We’re back for another marathon of financial technology. Day 1 covered a range of new developments in mobile payments, automated financial advice, and personal financial management. There are several interesting companies lined up for Day 2, and the presentations begin in a few minutes. ^SR
Kabbage Rob Frohwein (CEO & Co-Founder) and Kathryn Petralia (COO & Co-Founder) Kabbage provides working capital to small business, with over $400 million in loans. Their new offering is Karrot, a consumer loan product. They note it is the lowest cost loan option on the market. Their demo focuses on debt consolidation. You only need to submit last-4 of social security. It isn’t even a hard inquiry to the credit bureaus until/unless you accept the loan. Your financial information is pulled from your accounts automatically. Approval is within seconds, provided online. They don’t use ACH for money transfer, you link your debit card to your Karrot account for funding. Origination fee is deducted from the accepted loan. Institutional investors are funding the loans on the platform. This service can be provided white-label to banks and FIs. ^SR
This Atlanta-based company has a great reputation. I believe I first saw them at a Finovate several years ago. Loans to SMB market. They put out more than 0 million last year (I believe in lending to SMB’s). They did launch in May 2010 at Finovate (San Francisco). Announcing “Karrot” “least expensive, fastest loan for consumers. I’m interested in who will be doing the funding for Karrot. I think of Kabbage of a technology company as opposed to a lender but technology is changing that. Capitol Access Network, OnDeck, Kabbage seemed to have unlocked the code on better financing using technology. What are FI’s role with Carrot? Now discussing the problems with ACH (24 -72 hour turnaround) and their solution using payment through debit card exchange for faster funds movement.
One smart thing Kabbage has done is that they announced this PRIOR to today so there is some press coverage of the new product during their presentation. Great kudos to Kabbage and their PR team. ^WM
Sender & PrivatBank Egor Avetisov (Creative Director) and Maria Gurina (Deputy Head of E-Commerce) Sender has their client, PrivatBank, up on stage with them. PrivatBank is one of the largest banks in Eastern Europe, and had a great presentation themselves at the last Finovate. Sender offers a chat-based peer-to-peer payment system. Very simple setup on the bank side, as well as easy to use by the customer. Sender is a platform for customer communications and payments. ^SR
Sender.mobi “MC has only one product, a credit card. Each bank needs to create their own online bank.” I’m quite sure what their app does but hopefully we will get to that. I think it’s awesome that they have one of their customers, a large bank with them doing the presentation. They are now showing a chat-based IOS app where the person doing the demo is sending an invoice via the app and the recipient gets the invoice and pays via the app.^WM
Vantiv Coy Christensen (VP Product Management) with Jesse Kunicki (Development Manager) Demostrating their TriPOS system. Vantiv has a tough challenge here. This is more of an infrastructure and pipes play, and I think they haven’t articulated their real value. The demo requires too much knowledge of payment processing. They are talking features, but not really benefits to the bank, to the merchant, or to the consumer. However, EMV is the story of the day in the card industry. They have technology to help companies make the transition to EMV. This is a product for payments developers. ^SR
I met with folks from Vantiv last year at Money2020 and have been tracking them for the past year. In this demo they are showing triPOS (“try pos”) which I think is a merchant solution; perhaps like Square. We will find out but uses the existing PIN device (like VeriFone). I’m not sure what the difference is between triPOS and existing merchant point-of-sale systems. Perhaps it’s an easy way for merchants to be able to EMV certified easily as it only requires one EMV certification. Vantiv, Inc. is a U.S.-based payment processing and technology solutions provider headquartered in the greater Cincinnati, Ohio area. ^WM
CrowdFlower Tatiana Josephy (VP Product) Product to clean and complete your Big Data. Data scientists spend 80% of their time cleaning up the data. They provide the person-power to help train machine learning algorithms. Their example is spotting cars in a parking lot, to help train an image recognition application. CrowdFlower can extract data from PDF, manual process to identify the key information. CrowdFlower is vetting who is working on your tasks. This is another competitor to Amazon Mechanical Turk. CrowdFlower’s online workforce analyzes sentiment and purchase intent from social media. For AppleWatch, they analyzed 27,000 tweets for $280. It isn’t about Big Data, it is more about Rich Data (annotated by people). ^SR
“We collect, clean and label data.” “Rich data, clean and easy to use.” Skybox/Google is a current client and they are showing a demo using Skybox. This is pretty cool. Skybox is a satellite imaging company that collects photos and has scientists to mark/input data based on satellite photos. For example, counting the number of cars in a parking lot to determine how much traffic/business may have. Another client utilizes Crowdflower to collect data from SEC PDF documents. Their online workforce combs through SEC filings to collect the data. I’m guessing that CrowdFlower utilizes a paid crowdsourcing work force so people can work when they want for as long as they work (as opposed to outsourcing). I REALLY like what these folks are doing. Last example, one customer uses Twitter data to predict stock prices. CrowdFlower helped this company analyze Twitter data on whether the Apple Watch will be successful. In 24 hours 1,400 people in their workforce studied thousands of Tweets for a cost of 0. That is amazing to me. I can see big thing for these folks. It’s a fast, easy, low-cost solution that takes big data to rich (usable) data. I’m impressed and think they might be a “Best of Show” winner. ^WM
BioCatch Uri Rivner (Co-Founder & VP, Business Development & Cyber Strategy) They are trying to reduce customer “friction” from cumbersome fraud and authentication, by use of biometrics. Their example shows the onscreen pattern when you swipe your device. It tracks how you respond to the application. People actually are consistent, and the way they physically handle the device is unique. You can establish a baseline based on these user behaviors, and use this to detect fraudulent users. They also look at how you use the mouse, do you use the tab keys, do you click or hit “submit” to enter, do you use cut/paste, etc. Biometrics are really taking on a new character, with very different ways to analyze customer behavior. ^SR
Showing an iPad based application. Studies how a user is interacting with a mobile banking application, I’m assuming for authentification. Perhaps the platform might provide an ability to cross-sell or create offers based on the movement of a smart phone. I heard a presentation from an ex-RSA last month on authentication via a person’s movement so I think this is very cutting edge. Even is you have someone’s mobile phone, their email, password, bank account information and all passwords it is impossible (for now) to mimic someones unique movements: how they walk, hold their mobile phones, height and more. Very complex and interesting. ^WM
Ayasdi Michael Woods (Principal Data Strategist) and Max Song (Data Scientist) This is a data science company that has commercialized techniques developed by DARPA. In financial services, they are looking at predictive models and customer intelligence. They have a data visualization platform, but it is not ready for primetime. This sounds like a data science lecture, not a discussion of innovation. (Not that I’m complaining! But they’ve completely lost the audience.) The finding: low FICO scores had higher risk of bankruptcy. Wow, hope the client didn’t have to pay for that! ^SR
Now showing very cool data helix, much like human DNA. Boy, this is VERY cool but way over my head. Color coded by FICO score. These are smart folks. It almost looks like like something out of “The Matrix”. Now showing how an FI would use the helix. I’ll try to upload a photo. Very interesting. ^WM
Financeit & FIS Michael Garrity (CEO)
I was meeting with one of FinanceIT’s investors last week and I am really looking forward to their demo today. Katie from FIS is speaking today. FIS is led by a great guy, Frank Martire and they have acquired a TON of financial technology companies.
Launching FinanceIT product to US market today. Four years of operation in Canada. “POS Financing Platform”: We Offer Financing Everywhere.” Showing a demo of a merchant that uses FinanceIT. About FinanceIT from the TTC Capital web site: Financeit is a platform that makes it easy for businesses to boost sales by offering consumer financing to their customers from any device. The company brings point of sale financing tools to main street merchants to increase close rates and transaction size – a proven strategy previously reserved for big box retailers. Since launching in 2011, Financeit has signed up over 2,800 retail, vehicle, home improvement and healthcare businesses who have processed more than 0 million in loans.
Now showing the browser-based merchant dashboard and a customer is now at the merchant making the transaction and showing monthly payment and schedule, loan documentation and it looks like it is on-the-fly loan agreement based on geography and regulations using an e-signature. Very slick.^WM
Yodlee John Bird (Product Marketing, Yodlee), Jon Petz (Product Evangelist, Yodlee) and Avi Lele (CEO, Stockpile) Yodleee presenting the frequent tension between developers and bankers; Yodlee helps to bridge the gap by aggregating bank data and exposing it to developers via robust APIs. Yodlee is uniquely positioned to serve both developers and banks. The developer panel makes working with the platform simple. Yodlee is having fun with their demo, I like the “Jekyll and Hyde”-inspired character who melds the hoodie-wearing coder and the straight-laced banker. Where’d you guys get that costume? ^SR
I’ve know Yodlee since the “dot com” days besides being a survivor they now seem to dominate as the personal finance data provider in this part of of the financial industry. I bet 50+ companies use Yodlee’s data to drive the front end screens of their apps. I believe they are on a “road show” and I expect an IPO from Yodlee some time this year. From BIC: Financial management platform that uses data analytics to provide financial insights to users. Platform components include data aggregation, Money Movement. ^WM
Matchi David Milligan (CEO, Matchi) and Warren Bond (Co-Founder, Matchi) Matchi is a matchmaking service for member banks and innovators. The platform enables banks to create “challenges” that go out to fintech entrepreneurs. For banks, it is a way to grow and find innovations in your areas of interest. ^SR
We need to move beyond where we are on a continuous basis. That’s what Matchi does.” Co-presenter is from KPMG.
From their web site.
How does it work?
Founded by people with years of experience in selling into the banking world, Matchi is an Innovation Matchmaking platform that brings banks and innovators together. Co-designed with leading banks, Matchi showcases a collection of market-ready solutions for many of the challenges that impact delivery to your clients.
I’m not familiar with this organization or their market category so I will need to learn more. It was wise for them to bring KPMG with them as a part of their presentation today. “Rippleshot signed up with us and we have introduced them to several FI’s around the world” (I’m paraphrasing here). Announcing Global FINTECH Innovation challenge hosted by Standard Bank. Winner of this challenge will be flown to South Africa for presentations to at least six major banks. Interesting. Bankers will like it as well as innovative Fintech companies.