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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.
The Lazu Group’s CULTURL Heritage Calendar offers insights into the history and significance of holidays across many different cultures, helping companies educate and communicate in a multicultural workplace.
Features
Provides a wealth of resources designed to support internal inclusion
Includes 80 holidays, commemorations, and cultural heritage months
Offers 13 toolkits to guide organizations in the creation of diverse content
Why it’s great
The CULTURL Heritage Calendar offers ideas and resources for creating timely content and communication to promote empathy, curiosity and dialogue around the significance of cross-cultural moments.
Presenter
Malia Lazu, Founder & CEO Lazu is an award-winning, tenured strategist in diversity & inclusion who has sparked deep economic development and investment in urban entrepreneurship for more than twenty years. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.
Merlin Investor offers a multi-asset educational, strategizing and tracking tool complementary to any trading platform and designed for any kind of investor.
Features
Access different market data and sentiment all in one place
Create, analyze, compare and backtest an infinite set of investment strategies
Track portfolio performance
Why it’s great
The Merlin platform allows financial institutions to attract and retain customers throughout the entire investment process and not just during the execution of trades.
Presenter
Guido Petrelli, Founder & CEO Before starting Merlin Investor, Petrelli was the CFO and COO of a multinational company operating in the automotive sector for almost 15 years. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.
9Spokes unlocks the potential of open data and open banking by collecting consented data from businesses to give financial institutions a powerful set of tools to engage their business customers.
Features
Cashflow – plan, project and manage cash position
Banking – analyze spending habits and trends
Business Apps – provides a streamlined business management experience using key business apps
Why it’s great
The 9Spokes toolset makes the financial institution the center of their business customers’ daily financial lives – driving customer engagement, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
Presenter
Tom Baran, Head of Partnerships Baran has been a growth agent and business development leader concentrating within technology and SaaS verticals. He oversees the product-partnership ecosystem for 9Spokes. LinkedIn
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.
Prelim is a white-labeled platform that helps banks digitize business banking. With core integrations and out-of-the-box AML/BSA solutions, they power automation by connecting with any system via API.
Features
Automate business account onboarding with a few clicks
Connect to external providers, including cores, to satisfy AML/BSA/CIP requirements
Launch products and services without re-keying data
Why it’s great
Prelim offers a core integrated business account onboarding solution that allows users to launch other banking products (i.e., treasury & merchant services, lending, etc.).
Presenters
Heang Chan, Co-Founder & CEO Prior to founding Prelim, Chan was a Product Expert for Blend. LinkedIn
Sam Kim, SVP, Head of Banking Platform Before joining Prelim, Sam Kim worked for Wells Fargo Home Mortgage and Enterprise. LinkedIn
Ever since Elon Musk purchased Twitter last October for $44 million, he has been hinting of spinning the social media giant into what he is calling “X, the everything app.” In fintech, “everything apps” are known as super apps, and they exist primarily in Asia.
One of the latest developments in transitioning Twitter into a super app is Musk’s move to change Twitter’s name to X Corp. But a super app is much more than a name. Here’s a look at what the social media app currently offers, what it’s working on, and what it still needs to become a fully fledged super app.
What it has
Social Social is most certainly Twitter’s strongest attribute. The micro-blogging platform was founded in 2006 and currently has around 450 monthly active users. While this is a considerable user base, however, it pales in comparison to well-known super app WeChat, which counts 1.3 billion monthly active users.
Investment tools Earlier this month, Twitter partnered with eToro to not only offer real-time pricing data for stocks, but also to facilitate trades. The trades, however, do not take place within Twitter’s interface. Instead, users are routed to eToro’s website for stock details and to make trades.
What it’s (publicly) working on
Generative AI Last week, Musk unveiled a new company called X.AI, The move confirmed rumors of his plans to launch a generative AI product after he purchased thousands of graphic processing units. X.AI is expected to compete with OpenAI, which Musk co-founded in 2015 but left in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest.
While most super apps do not boast their own generative AI tool, adding a powerful chatbot such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT would be a major differentiating factor
Payments Musk is publicly vociferous about his plan to add Venmo-like payments capabilities to Twitter. And it’s not just talk. Twitter filed with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and is also in the process of obtaining necessary state licenses, as well.
After Twitter begins facilitating peer-to-peer payments, it may begin offering more digital bank-like tools such as a high-yield savings account or even an X-branded payment card. This leads the conversation into what Twitter still needs to become a super app.
What’s missing
Personal finance Twitter already offers stock trading (through a third party) and it is working on offering peer-to-peer payments. There is more to personal finance, however, than just investing and spending. In order to truly become an “everything app,” Twitter must offer brick-and-mortar payments, as well as an in-app dashboard that helps users track their spending, savings, and investments.
Shopping This may end up being one of the most challenging aspects for Twitter to add in a way that would compete with the current top super app contenders in the U.S.– Walmart and PayPal. Currently, Walmart offers consumers access to goods from an Amazon-like supplier base, as well as to goods in their local Walmart store. PayPal’s shopping experience is less compelling, but offers deals from major service providers and retailers (including Walmart).
For Twitter to start a shopping experience from scratch wouldn’t be unfathomable, but it would take a long time. If it is seeking to compete with Walmart as a super app, it will likely need to find success via a partnership.
Transportation A few of the most well-known super apps– Grab, Gojek, and Ola– began as transportation apps. Adding transportation capabilities has the potential to draw users into the app on a daily basis because they not only facilitate commutes via ride-hailing or public transportation payments, they also facilitate hyper-local delivery, grocery delivery, and restaurant delivery. These aspects play major roles in the lives of consumers.
Health services Amazon, Walmart, and others have tackled the fragmented healthcare industry. Providing affordable health services, such as appointment booking, tele-health calls, records management, and ask-a-nurse services in a single place provides a lot of value for end users.
Health services will not be a primary driver bringing users into Twitter’s super app, but it will certainly help to keep them around and may even help target the app’s older users.
Insurance Similar to adding health services, insurance tools will not serve as a primary draw for users. However, offering tools such as a digital lock box with insurance cards, contact information, coverage options, and payment history is a valuable add-on and can help reach older users not necessarily seeking social or payment capabilities.
Government and public services To become a well-rounded super app, Twitter should add government and public services, such as public transportation payment and tracking, library cards, and tax preparation services. In the U.S. however, with the advent of FedNow and the potential addition of a CBDC, the government may end up beating Twitter to the punch with a super app of its own.
Splitit is launching a new white-labeled payment offering called SplititExpress.
The new tool supports installment payments via GPay and ApplePay, and helps customers check out in under two seconds.
The merchant-branded checkout experience eliminates the typical visual clutter of online checkout interfaces by removing logos.
Buy now, pay later (BNPL) company SplitIt is launching a new white-labeled payment offering called SplititExpress. The new tool enables companies to facilitate a checkout process that takes fewer than two seconds while also supporting installment payments via GPay and ApplePay.
SplititExpress allows for a merchant-branded experience that eliminates the visual clutter by removing multiple logos and checkout options. It also empowers businesses by giving them full ownership of their customers’ journey and first-party data.
Splitit’s Installments-as-a-Service product is a BNPL tool that leverages Checkout.com’s payment-acquiring capabilities to enable consumers to pay for a good or a service in installments, interest-free. The Installments-as-a-Servce tool differentiates itself from traditional BNPL offerings, however, because it is completely white-labeled and offers customers a merchant-branded experience. Because of this, during the checkout flow, customers are not redirected to a third party. What’s more, because Splitit relies on a consumer’s existing credit card, the company does not require additional credit checks. All of this results in less friction for the customer and better control over customer relationships for the merchant.
“Reducing technical uplift for our Merchants is always top of mind at Splitit, that’s why SplititExpress can be embedded into their checkouts by simply adding a few lines of code,” said Splitit Chief Technology Officer Ran Landau. “The result is an end-to-end process that takes less than 2-seconds for a consumer to pay with installments, compared to the average 1 to 2-minutes that even the fastest legacy BNPL’s offer.”
SplititExpress also enables merchants to add their own branding and messaging, and choose the repayment option that best suits their customers. By helping merchants customize these details of the payments experience, SplitIt anticipates it will help improve the overall user experience during the checkout process.
Founded in 2012 as PayItSimple, Splitit is based in Atlanta with offices in London and Australia, as well as an R&D center in Israel. The company is listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) under ticker code SPT and also trades on the US OTCQX under tickers SPTTY and STTTF. In recent years, Splitit has partnered with Stripe, Shopify, and Alipay to act as an Installments-as-a-Service option for their merchant clients.
Payments consulting startup Yeeld has teamed up with Stripe.
Two former Stripe employees – Emily Tsitrian and Mira Boora – founded Yeeld in the fall of 2022.
Earlier this month, Yeeld announced a partnership with Merit Software Holdings.
Payments consulting company Yeeld has announced a partnership with Stripe. What makes the partnership interesting is that Yeeld was launched just a few months ago by a pair of former Stripe employees: Emily Tsitrian and Mira Boora. The two financial services professionals are leveraging their more than 24 years of payments experience to help businesses optimize all aspects of the payments process – from managing chargebacks to streamlining payouts. Yeeld’s partnership with Stripe is the most recent example of this effort.
“Payments is no longer a commodity – it’s a strategy,” Tsitrian said. “It involves customer experience, geographic expansion, managing risks, and building for scale. Yeeld is passionate about helping businesses of all sizes achieve their payments-related ambitions, and partnering with Stripe will help (us) to do so faster.”
Yeeld offers service at three tiers: Kickstarter, Premium, and Enterprise. These tiers target tech-enabled SMEs and startups; marketplaces, mid-sized businesses, and e-commerce firms; and established companies, respectively. All Yeeld customers benefit from an initial, deep dive into the company’s current payment operations. This enables Yeeld to determine the best path toward optimizing the company’s system. Companies also receive a customized integration guide, a detailed project plan, as well as developer support and custom training. In its few months of existence, Yeeld already has gained 18 clients and completed 20 projects.
Earlier this month, Yeeld announced its partnership with Merit Software Holdings. Merit Software acquires, manages, and builds vertical software businesses. Yeeld will serve as the firm’s embedded payments consulting partner for Merit’s portfolio companies.
“We are excited to leverage the deep industry expertise from the Yeeld team to further accelerate growth and deliver even greater value to our customers, portfolio, and future acquisitions,” Merit CEO John Burke said.
Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Yeeld was founded in November 2022.
This is a sponsored blog post by Tim FitzGerald, EMEA financial services manager, InterSystems
In today’s fast-paced landscape, where disruption is common and market volatility takes place with monotonous regularity, access to accurate and current data is necessary to ensure businesses can respond to changes effectively in the moment to remain competitive.
Being able to access to real-time data, and thus decrease business latency, is crucial to the competitiveness of financial services firms. Basing decisions on assumptions derived from old data imposes restraints on their ability to cope with sudden changes in market sentiment, deliver high-value services to customers, and manage risk exposure.
Research conducted by InterSystems shows that more than a third (35%) of European financial services organizations aren’t basing critical business decisions on real-time data, with just 8% of firms using data that is less than an hour old to make decisions. Given the constraints imposed by the traditional definition of intraday data, better solutions to managing, distributing, and deriving data are clearly required.
Financial services missing out on real-time data
The survey, involving almost 200 senior line of business leaders within European financial services firms, found the biggest data challenges are revealed to be delayed access to data (39%) and not being able to get the data in the correct format (33%) or from all the needed sources (31%).
Consequently, the overwhelming majority (92%) of European financial services firms are relying on data that is more than an hour old, with 85% relying on data that is 24 hours old or older. As a result, 35% of senior leaders report being unable to base decisions on real-time information and therefore forced to make assumptions, which may well be flawed.
There are multiple causes for delayed data within an enterprise, with the root often found in disparate legacy systems and applications that no longer connect to the rest of the organization. Typically, this causes pressure that then spirals to the IT department, where data-provisioning requests get stuck in a bottleneck. Forty-three percent of respondents also claimed they have anywhere between 25 and 100 data and application silos, an added complexity which further slows down their access to the required need.
But the use of intraday numbers, which can be up to eight hours old, no longer has a place in financial services. Instead, firms must now feed their frontline teams with real-time data that tracks events moment by moment to ensure they are able to respond to market changes and customer demands as they happen.
But delivering actionable data in real-time only solves part of the problem. Firms within the financial services sector must also go further and arm professionals with the data and analytics capabilities to predict what could happen next, through performing analytics on fast-moving transactional data, and provisioning access to those who need it.
Real-time data via smart fabric architecture
One solution that can be adopted uses an innovative architectural approach, the smart data fabric, which accesses and harmonizes data from existing systems and silos inside and outside the organization on demand, ensuring that the information is both current and accurate. It incorporates the ability to perform analytics on real-time event and transactional data without impacting the performance of the transactional system. This means firms can move away from querying information stored offline or elsewhere and equip themselves with real-time insights to drive their businesses forwards.
A smart data fabric architecture removes business latency and embeds agility by decoupling the reliance on old data derived via legacy methods. It achieves this by accessing, transforming, and harmonizing data from multiple sources, on demand, to make it usable and actionable for a wide variety of initiatives. It allows existing legacy applications and data to remain in place, ensuring one source of truth, and reducing architectural complexity. The ability to bridge silos from multiple sources, and from disparate locations, and allowing employees to access, query, and manipulate this data to deliver informed decision-making across the enterprise.
It also eliminates delays in accessing data and allows organizations to incorporate analytics on real time event and transactional data without impacting system performance. This is due to its distributed nature, and helps to eliminate errors and missed business opportunities. Allied to the enhanced flow of information, AI and ML can be utilized across the fabric to augment the decision-making process, delivering predictive and prescriptive suggestions while enabling programmatic decision-making when the use case warrants it.
Amid ongoing disruption, sudden market changes, and unforeseen circumstances, when the requirement for ever faster data delivery is an essential element of business success, smart data fabric architecture gives financial services business leaders a holistic view of the entire business at their fingertips so they can take a more strategic approach to their operations. Doing so gives the agility needed to not just survive, but thrive and gain a true competitive advantage in a volatile world.
A look at the companies demoing at FinovateSpring in San Francisco on May 23 and 24. Register today and save your spot.
Savana unifies and orchestrates banks’ processes between the core, back-office, and digital channels to enable frictionless interactions between banks and their customers.
Features
Provides one experience for servicing customers across bank-assisted channels and products
Includes core-to-customer centralization and automation of processes
Digital channels leverage centralized processes via APIs
Why it’s great
Savana enables banks to own business processes and channel experiences holistically, eliminate process silos on the back-end and the front-end, and launch or modernize quickly without risk.
Presenters
David Williams, CPO Williams leads the development and execution of Savana’s product strategy to bring value to banks and their customers. LinkedIn
Larry Edgar-Smith, SVP, Sales Engineering Edgar-Smith combines market intel with industry experience to help shape the strategic direction of Savana’s solutions. LinkedIn
Banking technology provider Plumery raised $4.5 million in seed funding.
Tomorrow Ventures, Headline, Seedcamp, and Cocoa Ventures led the investment.
Former Mambu CTO and CPO Ben Goldin founded Plumery in 2020.
Component-based banking technology company Plumery has raised $4.5 million in funding. Better Tomorrow Ventures, Headline, Seedcamp, and Cocoa Ventures led the investment. Also participating in the funding were business angels Didier Valet, Ricky Knox, and Alan Morgan. Valet is former deputy CEO of Société Générale. Knox is the founder of Tandem Bank. Morgan is a former senior partner at McKinsey. Ben Goldin, former CTO and CPO of Finovate alum Mambu, founded the company in 2022. Plumery will use the capital to fuel product development.
“The banking industry has changed and continues to evolve every day,” Goldin said. “Today, consumers are looking for a seamless digital onboarding and customer experience, continuous product improvements that are personalized, and reliability when it comes to their bank. However, many traditional banks aren’t able to make these changes as easily as one would think which is why it’s essential that we build a next-generation platform.”
Plumery offers a software overlay that enables banks to develop and launch mobile and web apps faster. Financial institutions can use Plumery’s technology without having to overhaul their existing banking infrastructure. The company expects to launch a publicly accessible version of its solution via a subscription-based model later this year.
Headquartered in Amsterdam, Plumery was founded in December 2022. Goldin, who serves as the company’s CEO, brings more than 20 years of experience to the new venture. He spent more than five years at Mambu as CTO, CPO, and Strategic Advisor. Previously to his tenure at Mambu, Goldin spent more than four years at Backbase – another Finovate alum.
In a LinkedIn post, Headline General Partner Jonathan Userovici explained the role he believed Plumery would play in helping banks innovate better.
“Something we all noticed,” Userovici wrote, “successful tech companies, including some challenger banks, improve their mobile applications up to 5x more frequently than traditional banks. With Plumery, everyone will be able to implement mobile and web apps blazingly fast and at a fraction of current costs.”
The European Payments Initiative (EPI) acquired two payments companies– Currence-owned payment solution iDEAL and payment solutions provider Payconiq.
EPI will leverage the new acquisitions to build a unified payment solution for Europe.
The unified payment scheme will begin by offering P2P payments by the end of 2023 across France and Germany.
Payments solutions initiative European Payments Initiative (EPI)announced it has acquired two payments companies and has simultaneously unveiled plans to launch an instant payments solution for Europe.
EPI is purchasing Currence-owned payment solution iDEAL and payment solutions provider Payconiq International (PQI) for undisclosed amounts. The three companies are joining forces to organize EPI’s unified payment solution for Europe.
“EPI will leverage the strong operational experience, know-how and local market knowledge of these companies,” said EPI CEO Martina Weimert. “We are developing a new, scalable platform to address the modern and evolving payment needs of European consumers and merchants in the best possible way, with efficient, state-of-the-art technology.”
Based in the Netherlands, iDEAL is the region’s major payment scheme. In fact, iDEAL’s payment scheme operator, Currence, counts all major Dutch banks as members. In the Netherlands, 55% of online transactions use iDEAL to facilitate payments. iDEAL was first launched in 2005 and was revamped 15 years later in 2020 to accommodate for the growth of ecommerce transactions and updated consumer expectations.
Founded in 2014, PQI offers a mobile payment platform that can be used in-store, online, and for peer-to-peer money transfers. With headquarters in Amsterdam, the company operates in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, and Luxembourg.
Both iDEAL and PQI will help build the EPI digital wallet solution that will offer instant, account-to-account payments under a single brand for users in all European countries. The unified payment scheme will begin by offering P2P payments by the end of 2023 across France and Germany. In the future, EPI will also offer person-to-professional (P2Pro) payments followed by ecommerce and point-of-sale payments. The scheme will support one-off payments, subscriptions, installments, payments upon delivery, and reservations. Over time, EPI will add in more services such as buy now, pay later, digital identity features, and merchant loyalty and rewards.
The scheme has a diverse set of shareholders, including BFCM, BNP Paribas, BPCE, Crédit Agricole, Deutsche Bank, DSGV, ING, KBC, La Banque Postale, Nexi, Société Générale, and Worldline. Also worth noting are the newest members. Belfius and DZ Bank joined in 2022, and today, ABN Amro and Rabobank are joining as well.
