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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
This year at FinovateSpring, we asked a handful of Finovate attendees, presenters, and demoing companies what ONE trend they think we should all be paying attention to in fintech over the next 12 months.
Will it be the return of cryptocurrencies or the ability to deliver better financial advice at scale? Embedded finance or the continued rise of personalization and niche banking? And what about macro-economic trends, and their impact on the ability of fintech startups to raise capital and fuel growth?
This is what they told us.
Be sure to check out the videos from our FinovateSpring demoing companies – including Best of Show winnersArray, Horizn, Keep Financial, FinGoal, QuickFi, and Spave – coming soon to our Finovate video archives.
National Australia Bank is launching its own BNPL tool called NAB Now Pay Later.
The bank’s BNPL offering will not charge late fees, interest, or account fees.
NAB expects to have a leg up on third party tools because, as NAB Group Executive Personal Banking Rachel Slade explained, “We know their banking and credit history and we’re assessing them based on our existing banking relationship.”
National Australia Bank is making its way into the buy now, pay later (BNPL) game. The bank announced this week that its customers can pre-register to use its BNPL tool, which is called NAB Now Pay Later.
NAB’s BNPL offering will enable customers to split online and in-person purchases of up to $1,000 into four payments. The bank will not charge late fees, interest, or account fees for the service.
NAB Group Executive Personal Banking Rachel Slade described NAB Now Pay Later as “safer” than competing third-party tools. “These are already our customers,” she explained. “We know their banking and credit history and we’re assessing them based on our existing banking relationship.”
From the consumer perspective, one of the biggest benefits of using a BNPL tool from their own bank is that the credit decisioning process is instant. “In the time it takes for a customer to go from the fitting room to the register, we’ve assessed their application, undertaken a credit check and opened an account with a virtual card so they’re ready to purchase,” said Slade.
Customers can pre-register today for NAB Now Pay Later, which is expected to launch in July.
Open banking expert Yapily and B2B BNPL player Two have paired up.
Norway-based Two will leverage Yapily data, eliminating the need for businesses to fill out forms when paying with BNPL.
“With Yapily and open banking, we can provide a safer, cheaper, and easier financial bridge for businesses that are ready to move forward,” said Two Head of Product Deane Barton.
Yapily, a fintech that seeks to help businesses enhance their offering by embedding open banking into their products and services, announced its newest plan to help small businesses succeed.
The U.K.-based company is joining forces with Norwegian BNPL player Two to fuel data for Two’s B2B BNPL tool. “We’re working with Two to ease the cash flow burden for SMEs by offering alternative ways to access credit with BNPL and open banking,” Yapily said in a blog post.
Small businesses making online purchases can use Two at checkout to pay 14 to 90 days after they make their purchase. To make the process easy on the business client, Two leverages Yapily data to retrieve the buyer’s account information, including their name and date of birth, to verify their identity and approve the purchase. Not only does it take place in real time, but the data integration also eliminates the need for businesses to fill out multiple forms.
“With Yapily and open banking, we can provide a safer, cheaper, and easier financial bridge for businesses that are ready to move forward,” said Two Head of Product Deane Barton. “The intersection between BNPL and open banking is an exciting place to be. Together, we are shaping the future of financial services as we know it.”
The small business BNPL technology serves as an alternative to a working capital loan for the business client. The tool also has the potential to benefit the merchant. According to Two, e-commerce platforms that offer Two as a payment method can see up to a 60% increase in average order value and a 20% rise in the percentage of site visitors that make a purchase.
Yapily has raised $18.4 million since it was founded in 2017. The company enables its clients to access data in 15 countries across Europe, and at more than 180 financial institutions. Stefano Vaccino is founder and CEO.
Through today’s partnership, Yapily’s open banking capabilities will initially be rolled out to Two customers across the U.K., with more European markets to follow. Two has raised $3 million since it was founded in 2020.
We’ve seen some bad news in the tech sector lately. YCombinator is asking its portfolio founders to “plan for the worst” and prepare for a downturn and Klarna is laying off 10% of its employees. Headlines such as, “Tech’s High-Flying Startup Scene Gets a Crushing Reality Check” aren’t helping consumer or investor sentiment, either. It can be tough to remain optimistic.
The good news is that the fintech industry is resilient. So amid the recent onslaught of disheartening news, here are four reasons you can be optimistic about fintech right now.
DeFi is promising
Fintech’s future is bright, and one shining light is decentralized finance (DeFi). It’s hard to know the exact implications DeFi will have on banks, fintechs, and other traditional financial (TradFi) organizations.
However, it’s clear that decentralizing traditional operations such as money transfers and loans will make a more efficient financial system. What’s more, DeFi is poised to help the 1.7 billion unbanked individuals across the globe benefit from financial services they’ve previously never had access to.
The best innovations are born when times get tough
It’s true that necessity is the mother of invention. Whether it’s an economic downturn, a pandemic, or a crisis in a different form, difficult times have proven to motivate people to develop creative solutions. This can be seen in countless examples from the COVID Recession of 2020. After the COVID pandemic hit, businesses were forced to figure out a way to convert their offering or service into the digital channel. In fact, many fintech companies grew while firms in other sectors were forced to make major cuts.
With new crises come new issues, and new problems that businesses and consumers need help solving. A bear market or an economic downturn would be no different; the best innovations are yet to come.
Still room for improvement
Because the fintech industry is relatively nascent, many of the problems the industry set out to solve still exist. In a piece we published earlier this month titled, “Has Fintech Failed?” we took a look at all of the ways fintech is failing to help consumers and businesses. As a few examples, underbanked populations are still lacking quality financial solutions, there are no open banking mandates in the U.S., fraud is rampant, and digital identity is flawed. The good news is that this leaves a lot of room for improvement, and therefore a lot of room for new competitors.
Fintech is here for a reason
When all is said and done, fintech is made to help individuals and businesses better manage their finances and more easily access financial services. Because money is not an optional tool for survival in the modern economy, financial services companies have a unique ability to help others through a recession or slowdown in their own industry. This pervasiveness makes for endless opportunities for banks, fintechs, and DeFi alike.
The fintech industry is not just here to serve financial services organizations, but rather to help people in this world that need financial services the most. That’s why we’re here, and it’s certainly something to be optimistic about.
Chimney announced partnerships with two banks, Farmers & Merchants Bank and Northwest Bank, that will deploy Chimney’s embeddable financial tools to boost customer engagement.
Formerly known as Signal Intent, Chimney won Best of Show at FinovateSpring in 2021.
Courtesy of this week’s agreements, Chimney now boasts a total of 15 bank partnerships.
In a bid to boost customer engagement, Farmers & Merchants Bank and Northwest Bank have teamed up with Chimney and will deploy the New York-based company’s financial calculators to help their customers make better decisions about their financial futures.
“In the last two years, we’ve seen greater investments into digital experiences that put customers first,” Chimney co-founder and CEO Matthew Covi said. “Consumers no longer want to be pushed products and services; they want experiences that add value to their everyday life and improve their financial health.”
Previously known as Signal Intent – and winning a Best of Show award in its Finovate debut a year ago at the all-digital edition of FinovateSpring 2021 – Chimney offers embeddable modern financial calculators that can be launched quickly and require no coding to set up and deploy. Chimney has developed more than 35 financial calculator templates, covering a variety of financial categories. Whether a business is looking for tools to better engage homebuyers, automobile shoppers, or simply consumers looking to improve their investment portfolios or savings and budgeting habits, Chimney provides organization with the kind of embedded turnkey digital experiences that help turn website visitors into customers.
“F&M Bank has grown slowly and safely since 1907, earning its reputation as ‘California’s Strongest,'” F&M Bank CEO and board chairman Daniel K. Walker said. “We have supported the communities we call home for more than 100 years, and we aim to continue that. By working with Chimney, we will build deeper relationships with customers by transforming and personalizing their banking experience with the help of meaningful data. We believe this will be incredibly valuable to our customers.”
F&M Bank serves customers in South California and has more than $11 billion in assets. Iowa-based Northwest Bank has 70,000 customers and $2.3 billion in assets.
Chimney began 2022 with a pre-seed investment from the ICBA ThinkTECH Accelerator and a seed investment from Anil D. Aggarwal, founder and chairman of Fintech Meetup, as well as Fin Venture Capital and Converge. The company rebranded as Chimney in February, in a shift that Covi said reflected a commitment to move beyond “providing outstanding products and services” and toward “delivering not just the products consumers want, but the experiences they expect.”
The company’s business customers will be able to browse the new digital store to find and integrate third party apps into their own operations.
Businesses will be able to develop and launch their own custom apps within their own company.
Ecommerce technology company Stripelaunched an offering that will help businesses tap the technology from third parties to enhance their own offerings. The new launch, the Stripe App Marketplace, is a digital store where businesses can browse popular third-party tools.
Integrating third party tools into their own solution enables businesses to customize Stripe. Adding multiple operations under their Stripe account also enables businesses to automatically share contextual information across apps.
As Mailchimp Chief Product and Design Officer Jon Fasoli explained, “Let’s say, for example, a business owner wants to automate a targeted message when a customer makes a purchase, sending them a specific discount offer to encourage repeat purchases. The Mailchimp app automatically syncs this customer’s information between Stripe and Mailchimp, streamlining their operations and saving them time.”
Mailchimp is one of more than 50 app providers that are launching in the Stripe App Marketplace. Others include DocuSign, Dropbox, Intercom, Mailchimp, Ramp, and Xero. Stripe plans to add apps from more third party providers in the future.
The marketplace isn’t just limited to third party providers. Businesses can enlist their own developers to create custom apps within the Stripe App Marketplace to use within their company.
”With Stripe Apps, businesses can customize Stripe with their SaaS tools to best serve their customers,” said Stripe Apps Head of Product Bowen Pan. “We’re excited for this new chapter and can’t wait to see the ingenuity of all the apps that developers will build in the months and years ahead.”
This is a sponsored post by Ann Kuelzow, Global Head of Financial Services at InterSystems.
Amid ongoing disruption, sudden market changes, and unforeseen circumstances, the ability to leverage live data and gain a 360-degree view of the enterprise is vital for financial services firms to gain much-needed resilience and agility. However, for many organizations, a number of data-related issues currently stand in their way.
Research from InterSystems has found that the biggest data challenge firms are facing is delayed access to data. This is followed by not being able to get data from all the required sources, and not getting it in the format needed. Meanwhile, line of business professionals also cite a reliance on IT teams to analyze and turn data into actionable insights as a key frustration.
Getting to the root cause
The majority of these concerns are likely to stem from organizations having amassed overly complex data infrastructures that rely on a disjointed set of production applications and data management technologies. This has resulted in the creation of a large number of data and application silos which make it difficult to obtain information and insights in a timely manner, and in a way that is easy to interpret and share. This is evidenced by 98% of respondents reporting that there are data and application silos within their organization.
The impact is significant, hindering their ability to gain accurate and current visibility of their distributed data assets to further vital initiatives such as business 360, improving enterprise risk and liquidity management, and data-driven decision-making, for example. Furthermore, more than a third of line of business professionals say they are basing decisions on assumptions rather than real-time information. Meanwhile, an overwhelming 86% of global financial services institutions lack confidence in using their data to drive decision-making.
This has major implications for both financial services organizations and their customers and requires solutions that enable firms to gain access to consistent, accurate, real-time data to enable them to leverage live data and power their critical business initiatives. This is where new, modern approaches to data management, including smart data fabrics, are primed to help.
More diverse data, for better insights
The smart data fabric, a new architectural approach, provides an overarching and nondisruptive layer that connects and accesses information from source systems on demand. It accesses and harmonizes data from existing systems and silos inside and outside the organization, ensuring that the information is both current and accurate. Together, this helps to eliminate delays which lead to errors, missed opportunities, and decisions based on stale or incomplete data.
With so much data at their disposal, using a smart data fabric allows financial services firms to incorporate both real-time event and transactional data along with historical data. Doing so provides business users with self-service analytics capabilities, enabling line of business professionals to make “in the moment” decisions. By incorporating more data from more diverse sources, firms can obtain a more complete and comprehensive view of the business and more insightful analytics.
This approach also addresses limitations of previous approaches, such as data lakes, data warehouses, static reports, and dashboards, while allowing firms to maximize their previous technology investments, rather than needing to “rip and replace.”
Empowered by a 360-degree view
Together, the capabilities provided by a smart data fabric will help firms overcome the issues they have identified by giving them access to a consistent, accurate, real-time view of their enterprise data assets. This will enable them to gain better insights and leverage live data to drive decision making.
With a truly comprehensive 360-degree view of the enterprise, including trading activity, customers, regions, risk, capital, and assets under management, firms will be better placed to respond to growth opportunities, address challenges in an agile manner, and make more informed, accurate business decisions.
By obtaining near real-time visibility across various departments and regions, firms will be able to improve various aspects of the business, from their understanding of market risk and risk reporting, to cash flow and regulatory compliance. Additionally, they will not only be able to gain a complete, 360-degree of the business, but will also be able to establish a comprehensive view of customer and institutional client activity to fuel a wide range of initiatives.
Data as a competitive differentiator
As financial services firms look to address their data challenges, a smart data fabric approach will help to ensure their concerns around outdated, inconsistent, and inaccurate data become a thing of the past. It will also help to restore confidence in using data to drive decision making and arm them with the critical insights needed to retain, support, and grow their client base, gain better visibility for risk management, and adapt to changes and disruptive events in the moment.
Amid ongoing disruption, sudden market changes, and unforeseen circumstances, this 360-degree view of the enterprise and ability to access and utilize real-time data will give them the resilience and agility needed to weather any storms that may arise and gain a true competitive advantage.
Modern card issuing platform Marqeta has come a long way since its Finovate debut in 2016. Back then, Marqeta was a six-year-old company, presenting the world’s first fully-documented, open API issuer processor platform, and emphasizing the company’s commitment to producing payments solutions that were “developer-friendly.” In fact, it was at Finovate’s developer conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley in 2016 that Marqeta led a presentation “Democratizing Issuer Payment Processing with Just-In-Time (JIT) Funding.”
In the years since then, the Oakland, California-based fintech has forged partnerships with fellow Finovate alum Token (2017); with CashFlows, Visa, and Mambu (2019), with Mastercard, Afterpay, and Uber (2020) and, last year, with companies including Bill.com, Coinbase, and Square. The company also has raised more than $530 million in funding, and launched as a public company a year ago, trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker MQ.
Most recently, Marqeta returned to the fintech headlines with news of its partnership with Alviere. An embedded finance platform, Alviere is currently in the process of expanding across Europe, where it plans to operate as an Electronic Money Institution and Principal Member Card Issuer in the region. By partnering with Marqeta, Alviere will be able to issue branded cards to customers in the European Economic Area (EEA) and the U.K.
“Access to financial services is continuing to evolve, and consumers are constantly opening up to new ways of moving, storing, spending and saving money,” Alviere co-founder and CEO Yuval Brisker said. “For brands in Europe, and around the world, providing financial services means uncovering vast untapped opportunities. Embedding financial products under their existing business, products, and to their existing customer base, has quickly emerged as an important strategy for growth and customer retention.”
Marqeta’s platform supports issuance of both physical and virtual payment cards, as well as tokenization, card management, and fulfillment. Processing and settlement are also included, along with authentication and 3DS (3-D secure authentication), just-in-time (JIT) funding, and dynamic spend controls. Marqeta’s reliance on open APIs and webhooks enables institutions to create customizable card experiences, and seamless interaction with other applications, while providing visibility and transparency via notifications and card monitoring.
Alviere hopes to take advantage of what Simon Torrance forecasts to be a $7.2 trillion global opportunity in embedded finance by 2030. To empower non-financial brands with the ability to offer financial products and solutions to their customers, Alviere offers a suite of solutions including branded bank accounts and cards, global payments, payment processing, as well as crypto wallets and exchanges. The New York-based company’s partnership news with Marqeta arrives in the wake of Alviere receiving an investment of $70 million and the appointment of its first Chief Financial Officer.
“Financial services open up a new avenue of consumer engagement for brands and allow them to deepen the consumer experience massively,” Marqeta Chief Operating Officer Vidya Peters said. “We’re excited that Alviere will be able to allow its brand customers to build in new payments experiences using our platform.”
The funding round featured the participation of U.K. pension fund giant Railpen. This week’s funding brings TransferMate’s total capital raised to $130 million and gives the company a valuation of more than $1 billion.
“By combining our technology and our global license network, we empower software providers, banks, and fintechs to deliver payments dramatically faster and cheaper than the traditional SWIFT system,” TransferMate co-founder and Executive Chairman Terry Clune said. “We will use this investment to continue to recruit senior financial talent who can help broaden our customer base.”
A global B2B payments infrastructure-as-a-service company, TransferMate specializes in streamlining, digitizing, and automating the manual operations required in order to facilitate the payments process. Used by banks, software companies, and fintechs alike, TransferMate’s embedded payments technology enables businesses to grow globally and pay locally. The company’s world-class compliance program, powered by a sizable portfolio of payment licences, features embedded security tools to defend against fraud and money laundering, and provides predictive risk assessments and real-time response solutions.
“Our commitment to deliver real-time transparency and speed when businesses are conducting cross border payments has resulted in TransferMate becoming the global B2B payment infrastructure of choice for the world’s leading procure-to-pay and spend management platforms,” TransferMate CEO and co-founder Sinead Fitzmaurice said. “This investment will allow us to accelerate our mission to drive innovation as businesses seek to digitize their B2B payments within the core software that they use to conduct their day-to-day activities.”
Founded in 2010 and headquartered in Kilkenny, Ireland TransferMate is a subsidiary of Clune Technology Group. Last fall, the company announced a partnership with ComplyAdvantage, a specialist in customer onboarding and transaction screening and monitoring.
Banking technology provider Temenos is launching ESG Investing-as-a-service.
The tool will help banks and wealth managers offer a digital experience that allows end customers to build an investment portfolio that reflects their values.
The move comes amid a time of major growth for ESG investing, which is expected to exceed $53 trillion by 2025.
ESG investing has been on the rise for the past couple of years. According to Bloomberg, money held in sustainable mutual funds and ESG-focused ETFs rose by 53% in 2021 to reach $2.7 trillion and ESG assets are on track to exceed $53 trillion by 2025. Banking software provider Temenos has taken note of this and is launching a new tool to help banks and wealth managers compete in the new environment.
Temenos’ ESG Investing-as-a-service, which can be run in the cloud or on-premise, combines Temenos’ market data management and digital capabilities such as filtering, scoring, and modeling techniques with external data feeds. The company generates easy-to-understand ratings to evaluate hundreds of ESG factors such as carbon footprint, water usage, diversity and gender equality, and executive compensation.
“At Temenos, our purpose is to power a world of banking that creates opportunities for everyone,” said Temenos Product Director of Wealth Alexandre Duret. “With the new ESG Investing service, we will help private banks and wealth managers to become compliant, and their customers invest with a purpose. Available as a service on our open platform for composable banking, it provides a fast track for our banking clients to launch innovative ESG investment products underpinned by robust, compliant processes, including new MiFID rules applicable in the EU from August 2022.”
Banks and wealth managers can leverage the tool to create ESG compliant products, with a lower cost of development. Ultimately, they can offer a digital experience that allows end customers to choose investments that they feel good about and build a portfolio that reflects their values.
Temenos serves 3,000+ banking and financial institutions worldwide representing 1.2 billion end customers. The Switzerland-based company has embedded sustainability practices into its own operations with ESG governance, reporting, and measurable targets. The Carbon Disclosure Project awarded Temenos an A- rating along with platinum recognition.
What a week it was in San Francisco, as FinovateSpring landed back in the tech capital of America!
And as much as this show felt familiar, being back in the same city again didn’t mean that we’re returned to 2019.
We come back to find a very different fintech ecosystem. There are surface-level similarities between where financial services is now and where it was in 2019, but the last few years have brought about dramatic changes all over the world. And more changes and challenges are coming. There are so many factors affecting everyday consumers and their finances that it’s hard to keep up with them all, but the short version is that consumers need help, and it’s up to us as an industry to provide the tools and technologies that people need to secure their financial futures.
The good news is that creativity in fintech abounds, and so do new ideas. Our attendees saw both on display over the three days, as innovative demoers and industry experts took to the stage to share their insights and vision for the future of fintech. And now it’s your chance to get a piece of the action, wherever you are in the world.
Auto loan refinance company Caribou received $115 million in Series C funding last week.
The company now boasts $190 million in total funding and touts a $1.1 billion valuation.
Caribou will use the funds to further invest in its platform, create new products, and expand its team.
Auto loan refinance company Caribouclosed on $115 million in an oversubscribed Series C funding round late last week. The investment brings the Washington, D.C.-based company’s total raised up to $190 million and boosts it into the fintech unicorn club with a valuation of $1.1 billion.
Goldman Sachs led the round, which drew contributions from new investors Innovius Capital and Harmonic. Existing investors, including Accomplice, CMFG Ventures, Curql Fund, Firebolt Ventures, Gaingels, Moderne Ventures, Motley Fool Ventures, and others also contributed.
Caribou will use today’s funding to further invest in its platform, create new products, and expand its team.
Formerly known as MotoRefi, Caribou was founded in 2016. The company helps its customers save an average of over $100 per month on their car payments by partnering with lenders and facilitating refinances. Caribou partnered with SoFi in April of last year to white-label its auto refinancing technology for SoFi’s 3.8 million customers. The company also offers a digital insurance marketplace that lets users browse quotes from a range of auto insurance providers.
“With the costs of car ownership soaring, and macroeconomic headwinds negatively impacting people’s finances, we believe that it’s more important than ever to help people save money,” said Innovius Capital CEO Justin Moore. “Caribou has established itself as the go-to platform to refinance their auto loan and we are excited for all that is to come.”
Over the past four years, Caribou has refinanced more than $1.5 billion in loans and scaled its workforce from 40 employees to 500. Kevin Bennett is CEO.
