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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateEurope on March 15 digitally and in London on March 22 and 23, 2022. Register today and save your spot.
Persistent Systems and Mambu will demo an intuitive solution that gives customers the ability to manage multiple financial accounts and enables seamless transfers to and from accounts using different currencies.
Features
Consolidated account balances from multiple accounts and currencies
Transfer of funds from one currency account to another
Transfer to third party accounts
Why it’s great
Customers are seeking digital wallets to hold and spend in different currencies. The Persistent solution and Mambu integration enables multi-currency wallets, quickly and globally.
Presenters
Rowhit Bhosale, Digital Banking Specialist at Persistent Systems Bhosale is a digital banking specialist with over 10 years experience working in the financial services sector, evangelizing and supporting transformative initiatives for the global enterprises. LinkedIn
Harjit Kang, Account Executive at Mambu Focusing on supporting financial organisations to break away from monolithic managed services and move towards a best of breed composable ecosystem. Having been an early joiner at Mambu, Kang has real life use cases of such journeys. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateEurope on March 15 digitally and in London on March 22 and 23, 2022. Register today and save your spot.
mmob makes embedded finance easy. The company connects digital brands with financial products to deliver great customer experiences and promote innovation.
Features
An ecosystem of financial products ready to be embedded
Integration within hours with low-code requirements
An analytics dashboard for acquiring customers and driving sales
Why it’s great
mmob’s solution allows any business to embed financial products. Embedded finance is not a future concept, but an opportunity for the audience right now.
Presenters
Irfan Khan, CEO and Founder Khan is the CEO and Founder of mmob, using his 15 years of experience within fintech and traditional finance to impact the industry through embedded finance. LinkedIn
Jake Figg, Product Manager Figg is a Product Manager at mmob, helping to develop the embedded finance platform. He previously worked in product at a property investment platform. LinkedIn
The metaverse, decentralized finance (DeFi), and crypto are rising up to become some of the hottest themes in fintech this year, taking the place of AI, digitization, and customer experience.
So how should firms in the traditional finance (TradFi) realm prepare for the road ahead? We spoke with NimbusPlatform CEO Alex Lemberg to get his thoughts on the intersection of DeFi and TradFi.
What changes will we see in crypto and DeFi this year in comparison to years past?
Alex Lemberg: A month ago my answer to this question would have been slightly different than today. We still believe that a great deal of capital inflows will come more and more from financial and institutional organizations. This will cover the gambit from high net worth individuals to hedge funds and family / PE offices alike. We are now also witnessing major use cases related to regions in conflict and faced with sanctions. Also the advent of SWIFT as a new means of restrictions will make sovereign groups look closer to crypto markets as well in the future.
How can traditional financial institutions prepare themselves for these changes?
Lemberg: Financial institutions are extremely well prepared to handle both client activities in the space as well as their own. The main precursor is better understanding of filing and reporting requirements to regulators. I strongly believe that even though most of the innovations we are seeing do come from private markets, the largest impact will come from institutions beginning this year.
The U.S. recently issued a discussion paper on a government-issued CBDC. What do you envision the role of TradFi will be if the U.S. government issues a CBDC?
Lemberg: It is too early to discuss impact, as too many things are still in discussion regarding structure. It could eventually provide some upheavals in the payments space and user data controls which are both quite ripe for it.
Does the recent rise in DeFi indicate an end to paper and coin currency?
Lemberg: Absolutely not in the immediate future, nor do I believe would it be the case for quite some time. That said, let us remind ourselves that 90% of the world’s currency is digital and has been for some time. Yes, this will add to that digital transactional landscape, but certainly as an addition and not a replacement of any meaningful sort.
As part of Finovate’s continued celebration of Women’s History Month and female-led fintech, we are taking a moment to showcase the women whose companies demoed their latest innovations at our Finovate conferences last year.
Hanna Wu
CEO and Co-Founder, Amplify Life Insurance, FinovateFall. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, and founded in 2019, Amplify helps people build wealth through permanent life insurance.
Katherine Regnier
CEO and Founder, Coconut Software, FinovateSpring. Headquartered in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, and founded in 2007, Coconut Software provides a platform for financial institutions to help them improve customer digital and in-person engagement.
Janice Diner
CEO and Founder, Horizn, FinovateFall (Best of Show winner). Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and founded in 2011, Horizn helps banks accelerate digital banking knowledge, fluency, and adoption for both customers and employees.
Laurie Rowley
CEO, Icon Savings Plan, FinovateFall. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, and founded in 2019, Icon Savings Plan provides portable retirement savings plans, the next generation in workplace savings.
Ana Inés Echavarren
CEO, Infocorp, FinovateFall (Best of Show winner). Headquartered in Montevideo, Uruguay, and founded in 1994, Infocorp offers a smart digital platform that provides banks with fast and flexible solutions to deliver superior customer experiences.
Lindsay Holden
CEO, Long Game, FinovateFall (Best of Show winner). Headquartered in San Francisco, California, and founded in 2015, Long Game is a gamified finance app that helps banks acquire new customers and increase engagement with their current Millennial and Generation Z customers.
Ksenia Yudina
CEO, UNest, FinovateFall. Headquartered in Hollywood, California, and founded in 2020, UNest is the leading provider of financial planning, savings, and investment tools for parents to help their children reach their dreams.
Yamini Bhat
CEO and Co-Founder, Vymo, FinovateSpring, FinovateFall. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, and founded in 2013, Vymo offers a sales acceleration platform for financial services firms like Berkshire Hathaway, AXA, and BNP Paribas.
Acorns has raised $300 million in Series F funding.
The investment, led by private equity firm TPG, gives the company a valuation of $1.9 billion.
The fundraising comes after the company abandoned its plan to go public via a SPAC merger.
Savings and investing app Acorns has raised $300 million in Series F funding in a round led by TPG. The investment gives the company a valuation of $1.9 billion and comes in the wake of the company’s decision to abandon a plan to go public via a SPAC merger that could have delivered Acorns a valuation in the neighborhood of $2.2 billion.
Also participating in the round were BlackRock, Bain Capital Ventures, and Galaxy Digital among others. Acorns said that it plans to use the additional funding to expand its offerings (including cryptocurrrency exposure), to enhance the ability of users to personalize their portfolios, and to fuel acquisitions. The company has raised a total of $507 million in capital, according to Crunchbase.
The investment comes amid increasing concerns over the fate of high growth fintechs in the public markets of late. In an interview with CNBC, Acorns CEO Noah Kerner pointed to “very volatile” markets as one of the reasons his company retreated from the SPAC market, saying he feared Acorns would be treated the same as other high growth technology companies whose valuations were coming under critical scrutiny. Kerner took solace in the successful Series F round which he said reflected the determination of Acorns’ private investors to support growing companies, “but not grow-at-all costs companies.”
Founded in 2012 by father and son Walter and Jeffrey Cruttenden, Acorns offers a platform that leverages micro- and robo-investing to help individuals and families save and invest. With as little as $3 a month, users can choose from among a number of diversified, exchange-traded fund (ETF) based portfolios with different asset allocation strategies. Automatic portfolio rebalancing is provided, and users can set up automatic recurring investments starting at $5 a day, week, or month, to take advantage of the efficiencies of fractional investing and dollar cost averaging. Acorns also offers a Round-Ups feature that enables users to automatically invest the spare change from their everyday purchases when they link their credit or debit card to their Acorns account.
With more than 4.6 million paid subscribers on its platform, Acorns has $4.7 billion in assets under management as of May of last year according to its Form ADV. The company is headquartered in Irvine, California.
Identity verification specialist Onfido has teamed up with U.K.-based retail bank Tesco Bank to enhance security of Tesco’s Clubcard Pay+ new account opening process.
Tesco made its Clubcard Pay+ offering available to all of its 20 million Clubcard members, following a phased launch that began in March of last year.
Onfido made its Finovate debut in 2018.
A new partnership between global identity verification and authentication provider Onfido and Tesco Bank will help secure the application process for Tesco’s Clubcard Pay+ customers. The security upgrade comes as the bank makes the new offering available to all 20 million Clubcard members, following a successful phased launch of Clubcard Pay+ that began a year ago with a limited number of customers and Tesco colleagues.
With Clubcard Pay+, Clubcard members will be able to pay with their Clubcard and earn extra Tesco Clubcard points wherever they shop. Using the Tesco Bank mobile app, users can add funds to their Clubcard Pay+ account from any U.K. bank account as well as ringfence their grocery spend. Additional features of Clubcard Pay+ include the ability to round up purchases to the nearest pound and transfer the difference to their Round Up savings account.
Courtesy of its partnership with Onfido, Tesco will enable customers to apply for the new offering directly from the Tesco Bank mobile app. All that is required is that applicants take a photo of their government-issued ID and a selfie. Onfido’s technology ensures first that the identity document is genuine, and then matches the image on the document with the image on the selfie. This establishes both that the person presenting the ID is the actual owner of the document and that the individual is physically present. The technology helps customers establish their identity anywhere and at any time, easing and accelerating the account opening process.
“By combining decades of banking experience with advanced biometrics and AI technology, Tesco Bank is now able to accelerate the account opening process for new Clubcard Pay+ customers,” Onfido CEO Mike Tuchen explained. “The innovative technology provided by Onfido underpins a seamless and secure application experience that protects customers and provides them with a streamlined access to Clubcard Pay+.”
Founded in 1997, Tesco Bank is the product of a joint venture between the Royal Bank of Scotland and U.K.-based supermarket giant Tesco. With more than five million customer accounts and £5.7 billion in customer deposits, Tesco Bank offers a wide range of banking and insurance solutions for the retail market. In addition to its new Clubcard Pay+ offering, the institution began 2022 with major changes to its C-suite, appointing new interim Chief Risk Officer Debbie Walker and new interim Chief Insurance Officer, Tesco Bank and interim CEO, Tesco Underwriting Gary Duggan.
London-based Onfido entered 2022 in the wake of what the company referred to as a “breakthrough” 2021. The company grew revenues by 90% year-over-year to more than $100 million and reached year-over-year growth of 134% in the U.S. Further, the company expanded its workforce by 50% to 600 employees to better accommodate increased demand for its services, this includes reaching 150 million in digital identity checks.
“Our strong year reflects the continued shift towards the critical adoption of digital environments where businesses are adapting to meet their users online,” Tuchen said earlier this year. He pointed to the $56 billion in identity theft losses consumers endured in 2020, adding “a fast, simple, and secure online journey is imperative when it comes to building customer trust, which is why we are continuing to invest in our workforce, technology, research, and development.”
Onfido has raised more than $188 million in funding from investors including TPG Growth, Augmentum Fintech, and Salesforce Ventures.
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateEurope on March 15 digitally and live in London on March 22 and 23, 2022. Register today and save your spot.
Trulioo is the global identity verification leader, helping organizations mitigate risk, reduce fraud and scale compliance programs globally.
Features
Easy-to-do business verification
Simple verification of owner identities
World-class orchestration and workflow building
Why it’s great
See just how simple yet effective verification of businesses and people can be with the industry leader in global verification.
Presenters
Hal Lonas, CTO Lonas brings over 25 years of technology leadership and expertise in cloud security and machine learning to his role as Trulioo CTO. LinkedIn
Mikkel Skarnager, SVP Product Skarnager co-founded HelloFlow, the innovative no-code digital workflow and onboarding solution, now a part of Trulioo. He previously led Digital Transformation at Saxo Bank. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateEurope on March 15 digitally and live in London on March 22 and 23, 2022. Register today and save your spot.
SESAMm is a fintech company that specializes in big data and artificial intelligence. It provides analytics and investment signals by analyzing over 17 billion web articles and messages using NLP.
Features
Early detection of ESG risks and alpha signals
Extensive coverage of companies from large to very small
Timely insights updated daily to anticipate market reactions
Why it’s great
TextReveal® creates alpha-generating opportunities and systematically identifies ESG Risks, leading to better decision-making and better returns.
Presenter
Sylvain Forté, CEO and Co-Founder Forté is the CEO and Co-Founder of SESAMm. His passion for artificial intelligence and finance led him to create SESAMm in 2014. He holds a double degree in engineering from Germany and France. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateEurope on March 15 digitally and live in London on March 22 and 23, 2022. Register today and save your spot.
Secfense helps banks replace passwords with stronger and better authentication across the entire organization. 81% of attacks come from weak or stolen passwords. With Secfense, this problem is gone.
Features
MFA is great, but implementation is a nightmare. Secfense introduces MFA on any application:
zero integration costs
no burden to end-users
fast and automated way
Why it’s great
It is possible to launch and scale strong authentication within the entire organization with zero integration costs. No matter how big and complex the organization is – it can be protected entirely.
Presenters
Antoni Sikora, Head of Growth, Secfense Sikora has been with Secfense from its early days. His goal is to spread the good news that password days are over and that they can be replaced with a stronger and better alternative. LinkedIn
Patrycja Karwat, IT Security Specialist, BNP Paribas Poland Karwat has been working in cybersecurity for more than five years and has been involved in many cybersecurity projects in banking. LinkedIn
The following is a guest post from Annette Evans, VP of People and Culture, Global Processing Services
This month we at GPS are joining the #BreakTheBias campaign for International Women’s Day 2022 and adding our voice to encourage the fintech community to actively speak up about gender bias in the workplace and outside of it.
Assessing the current status of the fintech industry – given that progressive mind-sets and innovation are the lifeblood of our sector – you may assume fintechs would be pioneers of gender diversity.
Whilst progress is certainly being made, the reality is our sector still has a long way to go.
As the GPS-sponsored Diversity for Growth Report in partnership with Findexable uncovered recently, the representation of women in fintech is not as diverse as one might expect.
Two data points stood out to me in our survey. Firstly, there is a consensus that a lack of gender balance means men’s ideas dominate across every stage of the fintech value chain. Secondly, rapidly scaling companies are struggling to balance diversity commitments with the challenges of building teams in new regions at scale and speed.
On the positive side, fintech firms appear to unanimously agree that a commitment to being fully inclusive makes business sense. They understand that well-managed diverse groups outperform homogenous ones as diversity leads to a higher collective intelligence, better decision-making, and accelerated innovation.
Many also understand that it makes commercial sense as having more women in technical positions leads to more customers because it means creating products which are tailored with women in mind. Women understand how women think and what they need.
It seems strange, therefore, that there is still a gender diversity issue in fintech.
When I speak to leaders across our fast-growing global GPS ecosystem of fintechs, schemes, and banks, I nearly always hear the same thing. The bench of candidates being presented for senior or critical technical roles is rarely diverse, limiting hiring choices.
But recognizing this issue does not solve it. It simply pushes the challenge back to recruiters to try and resolve.
The challenge recruiters face is that the pool of fintech talent we are all recruiting from, whilst growing, is still small compared to other sectors.
We all continue to recruit from the same talent pool, which is problematic, not just from a gender diversity perspective but also for diversity as a whole in all its guises.
This is where I say we all need to apply the #BreakTheBias lens. For recruiters to be successful in providing a more diverse range of talent, leaders need to be more open-minded about where the talent may come from.
Change is happening, but real change takes time. Whilst diverse talent is entering the talent pool at the entry level, it will take time for them to gain their experience and work their way up to bring diversity to more senior levels.
In the immediate term, companies need to review their business culture and ask potentially tough questions around why so few women choose to work for their company. Do you create an environment where talent in all guises can shine? Or does it unconsciously favor those who already fit the mold? If someone thinks or acts differently, how are they treated? Businesses who fail to ask these questions risk losing out.
It is only by shining a mirror on ourselves that we can discover the knowledge we need to take action to try and address diversity challenges. We have to listen to be given the opportunity to change. Change can take a long time, but it will take even longer if it is delayed, ignored, or hidden.
As the organizers of this year’s International Women’s Day state, knowing that bias exists is not enough. Action is needed to level the playing field. Individually, we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions – all day, every day.
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateEurope on March 15 digitally and live in London on March 22 and 23, 2022. Register today and save your spot.
txtsmarter is a Communications Surveillance Service for messaging and social platforms to capture, encrypt, and archive previously inaccessible data for compliance requirements in the financial space.
Features
Only txtsmarter can archive iMessage, Android SMS/MMS, and WhatsApp
Solution operates in accordance with FINRA, SEC, FDIC, MiFID II, Dodd-Frank, and FCA regulations
Service is permission-based and adheres to privacy regulations
Why it’s great
API-driven Intelligent Communications Surveillance Service: Once activated, requires no user interaction, is OS and device-agnostic with full compliance coverage, and data is directed to eDiscovery platform.
Presenters
Nuri Otus, CEO and Founder Nuri Otus has built multiple sales organizations from nil to eight figures. He has 20+ years experience in strategic planning, sales, marketing, organizational development, product leadership, and market-making. LinkedIn
Alex Otus, Sr. Project Manager and Co-Founder
Alex Otus works with txtsmarter’s development team, as well as its Directors of Marketing and Sales, to develop new integrations, develop and maintain marketing strategy, and ensure client success. LinkedIn
Finovate Best of Show winner Zeta announced a new partnership with Mastercard.
The five-year collaboration included an investment of $30 million from Mastercard and other investors.
The funding gives Zeta a valuation of $1.5 billion.
Zeta, which won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateWest Digital 2020, has announced a five-year global partnership with Mastercard. The collaboration, which also featured an investment of $30 million from Mastercard and other investors, will enable the two companies to jointly launch credit cards via Zeta’s full stack, cloud-based, API-ready card processing platform. The two firms plan to issue between 30 and 40 million debit and credit cards over the course of the partnership and process $60 billion in total payment value.
“With Zeta’s next-gen credit card processing platform, we are fundamentally rewiring how issuers launch credit card programs by offering new paradigms over legacy mainframe systems,” Zeta co-founder and CEO Bhavin Turakhia said. He noted that Zeta enables issuers to increase their lending books, reduce costs with pay-as-you-go SaaS billing, improve customer engagement and satisfaction, and leverage the platform to launch new solutions and iterate faster.
The funding gives the San Francisco, California-based fintech a valuation of $1.5 billion, further solidifying the company’s unicorn status it achieved last May when Zeta scored $240 million in a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
Zeta’s flagship solution, Tachyon, is a modern credit processing stack that provides integrated credit and loan processing. The platform spans the entire credit card lifecycle from issuance, core, and payments to BNPL loans, fraud and risk monitoring, rewards, and more. Zeta’s APIs enable issuers to create new revenue lines as BIN/balance sheet sponsors by providing co-brands, fintechs, and affinity partners with a complete banking-as-a-service and embeddable banking platform. The company also provides a suite of managed services including servicing, collections, and more.
Mastercard EVO for Products and Innovation Sandeep Malhotra underscored the capabilities of Zeta’s platform. “By deploying Zeta’s credit processing stack, issuers will have an opportunity to grow their user base, drive higher usage, and enter new geographical markets while accelerating the cashless revolution around the world.”
The relationship between Zeta and Mastercard extends back to 2018, when Zeta entered Mastercard’s Start Path engagement program. More recently, Zeta joined the Mastercard Developers Partner Network, Engage, which will give the fintech access to the Mastercard network. This will enable Zeta to pre-integrate or bundle solutions such as Mastercard’s Digital First and Fintech Express progams that support customer KYC and verification operations, as well as instant digital card issuance and provisioning.
Founded in 2015, Zeta began this year with the announcement that its card processing business grew to more than 10 million cards with more than 300 million transactions a year globally.