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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
It is a truism that many of our greatest technological innovations have come as a result of trying to empower people challenged with physical limitations. Whether the circumstances are sensory, mobility-oriented, or cognitive, the role of technology for many of us is to make the phrase “differently-abled” something more than a politically-correct euphemism.
The rise of mobile banking itself has been a tremendous boon for many disabled customers, rendering unnecessary those often-expensive, time-consuming, and potentially dangerous regular visits to physical bank branches. Technologies that turn text-into-speech or that enable speech to drive digital processes have revolutionized access to financial services for those with sensory limitations. Even more modest innovations that enable seamless debit card spending controls and transaction monitoring are valuable tools not just for small business owners, but for caretakers of adults with limited cognitive capacity, as well.
In financial services, there have been even more focused efforts to serve the adults with disabilities. One is to build institutions that are dedicated to serving populations that have been overlooked in general because of “able-ism.” Purple is a challenger bank that was launched over the summer by a company called youBelong, who built the first social network for “people with special needs.” The bank is the evolution of youBelong’s mobile bank for families with special need children, youBelong Cash, and emphasizes financial literacy and education as a strategy for helping people with disabilities enjoy security and independence.
Founded by CEO John Ciocca, Purple offers a digital savings account with no hidden fees and no minimum balance. Account holders can set up their accounts to receive any Social Security Insurance and Disability payments they are eligible for. Access to PFM features such as money transfers and transaction tracking are included in Purple’s banking app. The accounts come with a Purple Mastercard Debit card, and Purple donates a portion of its revenues to the Special Olympics with every card transaction.
Among fintechs, True Link Financial is a company that has dedicated itself to improving the financial well-being of people with disabilities as well as vulnerable older adults. Payment cards that can be administered by a responsible family member or guardian on behalf of an intellectually-challenged adult, for example, are among True Link’s offerings. The company announced a $35 million Series B round over the summer and its founder and CEO, Kai Stinchcombe, highlighted the way the platform can serve people with disabilities.
“When we launched the True Link Card, it quickly became clear that its features could protect a wider range of people who weren’t being served by traditional financial institutions,” Stinchcombe wrote. “We found that people with disabilities and individuals in recovery from addiction could use our product to meet their unique needs and circumstances.”
Other Finovate alums – from Best of Show winner Golden to Eversafe – also have platforms geared toward helping vulnerable seniors that can be similarly leveraged to benefit members of the disabled community and their families.
Still there are significant challenges. According to a Pew Research Center study from 2017, the rate of technology adoption among the disabled across age groups lags behind those without disabilities – and significantly so in some areas. The home broadband gap between seniors with disabilities and seniors without disabilities is more than 20%. The smartphone gap between non-seniors (ages 18 to 64) with disabilities and non-seniors without disabilities is 17%. If anything, the research suggests that an emphasis on not just the disabled, but disabled seniors in particular – where smartphone and home broadband adoption rates are below 40% – would go a long way toward helping the neediest among those with disabilities.
What happens when you combine two of fintech’s hottest trends– buy now, pay later (BNPL) and banking-as-a-service? Afterpay is about to find out.
That’s because the Australia-based company has inked an agreement with Westpac to become the bank’s first client for its digital banking-as-a-service offering. The deal will allow Afterpay to offer WestPac checking accounts, savings accounts, and cash flow management tools to its 3.3 million Australian customers.
Afterpay will make the new banking products available in the second quarter of next year.
“The platform allows us to combine our banking experience with the innovation of our partners to support new customer experiences,” said Westpac CEO Peter King. “We look forward to working with Afterpay to deliver new products and services.”
By selling a banking-as-a-service offering, Westpac is finding a way to work alongside third party fintechs. Instead of competing with them, the bank will not only profit from them by selling its banking-as-a-service tools, but also acquire additional client accounts in the process.
Founded in 2014, Afterpay helps merchants to allow shoppers to pay for their purchases in four interest-free installments over a short period of time. The service is offered by more than 50,000 retailers across the globe and is used by more than 9 million shoppers. The company is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange under the ticker ASX and has a market capitalization of almost $29 billion. Anthony Eisen is CEO.
Today’s news comes a week after the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (Austrac) cleared Afterpay from anti-money laundering accusations.
A new merger in the payments space will bolster the accounts receivables and payments solutions available to small and medium businesses. Versapay, a customer-centric order-to-cash solution provider based in Canada, announced this week that it has completed its merger with Twinsburg, Ohio-based, payment services provider Solupay. The combined entity will operate as Versapay in name and will be led by the company’s current CEO Craig O’Neill.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. But the merger does include a pair of Solupay subsidiaries: payment processors ChargeLogic and 2CP. Solupay’s technology simplifies payment acceptance, provides click-to-pay invoicing, and automates AR processes, and will give Versapay additional opportunities to serve its SME customers.
“Simplifying invoice presentment and reducing the cost of accepting digital payments are the building blocks for a customer-centric order-to-cash process,” O’Neill said. “We’re excited to welcome the complimentary capabilities of the Solupay team and its innovative integrated payments and AR automation technology as we seek to better serve businesses through their digital payments transformation.”
Founded in 2006 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Versapay has a worldwide network of 8,000 customers and 50,000 users, accounting for $10 billion in payment volume a year. The company’s solutions help businesses accelerate cash conversion, automate manual processes, as well as reduce costs and boost efficiency.
Versapay was acquired by Great Hill Partners in February in a deal that valued the company at $96 million (CAD $126 million).
A pair of partnerships this month have helped Unblu bring its digital conversational platform to a larger number of financial services customers. The company announced at the beginning of the month that digital technology solutions provider Celero will use Unblu’s conversational platform to enable its credit union customers to leverage digital channels to better engage with their members. The integration adds to Celero’s digital banking platform, Celero Xpress, which is powered by another Finovate alum, ebankIT.
“Our new digital platform offers credit union members an intuitive, engaging and secure digital banking experience,” Celero General Manager for Digital Banking Dean Rathwell explained. “By integrating Unblu, our clients can ensure these digital experiences also deliver a personal connection, which is core to the credit union difference.”
Set to launch later this year, the enhanced Celero Xpress platform will provide must-have communication functionalities such as live and video chat, as well as messaging and collaborative co-browsing. The platform is connected to Celero’s digital ecosystem, Celero Xchange, which leverages modern APIs to enable institutions to integrate their own or third party applications. Headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, Celero was founded in 2003 and counts more than 110 credit unions and financial institutions in Canada as its customers.
Unblu’s partnership with Celero came just a week after it announced that it had teamed up with Luzerner Kantonalbank (LUKB), the leading retailing banking group in the Swiss canton of Lucerne with more than $46 billion (CHF 42 billion) in assets as of 2019. LUKB has begun a pilot project to test an online customer advice feature powered by Unblu’s conversational platform. The feature uses a hybrid approach, with customers engaging with a live LUKB agent who works in tandem with the customer by way of Unblu’s screen sharing technology.
“With this new online function, LUKB’s advisors can make the documents on their screens visible on their customers’ devices. That way, the documents or online applications can be clearly explained in a conversation,” LUKB Head of Digitization and Multichannel Management Stefan Lüthy said. He added that while the new solution will save customers a trip to the branch, it is not intended to replace in-person meetings and consultations.
Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Unblu made its most recent Finovate appearance at our European conference in Berlin earlier this year. Unblu was founded in 2012. Luc Haldimann is CEO.
Even before the onset of the global health crisis, banks and other financial services companies were moving in the direction of greater digitization to improve efficiency, cut costs, and most importantly, deliver new and enhanced products and services to an increasingly-tech savvy – and tech-dependent – consumer.
But do firms in the financial services space need to do more than just digitally transform themselves? What strategies do these businesses need to adopt in order to further differentiate their offerings from rivals? How can they provide their customers with the kind of personalized, low- to no-latency, access anywhere, digitally-oriented service their customers have come to expect from all institutions – public or private, large or small, financial or not?
For this week’s Finovate Alumni Profile, we caught up with Stanley Huang, Chief Technology Officer for Moxtra, to discuss these challenges. Specifically, we talk about what he calls the “marketing mindset” that financial services businesses need to adopt in order to not just survive, but thrive in these uncertain times. A leading business collaboration platform designed for the mobile era, Moxtra offers an embeddable omni-channel client engagement solution for financial services companies. The company, founded in 2012 and headquartered in Cupertino, California, has been a Finovate alum since 2016.
Finovate: Digital transformation is the major buzzword for companies right now – understandably. However, would you say that there is more to making it through the current crisis – to say nothing of coming out better on the other side – than just digital transformation? What else do companies need to do?
Stanley Huang: Digital transformation is inevitable but it’s more about the overall industry transformation that needs to take place, especially in an industry like finance and banking which has been slower to adopt more modern, digital solutions. We encourage our customers to leverage this crisis in order to finish the long-term business service model transformation. It’s like shifting from using taxis to Uber.
Consumers have grown accustomed to and reliant on mobile in their interactions with businesses for more than a decade now, and that has raised customer expectations of all businesses fundamentally. It’s simply the reality, and it’s time for laggards to embrace that reality. In order to compete today, you need to place a premium on providing on-demand service with instant response and serving every client as a high-touch customer. The mobile era has created a level of service that customers are accustomed to – so getting ahead of the expectations and needs of customers is vital to better ensure loyalty during the entirety of the customer lifecycle, which in the financial industry is a lifetime if done right.
The silver lining of seemingly being forced into digital transformation during this unique time is that it’s serving to benefit not just some, but all customers in this time capsule we’re experiencing. Now is the time to ensure that no age demographic is left behind in the pursuit of digital adoption, for example. For financial institutions that previously didn’t have something like a OneStop Customer Portal to serve customers virtually, that was a missed opportunity to attract the younger generations who have grown up with mobile and digital solutions as an expectation, not a luxury.
And for financial institutions that had a digital solution headed into the pandemic, this period of time serves as a unique environment to bring older generations into the fold that previously may have been hesitant to do business virtually. Show them what they can do — safely — both physically and from a cybersecurity standpoint, with a OneStop Portal solution. Ensuring they feel comfortable to be served via this new channel with both a secure and user-friendly interface will make them a lifelong virtual banker, benefiting both parties long term.
Finovate: You’ve discussed a concept called a “marketing mindset” that you think more businesses need to adopt in order to survive and thrive in the current environment and beyond. What is a marketing mindset? Why do companies need it and how do they get it if they don’t have it? How did you come to this insight?
Huang: When we talk about doing business with a marketing mindset, it goes back to the shift in importance to how you provide service vs. what you offer – it’s evolving from a “product mindset” to a “marketing mindset”. By that, we mean creating a customer experience that is centered around brand consciousness. Marketers are naturally focused on this concept of brand consciousness in their role as they own the responsibility of overseeing the execution of how the brand is presented to customers as well as the messaging that is circulated. Oftentimes, banks aren’t as self-aware of their brand identity when interacting with customers on a day-to-day basis as they really should be.
Banks must have a marketing and customer-centric mindset to succeed in a digital age that has heightened consumer expectations for the type of experience they expect to receive, especially by an institution that is responsible for something so personal and important to them as managing their money.
When customers have other options for who they bank with, financial leaders — no matter their role — should consider leading with a marketing and customer-centric mindset to appeal to and retain customers. If this frame of mind and way of doing business isn’t innate within the company, it is up to bank employees to educate and promote the benefits of this new approach to banking. Especially during the early adoption phase of digital banking, a thought-out, handshake-replacing approach to doing business digitally is what will help banks gain customer confidence and trust to earn their loyalty long-term. If approached with a marketing mindset, your advocacy and education about this new approach to doing business will aid in customer adoption, comfort and, ultimately, loyalty.
Finovate: What industries or companies are doing the best job of embracing this mindset? Is there a reason why these businesses are better able to adopt a marketing mindset compared to other businesses/industries?
Huang: Industries embracing this mindset best are those that have the greatest reputations to uphold in comparison to other top-notch brand experiences, such as in retail and CPG (consumer packaged goods). While antiquated government institutions and utility companies can coast by with a lower caliber of service, retail and CPG brands can’t afford to slip up on the customer experience advertised — especially with all of the options available to consumers and the likes of Amazon coming for their customers.
That’s why retail banks serving your everyday consumer such as Citibank came to us to ensure the experience it offers its customers is thoughtful, thorough and robust to match their in-person banking experience, and in some ways surpass it with on-demand relationship managers.
High-touch businesses like Citibank are our sweet spot of service, because their OneStop Digital Branch requires comprehensive, collaborative capabilities — both on the front end and back end — that can manage a more complex level of services than a simple e-commerce site or app by a retailer needs. Banks need capabilities like secure messaging, digital signature, and a seamless tracking of finances, transactions, and banking communications in real-time.
High-touch businesses, such as those in the financial industry, law, real estate, education, event planning, etc. are the type of companies and organizations that may be slight laggards with digital transformation not because they don’t value their customers, students and other stakeholders, but because ten years ago the technology wasn’t out there to facilitate the complex facets of their business virtually in the way that a simple online clothing retail operation can pull off. We are working to fill that need at Moxtra with our Digital Branch Solution.
Accounts receivable automation company Billtrust announced today it agreed to a merger with South Mountain Merger Corporation, a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).
The combined entity, which will operate under the name BTRS Holdings Inc., will be a publicly traded company with a value of approximately $1.3 billion. BTRS is expected to trade on The Nasdaq Stock Market under a new ticker symbol.
Billtrust’s management team, which is led by Flint Lane, Founder and CEO, Steve Pinado, President, and Mark Shifke, CFO, will continue to lead the Company.
“As we begin our journey as a public company, we are thrilled to partner with the South Mountain team and know we will benefit from their extensive industry experience,” said Lane. “We believe accounts receivable (AR) is ripe for innovation, and together we will continue to invest in opportunities to scale the business, growing both organically and inorganically, as we seek to tackle the large total addressable market. As a leader in AR automation, we believe Billtrust is well-positioned to own a disproportionate share.”
Founded in 2001, Billtrust and has since worked to create a suite of solutions that simplify and automate B2B commerce through cloud-based software and integrated payment processing solutions. In 2018, the company launched its Business Payments Network (BPN). The network connects buyers, suppliers, and financial institutions to simplify and streamline electronic payment acceptance.
The transaction is expected to close in early 2021 and is subject to stockholder approval and closing conditions.
Heading into the new year, many fintech observers believed that customer experience would be as big a theme in 2020 as it was in 2019. And while the specific circumstances of that bigness (i.e., a generational global health crisis) were not anticipated by anyone, the importance of the customer remain as key theme this year as many thought it would be – if not more so.
This makes our upcoming conversation at FinovateWest Digital about the customer experience in 2020 and beyond so compelling. Joining us on Day Two of our all-digital, fintech conference next month are Sunil Dixit, Managing Director at BBVA, and Jeremy Balkin, Head of Innovation with HSBC. The two will take on the topic of how to create a customer experience that goes beyond insights to actually “surprise and delight” consumers.
Sunil Dixit leads the delivery of digital transformation of the consumer/retail bank for BBVA’s Global Client Solutions division. Based in Madrid, Spain, Dixit joined the company in 2017 after a tenure at Barclays where he led on strategy, embracing disruptive technologies, and the start-up ecosystem. Most recently, he has led development of BBVA’s open banking strategy and governance worldwide.
No stranger to Finovate audiences, Jeremy Balkin is Head of Innovation with HSBC Bank USA. The New York-based analyst serves on the bank’s retail bank management committee and manages the fintech innovation and exponential growth strategy for North America. Balkin is also the author of Investing with Impact: Why Finance is a Force for Good and Millennialization of Everything: How to Win When Millennials Rule the World.
Together Dixit and Balkin will address how financial services companies can avoid the dead-end of price competition and instead add new services, products, rewards, and benefits to differentiate their offering and improve the customer experience. They will look at how COVID-19 has impacted consumer preferences and what data science and other enabling technologies can be employed to help firms gain and act on insights into their customers’ preferences.
Learn more about our upcoming presentation on Customer Experience in the Post-COVID era. And visit our FinovateWest Digital hub to register today and save your spot.
Cloud banking technology provider Thought Machine has been tapped by U.K.-based Curve to power its new buy now, pay later (BNPL) offering that allows customers to pay for purchases in installments.
The new product, Curve Credit, allows users to spread their payments over three, six, or nine month periods. Thanks to Thought Machine’s core platform and Curve’s Go Back in Time technology, credit can be applied both retrospectively and prospectively.
The retroactive payment functionality will rely on the smart contracts product-building system in Vault, Thought Machine’s cloud native core banking engine.
“Thought Machine is the only technology that allows us to deliver the flexibility and manageability we desired for our customers,” said Head of Curve Credit Paul Harrald. “Curve Credit’s ethos is about responsible lending and responsible borrowing. Alongside Curve OS, this three-way dynamic will be able to give each customer the clearest possible terms via a simple and beautiful product and experience.”
Founded in 2014, Thought Machine provides core banking technology for tier one banks, neobanks, and fintechs across the globe. The company counts Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered, Atom bank, Monese, and SEB among its clients. Thought Machine’s funding total was boosted to more than $148 million in July of this year after the company closed a $42 million round.
Curve, which landed a partnership with Samsung Pay in August, enables users to consolidate all of their cards onto a single smart payment card. The company was founded in 2015 and has raised just over $74 million.
Two of the biggest phenomena in fintech worldwide: the rise of open banking and the growth of digital-first (and digital-only) banking, continue to make an impact on fintech as well. One example of that is today’s news that NYMBUS has partnered with PeoplesBank to help the Massachusetts-area financial institution launch its digital-only extension, ZYNLO.
“Only NYMBUS provided us a comprehensive strategy to quickly introduce a new digital-only effort,” PeoplesBank Brian Canina, Chief Financial Officer said. “Backed by and running in parallel to our established institution with 135 years of experience in creating satisfied customers, ZYNLO delivers the ideal combination of digital banking convenience and security that today’s consumers depend on.”
PeoplesBank’s new offering is a no-fee savings account that includes features like Zyng, a round-up savings benefit that rounds up debit card purchases to the nearest dollar and adds the difference to the customer’s ZYNLO account. The company is currently offering a 100% round-up match for the first 100 days, with a 10% match on debit card transactions afterwards. ZYNLO also offers Early PayDay and daily balance and payment alerts, and all deposits are insured via FDIC and DIF.
Today’s news represents an extension of the partnership between the two companies. At the beginning of the year, PeoplesBank announced that it would deploy NYMBUS’ SmartMarketing and SmartOnboarding platform to boost revenue growth and enhance customer engagement. With more than $3 billion in assets under management PeoplesBank is the largest community bank in Western Massachusetts, with 20 banking centers in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
Founded in 1885 and headquartered in Holyoke, Massachusetts, PeoplesBank recently announced that its latest new branch in South Hadley will feature VideoBanker ITMs, a combination of an ATM and a virtual teller that Canina said mitigates the need for drive-up teller windows. The innovation became a necessity when the municipality issued a zoning restriction that required the new branch building to be located closer to the street, making a traditional drive-up window problematic.
Most recently demonstrating its SmartLaunch digital banking solution at FinovateFall last year, NYMBUS has since inked partnerships to deploy the technology with Centier Bank, BankMD, and Pacific National Bank. Over the summer, NYMBUS secured $12 million in growth funding, taking the company’s total capital to more than $45 million. That same month, NYMBUS added Jim Modak as President and Chief Financial Officer.
In September, the company named former Kony DBX DVP and General Manager Jeffery Kendall as CEO. Kendall replaced former CEO and company founder Scott Killoh, who will continue with NYMBUS as executive chairman of the company’s board of directors.
Lending and marketing automation platform CuneXusannounced this week it has agreed to an acquisition by CUNA Mutual Group. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
CUNA began its relationship with CuneXus in 2017 when its venture capital entity, CMFG Ventures, became an early-stage investor in the Santa Rosa, California-based company.
“We are continuing our journey into a more diverse, digital-first world,” said Robert N. Trunzo, president and CEO of CUNA Mutual Group. “Our company is committed to using technology to enhance consumers’ access to financial solutions that work for them and create a more equitable financial system and society. This is a top priority for all of our core businesses.”
CuneXus works with more than 140 financial institutions to help lenders maximize customer relationships by offering turn-key access to its application-free consumer lending tool, cplXpress. The company helps banks offer pre-approved, “click-to-accept” consumer loans to customers that are personalized to appear where and when they need them.
“CuneXus is on a strong growth trajectory, and adding their expertise and product solution to our company portfolio allows us to maximize its growth potential and enhance our long-standing efforts to make a brighter financial future accessible to everyone,” Trunzo added.
Founded in 2008, CuneXus has raised $6.7 million.
“We are genuinely excited to join the CUNA Mutual Group family,” said CuneXus CEO Dave Buerger. “Our capabilities and culture align very well, and we believe we can greatly enhance CUNA Mutual Group’s digital evolution in the lending space.”
This week in Finovate Global we take a deep dive into the fintech ecosystem in Latin America through the lens of Rapyd, one of the companies that has been especially active in helping bring innovative financial services to the consumers of the region. We caught up with Eric Rosenthal, Vice President and Managing Director for the Americas with Rapyd for an extended Q&A via email.
Finovate: Rapyd just launched a new integrated payments solution in Mexico. How big of a deal is this for the company and its ability to serve the Mexican and Latin American markets?
Eric Rosenthal: We have made significant investments in product sales and marketing strategy in Mexico and Latin America as these are critical markets to Rapyd’s growth.
Rapyd has been quietly operating in Mexico since early 2018, building partnerships with local solution providers and developing relationships with businesses. With the launch of our integrated payments solution in Mexico, we formally announced our presence and the strong local partnerships we have developed which have enabled us to provide the full range of payment capabilities that merchants wish to offer to consumers based on how they want to pay.
We intend to target local merchants that are looking into expanding their offerings in Mexico or that are looking into launching in other markets in Latin America or globally, as well as merchants outside of Mexico that have an interest in transacting with Mexico, either by disbursing or collecting funds.
Mexico is a very strategic market for Rapyd. It is one of the five countries in the world where we have local entities and offer our full-stack capabilities – which means we offer all of our payment capabilities including collecting funds via bank transfers, cash and cards, disbursing funds across cash and bank transfers, and card issuing. It was one of the first countries we entered in 2018 – only two years since Rapyd’s founding – and the first country outside of the U.S. I personally opened as Managing Director for the Americas at Rapyd.
Finovate: What can you tell us about this offering? What problem is it designed to solve and who is it designed to solve the problem for?
Rosenthal: Whether we are talking about Mexico or any country in the world, the unfortunate reality of financial services has been and continues to be, that any merchant (marketplace, gig economy platforms, e-Commerce sites, etc.) trying to transact digitally will encounter payments infrastructure that is extremely fragmented. So if I am a Mexican merchant who is trying to solve the issue of collecting, disbursing, and issuing a card, I will need to integrate with three to five services providers – just in Mexico!
Merchants that are expanding in Mexico or looking to enter new markets globally deal with this problem. It becomes exponentially harder to manage as they move into multiple markets.
Rapyd is trying to eliminate the complexity that has come to characterize cross border finance. We look at how you simplify integration, and contracting processes and let companies dedicate their finite resources towards enhancing their core product instead of spending time and energy solving the challenges they face with payment and fintech integrations.
Finovate: The company partnered with a number of major Mexican payment providers for this initiative. How important are these relationships for fintechs in the Mexican payments industry?
Rosenthal: Our partners are what makes us unique – Rapyd is ultimately a network built on shared goals and collaboration. Through our partnerships we facilitate market entry that would otherwise be unattainable for many of these businesses to achieve on their own. Some of the areas we address include attending to merchants that are looking to scale their businesses as well as those looking to diversify their geographical coverage. In many cases, we have merchants that want to continue to work with their existing payment partners but in tandem begin to operate on the Rapyd platform as it offers a technology enhancement on top of what they are already doing, or simply because they are seeking a single point of reconciliation and settlement to minimize their operational overhead.
So, for us, our partners are absolutely critical. What does it mean for the Mexican ecosystem? It ultimately means a better level of service for our end clients. We went out and found partners that are best in class, a handful of which we have announced publicly, and then others that we have not announced, but all of them are the best at what they do. So if you are a potential merchant looking for top of the line providers, you can trust that Rapyd has done the footwork, from the necessary technical integrations, ensured the network is compliant, performed the business due diligence, and also established attractive commercial terms with our partners. On behalf of the client, we minimize the effort and time of what would otherwise have been an enormous effort to set up what we set up on their behalf. Rapyd allows them to focus on their core business and not worry about the challenge of building and maintaining mission-critical payments infrastructure.
Finovate: Many people in fintech here in the U.S. are aware of the fintech ecosystem in Europe and Asia, and even the Middle East, to a degree. We hear much less about fintech in Latin America. What are some important things for people to understand about that ecosystem?
Rosenthal: I personally have spent a lot of time living in Latin America. I lived in Peru for about 3 years and in Mexico for 3 years, so I have always felt a strong connection to the ecosystem. My perspective, shaped by having also lived in Southeast Asia, is that the Latin American ecosystem to a certain degree is a few years “behind” (in time, not in quality) and therefore the attention that has been given previously to APAC and Europe has to do with the fact that the ecosystem in Latin America is perceived to be a few years behind.
The amount of time it takes for new initiatives to take hold or knowledge to transfer across the globe is significantly compressed. For example, most of what Rappi is doing is modeled after what Grab was doing in Southeast Asia three years prior. But yet you are now seeing that Rappi itself has significantly compressed its innovation cycle to launch new solutions and products.
While the Latin American market may be less known for the time being globally, it is very well known by, and relevant to, those that have been operating in the region for some time.
Finovate: What are some of the more unique aspects of fintech in Central and South America?
Rosenthal: What is unique about Latin America is that it has a significant advantage over other markets, in my opinion when we talk about scalability and ease of adoption. While there are differences across cultures and of course dialect and language- don’t forget that Brazil has close to 250 million people speaking Portuguese, in the grand scheme of things Latin America is well suited for scale because of the commonality of language and ease of talent mobility- making the replicability of business models seamless.
All that being said, we do continue to confront one challenge in Latin America, that is of course the sheer size of the market. Operating across 18 countries means 18 different regulatory regimes and few regional banking partners that are truly regional and that can offer the full set of capabilities.
But where there is fragmentation there is opportunity for Rapyd. Our ability to weave together multiple partners has positioned us as the single largest cash payment provider in the region. We have over 400,000 cash payment locations across Latin America, a large bank transfer network spanning each country we operate in, the ability to offer card acquiring in most of the countries we operate in, and the ability to hold the vast majority of Latin America currencies. That is something that even some of the world’s largest financial institutions are not able to provide. All of this together puts us in a prime position to serve clients that are looking for multi-country regional solutions. We believe that other companies such as Rapyd are playing a major role in removing these artificial technology barriers and borders between countries and are laying the foundation for more and more companies to scale with ease across the region and ultimately build more globally recognized fintechs.
For workers in the gig economy, getting paid as quickly as possible is a critical way to manage – to say nothing of survive on – an often-irregular source of income. And with the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, even those working in the traditional, 9-to-5 economy are feeling new levels of financial anxiety.
Responding to this challenge is Clair, a New York-based startup founded last year by Nico Simko (CEO), Erich Nussbaumer (CPO), and Alex Kostecki (COO). The social-impact fintech believes that workers should have access to their wages, without any additional fee or charge, at the end of the work session rather than at some arbitrary point in the future. This week, the company announced a $4.5 million seed fundraising that will help it fulfill its mission of enabling workers to “freely access money they’ve already earned,” said Simko in a statement.
“There are more payday lenders than McDonald’s in the U.S. that charge on average more than 300% annual interest on loans,” he said. “So we have one simple vision: it’s time for change.”
The round was led by Upfront Ventures and featured participation from Founder Collective and Walkabout Ventures. Also involved in the investment were Michael Vaughan, former COO of Venmo, and Paul Appelbaum, founder of Seamless. Combined with $55,000 in pre-seed funding the company picked up in the fall of last year, Clair’s total capital adds up to over $5 million.
Clair combines digital banking functionality – complete with savings account and debit card – with an Instant Pay Access feature that mitigates the temptation workers may feel to resort to high-interest payday lenders. Workers at participating businesses sign up for the service as they would for direct deposit. Once onboarded, they can request free advances on a portion of their earned income via the Clair app (or a partnering app). The advance is loaded onto a Clair debit card and the amount is deducted from the worker’s account on the subsequent payday.
According to Clair, Instant Pay Access provides a reduced reliance on payday loans and more income security in the event of emergency for workers, and turnover reduction and lower check printing costs for businesses. Upfront Ventures partner Aditi Maliwal, who sits on the Clair board of directors, praised the company’s business strategy of avoiding high customer acquisition costs by “creating a product embedded in other services that workers already use.” Simko echoed this point, highlighting not just Clair’s value to SME payroll operations, but also the value that fintechs bring to small businesses more generally.
“With small business employees making up nearly 50% of the country’s workforce, employers often don’t have enough scale to offer better benefits on their own, so they look towards their software providers,” Simko said. “By enabling these providers, we are bridging a gap and empowering them with functionalities their users want.”
