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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Illuma Labs, creator of the real-time audio authentication platform for secure voice communications, Illuma Shield, has received a joint investment from The Veridian Group (a CUSO of Veridian Cedit Union) and Texas Dow Employees Credit Union (TDECU). Terms of the funding were not disclosed.
The investment comes as a result of Illuma Labs’ participation in VentureTech, an annual program that helps fintechs seeking funding to secure investment opportunities from within the credit union industry. Illuma was part of VentureTech’s 2019 cohort, which also featured fellow Finovate alums Wizely Finance, Terafina, Plinqit, and Pinkaloo. VentureTech was launched by The Veridian Group, Open Technology Solutions, and CUNA Strategic Services in 2018, and will hold its third event this fall.
“Instead of waiting for technology to come to market, VentureTech allows the credit union industry to be proactive in building its competitive advantage in the digital space,” President of The Veridian Group, Nick Evens explained at last year’s conference, which saw Illuma Labs take home top honors. “By recognizing and investing in promising fintech, we’re providing innovative, digital-first solutions that will drive the Movement forward.”
Iowa-based Veridian Credit Union, the FI served by The Veridian Group, has more than 244,000 members and $4.5 billion in assets. Texas Dow Employees Credit Union, with $3.7 billion in assets and more than 263,000 members, is the biggest credit union in the Houston, Texas area, and the fourth largest CU in the state.
Founded in 2016 and making its Finovate debut last year at FinovateSpring, Illuma Labs provides real-time voice authentication for customers around the world. With a technology that has its origins in R&D projects with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, the company’s solutions support secure communications in verticals ranging from financial services and insurance to e-commerce. Illuma Shield, the company’s flagship solution, leverages signal processing, machine learning, and AI to offer call centers a real-time voice authentication solution that analyzes voices in natural conversation and provides a high authentication accuracy rate in a short period of time.
Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Illuma Labs was founded in 2016 by Milind Borkar (CEO) and Jeremy Whittington (CTO).
We caught up with Uri Rivner, co-founder and Chief Cyber Officer of BioCatch, a leading cybersecurity firm that provides behavior-based authentication and threat detection solutions to banks, e-commerce platforms, as well as mobile and web applications.
We wanted to learn how the company, founded in 2011 and headquartered in Israel and New York, has fared in the wake of its major $145 million spring fundraising. We also wanted to hear about the new cybersecurity environment brought on by the global public health crisis and what BioCatch is doing to help institutions manage this challenge.
Finovate: You are one of the founders of BioCatch, and your current role with the company is Chief Cyber Officer? What does this role entail within the company?
Uri Rivner: I was actually head of new technologies at security giant RSA when, in 2011, a foreign state hacked into RSA. It was one of the most famous hacking incidents in history, and following that I was on the look for new technologies that can help the industry against cyber attacks and online fraud. BioCatch, then a very young company, came to us at RSA to present the tech, which sounded really sci-fi. I was impressed and introduced them to industry players who all said that if this was working as advertised, this is a game-changing technology.
At some point the founders of BioCatch asked me to join as a co-founder and help them build the business. I joined mid-2012 as VP of Cyber Strategy. My current role as Chief Cyber Officer is to identify new cybercrime business problems the technology can address, and provide internal and external thought leadership on the role of behavioral biometrics in digital transformation and fighting online fraud.
Finovate: When we last shared BioCatch news with our readers, it was in April on the heels of the company’s $145 million fundraising. How big of a moment was that for BioCatch?
Rivner: It was a major milestone. A vote of confidence that showed us how well the market appreciates what we have accomplished. We’ve taken a scientific field in cognitive studies, something that was working in the lab, and made it extremely practical for use in solving the biggest issues in online fraud across dozens of banks, credit card issuers and companies outside the financial sector, protecting over 100 million online and mobile users. We’ve tackled issues that were initially deemed impossible to solve. And we’ve done all of that with very happy customers and a highly scalable product. It was a proud moment, but at the same time also a commitment to work very hard to justify the trust of our new investors!
Finovate: What has BioCatch been up to in the weeks since then – specifically, how has the COVID-19 crisis impacted the work your company does?
Rivner: Our team has shifted to a work from home model; it was done quite efficiently, and we experienced no issues in continuing to serve customers. We run in the cloud, and there was no interruption to the service. The customers also moved to the same mode of operation.
Finovate: Let’s talk about some of the new security challenges that have developed during the pandemic. It seems like there are fraud “hotspots” everywhere: COVID aid/relief fraud, the security issues of Work From Home, and the potential for identity crime in any track and trace program. Can you talk a little about the cybersecurity landscape in the era of COVID-19?
Rivner: If I had to pick one community that is definitely going to thrive during a global virus outbreak, it’s online fraudsters. They have a golden opportunity to scale their operations while entire companies move their fraud operations and analytics teams to a work from home model, which is not an easy process for, say, a major bank. Here are some of the trends to watch for:
Stimulus Fraud
American taxpayers get a direct deposit to their bank account using the information included in the last tax return they filed. If they haven’t filed a tax return for 2019 yet, it’s then a race with the fraudsters, who will try to beat them to it and provide a falsified tax return including a bank account that they control. This means the stimulus deposit will go to the bad guys. There are many people who do not file tax returns and go to a website where their information is validated and a check is sent to their address. That’s an easy venue for identity thieves who can obtain full identity records for all U.S. citizens in the dark web. Fraudsters are also impersonating small businesses to apply for stimulus loans using similar methods. In short, it’s a fraudster’s heaven.
Account Opening Fraud
The most scalable fraud operation is opening credit card or personal loan accounts. All you need is to buy a bigger list of stolen identity records, and have a team of people opening accounts in other people’s names. Identity theft is reported to sky-rocket, and it can be quite dangerous, especially if it’s a new digital service that is launching these days. If a new digital service is targeted by a massive campaign, there will be more fraud applications than real applications – that’s disastrous. Traditional defenses such as checking KYC (know your customer) data and device recognition no longer hold, and new technologies such as behavioral biometrics are used to stop such fraud campaigns and reduce false rejections due to high security bars.
Corona Tracker Rogue Apps
Cyber space is teeming with coronavirus scams. The most dangerous scams are the ones that manage to trick users into downloading rogue apps onto their mobile device. They’ll look like useful tools that alert you when a coronavirus carrier is in your immediate vicinity or providing CDC-approved virus contagion maps. But, in reality, they’re after your mobile banking app and mobile e-commerce purchases.
Social Engineering… From ‘Your Bank’
“Hey, we’re your bank, and wanted to reach out! The branch is closed, so we’re the friendly help desk. We’ve noticed some issues in your account, and would like to help you sort it out. Can you please install this utility to help us run some tests remotely?” You know the rest of this story.
Uri Rivner demonstrating BioCatch’s Passive Biometrics/Invisible Challenges technology at the company’s Finovate debut in 2014.
Finovate: Earlier this year you were part of a conference presentation that highlighted the importance of machine learning and AI in fighting fraud. What about these enabling technologies is so beneficial when it comes to cybersecurity?
Rivner: My lecture talked about how Sherlock Holmes managed in A Case of Identity to identify an imposter based on a dozen or so “features” related to the typewriter they used to type love letters. Machine Learning can instantly look at thousands of features, resulting in an extremely accurate model that predicts fraud and can adapt itself when cyber criminals change their strategy. At BioCatch we have over 2,000 such features – and not even good old Sherlock could have managed that many in his identity model!
An important consideration though is that some machine learning models are a black box and don’t really provide insights into why a certain action is risky. BioCatch, for example, uses Explainable AI models to make sure customers can get the reasons why a score was high, as well as many negative and positive behavioral factors observed during a session.
Finovate: What can we expect from BioCatch over the balance of 2020? Has the global health crisis made it more difficult to have visibility into the second half of the year?
Rivner: Fraud isn’t going away and, in fact, we anticipate a surge in account takeover activity as criminals scale up their cash-out operations. They already have the data they need to steal more money, but they need to scale their infrastructure. Think of mule accounts for moving money out of victim’s account. The crisis makes it easy to recruit mules in work-from-home scams, and to open bogus bank accounts to which stolen money can be moved. Right now criminals are busy doing just that, preparing for a big wave of attacks that is likely to focus on real-time payments such as the relatively new Zelle infrastructure in the U.S., or similar services elsewhere. So demand for a frictionless control that stops fraud and highlights genuine behavior is going to increase.
Specifically, Banco Santander will use ThetaRay’s anti-money laundering technology to detect activity in SWIFT traffic, risk indicators, and KYC data that may be indicative of money laundering. Banco already has begun deploying ThetaRay’s anomaly detection solution and anticipates a full global rollout “over the next months.”
“We are proud that a financial institution as universally respected as Santander Bank has chosen our AML solution for correspondent banking,” ThetaRay CEO Mark Gazit said. “Recent progress with Partnerships Unit makes me feel Santander is the best financial platform to partner with.”
ThetaRay leverages big data analytics and machine learning algorithms to provide organizations with automatic, real-time detection of suspicious behavior. This enables firms to move faster to address potential threats and to initiate early remediation efforts sooner. ThetaRay’s Investigation Center, designed specifically for the needs of correspondent banking, gives Santander complete access to the data lineage, as well, enabling the bank to conduct extensive forensic investigations to understand the reasoning behind every warning generated by the system.
“ThetaRay’s solution will further improve our ability to detect the earliest signs of money laundering and uncover unknown originating risks,” Santander Global VP for Global Transaction Banking CIB, Carlos Gutierrez said.
ThetaRay demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall in 2015, showing how its fraud and anomaly detection solution helps increase the efficiency and accuracy of cybersecurity systems. Last month, as part of the company’s effort to help financial institutions manage new cybersecurity challenges during the coronavirus crisis, ThetaRay launched FAST START. The new offering packages ThetaRay’s financial crime technology into a cloud-deployable solution that banks can get up and running within 30 days. FAST START is available in three different packages – AML Alert Triage, AML Detection and Monitoring, and Enterprise Fraud Prevention -geared toward the specific kinds of cyberthreats FIs are dealing with.
Founded in 2014 and headquartered in both Israel and the U.S., ThetaRay has raised more than $66 million in funding from investors including ABN AMRO Ventures and Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP).
As a company, the only thing better than a customer that loves your services and solutions is a customer that wants a piece of the action as well. That’s the happy situation digital banking solution provider Meniga finds itself in; the multiple-time Finovate Best of Show winner has just secured a $9.4 million (€ 8.5 million) strategic investment from current customers Grupo Credíto Agrícola, UniCredit, and Groupe BPCE, which led the round.
The investment, which takes Meniga’s total equity funding to more than $43 million, will help fuel the company’s R&D activities, as well as bolster its sales and service teams. Also participating in the round were current investors Velocity Capital, Industrifonden, and Frumtak Ventures.
Having Groupe BPCE, the second largest banking group in France, as both a customer and an investor is no accident. “Partnering closely with our customers is a key part of our strategy to be the preferred digital innovation partner to our clients,” Meniga co-founder and CEO Georg Ludviksson explained. “An equity relationship is an excellent way to strengthen such partnerships and we appreciate the continued vote of confidence and growing business we have with our impressive global client base.”
Meniga’s funding announcement comes amid a flurry of activity worldwide from the London-based company. In April, Meniga partnered with UniCredit to offer an enhanced version of its smart banking app in the Czech Republic. Also that month, Meniga teamed up with payments and transaction services firm Worldline to help boost digital customer engagement via personalization. Opening a new office in Warsaw, Poland in March, Meniga began the year by receiving its AISP license from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the U.K.
“The FCA license is an important milestone for Meniga,” Ludviksson said when the license was granted this February, “We will now be able to test new innovations against the Open Banking APIs and with real use cases, which will help us develop products of outstanding quality.”
Meniga’s technology is used by more than 90 million digital banking customers in +30 countries. Founded in 2009, the company most recently demonstrated its technology at FinovateFall in 2019.
How has COVID-19 impacted fintech funding in the first half of 2020?
Writing about fintech funding in the first quarter of 2020, CB Insights painted a bleak picture of how the global health crisis and its economic effects have put a pall on VC investment in fintech around the world.
“Worst first quarter for funding since 2017…” “Worst first quarter for deal volume since 2016 …” Across the globe, venture capital investors were on the retreat with only Europe showing significant quarter over quarter growth – thanks largely to the $500 million investment secured by Revolut.
And as the appetite for risk waned, so did interest in smaller fintech startups. CB Insights noted that early stage startups were among the hardest hit in the first quarter, with this subset of companies falling to a nine-quarter low in funding and a 13-quarter low in deal volume.
The struggles of the first quarter of 2020 – when the lockdowns, shelter-in-place, and quarantines were implemented – had reduced much of economic activity to a trickle. With Q2 all but wrapped up – and countries around the world beginning, some more tentatively than others, to reopen their economies – are venture capital investors proving more ready to return to the table?
What were expectations for 2020?
Although VC investment in fintech was down modestly from 2018, last year featured more than enough fundraising to give fintech observers confidence that 2020 could still be a strong year. Again, using CB Insights’ figures, fintech investment pulled back to $33.9 billion in 2019 from $40.8 billion in 2018, with deal volume easing to 1,912 deals in 2019 from 2,049 deals in 2018. Early stage investment declined from a peak in Q1 2018, en route to the 13-quarter low noted above. But investment in more mature startups, Series B and beyond, was strong, with deal volumes reaching their highest levels in five years.
Articles like “Fintech Startups Got All the VC Love in 2019” were also indicative of the general optimism fintech observers felt headed into 2020. Major merger and acquisition deals like Add to this the enthusiasm engendered by major merger and acquisition deals like Fiserv and First Data, and Worldpay and FIS added to the enthusiasm. When combined with the rise of digital banking and regtech, and the addition of 12 new fintech unicorns in the U.S., the conclusions reached by KPMG late last year in its Pulse of Fintech report for the second half of 2019 seemed perfectly sound.
“Fintech investment is well-positioned to grow in 2020,” the report noted, “particularly with the growing proliferation of fintech hubs globally, not to mention the ever-widening scope of fintech offerings.”
How have these expectations played out? Who has benefitted most?
While fintech VC funding in the first half of the year has struggled, there are signs that this slowdown may be a function of trends that began before the pandemic hit. The second quarter – when quarantines were the case in much if not most countries – did not lack for big fintech deals; Stripe’s $600 million extension of its Series G round in April rivals the $500 million raised by Revolut in February. Micro investment platform Stash scored $112 million in funding in April, as well. Payments company Marqeta announced a $150 million investment – and $4.3 billion valuation – in May.
Similarly, did COVID-19 cause or merely accelerate a growing VC preference for larger, more established companies over the early stage startups? KPMG was among those who predicted that 2020 would see “frothy speculative deals … increasingly replaced by high-conviction deals focused on companies with proven business models and paths to profitability or access to capabilities in adjacent areas of interest.” This view was shared in February, before the challenge of the global public health crisis had become incorporated fully by many analysts (and not just fintech). Since then, we have seen this play out in the form of new lows in deal volume and deal value for seed and Series A fintechs mentioned above.
When risk appetites are modest, it is understandable that the riskier, early stage startups will be those most likely to suffer. This so far has proven to be the case this year, as investment preferences continue a trend toward relatively more established companies. The fact that this shift had been anticipated by analysts, pre-COVID, suggests this trend is likely to endure in the near term.
Has there been significant geographic variation? Why?
As mentioned above, the only area to see significant VC investment gains in their fintech sector was Europe. In all other regions – Asia, North and South America, Australia, and Africa – both deals value and deal volume were down in the first quarter of 2020.
The profile of VC fintech investment in Europe so far this year was boosted by the $500 million raised by Revolut in Q1. Fintech is in many ways a favorite sector of the European venture capitalists; fintech has lead all others as a destination for VC investment for the past 6+ years. But there was no big Revolut/Stripe level investment in Europe in Q2, although there were a number of smaller deals in firms like U.K. ID verification company Onfido ($100 million) and Germany-based stock trading app TradeRepublic ($62 million) in April. U.K. challenger bank Monzo is also reportedly working to raise capital, as well.
One interesting development on the international fintech funding front is the continued rise of India relative to China. As reported in our weekly Finovate Global column last week, fintech investment in India bested fintech investment in China by a significant margin of more than $50 million. Indian fintechs racked in more than $330 million in funding while their Chinese counterparts raised “approximately $270 million” in capital. Deal volume in India also surpassed deal volume in China in Q1 by 37 to 26. GlobalData, the firm that conducted the analysis, credited the overall cooling of VC investment enthusiasm as disproportionately benefitting India relative to China.
Interestingly, early stage startups were the preference of Indian investors, compared to a focus on more established fintech firms in China, where the fintech industry is arguably both more advanced and more COVID-sensitive, at least in terms of headline risk.
What are the best projections for H2 2020 and beyond?
The analysts at CB Insights have suggested that we could see a “fintech M&A” spree in the second half of the year. This would mean a resumption of a trend toward consolidation in many areas of fintech that was pronounced in 2019 and at the beginning of this year. They highlight the deals involving Plaid and Credit Karma, SoFi’s acquisition of Galileo and LendingClub’s acquisition of Radius Bank. This is another trend that could be accelerated as part of the industry’s response to the coronavirus, as hardships for some companies become opportunities for others.
Most fintech analysts remain relatively positive about the industry and its capacity to continue to attract VC money during and after the pandemic. In its report on the fintech and the coronavirus – The Future of Disruptive and Enabling Financial Technology Post CV-19 – Finch Capital sees opportunities for lenders, and for both “agents of digitalization” and digitalization’s newest beneficiaries in mortgage and insurance. Enabling technologies like AI and critical services like cybersecurity and KYC are also likely to continue to fuel innovation and investment in fintech. Interestingly, those industries the report sees as “under pressure” – challenger banks, wealth management, and payments – are among those at the foundation of traditional fintech. This may suggest more disruption – and perhaps more consolidation – ahead for incumbents in these areas once we emerge on the other side of the current crisis.
This week on Finovate Global we feature an interview with Beerud Sheth, co-founder and CEO of smart messaging platform, Gupshup. We talked with Mr. Sheth about the smart messaging business and its relationship to driving payments in India. We also discussed the current state of Indian fintech more broadly, including an update on Prime Minister Modi’s goal to improve financial services through a combination of better payments technology and new digital identity solutions.
Finovate: Tell us about Gupshup and the role of smart messaging in enabling payments in India.
Beerud Sheth: Gupshup is a smart messaging platform. We use messaging as a platform to make it easier to use other services such as e-commerce, payments, and more. Messaging enables one-click payments, which makes it easier for consumers to keep up with their busy financial lives. For example, they can pay bills instantly without missing deadlines, manage recurring payments, make a digital payment to an offline merchant, or pay friends quickly and easily.
Finovate: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. Why did you decide to launch the company?
Sheth: My name is Beerud Sheth – co-founder and CEO of messaging and AI-building company Gupshup, based in Silicon Valley. We are primarily focused on automating enterprises’ messaging processes across multiple channels using a single API. I am responsible for the overall strategy, execution, and growth of Gupshup.
I also founded Elance, the world’s largest online services marketplace, and also have played various leadership roles at different stages of the company’s growth.
Before founding Elance, I worked in the financial services industry, modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and, before that, at Citicorp Securities. My graduate research, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning software agents for personalized news filtering.
I earned an M.S. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where I was awarded the Institute Silver Medal. I am a frequent speaker at industry events as well as a holder of two technology patents.
Finovate: You recently won a $100,000 Grand Challenge competition sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Can you tell us about this contest? Why did you get involved in this event and how do you think it will help promote your technology and solution?
Sheth: The Gates Foundation in partnership with National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) sponsored a competition to discover new ideas to enable payments for the next billion users – who use low-end feature-phone devices. It attracted over 750 participant companies from around the world. They announced a couple of weeks ago that Gupshup won the 1st prize. Our key insight was that for payments to work well, the primary focus has to be on the user experience. If users have to remember and type in numerous digits, it will never work for users that may not be tech-savvy or have low-end devices.
Gupshup used its expertise in messaging to enable a one-click payment experience. The message contains the entire context about the payment, freeing up the user to do nothing else except authorizing the payment. Gupshup is now working with enterprises and device manufacturers to roll this out to consumers.
Finovate: Your winning entry was a solution called the Smart Feature Phone. What does the phone do and who is the primary market for it?
Sheth: The Smart Feature Phone brings smartphone like capabilities to the feature phone. The target users are the next billion feature-phone users in emerging markets that are left out of the digital ecosystem.
The key feature is the use of messaging to enable chatbots and payments on the feature phone. Chatbots and the Bot Store have the same impact on feature phones as Apps and App Stores did on smartphones. It opens up a wide range of use cases including commerce, gaming, entertainment, sports, etc. Payments enable the monetization of these activities.
Finovate: Can you tell us a little about your partnership with Amazon?
Sheth: Gupshup partnered with Amazon Registry Services to enable customers to validate their bots and register a domain name with Amazon’s BOT Registry.
Without getting too technical, this means users who own, operate, or manage bots published using Gupshup’s tool will be able to be found by end-users no matter what platform or framework they use now or in the future, something previously unavailable for bot owners.
Finovate: You’ve also leveraged your technology to help during the global coronavirus public health crisis. Can you tell us a little about the “COVID bot” you’ve created?
Sheth: CareMe Health, a Chennai-based tele-health company, the National Health Mission of Tamil Nadu and American company Gupshup, worked together in implementing a multi-language WhatsApp-based chatbot readily accessible by millions of citizens in Tamil Nadu and the world over.
The bot, named Careme Bot, is designed to:
Educate the users on the health hazards of COVID-19
Provide emergency helplines and information on testing centers
Facilitate self-reporting
Provide up-to-the-minute updates on the COVID pandemic
The creators of Careme Bot are Dr. Arun Babu and Dr. Vasanth Kattalai Kailasam- Chief Medical Officer, Interventional Pain Physician at Northern Light Health, Maine, USAGK, CTO of the company. Check out screenshots of the Careme Bot here.
Finovate: What do you find most interesting about the Indian fintech scene right now? What is it about the fintech scene in India that you think would surprise people outside of India?
Sheth: The scale of a billion-user market would surprise people outside India. India is leapfrogging its way to advanced fintech services since the consumer has been capital-starved for a long time. Indians tend to be conservative about debt which makes them generally creditworthy. However, the financial delivery systems have been lacking, which is now changing because of new technology and startups.
Finovate: You mentioned that one goal of your solution is to help realize the JAM initiative proposed by Indian Prime Minister Modi. Could you elaborate a little on this vision and why it is important?
Sheth: Prime Minister Modi’s vision is to transform India by making sure no citizen is left behind. Three initiatives, in particular, are critical enablers: Jan-dhan (a layer of free, basic financial and payment services for every citizen), Aadhar (unique, biometric-linked identity, like SSN + fingerprints, for every individual) and Mobile (delivery of government services through ubiquitous mobile phones).
The missing piece was the enablement of financial services on low-end feature phones. This problem has now been solved by the Gupshup solution.
Finovate: What can we expect from Gupshup over the balance of 2020 and into the next year?
Sheth: Gupshup is singularly focused on its vision of “smart messaging” i.e., leveraging the power of messaging tools to enable richer services. As people’s lives get increasingly busy and complex, messaging apps, with their ubiquity, simplicity, and richness, are uniquely positioned to be the glue that ties it all together. Gupshup will keep rolling out new components of this over-arching vision.
In the midst of the myriad challenges COVID-19 has thrown up for financial institutions and the people and businesses they serve, the crisis is also propeling innovation forward, proving the worth of past technological investments, and shifting the view of digital initiatives from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a ‘need-to-have’, particularly in a time of social distancing.
Against this backdrop of crisis-galvanized change, senior content producer Laura Maxwell-Bernier caught up with Sunayna Tuteja, Head of Digital Assets and Blockchain at TD Ameritrade, to talk about how she is seeing this play out, and how financial institutions should approach digital transformation to ensure relevance in the ‘new normal’.
We are also delighted to announce that Sunayna will be expanding on the themes covered in our conversation at FinovateFall in September, where she will look at the next phase of this trajectory, how changed consumer behaviors will drive further change, and what role technology will have as the dust settles.
Laura Maxwell-Bernier: Crises like COVID-19 have historically shown us how quickly technology can go from a nice-to-have to a real necessity for consumers. How are you seeing this play out in the context of COVID-19?
Sunayna Tuteja: Innovation often gains traction in times of turbulence. We are certainly witnessing that play out at massive and magnified levels in the context of COVID-19. Technologies and trends that were already in motion reached escape velocity – in scale and speed of both investment and adoption accelerating in the span of weeks vs. years. Examples include tele-medicine, online learning, and omni-channel commerce. The necessity of solving a pain point combined with a sense of urgency is activating laser-focused action that otherwise might be slowed down by inertia. In short, digital transformation is now a matter of business resiliency, representing an ultimate shift from “nice-to-have” to “need-to-have”.
Perhaps my favorite example is the Supreme Court of the United Sates (SCOTUS), an institution steeped in tradition which until recently conducted all oral arguments in person, behind closed doors and without cameras present. They too have had to adapt and transform. Last week the SCOTUS moved to hearing arguments via tele-conference, and also opened it to the public to listen in real time. While the new format may lack the usual pomp & circumstance, it ushers in an era of transparency & inclusivity. It’s a joy to witness this epic transition. Necessity is the mother of invention, or in this case adoption!
LMB: What similarities are you seeing in the way financial services organizations are responding to COVID to how they responded after the 2008 financial crisis? What lessons should we be drawing from this in our planning for the longer-term repercussions of COVID?
Tuteja: An imperative for institutions (private and public) to innovate is the rapidly closing delta between novelty and necessity. It wasn’t that long ago that the notion of banking and trading on your mobile device was unfathomable – mobile phones were for playing Candy Crush and Angry Birds! But within a matter of years, driven by a shift in consumer behaviors and expectations plus the rise of Fintech, incumbents have had to evolve and for many, the nice-to-have digital venues are now need-to-have primary on-ramps to attract, engage and retain consumers. Ergo, shocks like the global financial crisis and COVID-19 further reinforce and validate that tapping into the power of nascent yet powerful technologies to break down barriers and create next generation products/client experiences must be an evergreen endeavor. You need to maintain a persistent and pervasive focus on client-centric innovation to keep up with and surpass the evolving expectations and norms.
At TD Ameritrade, we saw this thesis come to fruition as we embarked on transitioning our employees to work from home in a matter of 10 days whilst serving millions of clients during tumultuous market conditions. The firm’s steady investments over the years in capabilities like cloud, Artificial Intelligence, messaging, mobile etc. enabled a speedy and smart transition.
LMB: What implications do you see this crisis having for the rate of adoption of digital assets – stablecoins, CBDCs and the like?
Tuteja: Digital assets are uniquely qualified for these present times. Be it as an investment vehicle akin to bitcoin’s value proposition of ‘digital gold’ or the prospect of modernizing payments, remittances, money movement or banking the unbanked/underbanked driven via stablecoins, digital wallets and CBDCs, the opportunities abound. It’s fertile ground for projects in the digital assets space, including DeFi efforts currently focused on solving these important problems. Again, this momentum is driven by heightened need as we reimagine and reconfigure our day-to-day norms in the time of/after COVID. For example: In my role leading emerging tech and partnerships, I had the opportunity to work with several Asia Tech firms in China. As someone who needs her daily dose of Starbucks, it was always amusing when I tried to pay for my drink with cash or credit card. In a society that has adopted end-to-end digital payments driven by digital wallets embedded within messaging apps like WeChat, the notion of a cash or physical credit card interaction could not be more antiquated. While the proliferation of digital wallets and QR codes have been slow to gain momentum in the U.S., current circumstances may mark a significant shift as consumers are more conscious and concerned about what they touch and who touches their card.
In this new world order, businesses will have to strike a balance between efficiency and resiliency, and as business leaders we must deliver a compounding and comparative advantage to our constituents – customers, employees, and the communities we serve. All of which will enable a good deal of change management and digital transformation to ensure long-lasting relevance. Yet in these times of hyper-change, innovation guided by the voice of the customer is always in vogue.
The confluence of these developments combined with the current macro environment garner an important inflection point in the proliferation of this nascent technology & asset class. It is therefore incumbent on the institutions that consumers know and trust, to lead with prudence and pragmatism in addressing this growing demand from consumers for education and access to digital assets, and continue the journey of bringing Wall Street to Main Street.
LMB: What does the path forward for digital transformation look like as a whole, and what do you anticipate the long-term effects on technology adoption being?
Tuteja: I’ve long maintained that anything that can be digitized will be digitized, it’s a matter of timing and led by the consumer, with technology as the enabler vs. the driver of change. An evergreen approach is key because the timing and pace of adoption is often influenced by external factors as we are witnessing at the moment. I’m reminded of examples like Webvan and Pets.com, which are often cited as failures of the dot.com bubble. Yet their contemporaries, Instacart and Chewy.com, are gaining tremendous adoption today. As an organization, you don’t want be caught off guard and unprepared, hence a persistent evaluation of the evolving consumer needs combined with a “perpetual beta” mindset in deploying new technologies is critical.
While starting with the technology can be alluring, it can lead to “shiny object syndrome” and innovation theater without much value for the end constituents. The not-so-secret secret sauce is an obsession with customer-focused innovation. A myopic focus on solving gnarly problems to deliver meaningful value by breaking down barriers that enable consumers to take charge of their financial future with confidence. If that’s powered by blockchain and AI, great, but the tech ought be secondary to the problem statement. The litmus test we apply is: What is the problem we are solving? Why is this problem worth solving? And why are we or is this tech uniquely qualified to solve this problem? It’s always better to be solving the hard problems and shipping pain-killers vs. vitamins. A strong anchor to the problem statement is also useful in maintaining focus on investing in, experimenting with and operationalizing new capabilities while averting the trappings of fads or fear of missing out.
In this new world order, businesses will have to strike a balance between efficiency and resiliency, which will enable a good deal of change management and digital transformation to ensure long-lasting relevance. Yet in these times of hyper-change, innovation guided by the voice of the customer is always in vogue.
We’ve heard a lot about how the coronavirus has made an impact across the fintech realm, but what about in the crypto space? With an unstable stock market, why weren’t investors fleeing to alternative, blockchain-based assets?
To get an inside view on these questions and more, Finovate’s Adela Knox spoke with Max Lautenschläger, managing partner and co-founder of Iconic Holding, a Germany-based company that manages and sells crypto asset investment vehicles and invests in blockchain and crypto-focused companies via its in-house accelerator.
How has the coronavirus pandemic disrupted traditional investments?
Max Lautenschläger: Personally, as a supervisory member of the biggest independent financial advisory company in Germany, I am monitoring the German financial market closely. I was surprised how good the day-to-day business is going in this very special time, which is forecasted to be one of the biggest economical depressions in modern history. Moreover, it’s positively surprising how much this pandemic is pushing us towards a more digital financial ecosystem. Consumers are adapting to the “new normal” and are suddenly forced, but also willing to make decisions online. Investment advisors and financial consultants on the other hand are realizing the potential of using online tools for signing documents, online identifications or video calls for customer acquisition and retention. Financial institutions seem to finally understand how important digitization is for the daily operations with millennials, which have a very different expectation of financial services. Even though the whole financial industry is suffering, it will also have a positive impact long-term.
By looking at the best performing stocks since corona started, you can also see that more and more money is getting invested into themes like data, remote working, online education, and sustainability. In this pandemic people are realizing the shift the world has already made and want to be exposed to the increasingly important topics.
How has this impacted the appetite for digital currency?
Lautenschläger: It’s very important to understand what was going on when corona hit us out of the sudden. We’re not in an economic crisis yet, but the initial shock led to a so-called liquidity crisis, which makes investors liquidate their holdings -if possible- to cash. All asset classes suffered severely, even “safe havens” like gold decreased by more than 10 percent. Cryptoassets crashed in those extraordinary times, as well, even though they’re said to be non-correlating to other asset classes. Nonetheless, this crisis just confirms what we already know: central banks can print money and are increasing the circulating supply constantly. The beauty about crypto is that code is law, which means that the supply-demand-relationship is predefined. Over the last couple of weeks more and more institutional money has been invested into crypto assets which also led to a new peak in commitments to traditional financial vehicles like the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.
Secondly, the discussion of introducing a blockchain-based Euro or US Dollar is again one of the top priorities for central banks all over the globe.Libra, despite its weaknesses, seems to be a solid backbone infrastructure for those digitized currencies and could help to accelerate this development.
What is the biggest myth about cryptocurrency?
Lautenschläger: Most people I talk to think that crypto assets don’t have any intrinsic value and research from big financial institutions are trying to support this hypothesis. But this is entirely wrong! Let’s take Bitcoin as an example. Digital gold, safe haven, store of value — a lot of phrases have been used to describe Bitcoin, and to a certain extent, I agree with all of them. For me, Bitcoin is a commodity like gold, other rare metals or rare earth, which can be modeled by the stock-to-flow ratio. On the other hand, there are blockchain protocols which are the infrastructure for decentralized applications. The value of those protocols and their native tokens is derived from the number of deployed applications and the level of engagement. Users will use the infrastructure that offers them the applications they need and developers will go where the users are.
How is cryptocurrency performing in the current pandemic climate?
Lautenschläger: First it crashed like all the other asset classes. The reason for this is that corona -at first- didn’t cause an economic crisis, but primarily a liquidity crisis. Studies in behavioral finance suggest that people tend to convert all liquid assets to cash to be prepared for an upcoming crisis. But even though crypto
tanked even more than the stock and commodity markets it is still the best-performing asset class of 2020. With the monetary policy of the ECB, FED, and BoJ you can clearly see the vulnerability of our system, which makes more and more people lose trust in central bank policies and money in its current design. This is why crypto was born in 2009 as a reaction to the financial crisis.
What are the biggest benefits and reward of investing in digital cryptocurrency?
Lautenschläger: First of all, crypto has a low correlation to traditional and alternative asset classes, which makes it a perfect portfolio diversifier. Recently, we conducted a study in collaboration with the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, which clearly shows that an allocation of 1% to 5% of crypto to a traditional portfolio not only generated additional returns, but also increased the sharpe-ratio severely, which is the most well-known risk-to-return measure.
Is the demand for crypto assets limited to professional investors or is it something that everyday investors are looking into as well?
Lautenschläger: Crypto assets were originally completely retail driven by individuals who believed in the potential and the idea of an intermediary-free world, in which everyone is financially included. Nowadays, we see more and more high net worth individuals and family offices investing into the space. The lack of professional, enterprise-grade financial vehicles is still an issue and makes it hard for institutions to enter the space. But recent developments like the European AML directive and the German crypto custody license are first indicators that crypto assets are becoming “bankable.” This is also what we have been working on for years at Iconic Funds: make crypto accessible through traditional, regulated vehicles.
Financial services organizations have significant and unique roles to play in the societal responding to COVID-19 – both as we are in the midst of the global pandemic and as we emerge and eventually start to rebuild and recover. In light of this unprecedented challenge, Senior Content Producer at Finovate, Laura Maxwell-Bernier, spoke with Norman Buchanan, First Vice President of Design & Transformation at Alliant Credit Union, to discuss the implications of these unprecedented times for the customer experience and member engagement.
LMB: Thanks for taking the time to join me today. Let’s start with how customer experiences are changing… what does a good customer experience look like in these unprecedented times?
Norman Buchanan: The definitions and fundamentals of member experience stay the same no matter what external forces are at work. Throughout our 85-year history, Alliant has been committed to serving and supporting our members in good times and in bad.
However, times like these do reinforce the human condition and highlight the importance of a human-centered member experience. Establishing authentic, empathetic connections in these times is even more appreciated and critical during the crisis.
LMB: So, how can financial services institutions offer support and reliability to customers when they need it most?
Buchanan: It is critical for financial institutions to show support to our members and customers in this crisis. At Alliant Credit Union, our lending, product management and marketing team quickly developed a new unsecured loan product offering for our existing members within the first week of the crisis. In addition to our unsecured loan product, we have also made our Payment Deferral, Modification and Payment Reduction programs more readily available and easily accessible. These offerings are critical to providing a small amount of relief and peace of mind to members who are experiencing a sudden and dramatic change to their financial condition.
We have been doing scenario planning for the last 10 years and some of the scenarios track closely to what we’re seeing in the market now. We’ve prepared for times like these and will continue to monitor the situation every day so we can make rate change decisions that are in the best collective interests of our more than 500,000 member-owners nationwide.
LMB: How is Alliant Credit Union responding from the customer and member perspective?
Buchanan: During this uncertain time, we are focused on four priorities: continuing strong service to our members, employee and member safety, helping members impacted by COVID-19 and keeping members and employees informed.
Alliant instituted an initial work from home policy on March 13 and implemented a 100 percent virtual work from home call center within 3 business days to help support our members. We had never implemented this type of a call center before in Alliant’s history, (and honestly something I never thought we would ever see) but we were able to accomplish it in rapid time thanks to our resilience as an organization.
Our contact center NPS Scores for the first month of being 100 percent remote are 2 points higher than the same period last year. We mobilized a 100 percent work from home call center and have had slightly improved YOY satisfaction response from our members. This is something our credit union takes a great deal of pride in having accomplished.
LMB: With social distancing now the norm, how can we harness digital services to best serve customers and engage members?
Buchanan: Digital Transformation has been the lynchpin of Alliant’s strategy over the last five years. As our CEO, Dave Mooney puts it, “Banking is something you do, not a place you go.” This strategy has driven the transformation of our Mobile and Online Banking offerings based in research and continual feedback from our members as well as investment in our call center infrastructure and analytics. This strategy enabled Alliant to be in a position to close the majority of our branch network in 2018 so that we could focus on serving our members needs exclusively through our digital and phone channels.
LMB: In your opinion, what is the biggest challenge COVID-19 presents us in terms of delivering best-in-class customer and member experience?
Buchanan: The COVID-19 situation highlighted that a frictionless member experience needs to be supported by a frictionless employee experience, especially when that employee experience is 100 percent remote!
Areas of the operation that historically have been underinvested in automation have been highlighted by this historic experience. Operations like loan deferrals and modifications, which typically handle transaction volumes in the teens per week for us, have been overwhelmed by the current environment. This allows us the opportunity to re-prioritize our focus to ensure that we can support our members with optimized and automated back office processes. That will be an immediate legacy of the COVID Member experience challenge.
In a world of shrinking valuations and declining VC funding, payments company Marqeta is bucking the norm. The California-based company announced today it raised $150 million. Marqeta has also boosted its valuation to $4.3 billion, more than double the $1.9 billion valuation it earned a little over a year ago.
Today’s funding comes from a single investor, which Marqeta has not disclosed. However, sources have identified the party as L.A., California-based Capital Group. Marqeta’s previous investors include Coatue, Vitruvian Partners, Visa, Goldman Sachs, 83North, Granite Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, and others.
Marqeta, which was founded in 2010, positions itself as a modern card-issuing platform. The company offers scalable and configurable payments solutions available via an open API. Its services include ecommerce, incentive and disbusrsement payments, expense management, lending, and digital banking. Among its clients are Square, Uber, Affirm, Instacart, and DoorDash.
“Marqeta continues to move forward from strength to strength in 2020 as our global modern card issuing platform provides essential infrastructure and support to our customers across industries and oceans,” said Marqeta CEO and Founder Jason Gardner. “We’re building a single global platform to define and power the future of money for the world’s leading innovators. This new capital helps us accelerate our mission to empower builders to bring the most innovative products to market, wherever they are in the world.”
The company’s payment services are available in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia and is able to process payments in 10 countries in the Asia Pacific region. Last year, Marqeta marked the issuance of 140+million cards and doubled its revenue from the year prior to exceed $300 million. Jason Gardner is founder and CEO.
As Finovate events return this fall, dozens of companies are getting ready to showcase their latest financial services technologies this September and November. And not surprisingly, many of these innovations are part of larger stories related to COVID-19.
As a sneak peek, we recorded an early digital demo interview with Momentifi, who will also demo at FinovateWest. Along with Finovate VP of Strategy, Greg Palmer, Momentifi explores its CRM and sales system for remote workers. The company’s technology will continue to be pivotal as many regions still face stay-at-home orders and companies will not see offices at full capacity for many months.
To join Momentifi and other companies demoing this fall, visit the FinovateFall and FinovateWest (formerly FinovateSpring) websites. Hope to see you apply!
We’re used to things changing fast in the fintech industry, but in the past few months, we’ve seen even more rapid change. That’s the reason behind the latest series on the Finovate podcast: Fintech in Extraordinary Times.
In this series, host Greg Palmer caught up with nine fintech analysts to get their thoughts on what we can expect to happen in fintech now that the economy and our way of life is turned upside down. Check out the series to get a glimpse of who will be the winners and losers, what strategies will prove beneficial, and what the future of customer service will look like.
Ron Shevlin
Shevlin summed up his projection in three words: “I don’t know.” To be fair, he was the first guest in the series and didn’t have the benefit of seeing government stimulus packages, consumer purchasing changes, and infection curve adjustments. Shevlin explained that making guesses about the economy is the wrong move at the moment, and guided firms to instead focus their attention on strategic planning and helping to stabilize customers’ and employees’ lives.
“None of this advice matters,” he emphasized, “if the bank doesn’t first take a customer-centric approach.” Shevlin concluded that when we emerge from the other side of this crisis, banks will better understand the connection between financial health and physical health and will be better poised to deliver digital services.
Alyson Clarke
During her discussion, Clarke focused on the positive. She made the point that the key to surviving recessions is preparing for the upturn. Banks need to balance cost-cutting efforts with productivity and should reengineer their processes around the customer and not the product. Instead of simply cutting costs by laying off employees, Clarke noted, banks need to consider how they can improve their productivity and focus on higher value tasks.
As for what’s next, Clarke believes that the next wave of innovation will center around risk and back office solutions that drive efficiencies. “We’ve already seen sexy front-end innovation and now there is a demand for efficient solutions to drive more scale,” said Clarke. In addition to back office solutions, she noted that the low-touch commerce movement will spur innovation in digital payments. And, she opined, we may even end up with a mobile payments solution that sticks.
Jacob Jegher
Jegher stated that the crisis will prompt fintechs to be more creative, especially since consumer behavioral change has prompted a move into digital opportunities. The new era of the digital economy will ultimately be a test of a bank’s user experience. He explained that if consumers come running back to the bank branch when this is all over instead of learning to embrace mobile, perhaps there is room for improvement in the mobile experience.
In the future, Jegher predicts that changes to the economic environment and lower unemployment numbers will inspire banks to offer solutions that cater to the gig economy. Up to this point, traditional banks have failed to serve this customer segment.
Dan Latimore
Latimore kicked things off with a disclaimer that in the next few weeks as things progress and as new information comes in each day, his views may change radically. Overall, however, he predicts that COVID-19 will accelerate a lot of existing initiatives and consumer behavior patterns. For example, Latimore noted that we can expect to see hockey stick growth in consumers’ digital adoption and in their move away from cash usage.
On the other (perhaps more negative) side of the spectrum, Latimore said that we will likely see an acceleration of the “thinning of the fintech herd.” In other words, many fintechs will close their doors or become acquired by larger players.
Brett King
In his segment, King opened by saying, “This isn’t a fintech bubble that has collapsed, this is the entire world economy that has collapsed.”
In predicting winners and losers, King anticipates that challenger banks will do well. And though a lack of future funding rounds may slow their growth, these non-traditional banks will be able to acquire new customers organically at a faster pace. He added that, conversely, fintechs working in the credit space may not fare as well. “If you’re in the credit business in fintech right now, that’s going to be tough– you’ve got to de-risk,” King said.
As for change that has already occurred in the industry as a result of the coronavirus, King looked to his own company, Moven, as an example. He explained that because the direct-to-consumer version of Moven lost a major round of funding due to concerns around the economic effects of COVID-19, the company had to make some major decisions. Ultimately, Moven closed its direct-to-consumer offering and pivoted to focus all of its efforts on Moven’s enterprise product, which is currently experiencing increased demand because of new digitization requirements.
Adrienne Harris
Harris made that point the fintech has yet to experience a downturn, since much of it was born out of the last financial crisis. That said, many are watching the industry closely to see how it will weather the storm.
She highlighted the hope that fintech tools will help repress some of the negative effects of the economic downturn. Since we have a lot more tools and more data going into the current crisis than we had going into the 2008 financial crisis, perhaps the economic situation won’t be as bad as it would have been in the absence of fintech tools.
Harris predicts that as fintechs are impacted by the economic effects of the crisis, some will fold and others will fall short of meeting customer expectations. Because of this, she noted, we can expect to see more scrutiny from policymakers and regulators.
Louise Beaumont
In her interview, Beaumont made the point that this is a time of forced change, and it’s causing innovators to step up to new challenges. Experian, for example, is offering its Affordability Passport to its customers for free.
As a champion of open banking, Beaumont highlighted that the need for open banking is even greater during this time of crisis. When it comes to lending, she said that leveraging business data using open banking is one of the keys to ensure that the right funding hits the right company at the right time. This will allow all banks to see a business’ entire financial history– even if that company does not do business with the bank that is extending the funding.
Chris Skinner
Skinner explained that large banks are having difficulty with the shifting demands of consumers. He noted that not only have they increased their digital demands, they are also requiring more one-on-one attention in areas such as mortgages. Because of these changes, many banks are receiving 10x their usual call volume but have 10x fewer employees to service the calls. After the pandemic, he concluded, many banks will rush to become purely digital.
Skinner predicts that the fintech industry has another decade until it will fully mature. He explained that once fintech reaches true maturity, it will be built on open banking. Even before this time, however, he anticipates we’ll see banks flock to the open banking model because after the pandemic, banks will be seeking agility. “The ones that are just sitting there like rabbits in the headlights are really going to struggle,” he said.
