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
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateFall in New York on September 9 and 10. Register today using this link and save 20%.
Accelera Payments
Accelera Payments is a comprehensive payments stack. The flagship product Comply is a plug-n-play utility that integrates with existing payment infrastructures, ensuring ISO compliance with minimal disruption.
Features
Achieves ISO 20022 compliance at lightning speed
Provides multiple financial message formats
Offers ISO message validator
Who’s it for?
Small-and-medium size banks, credit unions, and financial institutions.
CardLift
CardLift keeps banks’ credit cards top-of-wallet by enabling customers to effortlessly switch payments to CardLift’s partner cards while showcasing card benefits at every online checkout.
Features
Transfers spending to the partner card seamlessly through CardLift’s auto card switching
Boosts online card usage through one-tap checkout
Drives consumer loyalty through enhanced cash back rewards
Who’s it for?
Banks, credit unions, and card issuers looking to increase card usage and transaction volumes.
CD Valet
CD Valet empowers financial institutions to compete online in the CD market with proven, targeted digital marketing solutions and online account opening.
Features
Provides CD digital account opening services
Delivers new digital account opening for IRA CDs
Offers featured CD listings, lead generation services, and lead qualification based on the user’s criteria
Who’s it for?
Financial institutions offering competitively priced CDs and IRA CDs.
Credit Mountain
The Warm Decline by Credit Mountain reinvents the decline experience for rejected borrowers and saves lenders money at the same time.
Features
Automates adverse action notices
Provides a personalized path to “yes”
Monitors, tracks, and re-engages declined borrowers
Who’s it for?
Credit unions.
illuminote
DARCi by illuminote digitally controls assent by securely registering, authenticating, and protecting legal records to guard companies from fraud, litigation, human error, and liability.
Features
Offers workflow optimization and protection
Improves client retention and business development
Delivers digital transformation and regulatory compliance
Who’s it for?
Financial institutions (banks and credit unions) and financial advisory firms.
NayaOne
Compass by NayaOne, the default industry utility, quickly and simply connects banks with vendors, reducing cost and complexity associated with discovering and sourcing partners and customers.
Features
Showcases tech to 100+ banks ready to buy
Investigates what peers are using
Accelerates vendor selection process
Improves third-party risk management
Who’s it for?
Banks, credit unions, and tech vendors.
Sei
Sei builds AI agents for risk and compliance teams to automate complex tasks. Sei’s customers include banks, publicly listed companies, and fintechs across the U.S., U.K., Europe, and APAC.
Features
Sei automates work for compliance and risk teams including marketing review, customer support QA, TPRM, etc., allowing for:
Faster growth
Real time compliance at scale
Reduced cost by 60%
Who’s it for?
Banks, credit unions, fintechs, and payment providers.
2024 marks the 90th anniversary of the Federal Credit Union Act. Signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the summer of 1934, the Federal Credit Union Act authorized the formation of federally chartered credit unions in every state.
How are credit unions faring 90 years later? Today, total assets in federally insured credit unions sit at more than $2.3 trillion as of the first quarter of this year. That figure represents a year-over-year increase of 4.4%. Membership in federally insured credit unions has also picked up year-over-year, with membership topping the 140 million mark in Q1 of 2024.
But credit unions face significant challenges. Digital transformation is neither cheap nor easy. Competition with larger financial institutions–as well as Big Tech and Big Retail–has forced credit unions to seek new ways to better serve and engage their members.
FinovateFall 2024’sCredit Union Spotlight, presented by Curql, is designed to help credit unions overcome these challenges, offer new innovative solutions, and grow their membership ranks. The session, Wednesday afternoon, on September 11, will enable credit union executives to connect and speak intimately with a small, curated group of fintechs who are specifically focused on serving credit unions. The session will feature a series of rotating roundtables to give participants an ideal opportunity to interact, ask questions, and share best practices.
“It’s an exciting time to be a credit union looking at fintech,” said Greg Palmer, host of Finovate. “More and more innovators are creating solutions with credit unions in mind, and we’re delighted to be able to showcase some of those solutions to a room full of people who can start using them right away.”
Curious? Here are three reasons why you should attend our Credit Union Spotlight if you care about the future of credit unions in America.
Transformation
Digital transformation is reshaping businesses across industries. Credit unions are no exception. Moreover, many of the forces that are driving digital transformation in other industries are especially relevant to credit unions. Digital technology enables credit unions to offer more personalized services and better engage members. It also enhances processes to ensure that members’ data is secure, making the organization more efficient and capable of serving their current members more comprehensively.
And while every credit union is unique, there are commonalities when it comes to the digital transformation journey. Here, the lessons of those institutions that have already undergone this process can be invaluable for those institutions that have just begun–let alone those credit unions encountering challenges on their path to greater digitalization.
Competition
The opportunity to grow, accelerated by digital transformation, also means that credit unions are facing and will continue to face greater competition than ever before. Personalization makes it easy for larger financial institutions to customize their offerings and compete with credit unions when it comes to deeply engaging with individual needs and preferences. Larger financial institutions also often have resources to take advantage of technologies faster and more thoroughly than most credit unions. This can make it easier for these bigger rivals to offer innovations to their customers before credit unions can provide similar solutions for their members.
This is to say nothing of the non-financial entities in Big Tech and Big Retail, for example, who, through innovations such as embedded finance, have begun to offer a variety of financial and banking services to their customers.
Learning more about ever-evolving member preferences is an important initial step. But following up with new initiatives, new services, and new solutions can be a key hurdle early in the process. To this end, credit union professionals owe it to themselves to learn and share strategies that have helped credit unions of all sizes better understand their members, deploy new products that are eagerly adopted, and boost engagement.
Collaboration
One of the ways that credit unions are dealing with the challenge of competition–with Big Banks, Big Tech, Big Retail–is by embracing opportunities to collaborate with innovative fintechs, many of whom specialize in serving the credit union industry. This is important. For credit unions looking for partners to help them improve back-office operations, offer a new rewards program, or fortify their defenses against fraud, teaming up with fintechs that have demonstrated interest and experience in partnerships with credit unions can make the difference between achieving digital transformation goals that may have seemed unreachable–and falling short.
To facilitate these kinds of partnerships, credit union professionals need a forum that focuses exclusively on credit unions and the fintechs that serve them. Our Credit Union Spotlight, taking place next month at FinovateFall in New York, is that forum. To learn more about joining us and participating in the session, email our registration coordinator at ella.burton@informa.com.
Shift4 is acquiring gift card and loyalty solutions Givex for an undisclosed amount.
The deal will expand Shift4’s client base by 130,000+ locations across 100+ countries.
The acquisition is expected to close in Q4 2024, and follows Shift4’s recent acquisitions of Revel Systems and Vectron Systems.
Payments processing technology company Shift4 announced plans to acquire gift card and loyalty solutions company Givex. Financial terms of the deal were undisclosed.
Givex was founded in 1999 to help businesses launch and manage gift card and e-gift solutions, loyalty programs, point-of-sale (POS) systems, and more. The company’s clients include Nike, Marriott, 7/11, Wendy’s, Best Western, Texas Roadhouse, and others.
Founded in 1994, Shift4 offers a range of in-person and online payments solutions, including physical point-of-sale, mobile ordering, and contactless payment solutions. The Pennsylvania-based company also offers fraud prevention and business intelligence tools, as well as a gift card platform to help clients manage, sell, and redeem gift cards. “By combining Shift4’s end-to-end payment solution with our value-added engagement services, we can deliver an unparalleled package to both of our customer bases,” said Givex CEO Don Gray.
Once it is finalized, today’s deal will offer Shift4 an additional 130,000+ client locations across more than 100 countries where Givex’s solutions are implemented.
“Givex has a considerable footprint around the world which will dramatically increase Shift4’s overall customer base,” said Shift4 President Taylor Lauber. “At the same time, their gift card and loyalty solutions are second to none and will add significant value for our current customers, creating stickier relationships and enhancing our overall value proposition. Similar to other deals we have recently completed, this acquisition aligns perfectly with how we like to deploy capital – adding blue-chip merchants at a low customer acquisition cost while delivering additional benefits to our customer base.”
As the -as-a-service economy in fintech picks up, companies have been increasingly integrating digital gift cards into their existing apps apps, making them more accessible and easier to manage. The rise of e-gift cards has also been fueled by the post-2020 increase in online shopping, with consumers opting for digital solutions that can be easily redeemed at a wide range of retailers, both online and in-store. Financial services platforms also leverage gift cards to promote customer engagement with personalized rewards and loyalty programs that drive consumer spending.
Moving forward, as firms continue to leverage consumer data we will likely see further data-driven marketing and personalization efforts that will allow companies to tailor gift card offerings to consumer preferences and enhance the user experience.
The deal, which is subject to closing conditions, is expected to be completed in the fourth quarter of this year.
Shift4 has made a total of 14 acquisitions, including Revel Systems and Vectron Systems earlier this summer. The company went public in 2020 under the ticker symbol FOUR on the New York Stock Exchange and has a current market capitalization of $7 billion.
Headquartered in Littleton, Colorado, CPI Card Group offers a range of credit, debit, and prepaid solutions, as well as complimentary digital solutions and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) instant issuance. The company’s partnership with Rippleshot will enable its customers to take advantage of the fraud prevention firm’s technology that leverages AI, machine learning automation, and predictive analytics to identify and stop credit and debit card fraud.
“Our partnership with CPI furthers our commitment to collaborating and helping financial institutions better protect their revenue and their account holders,” Rippleshot Co-Founder and CEO Canh Tran said. “Keeping up with evolving fraud trends is complex, labor intensive, and impossible to tackle alone. We’re excited to team up with CPI and their partners to help financial institutions proactively transform fraud prevention with a data-driven fraud management approach.”
Rippleshot’s fraud analytics platform spots fraud patterns and creates intelligence and rules to proactively identify emerging fraud risks and stop fraud incidents before they take place. With the backing of an expansive data consortium of 5,000+ financial institutions, the platform also enables banks and financial institutions to block merchants deemed “high risk” and limit the potential damage from major data breaches.
Rippleshot clients using the platform on a consistent basis have experienced a decrease in fraud activity of up to 35% a year. These clients have also identified 10x more compromised incidents compared to average network alerts. Thanks to Rippleshot’s risk score-based reissuance strategies, the fraud prevention process does not create additional friction for the client; institutions report 5x less disruption to customers’ transactions with Rippleshot’s technology.
“Rippleshot is a technology-forward solutions provider with a human-centric approach to decreasing fraud,” CPI Card Group VP of Business Development and Digital Solutions, Rob Dixon, said. “Through this partnership, our customers will be able to reduce costs associated with fraud loss, chargebacks, and manual monitoring while increasing profits and retaining top-of-wallet status with their cardholders.”
Founded in 1982 as Colorado Plasticard, CPI Card Group today is the largest manufacturer of credit, debit, and prepaid cards. The company went public in 2015, trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker PMTS, and has a market capitalization of $303 million. CPI Card Group began the year with the appointment of its new President and CEO John Lowe.
Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, and founded in 2012, Rippleshot made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2014. The company returned later that year to demo its fraud prevention technology at FinovateFall in New York.
Financial services giant Visa and Revolut have teamed up to offer real-time cross-border transactions for Revolut’s business customers.
Specifically, Visa’s Visa Direct will enable Revolut’s business customers to initiate instant card transfers. Visa launched Visa Direct in 2011 to serve as a real-time payments platform that enables both retail and commercial customers to send money across the globe to cards, bank accounts, and other end points. Customers can use Visa Direct to send person-to-person payments, business payouts, and cross-border remittances.
“We’re delighted that Visa Direct’s global reach, security, and reliability will enable Revolut’s business customers to move money worldwide with speed and confidence,” said Visa Senior Vice President, Global Clients Mark Jamison. “This step deepens our collaboration with Revolut to continue their impressive track record of growth and product differentiation.”
By leveraging Visa Direct, Revolut can now allow its commercial clients to send money across international borders in real time. With only their card number, business customers can send funds to payees in 78+ countries and in more than 50 currencies in 30 minutes or less.
“We’re excited to launch Instant Card Transfers in the U.K. and E.E.A., providing businesses with a simple, instant, and secure way to pay employees, contractors, and customers globally by supporting major card schemes,” said Revolut Business General Manager James Gibson.
Originally founded in 2015, Revolut launched its Revolut Business product in July 2017. Today, the commercial banking platform offers businesses a range of financial tools and solutions, including multi-currency accounts, payment processing, treasury management, and expense management aimed at helping businesses manage their finances more efficiently on a global scale.
U.K.-based Revolut has had a summer full of milestones. In July, the fintech earned its banking license from the U.K. Prudential Regulation Authority after first applying for the license in 2021. Then, earlier this month, Revolut signed agreements with investors to provide liquidity to its employees through a secondary share sale that valued the company at $45 billion.
Next-generation banking technology company Zeta has partnered with India’s HDFC Bank to power its Credit Line on UPI (CLOU) solutions.
The bank will leverage Zeta’s Digital Credit as a Service technology, which enables banks to manage a credit product from origination through processing without requiring multiple integrations.
Zeta won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at our all-digital fintech conference in 2020.
Banking technology provider Zeta has inked a partnership with India’s HDFC Bank to power its new Credit Line on UPI (CLOU) solutions. Announced by India’s National Payment Corporation of India (NPCI) in 2023, the CLOU scheme will make it easier for individuals to access credit and help banks leverage the UPI ecosystem to reach a significantly wider audience. HDFC’s partnership with Zeta will enable the bank to use the CLOU scheme to launch a range of new credit products by connecting pre-approved credit lines to the UPI user base.
Zeta Co-Founder, Global CTO, and CEO APAC Ramki Gaddipati referred to CLOU as “a credit superhighway.” He added, “Our solution is architected to leverage its innovative capabilities across the entire credit distribution lifecycle spanning underwriting, origination, distribution, usage, repayments, collections, and more.” Gaddipati emphasized that Zeta’s solution was built to fit the new technology, saying it would deliver a “UPI-first, mobile-first, and cloud-native credit products ecosystem.”
HDFC’s CLOU offerings will be powered by Zeta’s Digital Credit as a Service (DCaaS) solution. Unveiled earlier this year in India, Zeta’s technology enables banks to manage a credit product from origination to processing–as well as rewards, customer services, and more–without having to integrate multiple software packages and services. DCaaS also provides specific product blueprints to streamline the development of different types of credit lines on UPI products.
The technology was developed as Zeta recognized that the growing popularity of UPI was putting a strain on core banking systems–and that this strain could impact credit lines on UPI, as well. The company believes that CLOU will become a $1 trillion opportunity for banks by 2030.
The CLOU announcement is only the latest achievement of the partnership between Zeta and HDFC Bank. This spring, the bank announced that its PayZapp mobile app–developed in partnership with Zeta–had won the Celent Model Bank Award 2024. The app notched more than seven million customers since its launch in March 2023, and is among the top-rated apps in the Finance section on Indian app stores.
“We are glad to develop the Credit Line on UPI offering with Zeta enabling our customers to enjoy the benefits of an affordability program combined with the ease of doing a UPI transaction,” HDFC Bank Sr. EVP Rajanish Prabhu said.
HDFC Bank offers a wide range of banking products and solutions, including consumer, commercial, private, and investment banking; investment, asset, and wealth management; insurance; credit cards; and more. As India’s leading private sector bank, the Mumbai-based institution is the 10th largest bank by market capitalization ($145 billion), and the 16th largest employer in India.
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, Zeta won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at our all-digital conference in 2020. The company returned the following year to demo its modern, cloud-native, omni stack banking platform at FinovateFall 2021. Zeta achieved unicorn status that year courtesy of a $250 million round led by SoftBank.
Coupa announced a handful of AI-powered product enhancements this week.
The updates will help Coupa clients leverage their data to simplify workflows, save time, and improve collaboration.
The updates will go live next month for select Coupa clients.
Spend management platform Coupaannounced its new product enhancements this week. The California-based company recently unveiled more than a dozen innovations that it says will help companies create efficiencies, improve productivity, and free up their employees to work on more important tasks.
Coupa was founded in 2006 to offer businesses spend management solutions that help them view and control their indirect spending. Some of the company’s business spend management tools include e-invoicing, travel and expense management, spend analysis, treasury management, and more. Since launch, Coupa has created an AI-driven platform that helps businesses leverage their data by extracting insights, simplifying workflows, and improving collaboration without requiring new code or change management.
“Our goal to be a margin multiplier for every business large and small worldwide requires a relentless focus on co-innovation with our customers. As market dynamics continue to shift and operating capital becomes more limited, companies are searching for more ways to drive profitable, sustainable growth. Coupa’s leading total spend management platform underpinned by our community-generated AI gives customers predictive insights, prescriptive decisions, and automated actions needed to drive smarter and more profitable decisions,” said Fang Chang, Chief Product Officer, Coupa. “By replacing archaic processes with Coupa’s AI-driven solutions, businesses will run more efficiently, grow more effectively, and operate more confidently.”
The four major enhancements the company unveiled include:
Coupa Navi, which aims to increase productivity by helping customers find document status and approvals faster, accelerate requests, and access Navi’s knowledge base for instant answers to questions.
Contract Intelligence, which provides customers with risk-informed clause recommendations that can help reduce exposure to potential issues. The tool also offers generative AI-generated legal agreement summaries.
The Coupa Advantage Marketplace, which offers businesses quick access to goods from a range of suppliers. Coupa’s marketplace offers pre-negotiated rates and financial benefits and helps teams identify savings opportunities and improve visibility into their spending.
Service Maestro helps customers create, view, and manage contingent worker records and assignments.
The updates will be available to select customers starting in September.
“Our September release, and each of our product releases, drives the Coupa platform forward so our customers can reach their ambitious goals,” said Chang. “We continue to invest in new and powerful AI use cases, which gives our customers a disproportionate advantage to achieving top-line growth and bottom-line performance gains.”
Coupa went public in 2016 and was acquired by Thoma Bravo for $8 billion in 2022. Earlier this month, Coupa partnered with communications platform RingCentral, which deployed Coupa to improve its spend and business operations.
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateFall in New York on September 9 and 10. Register today using this link and save 20%.
Ascent
Ascent streamlines and simplifies any and all product applications and forms across an FI without disrupting existing systems and processes, while learning from every customer interaction.
Features
Eliminates buying a different solution to solve each product application experience or problem
Reduces abandonment
Improves cross-sell
Grows loyalty
Who’s it for?
Community banks, regional banks, credit unions, CUSOs, non-bank lenders, and insurance carriers looking to reduce the cost and complexity of delivering great experiences across the enterprise.
Finli
Finli, a certified B Corp, offers SMBs trusted and easy-to-use financial tools. The company helps FIs compete through expanded digital services that drive deposits and strengthen customer relationships.
Features
FI’s can view Finli as their SMB obsessed innovation team that offers
Real-time business health insights
Complete back office suite of digital services for SMBs
Secure digital payments
Who’s it for?
Banks and credit unions looking to drive business deposits and offer innovative digital tools to business clients.
Flextract
Flextract uses AI to extract structured data from complex financial documents, eliminating manual copy-paste and enhancing accuracy.
Features
Supports a wide variety of complex document types and layouts
Automates complex operational processes that need large teams of human analysts
Delivers structured data without workflow changes
Who’s it for?
Commercial lenders, mortgage lenders, wealth managers, and asset managers.
getAIreports.com (by Stock Unlock)
getAIreports.com (by Stock Unlock) automates report generation using AI, transforming complex data into clear insights. The company streamlines reporting processes, saving time and improving decision-making for businesses, allowing companies to focus on their core competencies.
Features
Saves time generating comprehensive reports
Closes more deals with clear, data-driven insights
Drives actionable insights with accurate AI summaries on financial data
Who’s it for?
Any businesses that generate reports.
Illuma
IllumaShield™ by Illuma streamlines caller verification with a frictionless voice biometrics authentication solution that protects against account takeovers.
Features
Improves account security and customer satisfaction
Reduces caller verification time by 85% or more
Deploys quickly with low lift from internal IT resources
Who’s it for?
Community banks, regional banks, and credit unions that need a state-of-the-art solution to prevent fraud in contact centers.
Vectari
Vectari’s software can be thought of as “compliance expertise as a service.” Their cloud-hosted subscription software services find hidden trends in customer interactions.
Features
Reduces operational costs of servicing customers due to avoidable errors
Reduces regulatory risk caused by compliance errors
Provides better oversight of third-party partners and servicers
Who’s it for?
Financial institutions of all flavors, particularly mid-size banks, BaaS and embedded finance banks, and non-bank FIs involved in loan servicing.
ZayZoon
ZayZoon’s Embedded EWA, trusted by 180+ HR and payroll companies since 2014, delivers custom end-to-end solutions that enhance offerings, attract clients, and drive new revenue.
In a recent post about the themes of FinovateFall 2024 (New York City, September 9 – 11), we recognized just how much our demoing companies were leveraging AI to help build innovative financial solutions in everything from payments and lending to cybersecurity and regulatory compliance. Financial services and fintech have truly entered the AI era.
And while our demoing companies showcase ready-to-go AI-powered tools and platforms, our keynote speakers are doing their part to help fintechs, banks, credit unions, lenders, and other financial services organizations figure out how to make AI work for their businesses and their customers.
Below is just a sample of the AI-in-financial-services content we have in store for you in less than two weeks time. If you haven’t picked up your ticket yet, you’re in luck: registration is still open and spaces are still available. Visit our registration hub today and we’ll see you in New York in September!
Conversational Banking: Get Value from Generative AI
Wulfraat is a seasoned industry leader bringing more than 20 years experience in solutioning and selling automated customer and employee experience solutions to many of the world’s most prestigious brands. At Kore.ai, he leads global direct sales, and is responsible for revenue performance across product offerings and regions. LinkedIn.
Unifying and Personalizing the Customer Journey through a Digital and AI-First Strategy
Kumar is focused on driving thought leadership and industry specific innovation to position Talkdesk as a leader in the market. He advises all components of digital transformation within the financial services industry on business strategy and adoption of new business models to support growth plans. In his 15 years in financial services, Kumar has helped multiple credit unions and community banks ideate and execute large scale digital transformation program. LinkedIn.
AI as a Co-pilot in Financial Services – How Every Function is Being Reimagined by Automation, AI Data Mining & AI-Generated data
Dan Latimore – Chief Research Officer, The Financial Revolutionist
Latimore is Chief Research Officer at The Most Impactful, a leading research-based recognition program created by The Financial Revolutionist to identify companies in financial services making the greatest difference. Latimore’s focus is on innovation in financial services and fintech, with a keen interest in consumer behavior and technology-enabled strategy. Most recently, he was the Chief Research Officer at Celent, a leading research firm focused on technology for financial services. LinkedIn.
Beyond the Hype: Delivering Real Business Value with AI in Financial Services
Brown is a seasoned leader in the AI and tech industry, specializing in transformative solutions for banking and fintech. Leading a team dedicated to innovation, Brown drives the development of tailored Deep Tech solutions to meet evolving client needs. At Intelygenz, he focuses on pushing AI technology boundaries, specializing in data-driven architecture, streaming AI, and human-centric solutions. LinkedIn.
What Does the Era of Generative AI Mean for Financial Institutions? What are the Real Use Cases for GenAI in Financial Institutions and Banks?
Subbarao leads Financial Services and Strategic Parnterships at Instabase. She is responsible for setting and implementing Instabase’s Financial Services product and market roadmap, enabling organizations across the world to drive bottomline efficiencies and transform customer journeys through the automation of critical processes underpinned by unstructured data. LinkedIn.
Alwell leads the Financial Services Solutions engineering team at GitHub and has worked in AI for the last decade. He has spoken at Microsoft events such as Build and Innovate as well as every GitHub Galaxy event including the keynote of 2022. His developer tools journey started in communications, digital media, then consulting, and now his focus is on serving GitHub’s financial services customers. LinkedIn.
Leveraging Advanced AI to Deliver Accurate and Adaptive Customer Service
Misra is Senior machine Learning Engineer at Truckstop and an AI Consultant at Sentick, where she focuses on assisting startups with their AI strategy and building solutions. She leverages her extensive experience in machine learning and a Master’s degree from the University of Waterloo, where her research bridged driving and machine learning to offer valuable insights. LinkedIn.
Governance, risk, and compliance platform Themis has partnered with regulatory compliance company Sei.
The partnership integrates Sei’s marketing compliance engine into Themis’ platform to enable financial institutions to maintain marketing compliance across all channels.
Themis won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022. Neepa Patel is founder and CEO.
A partnership between regtech Themis and AI-powered regulatory compliance company Sei will provide financial institutions and fintechs with new tools to manage their marketing compliance operations. Integrating Sei’s marketing compliance engine into Themis’ platform will help institutions remain compliant across multiple marketing channels.
Sei’s technology leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to convert regulations into actionable code. This can be used by compliance and risk teams to automate a variety of complex tasks. The integration of Sei’s AI agents into Themis’ platform will enable companies to screen partner websites and social media, automate the review of marketing content before it is shared with the public, and identify potential compliance issues.
Financial institutions and fintechs will benefit from access to advanced AI models that detect compliance issues across text, image, audio, and video. Sei’s AI agents support multiple languages, and are enabled with contextual understanding to ensure that only the most relevant issues are flagged.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Themis, the leading GRC platform for banks and fintechs, to offer Sei’s Marketing Compliance AI agent,” Sei founder Pranay Shetty said. “Together, we aim to improve consumer protection and help companies navigate an increasingly complex regulatory environment.”
Backed by Y Combinator and PayPal, Sei offers AI agents that work with risk and compliance teams to boost their efficiency, impact, and ability to scale. Founded in 2023 by Ramkumar Venkataraman, the New York-based company serves customers across three continents with solutions for marketing, customer support, and communications compliance, and regulatory change management.
Headquartered in New York and founded in 2021 by CEO Neepa Patel, Themis made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022. The company won Best of Show for its demo of its GRC solution that serves as a one-stop shop for compliance. In addition to managing internal compliance workflows, Themis’ GRC solution can also be used to help banks and other financial institutions accelerate their partnerships with fintechs by examining their compliance controls in real-time.
As summer draws to a close, there may be a big acquisition on the horizon in the fraud and financial crime prevention space. Be sure to check in with Finovate’s Fintech Rundown all week long for the latest in fintech news.
This week’s edition of Finovate Globalfeatures an in-depth interview with Nacho Díaz de Argandoña, Chief Product Officer with Spain-based fintech, GPTAdvisor.
Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Madrid, GPTadvisor made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateEurope 2024 in London. GPTadvisor offers a Gen AI platform that is specifically built to boost the productivity of financial advisors and wealth managers, as well as enhance client engagement.
This year, GPTadvisor announced that it has successfully completed a capital expansion round that featured support from two major Spanish venture capital firms, Kfund and JME Ventures. The company also announced that has launched a version of its GPTadvisor solution in the GPT Store by OpenAI. This launch made GPTadvisor the first portfolio management app available in the OpenAi store.
We caught up with Nacho to talk about current trends in wealth management and what AI can bring to the industry.
What problem does GPTadvisor solve and who does it solve it for?
Nacho Díaz de Argandoña: GPTadvisor addresses a critical challenge in the wealth management sector: the need for increased efficiency and productivity to remain competitive in an increasingly complex financial landscape. Financial advisors often face time-consuming, repetitive tasks such as investment research, portfolio management, and compliance. These tasks can detract from their prime objective, which is increasingly harder to accomplish: to nurture strong relationships with their clients and provide them with truly personalized and strategic advice.
GPTadvisor solves this context by providing advanced AI-driven tools that automate and streamline many of these processes, in a secure, private and controlled environment. Our wealth management platform uses the latest generative AI technology to assist financial advisors in quickly finding the right investment product, analyzing and comparing portfolios, elaborating comprehensible narratives to excel in client engagements and, ultimately, helping their clients reach their financial goals. By dramatically improving productivity, GPTadvisor allows advisors to focus more on client relationships and strategic decision-making.
The primary beneficiaries of our solutions are wealth management entities, including financial advisory firms and independent financial advisors. We see this product as a truly global proposition, where advisors anywhere around the globe can really start engaging in a new way of working.
How does GPTadvisor solve this problem better than other companies or solutions?
Díaz de Argandoña: GPTadvisor emerged during the generative AI wave with a clear objective: to apply this groundbreaking technology specifically to the wealth management sector. This focus distinguishes us from many other tech companies that, while experienced in general AI, are now struggling to adapt to the fundamentally different approach required by generative AI. Our foundation in this new paradigm allows us to harness its full potential in ways that others find challenging.
Having said that, we take AI very cautiously. We acknowledge there is a lot of noise and over-reliance in the industry where we expect AI to solve all our problems, and that is not the case. We focus on the use cases that provide the biggest gains in productivity, but without putting compliance at risk. This is why we proactively collaborate with regulators – FCA in the UK and CNMV in Spain – to explore the risks this technology involves and frame the guidelines to follow in order to successfully implement these capabilities.
Our core team brings over 40 years of collective experience in the wealth management industry. This deep expertise has enabled us to develop an innovative product from the ground up, in close collaboration with key industry partners. We work closely with numerous wealth management entities worldwide to ensure that our solutions are aligned with industry needs, making them both relevant and impactful.
Who are GPTadvisor’s primary customers. How do you reach them?
Díaz de Argandoña: GPTadvisor’s primary customers range from big commercial banks, private banks, and wealth management firms, to financial advisory entities and independent financial advisors. We work with entities that are seeking innovative solutions to enhance their productivity, streamline their processes, and ultimately provide more value to their clients by leveraging the latest technology in the market.
Interestingly, we’ve been receiving considerable inbound interest from various industry entities, driven in part by the growing enthusiasm for generative AI. As a result, we are actively engaging these entities and incorporating them into our aggressive generative AI product roadmap. This roadmap is designed not only to meet current market demands, but also to anticipate and continuously bring the benefits of this technology that is moving at unprecedented velocity.
We’ve also had the opportunity to pitch and present our work in numerous industry events, just like what we did with you last February at FinovateEurope in London. These platforms allow us to demonstrate the unique capabilities of our solutions to a wide audience that has generated very interesting conversations for us.
By capitalizing on the current momentum around generative AI and maintaining a strong and cold focus on the needs of wealth management professionals, I think we are successfully positioning GPTadvisor as the go-to solution for entities looking to stay ahead in this rapidly evolving landscape.
Can you tell us about a favorite implementation or deployment of your technology?
Díaz de Argandoña: One of our most exciting recent implementations is our quick portfolio analysis tool. This innovative function allows advisors to simply take a picture of a client’s portfolio with their phone and receive an instant, comprehensive analysis, thoroughly explained. The analysis includes generated insights on performance, risk, fees, and even comparisons with model portfolios. All in one go. This feature exemplifies the kind of intuitive, productivity-boosting tools we aim to deliver, making sophisticated portfolio analysis as simple as taking a photo.
Another feature we’re particularly proud of is our fund documentation auto-read feature. This tool is going to be a game-changer for GPTadvisor users globally, as they are now going to be able to instantly find and chat about key data and information in the documentation of thousands of investment funds. Whether they need details on fund performance, fees, or any other critical information, this tool streamlines the process, saving valuable time and enhancing decision-making capabilities.
These features are just the tip of the iceberg. We’re seeing new productivity functions like these arise on a weekly basis, as our team is able to move in sync with the fast-paced advancements in generative AI. Our ability to rapidly bring ready-to-use features to the wealth management space is one of the key strengths that sets GPTadvisor apart. It’s incredibly rewarding to see these innovations in action, transforming how wealth managers spend their valuable time and providing them with the tools they need to stay competitive.
What in your background gave you the confidence to tackle this challenge?
Díaz de Argandoña: The confidence to tackle challenges at GPTadvisor stems from the extensive experience and proven track record of our CEO, Salvador Mas. Before founding GPTadvisor, Salvador served as the Chief Digital Officer at Allfunds for five years, where he played a pivotal role in the company’s digital transformation and its successful public offering. Prior to his tenure at Allfunds, Salvador founded several startups at the forefront of innovation in wealth management. His most recent venture, Finametrix, a portfolio management platform, was eventually acquired by Allfunds.
This entrepreneurial experience, coupled with his leadership in a global financial powerhouse, has provided Salvador with deep insights into the challenges and opportunities within wealth management. It has also equipped him with the expertise to leverage technology in creating innovative solutions that address real-world problems in the sector.
Under Salvador’s leadership, we have fostered a highly talented, agile, and focused team at GPTadvisor, which has successfully grown the product and its capabilities since its inception just over a year ago.
With this strong foundation, we are confident that we are well-positioned to lead the way in bringing cutting-edge generative AI solutions to the industry.
What is the fintech ecosystem in Spain like? What is the relationship between fintechs, banks, and traditional financial services companies in the country?
Díaz de Argandoña: The relationship between fintechs and traditional financial services companies in Spain is characterized by a mix of competition, collaboration, and co-opetition.
In the specific case of wealthtech, traditional institutions have maintained their market share despite some success stories (such as the robo-advisor Indexa Capital and the neobank MyInvestor). However, the majority of advisory services continue to be provided by traditional institutions like Santander, BBVA, or CaixaBank, which have successfully embraced digital transformation.
At GPTadvisor, we are collaborating with both types of entities, introducing generative AI in both traditional and disruptive institutions.
Left to right: Nacho Díaz de Argandoña and GPTadvisor CEO Salvador Mas at FinovateEurope 2024.
You demoed at FinovateEurope earlier this year. How was your experience?
Díaz de Argandoña: FinovateEurope was an excellent experience for us. The event was professionally and thoughtfully organized, making us, as demo participants, feel like true protagonists. It provided a valuable platform to connect with a wide range of wealth management professionals, investors, and industry stakeholders, which allowed us to test our proposition with real prospects in London—one of the world’s premier fintech hubs.
As we prepare to demo our solution again, this time in New York, it feels like a natural next step in our journey. Entering the U.S. market is a key priority for us, as we believe our solution can significantly enhance the day-to-day operations of financial advisors across the country.
We’ve been steadily growing our platform, adding a host of new features and enhancements, and we can’t wait to showcase these developments on stage. We’re confident that the New York demo will be another great experience for us, helping us to further expand our presence in a critical market.
What are your goals for GPTadvisor? What can we expect to hear from you in the months to come?
Díaz de Argandoña: Over the past year, we’ve focused intensely on refining and validating our proposition in the market. We’ve been building a next-generation AI-native platform from the ground up, one that evolves in tandem with the rapid advancements in AI technology. Our approach has involved close collaboration with leading financial entities worldwide, ensuring that we stay connected to the real-world challenges and opportunities that need solving.
I believe we’re now at a tipping point where the product is ready for greater scale. GPTadvisor is now ready to support thousands of financial advisors work more productively and deliver more value to their clients. Our plan is launching our SaaS model at global scale through the second half of the year to reach more clients and gain more leadership in the market.
As we continue to explore the full potential of generative AI and its applications within our sector, I can’t imagine a more exciting time to be involved in shaping the future with GPTadvisor. We’re just getting started, and there’s much more to come.
