This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.
Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
BankiFi launched its Open Cash Management platform this week.
The U.K.-based fintech built its latest offering to bring the benefits of both embedded banking and open banking to small and medium-sized businesses.
A “supercharged” version of BankiFi’s current platform, the new offering works alongside existing accounting systems and requires no tech integration.
The new Open Cash Management platform offered by BankiFi will provide SMEs with a fully embedded banking service that enables them to manage a wide variety of banking capabilities. Invoicing, payments, collections, accounting, cash forecasting, and working capital optimization insights are all available via the platform, which is built with small and medium-sized businesses in mind.
“The Open Cash Management Platform is a business banking super app,” BankiFi Chief Product Officer Marijke Koninckx said. “With Open Cash Management, banks can offer their small business customers a full embedded banking service, which revolves around procure to pay and order to cash workflows. Instead of offering a banking channel for simple tasks, such as checking account balances and making payments, banks can instead offer a rich and comprehensive service to their SMBs centered around a bank’s brand and digital channel.”
The new offering is described by the company as a “supercharged” version of its current service that combines the benefits of both embedded and open banking. The platform leverages a suite of pre-existing bank connectors that allow the solution to be onboarded without the hassles of technology integration. The solution also works alongside the company’s existing accounting system.
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Manchester, U.K., BankiFi began 2022 by helping TSB launch a new app, Revenu, that will enable small businesses to leverage SMS, WhatsApp, email, and QR codes to get paid faster. Also this year, BankiFi announced that it was joining the Visa Fintech Partner Connect program to help bring SME business banking solutions to Visa’s clients and partners.
BankiFi has raised $3.7 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The company includes Co-Operative Bank, Praetura Ventures, Tech Nation Fintech, the Nationwide Building Society, and the FIS FinTech Accelerator in Partnership with The Venture Center among its investors.
Visa is bringing its Installment Solution to Air Canada, allowing customers to pay for their qualifying purchases over time.
According to Visa’s recent survey, a third of Canadians interested in using installments plans would do so for travel and entertainment.
Air Canada will be among the first group of airlines to use Visa’s BNPL tool.
If you’re looking to fly now, pay later in the friendly Canadian skies, you’re in luck. Visaannounced this week it will collaborate with Air Canada to bring its Visa Installment Solution, a buy now, pay later (BNPL) solution to the Canadian airline.
Air Canada, Canada’s largest airline, will be among the first group of airlines to use Visa’s BNPL tool. The Visa Installment Solution offers eligible cardholders a more flexible way to pay for qualifying purchases. At checkout, customers can opt to convert their purchase into smaller, equal payments made over time. With Visa’s Installment Solution, the card issuer sets attributes such as the duration of the installment plan, interest, and fees.
Keith Wallis, senior director Distribution and Payments, Air Canada expects the additional payment option will elevate the customer experience. “Visa is one of the most trusted brands in Canada and their close collaboration with major Canadian financial institutions provides a unique opportunity to deliver an exceptional shopping experience to our mutual customers,” Wallis said.
According to Visa’s recent survey, a third of Canadians interested in using installments plans would do so for travel and entertainment. In fact, BNPL is on the rise across the board. A separate survey found that one third of shoppers use BNPL at least once a month, while 9% of consumers surveyed use it more than once a week.
Last August, Visa announced it was collaborating with payment solutions company i2c, which is using the Visa Installment Solution to launch BNPL capabilities for their participating issuers in North America. The partnership offers merchants an accelerated path to providing consumers with a BNPL option at checkout. Visa has also formed partnerships with Moneris, CIBC, Commerce Bank, Desjardins Group (Desjardins), Equinox Payments, ScotiaBank Versapay, HSBC, ANZ, GHL Systems Malaysia, Quest Payment Systems, Home Credit Bank, Russian Standard Bank, Cybersource, FIS, Global Payments, and TSYS to enable the Visa Installments Solution.
Biometric cybersecurity company iProov appointed Miguel Traquina as Chief Information Officer.
Traquina comes to iProov from Santander U.K., where he served as Chief Information Officer for Operations and Economic Crime.
The appointment was made possible by the $70 million investment iProov received earlier this year, which the company set aside to “rapidly build on its leadership in the United States.”
When it comes to C-level hires, there may be plenty of fish in the sea, but only a select few make the best catch. Biometric cybersecurity company iProov announced today it snagged a good one, landing Miguel Traquina as Chief Information Officer.
“I am delighted to welcome Miguel to iProov, as we further grow our business,” said iProov CEO Andrew Bud. “The scale and scope of our technology activities are expanding rapidly. Miguel’s extensive experience with financial technology for a major bank complements and extends our team’s outstanding capabilities, enabling us to innovate and operate on more fronts globally.”
Traquina comes to iProov from Santander U.K., where he served as Chief Information Officer for Operations and Economic Crime. He has also spent time working at Accenture, where he was responsible for financial services projects in Europe and Latin America.
Launched in 2013, iProov helps governments, banks, and businesses securely verify the identity of their customers. The company’s differentiating technologies include Liveness Assurance and Genuine Presence Assurance, which help organizations protect against spoof attacks, digital injection attacks, and deepfakes by ensuring that the online customer is the right person, a real person, and is authenticating right now. Among iProov’s clients are the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the U.K. Home Office, the U.K. National Health Service, GovTech Singapore, Rabobank, and ING.
Bringing Traquina on board is made possible by the $70 million private equity investment iProov closed in January. The company allocated the funds to “rapidly build on its leadership in the United States” as well as expand its international customer base, and grow its global partner network.
Plastiq launched its new Plastiq Pay solution this week.
The new offering will help small and medium-sized businesses better manage cash flow and automate payment processes.
Plastiq has raised more than $140 million in funding and includes Kleiner Perkins among its investors.
The new offering from San Francisco, California-based fintech Plastiq is designed to help small businesses better manage their cash flow at a time of exceptional inflationary pressure. Plastiq Pay, launched this week, enables companies to reclaim time spent managing vendor payments by hand, and makes it easier for SMEs to connect with affordable working capital.
“Plastiq Pay represents the biggest update to our product offering since our founding,” Plastiq Chief Operating Officer Stoyan Kenderov said. “It solves the mismatch of how businesses and suppliers want to make and receive payments by digitizing back office processes and providing instant access to short term financing to make money flow easier. It is the result of more than a decade of working with SMBs to help solve their biggest challenges and friction points.”
Plastiq Pay has five main capabilities to help small businesses become more efficient and better able to compete: invoice data capture, team workflows, automatic two-way sync, a cash flow dashboard, and short term financing options. Along with a mobile app that enables companies to manage payables remotely, these resources help small businesses automate all the critical components of the invoice receipt, payment approval routing, submission and bill reconciliation process.
“Plastiq’s payment automation features are built for CFOs that want to upskill their teams, get people out of mundane and manual work, focus on more meaningful finance function optimization, and reduce cos with a more elegant, modern payables platform,” Plastiq Chief Financial Officer Amir Jafari said.
Plastiq’s latest offering comes in the wake of a pair of partnerships forged in late 2021. In December, the company announced that it was working with PayGround to help patients manage and pay for healthcare expenses. The strategic partnership leverages Plastiq Connect APIs to enable PayGround to integrate Plastiq’s payment capabilities into PayGround’s mobile app. Patients can then create and use their PayGround Digital Wallet to pay the medical expenses using whatever payment method they prefer – from credit cards to HSAs to bank accounts. Last fall, Plastiq teamed up with community-powered corporate card Trust to help businesses pay for their marketing investments using their Trust cards.
‘Trust is focused on helping members of the Trust community make smarter marketing investments and increase cash flow,” Trust CEO James Borow said. “Paying for marketing investments through bank transfers (ACH) or check can restrict cash flow and constrain growth. Our partnership with Plastiq will help remove that hurdle.”
Founded in 2012, Plastiq has raised more than $140 million in funding from investors including Kleiner Perkins, B Capital Group, and Khosla Ventures.
Upcoming Webinar: AI in Fintech: Driving innovation, inclusion, and impact Date: Thursday, April 28, 2022 | Time: 02:00 PM British Summer Time
Artificial intelligence is more than just the latest buzzword – using AI has a meaningful impact on decisions across the entire customer lifecycle. From improving fraud detection and decisioning accuracy to optimizing pricing and managing bias, AI has a key role to play in changing the way financial services products are developed and offered to customers.
While 2021 was a record year for fintech merger and acquisition (M&A) activity, 2022 is off to a great start.
According to FT Partners, there were 1,485 M&A deals in the fintech space totaling $348.5 billion in 2021. As Square’s $29 billion takeover of Afterpay demonstrated, last year’s massive volume is partially thanks to multiple large deals.
This quarter, only eight of the 21 deals initiated disclosed financial details. Of those, the deal volume added up to almost $5 billion.
While experts predict that 2022 M&A activity will likely see momentum from 2021, there are two aspects to watch out for this year. First, we will not see as many SPACs as we saw last year. This may decrease the number of companies choosing to exit this year. Second, fintech valuations are deflating after experiencing huge rises over the course of the past two years. While the loss in value won’t directly impact the number of M&A deals, it will decrease the deal volume.
Secure document exchange and digital vault platform FutureVault announced a partnership with Envestnet | Yodlee.
FutureVault made its Finovate debut in 2016 at FinovateFall in New York.
FutureVault CEO Daniel Kenny took the helm of the Toronto, Ontario, Canada-based company in January.
Last week we announced that Envestnet | Yodlee had partnered with fellow Finovate alum Backbase to bring new data aggregation, account verification, and enriched transaction data insights to banks. This week we report that Envestnet | Yodlee has forged a collaboration with another Finovate alum, FutureVault.
The partnership will enable FutureVault to leverage Envestnet | Yodlee’s data aggregation and analytics platform to enhance its ability to serve its financial services and advisor clients with advanced document exchange solutions. FutureVault’s platform supports front, middle, and back-office teams with the tools they need to securely access, share, and manage sensitive information and documents. These tools give organizations the ability to aggregate and centralized financial documents and data from multiple institutions into FutureVault’s secure digital vault, provides financial planning professionals with a holistic view of client finances, and enables trusted advisors to build better relationships with their customers.
“The integration with Envestment | Yodlee is another milestone in our aggressive 2022 technology roadmap,” FutureVault CEO Daniel Kenny said. “This integration is driven by our plan to continue building the most comprehensive digital vault solution and will contribute toward our strategic platform vision that brings together Documents, Data, and Digital Assets.”
FutureVault put the partnership in the context of the company’s Personal Life Management initiative. This thesis is based on aggregating financial documents and data in a secure location while giving financial planners and advisors the ability to leverage FutureVault’s technology to provide a “family office” type of service.
“This integration with Envestnet | Yodlee is not only driven by improving the relationship advisors will have with their clients,” FutureVault co-founder and Executive Chairman G. Scott Paterson said. “It is about ultimately providing clients with access to the best tools to manage their financial lives that extend beyond the advisor.”
FutureVault made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2016 in New York. Recently, the company has partnered with companies like PureFacts to facilitate secure and automatic delivery of financial statements, and with enterprise wealth management platform d1g1t. With this collaboration, FutureVault’s secure document exchange technology will help the d1g1t better manage its compliance, document retention, and document sharing responsibilities.
“We know that there is a significant need across the industry for all-encompassing solutions,” Kenny said when the strategic partnership with d1g1t was announced in late March. “By partnering with the exceptional team at d1g1t, we can bring that type of integrated solution to the market that addresses the many workflow challenges firms and advisors face, while elevating the experience for both clients and advisors.”
Founded in 2014, FutureVault has raised $2.3 million in funding. Current CEO Daniel Kenny was appointed to the position in January of this year after serving briefly as the company’s Chief Operating Officer. Previously, Kenny was an executive at HSBC for more than 22 years.
Swedish B2B financing company Qred launched a B2B payments platform for its business users.
The new tool enables users to pay invoices using their Qred Visa credit card from within the Qred mobile app.
Helping to fuel this new tool is $11 million (€10 million) in funding from existing investor Nordic Capital. The investment brings Qred’s total funding to $70.7 million.
Small business financing company Qred is making its platform a bit more powerful for its small business clients this week. The Sweden-based company unveiled a new B2B payments platform that will enable business users to pay any invoice using their Qred Visa card from within the Qred app, benefitting from Qred’s 45-day interest-free liquidity.
Founded in 2015, Qred offers an alternative lending platform for small businesses that makes the funding process simple, digital, and fast. The company helps businesses receive the working capital they need within 24 hours of applying.
The Qred Visa credit card is free for small business users and offers 1% cash back with every purchase. Businesses can use the Qred card and mobile app to pay invoices from billers that use Sweden’s clearing system, Bankgiro, even if the biller doesn’t accept card payments. And users can postpone their payment, interest-free for up to 45 days.
For now, Qred’s invoice payment tool is free for businesses when they use their Qred Visa card. However, starting in August of this year, there will be a 2.5% transaction fee.
“Tens of billions of dollars worth of invoices are issued each year and for most businesses the only way to pay them is to use cash directly from their account since most suppliers or vendors don’t accept card payments,” said Qred CEO Emil Sunvisson. “With our new payment platform, small businesses can use their Qred Visa to pay any invoice they have with much more flexible payment terms. This frees up much needed, short-term cash which is the life blood of most entrepreneurs.”
Qred also announced today it has received $11 million (€10 million) from existing investor Nordic Capital. This brings the company’s total funding to $70.7 million. The company will use the investment to “continue to deliver innovative products and services to small businesses throughout Northern Europe.”
TD Auto Finance is enabling real-time payments for its network of auto dealers.
The move will fund dealers throughout the day as new contracts are booked.
TD Auto Finance is leveraging The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments (RTP) network to fund dealers in real time.
TD Bankannounced its TD Auto Finance division has enabled real-time payments for its network of auto dealers this week.
To facilitate the flow of real-time payments, TD Auto Finance will no longer send ACH batch payments overnight. Instead, the finance arm is funding dealers throughout the day as contracts are booked. As a result, dealers will have better visibility into their finances and will see improved cash flow management.
“Our goal with real-time payments is to make life easier for dealers by eliminating the need to wait for payments overnight and giving them maximum confidence in their cash position and ability to operate their business,” said Andrew Stuart, President and CEO of TD Auto Finance.
The move makes TD Auto Finance the first indirect auto lender to offer the ability to send real-time payments nationwide. We’re proud to be the first major auto lender to introduce this capability for dealers and we believe our focus on driving payments innovation is critical to deepening our dealer relationships,” added Stuart.
To help auto dealers make payments in real time, TD is leveraging The Clearing House’s Real Time Payments (RTP) network, which it first connected to in November of 2019. Since that time, TD has seen increased interest for real-time payments. To meet this demand, TD said it will “continue to invest in this capability.”
TD Auto Finance piloted this move last October with a small group of car dealers. Today’s real-time payments capabilities will be available in phases over the coming weeks to dealers whose banks use The Clearing House’s RTP network.
One of the many fascinating conversations I enjoyed at FinovateEurope last week was my chat with Trulioo Chief Technology Officer Hal Lonas. Among the topics we discussed was the way evolving regulations were impacting the business of keeping financial services companies compliant with regard to KYC and AML requirements.
This week we learned that the European parliament is moving closer to embracing another measure to tighten rules with regard to financial services – in this case, cryptocurrency transactions. Members of two parliamentary committees this week approved new rules to ban anonymous cryptocurrency transactions as part of an overall European Union-wide anti-money laundering campaign.
The new regulations will require all transfers of cryptocurrencies, regardless of size, to include information on the source and the beneficiary of the assets involved. This information, which will be made available to regulators, would cover transactions from wallet addresses that are held by private users (“unhosted wallets”). The new requirements, however, would not apply to P2P transfers made without an intervening provider.
“Illicit flows in crypto assets move largely undetected across Europe and the world,” Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs co-rapporteur Ernest Urtasun explained. “(This) makes them an ideal instrument for ensuring anonymity.”
The new policy has its critics. Supporters such as Urtasun have pointed to the disclosures of the Panama and Pandora Papers as good reasons for bringing additional scrutiny to cryptocurrency transactions. But critics such as Paul Grewal, Chief Legal Officer with Coinbase, suggest that the new regulations are based on a false premise: that cryptocurrencies represent a significant vehicle for illegal activity.
“The truth is that digital assets are in generally a markedly inferior way for criminals to hide their illicit financial activity,” Grewal wrote in a blog post earlier this week. “That’s why, according to the best research available, by far the most popular way to hide illicit financial activity remains cash.”
By contrast, Grewal noted “digital assets and the immutable nature of their blockchain technology actually enhances the ability to detect and deter illicit activity.”
The proposed legislation will now be voted on by the full parliament and national ministers.
April is Financial Literacy Month. Be sure to check out our themed coverage of financial literacy both on the Finovate blog in general and here in Finovate Global in specific all month long.
To this end, we found news of the Memorandum of Understanding recently signed by the Abu Dhabi Global Market Academy (ADGMA) and the National University of Singapore’s Asian Institute of Digital Finance (AIDF) to be especially noteworthy.
The goal of the pact is to help bring thought leadership to the fintech community and bolster the fintech ecosystem in Abu Dhabi “and beyond.” There are three main pillars to the agreement: research and publication, technology development, and knowledge dissemination – each of which contributes differently toward the goal of facilitating knowledge exchange across regions and encouraging research collaboration.
What’s interesting about this initiative is the way it supports financial literacy and education among professionals already in the field of financial services. “We, at AIDF, look forward to the close collaborations with ADGMA in research advancements, the education of skilled professionals, and nurturing of FinTech entrepreneurs,” Duan Jin-Chuan, Executive Director of the Asian Institute of Digital Finance at the National University of Singapore, said. “We see these activities as a vital component in pursing a better future for our countries.”
The ADGM Academy, headquartered in Abu Dhabi, UAE, was established in 2018 to build expertise, financial education, and literacy in the region. The Academy is part of the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM), an international financial center, and features coursework areas including banking and finance, digital and fintech, and entrepreneurship, as well as national, personal, and professional development.
FinovateEurope ended just a few days ago. Of all our events, our London conference often provides the best showcase for international fintech innovation – especially from developing economies and parts of the world not always considered to be fintech hubs in spite of their economies.
Below is a quick run-down of companies in this category that demoed their latest solutions at FinovateEurope last month.
Zilvinas Bareisis is Head of Retail Banking at Celent. Based in London, Bareisis specializes in consumer and card-based payments, as well as identity and authentication. He is especially interested in payments innovation, and what he calls “the perfect storm” of competitive, regulatory, and technology developments that are shaping the present and future of consumer payments.
Embracing the open ecosystem is a really big topic right now – from open banking to embedded finance. How do you innovate around products and how do you differentiate yourself? Banks are starting to talk about their purpose, how they embrace different communities they may be serving, and how they tailor their products to those communities. Even things like crypto (are important). Twelve months ago I didn’t think retail banks should be interested in crypto, and here we are talking about that now.
On the role of enabling technologies in financial services
You really need to have the right set of technology tools – and those tools are diversifying. It’s easier now to have composable building blocks that might be coming from different parties, platforms like low code and no code that do not require much IT capability so that business users can start developing applications and, of course, the cloud. A lot of our clients are looking into how to migrate to the cloud and how fast.
On the promise and potential of embedded finance
At the heart of embedded finance is the idea that customers are out there, doing their own things and, as they do those things, they realize that there might be a need for a financial services product, which is something they can acquire right there and then. The idea itself is not new; you and I have probably bought car insurance at the same time we bought our car at the dealership. What’s changing is that there are nice, big, sophisticated digital experiences, first of all, and it’s easier now for financial services to plug into those experiences because now the technology is catching up.
Check out the rest of our conversation with Zilvinas Bareisis from FinovateEurope 2022 on what’s next in the “new normal” in fintech and financial services.
Cryptocurrency platform Blockchain.com is now valued at $14 billion.
The updated valuation, which is almost 3x higher than its valuation a year ago, comes after Blockchain.com closed a Series D funding round.
Blockchain.com’s 37 million users have opened 82 million crypto wallets and have made transactions worth over $1 trillion to-date.
According to its most recent valuation, cryptocurrency platform Blockchain.com is now worth $14 billion. This updated value comes after the U.K.-based company closed a Series D funding round this week. The amount of the new round, which was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, was undisclosed. Blockchain.com’s funding now totals $490 million.
The new $14 billion valuation is up almost 3x from $5.2 billion, the valuation Blockchain received at its Series C financing round of $300 million in March of last year. As far as valuations in the crypto space, $14 billion is a lot, but it doesn’t place Blockchain.com at the top. Competitors Coinbase and Revolut are valued at $56 billion and $33 billion, respectively.
Blockchain.com was founded in 2011 and serves as a platform for users to buy, sell, hold, and trade cryptocurrencies. With 82 million crypto wallets, the company’s 37 million users have made transactions worth over $1 trillion to-date.
Blockchain.com has five acquisitions under its belt, including ZeroBlock, RTBTC.com, AiX, SeSocio.com, and Altonomy. The most recent buy was the OTC trading and executions businessof Singapore-based Altonomy. Blockchain.com anticipates the purchase will spur the growth of its institutional business.
As for what’s next for Blockchain.com, the company is currently exploring the launch of its own NFT marketplace. The new platform, which is currently in beta, will enable users to browse, buy, sell, and store NFTs without leaving their Blockchain.com wallet.
