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
U.S. payments platform PayPal has been slowly inching toward becoming a super app in the past few years. Today’s news that the California-based company has acquired Happy Returns indicates a step further toward that goal.
Terms of the deal are undisclosed.
“The post-purchase experience is something we’ve been looking into, since it’s such a pain point — people want to shop online and return in store, and vice versa,” PayPal SVP of Consumer In-Store and Digital Commerce Frank Keller told CNBC in an interview. “For retailers, we’re providing more comprehensive services beyond payments.”
Happy Returns launched in 2015 to provide box-free, in-person returns for online orders. The company sees the benefits as three-fold– it makes for a better customer experience, it is less expensive for the merchant, and is less wasteful and therefore better for the environment.
Consumers making purchases at one of Happy Returns’ hundreds of brand partners can use the company’s software to make returns at 2,600+ drop-off locations in 1,200+ cities across every U.S. state.
What started as PayPal’s flagship payments platform expanded to encompass the pre-purchase shopping experience when the company acquired Honey in 2019. Today, with the addition of Happy Returns, PayPal adds another element to serve the post-shopping experience to its already robust platform.
This holistic shopping experience is in line with PayPal CEO Dan Schulman’s plan for the company. Schulman recently announced PayPal will roll out a “next-generation” digital wallet that will offer a personalized shopping, financial services, and payments experience.
Finovate Global extends a special thanks to the demoing companies, keynote speakers, and attendees that joined us for FinovateSpring this week via our digital platform. On Demand video from the conference will be available soon.
And for Finovate Global readers with an interest in innovators from outside of the U.S., here are some of the companies to look out for when the On Demand video is made available in the coming days.
Aisot Technologies (Switzerland) with its technology that provides next-generation, real-time analytics and forecasts, allowing financial services to enhance returns, reduce risks, and increase efficiency.
Coconut Software (Canada) with its customer engagement platform for financial institutions that want to improve their digital and physical engagements.
DigiShares (Denmark) with its white-label platform for tokenization of real estate to provide automation and liquidity to the real estate markets.
Dreams (Sweden) with its technology that leverages cognitive and behavioral science to help banks increase their end users’ financial wellbeing and engagement, and attract new audiences. Best of Show winner.
Flybits (Canada) with its customer experience platform for the financial services sector, delivering personalization at scale.
FormHero (Canada) with its SaaS solution that enables rapid creation of digital front-end experiences to solve for complex data collection needs.
In a round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2, online fraud and abuse prevention specialist Arkose Labs has raised $70 million in Series C funding. The San Francisco, California-based company will use the additional capital to support platform development, hire new talent, and fuel global expansion.
This week’s investment takes Arkose Labs’ total capital to $114 million. Also participating in the financing were Wells Fargo Strategic Capital and existing investors M12 and PayPal Ventures.
“With Masa and the team at Softbank, we have a partner who matches our ambition for eradicating fraud online by means of disrupting the economic ROI for bad actors,” Arkose Labs founder and CEO Kevin Gosschalk said. “At Arkose Labs, we are building a portfolio of capabilities that can adapt and respond based on the fraudsters’ techniques to ensure we are maximizing the impact to them whilst minimizing any form of friction to good users.”
A Best of Show winner in its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring in 2019, Arkose Labs specializes in defending neobanks, ecommerce companies, payment firms, insurers, and other businesses against a range of cybercrimes including account takeover and both payment and new account fraud. Founded in 2015, Arkose Labs offers an authentication platform that invisibly identifies the context, behavior, and past reputation of a each request, classifying it as Authentic or Inauthentic. Authentic requests are passed on to the enterprise, while Inauthentic requests are remediated by dynamic defenses that generate continuous losses.
This is part of the company’s strategy, articulated by Gosschalk at FinovateSpring, to “break hacker economics by making it more expensive for the bad guys to get in than the data they are getting out.” He added “if you do that, they give up and move on.”
In its funding announcement, Arkose Labs highlighted a number of key milestones the company has met since its last funding – a $22 million Series B round – in March of 2020. These accomplishments include analyzing more than 15 billion online sessions last year, stopping more than four billion attacks; the opening of regional EMEA headquarters in London and a doubling of the company’s workforce. Arkose Labs also announced a number of C-suite hires over the past year, including a new Chief Operating and Financial Officer, a new Chief Product Officer, and a new Chief Security Officer and VP of Information Technology. The company also pledged to make additional hires this year to lead operations in North America, Australia, and Europe.
“With Arkose Labs’ successful expansion in the financial services industry, this signifies a continued digital shift in banking,” Gosschalk said. “(It) requires a customer-centric approach that kicks the bad guys out of online operations, while maintaining the highest levels of convenience and usability that financial services operations require.”
It’s hard to believe that we’ve now done a full calendar year of digital events! FinovateSpring was our fifth completely digital event, and while we’re excited about the return to in-person events later this year, it’s already clear that things aren’t going to return to the same “normal” that existed in 2019.
This same pattern holds for the larger banking ecosystem as well. It’s clear that we are entering a new, substantially more digital era in finance and banking. Customer behavior has changed forever (and so have customer expectations), and it’s not going to change back.
Over the past year, the industry has (understandably) been focused on dealing with immediate challenges, but now it’s time to start looking at fintech more broadly again. We’re a long way from a new status quo and things are going to keep moving quickly. It’s up to all of us to decide if we’re willing to move quickly too.
Customer-focused banking tools provider W.UP revealed its latest development today. The Hungary-based company is launchingMoney Stories.
The new embeddable tool enables banks to offer their customers bite-sized snapshots of their financial lives. These easily consumable bits of content combine data analytics with digital storytelling to make it even easier for banks to help users to understand their financial standing in a fast-paced way.
The new tool takes the concept from millennial-friendly mobile apps such as Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Each of these social media platforms are notorious for enabling users to quickly publish and view life updates and ideas, share new songs, and even exchange gossip. The micro-content requires little attention from viewers, who are easily distracted and prone to multi-tasking.
Similarly, Money Stories leverages transactional and behavioral analytics to show users daily highlights, weekly and monthly forecasts, and yearly summaries. Overall, these updates take the form of unusually large transactions, double charges, sharp balance drops, recurring transitions, top spending categories, changes in spending or credit card usage, and more. In addition to showing users their historical data, Money Stories can also help users plan for the future by showing options to pay off credit card debt, avoid overdrafts, and more.
All of the graphics appear on a single screen for seven-to-ten seconds, so the user does not need to scroll or set aside much time in their day to understand the analyses.
W.UP is keeping the integration easy for banks. “When all is said and done, the only decision for banks to make remains what product and service offers to slide into the story stream to boost targeting accuracy, conversion, and customer satisfaction levels,” said W.UP Head of Product Gellért Vinnai.
Founded in 2014, W.UP takes PFM to a personalized level by leveraging AI and real-time data. These product offerings have obviously struck a chord in the banking crowd; the company has won Best of Show awards at FinovateEurope 2018, 2019, and most recently for its demo in 2020.
In a round led by Group 11, banking app Lili has secured $55 million in Series B funding. The capital will help the New York-based fintech grow its product range over the next few months. This will include the addition of new features for invoice and payment management and a new loans product.
“We’ve created the tools you need to spend more time building your venture and less time on things that historically your employer would handle: sorting expenses, managing financials, and filing taxes,” Lili CEO and co-founder Lilac Bar David explained.
The Series B took the two-year old company’s total capital to $80 million. Also participating in the investment were Target Global and AltaIR.
Having doubled its account base over the past six months and currently boasting 200,000 users, Lili offers real-time expense management, tax preparation, and no-fee accounts designed for freelancers and gig economy workers. Lili also provides direct deposit and a Visa business debit card with free ATM withdrawals at more than 32,000 locations.
Named to the Forbes Next 1000 list for 2021, Bar David co-founded Lili having spent three years as CEO of Israeli challenger bank, Pepper. Along with current Lili CTO and co-founder Liran Zelkha, Bar David’s goal was to build a solution for workers in the freelance economy that combined banking and business management services into a single platform. She estimated that Lili has saved its users 60 hours on administrative tasks and $1,700 a year in fees, costs, and tax savings.
The 60 million freelancers in the U.S. – more than a third of the workforce – often struggle to secure timely payment for services rendered, accurately meet tax obligations, and manage their overall financial work/life balance. With the expectation that this relatively young cohort will only grow in size over time, investors like Group 11 see Lili as well-positioned to take advantage of this evolution in the “future of work.”
“Lilac and Liran’s forward-looking vision is changing how modern workers manage their finances, while saving them valuable time and money,” Group 11 founding partner Dovi Frances said during the company’s seed funding round announcement just under a year ago. “Lili is redefining banking for freelancers and we’re thrilled to be partnering with the team.”
This is a sponsored post in collaboration with InterSystems, Gold Sponsors of FinovateSpring, and Monica Summerville, head of capital markets, Celent, a division of Oliver Wyman.
Financial institutions and data have had a love-hate relationship for many years.
On the one hand FIs and data are a match made in heaven. It is a symbiotic relationship where business functions create and consume data over and over until the result exceeds the sum of the parts. Ideally this partnering results in revenue or alpha-producing insights. On the other hand, siloed, unreliable or simply too much data creates frustration and risk as the business potential is teased, but ultimately unattainable as FIs struggle to extract value from their data (see figure 1).
Business use cases for leveraging data across financial services are plentiful, from management reporting, enterprise risk, liquidity and treasury management, and more recently, driving innovative customer experiences. More specifically within capital markets and banking, trends such as the embracing of multi-asset trading or the desire to simplify architectures have triggered a rethink of data approaches. There is also, now more than ever, the desire for cost savings – equally important to FIs whose margins are increasingly coming under pressure from increased regulation and competitive factors. Indeed, research by Oliver Wyman and Morgan Stanley found that the benefits from having clean, consistent, and automated data management could be a two-to-four percent reduction of infrastructure and control costs. When IT spend ranges into the billions of dollars, as is the case with larger FIs, every percentage point of savings is a big win.
No wonder then that cracking the data management challenge has long been considered the perfect marriage of technology achievement and business function. FIs have made repeated attempts and invested hundreds of millions of dollars through the years to get this right. From simple relational databases storing structured data, to data warehouses and more recently data lakes capable of holding all types of data, there has been no shortage of excitement that maybe (whisper it) this latest approach could be “the one.” Heartbreaks inevitably followed as the heady days of getting to know new technologies turn into frustrations and recriminations. A pristine data lake becomes a swamp.
The latest research by Celent discovered that leading FIs including Bank of America, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and RBC, to name a few, have lately been getting serious with a new data management approach called Smart Data Fabric. As these entities move from a process- to platform-driven organisation, their business focus has shifted to ensuring the best customer experience possible. This shift however requires mastering and leveraging data to generate insights at an enterprise level. The reality is that a history of disjointed business expansion common to financial services, means data is siloed across numerous platforms, tuned for very different use cases. There are multiple “single sources of truth,” and these vary depending on whose truth you are seeking.
The right data management approach should empower FIs to become better versions of themselves, without fundamentally changing who they are. Unlike previous data management architectures, Smart Data Fabrics offer centralized access and a single unified view of data across the organization. Crucially, Data Fabrics do not require that copies of the data be created and stored outside its original location, so can offer a useful bridging solution between modern and legacy systems – the latter often holding the most business crucial data. In this way Data Fabrics can also avoid the creation of more data silos, which is especially important as FIs increasingly embrace cloud. A Data Fabric becomes “Smart” when it inherently supports advanced data analytics and aims to future-proof data management (see Figure 2).
Financial institutions, from asset managers to banks and brokers, have always known that they need to become smarter about data. Business end-users and clients are demanding better user experiences, targeted insights, and increased access to analytic capabilities which requires free access to accurate and harmonized data drawn from disparate sources across the entire enterprise. At the very core of modernization is the ability to innovate at scale, and this relies on freer access to data. Celent’s latest research report sponsored by InterSystems found that the business necessities and benefits of better data management is driving adoption of Smart Data Fabrics. This time it might just be for real. Read the full report here >>
The people have spoken and the votes for Best of Show for the second, all-digital FinovateSpring have been counted. After two days of innovative fintech demos, here are the companies that have been awarded Finovate’s top prize.
Dreams for its financial wellbeing platform that helps banks attract the new generation and create superior digital engagement by leveraging the latest insights from cognitive and behavioral science. Video.
Glia for its digital customer service platform that connects financial institutions to their customers using chat, voice, video, co-browsing, and AI. Video.
Signal Intent for its financial calculators for the digital age – built to win you more customers, capture better customer data, and help you move fast in the era of digital transformation. Video.
Thank you to all of our demoing companies, our speakers and presenters, our sponsors and partners and, of course, our wonderful audience and digital attendees.
Stay connected to the Finovate blog for more from our FinovateSpring companies and presenters, as well as updates about our upcoming events in July for FinovateAsia and our return to in-person conferencing in September for FinovateFall.
Notes on methodology:
1. Only audience members NOT associated with demoing companies were eligible to vote. Finovate employees did not vote.
2. Attendees were encouraged to note their favorites during each day. At the end of the last demo, they chose their three favorites.
3. The exact written instructions given to attendees: “Please rate (the companies) on the basis of demo quality and potential impact of the innovation demoed.”
4. The three companies appearing on the highest percentage of submitted ballots were named “Best of Show.”
5. Go here for a list of previous Best of Show winners through 2014. Best of Show winners from our 2015 through 2020 conferences are below:
The last time eBay truly dominated news headlines may have been in 2015, when it split from payments giant PayPal. Since then, the online marketplace has been quietly fending off new competitors including Amazon, Etsy, Rakuten, Mercari, and even Facebook Marketplace.
Today, however, the California-based company made an announcement that will help differentiate it from every other online marketplace– the company’s users can now buy and sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs). According to eBay’s updated policy, trusted sellers can now list and sell NFTs across multiple categories.
“This isn’t new to eBay,” said Senior Vice President and General Manager for eBay’s North America Market Jordan Sweetnam. “For 25+ years we’ve been the world’s destination for collectibles, connecting millions of buyers with sellers who have deep knowledge of the things they care about most. Our platform has helped collectors turn their hobbies into their livelihoods and, along the way, collectibles – ranging from beanie babies and railroad memorabilia to high-end art and rare coins – became an alternate asset class, combining passion with investment.”
Currently, eBay is allowing NFTs that fit categories such as trading cards, music, entertainment, and art. However, the company notes it will expand to facilitate the sales of NFTs across more categories.
You may inherently associate NFTs with cryptocurrencies because they, too, are held on the blockchain. However, eBay has not indicated any current plans to accept cryptocurrencies as a form of payment, so users can expect to pay for their NFT using a traditional online payment method such as a credit card.
Self-proclaimed “financial super-app” Curve announced it will soon go live with a crowdfunding campaign.
The campaign, which will launch “sometime in May,” will be held on Crowdcube and will enable Curve’s more than two million customers to invest and be part of its journey. Curve will use the funds to fuel its launch into the U.S. market and help it to expand further into Europe.
“We know many new customers missed out on our 2019 crowdfunding, and we’ve fielded constant requests to open a new round,” said Curve Founder and CEO Shachar Bialick. “Since we place our customers at the heart of everything we do, we wanted to offer another chance for them to be involved in our success, enabling them to be part of our journey.”
Funds raised from the campaign will add to the $169 million Curve has raised since it was founded in 2015. This includes the company’s recent $103 million (£72.5 million) Series C round it closed in January which received contributions from Fuel Venture Capital.
“With increasing fragmentation in financial services, and growing demand from consumers for a simpler way to control and manage their finances, the scene is set for Curve to seize a global opportunity,” said Bialick. “We are investing in our people and the business to make that happen.”
This news follows Curve’s 2019 crowdfunding round, which raised $5.7 million (£4 million) in 42 minutes. The move tripled the company’s valuation. The announcement also comes after a year of growth during which Curve hired over 100 new employees, doubled its customer base to over two million, and saw its transaction volume increase to $3.7 billion (£2.6 billion).
Curve has big plans for 2021, including the launch of its crowdfunding campaign. This year, the company is also working on the rollout of its Curve Credit product and will increase its workforce by 60%, hiring 200 additional employees.
The firms are Fort Community Credit Union, headquartered in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin; Alltrust Credit Union (formerly Southern Mass Credit Union) based in Fairhaven, Massachusetts; and Statewide Federal Credit Union, headquartered in Starkville, Mississippi.
“We couldn’t ask for a better way to start 2021, signing these three progressive credit unions,” Bankjoy CEO Michael Duncan said. “Since we are now officially in the digital age thanks to the pandemic, these credit unions are now poised to hit the ground running with our most advanced online, mobile, and voice banking technologies. We are excited to see how they will perform and how their members will take advantage of these new offerings.”
Founded in 2015 and making its Finovate debut a year later at FinovateFall in New York, Bankjoy provides financial institutions with a variety of digital banking solutions ranging from mobile / online banking, and e-statements to online account opening and loan origination, as well as access to conversational AI-based products. From flagship banks to credit unions, Bankjoy offers an out-of-the-box alternative to outmoded legacy systems that prevent banks and credit unions from being able to meet the rising digital expectations of their customers and members.
“Bankjoy will improve our credit union’s digital banking solution and offer an experience that is in line with our members expectations,” Alltrust Credit Union Vice President of Operations Stephanie Medeiros said. “Our partnership with Bankjoy will allow us to maintain our commitment to our members while delivering the latest digital technology.”
“The Bankjoy solution will allow our members to access and manage their account from anywhere,” Statewide Federal Credit Union CEO Casey Bacon added. “They will have access to all of the conveniences of modern banking at their fingertips.”
Headquartered in Troy, Michigan, Bankjoy has raised $1.8 million in funding from investors including SixThirty and CheckAlt. The company is an alum of the Y Combinator incubator program.
You can thank Gen Z’s “I want it now” mentality for Credit Karma’s freshest release. Dubbed Instant Karma, the newest product is the latest to come from Credit Karma Money, the company’s challenger banking service.
According to TechCrunch, which covered the launch, Instant Karma rewards users by randomly reimbursing their purchases.
Credit Karma General Manager Poulomi Damany told TechCrunch that, since the purpose behind Credit Karma Money is to “change people’s relationship with money” the new rewards product is an extension of that goal.
There are two major differentiating factors of Instant Karma over traditional payments rewards programs. The first is that the rewards are issued based on purchases made on debit cards, not credit cards. That’s because, as Credit Karma Product Manager Kyle Thibaut said, “Gen Z do not necessarily like credit cards. When you talk to them, they like debit cards and debit cards are the way they spend. Debit card usage is higher than credit cards in the U.S., and it’s actually growing while credit card usage is declining.”
The second point of differentiation is that the reward is issued the instant the user makes the transaction. Traditional cash-back programs, in contrast, will only issue rewards based on a time scale (eg., monthly) or once they reach a certain threshold (eg., the balance reaches $25).
So far, Credit Karma has rewarded $5 million in rewards on 100,000 transactions.
Founded in 2007, Credit Karma added a checking feature to its Credit Karma Money suite in October of last year. This complements the savings tool the company launched in October of 2019, when it initiated its entrance into the neobanking space. Prior to this, Credit Karma operated solely in the financial wellness space, in which it continues to offer its 110 million members access to credit scoring data, loan and credit card marketplaces, identity monitoring, and tax filing tools.
