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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
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.
For the first time since 2019, FinovateSpring was held before a live audience of more than 1,000 fintech professionals, analysts, entrepreneurs, and observers. The energy at the San Francisco Hilton in Union Square was palpable. Attendees arrived early and stayed late – even on a sunny Friday afternoon with the delights of the City by the Bay beckoning.
With the event concluded, what did we see, what did we learn, and what do we know now about the state of fintech that we did not know a week ago? Here are a few thoughts on where we are as an industry and where we might be going.
Embeddable You (Me and Everything Else)
If there was one theme that dominated an event as diverse in ideas as FinovateSpring it was: “embeddedness”. Companies are looking to leverage embedded finance to make banking and investing more streamlined and accessible. Futurists are predicting the rise of smart technologies – including intelligent toilets (!) – that would use embedded technology to help users better manage their physical wellness. The ability to bring both intelligence and connectedness to an ever-growing range of products and services is a trend that looks likely to dominate both technology in general and fintech in specific for years to come.
As more than one main stage presenter noted, the embedded finance revolution brings new heat to a handful of fintech trends that arguably were in danger of cooling down. On the demo side, FinovateSpring featured companies committed to helping banks and businesses alike maximize the embedded opportunity with solutions that will enable them to pursue new customers, launch new lines of business, and grow revenues in new ways.
Among our presentations were deep dives into who was likely to benefit the most from embracing embedded finance (Daniel Haisley of Apiture’s Embedded Banking – Debunking the Myths), as well as strategies that banks can follow in order to make money from the embedded finance phenomenon rather than be disrupted by it (Sam Kilmer of Cornerstone Advisors’ How Embedded Finance Can Generate Over $100 Billion in Revenue for Banks).
What We Know from Best of Show
Our FinovateSpring attendees awarded Best of Show trophies to six companies at this year’s event. Is there anything in their selections that we can use to learn more about what fintech enthusiasts are enthusiastic about when it comes to the latest in fintech innovation?
Every one of the six companies that won Best of Show honors last week was innovating in a different aspect of fintech. Embedded finance and data management (Array and FinGoal). Financial wellness and alternative financing (Spave and QuickFi). Innovations in employee training, education, and retention (Horizn and Keep Financial Technology). This year’s FinovateSpring Best of Show winners paint a picture of fintech innovation that is, in some ways, a little different from and more diverse than what we tend to see everyday in the fintech headlines.
Who’s right: the fintech “buzz” or the Finovate Best of Show winners? On one hand, continued carnage in the crypto space may help moderate the voices of digital asset partisans and steer their efforts toward more in-demand solutions. After all, as one clever fintech observer noted, no one believes that the president of El Salvador had planned to risk his country’s economy on a cryptocurrency that has behaved like an overvalued tech stock. On the other hand, the top picks from our attendees demonstrate a combination of perennial challenges – safe, affordable financing, data access and cleanliness, improving workplace conditions via training and incentives – as well as novel, innovative responses that have always been the hallmark of fintech in general and of Finovate in specific.
Crypto and the Metaverse: The Dogs That Didn’t Bark
Fintech analyst Glenn Sarvady of 154 Advisors made an insightful observation last week when he noted an absence of demoes looking to leverage the current buzz surrounding the metaverse. There was a keynote address from an actual Metaversean – namely, Deepanjan De, Head of Industry, Financial Services, with Meta (formerly Facebook). De discussed how financial services companies can leverage the “creator renaissance” to future-ready their businesses on the final day of FinovateSpring. But that presentation aside, there was precious little to be said about the metaverse even, as Sarvady pointed out, from companies that looked pretty obviously like they were based on the metaverse.
The relative absence of cryptocurrency-related conversations and live demonstrations was also noteworthy. Certainly recent events in the cryptocurrency world have dampened much of the enthusiasm for digital assets that has characterized the fintech conversation for the past few years. But with the exception of Cion Digital, Coinme, and Polymesh, the demoing companies of FinovateSpring 2022 were more focused on solutions to problems that, in some respects, have been long-standing ones. These include access to credit, access to data, access to wellness and financial self-improvement. If cryptocurrencies – and the metaverse for that matter- are able to respond to these core financial concerns, we yet may see a lasting, more enduring place for these technologies on the agendas of fintechs and financial services companies.
The Palmer Report: “Worry Cripples Activity”
Finovate VP (and host of the Finovate Podcast) Greg Palmer set the tone on the very first day of FinovateSpring with an inspiring address on worrying. Mindful of the difficult times we have been going through in recent years – from political polarization and the pandemic to the war in Ukraine and economic uncertainty around the globe – Palmer also urged us to be mindful of the dangers of living life in what amounts to a defensive crouch.
“The innovators and thought leaders you’re about to hear from aren’t worrying,” Palmer announced from the stage on the morning of Day One of FinovateSpring. “Well, they’re not just worrying. They’re building. They’re looking forward. They’re focused on what’s possible now that wasn’t possible before. And we all need to join them.”
Financial enablement platform Array announced a partnership with Jack Henry Associates to embed its credit management and identity protection solutions into Jack Henry’s Banno Digital Platform.
Among the institutions to adopt the technology is Washington-based Timberland Bank.
Array is a two-time Finovate Best of Show winner, earning its most recent award at FinovateSpring 2022 last week.
Array, a financial enablement platform that specializes in embeddable solutions for financial institutions, announced a partnership with fellow Finovate alum Jack Henry. The partnership will integrate Array’s credit management services, identity protection tools, and offer engine into Jack Henry’s Banno Digital Platform. The combination of technologies will give customers personalized credit and financial insights via their preferred financial institution partners.
“The financial services ecosystem exists to enable consumers to improve their financial health,” Array Director of Strategic Partnerships Jacob Bouer said. “This movement is both necessary and urgent. If financial institutions do not offer credit monitoring and identity protection products, consumers will find them elsewhere.”
By leveraging the Banno Digital Toolkit, Array has been able to help financial institutions better serve their customers and members by enabling them to securely access and monitor their credit directly from their bank or credit union. Not only does the integration give better service to customers, it also helps banks boost digital engagement, grow revenues, and expand opportunities for both new lending and credit. Among the institutions to take early advantage of Array’s technology is Timberland Bank, headquartered in Washington. The bank’s EVP and COO, Jonathan Fischer, praised the partnership for providing “the tools necessary to engage and educate customers on their credit health, which strengthens relationships and ultimately improves our community’s well-being.”
Among the solutions available to bank customers via the collaboration are customized credit score simulators, score factors, debt analysis, alerts, and more. The technology helps educate bank customers by giving them greater awareness of their credit information and history, and enables them to make better decisions on how to improve their financial lives.
Founded in 2019 and headquartered in New York, Array demoed its technology last week at FinovateSpring in San Francisco. At the conference, the company earned its second Best of Show award for its platform that democratizes data accessibility while simultaneously protecting privacy and ensuring consent. Martin Toha is founder and CEO.
Blockchain-driven financial platform BlockFi has partnered with purchase-based intelligence firm Cardlytics to launch BlockFi Offers.
The new rewards program will enable BlockFi cardholders to earn up to 10% crypto back on select purchases.
BlockFi Offers rewards can be accrued on top of BlockFi’s existing 1.5% crypto back on all purchases.
Earning crypto is about to get easier for users of BlockFi, a blockchain-driven financial platform. That’s because the New Jersey-based company is partnering with purchase-based intelligence firm Cardlytics to launch a new rewards program called BlockFi Offers.
The BlockFi Offers rewards program will allow BlockFi’s Rewards Visa cardholders to earn up to 10% crypto back when they use their card to make purchases at select brands and restaurants. Participating retailers include Shake Shack, H&M, Finish Line, Costco, Meta Quest, Jared, and more.
“Partnering with BlockFI to bridge the gap between crypto and traditional financial institutions to deliver a flexible solution for their customers to shop, pay and be rewarded is very exciting,” said Cardlytics FI EVP Farrell Hudzik. “As blockchain and digital currencies become more accepted, it is imperative that we facilitate universal redemption opportunities.”
The crypto rewards launching today can be earned on top of BlockFi’s 1.5% crypto back on every purchase. Cardlytics automatically adds the offers to each cardholder’s BlockFi account at the end of every month.
Founded in 2017, BlockFi seeks to bridge the gap between cryptocurrencies and traditional financial and wealth management products. Since launching its Rewards Visa credit card, BlockFi has added more than 85,000 cardholders and distributed more than $26 million in crypto rewards to those users.
BlockFi Offers will be available to all BlockFi Rewards cardholders before the end of this month.
Cardlytics, which has been facilitating rewards and offers since launching in 2008, also helps marketers gain insight into consumer behavior by analyzing where and when consumers spend their money. The company went public on the NASDAQ under the ticker CDLX in 2018 and has a current market capitalization of $986 million.
Unit received $100 million in Series C funding this week.
The funding boosts the company’s total investment to $170 million and brings its valuation to $1.2 billion.
The company, which will unveil its business credit card in the next few months, will use the investment to accelerate its product development and expand into credit offerings.
Banking-as-a-Service company Unit has reached unicorn status this week after a $100 million Series C round. The investment brings the California-based company’s valuation to $1.2 billion and boosts its total funding to $170 million.
Insight Partners led today’s round and existing investors Accel, Better Tomorrow Ventures, and Flourish Ventures also contributed, along with new investors Moving Capital and Stepstone.
“Unit has established itself as the leader in the banking-as-a-service space, backed by the overwhelming positive customer feedback and traction they have shown over the last year,” said Insight Partners Co-Founder and Managing Director Jeff Horing. “The company has been able to onboard high-growth tech companies of all sizes, from startups to publicly listed enterprises, with their superior technology, speed, and reliability. We are bullish on the future of embedded finance and see Unit as the platform of choice for companies big and small.”
Unit was founded in 2019 to help companies build banking products such as bank accounts, cards, payment products, and lending tools into their existing offering. The company will use today’s funding to accelerate product development and expand into credit offerings. Unit will launch its first business credit card product in the next few months and aims to add more credit products in the future.
“Credit is the clear next step of growth and we believe it will be the most important wave in financial services in the coming years,” said Unit CEO and Co-Founder Itai Damti. “With this new round of funding, Unit will be able to empower the companies best suited to offer credit with the technology and infrastructure to make that a reality.”
Unit has experienced impressive growth over the past year, riding the banking-as-a-service wave that has been sweeping fintech. The company added more than 140 customers over the past year and, over the last six months, Unit’s transaction value has grown 7x to $2.6 billion. Among the company’s clients are AngelList, HoneyBook, Homebase, Veryable, Roofstock, Hearth, and Benepass.
