with financial services companies, nonprofits, and community organizations to offer online access for donors, advisors, and employees to manage a variety of planned gifts ranging from charitable trusts to endowments and private foundations.

“Today’s philanthropic ecosystem demands ongoing innovation in how we recruit, engage, and retain donors – all while also giving donors the best possible experience,” Taub said when the deal was announced. “Donors want to be involved and drive change via small and large contributions alike. They need a robust platform to do just that – and a RenPSG-Pinkaloo team uniquely answers that demand.”

The future of the Pinkaloo brand, post-acquisition, remains to be seen. Techincal.ly quoted Taub in March 2021 as indicating that a “new shared brand will emerge from our combined company” as the two entities “integrate and innovate.” With employees around the country, Pinkaloo said it will retain its “Baltimore presence” as its leadership and team are integrated into Ren. Taub praised Ren for “respecting and welcoming our ideas and processes,” adding that the alignment of visions between the two companies “makes for an easy transition.”

Pinkaloo was a finalist in the Reimagine Charitable Giving Challenge sponsored by the Better Giving Studio (BGS) of Giving By All, an initiative of the Philanthropic Partnerships team of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Previous to its acquisition by Ren, Pinkaloo had raised $1.8 million in funding from investors including Squadra Ventures, C5 Accelerate, TEDCO, Baltimore Angels, and PeaceTech Accelerator.

Photo by tyler hendy

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FinovateFall is Coming in Hot

FinovateFall is Coming in Hot
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: FinovateFall 2022

It’s August, which means that FinovateFall officially kicks off next month. The summer heat may have you in vacation mode, but in a matter of weeks it’ll be time to switch gears and get ready for our three-day event, taking place in New York City, September 12 through 14.

Book your spot at this year’s conference by August 12 to save $600. FinovateFall is celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, so you know it’s going to be big!

Because I know you’re busy submitting your final vacation request for the summer, I’ve distilled the agenda down to a few highlights.

Day 1

Demos
It wouldn’t be a Finovate event without the 7-minute demos. We’ll have three demo sessions on the first day of the event. Check out our list of who is demoing so far.

Panel: The Fintech Ecosystem & Strategic Partnerships – From Competition To Collaboration & Co-Creation
Moderated by American Banker’s Penny Crossman, this panel features Josh Williams, CBO & Head of Partnerships at Seattle Bank; Maria Gotsch, President and CEO at Partnership Fund for New York City; Mike Vostrizansky, Growth Equity Investor at FTV Capital; and Franklin Garrigues, Vice President, External Ecosystems at TD Bank Group.

Startup booster
The Startup Booster offers a chance for fintech founders to network with early stage fintech investors. This new session helps fintech founders gain insights and connections from investors through pre-booked one-to-one meetings. See if you qualify to participate in our Startup Booster program.

Day 2

More demos
We’re featuring four demo sessions on the second day of the conference and will announce the Best of Show winners at the end of the second day.

Keynote Address: What Wins Deals in Fintech – What Are The Essential Success Factors for Winning More Deals, Better Deals, Faster Deals?
Sam Kilmer, Managing Director at Cornerstone Advisors, will talk us through how to get deals done in fintech.

Power Panel: Why Reinventing Banking & Reimagining Customer Experience Is Vital For Banks To Compete In The New Normal
Oak HC/FT Co-Founder & Managing Partner Patricia Kemp will moderate this session, with participation from Beyond the Arc CEO Steven Ramirez and Quavo Fraud & Disputes SVP and Revenue Executive Brittany Usher.

Day 3

Analyst All Stars
Hear from Daniel Latimore, Chief Research Officer and Member of the Leadership Team at Celent; Alyson Clarke, Principal Analyst at Forrester; and Philip Benton, Senior Analyst of Financial Services at Omdia, on key opportunities and trends in the financial services space.

Fintech Fight Club Cage Match Edition
Watch three industry leaders duke it out over some of the most challenging questions facing financial services. This is not another panel, but a cage match of ideas and opinions. This year’s participants include Jason Henrichs, CEO of Alloy Labs; Mary Wisniewski, Editor of Bankrate; and Lindsay Davis, Head of Markets at Atomic FI.

Fireside Chat: Climate Change & Financial Services – An Existential Threat Or The Biggest Opportunity In A Generation?
I get to sit down with OakNorth President and COO Peter Grant to discuss how fintechs and financial services companies can find opportunities amidst a growing climate crisis.

There is, of course, much more to this year’s FinovateFall event. Check out the whole agenda, take a look at the speaker lineup, and be sure to register to be part of the 15th FinovateFall.

Photo by Dziana Hasanbekava

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Yext Announces Early Access Availability for its Summer ’22 Release

Yext Announces Early Access Availability for its Summer ’22 Release
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Yext
  • Yext announced the early access availability of its Summer ’22 release.
  • The New York company specializes in helping companies improve the way customers query their websites and apps for information about their businesses.
  • Yext made its Finovate debut in 2020 at FinovateFall.

Yext, a technology firm that leverages AI to collect and organize company information and provide it to customers, employees, and partners, announced that its Summer ’22 Release is now available for early access. The company announced last week that its solution now includes a number of new features that address a variety of business needs.

“Businesses today have to contend with an increasingly complex digital landscape,” Yext SVP of Product Management Maxwell Shaw said. “Instead of managing dozens of single-purpose applications, organizations should be empowered to consolidate essential functionality into one platform that can power both first and third-party experiences.”

The new features include:

  • Listing Updates: Provide greater visibility into engagement metrics and top keywords for enhanced search results. Improve status detail messages for better troubleshooting.
  • Custom Pages Development: Offers an improved, open architecture to enable external developers to create SEO-optimized landing pages at scale.
  • AI Data Cleaning. Applies a machine learning model for cleaning data, providing greater flexibility for developers who want to write complex functions or format data manually. Available currently as a Preview feature.
  • Fully Custom Search UI: Includes a new React component library which gives businesses new tools to build custom, AI-powered search experience frontends.
  • Solstice Algorithm Update: Leverages the Solstice algorithm update to enable administrators to optimize search experiences with Custom Phrases. Introduces Multi-Hop Relationship to support more complicated user queries.

Yext demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall 2020. The New York-based company showed how its technology helps streamline the way customers find answers to their queries when visiting a company’s website or app, using direct answers and calls-to-action. This helps boost conversion, lower operational costs, and generate new potential sources of customer intelligence to fuel future marketing efforts.

“Your marketing teams are spending a lot of money and effort driving customers to your site. We’re going to show you how to stop losing those customers because of your site experience,” Yext Head of Industry for Financial Services and Insurance Shane Closser explained during the company’s FinovateFall 2020 demo. “There’s no other solution in the market, especially within financial services, that you can deploy within six to eight weeks and see a demonstrable marketing ROI. Typically what we see is a 2x to 3x improvement in search experiences (for) users browsing your website.”

Founded in 2006, Yext began this year with a round of new platform additions for its Winter ’21 release, including listing modernization, consumer authorization, connector updates, and a feature called “Answers Headless React” which gives businesses new tools to build custom, AI-powered search experience frontends. This spring, the company announced a significant leadership transition that put board chair Michael Walrath in the CEO seat and named former Yext Chief Accounting Officer Darryl Bond as CFO. Yext also promoted Chief Strategy Officer Marc Ferrentino to the position of President and Chief Operating Officer.

With customers such as BBVA, Banner Bank, Farmers, and Citizens Financial, Yext is a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker YEXT. The company has a market capitalization of $550 million.

Photo by Pixabay

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