The 10 Most Innovative FinTech Solution Providers in 2022 July2022

Most Innovative

FinTec Solution

in 2022

The way of business solutions

Using Blockchain Technology to Provide High Levels of Privacy and Security

Driving Forward - Fintech

Editor’s Desk

Aditya Gaikar

everal organizations have developed innovative

S technological components that have deeply rooted their name in the finance industry for decades. Their unique approach improved and refined existing traditional financial services with different aspects and perspectives, giving rise to the sun known as “fintech.”

Recently, the uproar of micro-enterprises with robust IT infrastructures, software developments, and automation are offering much more work at reduced costs, becoming formidable support for large-scale organizations. With widespread services from asset management, mobile wallets, payment apps, credit, and insurance, these enterprises are making people's lives easier by utilizing the most ubiquitous forms of fintech. By building up trust and delivering on time in responsible and sustainable ways, fintech service providers offer a complete solution.

Financial services provide availability and affordability for individuals and firms anytime, anywhere by lowering costs, increasing efficiency, and providing beneficial economic opportunities that were non-existent.

With the introduction of fintech, financial services have become more secure than before; however, there is a constant threat of security breaches, fraud, privacy invasion, and more. Fintech shines bright with newer security options from biometrics to facial recognition and fingerprint sensors, making users feel safer about their money.

If I access these financial services, my digital footprint is left behind at any time, which helps undertake preventive security measures, analyzing digital print every time the services have been used, thus ensuring a substantial reduction in fraud. Imagine the millions of people using these mobile banking solutions from every corner of the world with a simple, convenient, and accessible technology.

The more advanced technology, the more straightforward services become for the people, giving these financial institutions an advantage to better communicate directly with the client than physical banking centers.

To cherish the achievements of innovative financial institutions, Insights Success came up with the edition “The 10 Most Innovative FinTech Solution Providers in 2022,” highlighting the companies who have disrupted the fintech niche paving the way to a better future.

Dive into fintech and learn more about the strategies that can uplift your business to newer heights. Have a glance through the articles written by our in-house editorial team that focuses on industry insiders.

Have a good read!

Using Blockchain Technology to Provide High Levels of Privacy and Security

The

Most Innovative

FinTec Solution

Providers in 2022

BriefCompany Name

Featured Person

Christine Schmid, Head of Strategy additiv additiv.com

Asignio web.asignio.com

Atidot atidot.com

Kyle Rutherford, Founder and CEO

Dror Katzav, CEO & Co-founder

Established in 1998, Additiv partners with leading companies across the world to help them capitalize on the possibilities of digital wealth and investment management.

Asignio is leading the next generation of authentication, with a more secure, easier-to-remember way to replace passwords.

Atidot is an AI cloud-based platform, tailored specifically to the needs of the life insurance industry, enabling insurers to grow their customer's Life Time Value and create new revenues.

Julian Mwika, Head Digital Service Bank One Limited bankone.muen

Bank One is a universal bank with a focus on domestic and regional markets. It serves the four main banking segments Retail, Corporate, Private and International and has strong capabilities in Treasury Services and e-Commerce Card Acquiring.

Benjamin Buchanan CEO SBT sbt-alliance.com

Finlocker finlocker.com

FinMkt finmkt.io

MO Technologies wearemo.com

Brian Vieaux, President & COO

FinLocker is a financial fitness platform transforms the way consumers prepare for a mortgage by offering datadriven personalized journeys to achieve homeownership and other important financial milestones.

Luan Cox, CEO & Founder

Veronica Crisafulli, CEO & Co-founder

Markus Rupprecht, Founder & CEO Traxpay GmbH traxpay.com

ZorroSign zorrosign.com

Shamsh Hadi, Co-founder & CEO

FinMkt is revolutionizing buy now pay later (BNPL) and point of sale financing with a fully customizable, embedded SaaS solution optimized for home improvement and healthcare.

MO is a B2B fintech that helps companies launch their credit operation at a laser speed launch, through cutting-edge credit products.

Traxpay is a fast-growing Supply Chain Finance platform that operates globally from Europe with a multi-bank approach.

ZorroSign was founded to use the digital signature technology to create a unified platform delivering superior data privacy and security on blockchain.

Shamsh Hadi Co-Founder, and CEO ZorroSign, Inc.

Created in 2008, Bitcoin was the first implementation of Blockchain technology. Since its launch, a slew of other apps has emerged, aiming to capitalize on the digital ledger's principles and capabilities.

Blockchain is a game-changing concept, having a direct impact on various industries. However, there are risks associated with it. Technology, implementation, investment, and others directly or indirectly associated with blockchain might all pose hazards.

No matter how big or little, almost every business field relies on sensitive documents. For improved digital documentation security and maintenance, many enterprises rely on the adaptive and user-friendly platform of ZorroSign, Inc

Shamsh Hadi, Co-founder, and CEO of ZorroSign, Inc, states, “ ZorroSign's tamperproof solution uses blockchain technology to ensure the privacy and security of your digital documents with an immutable audit trail and chain of custody for your digital transactions."

Insights Success caught up with Shamsh in our attempt to find "10 Most Innovative FinTech Solution Providers in 2022" and talked in-depth about ZorroSign.

Below are the highlights of the interview:

Give us a brief overview/inception of ZorroSign, its mission, and the key aspects of its strong foothold in the Workflow Automation industry.

My company’s multi-chain blockchain platform integrates digital signatures, AI/ML, identity-as-aservice (or IDaaS), and patented fraud prevention to ensure user authentication and document verification for legally enforceable digital transactions.

ZorroSign was founded to move from a trust-based to a truth-based solution. We strive to have a positive impact on the environment by implementing sustainable practices and securely transforming paperbased workflows to digital, decreasing costs, reducing errors, and increasing productivity.

Describe your top-notch solutions, and what makes your company a preferred choice among your clientele over other competitors?

ZorroSign's blockchain platform helps people build, sign, store, and track their mission-critical documents on the blockchain. By using distributed ledger technologies, ZorroSign provides superior privacy and security. This offers peace of mind for digital transactions and helps to avoid fraud and compliance issues. ZorroSign utilizes web3 technologies to unite digital signatures, AI/ML, IDaaS, and patented fraud prevention, delivering the future of digital transactions to governments, organizations, businesses, and individuals today.

My company is constantly adding strategic integrations and collaborating with prospects and customers to ensure its multi-chain blockchain platform is easy-to-use and frictionless with other software solutions. Our users gain industry-leading privacy and security compliance to many international standards and regulations.

What are the primary objectives and philosophy of ZorroSign?

At ZorroSign, the company’s primary objective—its vision—is to provide the most trusted, secure and legally compliant paperless experience to organizations, companies, and individuals worldwide by using disruptive web3 technologies. As CEO and co-founder, I have dedicated my career to advancing technology while simultaneously advancing sustainability, ensuring the new technologies I bring to market also elevate information privacy, data security, and data democratization. The web3 internet is built on blockchain and similarly aspires to greater privacy, greater democratization, and greater sustainability for users...breaking the centralized and monopolistic model of web2’s Big Tech.

With this philosophy, ZorroSign designed a digital signature platform from the ground up based on blockchain—delivering a solution to an eSignature market where competitors are locked into old architecture and legacy software. Carrying the torch of my vision through ZorroSign’s development team in Sri Lanka, the company has unified digital signatures on a blockchain platform that ensures user authentication and document validation via identity-as-a-service technologies and a patented fraudprevention solution called Z-Forensics. This unique solution set pulls digital signatures into the future—providing digital transactions in the universe or metaverse with an immutable and legally enforceable chain-of-custody.

What are your top-notch offerings that have a strong foothold in the industry?

ZorroSign’s multi-chain blockchain platform is the company’s flagship solution. Originally built on private, permissioned Hyperledger Fabric, ZorroSign has recently added public, permissionless Provenance Blockchain to the platform and has a roadmap to adding additional distributed ledger technologies. This unique combination of public and private blockchain solutions, consolidated on a single platform, delivers all the cryptographical strengths of blockchain endpoint security while also distributing the data set in an architecture that helps mitigate the risks of phishing and ransomware attacks.

Our emphasis on privacy and security for digital signatures and digital transactions gives ZorroSign a strong foothold in industries as diverse as education and government, financial services, healthcare, IT, legal services, real estate, and more. By providing a mobile solution for digital signatures, ZorroSign facilitates digital transactions and the opportunity for organizations, companies, and individual to “go green” with paperless operations.

Geographically, the United Arab Emirates has been a strong early market for ZorroSign, not least because the Hadi family has made a home in Dubai for over fifty years. But ZorroSign’s global footprint readily expands to India and Sri Lanka, and in 2020, the company opened a U.S. headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona.

What are the roadblocks that ZorroSign faces in the ever-changing landscape of the business world?

While blockchain (as a technology) makes headlines via bitcoin, Ethereum, and cryptocurrency crashes, web3 solutions for businesses are lost in the noise. The recent financial market tumult has analysts, journalists, and editors wary of spotlighting good news in crypto, which makes promoting blockchain solutions difficult against the head winds of the current market.

That said, ZorroSign has been fortunate to find both early adopters (ready to gain the advantages of web3 technologies again web2 competitors) and organizations knowledgeable on the future of the internet and how blockchain-based apps can improve data privacy, security, and democratization. For those forward-thinking government agencies, corporations, small businesses, and individuals, ZorroSign is the only digital signature solution that bridges their operational needs of today with their vision for improved customer experiences tomorrow.

It is certainly a longer sales cycle—messaging and educating financial service organizations, legal departments and firms, IT companies, and others on the long-term benefits of blockchain-based solutions—but ZorroSign has the technology stack to win them over and prove the value of web3 for their businesses, constituents, and customers. Bringing new technologies to market always requires taking chances and carving new paths, and the roadblocks we face are readily navigated when you can deliver what you promise.

How is your ZorroSign adapting to market orientation?

We take a blue ocean approach to the market, not just differentiating ourselves from legacy digital signature technologies, but opening up new opportunities for conducting business, government, or personal transactions in our increasingly digital world.

We saw a need in the market to push past web2 solutions for digital signatures and digital transactions, escaping centralized databases and information architectures that consolidate data with a provider—leaving centralized data at risk to cyber-attacks and pulling data ownership away from users to be housed and monetized by the web2 provider.

The 10 Most Innovative FinTech Solution Providers in 2022

ZorroSign empowers our users by deploying web3 solutions that decentralize data and allow users to always own and access their documents and transaction metadata—even after their subscriptions end.

Further, we also saw an opportunity to break from unsophisticated per-seat pricing models, and instead meet market demand with more control over data and corresponding costs. ZorroSign launched consumptionbased pricing for our software subscriptions late last year: Allowing Individual subscriptions to be priced by set numbers of documents or unlimited document sets, while Business subscriptions are custom priced by number of needed users, signers, and document sets. And our Enterprise subscriptions are priced granularly by users and documents used, so users never pay for unused licenses or consumption.

Describe in detail the work culture and the values that drive your organization's services.

ZorroSign aspires to provide our customers with the world's most secure and trusted digital platform in their transformation to a paperless life. We leverage disruptive technologies to make our customers' lives and businesses more secure and private while making ZorroSign the global standard for a trusted partner in paperless transactions.

ZorroSign attracts the best talent available, always encouraging teamwork, collaboration, and a spirit of innovation to solve businesses' toughest problems while promoting ZorroSign's core principles and values. We place the needs of the customer first while continuously pursuing excellence in product development and market execution. We enable our business, employees, stakeholders, customers, and community to prosper. And strive to make a difference by planting trees, reducing water consumption, and lessening the carbon footprint.

In what traditions is your company contributing to the communities?

ZorroSign prioritizes sustainability in all our business operations and development, contributing to our communities and participating in environmental conservation through three key initiatives:

First, our web3 technologies enable a paperless life! Each time you use ZorroSign to digitally transact instead of printing, faxing, scanning, and shipping documents to collect signatures, you save trees and water, plus reduce our carbon emissions, while your organization saves time and money with digital operations.

Second, ZorroSign has partnered with One Tree Planted and is a proud sponsor of Million Tree Challenge: California's most recent drought saw low precipitation combine with record high temperatures which has resulted in dramatically increased tree mortality and large, severe wildfires. Now, a record 129 million trees need to be restored in California, and ZorroSign is partnering in that replanting effort.

Third, our technology and customer base drive our "Save a Tree, Plant a Tree" program, whereby ZorroSign will plant a tree on behalf of our customers every time they save 8,000 pages of copy paper. One tree produces roughly 8,000 pages of copy paper and studies show that by just eliminating or reducing the use of paper, we can realize significant environmental benefits like conserving water, reducing carbon emissions, improving air quality, and reducing deforestation. ZorroSign provides users with a tracker in our app to see the paper they have saved and the new trees they have "sponsored" for planting with their paperless operations.

Undeniably, technology is playing a significant role in almost every sector. How are you leveraging technological advancements to make your solutions resourceful?

ZorroSign is built on web3 principles and technologies, starting with a foundation of private, permitted Hyperledger Fabric that aids in minimizing not only its own carbon footprint but the carbon footprint of businesses and individuals which implement ZorroSign.

Our team is adding new blockchains, now with public, permissionless Provenance Blockchain, to expand its platform and securely manage the privacy and security of its users' digital documents. ZorroSign aspires to advance technology and sustainability for legally compliant and environmentally conscious digital transactions.

If given a chance, what change would your company like to bring in the document security industry?

Security has been a hot topic within document management, but a key component of true security is a superior level of trust to be effective. ZorroSign has restored the missing element of trust and peace of mind into the equation. Blockchain user authentication systems are secure, but ZorroSign is the only company that offers a multi-blockchain platform to secure, track, and manage your digital signatures and documentation. While our platform is a product of 21st-century technology and our team is steadfast in providing security,

ZorroSign delivers it to you in a user-friendly platform, all while restoring trust in relationships.

What, according to you, could be the next big change in the Document Management System? How is ZorroSign preparing to be a part of that change?

It is true that blockchain is integrating into our lives daily. You see it everywhere, implemented by real estate, healthcare, financial services, legal, government industries, and more. Blockchain-based document management not only protects their operations but their client's/constituents’ information as well. The new normal is evolving to be inclusive and accessible for every size of business to have streamlined, simplified, and secure document management, aiding in their growth and success.

ZorroSign delivers an easily accessible, user-friendly document management platform offering integrations into the services your organization already utilizes while making the implementation seamless and continuously improving its multi-blockchain to maximize your privacy and security.

What are ZorroSign's future aspirations? What strategies are you undertaking to achieve those goals?

ZorroSign's web3 platform provides emerging IDaaS capabilities through a patented Z-Forensics token, plus fraud prevention, user authentication, and document verification. It already includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) features to automate form completion for digital documents and can improve regulatory compliance across global standards for legally enforceable digital signatures.

In adding Provenance Blockchain—which reduces the need for third-party intermediation, drastically reducing costs and freeing up capital in financial transactions—our platform promotes greater transparency and liquidity for financial service organizations and allows for new kinds of financial engineering and business opportunities. Such benefits readily map to healthcare services, IT services, legal services, and real estate transactions, where the company hopes to further prove its technology's value.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into Digital Transaction Management?

The world we live in is constantly changing and evolving rapidly. As you work to build your company, you should always be forward-thinking and ready to adapt to the new

demands and needs of your customers, whether it be redesigning your product or adopting new underlying technologies.

As you set out to build your company, you should also be conscious of the impact on the world it will have, the consumption of natural resources, and the damage to existing environmental and social ecosystems. Your advancements may be the solution to problems, but they should not come at the expense of future generations.

The Good Deeds

" Aga Khan Foundation USA mobiles funds across the United States for some of the most remote, hard-to-reach part of Asia and Africa to improve the quality of life—we build hospitals and schools. We have a very large volunteer team with skills in communications, fundraising, finance, and event logistics. Since ZorroSign was introduced to AKFUSA, it has dramatically cut down the approval time for processing a check to a vendor or getting a contract approved. It saves us from receiving multiple emails and prevents any confusion about which contains the final contract in the email. ZorroSign is a friendly user interface, easy to use, and saves a lot of time and paper."

"We were looking for a solution for our firm to obtain clients' electronic signatures on documents in a verifiable manner. After speaking to several different companies that offered this service, ZorroSign was the most cost effective, thorough, and best product out there to meet the needs of our law firm. Especially during these times of social distancing and many clients only having access to smart phones at home, it allowed us to obtain signatures, process documents more quickly, and get results for our clients in a more timely manner. I would recommend ZorroSign to any other legal practice!”

- Rex L. Patterson, Attorney at Law, Patterson Law, LLC

"As a clinical research organization, VCS uses ZorroSign as an extremely traceable and secure method for capturing signature authorizations from our test subjects. ZorroSign provides a significant cost savings due to time related efficiencies. With our staff less focused on menial signature chasing, we can prioritize internal workflows and customer service. This helps us to save time and also provides additional added value behind the scenes.”

- Leroy Fernandes, Manager of Donor Services, Aga Khan Foundation, an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network

- Brian Ecclefield, Founder, Validated Claim Support.

Additiv

The Right Technology Partner for your Digital Wealth and Investment Management

In the last decade, digitalization has infiltrated every aspect of our lives. From how we create to how we consume, this new paradigm is transforming industries and shaping the future.

The ripples of this digitalization have washed ashore new possibilities for the financial sector as well. The evolution from brick-and-mortar financial institutions to online wealth management platforms reflects these changes and the ways in which financial operations are conducted today.

The emergence of digital wealth management will have a significant impact on consumer behaviour and the future of finance. Wealth management firms are eager to embrace this shift because they know that catering to an increasingly mobile workforce with diverse needs requires a different type of service delivery model than the traditional offerings.

Fortunately, there a few companies who are rising to the challenge pertaining to this emerging need, and one prominent name among such companies is additiv.

In the following interview, Christine Schmid , the Head of Strategy , shares a few insights into the company’s position in FinTech space. She also talks about the aspects that make additiv stand out from the crowd, and what more the company has in store for its clients.

Please brief our audience about additiv, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the financial services space.

Established in 1998, additiv partners with leading financial institutions (FIs) across the world to help them capitalize on the possibilities of digital wealth and investment management.

Headquartered in Switzerland, with regional offices in

Singapore, UAE, Germany, and Kenya, additiv is supported by a global ecosystem of partners.

What makes us different is that our products sit upon our cloud-native, wealth platform; Digital Financial Suite (DFS). This is an orchestration layer that sits between client interaction channels and systems of record.

As a result, DFS enables FIs to simultaneously deliver multiple highly engaging experiences, while data is seamlessly run on one platform.

Although, systems of intelligence are increasingly adopted elsewhere within other financial industries, we believe DFS is the first and only to adopt this approach as a wealth platform.

Our solutions have been designed by keeping agility and efficiency in mind, enabling our customers to realise the value of digitalization quickly.

On average, we are able to ensure that we can roll out a new IT platform to our customers within 6 months (from scratch). A digital wealth management platform is fundamental to realise the benefits of digitalization and the speed of delivery is the key to it.

However, once the platform is available, the ability to continually launch and enhance wealth management solutions is essential. At additiv, our clients are able to launch new solutions within three months (subject to the given environment).

Our clients realise benefits including, on average an NPS registered 26-point improvement in disparity between promoters and distractors, a 25% new customer acquisition rate and 75% of total customer AUM in e-asset management.

What other products do you offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?

We offer a range of products including three established solutions: Hybrid Wealth Manager, Wealth Robo Advisor, and more recently our Wealth Solution Builder.

Our Hybrid Wealth Manager is a set of digital applications for managing investments and client relationships –Workbench, Mobile Advisor, and an advanced Client Cockpit with all the interaction possibilities with advisors. It allows financial institutions to offer the best solution for their needs, only automating the menial elements previously undertaken by a relationship manager.

Our (assisted) Wealth Robo Advisor is a set of digital applications that offer self-service, remote chat with an advisor or via call-centre, screen sharing, and phone-in from anywhere, at any time (24/7). It allows financial institutions to offer the same superior quality service as traditional advice with efficiency of a completely automated approach.

Our Wealth Solution Builder is an established IT foundation platform and extensive range of API tools and functionality for FIs to build their own, end-to-end digital wealth offerings and client journeys. With the support of additiv technical staff, IT developers can create and control every element of their system including configuration, avoiding the lengthy and costly process of building the foundational elements of a system.

Building upon DFS’s value, we’ve recently launched our Embedded Wealth and Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) models. Like DFS, these utilise our extensive ecosystem of partners to support the growing need of wealth management solutions to be embedded into platforms as part of context relevant user journeys.

Our Embedded Wealth model offers a range of wealth management products that makes it easy for financial and non-financial institutions to embed investment services into their customer proposition. We offer end-to-end wealth services that a brand can easily include, either tightly integrated into an existing journey, or as a standalone service. additiv provides the orchestration platform and works with regulated finance partners to fulfil the complete customer journey.

“Our Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) model also utilises DFS. It links regulated wealth management services with the brands that wishes to embed the services into their offering. In practice, this means providing APIs for interaction and the intelligence to integrate services in context-relevant user-journeys.

Our conversations with FIs and consumer platforms or large employers indicates that no other vendor is supporting embedded wealth fully. In fact, a Geneva-based consultancy called Aperture recently published a methodology, assessing wealth management software vendors.

Their report (Digital Age Wealth Management) rated additiv as a top ‘Transformer’ stating, “In terms of business model enablement, we see additiv as best-in-class. The solution can be deployed with out-of-the-box user agents or headless, using existing or third-party customer interaction channels. This makes the solution ideally suited for wealth management-as-a-service models.”

Christine, please brief us about your journey in the financial services industry, and how they have contributed towards the company’s success.

I joined additiv in 2020 as a Member of the Executive Board and Head of Strategy. Prior to joining additiv, I was Investment Solution Head, and Head Global Equity and Credit Research at Credit Suisse.

“additiv supports a large number of the leading financial institutions for wealth management and non-financial brands.

Exhibiting Excellence

I am a thought leader and strategic thinker on long term trends, which are relevant to the society. I also have experience in research and investment. I also bring in extensive investment knowhow to the table along with ESG, pension, and private market knowledge.

Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring safety of your employees at the same time?

As an agile IT company, we were already set up for working from home. The impact has therefore, been minimal to us internally. In terms of the impact on our customers and market needs, we were also very well prepared. Even before the covid-crisis, wealth services were expected to be quick and easy, with availability from multiple access points.

The pandemic created an even greater reliance on digital but receiving personal and tailored advice was no less important. In fact, initially the crisis triggered a requirement for more wealth advice particularly for high net-worth individuals (HNWIs).

Reaching clients directly was a problem for many wealth advisors, however, at additiv we were already supporting

many of our clients with our Hybrid Wealth Manager product to avoid this challenge.

A hybrid approach allows financial institutions to offer services that best suits their client’s individual needs, letting them choose how they want to be serviced. Depending on these needs, the advice and guidance available can be human or self-service.

Supported by intelligent analytics, clients can be serviced personally. Rather than impeding the client relationship, it actually encourages collaboration through in-person and remote advisor/client conversations on a multitude of channels. It allows relationship managers to remain productive and focus on clients, when it matters most, improving scalability for banks.

Using this model, our customers who serve other clients are thriving, but the benefit isn’t just limited to this segment. For example, during the initial covid confinement period, our customer PostFinance launched their digital investment platform. As one of the largest retail banks in Switzerland, they wanted to expand their range to include wealth products to clients wishing to diversify away from low yielding saving products.

The platform offers a seamless and engaging advisory and discretionary end-to-end experience. It’s seen a massive take-up, adding around 6,000 clients and over CHF300m in assets-under-management within the first nine months, currently growing around CHF30m a month.

unique technology, synchronous dual biometrics, combines passive facial recognition and handwriting recognition to provide fast and extremely secure authentication

Kyle Rutherford Founder & CEO Asignio

Empowering Financial Institutions with Secure Authentication Soltuions

About the Leader

Kyle Rutherford, Founder, and CEO is a serial entrepreneur who has over 30 years of experience in a variety of industries, all technology-focused, but his current passion is improving the authentication experience and secure access to your data so you can transact safely.

This is especially relevant in financial services where an account takeover can cost FIs large sums of money and, even more importantly, their customer’s trust. Kyle has a degree in software and an MBA from Harvard. He is an expert on product technology and has helped the team develop something that is incredibly secure without sacrificing user experience. He has also built a great team around him to deliver on his vision.

In today’s world, where everything from your groceries to your dinner reservations can be done online, it is only apparent that financial services ride this wave of digital transformation.

The finance industry is changing rapidly with the introduction of new technologies, and legacy institutions are struggling to keep up. Financial Institutions (FIs) across the world are all required to comply with KYC regulations for customer identification and verification purposes. However, there are limitations on how much information can be collected from customers and what kind of data can be collected to not violate privacy rights.

Moreover, where there is data, there is the threat of cyberattacks, and FIs are the most lucrative targets for ransomware, phishing, and other data security threats. This is where companies like Asignio play a significant role in protecting FIs against such vulnerabilities.

Based in Seattle, Washington, Asignio provides a quick,

innovative, and reliable sign-in technique – synchronous dual biometrics, which combines passive facial recognition and handwriting.

In the following interview, Kyle Rutherford, the Founder and CEO , shares his insights on the company’s journey in the FinTech industry and his vision for future innovations under Asignio’s label.

Following are the interview highlights

Please brief our audience about Asignio, its USPs, and its position as a leading player in the financial services space?

Asignio was founded to make sign-ins easier and more secure. In the market, we saw that passwords were becoming a more cumbersome and a less secure solution, complex biometrics have limitations (i.e., selfies are vulnerable to deep fakes, and, if there is a data breach, your thumbprint, eyeball, etc. data is compromised, and there is no way to change them.), and fraudis rising dramatically.

Our unique technology, synchronous dual biometrics, combines passive facial verification and handwriting recognition to provide fast and extremely secure authentication. The system is built as a platform that enables cross-device and cross-account authentication, meaning users only need to create their signature once and then can use it anywhere.

Asignio is working with multiple large Financial Institutions (FI’s) to provide their customers and employees a better signin experience.

What other services/solutions does Asignio offer, and how are these impacting the industry and its clients?

Asignio has partnered with DocuSign, a leader in e-signature, to provide a solution called TCA (Transaction Confirmation and Approval), which combines the compliance capabilities of DocuSign with powerful authentication capabilities of Asignio. This solution is targeted at stopping money movement fraud, especially wire transfer fraud.

Wire transfer fraud is a massive issue (over $42B lost) and has grown exponentially in the last year. The solution has garnered interest across the financial services industry, and we are currently testing with DocuSign to ensure that the system runs

smoothly before a wider launch later this year.

We’re also offering an SMS Biometric replacement for SMS OTPs (text verification one-time passcodes). SMS OTPs have become ubiquitous as a second layer of security, but they are also particularly vulnerable to phishing, Sim swap, and SS#7 attacks.

Asignio’s SMS biometric uses the same system customers are already familiar with, they simply receive a link instead of a code. They can sign-in more securely using with their Asignio’s sign-in instead of simply transposing a passcode.

If customers are not already signed up with Asignio, the system can default to an SMS OTP. But for customers needing a higher level of security, FI’s can have them on-board with Asignio, and then use our SMS Biometric for an easy, more secure way to access their accounts and transact.

Being an experienced leader, share your opinion on the impact of the adoption of modern technologies such as AI, big data, and machine learning on the finance niche, and what more could be expected in the future?

AI, big data, and machine learning have all had a major impact on the financial services industry, but, unfortunately, with our focus on security, we’ve also seen some of the negative impacts of AI and machine learning.

Fraudsters are using machine learning and AI to constantly attack FIs. FIs are trying to combat this fraud with passive authentication solutions leveraging machine learning and AI, such as behavioral biometrics (i.e., movement tracking like your walking gate or typing style, VPN or WiFi use, locations, etc.) There are a few problems with these:

1) Consumers often feel they are invasive and annoying if they don’t work (i.e., if your transaction depends on your gate, so do you have to walk around the block a couple of times to get it to work?),

2) A large percentage of fraud is ‘friendly,’ done by someone you know.

Metrics tied to your device could potentially not prevent these, i.e., if your phone knows it’s you because it tracks where you typically login, then if your family member picks up your phone, they could be granted access.

3) With machine learning, fraudsters are often able to replicate these results and break into the systems

With Asignio, the user must be actively signing in themselves. The handwriting symbol is extremely difficult for someone else to copy, but combined with the live selfie (our

Synchronous Dual Biometrics), it is almost impossible spoof. While AI, big data, and machine learning can all have positive impacts in the finance niche, companies also need to be cognizant of the risks of using these technologies and be careful they don’t open the door to more fraud.

Considering the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face, and how did you drive Asignio to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of its employees at the same time?

We had the typical challenges of an overnight shift to remote work and delays as our customers scrambled to find solutions to new problems. We immediately shut down the office and moved to remote work. Our team worked a hybrid schedule before, so it was only a matter of a couple of weeks before we were back to full capabilities.

Modern technology made the move to remote much easier, and we will continue to remain a mostly remote workforce moving forward. Our biggest challenge was a slowed sales cycle. We had more difficulties reaching clients as they adjusted to working remotely.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the financial services space?

Build a good team and be willing to be flexible. Timelines will elongate, your product will need to change, and the space is constantly shifting. If you have a great team and remain flexible in your thinking, you can find a lot of success in the financial services space.

Also, try to get traction outside of financial services while you pursue this industry. The FI industry is so regulated there are extra hurdles to getting adoption that can extend timelines.

How do you envision scaling your company’s operations and offerings in 2021?

We’re in trials now with a couple of financial institutions. Once we roll those services out, we will need to scale rapidly.

We’re also working on NIST approval which should open up another partnership that, once we get through testing, will again require rapid scaling in new industries. We are constantly continuing to build out our company and grow the team to better service our customers.

Atidot

A Leading Cloud-based Platform for the Life Insurance Industry

With the emergence of modern technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), many industries got disrupted. Exceptional transformations took place in the way industry processes were run, making them more streamlined, efficient, and cost-effective. As industries gradually started adopting these modern technologies, more accurate and precise outcomes resulted in organizations understanding their client’s needs better and delivering them more personalized solutions.

One name among the companies that are leveraging technology to provide customized solutions to their clients is Atidot . Spearheaded by Dror Katzav, the CEO and Co-founder of Atidot, the company is a leading AI cloudbased platform tailored specifically to suit the needs of the life insurance industry, enabling insurers to grow their customer's Lifetime Value and create new revenues.

In the following interview, Dror talks about the exemplary personalized solutions that the company has been delivering since its inception.

Please brief our audience about your company, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the financial services space.

Atidot is an Insurtech company providing AI and ML solutions for Life Insurance companies. Atidot offers a cloud-based platform that provides data-driven insights to decisionmakers, drives new business strategies, and creates new revenue streams using AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics technology resulting in optimization and monetization of insurers’ books of business. We are currently one of the few companies with a tailored solution designed by a team of actuaries and data scientists that match the life insurance industry's needs.

Dr. Mark Schafer CEO

Atidot works with leading life insurers, such as Guardian Life and Pacific Life, mainly in North America and Europe. Because of our unique positioning as an AI solution provider that works with carriers to disrupt their organization, Gartner selected us to be ‘Cool Vendor 2019’, in Insurance. The company also received ‘Top 10 Insurtech’ Company by CIO Magazine and is included in

What other services/solutions does your company offer, and how are these impacting the industry and your clients?

Because we view AI solutions as such that have a ripple effect throughout the value chain, we offer many AI-based solutions for life insurers. Today, we focus on providing insurers with insights and analytics about

‘Insurtech100’ most innovative Insurtech companies by FinTech Global.

One size’ doesn't really fit all in today's world, and there are many variations and greys when insuring people.

policyholders to help them understand their needs and unlock the potential these customers hold. But we also offer to operationalize these insights with a complete marketing and operation package to drive new business.

In essence, we can manage the whole digital communication with an existing book of business and help customers make the transition from offline to online, generating upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

We also focus on solutions that enable accelerated and automated underwriting, detect inefficiencies in the underwriting process, produce insights on distribution channels and other solutions that will help an insurance company become more nimble, efficient, and most importantly, more profitable.

Being an experienced leader, share your opinion on the impact of the adoption of modern technologies such as AI, big data, and machine learning on the finance niche, and what more could be expected in the future?

Life Insurance used to be simpler a decade ago. Insurance was bought, not sold, and insurers became very wealthy. But the world changed during the last few years and specifically postCOVID. Interest rates are lower; people expect a different level of service today, which they are struggling to get from their insurance provider, and companies don't really know how to provide the expected level of service where everything is friendly, self-explanatory, and delivered at the speed of light.

AI and Machine Learning technologies are the power behind product and marketing strategies that can provide

Dror Katzav is Atidot CEO and Co-Founder. Prior to co-founding, Atidot Dror completed an 11-year career as a Team Leader and Project Manager with an elite IDF (Israeli Defense Force) Unit, leading state-of-the-art technology development in Intelligence. Dror led teams in Artificial Intelligence (AI), data solutions, and information sciences in that unit. He obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics and Mathematics and a Master of Science degree in Management Sciences and Information Technology.

When Dror came out of the Army, he partnered with Barak Bercowitz. Also, a veteran and a computer science wizard and together realized that the Life Insurance Industry could benefit immensely from data-driven solutions that would accelerate their transfer into the new digital era. The life insurance industry was not speaking the language of data the same way other industries were at the time. They both saw it as their life mission to transform the industry to become data-driven, focused and help insurers understand the policyholder's needs.

About the Leader

Dror Katzav CEO and Co-founder

better life insurance to customers. These technologies can ensure that people are provided with the right product or service at the right time and the right price. Advanced technologies can ensure that more people can be eligible for life insurance, and those who get it are provided with much better service.

‘One size’ doesn't really fit all in today’s world, and there are many variations and greys when insuring people. What if you could tailor a bespoke suit to people instead of providing one quote? What if they could be insured at the exact amount that fits their needs? Right now, there is a huge uninsured or underinsured population. If you could provide a more personalized solution to each of them, you could potentially serve better as a company.

If you think like Amazon, the policyholders can choose from a pool of products and services. They can pick and choose according to their needs and situation in life. It is a shift in paradigm in the way insurers view their customers. The customer is placed in the middle, and the data govern the interaction insurers have with them. That data is being managed and extracted with technologies such as AI and ML.

Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face, and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time?

Atidot, as a nimble start-up, maintained its ability to respond to the impact the pandemic had on insurance companies. For a while, we stopped recruiting and shifted into a hybrid model of work where we met at the office twice a week and worked from

home the rest of the time. That helped our employees stay safe and cope with that difficult time where the whole family stayed at home, and the children had no school.

Luckily, the Life Insurance Industry didn't really suffer from the pandemic, and most insurers experienced a record year. In fact, COVID accelerated many of the processes that started before the pandemic, such as digitization and moving to a cloud infrastructure. So, once we realized that the market was opening to us, we started growing significantly in terms of adding resources and expanding our product offering.

That said, during COVID, there were many things that insurers could do to help their customer, like providing cash value loans and other financial products that could provide relief. But it needed an immediate response from the insurers that usually rely on their channels and have a long response time due to culture and complicated internal processes.

What if you could send the right offer to the right customer with a personalized message that will give them the kind of financial security they were looking for with just the push of a button? That would surely do wonders not just in terms of loyalty to the company but also in terms of creating new revenue streams that would benefit the top line of companies. This is where Atidot fits in, and Insurers understand that.

How do you envision scaling your company’s operations and offerings in 2021?

Right now, we see a huge interest in the market for our end-to-end packaged solution that provides analytics and operations combined.

Insurers provide us with access to their data (anonymized), and we tailor the right product and marketing strategy that translates into new revenues.

This is often provided in a rev share model where we contribute our resources and infrastructure, and the carrier provides access to the data. It’s a win-win strategic model where all parties benefit from growing their business with minimal risk.

Exhibiting Brilliance

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“Given the current state and rapidly shifting buying trends, we were seeking a predictive analytics solution to help us drive future product performance in the marketplace with a high level of confidence,” comments

Mary Bahna-Nolan, SVP, Head of Product Innovation and Strategy Life Insurance Division, Pacific Life.

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“The iPipeline/Atidot, predictive analytics models, cover multiple dimensions of our business, and we expect this to provide valuable guidance immediately after implementation. We are excited about enriching our analytics with new, actionable insights to guide our decisions, minimize risk, and optimize efforts to grow our business while better serving the needs of our customers.” (Insurance Innovation Report, June 2020)

Mary Bahna – Nolan, Head of Product Innovation and Strategy, Life Insurance Division, Pacific Life

Bank One Limited

A Robust Commercial Bank for the Digital Age

Commercial banks have become a significant part of every nation's economy in today's age.

These banks are creating innovative products to provide wealth management, credit score, risk analysis, investments opportunities, loan grants and many alike services for the clients, so that money keeps flowing towards economic developments.

The new ways of doing business for commercial banks includes providing instant online services through apps and websites. Commercial banks have remarkably transformed themselves into the digital medium to grant customers live access to banking services and wealth management.

Excelling on all of the above-mentioned areas is Bank One Limited, a Mauritian commercial bank incorporated in 2008. Bank One is playing an active role in supporting businesses across sub-Saharan Africa. Over the past 13 years, the Bank has built a strong reputation as a “Bank of Choice” and a trustworthy partner “from Africa, for Africa”. Through its main business lines, namely Personal Financial Services, Corporate Banking, Private Banking and International Banking, it currently serves customers located in 19 countries across Africa, including Mauritius. Bank One has been getting tremendous international attention due

to its robust business fundamentals and outstanding systems and processes.

Bank One is playing an active role in supporting businesses across sub-Saharan Africa. The bank has been getting tremendous international attention due to its robust business fundamentals and outstanding systems and processes. We interviewed Julian Mwika, Head, Digital Services at Bank One Limited to understand innovations and progress happening at the bank.

Below are the excerpts from the interview.

Please brief our audience about your company, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the financial services space.

Bank One is a Mauritian commercial bank incorporated in 2008 following a joint venture between CIEL Finance Limited, the finance arm of Mauritian conglomerate CIEL Limited and Kenya-based I&M Group PLC.

It has a strong shareholder network with a banking presence across eight sub-Saharan African countries including Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Madagascar and Mauritius.

In 2021, we have entered the digital payment space and launched a game-changing payment solution, which we branded 'pop'. Pop leverages the MauCAS payment network, owned by the Bank of Mauritius, which aims to make ecommerce, banking and mobile payments inter-operable.

We believe that pop will eventually grow into the first "financial supermarket" in Mauritius with an exciting roadmap of new features including loans, insurance and savings accounts in the near future.

Audrey plays a vital role in developing, funding, and implementing solutions to social, cultural, and environmental issues.

About The Leader

Julian is a seasoned professional in digital soluons. He started his banking experience at the Development Bank of Rwanda where he was employed as a Project and Investment Analyst.

As the next step in his career, he moved to Rswitch as Head of Strategic Projects where he spent three years. Before joining Bank One, Julian had an impressive career at NCBA Bank of Rwanda where he started his career as Country Service Delivery Manager and then moved up as Head of Digital Business.

He has more than 10 years hands-on product design and implementaon experience, end-to-end project management of more than 20 projects and the seng up of the relevant operang structures and resources for long-term revenue streams.

Julian holds a Bachelor of Business Administraon from Makerere University Business School and a Master's in Economics and Business Studies from Karlstad University from Sweden.

Julian Mwika Head, Digital Services Bank One Limited

What other services/solutions does your company offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?

Operating a diversified universal banking model, Bank One serves both individuals and wealthy clients as well as local and international businesses, through a wide range of banking products and treasury services.

Awarded for market-leading trade finance structuring capabilities and the ability to offer clients a range of targeted solutions to address uniquely African challenges, Bank One plays an active role in supporting businesses across subSaharanAfrica.

On the domestic front, it offers a full range of products and services for individual customers and has established a reputation for innovation including best-in-class Retail Banking offers, an Open Architecture investment solution for Private Banking clients and a state-of-the-art Custody Platform.

With the launching of pop, Bank One is determined to change the payments landscape in Mauritius. We are convinced that pop will facilitate daily payments for individual customers and help companies, from SMEs to large corporates, provide a seamless and cost-efficient digital payment solution to help them grow their commercial activities in stores and online.

Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI, big data and machine learning had on the finance niche and what more could be expected in the future?

The adoption of modern technologies has and will continue to change banking, as we know it. Evolving technology has been

a catalyst for financial service providers to enhance customer experience management, and increasingly these financial service providers are using Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data, real-time monitoring to improve customer interactions in real-time.

With banks and other financial services, this has gone from customer on-boarding, product design, credit scoring, risk management and customer engagement (chat-bots, IVR etc.) and other facets of finance supported by technology improvements.

In the future, it is expected that there will be larger adoption of blockchain in "traditional banking", adoption of augmented reality, robotic process automation, quantum computation for complex data, further development in AI (across wealth management, payments, insurance, and capital markets for instance).

Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time?

The current pandemic fast-tracked the prioritization for delivery and enhancement of digital services across the banking industry. As governments put in place strict lockdown measures, banks were "forced" to find ways to continue serving customers who were not able to travel to branches to access banking services.

At Bank One, the pandemic has fired a very significant change in the way we serve our customers and how they access our services. We were already embarked on a significant digital transformation of our business, distribution channels, and processes when the pandemic hit, so it was more a question of fast-tracking our plans.

Our teams (and vendors working offsite) found it challenging at first to find the right balance and rhythm, but once alignment was reached on the expectations and our team members received the tools needed to adjust to remote working, it became easier for them to adapt to the "new normal" and resume production.

Our key focus areas during the crisis were staff safety, client support and managing credit risk, liquidity and capital. We believe that our experienced and committed teams and sound governance structures allowed us to face the crisis and weather the storm.

We ignite their minds and fuel their spirits while providing them with the tools they need to transform their dreams into reality and develop their leadership muscle.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the financial services space?

Understand your customers and their needs. Do not build a product or venture into the space without having a clear understanding of the customer and hearing what the customer wants. We sometimes build features and products with many assumptions on what the customer will want, but once we deliver the final version, we find that our initial assumptions were wrong.

Secondly, build a product and constantly make iterations. The product will never be perfect, so do not wait for a 100% perfect product before putting it out there. The market will always give feedback on what you need to enhance and change. Put in place a team that has an agile mentality to quickly adapt. Flexibility is key in the financial services space.

Lastly and most importantly – build with the customer at the centre of your strategy. Any product that is not customer-centric will have challenges with breaking into the competitive financial services space.

How do you envision scaling your company's operations and offerings in 2022?

As we start 2022, our main focus is on delivering new features and enhancements for pop in the next deployment phases. Our aim is to build more value-added propositions on top of the existing payment rails for both customers and merchants.

In addition to our strategy for pop, the bank is also developing enhanced digital banking platforms to serve our customers better and deliver a seamless customer experience across our digital channels. We believe this will have an impact on customer experience, profitability and reduce operational costs in the short and long term.

FinLocker

Keeping Customers and Businesses Financially Fit

We are in an era where technology has democratized financial services, giving customers unprecedented access to information, tools, and advice. However, for many financial institutions, it's an uphill struggle to make their products competitive in this new age.

As a result, to remain competitive, these institutions are turning to technology. And personalization is the holy grail that they need to stay on top of their competition. But to get there, they'll need a fresh approach to using technology and data to change their culture and workflows.

FinLocker is one such organization that is helping financial institutions to deliver financially personalized services. The company is changing the face of personalized financing solutions through an app that gives clear, concise, and engaging financial fitness information in a mobile-friendly format.

In the following interview, Brian Vieaux, President and COO, talks about the company's USP, the need for going mobile in making sound financial decisions, traversing the pandemic, and how the organization is ushering into the student loan area in the forthcoming years.

Please brief our audience about your company, its Unique Selling Proposition (USPs), and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the financial services space.

FinLocker offers the next generation in customer relationship-based performance marketing to empower mortgage originators, lenders, servicers, banks, credit unions, credit counselors, and housing advocacy non-profits to provide personalized financial solutions and experiences for their customers through the FinLocker financial fitness app.

FinLocker has partnered with Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Microsoft, and consumer housing advocacy groups to help

We provide nancial institutions with a custom, white-labeled instance of FinLocker with their own brand, so their consumers can stay within the platform for their entire homeownership journey

,first-time homebuyers on their journey to achieve homeownership. FinLocker is Day 1 Certainty approved by Fannie Mae for direct source asset verification.

We provide financial institutions with a custom, whitelabeled instance of FinLocker with their own brand, so their consumers can stay within the platform for their entire homeownership journey. The consumer doesn't need to use any of the other disparate apps on the market to build and monitor their credit, manage their finances, budget, and save for their down payment, pay down debt, and begin their online property search.

FinLocker provides a unique USP for each business category. For example, the platform enables mortgage lenders and originators to connect with homebuyers at the top of the sales funnel and provides a high-tech, high-touch solution to manage a larger pipeline of homebuyers and recover homebuyers initially turned down for a mortgage.

The tools in the FinLocker platform prepare homebuyers for a mortgage and homeownership and enable the homebuyer to initiate a mortgage application directly from the app with their lender once they have achieved mortgage readiness. This service contributes to an increased lead to loan pull-through rate for mortgage lenders and originators.

Once homebuyers become homeowners, they continue to use their sponsoring mortgage lenders or mortgage

About the Leader

Brian Vieaux, President & COO of FinLocker, joined the company in July 2019 following 28 years in mortgage lending. His knowledge and experience in originating purchase mortgage loans for homebuyers, and renance or repeat purchase loan for homeowners, has helped FinLocker develop a product that meets the needs of our app users (consumers) while satisfying the various use cases of our business clients. Holding senior leadership positions in banking and mortgage companies has enabled FinLocker to grow with a business development and sales strategy that has driven FinLocker's client acquisition and revenue growth.

Brian Vieaux President and COO

servicer's white-labeled FinLocker to monitor their credit, manage their finances, monitor their home equity, and net worth. FinLocker provides a valuable engagement platform that enables financial institutions to create customers for life and cross-sell additional financial products via the app.

What other solutions does your company offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?

Improving the credit eligibility of our clients' consumers can help them improve their eligibility to achieve multiple financial milestones. Financial institutions who use the FinLocker platform to stay connected with their consumers can have the opportunity to serve and profit from 15 financial transactions within a 10-year period from the typical consumer: home purchase, home insurance (annual), home warranty, auto loan, auto warranty (annual), credit cards, refinance, home equity line of credit (HELOC), debt consolidation, and another home purchase.

Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI, big data and machine learning had on the finance niche and what more could be expected in the future?

The advent of these features and functions with tools like AI and the analysis of big data and machine learning has created a much more intuitive, streamlined mortgage process for consumers going through the financial services process, regardless of the loan product. I come from a mortgage background, and I've watched large mortgage companies and mortgage tech providers focus on helping streamline the mortgage application process, which requires a lot of data gathering from their consumers.

One specific area for FinLocker is how consumer permissioned direct source data has aided asset data collection and verification. By enabling consumers to link their bank accounts inside their FinLocker account, the transactional data from those bank accounts can be used to make credit and lending decisions, as opposed to the traditional way of providing a stack of bank statements to their lender.

Another example where we're continuing to see expansion is going beyond transactional asset data by enabling consumers to link their own payroll data, similar to how a consumer using a personal financial management app would connect their bank accounts to see a holistic view of

their financial life. FinLocker is preparing to empower consumers also to link their payroll data.

Imagine a world where consumers are walking around with an app on their phone that's digitally linked in real-time, not only to their financial transactional data but also their income and employment data. We see a world where consumers, from a push of a button, can not only apply for a loan; it could be an auto loan, a student loan, a credit card, or a mortgage loan, and be approved instantly based on this directly sourced data.

Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face and how did you drive your company to sustain operations while ensuring safety of your employees at the same time?

The Covid-19 pandemic impacted FinLocker in many ways and continues to do so. FinLocker is a digital native, as in a fully digital business. At the start of the pandemic, FinLocker refocused the company's priorities to provide safety for our team by implementing a remote working environment, which also added agility to our hiring and staffing process. Knowing that we could sustain operations and product development in a remote working environment, over the past 12 months, we have cast a wider net to attract top talent to fill various positions in all company departments.

As a fintech company serving the mortgage industry, digital transformation is a business imperative. The pandemic impacted product development on the FinLocker app and our go-to-market approaches. FinLocker adjusted its product roadmap on when and how we launch new features to calibrate with our client's priorities, especially in light of the extraordinary refinance and origination volumes experienced by our mortgage banker and originator clients.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the financial services space?

Budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the financial services space have two opportunities. They can truly innovate by creating a new category for their new Fintech venture by developing the next generation financial services solution. They should start by identifying the various problems consumers have that relate to their finances and how technology can help solve those problems, or at a minimum, alleviate or lessen those problems.

The other area where most new businesses tend to excel is taking a current solution for a problem and making that solution better or faster, or some combination thereof. That's one of the things that we've done at FinLocker. Initially, we didn't really create a new category per se.

However, we understood the friction that consumers face in the traditional mortgage application process, and the FinLocker platform has moved forward from there. This concept of leveraging consumer permissioned data and letting consumers leverage their own data in a way that they haven't been able to before by using it to initiate financial transactions.

How do you envision scaling your company's operations and offerings in 2022?

FinLocker is a B2B2C platform, so scaling happens in two ways. The first way to scale is to add more customers by adding more businesses that will distribute the FinLocker platform to their consumers. We have a robust pipeline within the mortgage vertical, specifically large mortgage lenders who are in the implementation stage with our product and will begin distributing their white-labeled FinLockers to their customers and prospects over the next 90 days. That's going to significantly ramp up our user base in terms of consumers using the FinLocker platform.

Secondly, we continue to look at the FinLocker app as a holistic consumer financial experience, so we're continually reviewing how to add tools and features into the app to solve consumer problems, which also adds value to a lender providing the app to their consumers. So, while we focus today on mortgages, we're looking at other areas to help solve problems.

There's a massive population of consumers who are either credit invisible or credit light that need help either creating a credit profile or expanding their credit profile to improve their credit score. That's not just a mortgage use case.

That broadly applies to consumers to benefit them for related financial services like buying auto and home insurance that are somewhat priced based on a consumer's credit score. We've got another focus in the student loan area to help consumers with student loan debts who may be eligible to reduce their payments through a digital experience that we can provide.

Exhibiting Excellence

"PRMG partnered with FinLocker to address two specic customer segments and challenges: 1) increase engagement with servicing clients and 2) nurture prospects towards mortgage readiness.

"To engage prospects "up the sales funnel," we invite any client who is a prospect but is not yet ready for a mortgage to enroll in the PRMG Data Vault. The PRMG Data Vault then guides that consumer towards their goals and objectives to become mortgage-ready. The tools include credit monitoring and improvement, expense budgeting and nancial goal setting, nancial literacy, and much more."

"Consumer Empowerment in a frictionless experience is not a trend but how consumers demand to conduct business. FinLocker provides PRMG with a technology tool that allows us to compete with Fintech Lenders in the marketplace yet maintain the differentiator of having local Originators.”

"The VettedVA GoBag, and the Debt Does Deals Debt Locker allow our rural businesses to bring big-city nancial planning power to the pockets of Veterans, homebuyers, and homeowners no matter where they live.

FinLocker helps us begin helping people where they are in the journey to homeownership without requiring them to get to some ambiguous standard before assisting them with measurable purposes. Not leaving anyone behind is important to us. I think it is important to y'all also. Thanks for all the hard work; it matters.”

– Chris Grifth, Broker/Owner, Debt Does Deals & Vetted VA Home Loan Network

"The Goal feature is very powerful and will help the homebuyer stay the course!"

– Steve Ely, CEO, eCredable

– Kevin Peranio, Chief Lending Ofcer, PRMG

We are revolutionizing BNPL and consumer nancing through our API-driven, multilender, omnichannel, highly customizable, and scalable SaaS platform.

Luan Cox CEO and Founder FinMkt

Empowering Companies with Best-in-class Technology for Scalable Growth

Technological advancement and the emergence of digitalization have changed the dynamics of the finance sector. Once only limited to the long queues and tokens, today, the finance sector has moved to the digital giant. The journey from cashbooks and registers to the internet and mobile banking finance space has seen a revolutionary shift. The strides that technology has taken, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, Internet-ofthings, etc., are exploring new horizons for finance space.

This shift in the working culture gave birth to the new normal, i.e., fintech. Fintech firms are currently at the forefront of the sector, focused on the primary goal of making money management easier and more efficient. Looking at this ever-growing sector, many companies started their endeavor in the fintech market. One prominent name in that list is FinMkt , which delivers customizable technology solutions for sale financing and loan originations.

In following interview with Insights Success, Luan Cox, the CEO, and Founder of FinMkt, sheds light on the inception of her company, its values, and the future of the fintech market.

Please brief our audience about FinMkt, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the financial services space.

FinMkt is an award-winning SaaS provider of BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) and Point of Sale (POS) financing technology. We are revolutionizing BNPL and consumer financing through our API-driven, multi-lender, omnichannel, highly customizable, and scalable SaaS platform. A key differentiator of our technology is that it is designed to support multiple lenders and products in one seamless real-time consumer experience. This provides a full credit spectrum solution with much higher approval

About the Leader

Luan Cox is the Founder and CEO of FinMkt, a best-in-class multi-lender platform, and point of sale solution that has processed billions in loan application volume since launching in 2016. Ms. Cox is a seasoned ntech veteran going back to the mid-'90s in Silicon Valley. At that time, she joined a group of ntech pioneers that democratized access to stock quotes and 'Wall Street Quality' information to the masses via the web. Since then, she hasn't stopped innovating and introducing revolutionary ntech products to the market.

Prior to the founding of FinMkt, Luan was General Manager and Co-Founder of Interactive Data's Managed Solutions Group – Americas, Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing for Stock point, and Executive Director of Partner Solutions for Quote.com. She is an alumini and advisor to the Springboard Accelerator, comprised of the world's leading women-led media and technology companies, and is a Techstars mentor for its ntech accelerator.

In 2019, Luan was included in the NYC FinTech Women's Inspiring Fintech Females list in recognition for her outstanding leadership and support of the community of women in nancial technology. In September 2020, she again joined a prestigious list of female leaders, being named as one of the Top 25 Women Leaders in Financial Technology of 2020 by the Financial Technology Report. And this year, she was named one of the Top 100 Women in Fintech by Fintech Magazine.

Under Luan's leadership, FinMkt has grown from its humble beginnings in a small ofce in New York City to an international team of nancial technology innovators. Still headquartered in NYC, the company has now added ofces in Hyderabad, India, along with US team members working in California, Georgia, and Texas. Luan has led the team in stealthily building groundbreaking technology that is poised to power the world of nancial products.

We enable more banks, credit unions, and non-bank lenders to enter the BNPL consumer financing space and empower merchants with more products, providing borrowers across the credit spectrum fair access to a range of financing options. Vertical and product agnostic, our technology can be leveraged in eCommerce, healthcare, home improvement, and retail. Anywhere a sale takes place, FinMkt's technology facilitates safe and secure financing and payments.

What other services/solutions do FinMkt offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?

FinMkt offers a complete end-to-end or modularized SaaS solution that is completely customizable and globally scalable. Banks, credit unions, manufacturers, and merchants can virtually leverage any piece of our state-ofthe-art technology across all channels with any financial product. Essentially, our SaaS solution has no limits in its application.

Because of the platform's plug-and-play functionality, it is adaptable across consumer financial products, including but not limited to BNPL, POS loans, insurance, mortgages, and other consumer loan products. Our solution supports merchant and consumer underwriting, merchant monitoring, seamless API and lender integration, payment processing, and funds disbursement.

In addition to our point-of-sale financing platform, we also own and operate Lendvious, an online lending marketplace offering direct-to-consumer cash loans from top online lenders. Consumers can use Lendvious to browse and compare pre-qualified loan offers without affecting their credit. Our flexibility and breadth of offerings enable us to provide our clients with the financing solutions they need, accompanied by unparalleled white-glove service and support.

Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI, big data, and machine learning had on the finance niche and what more could be expected in the future?

There continue to be lots of buzz surrounding AI, Big Data, and Machine Learning – and for a good reason. Buzz words aside, the algorithms which power this technology are already revolutionizing so many industries, and financial services are no exception. The way in which AI can power automation is really just beginning to be fully realized. Intelligent automation is a game-changer for financial services across all verticals, from wealth management to lending.

Data-driven decisioning models, utilizing both traditional and non-traditional data elements, enable financial institutions to automate processes and decisions which used to take hours or days. This not only increases operational efficiency (time/money) but, more importantly, can greatly improve customer experience. For financial institutions to fully succeed in leveraging AI, it needs to be embedded in the capability stack. This will help deliver better solutions and experiences at scale.

Taking into consideration the current pandemic, what initial challenges did you face, and how did you drive FinMkt to sustain operations while ensuring the safety of your employees at the same time?

In a way, our platform was already designed to meet the challenges faced by companies during the pandemic. When

designing FinMkt's technology, the team focused on developing a product that would be highly customizable for merchants and lenders alike as well as highly adaptable to changes in the market. The technology is omnichannel and built to accommodate all verticals and lending partnerships with seamless integration.

As a fintech company, FinMkt is able to be nimble and adapt to market changes in real-time. As changes in the market and consumer demand occur, FinMkt quickly and effectively integrates new technologies to its platform. In the past, this has included card processing and prescreened applications. Fully agile and able to develop enhanced technology on demand, FinMkt had already added innovative features to its platform when consumer demand for contactless point of sale financing and payments exploded after the outbreak of COVID-19.

FinMkt not only paved a pathway for banks, credit unions, and alternative lenders to quickly and seamlessly enter the rapidly growing point-of-sale financing marketplace but empowers lenders to become industry leaders with perpetual innovation demanded by an ever-evolving marketplace.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the financial services space?

Fintech is a complicated and challenging industry because you have the convergence of finance and technology. One of the biggest things to recognize when you are building a company is that you can't do it all by yourself. It is incredibly important to surround yourself with a great team. And not just in terms of your co-founders and whom you have within your company as teammates, but also the investors you bring on.

You want to make sure you have investors that will help you, support you, and cheer for you because there will be more down days than up days. You want a team around you that will be with you through the good and the bad. People who will pick you up and dust you off during the rough times and be your cheerleader when things are good.

It is also important for budding fintech companies to develop good partnerships. Find leaders in your industry to partner with and gain their support; learn from them. Use your past experience as a springboard to build something to improve that space, whether it is lending, brokering, banking, etc. And also, be willing to be flexible and listen to others.

How do you envision scaling FinMkt's operations and offerings in 2021?

We have some very exciting announcements coming in the following months. Our team has been hard at work on new lender integrations that will set FinMkt up to transform healthcare and home improvement financing, bringing more industry-disrupting financial products to market for consumers across the credit spectrum. In addition, we are working on projects that will further cement our footprint in retail and eCommerce. We continue to build out the team and will announce the appointment of some new senior staff later this year.

Exhibing Excellence

"In this retail revolution where consumers expect to buy anything anytime, our partnership with FinMkt allows us to meet our customers' needs with exceptional technology. When we rst connected with FinMkt, we were immediately impressed by the extraordinary speed, responsiveness, and agility at which they operate. FinMkt made integration seamless and frictionless, allowing us to leverage their technology with zero disruption." – Larry Collins, CEO, HFS Financial

"FinMkt's unique enterprise technology solutions and its deep bench of highly successful ntech leaders solve a huge problem for organizations looking to provide full credit spectrum lending options to customers. By working with banks and other traditional lenders, we believe FinMkt will be the backbone of innovation in helping these nancial institutions become increasingly digitally-enabled and leverage best-in-class technology." – Joe Maxwell, Managing Partner at FINTOP Capital

"It was essential we partner with a ntech innovator, like FinMkt, who could provide world-class technology and also assist us through every step of the integration process, including training for our team and our users. Every challenge along the way has been met and solved with incredible creativity and swiftness. FinMkt's dedication and passion surpassed our expectations." – Stephen Galvin, CEO, US Credit

Providing Financial Solutions with Flexibility

Every B2B credit service issue that businesses face comes to an end at MO Technologies, where the company is leveraging technology to create an inclusive, digital, and seamless financial system. It is a Credit Lifecycle Management Platform with flexible and innovative solutions that drastically reduce time-to-market and improve the lending customer experience. The company has developed also an innovative credit scoring model that evaluates potential customers based on behavioural and alternative data without the need to access any personal information. It provides seamless and accessible experience through multiple use cases that are the most common and will bring the most value to new fintech credit operations: Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), Merchant Cash Advance (MCA), Credit card and Microcredit.

Veronica Crisafulli is the CEO and Co-founder of MO Technologies, leading the company with a creative mind and a clear focus on innovation in the digital lending space and financial inclusion. She has 15 years' experience as a strategic consultant for important consulting companies dedicated to TMT and financial services around the world. Her invaluable trajectory has helped the company optimize financial solutions through disruptive technologies.

Innovative and Disruptive Solutions

Veronica started working in consultancy for 15 years, which allowed her to travel and live in many developing countries.

As a result, she understood the limitations of credit issuing and the wide financial inclusion gap. She firmly believes that no one is included in the financial world if they can't access credit products. So, founding MO was the perfect opportunity for (generating a positive impact with innovative technology) her to do something for the good with innovative technology.

Consumer needs are in constant evolution. At MO Technologies, the team strives to solve the main issue fintech and other non-financial institutions face - the lack of proper technology to satisfy customers' demands for new types of credit products. It enables companies to innovative end-to-end credit infrastructure and operation that allows the company to democratize credit, diminishing the inclusion gap.

The lending market has exponentially grown, and still, only 20% of the worldwide population has access to credit. Fintech and non-fintech companies need an innovative credit technology provider such as MO to offer any credit product to their users. MO aims to provide this technology that makes the end-to-end credit processes – from origination to servicing and digital collection easier and fully digital, allowing a laser-speed launch of flexible credit products that are easy to integrate with any platform. The final objective of the company is to be the credit tech enablers for Latin America, Mexico, and the Caribbean region going the extra mile to implement the most disruptive solutions in the industry.

enhances

decisions and management.

Making a Difference Speedily MO Technologies holds many competitive advantages by offering a robust solution that competes with any top player worldwide and has a competitive pricing structure in comparison with competitors. Veronica shares, "What makes us one of the strongest credit tech players in LAC is that we offer a credit management platform that does not have solid competitors in the region, where the market is unserved. This platform, named MO Manage, covers the E2E credit lifecycle by providing fintech with the proper, flexible, and easily integrated technology to give access to credit to their end-users at a laser speed. We cover credit origination, servicing, and collection while managing it with our clients to achieve their goals of new credit products with a scalable and straightforward pricing model."

MO's clients are top players such as PayU, Santander, and Uber. The team has deep know-how of the credit ecosystem

in Latin America and the Caribbean. Today, it has more than 30 clients in 12 different countries and a fully developed solutions comparable to the ones implemented by only its few competitors worldwide. At MO, the team has three patents granted, and it keeps working hard to make a difference in its sector.

Veronica explains, "At MO Technologies, we know that the ever-changing landscape makes technology and consumer demands continuously evolve. As a start-up, we face new challenges every day to step up as a top credit tech player and fulfill the customers' changing needs."

"Funding was one of our first obstacles, but we dedicated time to preparing a customized commercial strategy and business plan aligned with our objective of finding the right investors. Recruiting the perfect talent to keep up with the fast-paced technology environment is also a big challenge. We encourage working as a community and putting our people first: that's why our "MOvers" are granted company

shares after the vesting period and have other benefits such as education, training, etc.," states Veronica.

Main Components of MO's DNA

MO Technologies is conscious of the market's continuous changes and is committed to adapting to the new behaviors and trends. The team dedicates time to listening to clients' needs and demands to fill the gaps, the reason why it transitioned from a project-led company to a product-led one.

The fintech market in Latin America has been growing exponentially in the last few years. More than 2 thousand fintech in Latin America don't have the proper technology to offer credit products to their end-users, and here's where MO comes into action. It is constantly researching and learning more about the emerging needs in the credit segment. The team has developed a credit management platform (MO Manage) that enables fintech to satisfy customers' needs by allowing a seamless launch of flexible and adaptable credit products through an integral coverage of its lifecycle.

Innovation and technology are the main components of MO's DNA. The company's constant need for innovation positioned it as the region's top credit tech enabler and led it to an advance in the journey to end the credit inclusion gap. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have created an

innovative credit platform in its region that solves the absence of proper technology that companies face when offering new credit alternatives to their consumers. Implementing innovative technologies is a crucial asset to dealing with problems and gaps we experience as businesses and societies.

Aiming for the Top

Currently, 80% of the worldwide population does not have access to formal credit products. At MO, the objective is to diminish the financial inclusion gap. Veronica shares, "For us, a person or business is financially included only when they can access credit products. We have been battling this issue by providing enabling credit technology to fintech and non-fintech companies, especially in the LATAM region."

She adds, "What comes next for MO Technologies is the scaling-up phase of our business. As I mentioned earlier, we have a proven track record working with top-tier companies, and we currently have almost 30 live projects in 12 different countries. We expect to gain more traction around our region, positioning as credit tech leaders in Latin America, Mexico, and the Caribbean and later expanding through other latitudes supported by our partners and exceptional human talent.”

Traxpay GmbH

In the past few years, the FinTech space has emerged as a treasure trove of opportunities for those in the banking and finance industry.

This niche has also aided the inception of several significant companies that have brought about a paradigm shift in the way we conduct our financial tasks.

One such prominent name in the FinTech space is Traxpay GmbH , a fast-growing supply chain finance platform that operates globally from Europe with a multi-bank approach.

In an exclusive interview, Markus Rupprecht, the Founder and CEO , sheds light on the company’s journey, the current landscape of the fintech space, and his vision for the company’s future.

Below are the Interview highlights.

Please brief our audience about Traxpay GmbH, its USPs, and how it is currently positioned as a leading player in the financial services space.

Traxpay is a fast-growing Supply Chain Finance platform that operates globally from Europe with a multi-bank approach. With the mission to become the "Platform of Choice" for buyers, suppliers and banks, Traxpay enables companies to manage their working capital in a simple, secure and sustainable way using all standard Supply Chain Finance tools.

Established financial institutions such as Deutsche Bank, Nord/LB, LBBW, RBI or KfW IPEX-Bank trust Traxpay's

A Leading Player in the Financial Services Space

financing solution maintains strategic partnerships with the company. Through a new Sustainable Supply Chain Finance program, platform users can financially incentivize the sustainability of their supply chains.

Through the Traxpay platform, the process is fully digitized, making it efficient and transparent for both parties.

What other solutions does Traxpay offer, and how are these making an impact on the industry and your clients?

Traxpay offers the full range of SCF instruments for both Receivables Financing and Payables Financing on a single platform. The support goes far beyond providing the platform.

Through the early payment program Dynamic Discounting Traxpay corporate buyers offer their suppliers the opportunity to be paid early in return for a discount. Suppliers can thus generate short-term liquidity if required, and the Traxpay customer receives a discount in return for using their liquidity, thereby increasing profitability. In addition, Traxpay has developed an innovative solution to further increase the sustainability of corporate buyers and suppliers.

Traxpay also offers Reverse Factoring. Reverse Factoring allows corporate buyers to secure longer payment terms while providing suppliers with liquidity when they need it. This gives customers and their suppliers financial flexibility and creates a future proof process, strengthening both new

and existing business relationships. A customer can work together with a bank or other financing partner of his choice, because Traxpay is an open platform.

When corporate buyers need a fast, agile conversion of receivables, they can use the Digital Forfaiting product from Traxpay, which enables the digital purchase of receivables to create additional liquidity.

The bank of the customer is usually involved in this process. The Digital Forfaiting Invoice Acceleration Program enables customers to generate additional liquidity quickly and conveniently at any time.

Clients can sell their outstanding trade receivables without recourse via the Traxpay platform, and they are able to release additional funds that would otherwise be blocked. One key advantage is the reduction of the use of overdraft facilities.

Since the start of 2022, Traxpay is offering a further product: Digital Guarantees. When suppliers want to reduce payment risk, they often secure their receivables with credit insurance.

Trade credit insurance remains very expensive or only available in limited amounts. With Digital Guarantees, Traxpay provides suppliers with a customized, secure, and cost-effective alternative.

This service allows suppliers to determine—according to their actual needs—the timing, term, and amount of payment protection to be purchased in conjunction with a Dynamic Discounting or Reverse Factoring program. Suppliers can benefit from the good credit ratings of corporate buyers by using Digital Guarantees while actively hedging the risk of non-payment in line with their needs.

Being an experienced leader, share with us your opinion on what impact has the adoption of modern technologies such as AI, big data and machine learning had on the finance niche and what more could be expected in the future?

The fintech industry is greatly influenced and driven by technology. The velocity of change is increasing, and technology is the driver. Artificial Intelligence is a technology we need to work with, but it is not the only one. Most fintechs already use AI-based tools. However, good, plentiful and clean data will continue to increase in importance.

Blockchain and crypto are two technologies that the finance industry will also need to understand and work with. We feel that banks may end up playing a larger regulatory role in the future providing support for KYC and AML while fintechs will support banks in this process.

I believe we will see more and better financial services products for all verticals housed on platforms, with a far greater degree of personalization. Banks will probably provide more commoditized services e.g., in the regulatory arena.

With Traxpay, you can access the full range of SCF instruments for both Receivables Financing and Payables Financing on a single platform.

With Traxpay’s dynamic financing platform, our suppliers have the to accelerate their outstanding invoices when they want to impro liquidity. Suppliers decide when they want to accelerate. T option gives them access to additional liquidity at comparative costs. For us at Landgard, this is an important step in strengthenin chain, increasing transparency towards our suppliers* and d processes,” explains Michael Maas, Division Accounting at Landgard.

“The simple and intuitive operation of the Traxpay platform en suppliers* to manage their liquidity with just a few mouse clicks. simply request early payment of their invoices in exchange fo discount. For the suppliers, the use is free of charge. We ar Traxpay to offer our suppliers* other value-added solution

- Press release from November 16, 2021.

With Traxpay, we can access the full range of SCF instruments fo Receivables Financing and Payables Financing on a sing maximum flexibility and minimal implementation costs,” explains Williams, Director Treasury & Investors Relations

“Traxpay’s support goes far beyond providing the platform, howe takes a lot of the onboarding work off our shoulders and kno select suppliers and approach them correctly. It was especially us to develop an innovative solution to further increase o activities.

-Press release from November 19, 2021.

Banks that succeed will become more contextual to stay relevant. People will trust brands with the greatest relevance to them going forward. The payments process will be further embedded and integrated.

We like to consume, we are even willing to pay, but we hate the process of paying. Some countries are, of course advanced than others in the tech game. This can be a matter of resources, regulation, or critical mass etc.

One issue that I see is the lack of understanding or perhaps sensitivity to regulation or compliance. FinTech companies, even some neo or challenger banks, seem to think that all problems can be solved via technology. This is NOT the case.

About the leader

Markus Rupprecht is CEO of Traxpay, a fast-growing platform for supply chain finance. Markus started his career at Deutsche Bank and subsequently worked for various technology companies. In 2009, he founded Traxpay, at a time when the term “FinTech” did not yet exist.

Five years ago, Markus pivoted the company away from the overcrowded payments space in order to support corporate buyers and their suppliers in the area of Supply Chain Financing.

Markus Rupprecht recognized that the challenge was basically the need for flexible, sustainable, short-term liquidity at a more affordable price.

Corporates also wanted to support their suppliers, while banks were looking to maintain client intimacy in order to continue to service their relationships.

However, corporate buyers were increasingly searching for multi-bank and bank-agnostic platforms. The idea was born to create a robust, bank friendly "platform of choice" for companies, suppliers, and banks.

Markus Rupprecht Founder and CEO Traxpay

Fintechs certainly had an advantage over the staff of traditional banks. Fintechs, like Traxpay, operate (primarily) digitally by design, be it the supply chain finance process via the online platform or the communication tools used by employees and customers.

As a result, everyone involved is already attuned to digital communication and has little fear of contact with online solutions. A majority of fintech companies, like traditional banks, have a fixed office location, however it is still much easier to decentralize tasks offering employees greater flexibility.

As we have seen, both flexibility and independence are becoming more important for workers and therefore for the companies that employ them. If you want to be and stay attractive as an employer, offering the possibility to work from home and hybrid work is key.

In order to support the safety of our staff, we have asked employees to work from home, given the high number of infections at this time. However, if someone needs to work in the office, we require same-day testing, regardless of vaccination status. Test kits are provided free of charge for employees to make this both easy and fully accessible.

What would be your advice to budding entrepreneurs who aspire to venture into the financial services space?

The path to entrepreneurship is exciting, fulfilling but also quite tough and rough at times.

Be strong! You will need to work harder and at the beginning you will make less money; especially if you were previously employed by a bank.

Be positive! As an entrepreneur, you must learn how to fail fast and gain insight from your mistakes. So, learn from your challenges, but stay positive, even when negative thoughts arise.

Be cool! Stay a “Why-Not” guy and don’t become a “Yes-Maybe” one.

Be aware! And take a break if you need it.

Be true to yourself! Do the right thing for the right reasons.

Be a visionary! Never stop innovating.

Be a networker! and build your network, constantly.

Be bold! Take calculated risks .

Ask your customers! Never assume you know more than they do.

Have fun! Don’t found a start-up to get rich, but to learn

faster and have more fun than in an established, more traditional environment.

How do you envision scaling your company’s operations and offerings in 2021?

I believe in the power of cooperation and collaboration –especially with banks.

This can work if both sides—bank and fintech—see a benefit and agree to cooperate. The ability and willingness to compromise are key. In the past, this type of cooperation was more difficult. Politics, culture, and KPIs/bonuses kept bankers from taking risks, choosing a new and different path, and innovating.

Being “daring” was a good way to lose your job…. quickly! The mindset prevalent in banking is changing! Being innovative and entrepreneurial is finally being considered an asset. Everything no longer “needs to be made here” to be relevant and appropriate, allowing for real partnerships of “equals”.

In the beginning, fintechs were giving away their knowhow for free…in order to get into the game. In the future banks need to both pay…and play their part in bringing business to the table. This will support better and quicker scaling of new ideas business models etc. If the banks continue to maintain the client relationship, this will put them in an ideal position to partner with bank-friendly platforms such as Traxpay.

Supply Chain Financing is one of the rare products that creates a win for all participants including the bank, the corporate buyer, the supplier, and the platform. By producing benefits for all parties, we have a quadruple win that will provide scale and in fact geometric growth over time, because everyone gains.

As a platform, we are building additional products and services that will benefit all our bank partners, corporate buyers, and their suppliers as well. The combination of the right offering, great people, and valuable partners is a powerful recipe for growth!