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At Your Service: A Look at Q2’s “As-a-Service” Offerings

At Your Service: A Look at Q2’s “As-a-Service” Offerings
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni profile, Q2, Q2 Holdings, Q2ebanking

In today’s era of embedded finance, everything is available as a service. Digital banking services company Q2 is at the leading edge of this trend, offering a range of solutions for banks’ retail clients, their commercial customers, and fintechs.

Many fintechs sell an “as-a-service” offering that focuses on a single aspect of banking. Q2, however, takes a more holistic approach. Here’s a look at some of the company’s embeddable offerings.

Q2’s consumer solutions include remote onboarding, PFM tools, remote deposit check capture, lending tools, marketing offers, behavioral biometrics, and authentication. The company helps banks leverage client data using machine learning technology that brings the necessary intelligence to effectively market new products to customers.

On the commercial side of things, Q2 can aid with account opening, loan origination, ERP integration, and scalable tools to suit a range of business sizes.

Q2 offers fintechs both lending-as-a-service and banking-as-a-service tools to integrate into their existing offerings. The former focuses on the application, approval process, and loan funding, while the latter offers bank accounts, debit cards and payment solutions without the need to partner directly with a traditional bank.

In addition to these embedded finance offerings, Q2 is venturing into the bank-fintech collaboration space. In a Best of Show winning demo at FinovateFall last month, Q2 launched its Partner Marketplace, an app store integrated within the company’s digital banking platform. Fintechs can upload their tools on the platform’s app store and banks can browse the offerings they’d like to integrate.

By relying on fintechs to bring the tech, the Partner Marketplace broadens Q2’s reach as a provider of embedded finance. The company offers banks access to a variety of fintech solutions that range beyond what Q2 itself is able to create or provide.

For fintechs, the marketplace lowers customer acquisition costs by making the startups’ solutions visible to Q2’s network of bank partners on the platform. It also helps with integration and deployment– after integrating with Q2’s digital banking platform, fintechs can offer their product to 400+ banks and credit unions, one million businesses, and 16+ million end users.

Photo by KOBU Agency on Unsplash

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Ondot Teams Up with CU Solutions Group

Ondot Teams Up with CU Solutions Group
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Ondot, Ondot Systems

CU Solutions Group, a CUSO (credit union services organization) that provides technology, marketing, and advisory products and services to more than 3,400 credit unions across the U.S., has announced a new partnership with digital card services platform Ondot Systems. Via the agreement, CU Solutions Group is now a Card App reseller partner with Ondot and will offer its digital card management program to credit unions in its network.

“We are excited to be able to offer our credit unions a way to level the playing field with the digital-first card experiences being offered by tech giants like Apple, Google, and Samsung,” CU Solutions Group President and CEO Dave Adams explained. “Consumers have long said they want to bank with digitally-savvy credit unions, and this helps ensure those desires are met.”

Ondot’s Card App enables financial institutions to offer their customers a mobile app for managing, tracking, and controlling both credit and debit card usage. The solution makes it easy to monitor transactions and improve financial planning and decision-making for users, while enabling card issuers to benefit from fewer service calls and more customer engagement. Last month, Ondot announced that eleven card issuers – from American State Bank to Utah Community Credit Union – had selected Ondot’s Card App to provide “digital-first card experiences, similar to cards launched or announced by Apple, Google, and Samsung.”

Ondot VP Jim Cahill referenced the challenge that financial institutions face from platform players that are determined to have a role in the card space. “Cards are the most critical touchpoint between consumers and a financial institution, and currently non-banks are promising a better user experience than banks and credit unions,” Cahill said. “The 11 financial institutions that have selected Ondot’s Card App are examples of regional and community issuers that can compete on digital experiences and win.”

A Finovate alum since 2014, Ondot’s digital card services platform is used by more than 4,500 banks and credit unions to power cardholder engagement. The San Jose, California-based company won “Best Overall FinTech Mobile App” at the 2020 FinTech Breakthrough Award for its Card App this spring, and was also named to the Financial Times’ inaugural The Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies 2020 roster. Founded in 2011, Ondot counts Citi Ventures among its investors.

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More Than $1.2 Billion Raised by 14 Alums in Q3 2020

More Than $1.2 Billion Raised by 14 Alums in Q3 2020
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Funding, Fundings, Quarterly Funding

Finovate alums raised more than $1.2 billion in equity funding in the third quarter of 2020. This year’s sum tops the amount raised in Q3 of last year, making it one of the strongest third quarters for Finovate alums to date.

Fourteen alums announced funding over the summer months, a lower total than in previous years.

Previous Quarterly Comparisons

  • Q3 2019: More than $1 billion raised by 21 alums
  • Q3 2018: More than $400 million raised by 19 alums
  • Q3 2017: More than $1 billion raised by 31 alums
  • Q3 2016: More than $500 million raised by 30 alums

As was the case last year, Klarna ranks at the top of the third quarter investment hauls; indeed, this year’s $650 million is significantly higher than the $460 million the buy now pay later company received in Q3 2019. Other sizable investments of this year’s third quarter include the $100 million raised by PayActiv and the $80 million secured by Revolut.

With fourteen alums receiving funding in the quarter, it is no surprise that the top ten equity investments represent an overwhelming amount of the total capital raised by alums in Q3. This year, the top ten equity investments provided more than 96% of the quarter’s total.

Top Ten Equity Investments for Q3 2020

  • Klarna: $650 million
  • PayActiv: $100 million
  • Revolut: $80 million
  • Blend: $75 million
  • Splitit: $71.5 million
  • Taulia: $60 million
  • Scalable Capital: $58 million
  • Thought Machine: $42 million
  • Alloy: $40 million
  • Socure: $35 million

Here is our detailed alum funding report for Q3 2020.

July 2020: More than $240 million raised by four alums

August 2020: More than $318 million raised by seven alums

September 2020: More than $692 million raised by three alums

If you are a Finovate alum that raised money in the third quarter of 2020, and do not see your company listed, please drop us a note at research@finovate.com. We would love to share the good news! Funding received prior to becoming an alum not included.

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Giving Kids the Gift of Goals; The New Rules of LendingClub

Giving Kids the Gift of Goals; The New Rules of LendingClub
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Eigen Technologies, Fenergo, IBM, Lending Club, Revolut

Revolut has added a new feature to its Revolut Junior app for youth aged seven to seventeen that will help parents teach the value of saving to their children. Goals enables both parents and child users to set and track financial savings objectives, and leverages the app’s other main features – Allowances and Tasks – to provide a more comprehensive financial wellness solution that works for kids and their parents.

Available to Revolut’s Premium and Metal customers, the new option can be used by parents to create financial savings goals and monitor their child’s progress as savings accrue. Kids can set their own savings goals as well, which can be supervised via the parent’s app. Goals can be funded directly by parents or by child users via their Allowances or by completing assigned tasks and chores.

“Goals, along with payments, allowances, and tasks, was one of our customers’ top requested and valued features,” Revolut Head of Premium Product Felix Jamestin said in a statement. “(We’re) excited to be building a product that is making saving fun and easy for both kids and parents.”

Revolut launched its Revolut Junior app earlier this year, and now boasts more than 200,000 children signed up for the program. Currently available in the EEA and the U.S., Revolut plans to offer the solution in Singapore, Japan, and Australia “in the near future.”

Alumni News Updates

LendingClub sheds P2P lending en route to bank rebirth: You would be forgiven for thinking the first rule of a company called “LendingClub” is to lend money. But LendingClub’s pivot away from its origins as an innovator in the P2P space 14 years ago continues as it announces that it will shut down its retail P2P platform as of the end of the year. The move comes more than a year after LendingClub shuttered its small business lending arm, and is widely understood to be a path-clearing effort en route to LendingClub incarnation as a bank.

Fenergo, IBM partner to bring AI to customer onboarding: A new integration between IBM Watson, the IBM Cloud, and Fenergo’s client lifestyle management technology will improve the efficiency of the onboarding process for financial institutions. IBM Customer Lifecycle Management with Fenergo combines Fenergo’s leadership in customer journey and digital transformation with IBM’s AI-enabled, AML and KYC solutions to provide better personalization, risk assessment, and regulatory compliance.

Eigen Technologies hires its first CFO: London-based NLP technology innovator Eigen Technologies has selected Spyros Karageorgis as its first Chief Financial Officer. Karageorgis comes to Eigen after tenures as CFO and COO at image recognition company Cortexica Vision Systems, and as CFO at SaaS e-commerce platform Venda. Karageorgis is one of two new members of Eigen’s C-suite: the company also announced new Chief Revenue Officer Tony Ehrens.

Photo by Joslyn Pickens from Pexels

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Square Buys Bitcoin; Coinbase and the Call for “Mission-Focus”

Square Buys Bitcoin; Coinbase and the Call for “Mission-Focus”
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Coinbase, Daily news, Square

When we asked a dozen-odd fintech founders and CEOs what they thought was a bigger deal: AI or Bitcoin, during our FinovateFall 25 in 5 Q&A series, the number of respondents more excited by the former than the latter was sizable. But bitcoin fans made their preference known, suggesting that the brightest days for cryptocurrencies were definitely still ahead of us.

We suspect those bitcoin bulls were buoyed by this week’s news that digital payments company Square has invested $50 million in bitcoin. The approximately 4,709 bitcoins purchased by the San Francisco, California-based company represent a fraction of Square’s total assets – around one percent, as of the end of Q2 2020 – but it is not the first time the company has expressed interest in the cryptocurrency. Via its Cash App, Square has offered bitcoin trading since 2018, and a year later, the company launched Square Crypto, a unit dedicated to supporting open source work on bitcoin. But this week’s investment marks the firm’s first financial investment in BTC.

Square CFO Amrita Ahuja explained the investment in part by expressing optimism about bitcoin’s adoption worldwide, saying that it has “the potential to be a more ubiquitous currency in the future.” Ahuja added that Square anticipated participating in the adoption of bitcoin “in a disciplined way.”

It is likely worth noting that Square founder and CEO Jack Dorsey is a big supporter of bitcoin. In 2018, Dorsey said he believed bitcoin – or a similar cryptocurrency – would become the world’s single currency at some point in the not-too-distant future. CNBC’s coverage of Square’s investment noted that other tech-savvy fintechs, such as Chamath Palihapitiya’s Social Capital use cryptocurrencies like bitcoin as a hedge.

As the Black Lives Matter-inspired social justice movement swept through the Western world this summer, corporations went into overdrive with efforts to show their support for ending racial discrimination. Many of these initiatives were outwardly directed toward potential customers, potential future employees, investors, the media, the public at large … But many of these attempts to show support were more inwardly directed, with companies encouraging their own workers to make their concerns with regard to social justice issues known – even, if not especially, in the workplace.

Unique among this trend was Coinbase, whose CEO Brian Armstrong not only took a different tack to politics in the workplace, but also put the company’s money behind its Keep Your Politics to Yourself policy. Armstrong made headlines weeks ago when he wrote in a blog post that, because Coinbase was a “mission-focused” company, “We don’t engage here when issues are unrelated to our core mission, because we believe impact only comes with focus.” Moreover, he added that if employees disagreed with Coinbase’s policy of leaving politics at the front door, he was happy to offer them a relatively generous severance (including up to six months of pay depending on tenure) if they decided to leave.

“Life’s too short to work at a company that you are not excited about,” Armstrong wrote, requesting his employees decide whether to stay or go by the end of September. And with Armstrong’s Wednesday deadline come and gone, it appears that 60 workers, approximately 5% of the Coinbase’s workforce, have taken the deal.

The move has been controversial, with others in the technology community – including Jack Dorsey of Square and Twitter – suggesting that a healthier environment could be achieved if companies like Coinbase embraced the challenge of these kind of conversations. But, at this point, Armstrong seems at a minimum happy that the policy did not result in what would have easily been the worst possible outcome. “I’ve heard a concern from some of your that this clarification would disproportionately impact our under-represented minority population at Coinbase,” Armstrong wrote in a follow-up blog post. “It was reassuring to see that people from under-represented groups at Coinbase have not taken the exit package in numbers disproportionate to the overall population.”

It will be worth watching to see if other companies – in or out of tech – take a similar strategy.

Photo by Worldspectrum from Pexels

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Italy’s New Payments Goliath; Nigerian Fintech Funds SMEs in the CEE

Italy’s New Payments Goliath; Nigerian Fintech Funds SMEs in the CEE
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global

Italy’s Nexi to Acquire Rival SIA in $5.4 Billion Deal

Italy has a new payments behemoth on the block courtesy of a big acquisition in its financial services industry. Nexi, the country’s biggest payments processor with more than $1.16 billion (€984 million) in revenue in 2019, has agreed to acquire banking and fintech solution provider SIA. The purchase price on the all-stock deal comes in at nearly $5.4 billion (€4.6 billion), and will create a new payments contender in the European market with a market capitalization estimated at $17.7 billion (€15 billion).

The acquisition will mark the second big deal in Europe’s payments space this year; Worldline agreed to acquire Ingenico Group earlier this year for $8.6 billion (€7.8 billion).

The combined company will be led by Nexi CEO Paulo Bertoluzzo, and will have two million merchants and 120 million cards. Analysts have suggested Nexi will be able to double its 2019 annual revenue to $2.13 billion (€1.8 billion) post acquisition, and enhance its business in Central and Eastern European markets in particular.

Curious about fintech in the EU’s third most populous member state? EY’s 2020 FinTech Waves report provides an in-depth overview of Italy’s fintech market, which grew from 16 fintech startups in 2011 to 345 fintech startups in 2019. The report notes that the country’s banking sector, though challenged by legacy systems in many instances, is focused on leveraging technology to improve efficiency and boost revenues. Five areas where Italian fintech startups have been especially active, based on EY’s research, are crowdfunding, machine learning/AI, smart payments and money transfers, lending, and insurtech.

“According to our analysis, the Italian FinTech ecosystem is heterogenous, small in size, but with high potential,” the report authors write. Read the full 100+ page report.

Nigerian Fintech Sees Opportunity in CEE SMEs

Lidya, which helps finance small businesses in its home country of Nigeria, has tuned its radar to opportunities far away: in Eastern Europe, to be specific. Earlier this week, the company announced that it had lent three million to small businesses based in the Czech Republic and Poland. Lidya went live in the Czech Republic in March and began offering its services in Poland one month later.

Lidya currently operates in 14 countries in Africa. The company’s expansion gives it the opportunity to lend not only to more small businesses, but to make larger loans, as well. Loans in Lidya’s native Nigeria average $1,500, and are available for as low as $150; Lidya co-founder Ercin Eksin said he anticipates that its operations in Europe could yield loan sizes 4x as big, given the GDP per capita difference between African markets and those in the CEE.

For more on Lidya and the technology scene in sub-Saharan Africa, check out this TechCrunch interview with Lidya CEO and co-founder Tunde Kehinde.

Here is our look at fintech around the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa

  • South African challenger bank Bettr readies for 2021 launch.
  • Ventureburn features PayCurve, an “ethical salary early access solution” provider based in South Africa.
  • Nigeria’s ImaliPay introduces new tailored financial products for gig economy workers.

Central and Eastern Europe

  • Four of Estonia’s biggest banks partner with AML startup Salv to launch pilot program AML Bridge.
  • Vienna, Austria-based Trality, which is developing a trading bot for cryptocurrencies, raises $1.95 million (£1.5 million) in new funding.
  • Estonia’s Sparq secures $517,800 (€440,000) in funding from Baltic International Bank.

Middle East and Northern Africa

  • Fintech Magazine features Commercial Bank of Dubai COO Stefan Kimmel on digitization in banking.
  • Dubai-based financial services platform Rise introduces its Xare app for expatriate workers to remit money back home.
  • Albawaba profiles five of the “biggest fintech startups” in the Middle East: PayTabs, Bayzat, Liwwa, Tribal Credit, Aqeed.

Central and Southern Asia

  • State Bank of India (SBI) launches the country’s first contactless payments wristwatch.
  • Uni, an Indian fintech startup that seeks to bring affordable financing options to the underserved, raises $18.5 million in seed funding.
  • A collaboration between Pakistan’s National Center for Cybersecurity and the National Clearing Company of Pakistan Limited has led to the creation of an AI-based cybersecurity system to help spot suspicious activity in financial transactions.

Latin America and the Caribbean

  • Financial Times looks at the role of Colombian fintechs in the overall landscape of banking in Latin America.
  • IBS Intelligence reviews the top five fintech funding rounds from September, highlighting Neon, dLocal, Marco Financial, Ideal, and Zoop.
  • In a world in which ride-sharing apps are getting into fintech, Costa Rican fintech Omni announced this week that it was launching a ride-sharing service.

Asia-Pacific

  • Bank of Thailand introduces the world’s first blockchain-based platform for government savings bonds.
  • Indonesian fintech BukuWarung, which provides financial services to small businesses, raises as much as $15 million in new funding.
  • MyMy, a digital payments startup based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, raises $2.8 million (RM 12 million) in the country’s largest fintech seed round to date.

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Feedzai Celebrates Growth Milestones, Welcomes New C-Suite Talent

Feedzai Celebrates Growth Milestones, Welcomes New C-Suite Talent
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Feedzai

Above-target growth and a pair of C-suite appointments characterize the first half of 2020 for risk management platform Feedzai. The company announced this morning that it has recorded H1 growth of 44% and negotiated “multiple multi-year enterprise contracts” during the initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic and related market uncertainty. This, along with new leadership in the CFO and CMO roles, enabled the company to have what co-founder and CEO Nuno Sebastiao described “one of the best quarters ever” despite the pandemic.

“This simultaneously shows that our technology is mission-critical, and our business is crisis resilient,” Sebastiao continued. “I’m confident that our next phase of growth will benefit from market conditions in which digital transformation will play a larger than ever role, and from a set of strategic decisions we’ve made in the last 9 months.”

SafetyPay, Credorax, and PayU are among the companies that have teamed up with the San Francisco, California-based risk management platform this year. And joining Feedzai’s executive ranks are Amaury Dauge, former Euronext CFO, who will take over as the company’s new Chief Financial Officer, and Varun Kohli, who has been appointed Chief Marketing Officer.

Founded in 2008 and a Finovate alum for six years, Feedzai leverages artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning to analyze 30 million transactions valued at $5 billion every day. The company’s technology is used by 10 of the world’s largest 25 banks, and has been recognized as “Best in Class” by Aite Group.

Financial crime has taken on new significance during the global health crisis. With more individuals working remotely, and more companies accessing new channels and agents in search of financial assistance, there has been a significant rise in the number of ways criminals can take advantage of the uncertainty of the current environment. Feedzai, in its statement, highlighted mule accounts, phishing attacks, and employer fraud, among the top three types of financial crime that have increased during the pandemic.

“Fraudsters thrive on periods of confusion and chaos,” Aite Group Research Director Julie Convoy said, “and this pandemic represents fertile breeding ground.”

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Google, 21st Century Branch Banking, and the Power of the Platform

Google, 21st Century Branch Banking, and the Power of the Platform
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateFall 2020, Google, Speaker series

This year, FinovateFall Digital brought representatives from some of technology’s biggest players to our all-digital stage. One of these individuals was Paul Rohan, Solutions Consultant with Google Cloud.

Rohan’s presentation on the future of banking showed a connection between the evolution of branch banking and the necessary changes banking will need to undergo in order to thrive in the 21st century. He also discussed the changing nature of competition in financial services brought on by trends like open banking.

Check out our interview with Rohan ahead of his FinovateFall Digital presentation last month.

On the current state of open banking and PSD2

This is a major change in mindset because you start to realize that you could have the very best banking product with superb features and brilliant pricing. But if it’s not a part of these connected digital experiences across multiple brands that customers are increasingly demanding, it could fail. And you could have a middle of the road, not the best financial product, with not the best prices and not the best features. But, boy, if it pops up with the right context, with the right personalization, and the right customization – in these connected digital experiences – it could be a tremendous success.

On open banking as 21st century branch banking

Why did unit banks fall away and then branch banking become the norm? Because it didn’t matter how superb the staff were in the one branch you had, or how wonderful the customer experience was once they came into the branch, or how fast the decision-making was because everyone in your bank was in that one location. But if your one branch was in the wrong town, or beside the wrong industries, as things changed, it didn’t matter how wonderful the user experience was … In essence, (branch banking) started to allow customers to begin their customer journey with the bank where they were living their lives or where they did business.

On the difference between pursuing an app strategy versus a platform strategy as a financial services provider.

The sociology is quite different. In a traditional enterprise that’s quite reliant on doing everything themselves, and there’s always a human desire to innovate and serve your customers, if you do something clever to serve your customers, there is a big round of applause: “This is exactly what we should be doing.”

Companies that are immersed in the connected experiences of digital ecosystems (are) all about trying to make your partners clever. Enable them to be clever because they’ll do the customization, they’ll do the personalization. So there’s a huge amount of thought that goes into taking friction and difficulty out of your partner’s ability to deal with you, and to extend your brand and your proposition into segments you don’t want to serve yourself directly or you couldn’t serve yourself directly.

Watch the rest of the conversation. And for more from our FinovateFall Digital speakers, check out our Finovate TV YouTube playlist.

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Meniga Launches in U.S.

Meniga Launches in U.S.
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Meniga

Oh say, can you see… new digital banking technology landing on U.S. shores? Meniga can.

The U.K.-based company with Icelandic roots is expanding operations into the U.S. with a New York City headquarters location. The U.S. team, led by North America Heads of Sales, Wim Van Lerberghe and Paul Renken, will work remotely until the offices open next year.

Meniga is making the expansion to meet new, pandemic-induced demand for digital banking solutions. “In the current economic climate, it is crucial that Americans are getting the support they need from their banks, and help with the management of their personal finances. But if the bank fails to respond with anything but an efficient and enjoyable user experience, those customers will go elsewhere,” said Meniga CEO and Cofounder Georg Ludviksson. “We know that the unrivalled expertise and local market insight brought by Wim and Paul will allow us to fully export our technology to the U.S., granting American banking partners access to cutting-edge digital products and apps that their customers will love to use every day.”

While many know Meniga as a PFM solutions provider, the company has broadened its approach. The company now has leveraged data to offer a more personalized customer experience via predictive analytics and personalized engagement technologies including spending reports, automated budgeting, personalized nudges, savings challenges, and personalized cashback rewards.

Unique to Meniga is the company’s transaction-based carbon insights tool. Launched earlier this year, the carbon insights tool allows end users to track the carbon emissions that result from their spending.

Meniga has brought this technology to 165+ banks across 30+ countries, reaching more than 90 million end-users across the globe. The company has offices in London, Reykjavik, Stockholm, Warsaw, and, as of last year, Barcelona and Singapore.

“Since expanding into the Southeast Asian market just last year, we’ve also been instrumental in getting some of the area’s most popular banking apps to market. By opening up to the U.S., we’re going to be leading the charge here too,” said Renken. “We see banks as the bastions of the customer, designed to protect and manage assets, particularly during such a financially unstable climate. However, in order to remain competitive, this means they also need to move, and digitalize, with the times. With Meniga’s technology and expertise, banks all across The States will be able to achieve this; creating a customer experience that is intuitive and seamless as well as secure and reliable.”

Among Meniga’s clients are UniCredit, Santander, and UOB. Founded in 2009, the company has raised $43.9 million.

Photo by Duane Swaby on Unsplash

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6 Ways Roboadvisors Have Evolved to Suit 2020

6 Ways Roboadvisors Have Evolved to Suit 2020
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Betterment, List series, Personal Capital, Wealthfront

By many accounts, 2020 has been a difficult year full of events nobody could have anticipated or planned for.

As an industry, however, fintech has faired rather well. The shift to digital combined with an enhanced focus on the customer experience have benefitted banks, end users, and even fintechs themselves.

Fintech’s wealthtech subsector is no different. In fact, roboadvisory tools have evolved over the past decade with near-futuristic new features and offerings that are helping today’s consumers battle the challenges of 2020.

Here we’re taking a look at six ways roboadvisors have improved to (unknowingly) prepare for the toughest year yet.

AI has gotten smarter

Thanks to machine learning capabilities, the AI technology that powers investment strategies, forecasting, and reporting has improved significantly since roboadvisors hit their peak in 2015. Additionally, the amount of data has increased and computing power has been significantly upgraded, meaning that AI has never been smarter.

Recession forecasting

One of my favorite tools that launched this year is Personal Capital’s Recession Simulator. While many investment portfolio models offer a range of what-if scenarios, the Recession Simulator helps users illustrate the effects that historical recessions may have on their portfolio. Currently the Recession Simulator allows users to mimic returns of the DotCom crash of 2000 and the Financial Crisis of 2008.

Challenging the challengers

Last year ushered in the era of challenger banks, and roboadvisors were quick to jump on the opportunity. Three of the top roboadvisors by assets under management– Wealthfront, Betterment, and Personal Capital– all launched checking tools last year. These accounts help consumers keep all of their cash in a single, unified place and some offer tandem, high-yield savings accounts.

Automation

While many fintechs have promised to automate savings, investing, and billpay, many have been slow to deliver. Recently, however Wealthfront has made strides toward its Self-Driving Money concept. Last month the company unveiled Autopilot, the first product in its self-driving money suite. Autopilot takes clients’ savings and automatically monitors their balances and moves money around on their behalf to maximize their savings and returns.

Looking beyond retirement

While everyone hopes to save for retirement, there are plenty of other events to save for, too. Many roboadvisors have set up their platforms to enable users to save up for relatively smaller savings goals, such as a kitchen renovation, a child’s education, or a wedding.

Built for everyone

While many investment platforms cater to a variety of risk appetites, some have started to cater to new client bases, such as gig workers. Betterment, for example, launched a promotion with Steady, a gig economy workforce platform, to offer its users free financial advisory services for one year.

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

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Instnt Partners with Identity Verification Platform Prove

Instnt Partners with Identity Verification Platform Prove
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Instnt

A new partnership will enable customer onboarding platform Instnt to leverage phone intelligence-based authentication to enable firms to “green light” more customers without having to resort to time-consuming, knowledge-based authentication protocols. The company announced that it has teamed up with Prove, whose technology is used by more than 1,000 businesses and 500 bank clients to provide frictionless, passive authentication to their customers.

“As mobile devices have become the de-facto second-factor authentication tool, Prove’s robust phone intelligence technology becomes a crucial component to enable frictionless digital acceptance and authentication of consumers on Instnt’s digital customer onboarding managed service,” Instnt CEO and founder Sunil Madhu explained. “Through this partnership, Instnt aims to bring digital inclusion and one-click federated sign-up to consumers across mobile apps and websites on the internet.”

Instnt enables retail financial institutions and e-commerce merchants to sign up more customers with less risk and fewer fraud losses. Using Instnt’s technology, companies follow a simple, three-step process to create their digital sign-up form and generate a single line of code. This code is added to their website or app to create the onboarding functionality. Instnt leverages AI-powered predictive analytics to validate the user and the device being used during the onboarding process, conducting device and cohort analysis, network analysis, and data validation and verification to provide high accuracy and “requirement levels of compliance.” Instnt goes so far as to indemnify users of its customer onboarding offering for up to $100 million in annual fraud losses.

Instnt’s partnership with Prove comes just weeks after the company announced that it was collaborating with ComplyAdvantage. The partnership will bring machine learning and natural language processing-powered financial crime detection capabilities to Instnt’s onboarding and verification platform. Instnt began the year raising $2.9 million in seed funding from Charge Ventures, Fantail Ventures, Third Prime, and Revel Partners.

Based in New York City, Instnt made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateFall. The company returns to Finovate’s all-digital stage in November for FinovateWest Digital. Find out more about our upcoming live and on-demand fintech event, November 23 through 25.

Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels

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Alkami Acquires ACH Alert

Alkami Acquires ACH Alert
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: ACH Alert, Akamai, Mergers & Acquisitions

Digital banking solutions provider Alkami acquired payments fraud prevention technology company ACH Alert this week.

Terms of the deal are undisclosed but the announcement comes just a few days after Alkami closed a $140 million round of funding.

Founded in 2008, ACH Alert offers two flagship solutions, PRO-TECH and PRO-CHEX, which provide a real time ACH approval process and a check positive pay service, respectively. Alkami will leverage ACH Alert’s solutions to provide a platform to enable banks to increase revenue, reduce complexity, and improve fraud prevention.

“ACH Alert provides FIs with a seamless solution that eliminates the flaws and inefficiencies in existing processes. These inefficient, paper-based processes not only undermine customer adoption and profitability, but also lead to a higher incidence of fraud,” said Alkami CEO Mike Hansen.

Among ACH Alert’s latest clients are Mountain America Credit Union and Citizens Union Bank. Last November, the Tennessee-based company signed a distribution agreement with Apiture, which will offer ACH Alert’s fraud detection services to its 450+ financial institution customers.

Headquartered in Dallas, Texas and founded in 2009, Alkami seeks to provide an end-to-end digital banking experience by offering tools for onboarding, user engagement, and account servicing.

“Together with ACH Alert, we expect to continue to create and deliver winning digital solutions to our clients and their consumer and business digital users,” Hansen added.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

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