THE ANNUAL GUIDE TO THE MOST INFLUENTIAL, INNOVATIVE COMPANIES AND POWERFUL FIGURES WITHIN THE FINTECH INDUSTRY T T
OFFICIAL PAR TNERS
Connecting the dots in fintech.
B-Hive is a European collaborative innovation ntech platform that brings together major banks, insurers and market infrastructure players. Together, we work on common innovation programs and build bridges between our corporate partners and our startup and scale-up community members. We aim to put Brussels on the map as the smart gateway to Europe and leverage on the opportunities offered by the digital transformation for the financial services industry. We believe that building bridges between important fintech hubs and the Eurozone enables both European and non-European companies to grow and expand.
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WELCOME TO THE INAUGURAL EDITION OF THE FINTECH POWER 50 The Fintech Power 50 celebrates the most influential, innovative and powerful figures in the global fintech industry, from disruptive startups to established operators. Combining the marketing support of major fintech publications, with the business development opportunities of an accelerator programme, The Fintech Power 50 is a unique concept, which has been growing exponentially since we first broached the idea to the industry earlier this year. Bringing two worlds together will always be a challenge. However, with our strong team and official partners, we can now provide combined support for fintech companies – not just during their early-stage growth, but also supporting the long-term profitability of their organisations.
JASON WILLIAMS We have worked the Power 50 companies are bringing tirelessly this year to to the traditional financial sector bring together a group and the challenges they face. of truly powerful Mark Walker, Head of International fintech companies and at The Fintech Power 50 says: MARK WALKER influencers. Between them, “After spending the last three they represent some of the years in London, specialising most disruptive and innovative in the UK tech ecosystem financial services technology in and fintech sector, I’m excited the world today. to be working with The Fintech In this, our inaugural publication Power 50. I’m extremely passionate to celebrate the Power 50, we bring about the growth of fintech. Despite you a stimulating mix of opinions ‘disruption‘ being an overused term, the and information on the technology development within the financial services that is transforming not just finance, sector has been fundamental to the UK’s but the way we live our lives. growth as a fintech world leader.” Jason Williams, Founder of The Fintech Our influencers have given commentary and insight into many areas of fintech, Power 50, comments: “We’re hugely spanning topics such as artificial excited to unveil the print edition in intelligence (AI), automation and open our inaugural year. The Fintech Power banking. They help to shine a light 50 is not just another fintech list, on the possibilities for the future of a nor is it a glitzy awards programme collaborative fintech industry. You will – we have built a platform from which also learn about the innovations that our fintech members can collaborate effectively, benefiting from bespoke advice, comprehensive media coverage and exclusive event access. We look forward to seeing our members accelerate and establish new market positions over the coming 12 months.”
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We look forward to seeing our members accelerate and establish new market positions
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TFP50#PARTNERS The European fintech ecosystem known as B-Hive, based in Brussels, fosters transformation through partnership – and it’s buzzing with enthusiasm about our latest community of innovators
THEPOWEROFCOLLABORATION B-Hive brings together major banks, insurers and market infrastructure players through a collaborative innovation fintech platform. Together with our partners and members, we work on a variety of innovation programmes and build bridges between our corporate partners and our startup and scaleup community members. B-Hive’s main objective is to put Brussels on the map as the smart gateway to Europe and to leverage the opportunities offered by digital transformation for the financial services industry. Located in the heart of Europe, B-Hive values internationalisation and, through various programmes, partnerships and events, we are building a strong international ecosystem where knowledge, experiences, innovations and technology can be shared. Currently, B-Hive has hubs in New York, London and Tel Aviv. These hubs allow our partners and members to have access to our global community and unlock unique business opportunities across the globe. With a broad and diverse network of financial services players, dynamic startups and government actors, our community actively shares knowledge and expertise with each other while creating potential business opportunities. Our programmes bring
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together financial services players and technology companies to co-create innovative technology solutions for the financial services industry.
IMPORTANCE OF PARTNERS We strongly believe that the collaboration between important fintech hubs and the Eurozone enables both European and non-European companies to grow and expand. Our main objective is to connect fintech startups and scaleups with the banks, insurers and market infrastructure players to accelerate innovation in the financial services sector. B-Hive Executive Chairman Fabian Vandenreydt thinks this mindset has been the key to its success. “Collaboration remains one of B-Hive’s core values. Collaboration with others does not only give you a new point of view, but also a whole new set of skills, knowledge and experiences that would otherwise be impossible to reach in a short amount of time. This becomes especially important in the ever-changing world of technology,” says Vandenreydt. “Major banks and financial institutions are often worried about the risks but what about the benefits? We like to see the glass half full rather than half empty.
In order to stay on top of the newest technologies, they need to be willing to take risks by collaborating with the innovators, which in most cases, are the startups. These collaborations will help them not only to stay on top of the latest technologies, but also to stay ahead of their competitors.”
WHY POWER 50? Among a lot of great projects that B-Hive has been a part of, Power 50 stands out with its unique flair and consideration of the startups’ needs. The project’s goals and global mindset align with B-Hive’s values, which makes us extremely proud to be partnering with the Power 50. When Vandenreydt was asked if B-Hive would be interested in supporting the project, he did not have to think twice. “We want to support the international development of fintech innovation and Power 50 does just that,” he says. B-Hive will actively help promote the members of The Fintech Power 50 programme to a global audience by organising networking event opportunities to the community. Through these events, B-Hive hopes to continue to help inspire growth and innovation while changing the industry for the better through The Fintech Power 50 initiative.
Collaboration with others does not only give you a new point of view, but also a whole new set of skills, knowledge and experiences that would otherwise be impossible to reach in a short time www.thepower50.com
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Cross-border payments made simple. Through a single relationship, Earthport offers access to the world’s largest independent ACH network, combining predictability, transparency and cost efficiency. Find out more at www.earthport.com Proud to be named a Fintech Power 50 Businesss
Can we help you? +44 207 220 9700 sales@earthport.com London | New York | Miami | San Francisco | Singapore
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FINTECHS TAKE YOUR BOW! Kimberley Waldron, Joint MD of our specialist PR partner, SkyParlour, on the rising stars of fintech and how to nurture them The world of fintech is bursting with opportunities. Over the past decade, deal volumes within financial technology have been growing by 74 per cent every year, according to What Investment magazine. The industry is attracting hugely talented people from a diverse range of sectors, who are applying technologies and formulating value propositions that are making a genuine difference to modern society and how we manage money. Fintechs are offering new platforms, available to businesses and consumers alike, with huge improvements in speed, convenience, flexibility and security. SkyParlour focusses specifically on improving the standard of communication in the fintech industry and, over our nine years, we’ve successfully developed numerous brands in the sector, overseeing the PR and content strategies that have seen them erupt into hotbeds of talent.
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By acting as a focal point for both global pioneers and emerging entities, The Fintech Power 50 is raising the standards of the fintech industry as a whole www.thepower50.com
So, we are extremely pleased to see the launch of The Fintech Power 50, which is designed to foster collaboration and communication, while showcasing the stunning results that these two factors can yield. The initiative is pinpointing those companies with the greatest potential in the sector and fuelling their growth to the top. By acting as a focal point for both global pioneers and emerging entities attempting to cut through the noise, The Fintech Power 50 is raising the standards of the fintech industry as a whole. The initiative is a place for innovators and pioneers to come together and shape the future of financial services. The launch of Fintech Power 50 signifies a move towards a more unified fintech industry. It’s no longer about large versus small, or heritage versus innovation – progress is taking place because, as a whole, fintech improves the lives of consumers and business worldwide. We’re moving away from dominant generalists and back into an era of specialists. This is down to the emergence of open technology and
AT A GLANCE Angela Yore (left) and Kimberley Waldron (right) founded SkyParlour PR in 2009, to work exclusively in international ecommerce, payments, cybersecurity and fintech. WEBSITE: www.skyparlour.com TWITTER: @SkyParlour
a decentralisation of power away from large financial institutions. This means that collaboration is a necessity and it’s bearing fruit. The big banks are working closely to incubate tech talent in-house and foster innovation – for example, with the Barclays Rise and Santander Innoventures programmes in the UK. Initiatives like The Fintech Power 50 only help facilitate and reinforce this positive interaction between financial services players of all sizes. The overwhelming number of nominees received for The Fintech Power 50 speaks for itself when it comes to the appetite for co-innovation. Participation in this programme means a very real commitment to helping the industry grow by working as one. As a PR partner to a number of influential fintechs, more and more of the media work we do is based on successful partnerships and joint ventures. We expect to see even more of this as fintech continues to have a positive effect, and businesses in the space become less afraid of patting each other on the back!
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TEAM BANKING
Partnering with fintechs can fast-track banks’ ability to deliver for customers. Alex Park, Director of Digital, explains what fintech means to Metro Bank When we opened our doors in 2010, Metro Bank was the first new bank to hit the high street for more than 100 years. It could be said that retail banking has changed more during Metro Bank’s short lifetime than in the entire century before. Many of the changes are clear to see: the shift to mobile, the rise of digital payments and the new ways for consumers to invest. But these are just narrow leading indicators that help illuminate the more seismic shift that is transforming the way that individuals and organisations interact with their money. New business models, emerging technologies and changing customer expectations are some of the forces that are redefining established value chains. But there’s also another, arguably more powerful, force at play: collaboration. With an ever-accelerating pace of disruption comes an imperative for banks
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For Metro Bank, fintech fuels the revolutionary spirit that brought us to market
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to find new ways to quickly deliver value to their customers. By partnering with agile fintechs, banks can fast-track their capability and innovation agendas in ways that can be difficult to achieve alone. We’re talking from experience. Metro Bank’s AI-powered money management tool, Insights, wouldn’t have been one of the first-of-its-kind to market without our partnership with Personetics, an Israeli fintech. Our customers couldn’t open a ready-to-use current account in under 10 minutes if it wasn’t for our partnership with Jumio, an identity-focussed fintech. And by working with Google to create the Metro Bank Developer Portal, we’ve made it easier than ever for fintechs to build innovative new propositions on top of our APIs. What does all this mean for customers? Fintech injects welcome competition into
financial services – a new type of competition. It’s a progressive, customer-focussed competition. It’s not zero-sum and it’s not confined to traditional boundaries. To refer to ‘greater customer choice’ is to trivialise. Fintech creates whole new markets, new experiences, new efficiencies, and it creates new ways to drive financial inclusion and safeguard vulnerable customers. For Metro Bank, fintech fuels the revolutionary spirit that brought us to market. Our commitment to building a different kind of bank – a bank based on convenience, amazing customer service and simplicity – is as relevant now as it was in 2010. Being a part of such a thriving ecosystem of fintechs, catalysed by initiatives such as The Fintech Power 50, gives us more opportunities than ever to empower our customers, our colleagues and our communities.
AT A GLANCE The first new bank to appear on the UK high street in more than 100 years, Metro Bank introduced a unique blend of physical and digital banking when it opened its first glass-fronted store in 2012. Since then, it has set up more than 1.4 million accounts, including 120,000 for small businesses, and has plans to launch at least 140 stores across the country by 2023. WEBSITE: metrobankonline.co.uk TWITTER: @Metro_Bank
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TFP50#PARTNERS
THE VOICE OF PAYMENTS
With change comes opportunity. For the Emerging Payments Association, the seismic shift in the ways we pay is prompting innovation, collaboration and investment on an unprecedented scale
We live in interesting times… A phrase once spoken by John F. Kennedy, but one which encapsulates the payments industry. While there is ambiguity on Brexit and the unrevealed journey ahead of us, the UK continues to innovate, collaborate and invest in the future of fintech and paytech. The payments industry is thriving and creating its own future by embracing opportunity. Fintechs and paytechs alike are spearheading this change, led by those imbued with entrepreneurial spirit. The launch of The Fintech Power 50 showcases the most influential, pioneering and powerful figures. It brings to light industry players of all shapes and sizes who are transforming the payments industry and creating the products that will benefit both businesses and consumers. By acting as a central hub for innovative and emerging organisations, The Fintech Power 50 enables and accelerates the growth of these enterprises by providing a platform for investment and networking, and to champion their products and the people who create them. As the UK’s only payments-focussed members association, the Emerging Payments Association connects the payments ecosystem, encourages innovation and change and drives
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profitable business growth. By working closely with The Fintech Power 50, the EPA can support the continuing development of these organisations through a network of payments influencers that span the entire ecosystem. Our members come from across the payments value chain; including payments schemes, banks and issuers, merchant acquirers, payment services providers (PSPs), retailers and more. These companies come together, from across the UK and internationally, to join our association, collaborate and speak with a unified voice. As an industry collective, the EPA is a platform to advocate change that improves the industry, provides guidance and support on burning issues, acts as a hub for networking and business growth. It also raises the bar by training the payments leaders of tomorrow. The Fintech Power 50 is a fantastic platform to highlight what our members and the wider industry is creating to change the way we pay. More than a fifth of the companies announced in The Fintech Power 50 are EPA members and we are delighted to partner with it. The future of the payments industry will not be driven by one or two companies or individuals. It will come through collective activity. It will come through breaking
The Fintech Power 50 is a fantastic platform to highlight what our members and the wider industry is creating to change the way we pay
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down barriers to innovation. It will come through enterprise and investing in early-stage players developing new technologies. And it will come through collaboration and ensuring that the voice of all players within the ecosystem is heard when creating new regulation, standards and payments infrastructure.
AT A GLANCE The Emerging Payments Association (EPA) represents more than 130 member companies, comprising a thriving community of payments professionals whose goals are to strengthen and expand the payments industry to the benefit all stakeholders, wherever they are in the value chain. Since 2004 the EPA has been instrumental in helping to connect this payments ecosystem, encourage innovation and profitable business growth. It achieves this through a programme of activities, including targeted events, conferences, awards, industry projects and lobbying activities. WEBSITE:
www.emergingpayments.org LINKEDIN: www.linkedin.com/ company/emerging-paymentsassociation/ TWITTER: @EPAssoc
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TFP50#PARTNERS
SMARTCROSSING
Hong Kong is a fintech hub that’s building virtual bridges with the rest of the digital world, as Thorsten Terweiden, Deputy Head of Fintech at InvestHK, explains A clear sign of a smart city is the quality of its digital payment infrastructure; and a clear sign of a really smart city is the practical support it gives to businesses coming from overseas. Hong Kong ticks both boxes. It recognises that digital payments, along with other aspects of financial technology, provide a crucial building block for innovation and inter-connectivity driven by big data. The city also provides companies from overseas with a combination of location, infrastructure, financial hub, legal system and local talent that simply cannot be matched elsewhere. It offers genuine on-the-ground support through Invest Hong Kong (InvestHK). In line with that, InvestHK is honoured to be a supporting partner for The Fintech Power 50, which is set to become more visible and influential during 2019. At InvestHK, we wish the compiler and publisher of this new list, Round Media, every success and look forward to seeing it being used in Hong Kong during the coming year. Hong Kong may even be represented on the list, given it is now home to more than 550 fintech companies, all looking to take advantage of the city’s huge financial services sector and proximity to China. Hong Kong is Asia’s leading asset management and insurance hub, while 157 licensed banks have bases in the city. These strengths have long appealed to financial services and fintech companies from the UK.
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Ties between Hong Kong and the UK are strong, especially in fintech. Indeed, the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London, in partnership with the UK Department for International Trade and Invest Hong Kong, recently celebrated the first anniversary of the Hong Kong-UK FinTech Bridge (‘the Bridge’). The Bridge fosters closer collaboration at government, regulator and business level in the fintech sector and, by extension, supports business growth and investment. It has already helped several UK-based fintech startups to launch operations in Hong Kong. These include data analytics company Mosaic Smart Data, winner of the inaugural InvestHK UK Fintech Awards 2018. Hong Kong is a city where new technologies quickly become mainstream. And where the technologies and systems are not quite ready, there are regulator-backed sandboxes that allow for experimentation in a safe environment. In September, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) rolled out its Faster Payment System (FPS) across 20 banks and eight epayment operators. By fully connecting banks and electronic payment operators, FPS facilitates free, real-time retail payments among individual and corporate customers. Besides that, a common QR code for retail payments is set to be launched. The HKMA will also announce in early 2019 which banks, technology
AT A GLANCE Thorsten Terweiden (right) is Deputy Head of Fintech investment at government body, Invest Hong Kong. Around half of the world’s leading 100 fintechs already benefit from the city’s ecosystem, which includes a trade finance platform on blockchain. WEBSITE: www.investhk.gov.hk LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/investhk TWITTER: @InvestHK
companies and other players will be awarded virtual banking licences. These virtual banks are required to only have one physical office in Hong Kong and will otherwise operate online only. The other big change next year will be the introduction of open application programming interfaces (APIs), whereby the leading banks will share around 130 sets of data. This will facilitate account opening, know-your-customer (KYC) processes and discernibly improve customer experience. Hong Kong already has a symbiotic relationship with China, the global standout in fintech development, but this will grow as more links develop across the dynamic Greater Bay Area – the Pearl River Delta comprising Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Zhuhai and Macao, and a population of about 70 million people. Why not come and see what’s going on?
The ‘Bridge’ has alreadyhelped several UK-based fintech startups to launch operations in Hong Kong
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Our Fintech clients are changing the world. You’ve probably already heard.
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TOMORROW BELONGS TO FINTECH
The UK is a natural home for the world’s revolutionary financial technologies, says Tom Helm, Head of Fintech at the Department for International Trade It is clear that we stand at a key moment for fintech. Never before have prospects been so great. Never before has investment in the industry been so attractive. In a world of rapid change, before we know it, today’s innovators will be tomorrow’s mainstream. Today’s disruptors will be tomorrow’s conventional wisdom. And today’s financial revolutionaries will be tomorrow’s financial establishment. This Fintech Power 50 inaugural guide to fintech disruptors, innovators and influencers will be a showcase and a celebration of an industry that has done so much to contribute to this country’s knowledge, skills and expertise, enhancing the UK’s status as a global financial centre. What is clearly highlighted by this guide is the uniquely strong position that the industry enjoys. In the UK, we have impressive headline figures: 61,000 people are employed by an industry that generates more than £6.6billion in revenue every year. We also have a government and a regulator that want to make the UK a global powerhouse of financial technology. The industry is still a comparatively young one. This will, of course, mean challenges. But so-called disruptive technologies produce change and innovation by taking on the orthodoxies of the industry to produce the evolution that the sector and the UK economy require. The exciting developments here at home will create vast opportunities for the sector across the rest of the world. Investors are eager to catch this wave of
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innovation that the UK has produced, such as the licences granted to challenger banks. It is no wonder that the UK is ranked number one globally for the strength of our fintech ecosystem, outpacing rival centres in Singapore and Silicon Valley. Our capital attracts more international companies from the financial services, technology and creative industries than any other city in Europe. But the success of fintech is spreading, as commercial centres, from Edinburgh to Manchester and Leeds, attract leading incubators and accelerators, helping startups across the world gain access to our industry. We should meet the future with confidence, but it is also vital that the industry enjoys the full practical support of the UK government, if we are to capitalise on the opportunities and retain our global pre-eminence. The Department for International Trade has a key role to play here. As a department of government, we work to maintain and improve Britain’s commercial ecosystem, providing the conditions in which UK firms can thrive. We boost exports by championing our industries abroad, working with our international partners to match businesses to projects overseas and encouraging the world to buy British. Moreover, we offer practical and
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financial support to any UK business that is looking to start exporting or wants to expand their overseas operations. Finally, we also work to attract foreign investment, promoting our country and British businesses as the ideal partners in future growth and prosperity. The UK is uniquely well placed to attract such investment, combining as it does robust government and regulatory support with a world-class business environment. Last year, more than $9.5billion of private equity and venture capital was invested in UK tech firms and corporate investment activity rose by 35 per cent, far outpacing Europe and the USA. Our country has always maintained a strong focus on leading-edge technologies. Tech companies that began as small UK startups have grown into global household names, such as Transferwise, Revolut, Skyscanner and Shazam to name but a few. We are globally renowned for the quality of our academic and research facilities, which create and maintain a highly skilled workforce, while the UK’s regulatory and policy environment supports growth and innovation. This industry is one of huge ambition and almost limitless potential. Britain stands ready to help it realise every opportunity to expand and grow. The UK is its natural home, and from here, there is nothing it cannot achieve.
Before we know it, today’s disruptors will be tomorrow’s conventional wisdom
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TFP50 EARTHPORT TFP50#EARTHPORT
THE WORLD THROUGH
ONE RELATIONSHIP
Earthport provides true global reach, enabling international access, scale and cost efficiency for clients through an end-to-end, cross-border payments service The traditional correspondent banking system has been the primary way to make cross-border payments for decades – but it’s far from perfect. It’s expensive to run, transactions take days and customers have little to no visibility of the process, which as a whole lacks the predictability that today’s businesses need. Increasingly complex regulatory environments are making the correspondent banking model more
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and more risky for those banks involved, resulting in many reducing their correspondent networks altogether. According to the Financial Stability Board, the average number of active participants in correspondent banking globally fell by eight per cent from 2011 to mid 2017 – in some regions that figure was more than 22 per cent. Using an innovative ‘hub-and-spoke’ model, Earthport provides an alternative. Through a single relationship, banks,
businesses and money transfer operators gain access to Earthport’s global automatic clearing house network, bringing new levels of predictability, transparency and cost-efficiency without intermediary deductions or landing fees. Bank-grade compliance expertise enables Earthport to provide peace of mind to customers, supporting their growth through end-to-end foreign exchange (FX), treasury and cash management.
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Headquartered in London and regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, in the past year alone, Earthport has grown its payment network of local automated clearing houses by a third – extending the global reach of its network and ensuring its clients can match the international payment demands of their customers. ““Through a single integration, our clients are able to settle funds locally in any one of the 88 countries on our network,” says Valli Ardalan, VP of Strategic Alliances. “We are filling the gaps as the correspondent networks are being reduced. More than 90 per cent of all international business payments are still going through banks, so, as the banks’ reach decreases, we present an alternative, not only for businesses, but also for banks themselves,” adds Ardalan. Earthport is not only solving a systemic problem, but it is also helping to foster
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The digital world demands a better solution and the Earthport cross-border payment utility offers it. In the words of its chief executive officer Amanda Mesler, the company’s aim is to ‘define the future of international payments’ trade by making transactions cheaper. The correspondent banking model involves money passing from A to B via banks that have bilateral relationships with each other. As each party takes a fee, the value of the transfer is eroded. A dollar can be worth 93 cents or less by the time it arrives. Using the Earthport
WHO WE ARE Earthport is a cross-border payments specialist, regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, offering services to banks and businesses. Through a single relationship, we offer access to the world’s largest independent automated clearing house (ACH) network, bringing new levels of predictability, transparency and cost-efficiency without intermediary deductions or landing fees. Instead of businesses having to build and maintain multiple banking relationships, they follow a single connection to our platform, leaving us to do the rest. As a business, we are constantly investing in our network to set new benchmarks in speed, transparency and efficiency to meet the changing expectations and demands
TFP50#EARTHPORT
‘hub-and-spoke’ model, a payment only passes through one intermediary, significantly reducing the cost of the transfer. Ardalan continues: “We are able to offer an end-to-end solution for our clients, including FX, treasury and cash management in addition to the delivery of funds internationally. “Through our unique virtual accounts, our customers have visibility of their funds in all of their different currencies at any one time. “We have Tier 1 banks that use us for access to routes that they don’t want to manage themselves, but also for transactions in the Eurozone because we simplify the process.” Earthport’s customers include some of the world’s biggest banks, as well as major money transfer service providers, which run on their rails.
AT A GLANCE of high-volume, low-value international payments. Our team of global experts works closely with regulators, central banks and our bank partners to ensure our service is compliant, resilient and continuously improving at pace with local developments. We monitor and manage global change in payments so that our clients don’t have to. Earthport offers clients access to global payment capability in more than 200 countries and territories, with local ACH options in 88 countries and an evolving suite of currencies and settlement options. Our straight-through processing rates and high levels of service equip our clients with the certainty that the exact amount they send will arrive.
COMPANY: Earthport FOUNDED: 2010 CATEGORY:
Cross-border payments KEY PERSONNEL: CEO Amanda Mesler (right) HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: New York, Miami, San Francisco and Singapore TEL: +44 (0)20 7220 9700 WEBSITE: www.earthport.com LINKEDIN: Linkedin/company/ earthport TWITTER: @Earthport
WHAT WE DO We support banks, money transfer operators and businesses with low-value, high-volume international payment requirements
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TFP50#BANKING BANKING CIRCLE
TFP50#EARTHPORT
FULL STEAM AHEAD
Banking Circle has stoked its growth plans in 2018 to explore new product areas and new territories, as CEO Anders la Cour explains As a financial utility, Banking Circle is fast becoming the backend engine room for both established banks and fintechs. Providing the rails for cross-border payments, global IBAN accounts, foreign exchange and SME business loans, its solutions allow clients to focus instead on the front end: their customer relationships. The Danish firm launched in partnership with Saxo Bank in 2013 and went live with its cross-border payments offer in early 2016. Growth was rapid – and by April 2018 it had achieved a €60billion run rate for annual payment volumes. Now its
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focus is on geographical expansion and product growth – and its acquisition by Swedish investment group EQT has given it the finances to do it. Banking Circle chief executive Anders la Cour says: “We have the scale so we can deliver at low cost. So why would you want to develop an in-house solution? It is far better to focus on improving your customer experience and engagement. “We are here to help the banks move up the value chain,
and to avoid becoming a utility, because we are the utility. “I believe the trend of banks outsourcing non-core services will continue. They need to focus on their core, which is enhancing their client relationships in their domestic geographical areas. “If they focus on the end customer, and try to keep that stickiness, they can let others do some of the boring backend stuff, and that's what we benefit from.”
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Banking Circle believes payments will become simplified for the end user – with no differentiation between national and cross-border transactions. It sees a future where all payments will be rapid and low cost – a future where payments will simply be payments, regardless of geography. Under the bonnet, Banking Circle's cross-border payments utility is highly sophisticated. It runs a Cloud-based system built on the Oracle FLEXCUBE platform that allows business-to-business transactions to be made in seconds, not days. Banking Circle Virtual IBAN allows fintechs and other financial institutions to issue multi-currency IBAN accounts for customers in their own name and in multiple jurisdictions, increasing the ease, speed, and clarity of payments. It is a 25-plus multi-currency, multi-jurisdictional banking solution that negates the need to have several banking relationships. With Virtual IBAN, payments acceptance, settlement times and reconciliation are improved because payments are made in the name of the Virtual IBAN account holder. Building on this success, in June Banking Circle launched its application programming interface (API)-based white-label SME lending product, which it sells to fintechs and smaller banks. According to Banking Circle research, the latter have traditionally struggled to effectively cater for this market because it can be difficult for them to collect the necessary credit information on a loan applicant. For the hopeful borrower, Banking Circle's entire application service takes no more than three days – rather than the weeks SMEs often face when dealing with mainstream lenders.
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They can find themselves buffeted by financial headwinds, such as a customer delaying a payment, and that is reflected in their borrowing needs. Banking Circle research revealed that while larger SMEs were often willing to take out traditional one to three-year loans from a bank, only a third of micro-businesses would do so because their needs were more short-term. Because of this, they tend to rely heavily on overdrafts. Banking Circle's response was to build flexibility into its SME lending product with repayments either fixed or with a variable percentage, so a business owner can increase repayments when trade is good and reduce them when funds tighten. Looking to the future, the firm is examining the development of insurance products and has talked of applying for a banking licence, while geographically it is eyeing moves west to the Americas and east into Asia. The business currently has offices in Denmark, Luxembourg and the UK. La Cour says: “We want to make Banking Circle global, so that our clients can have access to Europe, Asia and North America. We would be the infrastructure so they can operate there. “We'll focus on continuing to build our infrastructure, growing it and making sure we enhance the product capabilities so that our clients can grow their business into new verticals and new areas, should they want to.” Banking Circle is particularly bullish about the potential for Asia because banking infrastructure was slower to develop in many Asian countries than in Europe or the US. That gives fintechs an advantage because the pace of technological innovation means established players and banking methods can be overtaken. Take mobile payments. Banking Circle says about 70 per cent of the Asian population is expected to have access to a smartphone by 2021 and mobile payments will soar as a result. It believes
I believe the trend of banks outsourcing non-core services will continue. They need to focus on their core
EXPANDING THE PORTFOLIO Following a period of market research, Banking Circle tailored its product to provide the flexibility needed by smaller firms.
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the shift to digital payments is most apparent in China, where the size of the mobile payments market is estimated to be 90 times bigger than in the US. La Cour says: “I really like the growth of competition in the part of the value chain that is close to the end client. Because growth there means we've got more potential clients that we can serve.”
AT A GLANCE COMPANY:
Banking Circle FOUNDED: 2013 CATEGORY: Global banking services KEY PERSONNEL:
Anders la Cour, CEO (right) HEAD OFFICE: Copenhagen OFFICES IN: The business currently has offices in Luxembourg, Denmark and the UK TEL: +44 (0)20 7073 0421 WEBSITE: www.bankingcircle.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ bankingcircle/ TWITTER: @bankingcircle
WHAT WE DO ‘The network for global commerce’ – Banking Circle is a financial utility that focusses on providing global banking services to financial institutions, including financial technology companies and banks TheFintechPower50 19 The
INFLUENCER#JIM MAROUS
THE FUTURE OF BANKING GOES BEYOND FINANCIAL SERVICES By acting as a digital value aggregator, the banking organisation of the future will be rewarded with deeper relationships, increased loyalty and improved profitability, says Jim Marous
The future banking ecosystem will look very different from today’s and will extend well beyond financial services. There is a unique opportunity to capitalise on the insights banks hold and the innovation that they can build, buy or collaborate over to become the centre of a consumer’s everyday life. Fintech firms and big tech companies are capturing more and more of the banking value chain, providing services such as payments, cheque and even savings accounts that could erode much of traditional bank revenues. They raise service expectations and threaten to come between banks and customers. The banks’ response must go far beyond closing branches, improving online and mobile offerings or making current products and services ‘more digital’. They need to move further into the daily lives of customers, providing assistance before, during and after the financial transaction. The banking organisation of the future will leverage the vast amount of insight it possesses to become central to a customer’s financial and non-financial digital ecosystem. It will combine internal capabilities with external innovations to be a value aggregator, advice provider and access facilitator. Instead of a rear-view mirror perspective of their financial lives, it will provide the customer with a GPS view of their financial future. Instead of overdraft notifications, there will be low balance warnings. The banking organisation of the future will interact in similar ways to Amazon and
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Google, gaining insight and getting smarter with each interaction. Offers and opportunities will be presented in real-time. Banking, as we know it today, will be both invisible and seamless, providing insight-based support for commerce, communication and making life easier. By tapping into the wealth of transactional data, the banking organisation of the future will reach out to the right third-party providers and other key players to build a digital customer experience that combines mobile, big data, analytics, digital marketing, ticketing and more. It will be able to leverage the power of negotiation to lower the costs and simplify the access to products and services on behalf of the consumer. It will be able to do this while reducing back-office costs, improving speed of solution delivery, increasing revenues and building fewer solutions in-house. It will leverage application programming interfaces (APIs) and the Cloud to deliver a portfolio of solutions that are customised and personalised to the consumer’s individual situation in any given moment. The consumer will choose from multiple options, some of which may be provided by organisations that were once the banks’ competitors.
BENEFITS OF THE FUTURE BANKING ECOSYSTEM By acting as a digital value aggregator, the bank is rewarded with deeper relationships, increased loyalty and improved profitability due to a higher
volume of lower-cost transactions and additional service fees. But timing is of the essence – to move from doing occasional interactions to being embedded into consumers’ digital lives with daily interactions. Banks need to develop the digital partnerships with merchants, suppliers, small and medium businesses, telcos and other digital companies to deliver new products and enhanced engagement for the consumer. By collaborating with these partners as opposed to competing with them, the bank can have relationships with more segments of consumers at an efficient cost (including underbanked, unbanked or unhappily banked populations), using the number of interactions to offset the lower income per transaction.
AT A GLANCE A leading fintech influencer, Jim Marous is co-publisher of The Financial Brand, and owner and publisher of the Digital Banking Report. He has also advised the White House on banking policy and is a regular contributor and guest host for the Breaking Banks radio show. WEBSITE: www.digitalbanking report.com LINKEDIN: www.linkedin.com/ in/jimmarous/ TWITTER: @JimMarous
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TFP50#RUTH WANDHÖFER
STRONGER TOGETHER The financial services of the future will be shaped by two imperatives: to innovate and to collaborate, says Ruth Wandhöfer
Technology now more than ever is accelerating the evolution of financial services. It is the oxygen that fuels the system. Innovation is at everyone’s fingertips, making it harder for incumbents to hide behind history, status and regulatory regimes. Innovation is the reason we see so many solutions coming to the market that start to truly address customer needs and create better experiences. And these solutions are primarily not driven by banks but by the new kids on the block, the fintechs. Because, for them, the customer is at the centre. But fintechs cannot (yet) do it all on their own. And regulation plays an important role in many areas of financial services, which means that fintechs need to factor this into their business and compliance models without losing their agility and creativity. So, is it still a story of disruption? When we look at distinct pieces of the financial services toolbox we have to admit that some areas are perfect examples of where collaboration between ‘old’ incumbents and ‘new’ kids on the block is the answer. Take, for example, payments. We have seen quite some innovation in payments over the last decade, driven by both regulation and technology. While in some areas things are accelerating from snail speed to slow walk, others are being struck by lightning. The consumer-facing revolution is in full swing and real-time, app-based virtual solutions are replacing branch queues, paper and clunky online options.
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But even when we consider the more complex wholesale financial services space, things are starting to move. Cross-border payments in the field of correspondent banking are transforming to become more transparent and faster, reducing the risk and cost in this space. The emerging technology of distributed ledgers (DLT) is being tested to support inter-bank problem solving and future models of large-scale network adoption of this technology could be on the horizon as both understanding and technology mature. Here, fintechs play an increasing role in helping the industry to rethink their networks and allow for the much-needed interoperability with existing systems and players. Another example would be trade finance, a complex international business challenged by fraud, long execution times, paper-based manual processes and a general lack of transparency. Fintechs tackle this area in terms of digitisation at a sophisticated level, meaning moving from simply digitising the many documents in that value chain to creating rule-based logic, analytics and automated processes that can help financial institutions gain transparency,
improved risk management, speed and lower cost on the way. In all of this, the ability to get your hands around data and make sense of it has come to the fore as the baseline necessity that enables true risk management, without which there would be no business. Data is the new oil. The role of fintechs in helping organisations to make sense of their data is more important than ever. And, finally, the emerging digital financial ecosystem is an area where urgent action is required in order to bring the old and new world closer together. Instead of putting their heads in the sand, banks need to seriously educate themselves on topics such as blockchain, cryptocurrencies, cryptoexchanges, ICOs and how to manage anti-money-laundering risks in order to be able to support and work hand in hand with this new ecosystem. We are only at the beginning of the journey. And it is encouraging to see that technology innovation, out-of-the-box creative thinking and good attitudes can deliver true value for everyone.
AT A GLANCE A Top 10 Global FinTech Influencer, Ruth Wandhöfer is a banking veteran, fintech mentor, crypto aficionado, visiting professor at the London Institute of Banking & Finance, non-executive board member of several organisations, including a FTSE 100 company, and a published author. She is a regular contributor to key conferences, podcasts and other media in relation to financial services and innovation at an international level. WEBSITE: www.digitalbanking report.com LINKEDIN: www.linkedin.com/in/ ruth-wandhöfer-523b22/ TWITTER: @RWandhofer
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TFP50#IGTB
TFP50#EARTHPORT
‘THE BEST NEXT $MILLION’
PROOFOFFUTURE, FUTURE-PROOF Contextual banking is as relevant to corporations as it is to consumers. And it doesn’t just save them time... it can make them money, says iGTB Imagine a multifaceted transaction banking platform that doesn’t just process your operations efficiently, but also presents actions suitable to the context: ones that maximize your cash flow and enable you to borrow only when vital. It sweeps flush cash into overnight instruments, informs you about the best time to pay an invoice based on your current cash heath, and then automates payments through the best rails, highlighting the fastest, cheapest and the safest. Sounds futuristic, but that’s exactly what the digital banking pioneer iGTB is capable of, by deploying machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to power its suite of microservices, linked by open application programming interfaces (APIs). iGTB’s parent company, Intellect Design Arena, is the world’s fastest growing B2B fintech product firm, with a CAGR of 21 per
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cent over three years. All of Intellect’s divisions adhere to the same design principles: products must work out of the box, integrate seamlessly with existing infrastructures, link with present and future platforms through open APIs and cover the full spectrum of banking through industry-proven customer journeys. In iGTB’s case, all this boils down to contextual banking. Its Contextual Banking Experience (CBX) is a digital platform that uses machine learning and predictive analytics to provide the best next actions, to truly help the business and drive client satisfaction, while simultaneously up-selling and cross-selling other bank products. The Payments Services Hub (PSH) orchestrates payments using intelligent choices based on context. iGTB’s Digital Transaction Banking (DTB) service covers all aspects of transaction banking, integrating cash
and trade, collections and supply chain – all from the same code stable. No surprise, then, that about 23 per cent of the world’s liquidity structures pass through the iGTB Liquidity Management Solution (LMS), and that the company’s trade and supply chain finance platform (TSC) is the first and only solution for working capital, integrating trade finance and supply chain finance seamlessly. And when all these come together, users are equipped with all the data they need, and a multitude of options, to make much more money with much less risk. Chief marketing officer Phil Cantor explains: “You might have money in your account to pay an invoice, but imagine your bank’s system had the intelligence to say ‘you can pay this invoice out of this account, but it’s going to leave you short for the invoice that’s due tomorrow’. Or, ‘you haven’t got enough money to pay it,
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but here are some options: we can lend you the money; we can do an intercompany loan; we can combine funds from different accounts; or we can do a foreign exchange swap to get some money out of a different currency account’. “It brings in contextuality to help the business solve its real problem by providing advice on the fastest or cheapest way of doing something – the same kind of informed choice you get from a website like Expedia when you try to book a flight.” Cantor adds: “iGTB is centred around a model-bank approach and a proven IP (intellectual property) catalogue of persona-based customer journeys – the focus is always on the business impact, what you can achieve with the suite, how you profit from it, how you grow with it. “Simply put – Amazon points you to the best next sale, Netflix to the best next movie, we point you to the best next $million. “One direct result of design thinking is iGTB’s exploitation of the IADT principle for all customer journeys: businesses need the right information, but that has to be interpreted by deep analysis, which only serves to help make the right decision (presenting all options, with contextual
analysis) and, even then, only taking effect when executed through simple click transactions,” says Cantor. “Any firm’s CEO thinks holistically about the company’s money: the idea that trade finance is separate from loans, which is separate from foreign exchange, is utter nonsense. Contextual banking is about giving businesses a solution that is completely joined up.” And as well as improving organisations’ transactional efficiency and costs, this has the potential to free up decision-makers to focus on strategic direction.
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Contextual banking is about giving businesses a solution that is completely joined up “Treasurers should expend effort on setting strategy, not on executing it: the system should take care of that,” adds Cantor. “For example, our liquidity management system doesn’t just do sweeping and pooling and intercompany loans, cross-entity, cross-country, cross-currency.
WHO WE ARE Headquartered in London, Intellect Global Transaction Banking’s (iGTB) products are live in 192 settings, benefitting banks across 90 countries and 40 offices. iGTB’s transformational success is recognised by independent industry professionals – we have won various awards, including Advanced AI Mountaineer (Celent), and we are rated number one for Global Payments (IBS), for application programming interfaces APIs (Aité) and for Open Banking (Gartner). Recently, Celent also singled out iGTB for its unique, persona-based customer journeys. We bring contextual banking to banks
It also automatically sweeps money into investments, whether they’re rolling or overnight, but also combines that with cash flow forecasting and deposit management, to make sure you know what you’re doing with your balance sheet and with operational account management, how it’s affecting your position in terms of the bank’s capital. All the treasurer has to do is decide the policy.” iGTB’s impact on the market is being recognised in high places (see box for more). The Accenture report Building The Future-Ready Bank singled out the company’s architecture in its 2018 study on the advent of microservices-based platforms in transaction banking. Recent partnerships with CIBC, Fifth Third, ANZ and Raiffeisen underscore iGTB’s growing customer base. Many banks need to change their monolithic architectures into nimble, contextual, microservice-based platforms and are looking to invest in digital transformation by seeking out technology partners. And iGTB is that partner.
AT A GLANCE and, by extension, their business clients, with systems that understand – even anticipate – what they are trying to achieve. Our solutions spur banks into digital transformation through open APIs and machine learning. iGTB’s solutions are integrated and, uniquely, all come from the same stable. Our Contextual Banking Experience application provides microservices – maximising compatibility – and makes full use of platform-as-a-service technology. Our solutions help banks create desire in their clients, unlocking revenue simply by being context-aware as well, of course, as being reliable and fast.
COMPANY: iGTB, a
division of Intellect Design Arena FOUNDED: 1985 CATEGORY:
Transaction banking KEY PERSONNEL: CMO Phil Cantor HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: India, the Middle East,
Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific, Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand TEL: +44 (0)20 7516 1350 WEBSITE: igtb.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/showcase/igtb/ TWITTER: @i_gtb
WHAT WE DO ‘Contextual banking by design’ – through integrated transaction banking processes, we help banks help businesses create wealth www.thepower50.com
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Bringing banking into focus Introducing transparency to intraday liquidity management can have unforeseen benefits, says Peter Hainz, Global Presales Programme Manager for Cash and Liquidity at SmartStream Intraday liquidity risk has been a focus for regulators since the start of the 2007/08 financial crisis. In 2013, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) published BCBS 248, which set out the committee’s monitoring tools for intraday liquidity management, which the BCBS has recommended supervisors implement. Stage four implementation is reached when the final intraday rule is in force and the domestic legal and regulatory framework has been published and is put into practice by banks. The last BCBS review was carried out in March 2018. So how is the banking industry currently faring?
EUROPE In the EU, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, as well as Belgium and Luxembourg have all achieved stage four of implementation. EU regulation (Article 86 (1) of the Capital Requirements Directive) sets out that institutions shall have robust strategies, policies, processes
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and systems for the identification, measurement, management and monitoring of intraday liquidity risk. Looking outside the EU, the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) started intraday liquidity monitoring of Switzerland’s five largest banks on 1 January 2015. The rule setting out the requirement to monitor intraday liquidity was published in Russia in December 2015 and has been in force there since January 2016. Implementation in Turkey commenced in January 2017.
THE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA BCBS 248 intraday rules are in force in Saudi Arabia, South Africa and India. In Saudi Arabia, the final rule was published in June 2016 and came into operation on 1 January 2017. In South Africa, amended requirements were incorporated into regulations and came into play on 1 July 2016. The rulings came into effect in India on 3 November 2014.
ASIA AND THE PACIFIC Australia and Singapore have introduced and implemented BCBS 248, while local licensed banks in Hong Kong began monthly reporting of intraday liquidity positions at the end of October 2015. The final rule is also in operation in Indonesia, where regulation was issued in December 2015 and came into force in January 2016. In contrast, China has not published a draft regulation. Intraday policy, however, is under development. Japan is listed, too,
as not having published a draft law, regulation or other official document. A final intraday draft rule is under development in South Korea.
THE AMERICAS Regulation regarding liquidity management has been in force in Brazil since January 2013. Canada and Argentina have finalised and published local legal and regulatory framework but adoption by their banks is still under way. Mexico has an intraday draft under development, with publication expected later in 2018. Interestingly, the 14th progress report on the adoption of the Basel regulatory framework notes the United States as a country where the draft intraday regulation is not published. Industry participants that have undergone liquidity reviews have, however, provided feedback that the Federal Reserve has a strong focus on intraday monitoring.
REGULATORY INTEREST IN THE QUALITY OF BANKS’ TECHNOLOGY Answering the demands of the new regulatory regime has put banks’ IT systems in the spotlight. Financial authorities are now interested in the quality of the technology financial institutions use to meet their intraday liquidity monitoring and management responsibilities. Overhauling technology to meet regulatory demands brings challenges but banks are realising that having the
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TFP50#SMARTSTREAM appropriate IT systems can bring advantages, beyond just an ability to satisfy regulators. These include meeting challenges around: Macroeconomics – Financial institutions must now respond to speedily unfolding, sometimes unpredictable geopolitical events, often caused by Twitter messages. Emerging markets are currently subject to greater fluctuation, too. With ultra-low US interest rates, quantitative easing and a relatively weak dollar since the start of the financial crisis, borrowers have piled into dollar denominated debt. Increasing US interest rates have led to more volatile emerging markets as countries find that their dollar denominated debt is suddenly not so cheap. In the low interest rate environment, banks held cash buffers. With the Fed increasing rates, and facing markets shaped by often unpredictable geopolitical and macroeconomic events, banks are having to rethink the way they manage cash and liquidity. They want greater visibility into the funds they hold, giving them both more flexibility to respond to events and the ability to manage their money more profitably. Technology – Achieving clear visibility of cash and liquidity is more easily said than done, however. At many financial institutions – especially Tier 2 and 3 banks – cash management remains a manual, end-of-day activity. There is no way to track actual positions without real-time automation and so poor management of funds leads to missed opportunities and increased costs. As one senior manager remarked, they are ‘flying blind’. To make matters worse, banks have inherited a slew of legacy systems – the result of successive rounds of mergers – further obscuring the understanding they have of their cash and liquidity situation. To get around these weaknesses, firms must consolidate existing siloed infrastructures into one automated enterprise-wide solution. Only with this type of single system in place can the institution, with all its subsidiaries, ensure
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that liquidity buffers and limits are set correctly. The technology chosen should also be able to work with different message types. Systems must meet other requirements, too.
THE BACK OFFICE Banks’ back offices are eager to move away from the use of end-of-day data. If there is, for example, a big payment in the afternoon, banks do not have visibility of what happened in the morning with yesterday’s end-of-day-data. Real-time automated cash and liquidity monitoring and management solve this problem. Banks want systems that allow them to gather and reconcile high-quality, real-time data, which can then be channelled into functions such as cash sweeping, account forecasting, exception management and the central control of payments – activities vital for ensuring the efficient management of intraday liquidity. Financial institutions are keen to establish increased control over and visibility into the payment process in order to resolve issues and to ensure that payments are released on time. This is also in keeping with regulatory objectives.
Banks have gone beyond simply seeing intraday liquidity risk as a regulatory play
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THE MIDDLE OFFICE Banks and supervisors should also consider the impact of a bank’s intraday liquidity requirements in stress conditions. As guidance, four possible (but non-exhaustive) stress scenarios have been identified by BCBS 248 – their own financial stress, counterparty stress, a customer bank’s stress and market-wide credit or liquidity stress. Risk management and analytics required to support these tests are generally provided by the middle office.
THE FRONT OFFICE In the past, cash and liquidity monitoring and management fell, primarily, to the back and middle office. Today, front offices (e.g. FX and MM Treasury desk) increasingly ask for a real-time cash ladder view – a cash and liquidity forecast per currency, based on real-time data. Another issue in the front office
concerns the use of longs to cover shorts. All too frequently, one entity within a bank goes to the market to borrow when the necessary funds are, in fact, available in another part of the organisation but invisible to it. This results in unnecessary costs. Finally, it is important for the front office to be able to prove to regulators that money can be moved rapidly, if necessary.
CONCLUSION BCBS 248 was published in 2013 but fast-forward to the present and banks have gone beyond simply seeing intraday liquidity risk as a regulatory play. Financial institutions are realising that a clear and accurate view of intraday liquidity allows a more agile response to macroeconomic events and promotes banks’ ability to survive in today’s highly competitive, rapidly evolving commercial environment. In order to achieve the necessary visibility, banks must create an accurate, real-time, holistic view of all money movements, that can provide not only the back and middle office with a clear picture of cash and liquidity, but the front office, too.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: SmartStream FOUNDED: 2000 CATEGORY:
Financial software and managed services KEY PERSONNEL:
Haytham Kadoura, CEO (right) HEAD OFFICE: London PRESENCE IN: EU, United States, Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Africa, Zwolle, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Switzerland, Dubai TEL: +44 (0)20 7898 0600 WEBSITE: smartstream-stp.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ smartstream-technologies/ TWITTER: @smartstream_stp
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TFP50#EARTHPORT
FINGER-LICKIN’ GOOD FINTECH!
Judopay set out to change the way people pay. It’s strategy now is to become the world’s most admired payments tech provider
Third-party payment services often become the pebble in the shoe that hampers an ecommerce website’s promise of comfortable user experience. You happily pile up your shopping cart only to be taken to a third-party interface for checkout. You squint, you zoom in, you worry about the encryption and security, you doubt and cancel the transaction or go ahead sceptically. How would you score that experience as a customer? Compare this to a payment solution integrated into the website that doesn’t
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require the customer to move out to a third-party launchpad to make the payment. Not only does this make the payment process faster, more convenient and secure, but the ecommerce client also earns total delight from its customers. One only needs a smart thinking and innovative technology… the kind that the ambitious Judopay promises. Judopay is on a mission to change the way people pay – it aims to be the 'go to' mobile payments company for merchants/retailers across the world and
it hopes to develop advocacy from customers and employees alike. It helps that Judopay hangs out with possibly the coolest tech daddy of them all – it was the launch partner of Apple Pay. It also takes credit for developing the first mobile-specific fraud prevention service in the world and was nominated for two Emerging Payments Awards. “Our technology has been built with the mobile in mind. Compared to players that have been around for 20 to 25 years, who were focussed on a world of card present and are trying to make that
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TFP50#JUDOPAY experience digital now, our technology has been optimised for mobile from day one. So, we’re three times faster and the user experience is seamless throughout that entire app or ecommerce shopping experience,” says Jeremy Nicholds, CEO. It tells its potential clients from the website ‘You Run The Business. We Run The Payments’. So, what does that mean for its clients’ average customer? KFC Europe, one of Judopay’s clients, recognised early on that the technology could help amaze its customers and involved the firm in the food retailer’s digital transformation. KFC Europe now offers the convenience of online ordering and a smooth digital payment process. The Judopay platform is working its magic for both KFC’s customers and employees, and will soon launch the next version of the KFC app to further streamline online ordering with a new ‘click and collect’ option. “Digital transformation is the way ahead in whichever retail area you operate,” says Nicholds. “Think about your own experience. A year ago, how many times were you doing some sort of commerce on your phone? Fast forward to today and you’re probably doing it four, 10, 20 times
more. For me, it has definitely increased exponentially in the last year and it will only go up,” say Nicholds. He believes any company that doesn’t keep up in that digital race, will soon be replaced by the customer for one that does: “Customers would potentially spend money where the processes are simpler, easier, more convenient and drives more loyalty.”
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We help clients to think about commerce and payments strategically as a revenue source and a way for them to potentially grow their businesses At Judopay, the team understands this. They don’t hesitate to take that extra step and share their expertise in commerce, payments, and customer service with their clients. “We guide them, educate them, consult them, help them to not only create a really simple, easy commerce journey for their customers, but also help them
WHO WE ARE We create safe, seamless and simple payment processes for businesses across mobile, web and in-app payments. We pride ourselves on our customer service, we’re technically excellent and we grow with you – we help your business to succeed the best we can. And you’ll know when we’ve done our job because it’ll be like we’re not even there. A taxi with one tap. A coffee ordered and paid before your customer enters the cafe. It’ll just work. From being the launch partner of Apple Pay to developing the first mobile-specific fraud prevention service, we’re pioneers in next-generation payment solutions; we have exceptional
to think about commerce and payments, strategically, as a revenue source and a way for them to potentially grow their businesses,” says Nicholds. “We want to be that key enabler, to help those companies to really create a great customer experience, digitally, and make sure that the commerce experience is a painless, frictionless experience for those merchants.” If that’s not enough, fair and transparent pricing make Judopay a favourite among its clients. “Our technology today works in 185 countries, it connects and supports more than 40 currencies, we support seven different languages,” Nicholds adds. But it hasn’t reached world domination… not yet. Over the next 12 months, Judopay will be establishing sales operations and support centres in other key markets. And wherever it goes, Nicholds promises: “Our customers can have super peace of mind, knowing that they’ve got the best technology, the best service, at the best price.”
AT A GLANCE technology that completes a payment three times faster than our competitors. That means, using our technology, your customers can complete a payment while waiting at a station, on a train or on a Tube journey, before they are cut off from the Wi-Fi service between stations... now that’s fast. We concentrate on safety. We have machine learning fraud detection and prevention technology that keeps your customers safe and helps you become PCI compliant. And we excel in customer service. We become an extension of your team. We consult with you to make your process as slick and simple as possible. We grow with you.
COMPANY: Judopay FOUNDED: 2012 CATEGORY: Ecommerce
payments provider KEY PERSONNEL:
Jeremy Nicholds (right) HEAD OFFICE: London PRESENCE IN: Global TEL: +44 (0)20 3503 0600 WEBSITE: www.judopay.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/
company/judopay/ TWITTER: @Judopay
WHAT WE DO ‘You run the business. We run the payments. Judopay changes the way people pay’ www.thepower50.com
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TFP50#EARTHPORT
A BIG TICK IN THE BOX The latest version of Apply Financial’s Validate software takes companies closer than ever to achieving 100 per cent straight-through processing Customers in the digital age have come to expect a certain level of friction-free convenience from the institutions with which they associate. Complex international payments are no exception, with users expecting instantaneous and effortless validation of their transactions. But that comes at a cost. Human error contributes to some nine per cent of failed payments, while data errors contribute another six per cent. Each failed payment costs an average of £50 – and with billions of pounds beaming daily across the financial world, that cost quickly mounts up. It’s here that Apply Financial applies some digital science. Established in London in 2010, its goal is to provide ‘the de facto standard in bank payment validation through a single application programming interface (API)’. To achieve this, the company uses the art of data science to green-light valid bank-to-bank payments. Apply Financial’s Managing Director, Mark Bradbury, explains: “All payments are sent from bank accounts and end up in bank accounts. We validate payments as they’re being entered, removing the need to frantically chase an error-laden payment as it enters the gateway.” It’s a niche specialism, but the software suite offered by Apply Financial promises companies irresistible efficiency savings by reducing errors and increasing their rates of straight-through processing ( STP). For its clients, even a tiny percentile increase in STP translates into major rewards. “We know that if our clients increase their STP by 0.25 per cent, it will pay entirely for their use of Validate,” says Bradbury. “Further, our software allows
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our clients to achieve 100 per cent STP by eradicating human and data error.” And that’s a prize worth having. Epitomising what’s meant by ‘software-as-a-service’ (SaaS), Apply Financial is proving a no-brainer for institutions to seamlessly onboard as the financial world continues to change. A quick look at its 700-strong list of global clients goes some way to demonstrate the power held by Apply Financial inside the fintech ecosystem. They include significant financial titans, such as American Express, Barclays, HSBC and AXA, global corporations Dell, Mitsubishi, Easyjet and Virgin Media, and fintechs such as Ebury, Form3, Railsbank and
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The new features in Validate 4.0 are driven by great feedback from our clients… we are seeing double-digit improvements in STP Payment Rails. In all, Apply Financial has validated a staggering £1,000billion of payments, saving its clients a whopping £250million in the process. The software behind Apply Financial’s impressive solution to error-prone payments is called, simply, Validate. Cloud-based and available to institutions as an easily-integrated API, the Validate suite provides access to a vast repository of data concerning global financial codes, rules and regulations. This data helps to rigorously validate payments connected to the company’s clients as they are
entered. That takes some doing when you consider the scale of the challenge and the diversity of the rules and regulations that apply to global payments. “We now cover 197 countries and we have detail validation for 170 of those. But even in IBAN countries, there is no standard for what is needed to straight-through process a payment,” says Bradbury. “For instance, Mexico has something called a CLABE. In order to make a payment to Mexico or in Mexico, you have to have a tax code – if you don’t provide that tax code, the payment won’t straight-through process. There are other regulations in other countries that require you to have a purpose-of-payment code, or maybe even two purpose-of-payment codes,” he adds. Building upon its comprehensive and up-to-date global data coverage, the newly introduced Validate version 4.0 now also provides real-time reporting, bank holiday data and configuration tools to drive clients’ thrust towards 100 per cent STP. Version 4.0 is another giant leap towards minimising manual back-office checks and maximising friction-free customer experiences. “The new features in Validate are driven by great feedback from our clients,” says Bradbury. “With these exciting new tools we are seeing double-digit improvements in STP – but, most importantly, our clients are providing a better customer journey and this is key to their new digital approach to client services.” Bradbury sees Apply Financial’s software suite as a means for institutions burdened with legacy tech to keep up with trend-setting fintechs. “Our product will help them improve customer journeys dramatically,
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TFP50#APPLY FINANCIAL
helping our customers compete on a level playing field with the new competitors coming in to the market,” he says. Equally, outsourcing payment validation to Apply Financial gives banks and corporations much-needed breathing space in that they’re also outsourcing the need to be compliant, to protect against money laundering and to deal with other labour-intensive payment processing issues. By eliminating human and data errors while at the same time enhancing customer journeys, Apply Financial has
established itself as the global powerhouse for payment validations, be they domestic or international, single or bulk. As Apply Financial’s experience grows, client feedback will continue to refine,
WHO WE ARE Apply Financial is the world’s leading provider of bank payment validation solutions. Formed in 2010, the company has supplied its Validate suite of APIs and browsers to more than 700 companies around the world, including major global banks, foreign exchange companies, fintechs and corporates. Our growing partner community includes Bottomline, Currency Cloud, Payonomy and Temenos. The Validate suite of tools enables any payment platform to be able to check beneficiary details at point of entry so as to avoid human input errors and also check for any bank data changes. Validate also does a
adapt and perfect its Validate suite of solutions. And with the latest version 4.0 upgrade, it’s helping its partners knock firmly on the door of achievable 100 per cent STP.
AT A GLANCE thorough check of other requirements, such as in-country clearing rules, purpose-of-payment codes, additional information required and holiday dates. All this can be delivered for both single real-time payment entry and bulk payment files. Validate is a Cloud-based solution that holds a comprehensive set of global banking reference data that is sourced only from official sources and is updated every day. By providing these tools, we are able to help clients cut costs, provide a better service and be able to scale without employing more people in operations or the back office.
COMPANY:
Apply Financial FOUNDED: 2010 CATEGORY: Real-time bank payment validation KEY PERSONNEL: Mark Bradbury, CEO (right) HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: USA and the Philippines, providing global coverage with clients on all continents TEL: +44 333 012 4618 WEBSITE: www.applyfinancial.co.uk LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ apply-financial/ TWITTER: @applyfinancial
WHAT WE DO ‘Providing the defacto standard in bank payment validation through a single API’ www.thepower50.com
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TFP50#JAROONA
A NEW GUARDIAN OF THE
BLOCKCHAIN GALAXY TFP50#EARTHPORT
The Jaroona Chain project is aiming to introduce a revolutionary new node to our decentralised universe that will protect what we value most Blockchain will benefit society in profound and diverse ways. By ensuring that value is correctly and safely exchanged between parties, the technology will transform the industries that rely on centralised assurance mechanisms, acting as a powerful, transparent force against corruption. Before this potential can be realised, we must address and overcome the crucial security limitations that exist within our blockchains. First, current
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approaches secure the blockchain ledger, but not the smart contracts that are running on it. Second, due to the public nature of blockchain, there is no actively protected secure network perimeter. Third, blockchain security is dependent on consensus algorithms only and a patchwork of fixes to potential threats (most of which are unsuccessful). This approach cannot and will not deliver the performance, reliability or adaptability that is required for the global adoption of blockchain technology. At Jaroona, we envision a
decentralised and secure Web, where businesses and users can communicate freely, distribute value and be protected from those centralised threats that aim to steal assets and data from our blockchains. To ensure safety and security for everyone, we’re introducing a new, revolutionary type of blockchain node – the Jaroona Security Node (JSN). The JSN is a specialised node within the network, that utilises artificial intelligence algorithms and neural networks for self-improving security features. It self-learns from previously detected security threats and breaches to identify good and malicious behaviour/code patterns, alerting traditional blockchain nodes when the probability of a breach is above the consensus threshold. This kind of deep learning is resilient to changes, mutations and input variables, making it incredibly efficient at
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catching cybersecurity threats and mutations. It is critical for any effective security solution because the number of mutations constitutes 80 per cent of all malware. We call it self-improving security. We see the JSN acting as an automated, distributed cybersecurity guardian with the power to protect entire blockchains, decentralised application programming interfaces (dAPPs) and your own personal assets and data. Because it is based on machine-learning algorithms that automatically improve and adapt to new security threats, the JSN will work with new and existing blockchains, ensuring its security benefits are available to everyone; every mobile phone or desktop could have the power to act as a JSN.
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Everyone will be able to protect our decentralised world by running a JSN Crucially, the JSN cybersecurity protocol is designed not to affect the existing blockchain throughput, as JSN Master Nodes write the minimal nominal attack data on the main chain several times per week. The protocol is a highly scalable off-chain, layer two solution that, effectively, runs on top of a public or private blockchain and which is programming language agnostic. The JSN protocol’s goal is to perform:
■ real-time threat risk analysis on a specific blockchain and for a specific client on a specific blockchain ■ real-time incident response and providing warning alerts to traditional nodes, miners and block producers ■ real-time attack prevention on a specific blockchain (e.g. stopping or re-routing malicious network traffic) ■ smart contract auditing ■ endpoint protection for traditional blockchain nodes, dApps, computers and any users connected to a blockchain At the time of writing, there are an estimated 699 public blockchains and a substantial number of private ones. If a
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specific blockchain is under a malicious attack, as identified by JSN, the networking protocol can re-route an affected transaction or a smart contract to a multichain solution, which can further re-route it to a safe blockchain network. Existing blockchain nodes will also be able to act as security nodes, with each community able to establish their own fee and reward structure. Everyone will be able to protect our decentralised world by running a JSN.
By fostering co-operation, we believe enterprises will adopt blockchain solutions rapidly due to the reassurance that transactions will be concluded in a secure and timely way. Without the JSN, the blockchain ecosystem is incomplete; with it, we are able to protect the decentralised Web at scale, and with it our community, data and friends.
WHO WE ARE The Jaroona Software project was founded in 2018 by four core team members with more than 80 years of combined experience in creating and scaling IT architectures and software development. Previous successes of the team members include founding The Smart Engine Group (www.smartengine. solutions) in 2011. It now operates globally, providing predictive analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for financial services, retailing and advertising. Clients include 25 banks, 500 retailers, and four million consumers, growing at more than 90 per cent annual rate with eight-digit revenues achieved in 2017. Jaroona Software is based on a new type of node – the Jaroona Security Node (JSN) – which will be released in a beta version in early 2019, and which uses machine-learning algorithms to allow for quick detection and response to security threats, including hackers, malicious actors, spammers and malicious software, that attack blockchains. The solution is designed to enable commercialisation and mass adoption of decentralised application programming interfaces (dApps) across various blockchain networks. Individuals are able to run their JSN on any available hardware device,
earning fees for the transactions they secure on a specific blockchain with each community able to establish its own fee structure and set the balance between security and performance. The security nodes are connected in a meta-network, allowing Jaroona Software to adapt to new threats automatically across different blockchain networks. The software itself is designed to work in conjunction with major existing and emerging blockchains, as well as any hardware, making the benefits of security and scalability available to various networks and their participants.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY:
Jaroona Chain FOUNDED: 2018 CATEGORY: Security KEY PERSONNEL:
Christian Bacher, CEO (right) HEAD OFFICE: Tallin, Estonia TEL: +43 19195041-0 WEBSITE: www.jaroona.com LINKEDIN: Linkedin.com/ company/jaroona/ TWITTER: @Jaroona_Chain
WHAT WE DO ‘The cybersecurity guardians that protect blockchain’ – Jaroona Chain addresses the issue of blockchain network security without the need to sacrifice decentralisation or scalability TheFintechPower50 31
TFP50#ONEVISAGE
FACINGTHEFUTURE OneVisage is reimagining authentication, using 3D facial biometry and 3D graphical authentication to deliver simplicity and peace of mind Back in 2013, Christophe Remillet, the CEO of OneVisage, experienced two identity thefts in the same week. He had become one of the estimated 500 million people who have had their personal information stolen. But instead of accepting it and moving on, he started to investigate what solutions could protect his digital life. He concluded that passwords and pin-codes are remarkably weak in terms of security and that the future lay in 3D facial biometry. And here’s why. By 2022, American end-users will own more than 300 credentials. It’s clearly impossible to memorise a password for every service provider, which pushes people towards reusing the same password to access multiple services or
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accounts. Most of these passwords are weak and predictable and, in some cases, people even use those attached to private logins for corporate logins. Latest surveys suggest that more than 80 per cent of us admit to reusing the same password to connect to multiple digital services. No wonder then that passwords count for 83 per cent of digital security breaches – and by 2022, that will contribute to a total estimated annual cost of cyberfraud of more than $6trillion, which roughly corresponds to the combined global domestic product of Germany and France.
SMS AS SECOND FACTOR STILL HAS SECURITY FLAWS SMS used in two-factor authentication is
claimed to be more secure than passwords but it, too, has been bypassed by cybercriminals. That’s largely because there is no assurance that an SMS message will go to the intended recipient. Phishing and network communication attacks are the two most common security breaches. For example, when on-line transacting through the 3D Secure protocol on your mobile using a public Wi-Fi network, it might not be your bank’s window asking you to enter the one-time password (OTP) sent by SMS. That’s why, in the States, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) restricted the use of SMS two-factor authentication in its guidance 800-63-3. An alternative is to use push-based OTP, aka sending a code to a mobile device
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via a service such as the Apple Push notification service..
FINGERPRINT: A GOOD WAY TO START BUT The fingerprint scanner was first introduced to mobile devices back in 2011 and is widely considered an effective means to authenticate individuals. However, it’s not a universal solution; 45 per cent of mobile devices manufactured in 2018 don’t have fingerprint sensors. Neither is it unbreachable, as proved by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
2D FACIAL, VOICE AND BEHAVIOURAL MODALITIES 2D facial recognition has been around for some time and there are hundreds of 2D facial solution providers. However, most solutions can be easily spoofed by criminals – and even your kids – by using a picture, video or even by just waving a pen in front of a picture to trick eye-blinking detection algorithms. Similarly, voice spoofing is relatively easy. What’s common in all these modalities, is that the maximum accuracy level is 99 per cent. While that might be acceptable for low-value transactions, mid- to high-value transactions, such as ebanking login, corporate logical access or mobile payments for large amounts, demand 99-per-cent-plus peace of mind.
OTHER BIOMETRY – SUCH AS PALM VEIN, FINGER VEIN OR IRIS Iris or vein-based solutions have a high degree of accuracy, but they are struggling with two criteria: universality and cost-effectiveness. These solutions require specific hardware sensors, which makes it challenging to integrate them into a mobile device. Offering a technology or solution that allows a bank to only address five or 10 per cent of its customers isn’t a solution at all.
3D FACIAL AUTHENTICATION AS A STRONG MODALITY A prototype of 3D facial biometry running on an Android mobile device was first presented by OneVisage in February
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Surveys suggest that more than 80 per cent of us admit to reusing the same password to connect to multiple digital services 2015 at the Mobile World Congress. In September 2017, Apple unveiled iPhone X with Face ID, pushing 3D facial biometry to the forefront of biometric authentication. What‘s the advantage of 3D facial biometry? The ratio between the user-experience, accuracy and spoofing/ presentation attack resilience, which is currently superior to any other biometric. At OneVisage, we developed a ‘universal face ID’ – Premier Face SDK – which runs on any smartphone equipped with 2D front cameras. It works by the user simply gently moving his/her head to left and right in front of a mobile phone camera for two to three seconds. It’s as simple as a making a video selfie. We have designed our universal authentication technology for uses cases such as ebanking login, high-value payments, corporate logical access or
sharing your health data with your insurer. It gives a consistent user-experience, regardless of the device, and is aligned with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) .
THE FUTURE OF STRONG AUTHENTICATIONS The need for multiple authentication factors (MAFs) – something I have, something I am and something I know – is now commonly understood and acknowledged by cybersecurity solution providers and digital services. However, OneVisage took that one step further at Money 2020 Europe in 2018 by introducing the first 3D graphical authentication solution – Premier Secret SDK – to replace passwords and pin-codes on a smartphone. Instead of typing a password or pin-code, the user navigates a 3D picture to select one or several secret objects or figures. When combined with any biometry, Premier Secret SDK can elegantly solve challenging issues, such as non-repudiation, people looking alike or identical twins, and can be extended to all areas of our new digital world.
WHO WE ARE
AT A GLANCE
OneVisage aims to become a leading OEM digital identity solution provider by offering a premium, Swiss-based digital authentication platform and one-stop shop for large integrators and digital service providers.
COMPANY: OneVisage SA
The company offers and support superior multi-factor authentication solutions that totally eliminate passwords and PIN codes and reducing operating costs. OneVisage’s Premier Face SDK can be easily deployed on any modern and standard Android and iOS mobile phones.
FOUNDED: 2013 CATEGORY: Biometric authentication solutions KEY PERSONNEL:
Christophe Remillet, CEO HEAD OFFICE: Switzerland PRESENCE: Switzerland, France, UK, USA and India TEL: +41 21 566 70 55 WEBSITE: www.onevisage.com LINKEDIN: Linkedin/company/onevisage TWITTER: @OneVisageSa
WHAT WE DO ‘OneVisage helps financial services and IAM to fight cybercrimes with a strong 3D facial authentication in a safer, simpler and affordable way’ TheFintechPower50 33
TFP50#ONPEX
BUILD YOUR OWN FINANCIAL SERVICES! How great would it be to choose your banking, payment and compliance solutions, tailored to your individual needs, all from one platform? With ONPEX, you can
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ONPEX brings ease-of-use, automation and transparency to the payments and banking industry at a time when new standards are being set, both by consumers and by fintechs. As a global provider of banking and payment solutions, ONPEX allows organisations to tailor services to their precise requirements through a cost-efficient application programming interface (API)-driven platform that offers banking- and payments-as-aservice. You choose. The ONPEX solution enables clients to deliver seamless digital financial services by improving and broadening their offered product range, reducing their expenditures and meeting regulatory
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standards in the process. These services are conveniently packaged into one, easy-to-use platform. As a CSSF-regulated payment institution, headquartered in Luxembourg, and a member of SWIFT, ONPEX has offices in Europe and Asia, giving it a global perspective and worldwide reach. “We are a trusted and reliable partner for an array of banks, fintechs, and ecommerce businesses across the payments ecosystem,” says Christoph Tutsch, CEO and Founder of ONPEX. He continues: “Be it IBAN issuing, SEPA and SWIFT wire transfers, cash management, FX or epayments, our suite of solutions guarantees a seamless payment experience for businesses and financial institutions alike. Our clients include banks, acquirers and payment service providers, as well as non-regulated businesses: ISOs, processors and resellers, each of them benefitting from our made-to-measure software solution.” The ONPEX payment and banking solution is not just software that improves your efficiency: it’s geared towards flexibility and security, too. Its open APIs enable collaboration with other technology providers, businesses and regulated institutions in a speedy and seamless way, so one can scale with ease.
“Through our simple online platform, clients are free to choose the financial services they require – and for the ones they don’t, no fee’s charged. This pay-as-you-go functionality means that our solutions are not just highly tailored, but also customer-centric and universally applicable,” says Tutsch. One of the biggest developments in the banking and payments sector in the last 12 months has been Europe’s second Payment Services Directive (PSD2). Traditional financial services can now
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It’s the ultimate pick and mix, allowing clients to fully adapt and grow their businesses to achieve and exceed their goals be offered by third parties, such as ONPEX, as an alternative to established banks. A form of this financial service reform is banking-as-a-service (BaaS). ONPEX offers benefits for any such businesses looking to build, configure and manage their own financial services. Outsourcing relieves stress, gives
WHO WE ARE ONPEX is a Luxembourg-regulated payment institution, offering multi-currency IBAN accounts, FX, local and global transfers, and epayments powered by open APIs to create simple, compliant, and cost-efficient payment and banking solutions. Businesses have been without access to API-based solutions to manage their payments and banking in a regulatory-compliant environment. The overall banking and payments spheres are highly fragmented when it comes to providing a solution for a
companies more autonomy and heightens institutions’ agility when answering the needs of digital clients whose expectations and demands are ever-changing. When synched with ONPEX payment accounts, transfers are performed on a secure, Cloud-based platform that always operates with flexibility, transparency and compliance. ONPEX multi-currency IBANs allow businesses to accept the collection of up to 25 different currencies in one single account per client. It’s the perfect solution for international traders who recognise the importance of frictionless payments, whatever the currency may be. “We hold a complete information-, currency- and API-agnostic view, pursuing innovation for our clients above all else. We embrace the diversity of the payments ecosystem, enabling fast and secure transactions in fiat currencies, tokens, digital assets or smart contracts,” comments Tutsch. “It’s the ultimate pick and mix, allowing clients to fully adapt and grow their businesses to achieve and exceed their goals.”
AT A GLANCE specific need. Our aim is to add simplicity, transparency and automation to payments and banking. The ONPEX payment account is one of the most flexible solutions in the industry, powered through Cloud-based API technology. We offer integrated payment and banking services provided on a single, modular platform as a regulated service provider. This includes client and account management, IBAN issuing, multi-currency, SWIFT and SEPA transfers, foreign exchange, epayments, settlements and reconciliation.
COMPANY: ONPEX FOUNDED: 2013 CATEGORY:
Payment and banking service provider KEY PERSONNEL:
Christoph Tutsch, CEO (above) HEAD OFFICE: Luxembourg OFFICES IN: Luxembourg,
Germany and Hong Kong TEL: +352 27 861177 WEBSITE: www.onpex.com LINKEDIN: LinkedIn/company/onpex/ TWITTER: @ONPEX
WHAT WE DO ‘We enable banking and payments’ www.thepower50.com
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INFLUENCER# BRETT KING
HOW FAR ALONG IN THE DIGITAL JOURNEY IS BANKING? Fintech futurist Brett King ponders the road to transformation If you ask ‘how far along are we on our digital banking journey?’, you’ll get a ton of different responses. Some claim that we’re only one per cent finished; others will say we’re practically already there. To really determine the answer to your question, two critical data points are needed. What is the ultimate destination? And how do you determine how far along in that journey your bank is? As with everything, much depends on your perspective. For JMPC or DBS Bank, being optimistic and claiming they’re already digital, sells into their messaging to the market and shareholders. Consulting providers, such as Accenture or McKinsey, have to find that fine line between suggesting the industry is still in need of fundamental transformation and that their incumbent clients are really good at digital already,
due to their help. Or you imagine a future that is radically different from today. We’re starting, perhaps for the first time in 700 years, to rethink the design of banking in an embedded sense – when the utility of banking is optimised experientially through technology. Not forcing a plastic credit card experience onto a mobile wallet but, instead, figuring out a way to provide access to credit when and where it will have most impact. Banking’s digital journey needs to be seen in the context of the world’s digital journey. But what makes banking different to many other sectors is that, over the last 30-40 years, we’ve increasingly made it a high-friction, high-touch environment. We’ve had anti-money laundering legislation, the Patriot Act, Terrorist Financing and now the General Data Protection Regulation, all adding to the burden of data collection and processing for simple things, like opening a bank account. This friction is what we’re attacking with digitisation. In most instances, however, it’s more a digitally optimised version of historic, branch-based banking.
BEYOND RETROFITTING
AT A GLANCE Brett King is a futurist, an Amazon best-selling author, an award-winning speaker, hosts a globally recognised radio show and is the CEO of challenger bank Moven. He focusses on how technology is disrupting business, changing behaviour and influencing society. WEBSITE: brettking.com TWITTER: @BrettKing
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That is not where we are going, however. If you strip back banking products to their core capability, a mortgage, an overdraft, a credit card or a car loan are all essentially the same basic utility – the ability to access credit for a particular purpose when you need it. A more efficient way of packaging that utility is behaviour or context – buying a home, buying groceries, buying a car. When you think about banking like this, it’s much easier to think of the bank’s core utility as the heart of banking, not the products and departments we packaged up in the branch distribution model. Thus, you end up with three core pieces of utility:
■ The ability to store value (everything
from ewallets, to crypto deposits, to high-yield, interest-bearing accounts, to investment class products) ■ The ability to safely move money (from SWIFT bank-to-bank transactions, to card or wallet payments from consumer to merchant, or large commercial TTs) ■ Access to credit when and where you need it (to help you transactionally where you can’t get it done yourself) Bank 4.0 is about fundamentally resurfacing the core utility of a bank in this real-time, technology-capable world. It is about embedded, ubiquitous banking, redesigned for technologies such as voice-based smart assistants, augmented or mixed reality smart glasses, and based on data received contextually from sensors all around us.
BUT WHAT IS BANK 5.0? When you go beyond frictionless, ubiquitously embedded banking utility, you have to go not only to a cashless environment but also to one where money has no inherent value; a world imagined by science fiction authors where technology takes care of all our needs and we have eliminated commerce and money. We won’t be there for a long time. Meanwhile, we are designing a world where banking is embedded and customised for us. So, how far along are we? We could be half way, with most banks in the transition between Bank 2.0 and 3.0. The destination, however, takes a reimagining of the value your bank has in a real-time world. In that sense, you could argue most banks haven’t even started or that a bunch of the fintechs definitely get it. Either way, banking is going to be completely different by the end of the next decade. And if you don’t believe in this destination, don’t worry because you’ll be irrelevant before you arrive.
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TFP50#DEVIE MOHAN
A PROGNOSTIC LOOK AT
FINTECH FOR 2019 Regtech on the rise, insurtech poised for impact, banks besting fintech and Britain still great… Burnmark’s Devie Mohan makes an optimistic forecast 2018 will always be known as the year fintech became a topic of conversation in pubs around the UK. It was also another year of records for the fintech industry – more than $100billion has already been invested in fintech – $42billion of that across 748 deals in just the first half of 2018. Countries like China, India and Indonesia have emerged as fintech powerhouses with Ant Financial brokering the largest deal ever earlier this year. And it’s not just the numbers that point to the mass market entry of fintech – it has actively changed the lives of the common financial services consumer, from students to freelance workers, to the teachers at my son’s school. It has also been fascinating to watch sub-segments within fintech emerge as strong industries in their own right. Regtech, robo advisory and insurtech are all featuring heavily at events, accelerator programmes and in academic papers. So what do we at Burnmark expect 2019 to look like?
UK CONTINUES TO 1 BE THE FINTECH CAPITAL OF THE WORLD London continues to be the largest city receiving fintech investments and incubating the largest number of startups in the world. The UK this year received more investment than the whole of the US and more than half the investment received by Europe. Challenger banks continue to innovate with new products, services and partnerships (such as Starling Bank’s collaboration with the Post Office) and regtech is gaining huge momentum with London as its base. The year has ended on a very strong
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note with the UK banks coming together to publish a collaboration toolkit opened up to 1,600 fintech companies. We saw some large investment rounds, including $250million for Revolut, $100million for eToro and $60million for Flender (Brexit?, what Brexit?).
INSURTECH NEVER 2 REALLY TOOK OFF, BUT NOW IT MIGHT Strangely, investment in insurtech dipped between 2015 and 2017. 2018 numbers remain the same as 2017. However, 2019 may be the year to change that trend. Insurtech, as we have written at Burnmark several times in the past, remains one of the largest target spaces for startups, with a potential to change billions of dollars’ worth of legacy systems. A lot of the innovation is still focussed on offering new products via apps, but the biggest transformation potential is indeed for the backend, and new startups including ClarionDoor, Trionfo and Boldpenguin, are set to change the landscape.
2.0 3REGTECH HAS BEGUN
Data continues to be the cornerstone for regulatory compliance and banks have started deploying powerful technology solutions to gather, structure, analyse and
AT A GLANCE Devie Mohan is Co-founder and CEO of fintech research company Burnmark, which works towards better collaboration between banks, startups, regulators and investors. WEBSITE: www.burnmark.com TWITTER: @burnmark_
present data for regulatory review. Banks have started to look at managing their data resources holistically, incorporating proprietary internal data with external data sources (including social media data) to fill logical gaps. Regtech 2.0, as we call it at Burnmark, is a phase that has begun in 2017 where regtech startups have begun to collaborate more widely with players in the ecosystem, beyond banks.
LARGE BANKS ARE NOW 4 BEATING THE GAME OUT OF FINTECH STARTUPS Most global Tier 1 banks have now set up processes, systems and technology to beat any (current) competition from startups. Last month, JPMorgan announced a new fintech campus in Palo Alto, housed next to the Google and Facebook offices ,with 1,000 employees. The bank has almost 50,000 employees in technology and is pouring money into AI and machine learning to reduce risk and improve underwriting, while also building up its Cloud infrastructure. It also entered the crowded market of online investing when it introduced a mobile and web service that includes free or discounted trades. HSBC's CEO has ‘aggressive growth’ in mind and is creating its own challenger bank. But startups move faster than large banks. It will be interesting to see how banks’ own offerings and acquisitions play up against future startups and innovative products in the fintech space.
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TFP50#BOTTOMLINE TECHNOLOGIES
RISING TO THE CHALLENGE OF A NEW BANKING ERA Bottomline Technologies is an innovator in business payment automation technology, helping to make complex transactions simple, smart and secure In a technological age where goods and services can be purchased in seconds on a mobile phone, and peer-to-peer payments can be made just as easily, it’s difficult to understand why business payments still remain as challenging as they are. It’s true that business payments are more complex. They are often international, higher in value, subject to regulation and carry a degree of risk. However, some of the challenges stem from the legacy systems that underpin a number of the best-known brands. Older technology is struggling to meet the demands of today’s fast-paced and competitive global environment. Let’s take the recent introduction of Single European Payments Area Instant (SEPA Inst) for example, which enables real-time cross-border payments for 34
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participating European countries. Existing legacy end-of-day and batch-based systems are simply not equipped to deal with the instant processing demands of real-time payments. They also can’t manage the increasing number of payment and settlement networks across a range of geographies, including SWIFT, EBICS, SIC4, Bacs, Direct Debit, Faster Payments, CHAPS, CASS, Crest, ACH, TCH-RTP, NACHA and PayM. When you include new open access initiatives being driven by the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), regulations around data protection and increasing fraud risks, the cracks are inevitable. The payments landscape is evolving, more customer centric and highly innovative. A payments infrastructure that hinders operational efficiency, limits agility and innovation and is
open to exploitation is concerning for any organisation needing to remain competitive. Bottomline Technologies is an innovator in business payment automation technology. Its primary focus is to make complex business payments simple, smart and secure, handling the heavy work of payments so organisations can focus on more important aspects of their business. Its recent white paper, The Changing Payments and Financial Messaging Landscape, addresses the rapid evolution of the global payments and messaging ecosystem and discusses the benefits of using an integrated, Cloud-based aggregation platform as a way for organisations to navigate the complexity. The paper identifies a number of key challenges facing the industry, including:
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■ The need to remain competitive by connecting effectively with a web of global payment networks, standards and instruments ■ The integration of new and emerging technologies into existing systems and processes ■ The provision of simplicity, convenience, control, speed and security in a cross-channel environment Add to this the burden of minimising risk and the demand for real-time visibility, and organisations could be forgiven for feeling somewhat overwhelmed.
MINIMISING RISK Changing regulations and sanctions and an ever-increasing risk of fraud are at the top of most organisations agendas. It has become essential for financial messaging and payment processing technology to better protect the organisation against cyber attacks, insider threats, web and mobile fraud, payment fraud, and money laundering. There is a reputation at stake and a responsibility to protect the institution and its customers. Finding the quickest, most cost-effective way to achieve this is critical – whether that is inherent in the financial messaging software or through closely integrated solutions. Payment aggregation technology that offers built-in compliance, sanctions screening and real-time fraud detection can help achieve exactly this. For banks and financial institutions, that means catering to new, multi-regulations across the globe becomes much easier. It also means it becomes possible to protect against fraudulent activity and data theft before it happens with the use of real-time transaction and behaviour monitoring.
GAINING REAL-TIME VISIBILITY Achieving complete transparency is a goal every organisation should aim for. Without the ability to apply sophisticated, configurable and fully automated reconciliation rules, financial institutions find themselves having to manage a task that is not only tedious, but very complicated and time-consuming due to the combination of complex data sources
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and messaging formats. Putting aside the numerous core benefits that aggregation technology can offer banks and financial institutions, integrated reconciliation is certainly a valuable addition that delivers more visibility and tighter control. By going beyond the core capabilities of accessing payment clearing and settlement systems globally, Bottomline provides value-added offerings unlike any other solutions available in the market, specifically helping organisations to remain compliant, mitigate risk and increase real-time visibility. In the current payments environment, the banks, non-bank financial institutions and new payment services providers of today are faced with a strategic opportunity to deliver innovative and compelling services to businesses and consumers. By adopting a Cloud-based aggregation approach, they can easily seize that opportunity and gain a significant competitive advantage,
removing complexity and process duplication, lowering operational costs, and increasing productivity. Being agile enough to take advantage of this payments evolution without negatively impacting profitability, growth potential and reputation is a fine balancing act. As in any competitive environment, only the fittest and the fastest will survive. Those that can position themselves to rapidly connect to and absorb new payment schemes without adding complexity and significant costs in the process will be seen as innovative leaders. Bottomline continues to be at the forefront of this payments evolution, providing the innovative solutions and forward-thinking services that institutions need to secure and better manage their financial messages and payments.
WHO WE ARE
AT A GLANCE
As a trusted fintech partner, with a pedigree in business payment processing, and the largest, third-party SWIFT bureau in the world, Bottomline Technologies enables organisations to efficiently and securely monitor and move their financial transactions.
COMPANY: Bottomline
We securely communicate, reconcile and manage the data in financial transactions within and between banks, both locally and internationally. Using innovative, Cloud-based technology, Bottomline’s solutions enable the processing of domestic and international payments, efficient cash management, automated workflows for payment processing and bill review, as well as state-of-the-art fraud detection, behavioural analytics and regulatory compliance.
Technologies FOUNDED: 1989 CATEGORY:
Financial technology KEY PERSONNEL: Nigel Savory, Managing Director Global Business Solutions (above) HEAD OFFICE: Portsmouth, USA OFFICES IN: North America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and the Asia Pacific (APAC) region TEL: +44 (0)118 925 8250 WEBSITE: www.bottomline.com/uk/ LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ bottomline-technologies/ TWITTER: @bottomlinetech
WHAT WE DO ‘Making complicated business payments simple, smart and secure’ – enabling financial institutions and corporates of all sizes, across all industries, in 90-plus countries to pay and get paid TheFintechPower50 39
TFP50#INSTANTOR
ON A MISSION TO REVOLUTIONISE CREDIT RISK MANAGEMENT By Raiha Buchanan,CMO at Instantor and Founder of Women in FinTech Early this year, Instantor released a report on how machine learning is revolutionising credit risk management in Europe. The main finding was that machine learning is drastically changing the game for financial organisations: 70 per cent of companies surveyed said they’re working with machine learning to increase loan acceptance while reducing risk. The report Credit Risk Management 2019 – How Do You Stack Up? is the result of a survey conducted by Instantor across 20 European countries among top executives within leading financial organisations. The report revealed that two-thirds of these players benefit from machine learning implementation within credit risk management. At Instantor we have acknowledged the vast number of stringent regulations rapidly evolving in Europe in the last decade to protect the economy and the end consumer. We are aware of stricter consumer demands for fully digitised services, mobile-friendly interfaces and more convenient experiences.
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Moreover, we recognise that organisations are experiencing internal pressures to meet business targets while diminishing risk and compliance costs. We believe that all these factors have urged financial institutions to utilise more efficient and innovative tools, such as machine learning. As part of the report, we identified the changes that financial organisations need to make to adapt to the current landscape in 2019: a shift to fully digitised and automated solutions; an implementation of advanced analytics; partnerships with fintechs; and deployment of innovative services around data. Instantor recognises the unprecedented opportunities being created by Europe’s revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) that make it possible for financial institutions to gain new customers currently excluded from the financing system and tap into new data sources,
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We are committed to empowering organisations with the technology and the knowledge they need to position themselves ahead of the curve
such as transactional data from bank accounts to verify income in real time and predict credit behaviour. Therefore, the report highlights the significant benefits that can be drawn upon with the implementation of machine learning and bank data within financing, such as a boost in the bottom line and higher consumer satisfaction and retention. Based on experience, Instantor has observed an increase in the predictive power of the scoring models, a faster and more accurate loan acceptance process, and streamlined management as additional benefits that financial organisations can reap from machine learning implementation.
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The report covered challenges in regard to machine learning implementation, finding that reasons for not implementing these techniques relate to a lack of understanding of its potential impact on operations (44 per cent) and how it could affect company performance (22 per cent). As part of our mission to democratise the financing system, we released this report with an educational purpose and a series of seminars and webinars aiming to transfer knowledge to credit risk professionals. We are committed to empowering organisations with the technology and the knowledge they need to position themselves ahead of the curve. At Instantor we´re on a mission to revolutionise credit risk management, too. I’m a firm believer that by better understanding the remarkable impact of machine learning utilisation for credit risk assessment, organisations will be able to offer more loans with less risk and gain a definitive competitive advantage to stack up to competition.
WHO WE ARE Instantor helps organisations understand their customers´ true financial capacity with solutions that process transactional data from bank accounts, support financial data aggregation and improve credit risk management. It empowers customers to accurately predict the possibilities of defaulting – making credit risk decisions faster, easier and fairer for all. With Instantor’s fully digitalised solutions, financial organisations can increase acceptance, reduce
risk and streamline credit risk management. Instantor has 300-plus integrated banks in more than 25 markets, with 200 clients in Europe, Latin America and Asia. In March 2019, the Financial Times ranked Instantor as the second fastest growing fintech in Sweden. It is the first fintech to be authorised by the Financial Swedish Authority (FSA) to operate as an account information service provider (AISP) under Europe's revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2).
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: Instantor FOUNDED: 2010 CATEGORY: Software
as a service KEY PERSONNEL:
Raiha Buchanan, CMO HEAD OFFICE: Stockholm PRESENCE IN: Europe, Latin America and Asia TEL: +46 72 234 6035 WEBISTE: www.instantor.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ instantor-ab/ TWITTER: @InstantorAB
WHAT WE DO ‘Make tough calls easy’ www.thepower50.com
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TFP50#RECORDSURE
PUTTING
THE RECORD
STRAIGHT
Every business problem, no matter how stubborn, has a solution. The problem Recordsure solves lies at the heart of the financial sector. Financial organisations undertake hundreds of thousands of customer interactions every day across multiple communication channels. In a tightly regulated sector, these conversations need to be closely monitored to ensure they are compliant, which becomes increasingly challenging at scale. Traditionally, firms review customer conversation recordings and written communications manually: teams physically trawl through files to ensure that processes have been followed correctly. This method is fundamentally flawed, though. In fact, it is so inefficient that only one per cent to five per cent of communications can generally be monitored. The result is a naked risk that ill-serves both the financial institution and the customer. What was said, how it was said and to whom has proved the basis for many regulatory scandals and these have collectively cost the industry billions of pounds in fines over the past decade while simultaneously damaging customer trust and brand value. Recordsure solves this problem and
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Failure to monitor customer communications across all channels leaves organisations open to regulatory challenge and wastes a business opportunity, says Recordsure turns traditional methodology on its head through advanced conversational artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Our analytics and automation software gathers valuable data from all customer touch points, automatically organises it at scale and draws powerful insights to drive efficiencies, performance and culture. Innovative machine learning technology interprets conversations in the same way a human would and with comparable levels of accuracy. For instance, it can automatically spot any part of a conversation where a particular topic was discussed, behavioural traits indicating signs of potential customer vulnerability so further support can be channelled, and anomalous patterns within a conversation, such as a recommendation that was made before the necessary research was conducted. High-risk interactions are elevated for human review, saving thousands of man hours and focussing resources on underlying issues early, before they develop into problems.
The technology does not replace the human decision-maker in the review process but automates the bulk of their administrative chores, allowing them to work 80 per cent more efficiently and make better decisions based on stronger intelligence. This is simply transformational for financial firms and allows them to monitor 100 per cent of their interactions, thus eliminating the need and fragility of small-scale random sampling. It also opens the door to multiple non-compliance specific benefits, such as training, optimising sales and customer care – for instance, in complaint reduction. Recordsure AI benefits from the network effect: the more it is used, the smarter it gets. This leads to advanced functionality, such as trend analysis, benchmarking performance against the industry and predictive insights. The technology can be integrated for business-as-usual activity on an ongoing basis or applied to past business reviews, in which it generates 60 per cent cost savings compared to other methods. Traditionally, team leaders have faced a choice between either reviewing cases in very granular detail or looking at
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vaguer trends across the wider landscape. For the first time ever, Recordsure is offering business leaders a platform that provides clarity in meticulous detail, but on an industrial scale. It offers a suite of complementary analytics and automation tools, which are designed to integrate seamlessly alongside existing IT infrastructure. Our solution is split over three core stages:
gather data across 1 We all customer interactions
Before you can analyse data, you first need to collect it. When there is no existing infrastructure in place, Recordsure provides the necessary tools to collate data across all customer touch points. Speech data is recorded from face-to-face meetings, telephone conversations and video interactions plus text-based content, including not just digital copy but also printed documents.
We analyse the 2 data and convert it into usable formats Audio files are transcribed with unprecedented accuracy through our bespoke machine learning algorithms.
The combined files are then automatically segmented intelligently by both keywords and advanced themes, such as behavioural traits and contextual topics. Our advanced conversational AI technology mimics the way humans understand language and offers analysts a swift way to retrieve and review any significant elements of the dialogue.
We dive deep into 3 the data to draw ground-breaking insights and
drive extraordinary efficiencies
Our analytics is trained to draw advanced insights that are tailored to meet specific business objectives. For instance, sales trends indicating cross-selling opportunities and risks such as behavioural traits indicating potentially vulnerable customers can all be flagged automatically and elevated for human review. Data can be fed automatically into customer relationship management or quality assurance systems to drive operational efficiencies, optimise customer care, manage risks and improve regulatory compliance. Recordsure was created in 2012 after the gap in the market was identified while the founders helped major UK
WHO WE ARE Recordsure is a transformational fintech and regtech solution designed to drive performance and culture within finance and other regulated industries. Comprised of a unique blend of regulatory experts, AI specialist and language scientists, we are firm believers that knowledge is power, and specialise in unlocking unparalleled intelligence and efficiencies to keep our partners ahead of the curve.
AT A GLANCE We transform the performance and culture of regulated organisations by providing them with unique, actionable insights from their customer interactions on a highly scalable basis, using advanced AI to help them gather valuable data from all their customer touch points. Working alongside their existing IT, we then use automation to organise it at scale and draw powerful insights that drive efficiencies, performance and culture.
WHAT WE DO ‘Unleash revolutionary business intelligence from all your customer interactions’ – we transform the performance and culture of regulated organisations by providing them with unique, actionable insights from their customer interactions on a highly scalable basis www.thepower50.com
retail banks improve their compliance. Recording and analytics technology of a high enough standard couldn’t be found externally, so the decision was made to build the solution in-house and a team was created, blending a unique combination of financial regulatory specialists, artificial intelligence technicians and language scientists. Recordsure received £14milion of investment from the UK’s Business Growth Fund in order to scale up and since 2016 we’ve seen revenue growth of 250 per cent year-on-year. We now count large banks and UK government departments among our clients. Recordsure holds a world-leading pool of real-life, specialist conversation and language data from the finance sector. It is rich in intellectual property and this value base only increases as the client base grows and we build further unique insights and data sets. While we continue to strengthen our domain expertise and influence in the UK financial sector, we are also expanding our global presence, with momentum growing internationally, across Australia and beyond.
COMPANY: Recordsure FOUNDED: 2012 CATEGORY:
Customer insight KEY PERSONNEL:
Joe Norburn, CEO (right) HEAD OFFICE: United Kingdom PRESENCE IN: Australia TEL: +44 (0)20 3772 7272 WEBSITE: www.recordsure.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/recordsure/ TWITTER: @recordsure
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TFP50#KOMPLI-GLOBAL
TAKING THE FIGHT TO MONEY LAUNDERERS Jane Jee, CEO of Kompli-Global, explains how regtech is transforming the financial crime and regulatory compliance space by combining cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology with human expertise Banks are under immense pressure to change their traditional business models and become digital-first. Online banking penetration in the UK reached an incredible 69 per cent in 2018. Meanwhile, mobile banking has grown in popularity – according to data from the British Bankers Association and EY, cited by Finextra, consumer use of banking apps increased 356 per cent from 2012 to 2017. Lloyds Group, Barclays, and the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) – the UK’s largest banks – alone added millions of mobile users in 2016, reaching eight million, 5.7 million, and 4.2 million mobile banking customers, respectively. At the same time, banks are having to handle the challenge of meeting growing demands in anti-money laundering compliance. Regulated entities from financial services, real estate, legal and accounting, are all obliged to carry out customer due diligence (CDD) checks to minimise the risk of their organisation abetting money laundering. But these know-your-customer (KYC) checks should not just be carried out on new and existing customers; organisations must be comprehensive when vetting partners and suppliers and assessing new employees, too. This enhanced due diligence means being meticulous in continuously searching for ‘adverse information’ or ‘negative news’ on customers, partners and staff. Ongoing research is essential in identifying if the people or companies you do business with have links with the world of organised crime. Failure to
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comply with legislation could have serious implications for a bank’s business, with the risk of heavy fines.
SORTING FRIEND FROM FOE Digital data is being created at an astonishing rate – 90 per cent of the data on the internet has been created since 2016, according to an IBM Marketing Cloud study. Around the world, more than 44 billion GB of data was created each day in 2016. This is an overwhelming amount of information for a regulated entity to sift through. Many compliance managers seek to supplement database research with searches on Google and similar commercial search engines. However, this isn’t enough to comply with regulations for a number of reasons. Google is not designed for AML purposes and is incapable of exploring the ‘deep Web’ for non-indexed data – which makes up 90 per cent of all the information available on the internet. The algorithms employed by commercial search engines cannot understand or judge the context of a piece of data. As a result, they are unable to provide researchers with a meaningful ordering of results and can even provide false positives that compliance managers will need to read and consider before discounting. Worse, results may be skewed by search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques designed to bury and
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suppress bad news, as well as other factors, such as an analyst’s previous search history, preferences and location. All of these can combine to leave significant gaps in a bank’s KYC searches.
CHOOSE YOUR WEAPON There are two ways to handle the scale of the task. One is to hire an army of multi-lingual compliance managers, working around the clock to review endless data sources. Not only is this costly and time-consuming, but it is also inefficient, leaving banks vulnerable to missing vital data. The alternative is to employ regulatory technology (regtech) to do the heavy lifting for you. Advanced regtech, incorporating innovative machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) technology – commonly known as artificial intelligence – is the greatest weapon in banks’ AML armoury. This is because it has been designed specifically to help banks fully automate KYC searches to minimise onboarding times while optimising due diligence. Kompli-Global’s Kompli-QED™, for example, replicates the very best due diligence analyst by deploying such technology. Using more than 500 search terms in multiple languages, the solution can perform real-time searches of the surface and deep Web, as well as other key global databases for information on any new or existing customers.
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Such AI technology can perform multiple KYC checks simultaneously and search 24 hours a day, seven days a week, enabling it to flag any adverse media to human compliance managers the instant it appears. In doing so, it can help to identify potential bad actors even before they are onboarded as team members, customers or new suppliers, and fulfil the regulated entity’s obligation to carry out ongoing monitoring for compliance purposes. With all these benefits in mind, it is unsurprising that the UK Financial Conduct Authority encourages the use of innovative technologies to support risk assessment processes.
TIME TO ACT The Fifth Money Laundering Directive (5MLD) is due to come into force on
WHO WE ARE Kompli-Global has developed the world’s first networked, multi-jurisdictional, multi-lingual due diligence search utility. Our software-as-a-service desktop portal Kompli-IQ™ performs comprehensive searches on target subjects, including corporate entities, individuals, trusts and other organisations (public and private). Searches include interrogation of indexed content from the Web using traditional search engines but also non-indexed, ‘deep Web’ sites and unstructured data. We prioritise the reliability and credibility of sources so banks fulfil their legislative duties. This is transforming the financial crime and regulatory compliance space by combining cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) technology, human expertise and effective processes. We enable businesses to perform fast, accurate and thorough customer due diligence checks in an increasingly complex and regulated environment. Kompli-IQ™ empowers organisations to consistently and repeatedly screen for negative news on target entities that would otherwise be unavailable, too
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Google is not designed for AML purposes and is incapable of exploring the ‘deep Web’ for non-indexed data 10 January 2020. Over the next year, regulated entities will come under the microscope; failure to optimise due diligence processes now could mean they are not prepared for when the new Directive comes into force – leaving them vulnerable to significant penalties. Money launderers are getting smarter all the time, using the latest technology to cover their tracks. The financial industry needs to be smarter, too, and take the fight to their door. time consuming or expensive to analyse. Kompli-Global is led by barrister and compliance expert Jane Jee, augmented by a worldwide advisory community of compliance experts stationed locally in key locations.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: Kompli-Global FOUNDED: 2016 CATEGORY: Regtech KEY PERSONNEL:
CEO, Jane Jee (above) and CCO, Martin Pashley (right) HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: New York TEL: +44 (0)20 3199 7115 WEBSITE: www.kompli-global.com LINKEDIN: LinkedIn/company/ kompli-global TWITTER: @kompliglobal
WHAT WE DO ‘Deeper due dilligence’ TheFintechPower50 45
REVOLUT-IONARY ROAD Revolut challenged the banking sector on almost every front when it launched in 2015. Now it’s about to become the first of the challengers to provide investment services. The revolution continues…
When we launched Revolut in the July of 2015, we did so with an overtly irrational ambition – or so other people thought – of turning the financial sector on its head. Today, we have almost achieved it. Going into 2019, as we expand into Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the US, with a sky-rocketing customer growth and multiple new products, our revolutionary global bank will soon need more dreams and ambitions, to crunch.
HOW DID WE COME SO FAR, SO FAST? Over the last few years, the fintech sector has exploded. It has undergone so much innovation and experimentation, sometimes stretching the seams of orthodox financial regulations, that authorities had to think up new boundaries. Financial services have crossed borders, become more inclusive and attend to
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people of all backgrounds, financial requirements and capabilities through technology-based options that were unthinkable a decade ago. Today, businesses and consumers have multiple choices when it comes to banking and money management – they can choose between methods of payments, wealth and asset allocation, performing transactions, investing in insurance options, performing every other banking task, specialised or mundane, and more. So what makes Revolut different or more attractive than traditional banks? We provide an app-based current account to our customers that they can use to make payments in foreign countries, across 150 currencies, with no additional fees. Revolut users can hold and exchange
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We hope to continue the trend of disruption in the investment vertical
24 currencies in-app and send free domestic and international money transfers based on the real exchange rate. And all these with an app-based current account that needs less than a minute for setting up. Additionally, we will roll out more complicated and steadfast wealth management and insurance options in the coming months. We have already started delivering device insurance and travel medical insurance, right through the app. With us, users can also access instant credit within two minutes from anywhere in the world at 50 per cent cheaper rates than banks. Revolut users can lock-in exchange rates in real-time through the app, which also offers one of the easiest and fastest ways to buy, hold and exchange cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and Ripple. And soon, they will be able to invest in stocks from British and US-listed firms as well as exchange-traded funds via our new commission-free trading platform.
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TFP50#REVOLUT The Revolut app comes with enhanced security and allows choosing between contactless or swipe payments. Additionally, it sends users instant heads-up on spending with notifications, categorisations and budgeting controls. Since our inception, we have provided clear benefits, value for money, and amazing customer experience.
WHAT ELSE? This August, we launched our prepaid card called Revolut Metal with mainly our millennial clients in mind. It’s designed to make life more convenient. If you carry Revolut Metal during your travels, you can withdraw up to £600 per month, transaction-free, at international locations and for each of those transactions made outside of Europe, you’ll receive up to one per cent cashback in conventional currency or crypto – it’s your choice. Within Europe, too, users will receive 0.1 per cent cashback, plus unlimited foreign exchanges and free international money transfers. Add to that a concierge service for booking flights and event tickets that includes travel insurance and we are convinced that Revolut Metal will be the card of the future and a must for travellers.
WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO ACHIEVE? Trust and transparency. They go hand in hand with technological innovations. This is where Revolut has brought about massive changes – not only with what can be done, but also with what it is offering to do for its clients. Instead of taking advantage of consumers, instead of pushing hidden fees or dated technologies on them, our global transparent banking philosophy finds strength in rebuilding the banking business from the ground up and putting people back in control of their money. Consumers have the choice today to move away from banks that don’t cater to their specific needs or are not clear on how their products work or how they charge their fees. When a service provider fills up all the right gaps for its customers, they don’t need superficial efforts to woo them. It’s no wonder then that ever since founders Nikolay Storonsky and Vlad Yatsenko started Revolut, we have signed up more than three million customers across Europe, representing a huge increase in user growth, year on year. And it’s all been achieved with zero above-the-line marketing spend. In the US, where Revolut is sailing soon, we have a waiting list of more
WHO WE ARE Revolut is regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and holds a European emoney licence. An application for a full banking licence is underway. We currently have more than three million customers in Europe with more than 350,000 daily active users and we are acquiring more at the rate of 8,000 every single day. Our retail banking features include an app-based current account with individual GBP and EUR IBANs that can be set up in 60 seconds and with which customers can hold and exchange 24 currencies. They can also make not just hassle-free but totally free domestic and international money transfers and spend abroad with no fees in more than 150 currencies with a contactless
than 50,000 potential customers waiting for us already. By April 2018, we had raised $250million to secure a valuation of $1.7billion, five times Revolut’s worth a year ago, simply through the surge in numbers of users. The investment came from Index Ventures, Ribbit Capital, and Russian tech investor Yuri Milner’s DST Global, which had earlier invested in Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb and Twitter. This makes us one of the fastest fintechs in Europe to reach unicorn status. Going forward, Revolut will steadfastly break down barriers that prevent people from investing. Revolut will soon become the first digital bank to provide both investment and everyday banking services, probably through the same app. With its new products, RoboAdvisor (with Wealthsimple) and commission-free trading in 2019, we will do away with high investment costs, broker fees, complicated app interfaces and sign-up processes. Smart technology and procedural transparency motivates all of Revolut’s functionalities and makes it the user’s favourite. We plan to continue our trend of disruption, and this time in the investment vertical.
AT A GLANCE Mastercard or Visa. If they run short of cash, they can make £200 per month of free international ATM withdrawals and they will always receive the real exchange rate (interbank exchange rate). That’s not an exhaustive list of features! Business customers are also allocated individual EUR and GBP IBANS and have the same access to currency exchange services. They have the option to issue free corporate cards to employees to spend abroad with no fees, and we provide a state-of-the-art platform to manage all their business finances. An open application programming interface (API) automates payments with the potential to connect to business platforms, such as Xero and Stripe. Merchant accounts will be added soon.
COMPANY: Revolut FOUNDED: 2015 CATEGORY: Fintech KEY PERSONNEL:
Founders Nikolay Storonsky (above) and Vlad Yatsenko (right) HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: Krakow, Moscow, St Petersburg, Vilnius, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, Athens, Bucharest TELEPHONE: +44 (0)20 3725 7583 WEBSITE: www.revolut.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/revolut/ TWITTER: @RevolutApp
WHAT WE DO ‘Radically better banking’ www.thepower50.com
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TFP50#VIVA WALLET
VIVA WALLET.
0% acquiring fees for the first time in Europe The flexible, Cloud-based payment provider for physical or electronic stores Viva Wallet is a highly competent ‘digital payments factory’ that harnesses strong technological capacity, acquired over 18 years of developing transaction-based applications for banks and other institutions. It offers European businesses innovative, multi-feature smart Android card terminals (eFTPOS), card processing through its own, Cloud-based infrastructure (Microsoft Azure), card-present and card-not-present acquiring services, card issuing for business debit cards and localised, country-specific, IBAN-enabled payment accounts. In summer 2018, it addressed the challenge of high acquiring fees by offering commission-free acceptance charges to current and new customers. For the first time in Europe, merchants who use Viva Wallet’s card terminals and eshop payment solutions, as well as Viva Wallet’s company debit card for the daily expenses of their business, can effectively set their payment acceptance fees to zero. “We strive to combine our superior Cloud-based processing
infrastructure and our card acceptance and card issuing services into integrated, value-adding payment products,” says Dr Yannis Larios, Business Development Director at Viva Wallet. “We offer our retail merchants in Europe the unique opportunity to have zero charges for all their Visa and Mastercard transactions that are made by European consumers’ cards, and when they use funds through their Viva Wallet business debit cards.” Besides its innovative products and payment services, Viva Wallet also operates on its own bespoke, end-to-end infrastructure. Instead of relying on third-party platforms and costly licences, Viva Wallet has built a payments and card processing infrastructure from scratch, using its strong team of engineers. Also, the company uses Microsoft Azure to run its operations, which allows it to be always available, always on, ensuring that there is no down time and no ‘scheduled maintenance cut-off time’ for its clients. The multiple Microsoft Azure sites from which it operates gives it high reliability and unmatched scalability, allowing it to quickly adapt to changes in demand growth and peaks across Europe. Even though Europe is a single market, in terms of payments it’s a very fragmented one, and yet other payments providers serving these markets do not offer services
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localised to specific regions. By contrast, Viva Wallet offers its merchants payment accounts with an IBAN that’s localised to where they are. For example, a UK based start-up will have a UK IBAN, a Belgium based company will have a BE IBAN. This facilitates transfers for merchants at a lower cost and renders the service more familiar to them, making it far easier to transact from day one. Other payment providers may be able to offer their services in several countries, but they do so with an IBAN based in their country of origin. Viva Wallet is also multilingual – it uses the language of the merchant and even specific dialects. Currently preparing for its third round of funding, Viva Wallet’s aspiration is to have the largest footprint of any payment provider in Europe. Having grown rapidly – it already has offices in the UK, Belgium, Romania, Greece and Cyprus – it plans to establish others in Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands during the first quarter of 2019.
We strive to combine our superior Cloud-based processing infrastructure and our card acceptance and card issuing services into integrated, value-adding payment products
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www.thepower50.com
WHO WE ARE Viva Wallet is a global, Cloud-based digital payments factory, providing innovative and reliable acquiring and issuing services to professionals and businesses of any size, based on their individual needs. It is a licensed emoney institution and Principal Member of Mastercard and Visa for issuing and acquiring as well as being a partner to leading global companies, such as Microsoft, Alipay and PAX.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: Viva Wallet FOUNDED: 2010 CATEGORY: Card present and online payment services KEY PERSONNEL: Haris Karonis, Founder & CEO (above) HEAD OFFICE: Greece PRESENCE IN: UK, Belgium, Cyprus, Romania and Greece TEL: +44 (0) 203 665 8171 WEBSITE: www.vivawallet.com/ LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/viva-wallet/ TWITTER: @VivaWallet
WHAT WE DO ‘Open to all payments’
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TFP50#PAYBASE
RAISING THE BAR
OF WHAT PAYMENTS CAN AND SHOULD DO The Paybase platform is offering merchants a portal to a new world where they can leave their payments baggage behind and make the impossible possible
2018 has been a milestone year for Paybase – we have launched with our first set of clients and taken a big step forward in changing the payments industry. However, we believe in 2019 we will make our biggest impact yet. Put simply, the biggest impact that we hope and expect to make is allowing far more businesses to get their innovative products and services to
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market. For businesses that connect buyers and sellers, such as online marketplaces and gig/sharing economy platforms, payments can be a nightmare. The payments industry is plagued by legacy technology and legacy thinking, meaning that routing payments between multiple parties is no small feat, with these ‘platform businesses’ often having to take in all funds centrally, calculate their
commission, then make manual payouts to their merchants. This approach requires large amounts of operational overhead, dedicated staff and, as of January 2018, businesses to be licensed as payments institutions. The time and resource required to take payments therefore forces these firms to compromise on what they want to build. For many, this compromise can result in a core aspect of their business being lost or, in certain
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cases, the business simply failing to get off the ground. Exciting, user-friendly products and services do not make it to market due to the rigidity of payments. This is the problem that Paybase solves. The flexibility of the Paybase platform allows businesses to handle payments however they want. Not only can payments go directly from buyers to sellers, with the platform business automatically taking whatever commission it wishes, but this commission can vary by merchant, transaction size, date and more. Perhaps you have an online marketplace and want social media influencers to be instantly rewarded when they direct customers to your website. Alternatively, it may be essential that merchants are able to have funds withdrawn to their bank account instantly. Whatever payments requirements your business has, Paybase ensures that they are met. But this flexibility does not just apply to payments. We help you create a risk management framework which fits your business model. We are able to automatically block a transaction of £200 for a customer that has created an account within the past 24 hours, but allow a transaction of £500 for a more established user, for example. Crucially, we work with you to identify your usual and expected activity, then build an adaptable framework around it, providing a far more thorough and accurate approach to financial crime prevention. This type of flexibility in risk management is not seen anywhere else. Whilst Paybase believes all firms should be able to build the business they want, no matter what payments requirements they have, as well as keeping their customers and merchants safe, we can go further. We are not just set up to support your business, but to improve it. As your business grows you may seek to introduce a tailored loyalty programme to augment your customer spending, based on transaction data that we provide you with. Merchants can be encouraged to increase sales through dropping commission charges after they have not made a sale for X amount of time. Paybase was built to accommodate this type of iteration rapidly from both a technical and operational perspective, meaning this
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The time and resource required to take payments forces firms to compromise on what they want to build… This compromise can result in the business simply failing to get off the ground type of product enhancement can be introduced almost instantly to set you apart in an increasingly saturated market. The truth is that there are so many ways in which our platform can be used that firms are likely to utilise our solution in
ways we have not even imagined. What we can be sure of, is that we are making it possible for firms to build the business they want, allowing more to get to market and providing the consumer a far richer experience in a variety of industries.
WHO WE ARE Founded in 2016 and headquartered in London, Paybase has gained industry recognition for revolutionising the world of finance. It is tipped as one of the UK’s 50 most disruptive companies. Paybase provides an end-to-end platform that covers payments, compliance and risk management. Specialising in payments between multiple parties, it is a perfect solution for online marketplaces, gig/sharing economy platforms and products with sophisticated payments requirements. We offer the most flexible solution on the market, which allows our clients to build the business they want, instead of being constricted by the rigidity of existing payment technology and uncompromising operational processes. Our solution enables businesses to leverage payments to their competitive advantage, taking them from something purely transactional, to a feature that genuinely enhances their product. Configurable loyalty programmes and unrivalled customer insights are just some of the features our clients can offer to attract and retain their buyers and sellers. Too many payment platforms offer an out-of-the-box, disengaging plug-in
service that ensures initial simplicity and not much else. Paybase offers a partnership, providing our clients with training, support and advice from a team with decades of experience, as well as peace of mind that their business meets all current and future regulatory standards. With everything rolled into one unified application programming interface (API), Paybase can be set up with one simple integration. It is the first choice for businesses with big ideas that want to grow quickly.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: Paybase FOUNDED: 2016 CATEGORY: Payments KEY PERSONNEL:
CEO/Co-founder Anna Tsyupko (above) and CTO/Co-founder Chris Wessels (right) HEAD OFFICE: London TEL: +44 (0)20 3909 8560 WEBSITE: paybase.io/ LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/paybase/ TWITTER: @Paybase
WHAT WE DO ‘Raising the bar of what payments can and should do’ – Paybase meets the sophisticated payments requirements of online marketplaces and gig/sharing economy platforms TheFintechPower50 51
TFP50#N26
THE FUTURE OF BANKING IS TFP50#EARTHPORT
MOBILE
App-based N26 set out to be the bank that ‘the world loves to use' by eliminating the challenges and costs of physical finance
The world is undergoing a digital transformation and the move to mobile has triggered a seismic shift in the way customers interact with everyday products and services. Yet retail banking is one of the few industries that has not kept pace with the speed of digital advancements. Most traditional banks still operate in a physical world, tied to the whims of branch opening hours and mountains of paperwork. But customers are demanding more from their banks than they did 20 years ago. In 2014 the Millennial Disruption Index – a three-year survey carried out
by Viacom – reported that 71 per cent of millennials in the US would rather visit the dentist than go to the bank. In the UK, a November 2018 survey revealed that 80 per cent of millennials delay important financial decisions due to difficulty understanding banking products and services. It is clear that the future of banking is digital. More specifically, it is mobile. N26 is the mobile bank that understands the financial challenges of the mobile generation. Focussed on meeting the everyday needs of modern day customers, N26 is 100 per cent app-based and designed to create a
seamless banking experience. By putting emphasis on simplicity and ease of use, N26 believes it can turn exasperating experiences (like bricks-and-mortar banking) into ones of enjoyment, while placing control over finances back in the hands of customers. A sharp focus on design and intuitive user experience gives customers ultimate flexibility to organise, control and update their financial world. Following a paperless sign-up, which only takes a few minutes, customers have their purchases automatically categorised and can organise money in sub-accounts to easily set financial goals. Daily payment and withdrawal limits can be changed in real-time at the touch of a button. The app also provides an easy-to-understand summary of spending and instant notifications on every transaction. With no markups on overseas transactions and with no hidden fees, N26 customers have the freedom
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N26 is the mobile bank that understands the financial challenges of the mobile generation
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to bank from anywhere. Launched in 2015, N26 holds a full European banking licence and is the fastest growing digital bank in Europe, with more than 1.5 million customers across 22 countries. Without IT legacy or the expense of running physical branches, the bank is able to offer customers a cost-efficient alternative to the traditional banks. Valentin Stalf, CEO and Co-founder of N26 remarks: “Money management should not be a time-consuming and frustrating experience. N26 has been designed to simplify banking and empower people to take control of their finances.” And simplifying banking doesn’t stop at borders. N26 has a vision to build a bank that the world loves to use. Globally, people face the same challenges and complexities when it comes to banking. A customer in the US encounters the same as someone in France. This shared experience is one that N26 aims to eliminate for everyone.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: N26 GmbH FOUNDED: 2013 CATEGORY: Online mobile banking KEY PERSONNEL:
Valentin Stalf, Cofounder and CEO (right) HEAD OFFICE: Berlin OFFICES IN: Berlin, New York, Barcelona and London WEBSITE: n26.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/n26/ TWITTER: @n26uk
WHAT WE DO 'The bank you’ll love to use' www.thepower50.com
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INFLUENCER # GHELA BOSKOVICH
THE PRIVACY PREMIUM
Fintech commentator Ghela Boskovich makes the case for banks to create new revenue streams from the most valuable capital of all
Much has been written about the fundamental gap between Internet 1.0 and Internet 2.0, what is required to fix it, and what underlying infrastructure needs due consideration in order to bridge that gap. Why bother mentioning this in relation to banking? Why should anyone in financial services care about fixing the Internet? Because what is fundamentally broken about the internet is the definition of what the future banking business model will be: identity. Specifically, identity-as-a-service. There is no standard protocol for identity baked into the framework of the internet The current ‘identity provider’ is social media, with Facebook taking most of the market, but that identity service is single-faceted, unlike actual identity, which is multi-faceted, complex, contextual and dynamic. Banks are in a prime place to flesh out these facets, as they sit on some of the richest transactional data that puts the context back into Identity. Banks have the data. Fintech has the solutions to manage that data effectively and efficiently. Judicious collaboration between the two makes identity-as-a-service an obvious business model for financial services. As banks’ fee-based revenue continues to decline, the commercialisation of value-added
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services becomes paramount to continued industry success. What’s more, regulatory changes are ploughing the field for those first movers into the identity custodian space to reap commercial rewards. In the wake of the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) mandate to authenticate every single transaction, that authentication is essentially a validation of the identity of the individual (or company), which maps to existing know-your-customer (KYC) requirements. Here is the bank’s competitive advantage over Facebook: the banks hold record of a person’s recognised government-issued identity. Personhood, not social presence, maps to richer data: drivers’ licences, passports, healthcare, movement and travel, voting rights, government benefits, etc. These supporting data sets fully flesh out dynamic contextual identity. Legal personhood is draped in other facets of identity that are contextual: biometric (security context), behavioural, psychometric, commercial and consumptive, and geographic. And all these facets are dynamic, changing on the surface according to circumstance, but consistent at the core (the personhood). Added to PSD2, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now imposes a privacy framework that manages the connection between an individual’s sensitive personal data and an authorised transaction. No longer are banks just managing the transaction, nor the movement of money; they are now managing identity and privacy. And it is privacy that becomes the crucial component. Privacy is, for the first time, a human right. A right that is under threat precisely because there is no common protocol for identity in Internet 1.0, an oversight that application layer commercial ventures, like Facebook, have been able to exploit. Identity is not, nor should it be, consolidated into a single entity with obligations to only its
shareholders and not its users. Yet that is what has happened under Internet 1.0. The banking industry has an opportunity as we move to Internet 2.0 to not just shape the protocol for identity (which is a technical question, much of which is being debated in the blockchain and personal key encryption sphere), but to manage it and be custodians of it. How financial services adopt this technology and the framework for interoperability across the industry will shape its ability to evolve money transactions (which no longer require a bank middleman) into the next value-oriented business model of identity and privacy custodianship. The definition of wealth is also changing: privacy is the new capital wealth. Identity data has commercial value; the more privacy constraints around it, the higher the market value. Control over who has permission to access that data needs managing and that management has commercial value as well. In the very near future, those with the most control over their privacy will hold the most capital wealth. Control will be worth a very high premium indeed and in the sprint to Internet 2.0, how the banking industry chooses to collaborate will determine how quickly it is positioned to be that custodian.
AT A GLANCE Ghela Boskovich describes herself as an ‘inclusive tech culturalist, fintech fanatic and FemTech founder’, the last a worldwide community working towards inclusion and diversity in financial services. She is one of the most dynamic and thoughtful voices in fintech today. WEBSITE ghelaboskovich.com/ LINKEDIN https://uk.linkedin.com/ in/ghelaboskovich TWITTER @GhelaBoskovich
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TFP50#HAYTHAM KADDOURA
SHAPING A SINGLE VERSION OF TRUTH Zoya Malik of The Fintech Times and SmartStream CEO Haytham Kaddoura explore how AI and blockchain can improve data quality and reduce cost ZOYA MALIK: Can you give us the backstory to SmartStream?
HAYTHAM KADDOURA: We started as a processing platform provider, primarily addressing reconciliation. Over the years, we have branched out into ancillary areas, such as cash and liquidity management, corporate actions and expense management, which handles chargebacks between brokers and other counterparties. Since 2015, we have formed a joint venture with JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to develop a Reference Data Utility (RDU) that picks up data from various financial exchanges, along with data feeds from digital financial news and information providers, such as Bloomberg and Reuters, in order to deliver a greater level of accuracy. RDU is about delivering clean and rich data to financial institutions via more developed data sets than banks can access individually. At the moment, we are focussed on Exchange Traded Derivatives (ETDs) and expanding into equities. In 2019, we will be looking at fixed income as an asset class. ZM: What are the problems you are addressing for your bank partners?
HK: The data that is being pumped into banks’ various operations is not necessarily consistent; inaccuracies creep in from individual exchanges and financial news agencies. These discrepancies can be time-consuming and costly for the banks, who end up spending significant resources on addressing the shortcomings, i.e. filling in the blanks. We do that on their behalf while making that data available to a whole host of financial institutions.
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This eliminates duplication of banks’ individual efforts and improves speed, accuracy and cost effectiveness in the processing of reconciliations. ZM: How has SmartStream invested in AI and blockchain over the past year?
HK: Towards the end of 2018, we announced that we would set up SmartLabs Innovation Centres in Vienna, the objective being to build a team to look at implementing AI within our existing solution sets. A Cambridge Lab will also concentrate on blockchain. Prioritising AI as a strategy is a critical investment for us and it’s proving a great success. SmartLabs invites banks to sit within the organisation and, with the appropriate Chinese walls in place, these institutions can share their anomalous data so that we can make it more intelligible, enabling them to better understand why they have breakdowns in processes. SmartStream has almost 30 years of market expertise within the industry and our solutions are running at 70 of the world’s top 100 partner institutions. So, we are able to test our blockchain technology while increasing our understanding in tandem with our partners to evolve strategic solutions. In 2019, these solutions will become commercially available to smaller partner institutions who may not have the data volumes of a Tier 1 organisation. Designed to be plug and play and modular, these solutions can sit on both our own existing platforms and directly on the client’s system. One of the solutions that we are developing is communication of verification and reconciliation of orders, which is happening at around 20 banks
AT A GLANCE Haytham Kaddoura is CEO of SmartStream Technologies, one of the most influential global fintechs, providing solutions to more than 1,500 clients, including more than 70 of the world’s top 100 banks, eight of the top 10 asset managers and eight of the top 10 custodians. WEBSITE www.smartstream-stp.com LINKEDIN uk.linkedin.com/ in/haytham
as an on-premise offering. We can put this solution onto a blockchain environment so that clients can then see the data online, as a single version of truth and thus discrepancies can be reduced between organisations. We will have a major announcement on AI and I am confident we will have a major impact in the blockchain space. ZM: In which are of your service are you seeing most growth?
HK: Corporate action is one of our fasting growing business lines. Let’s say an organisation announces an action globally across multiple financial jurisdictions where it must communicate, for example, a stock strip or a M&A. The data needs to be acquired by financial institutions to understand the implications for client portfolios. Historically, that’s been a massively labourious undertaking by banks because very few institutions are able to afford automated processing. We are creating solutions for smaller institutions that hold securities and are subject to corporate actions that permit them to keep pace.
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TFP50#STARLING BANK
CHOOSE YOUR
PARTNER Starling Bank, the leading mobile-only UK bank, is changing the face of banking in many ways.
Chief among these is through the Starling Marketplace, which aims to be a hub or ‘mission control’ for customers’ entire financial lives. The Marketplace is a space in the app that connects customers to financial products and services offered by third-party providers. It enables customers to visualise and manage everything from their mortgage to their insurances, savings to investments. It is a compelling example of Open Banking in action. Through the Marketplace, Starling is helping build a new digital financial services ecosystem with the customer at the heart of it. This dynamic, collaborative approach to full-service banking is already having a huge impact on the finance industry. Over the next year, the Starling Marketplace will grow to include more partners and therefore will offer more
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Starling set out to be not just a bank but an indispensable part of its customers’ financial lives through collaboration
choice for customers, both for personal and business current accounts. Starling has already partnered with nine digital companies for the personal account Marketplace. They include the mortgage broker Habito, investment platforms Wealthify and Wealthsimple, pensions platform PensionBee, insurance provider Kasko, digital receipt provider Flux, life insurance adviser Anorak, mobile phone insurer So-Sure, and loyalty platform Tail. There are also three Marketplace partners for business (Tail, Flux and insurance provider Zego). “To our knowledge this is by far the largest marketplace offered by a financial
institution in Europe and we have a pipeline of another 80 partners that are expected to join our ecosystem in the near future,” says Anne Boden, founder and CEO of Starling Bank. Partnerships within the Starling Marketplace are enabled by open application programming interfaces (APIs). “We have a set of public APIs that are freely available for anyone to use at developer.starlingbank.com – these APIs range from basic read-only information up to instructing payments via the API or, in the case of Raisin (the savings marketplace that has partnered with Starling) even creating an account via the API,” explains says Megan Caywood, chief platform officer at Starling Bank. “In the developer portal, potential partners can find our API documentation and can create a developer account and test their application in our Sandbox before requesting access to the public API.” Following a request to access the public
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API, Starling completes due diligence on potential partners who are carefully selected and integrated before launching in the app. An upcoming Marketplace partnership for Starling business customers will be the peer-to-peer lender Growth Street. It follows the launch of the first UK mobile-only business accounts by Starling in March 2018. Over the next year, small business banking will be a key focus as it supports small businesses by providing fast digital banking with no monthly fees. Banking-as-a-service will also be a key part of how Starling works with other businesses. Raisin UK, the savings marketplace, is the first partner to use Starling’s platform to offer its own service.
“Raisin UK will open an account with us in the name of an individual Raisin UK customer. We will send Raisin the account number and sort code for what is essentially a Raisin UK-branded account, powered by Starling. Raisin UK is then able to send instructions to us for transactions to be executed,” says Caywood. Such platformification is a fundamental part of some successful tech companies;
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The Starling Marketplace is a compelling example of Open Banking in action
Starling is now bringing it to finance. “Platform strategies have taken off in many other industries, with Airbnb, Uber and Apple becoming major players in the markets for accommodation, transport and music and yet owning no properties, vehicles or content themselves,” says Boden. “As a new-generation digital bank, Starling is now bringing the model to UK banking, enabling other businesses to build banking services on top of its own-label banking infrastructure.”
WHO WE ARE Starling is a completely different kind of bank. Based in London, it offers a mobile-only personal, business and joint accounts on Android and iOS. The Starling Marketplace allows customers to access to a wide range of complementary financial products through its app, while business customers have access to a B2B payments services offering. It is a fintech business with a banking licence, fully regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority and Prudential Regulation Authority and covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. It is directly connected to major payment schemes, including Faster Payments, SEPA, BACS, and Mastercard. Accounts can be set up in minutes and offer real-time notifications, spending insights, multiple payment methods (via Apple Pay, Google Pay, Fitbit Pay, Garmin Pay and Samsung Pay) with no unauthorised overdraft fees, in addition to traditional functions, such as the ability to set up Direct Debits, standing orders and payments. Customers even earn interest on their current accounts. Users can lock lost debit cards with one tap, while Starling’s Settle-Up
feature allows them to easily split bills with friends and family. Its London-based customer services team is available 24/7. Starling was the first to develop a mobile-only proposition for the Current Account Switch Service, allowing new users to switch between banks in a simple, reliable and stress-free way. It was also the first to offer Faster Payments with real-time notifications. Key to the Starling approach is the belief that having an IT department is a broken model. After a 30-year career in traditional banking, Starling Bank’s founder and CEO Anne Boden was clear from the outset that it’s more productive to have all the people with different skill sets who are going to be involved with a project, working together from end to end. While the big banks are spending billions on their digital transformations, Starling has built a fully functioning retail bank on its proprietary technology in less than 18 months for less than £20million. Because it began with a blank sheet, with no outmoded legacy IT systems in place, instead using only Cloud hosting, it is able to deliver more with certainty at a lower cost and in less time. It recently launched its pioneering
Starling Banking-as-a-Platform service, which enables businesses – including retailers, brands and fintechs – to develop and scale customised products quickly and efficiently. Because they are using Starling’s banking licence for customers to open accounts, they do not need to become a regulated entity. The first of these is with Raisin UK.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY:
Starling Bank FOUNDED: 2014,
app launched 2017 CATEGORY:
Mobile-only current accounts KEY PERSONNEL:
Anne Boden, Founder and CEO (above) HEAD OFFICE: London PRESENCE IN: UK TEL: +44 (0)20 3874 9514 WEBSITE: www.starlingbank.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ starlingbank/ TWITTER: @StarlingBank
WHAT WE DO ‘Bank anywhere' – we’re breaking ground, not catching up www.thepower50.com
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TFP50#PENDO SYSTEMS
SORT IT OUT!
In the uncodified muddle of unstructured data lies a golden opportunity that Pendo Systems is helping more and more businesses to realise Looking ahead to 2019, Pendo Systems’ focus is squarely set on explosive growth; organic, geographic and via key strategic partnerships. So, we feel confident our impact on financial services will be bigger than ever next year. The reason we’re anticipating such explosive growth is simple: more and
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more financial institutions are waking up to not only the scale of the problem presented by unstructured data, but the scale of the opportunity unstructured data represents to their business. Having saved existing customers more than $90million (customer data), Pendo has helped our partners discover a fast, accurate and repeatable process for
accessing the insights and information hidden away in millions upon millions of difficult-to-access documents. As a result of our two-year history of success, our production tested platform and experience with Tier 1 banks, Pendo has seen a dramatic increase in organic growth, a trend we see persisting through 2019 as we rapidly scale our business.
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Already in the past 12 months, we’ve almost doubled our staff, our customer count, and significantly increased the amount of data processed through the platform – we’ve indexed more than one billion pages of data in the last two years. Key to scaling the company are Pendo’s geographic expansion plans, with the firm looking to open offices in both Europe and the APAC region. Plans to open a European office are the most advanced but APAC is slated to be not too far behind – potential partners in Sydney are ready to plant the Pendo flag Down Under. We’ve always known the issue of unstructured data is agnostic to industry, but it’s also an issue that’s borderless and will require solving all around the globe. We are able to execute using the Pendo Platform, a web-based app that can be deployed on-premise, so within an enterprise’s firewall and with all the data security that comes with it. We are also able to deploy via Azure or AWS. The Platform ingests data, indexes and associates metadata with each and every page of each and every document so customers have immediate access to our Google-like natural search option that enables them to iterate across large volumes of data to better understand
what will provide the most value for a given project. They can then create structured data using either our classification or machine-learning tools. Once they’ve created structured data from previously unstructured sources the platform enables them to export that data in a variety of ways that best serves their project. Another way in which we can continue to impact the finance industry is through our extensive strategic partnership efforts. We’re currently in discussions with several
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Unstructured data is 80 per cent of the data held by business and it’s growing at 800 per cent per annum global professional services companies who will enable the platform to both extend its reach within financial services as well as other verticals where we currently don’t have the subject matter expertise that we enjoy in financial services. We are close to announcing our first two strategic partnerships with other fintechs with whom we do not compete, but who need access to the Pendo
WHO WE ARE Pendo Systems is a financial technology company providing global financial institutions with the tools, technology, and processes to access their data and become fully data transparent. Based in Montclair, New Jersey, with offices in Charlotte, NC, the Pendo senior management team has decades of experience developing, selling and supporting enterprise software solutions to global banks, insurance companies, and asset management firms.
AT A GLANCE The Pendo Machine Learning Platform is the first, production-ready, infinitely scalable machine-learning tool capable of transforming unstructured data into artificial intelligence (AI)-ready datasets that enable financial service enterprises to fully participate in the AI revolution. All AI platforms have been designed to run on structured data sets; the Pendo Machine Learning Platform enables you to quickly and easily turn your unstructured documents into structured, AI-ready data.
WHAT WE DO ‘Fuelling the AI revolution’ – delivering value across use cases in BPM/RPA; AML/trade finance;regulatory and tax reporting as well as risk and model management www.thepower50.com
Platform to capture and transform unstructured data and maintain full automation with their own tool. We are also looking to partner with BPM/RPA companies in order provide the structured data their systems need and that the Pendo platform is able to capture from unstructured sources. By enabling BPM/RPA systems to add unstructured data sources to the structured data they already consume Pendo is able to significantly enhance the value proposition of these tools. Last but not least, we are planning to add several platform enhancements in addition to the new machine-learning tools that we added recently. These changes will help increase both our customers’ productivity and make using the platform even easier. Perhaps our favourite stat regarding the growth in data came earlier this year from EMC, it stated that, by 2020 there will be more data in the world that there are stars in the universe. Given that unstructured data is 80 per cent of the data held by business and it’s growing at 800 per cent per annum, the need for Pendo isn’t likely to go away anytime soon.
COMPANY: Pendo
Systems FOUNDED: 2007 CATEGORY: Regtech KEY PERSONNEL:
Pamela Pecs Cytron, Founder/CEO (above) HEAD OFFICE: New Jersey TEL: 00 1 973 735 5788 WEBSITE: pendosystems.com LINKEDIN: www.linkedin.com/ in/ppecscytron/ TWITTER: @PendoSystemsInc
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TFP50#EARTHPORT
The way to pay Through its multiple, award-winning customer-centric products, Paysafe promotes financial inclusion – whatever the chosen method of transaction Paysafe believes that the core purpose of its business is to enable others to connect with consumers and transact seamlessly, be it using online cash, digital wallets, or cryptocurrencies. “I don’t think our job is to try to gaze in to a crystal ball and predict which methods are going to carry the day. I think our job is to build a platform that’s agnostic and that offers the consumer all of the alternatives, and lets the market decide where it wants to go,” says Daniel Kornitzer, Chief Business Development Officer. “So, when I say cash is important, I don’t mean that cash is more or less important than other payment methods. I believe that it’s important to give consumers the choice.” And that’s precisely what the global
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end-to-end payment solutions provider did again in June this year when it launched Paysafecash, an ultra-safe option for customers who prefer to pay for their online merchandise in hard currency. And data says there is a sizeable number of them. So, in this digital age, why the crush on cash? Partly because there are still more than two billion people in the world who didn’t have a bank account by 2015, according to the World Bank – more than 57 million of them in the European Union. While that doesn't entirely account for why 68 per cent of transactions worldwide are paid in cash, Kornitzer
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believes everyone should be able to participate in the digital economy – not having access to a regular bank card or mobile wallet shouldn’t stand in their way. “Paysafecash is a great tool for financial inclusion, no question,” he says. It’s the latest in a long line of innovative Paysafe products, such as paysafecard, that have taken off across the world, and which are helping to address consumer issues around fraud and security. A market leader in online prepaid payment methods, paysafecard recently bagged the Best Overall Payment Service Provider 2018 at the Central and Eastern European Gaming
Our job is to build a platform that’s agnostic and that offers the consumer all of the alternatives
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TFP50#PAYSAFE
Conference (CEEG) Awards, was named Payment Solution of the Year at the Global Gaming Awards in February and won Best Innovation in Payments at the EGR B2B Awards in April. Paysafe Group was also named Best PSP or Acquiring Solution Provider at the Emerging Payments Awards in 2018, and took the Payments Company of the Year award at the EGR North America Awards in June. “Today, we have around 3,000 employees in 12 global locations. We reported an annualised transactional volume of more than US$80billion in 2017,” says Kornitzer. Listed in the FTSE 250 until last year, Paysafe was acquired in December 2017 by a group of private equity investors, including Blackstone, CVC, and Francisco Partners. “Being part of those large and very prestigious groups is fantastic,” says Kornitzer, but he’s keen to stress it hasn’t altered his company’s ‘entrepreneurial DNA’. That was shown to be alive and well with the recent launch of a buy and sell cryptocurrency feature in its Skrill wallet.
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WHO WE ARE
AT A GLANCE
As well as servicing thousands of merchants worldwide, more than five million consumers login to a Paysafe-powered product every month.
COMPANY: Paysafe
Through digital wallets, with cash or direct from the bank, we believe that moving money should be easy, safe and fast – for everyone. We develop tailored solutions for online business, platforms or in-store, using a number of payment acceptance products: ■ Card payments: We accept all major credit and debit cards online in more than 17 currencies ■ Digital wallets: We help merchants open their doors to millions of customers by accepting Skrill and NETELLER wallets at checkout ■ Platform services: Paysafe’s processing services can be integrated into your platform or marketplace ■ Bank transfer: We offer bank transfer direct from the checkout ■ Cash online: We enable your customers to pay with cash online ■ Pay later: We can arrange online and in-store instalments and invoices ■ Point of sale: We provide end-to-end payments and business management tools for retailers “The consumer can buy four different cryptocurrencies and store balances and sell them as well for fiat,” explains Kornitzer. “We have also launched a money transfer service within our Skrill digital wallet that allows consumers to transfer money to people in a multitude of receiving countries and using local payment options." Then there’s GOLO, an innovative platform for mobile ordering, which enables a virtual marketplace to be built around places such as airports, office towers, hotels and campuses for people busy travelling or confined in a location. For example, airline crew or airline passengers can use GOLO to have food or duty-free delivered to the gate. “If an airline has a delay, it could put a $20 credit in each customer’s wallet so that they can order while they’re sitting at
FOUNDED: 1996 CATEGORY: Payments KEY PERSONNEL:
Joel Leonoff, CEO and President (right) HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: 12 locations worldwide, including London, Montreal, Houston, Vienna, Sofia and Hyderabad TEL: +44 (0) 207 608 8460 WEBSITE: www.paysafe.com LINKEDIN: Linkedin.com/company/ paysafegroup/ TWITTER: @PlugIntoPaysafe
WHAT WE DO ‘Plug into Paysafe’ – one network, one partnership, all the ways people pay
the gate and have a sandwich or a bottle of water delivered to them,” suggests Kornitzer. “If you’re at a hotel and forgot your shaving cream, you can have the local pharmacy deliver it to you.” With such a wide range of products, how does product diversification and design begin? “What defines Paysafe is our pioneering spirit; the deep-seated customer centricity of every individual in our company; and our healthy dissatisfaction with the status quo,” says Joel Leonoff, President and CEO of Paysafe Group. “We take pride in our ability to combine scale with nimbleness; reach with relevance; and to be able to offer an unrivalled portfolio of proprietary solutions that empower businesses and consumers to connect with each other using just one meeting point, Paysafe.”
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TFP50#EARTHPORT
ThePowerofNetworking The next 12 months will see plenty of industry changes, including the widespread adoption of open banking due to new customer journey empowerment and open banking initiatives that extend outside of the UK. Large banks will adopt marketplace-banking models and consumers will become more powerful by taking control of their data. The new technology that accompanies this will dramatically change the distribution model and strategy for financial services and a new ‘interoperability’ infrastructure layer will enter the market. This new environment will also see the evolution of three new financial experiences. And every one of these developments will be directly related to work done here at Bud. Wide-spread adoption of open banking Bud is out to simplify the relationship everyone has with their finances. In our case, we’re taking the amazing internal tools we have built and externalising them. The Bud Exchange (Bud.x), announced on stage at Money2020 in 2018, will be the way companies leverage our open banking tech within their own channels. This will help
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Bud has been busy joining the dots between data, customers and financial services in what it calls a new Age of Enlightenment businesses develop new services or improve existing customer journeys using ported customer data. Conversations we’ve had with companies who are excited about this have uncovered areas where we could add more value: creating the automation algorithms to make use of the data. These data enrichment services will also be included through Bud.x. Open banking initiatives extending outside of the UK Open banking stems from the European revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2). Next year, the European standards will be set and the ability to connect across more accounts will be possible. Bud has also been involved in developing open banking initiatives in countries such as Mexico and Australia, working with regulators and other interested parties to understand the positive impact open banking will have on people. This work will open up countries
that could benefit most from open banking. In developing nations, people with minimal credit histories could use open banking data to get capital to set up a business, for instance. Large banks will adopt marketplace-banking Banks are now looking seriously at new business models for potential growth. Marketplace banking is where a bank provides one core product, usually a current account, and uses third-party companies to provide the additional banking services. The seamlessness of this model is dependent on both sides developing application programming interfaces (APIs) and allowing their services to be joined together and accessed from one place (an app or website). While this might all seem rather counter-intuitive for banks, there are plenty of reasons why banks would allow their customers to connect with services they don’t own: Younger customers value choice and freedom They value things being simple and, most importantly, they value things on their terms. That means mobile first, no postage, no week-long wait… not things associated with traditional banking
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products. There is a risk banks may lose relevance with this market just because their products aren’t digitally up for it. Providing options alongside a bank’s own products is a great way to develop a product roadmap. If one product is being chosen over another consistently, it gives a pretty good idea of what product innovations banks should be focussing on. All of this considered, integrating more companies into your ecosystem will be a benefit. As shopping around becomes easier, why wouldn’t banks let people shop within their ecosystem? In the future, losing customers to competitors won’t be that bad. Losing customers from your ecosystem will be worse. Consumers will take control of their data The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has set out principles that help people understand the value their data has. It’s like a new ‘Age of Enlightenment’, only we are talking data, not philosophy. It will open up new conversations and business areas we’ve not even thought of yet. The right to data portability is a big area of interest and fits with the ethos of open banking. For instance, work we are doing with the
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There are plenty of reasons why banks would allow their customers to connect with services they don’t own UK Treasury will help renters verify their rental payments, which will be used as a way of adding to someone’s credit history, work that wouldn’t be possible without open banking. We are building this because the value is there in the data, we just need to put it in people’s hands. Technology will change the distribution model or financial services More companies are building APIs so that their products can be distributed in marketplaces – mentioned above. The financial market is evolving to favour low friction and high levels of user experience. Bud’s work with our banking partners means we have a large base to distribute to in an easier way: right in the customer’s banking app. We are using transactional and user-generated data to understand customers better than ever before and using microservices to connect individuals with the right products within our
WHO WE ARE Founded in 2015 by Ed Maslaveckas and George Dunning, two school friends from Yorkshire, Bud has pioneered market place banking and open banking technology in the UK, winning multiple innovation and banking awards as well as appearing on notable shortlists, such has the Fintech 50 and Innovators Race 50. Bud’s platform is currently being licensed by banks, such as HSBC, for retail and small business banking. It has worked with HM Treasury and has been through the Financial Conduct Authority’s sandbox process. Bud’s unique position leverages regulatory change (PSD2/open banking)
TFP50#BUD marketplace: making the experience easy for people. This ‘recommendation engine’ pre-qualifies leads for our partners, shortens journeys for customers to get new products and reduces the cost of acquisition dramatically. ‘Interoperability’ infrastructure will enter the market Every product we build and service we empower with our technology is adding to a new infrastructure in financial services. One that allows for banks and fintechs to collaborate and work together. One that favours customer outcomes and data empowerment and one that solves problems for banks, providing a base for quicker product development, for fintechs, in helping them find scale through new distribution, and for customers because they get to their desired outcomes using the most appropriate products. Three new financial experiences will enter the market Well, we can’t say much on this yet, but keep your eyes peeled! It’s going to be a busy year, but change like this is worth it.
AT A GLANCE and changing consumer expectations to provide data-driven benefits to users, financial institutions and service providers. For users, Bud aggregates all of their financial products in one place and provides data-driven assistance within their trusted banking app. For banks, it mitigates the risk of disintermediation and provides a new revenue model from a marketplace of third-party services. For service providers, Bud makes introductions to relevant customers at a reduced cost, enabling rapid scaling. We are always on the lookout for brilliant people to join our team. If you want to be a part of the change, check out our vacancies on our website.
COMPANY: Bud FOUNDED: 2015 CATEGORY:
Banking platform KEY PERSONNEL:
Ed Maslaveckas and George Dunning, Co-founders (right) HEAD OFFICE: London PRESENCE IN: Europe TEL: +44 7540696675 WEBSITE: thisisbud.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/bud-financial TWITTER: @this_is_bud
WHAT WE DO ‘The financial network combining APIs and data to create a new species of connected experiences’ www.thepower50.com
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FULL FULLMARKS!
UniZest provides a unique financial service for students studying abroad – and with five million of them leaving home every year, it’s set for growth The banking and financial markets are in the process of changing drastically – and changing on a global basis. Historically, these markets were dominated by monolithic institutions, organised and regulated nationally. A few established players provided broadly similar services in a quasi-competitive market. But the customers had little real choice, creating an in-built market inertia with no incentive for customers to change their banks. However, customers’ expectations have altered dramatically in the last 20 years. Customers now want to carry their banks around with them, 24/7. They expect the supplier of their financial services to smoothly enable their lives, rather than appearing to be an obstacle placed in their way. They need the same level of support and customer service as they get from other suppliers in more truly competitive markets.
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Current trends point towards a global, digitalised market with cross-border fluidity in which cryptocurrencies are the financial basis for a whole new structure. Financial technologies provide a digital, platform-based architecture in which a variety of commoditised financial services are delivered through plug-in tools, such as application programming interfaces (APIs), meaning there is no need to invest in large infrastructure systems that traditional banks are encumbered with. 'There is no doubt the market will change beyond recognition over the next 20 years. The traditional banking institutions are finding 'upstart' entrants from the world of fintech moving into their space. Some of these upstarts are now showing significant customer growth and have attained the mythical status of unicorns in a few short years – Revolut and Monzo among them. These companies have stolen a march on the traditional banks by the speed with which they are able to innovate their digital offerings and embrace the mobile as an integral part of the customer experience. They are lean and agile and are much more attuned with current customer trends and needs.
UniZest provides similar services and satisfies similar customer expectations but is pursuing a different corporate strategy. Where other companies require a broad reach across all markets, UniZest is focussed on a deeper relationship with a very particular section of the market: the international student. UniZest launched an online banking service for the international student community in the UK in 2017 that uniquely resolved a long-standing problem. Every international student needs a bank account in the host country. However, with no credit history or permanent address in that country, the process can take several weeks and requires multiple visits to a branch after they arrive. It is an outdated situation that negatively impacts the students and their universities,
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TFP50#UNIZEST WHO WE ARE UniZest is exclusively focussed on the five million students who leave home to study in foreign countries. Its suite of products and services empowers these customers to make the very most of their time in the country of study by allowing them to sort out their key financial needs prior to their arrival. Offering a frictionless transition to their study lives makes this major life experience as stress-free as possible for them, their families and the institutions where they will be studying Initially, UniZest launched an online banking and foreign exchange service in 2017, which uniquely resolved the
AT A GLANCE long-standing problem suffered by students related to opening a bank account in their host country. UniZest is now developing v2 of the service, which includes enhanced features and services within the core product, as well as a marketplace within which other relevant products and services are provided to students. We operate with partners who are fully regulated and compliant with all national regulations in each market to provide financial services and we work with students, university international departments, educational agents, and student accommodation providers.
COMPANY: UniZest FOUNDED: 2016 KEY PERSONNEL:
Peter Miles, CEO (right) CATEGORY:
Financial services for the international student market HEAD OFFICE: UK TEL: +44 (0)20 7881 2610 WEBSITE: www.unizest.co.uk LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/in/milespeter/ TWITTER: @Uni_Zest
WHAT WE DO ‘The go-to account for international students’ – offering frictionless living in a global market causing unnecessary stress and anxiety. Many bring large amounts of cash with them to use during this period, which is unsatisfactory and extremely risky. By providing compliance documents specific to their lives as students they are able to set up and start using their accounts before they arrive in the UK. In addition to account services, UniZest is now building v2 of the product, which includes a digital marketplace and
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provides students globally not just with access to finance, but also to other services and products that offer them a seamless transition in to their student lives. We were proud to have been chosen to take part in the London Mayor’s
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By providing compliance documents specific to their lives as students, they are able to set up and start using their accounts before they arrive in the UK
International Business Programme trade mission to China with the Deputy Mayor in July 2018. We are now part of the Lord Mayor of London’s Fintech China Bridge. UniZest was also selected as Start-Up of the Month by The Class of 2020; it was a finalist in the Professionals in International Education Digital Innovation of the Year Award; and it was one of 10 companies in the 2018 Barclays Techstars FinTech Programme. UniZest is building a global brand that will become the ‘go-to’ account for international students and will be offering that service, not just in the UK, but also in Europe, North America, Canada and Australia.
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TFP50#FORM3
AHEAD OF THE FIELD TFP50#EARTHPORT
Form3 broke the mould by facilitating the first payment service provider access to the UK Faster Payment Scheme. But there are more miles to be run in the real-time race
In today’s fast-moving international marketplace, time really is money and shifting cash without delay can literally make or break businesses. Real-time payments have been the Holy Grail of regulators, but where they do exist, they have been limited to bank-to-bank exchanges, at least in the UK. Until now that is. In March this year, Cloud technology provider Form3 collaborated with payment services provider (PSP) Ebury – one of the fastest-growing global fintechs – to launch a truly instantaneous fund transfer service using the UK Faster Payments scheme. Employing native Cloud technology, application programming interfaces (APIs) and microservices, this was an industry first. Ebury broke the mould in becoming the first non-bank organisation to join the Faster Payments Scheme under an agency bank-sponsored model (in this case Barclays). It has enabled customers of a PSP to move money between accounts in less than 10 seconds by connecting directly to the country’s national payments infrastructure. It was made possible by Form3’s fully managed payment technology, which is already trusted by the world’s leading financial institutions. Built on pure microservices architecture running concurrently across three physically separated sites, its platform simplifies
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the process and cost of payments processing for banks and fintechs, and particularly for those running legacy systems that might otherwise struggle to keep up in the real-time payments race. Form3 combines a powerful AWS Cloud platform, multiple-scheme payment gateways and fully managed, 24/7 service with reliable and secure Cloud-based access and processing for FPS, BACS, CHAPS, SEPA, SEPA Instant and SWIFT, with no hardware or software required by its customers and via an API-controlled, single point of access.
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The majority of banks and regulated financial businesses are struggling to meet customer needs in moving money in real-time Future-proofed at the point of delivery, the result is a straight-forward, easy to use and hassle-free payment-as-a-service that was recently recognised by the global research and consulting firm Frost and Sullivan for Customer Value Leadership. Michael Mueller, Form3’s Chief Executive Officer, said he was delighted to have been able to secure Ebury’s access to the UK’s national payments infrastructure.
“For too long, access to real-time payments has been limited to only a few banks,” he said. “Form3’s mission is to simplify back office processing and in doing so ensure that direct access to real-time payments is economically viable for banks and payment services providers (PSPs) of all sizes. “Opening up this new sponsored access route was only possible through strong collaboration between Ebury, Barclays and the Faster Payments Scheme and we are very grateful for the support that we have received from our great partners.” Describing it as an ‘historic milestone’, Craig Tillotson, chief executive officer of the Faster Payments Scheme, said it fitted the ‘evolution of our open access agenda and allows more financial institutions and PSPs to directly participate in the scheme, fuelling competition and innovation’. This partnership worked by Form3 providing Ebury with its own dedicated and portable sort codes, and allocating every customer with their own addressable account number (domestic and IBAN). This not only improved transparency for Ebury and its customers but also accelerated the movement of funds – both debits and credits – to real time. Outbound payments to suppliers can now be paid instantly and inbound payments for the initiation of foreign exchange transactions are executed
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immediately, underpinned by the agency banking service sponsored by Barclays. The result is significantly improved customer satisfaction, working capital efficiency and improved management of cash flows for Ebury. Set up in 2009, Ebury is one of the fastest growing fintechs in its sector, employing more than 650 staff across 11 European countries, Canada and Dubai. It provides corporates with international financial services that are normally reserved for large companies, including supply chain finance, tailored currency services, cash management and risk management solutions. It serves in excess of 24,000 corporate clients and has received more than 15 international awards, including being one of the Financial Times’ Europe’s 1,000 Fastest Growing Companies in 2016 and 2017. It was an obvious partnership for Form3, which was launched in 2016 to give banks and regulated fintechs access to UK domestic schemes (Faster Payments, BACS, CHAPS) as well as connectivity to SEPA Instant across the European Economic Area – all through a single API connection. Form3’s mission is to power the future of payments, providing elegant
solutions to managing domestic and international payments on a pay-per-transaction basis. Operating today in the UK and Europe, Form3 plans to extend across other international markets with its largest customers helping set the course. “The majority of banks and regulated financial businesses are struggling to meet customer needs in moving money in real-time. Delivering attractive business solutions based on payments is really hard,” says (name and status to come). “Legacy technology makes payments inefficient, costly and cumbersome to manage. We can help both banks and fintechs make them faster, cheaper and smarter.”
WHO WE ARE Form3 was established to meet the challenge of making payments easier, faster and cheaper. We love creating payments solutions that combine the latest technology with banking expertise to offer our clients choice. Working with both regulated fintechs and established banks, we care deeply about crafting elegant business models, APIs and documentation. Our Cloud technology provides a streamlined, end-to-end payments-as-a-service platform, delivered via a unique payment API.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: Form3 FOUNDED: 2016 CATEGORY: Payments KEY PERSONNEL:
Mike Walters, Chief Product Officer (right) HEAD OFFICE: London TEL: +44 (0)20 3861 6489 WEBSITE: www.form3.tech LINKEDIN: Linkedin/company/Form3 TWITTER: @Form3Tech
WHAT WE DO ‘Help banks and regulated fintechs move money faster’
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HAVE BANK, WILL TRAVEL
Monese believes home is where your bank is. And with its globally connected and locally smart banking service, that’s anywhere!
At Monese, we believe everyone has the right to fulfil their ambitions – both in the place that is called ‘home’ right now and in every other place they will visit or move to next. Traditional banks, driven by national jurisdictions and boundaries, don’t let everyone open an account; Monese is rethinking how everyday banking works for those who are geographically mobile.
LEADING BY EXAMPLE We are defining a new category of banking – one that is unrestricted by national boundaries or financial borders. A banking service that keeps people connected; that speaks your language and uses your currency; that is transparent on pricing; one that makes it easier for you to live, study, work, travel and retire anywhere in the world. Even the most successful person can find it difficult to access traditional banking services, simply because they are new to a country. You can be an entrepreneur, an investment banker, or even accepted onto the university programme of your dreams but, if you’re new to a country, you’re often left paying much higher fees for pretty much any financial service. We think this is fundamentally unfair. Traditional banking has failed people on the move. It was developed when people lived most of their lives in the same place. Opening an account can be time-consuming, expensive and, at times, painful if you are new to a country, as you
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cannot bring your existing account with you and local requirements can be rigid and bureaucratic. This frustration is compounded if your life and your business take you to other parts of the world as bank accounts are not seamlessly connected across countries. At Monese we’re working to fix that.
PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES Monese is laying the foundation of how banks will work in the future by bringing accessibility, connectivity and convenience to levels that weren’t possible just a few years ago. With our mobile-only dual UK and Euro IBAN current account, its portability across 20 countries, and both our app and
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With our mobile-only dual UK and Euro IBAN current account, you can bank like a local in 20 different countries customer service available in 11 languages, you can bank like a local in 20 different countries. You can do all this in a matter of a few minutes – all you need is a mobile phone and your passport. You can literally open an account in your home country or an international IBAN in another country while standing in a supermarket queue. What we offer is a smart and connected banking service for lives on the move. It is built around people’s lives, not around
jurisdictions. It is built to help our users manage their money in all the places they may be, in their languages and currencies. We move with our customers and keep them connected to people and businesses in all the places they call ‘home’.
POPULAR & TRUSTED BANKING Soon, a million people will have signed up to Monese. Every day, thousands are joining us. We are a primary bank account for most of our customers, with 75 per cent of our incoming funds being salary payments. Customers trust us with their salaries and that tells us that Monese is meeting a real need. People who spend time abroad, be it for work, study, leisure or retirement, need our banking services more than ever before. We have seen fantastic support for our app and the multi-language customer service we provide. We consistently rate highly across sites like Trustpilot and Smart Money People, but we’re never complacent and we’re not stopping here. This is just the beginning as we work towards bringing Monese to many other countries, enabling people to access and move their money securely through our rapidly growing international network with the high speed and low cost that you’d expect in the 21st Century.
AND THERE’S MORE As with personal banking, opening a business account can be just as time-consuming and complicated, this is certainly the case if you’re not a local.
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TFP50#MONESE It can sometimes take weeks, or even months, to open a business account, which is often a deterrent for young companies looking to start out on their entrepreneurial journey. This frustration is compounded if your business takes you all over the world. Following the great success of our personal banking service in the UK and Europe, we launched the Monese Business in October 2018. Monese Business is available in 11 languages. We know that life moves fast for entrepreneurs and their work often takes them all over the world, so they need fast, connected and transparent banking. Monese Business speeds-up this process and allows globally minded entrepreneurs to set up an account in just five minutes,
WHO WE ARE
Access to convenient and affordable financial services are at the core of Monese, the financial platform that allows people and businesses to bank like a local across the UK and EU. Its groundbreaking product enables eligible customers to create an account in as little as 120 seconds, regardless of citizenship, proof of address or credit history. This allows Monese to fill a gap in the market and serve a diverse set of internationally mobile customers, who are currently underserved by traditional financial institutions. With transparent, low-cost pricing packages, Monese has created a financial platform that the majority of customers use as their primary salary account. It also recently launched Monese Business accounts for UK registered companies, which can be set up in minutes, wherever you are in the world. Monese currently employs 160 people across offices in London, Tallinn and Lisbon. In September 2018 it secured $60million in Series B funding to support product development and international expansion. The funding round was
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simply from their mobile phone, wherever they may be. We are firmly of the belief that business banking should not slow down anyone’s ambitions. It should be with you at every step, wherever you are in the world. We are still at the beginning of the Monese journey, but our mission to build the world’s most connected, smart and portable banking service has never been clearer. We believe in a future of banking that has the possibility of including everybody. And we’re inviting you to be a part of ours. led by Kinnevik, a global investor focussed on digital businesses, with participation from PayPal, European investor Augmentum Fintech and International Airlines Group for its loyalty and data business Avios Group Ltd. Existing investors, including Investec’s INVC Fund, also participated.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: Monese FOUNDED: 2013 CATEGORY:
Personal and business banking services KEY PERSONNEL:
Norris Koppel, Founder & CEO (above) HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: London, Tallin, Lisbon TEL: +44 (0)1706 304 001 WEBSITE: monese.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/monese TWITTER: @monese
WHAT WE DO ‘Locally smart and globally connected banking’ TheFintechPower50 69
INFLUENCER # DUENA BLOMSTROM
TRYING TO FIX BANKING? MAKE HR GREAT AGAIN Duena Blomstrom asks who has ‘soul’ on their P&L? Let me tell you what HR does in most banks today: PR/internal communication and admin. Loads and loads of admin. Recruitment and selection is a series of process-driven tasks with little to no input from good, old-fashioned intuition. Retention, talent management and performance are antiquated exercises in paper pushing, with no understanding of market context. In essence, they do what a future version of Sage or Xero will accomplish with little to no human intervention very soon. Now, let me tell you what HR should be in charge of: the health of the organisation and its people. They are the keepers of its soul. So, if the organisation needs to be something, aka ‘the brand’, or be something else, aka ‘transformed’, HR ought to be in charge of driving that. Not marketing, not service design, not the change departments (yes, some banks have these), not operations. How this fundamental truth has gotten away from us in many big organisations, but particularly in banking, is the tragic mystery. Why HR ever said ’yeah sure, you go ahead and fundamentally change people – decide on how they should work and what they should be like, I’ll be over here, putting out ads and calculating vacation pay’, is beyond me. Today, HR has no seat at the table when the bank talks about strategy and the consumer. That’s outrageous. How will the bank deliver any of its promises to consumers if not through its greatest asset – its people? Who is the one who brings in the right people and makes the people they have right? HR. But no one thinks of HR as more than an admin function today, including themselves. This needs to change and change fast.
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CULTURE – LESS ABOUT EQUAL GENDER PAY, MORE ABOUT THE DNA OF THE SHOP Real change to the very bone counts as basic hygiene in an organisation as complexly stuck as a bank. If you want the thinkers and the imaginers to work out how a certain financial operation can be turned into a fun one from a drab, painful one, or how a customer may be spared pain and discomfort and instead be given (gasp!) joy by a banking product, then they need to have the fundamental freedom to do so. Building a strong, clean, genuinely honest and collaborative internal culture doesn’t mean removing all impediments, but it does mean making sure none of those impediments is politics, office ego or systemic negativity and fear. This last one is where the HR of the future has its biggest challenge: how to extract fear from the organisation. Not by removing any regard for risk and throwing caution and process to the wind but by using those as the foundation to let people know it’s OK to be themselves, to care and to build.
IN WITH THE NEW… Once the Banking Superheroes and Heads of HR are in place, they can fix recruitment to pipeline only that right type of individual in easily, by simply setting the tone. A bigger challenge than recognising the seeds of the core attributes of knowledge, passion and courage in newcomers, is finding those things in the thousands of existing employees and then cultivating them and making them grow while assuring them they live in a brave new world and not a PR exercise.
…NOT OUT WITH THE OLD Those core attributes we advocate are
sine qua non conditions of success. Having them be a pervasive part of the culture and deeply ingrained in every individual would project us into functional organisation heaven. But the bulk of the work for that to be achieved is in the existing employees. One of the most infuriatingly puerile lines of discourse in our industry is that ‘bankers are dinosaurs – they can never comprehend this new reality’. Battling the inner workings of an organisation, crippled by years of paralysis and office politics while finding the beating heart of dinosaurs and ensuring the foundations can support them jumping and reaching and taking off for flight, is the only job that bank HR has. There are only two parties that can make HR great again: management and HR themselves. They must enter boardrooms where the strategic, real conversations are happening, announce they have arrived and why they must be there to drive branding and change.
AT A GLANCE Duena Blomstrom is a thought leader on fintech, author of Emotional Banking and Co-Founder and CEO PeopleNotTech. WEBSITE: peoplenottech.com LINKEDIN: uk.linkedin.com/in/ duenablomstrom TWITTER: @DuenaBlomstrom
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TFP50#SIGNICAT
BANKING ON TRUST TFP50#EARTHPORT
Signicat is enabling the adoption of digital identities through a single set of trusted, verified and secured credentials
All of us at Signicat are extremely honoured to be named one of the Fintech Power 50. Having been a critical part of the emergence of verified digital identities in the Nordic markets, we now feel that many other markets across Europe and the world are primed to adopt this game-changing approach to building trusted digital relationships. As the verified digital identity concept has reached maturity across the Nordics, vendors and customers are now getting the full benefit of using a single set of trusted, verified and secured credentials. These credentials, known as electronic IDs (eID), can be used to sign up for new financial services, file taxes, interact with government agencies online, even sell used cars among many other time-saving and game-changing ways. We have conducted extensive research around eIDs, digitally onboarding customers and on the concept of trust
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in who consumers would be willing to trust to be the holders of their personal information. We interviewed 4,000 consumers from four different countries and, overwhelmingly, banks emerged as being the most trusted entities. This meshes well with what we have observed in the market. The Nordics are leaders in the adoption of eIDs, and the eID scheme in each market is led by a consortium of banks. Governments, social media providers and even specialist companies have all tried (and failed) to establish pervasive eIDs in the market. By and large, only bank-led eIDs have succeeded. While money is the fuel that drives banks, our belief is that in many ways their main product is trust. We trust banks with our mortgages and our savings. It’s not a significant extension to also entrust the banks to be the champions of our digital identities.
HOW WE HELP We help in the creation of verified digital identities. Whether it’s a bank, government, or other company (typically from a regulated industry), we help in the creation of reusable electronic IDs, whether it’s for a pervasive eID or one used within an individual organisation that is looking to offer an expansion of services to existing customers, and on-boarding new customers in a streamlined, digital manner. As part of our offering, we also include adaptive authentication services, electronic signatures and a preservation archive to ensure documents and transactions are sealed and archived.
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OUR OFFERINGS We have simple-to-set-up, point solutions around identity verification, adaptive authentication, electronic signatures and preservation archives, streamlining your existing processes, improving conversions and ensuring secure connections with your customers. We also offer more comprehensive digital identity platform solutions. These are solutions designed to address strategic business requirements relating to digital identity and improving customer adoption and upselling. These include:
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Digital Identity Service platform Our best example of this offering is what Rabobank has done with us. It has created a digital identity service, based on the Signicat platform offering, which it is now providing to its corporate customers to further its business online. It’s an example of how a bank can use its consumer trust to build digital relationships with businesses.
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Reusable Electronic ID Framework Creating an electronic ID? We are able to provide the technology for the establishment and ongoing operation of a shared, pervasive eID. Most importantly, we have been involved in the eID market for more than 10 years, so we are able to provide guidance and implementation support to ensure successful adoption.
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Cross-border Identity Services With more than 10 years of building
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We trust banks with our mortgages and our savings. It’s not a significant extension to entrust them to be the champions of our digital identities
WHO WE ARE Signicat is a leading provider of trusted digital identity services, offering the only complete identity platform in the market and trusted to reduce the burden of identity corroboration and verification in regulated markets. Service providers can build and leverage existing customer credentials to connect users, devices and even ‘things’ across channels, services and markets, building digital trust with their customers. By ditching manual, paper-based processes and replacing them with digital identity assurance, customer on-boarding is accelerated and access to services is made simple and secure. This is particularly relevant in the financial sector where Signicat research revealed that retail banks lose more than half of European applicants during on-boarding. The Signicat Open Identity Platform is a comprehensive
our Digital Identity Hub, we’ve collected a large number of electronic IDs, registry lookups, social logins and other verification methods (document scanning, live video detection, SMS OTP and more), so we are able to offer clients customer on-boarding and authentication services in a number of markets across Europe. In fact, we are uniquely positioned in the market to help our customers and partners with this emerging problem. In summary, over the course of the next year and beyond, Signicat is dedicated to helping financial institutions get the most out of their digital relationships and, ultimately, allow them to bank on the trust they have earned. ■ To learn more about our research into trust and digital identities, visit our site and look for our Battle To On-Board 2 report.
AT A GLANCE identity verification and corroboration platform designed specifically for these highly regulated markets. It includes: ■ The Signicat digital identity hub, which connects 20-plus electronic ID methods, seven registry lookups, social logins and paper-based verification methods ■ On-boarding Engine to smoothly on-board customers ■ Flexible authentication offering for customisable authentication requirements ■ Electronic signing solution for secure digital signing ■ Preservation archive with time stamps and record seals
COMPANY: Signicat AS FOUNDED: 2007 CATEGORY: Digital identity specialists KEY PERSONNEL:
Gunnar Nordseth, CEO (right) HEAD OFFICE: Trondheim, Norway OFFICES IN: Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Netherlands, London, Portugal and Germany TEL: +47 400 03 410 WEBSITE: www.signicat.com LINKEDIN: www.linkedin.com/ company/signicat/ TWITTER @signicat
The Signicat Open Identity Platform additionally includes open APIs for the integration of additional ID methods, 3rd party solutions, and more.
WHAT WE DO ‘Trusted digital identity’ – digital ID verification, authentication and signing solutions for regulated industries www.thepower50.com
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DRIVING CHANGES IN FINTECH: FAST & FURIOUS The Glue helps financial institutions take to the digital highway while reducing the load on legacy systems
The financial services sector is a complex and fast-moving industry. That’s a statement that has never been more relevant than today. The global fintech sector raised $41.7billion in the first half of 2018, surpassing 2017’s entire annual total. It is one of the fastest growing industries in the modern world. In the past, financial firms have always been in the driving seat. They have had the luxury of loyal customers, favourable economic conditions and a comfortable monopoly on the high street. The average person was not interested in discount codes and cash rewards, they just wanted to deposit their wages, pay their bills and
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make their mortgage payments. Most people had one trusted banking partner and were with them forever.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD Customers have changed, expecting a great user experience and easy access to solutions, 24/7, preferably via mobile devices. Digitisation forces the industry to reimagine itself – away from focussing purely on its own goals, to solving the problems of its customers. Moreover, challenger banks and fintechs are competing for a piece of the cake. And they do digital better. The traditional protagonists are massively hampered by stacks of legacy
technology and outdated working practices, which inhibit them from responding quickly to market trends and customer demands. In too many cases, the risks and costs of undertaking a wholesale digital transformation programme are just too much to bear. Today’s financial services environment is very different to what it was 10 years ago. Only those who innovate are the ones who will sustain business for years to come.
REGTECH AND BIG DATA But innovation is not just about cool banking apps and contactless payments. Regulation remains high on every financial firm’s agenda as well.
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TFP50#THE GLUE They should continue to drive the efficiency of risk and compliance programmes to meet applicable laws, regulations and supervisory expectations. By nature, the deadlines are strict, require wholesale change across multiple departments and, if you fail to comply, the damage to a firm’s reputation, let alone the financial risk, is huge. Historically, the lack of control has resulted in the regulators investing heavily in enforcing new working practises and better security protocols that put the customer back in control. The impact of the digital transformation drive and the Cloud means that, globally, one of the most valuable assets is data. It defines every industry, not just banking, and, if we are to thrive in this new world, financial firms need to quickly, efficiently and securely learn how to handle and harness the power of this invaluable asset. All of the above adds huge financial strain on a firm’s balance sheet. Adding in the increased competition means that all organisations are having to find more ways to save money. Automation is the watchword of the hour and banks are realising that through smart use of collaborative technologies they can dramatically improve efficiencies, which not only help to cut costs but also streamline processes and provide dramatically improved services to their clients.
HOW BANKS STAY RELEVANT The Glue lets banks connect to the digital lives of their customers. We offer digital banking and insurance solutions that allow meaningful conversations with consumers, enhance their user experience and spur engagement. Our scalable innovation and orchestration hub allows banks to move from a tech-bound organisation to an agile provider, fast and reliably, without disrupting their legacy mainframe systems: they can innovate, aggregate data and thrive in open application programming interface (API) ecosystems. Our solutions include: ■ ■ ■ ■
Personal finance management AI-based insurances Location-based services Know your customer client life cycle management
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■ Online market places ■ Open banking ■ Dynamic insurance pricing, based on the Internet of Things ■ Connected customers A recent Juniper Research report forecasts that by 2021, nearly three billion users will access retail banking services via PC or mobile devices. That is up 53 per cent from 2017. If banks want to keep up with challengers and continue to lead, they will need to design a strategy that connects customers with their digital life. The Glue enables companies to accelerate their ability to deploy innovative services for sustainable revenue, coupling the new with the old. Our deep domain expertise and high-end technology platform uses event-driven service modelling for powerful microservices. We enable fast deployment, reduce the load on legacy systems, higher performance and enhanced scalability. Our solution protects existing infrastructure investments and prolongs their lifespan.
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The key thing to remember is that digital transformation is not about technology. It’s purely about how our customers can use it Our field-proven technology hub is built from the ground up and designed specifically for the global financial services and insurances sectors – embedding the essential non-functional requirements.
CHANGE, NOT TECHNOLOGY The key thing to remember is that digital transformation is not about technology. It’s purely about how our customers can use it to offer relevant, meaningful services and keep up with today’s market challengers. The Glue is about convenience, accessibility and novel ways of customer engagement.
WHO WE ARE
AT A GLANCE
We inspire our clients to visualise the unimaginable and very quickly develop customer-centric service offerings that both protect existing technology investments and accelerate business growth.
COMPANY: The Glue
The Glue's technology platform enables innovation, business transformation and improved collaboration capabilities and empowers our users to continually create exciting new revenue-generating opportunities. We provide pre-defined services built on our transformative platform or customers may choose to build their own services. Services can always be amended or new ones can be added by our team. The Glue reduces the load on legacy systems and enables higher performance and enhanced scalability. It is a non-disruptive solution, that protects existing investments in infrastructure and prolongs its lifespan. It allows you to create innovative solutions at an unprecedented pace, enabling you to keep up with fintech service providers.
FOUNDED: 2015 CATEGORY:
Financial technology KEY PERSONNEL:
Stefan Dierckx, Co-Founder and Board Member (right) HEAD OFFICE: Brussels OFFICES IN: Singapore TEL: +32 476 53 13 80 WEBSITE: www.theglue.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ the-glue-solutions/ TWITTER: @TheGlue_fintech
WHAT WE DO ‘Empowering business innovation’
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TFP50#EMERCHANTPAY
THE WAY TO PAY emerchantpay is all about maximising payments efficiency in the ever-evolving world of fintech
The payments sector is one of the most dynamic areas of technology and the pace of change and innovation grows constantly. One way to keep up with this is by centralising your payment solutions and realising efficiencies across your supply chain. We believe that payment performance is key. Sure, innovation will continue to
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shape the industry. But businesses that focus on performance across their entire payments system, whether that be traditional card payments or the latest APMs, will drive efficiency and grow their bottom line. There are multiple performance focus areas that can drive efficiency. Optimised payment pages is one of them. If applied appropriately, there are various payment page components that may minimise the
risk of errors that can cause declines. For example, with AMEX transactions there’s a four-digit security code required as oppose to the three-digit security code required on Visa and Mastercard. If the payment page isn’t correctly configured to accept three or four digits, based on the card type, this may result in a decline as the correct information will not be submitted. As part of transaction fields review/ analysis to improve acceptance, merchants should identify fields that are
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not required to complete a transaction in order to reduce the checkout steps. It’s good practice to look at how you can speed up and optimise the payment process for customers. For instance, ‘account on file’ merchants may implement specific dynamic CV2 capture rules to shorten the steps required to complete a payment and improve the customer journey. In our experience, this can have a positive impact. It’s vital to prioritise and highlight local preferred payments methods on the payment page, too. Customers want to make transactions as quickly and easily as possible, using payment methods that they are familiar with. This can help reach more customers in new markets and maximise revenue from existing ones. Merchants can offer multiple currencies for both processing and settlement, as consumers are more likely to purchase if their local currency is offered to them. Merchants should also capitalise on the benefits of routing transactions via specific entity locations, where applicable, as this can improve acceptance rates. For instance, routing
UK-issued cards via a UK entity, or Ireland-issued cards via an Irish entity. Card issuers are typically more likely to approve a transaction if it’s processed domestically. What’s more, when applied correctly, domestic transaction routing may reduce merchants’ processing costs. Driving payments performance is all about identifying and utilising meaningful data, analysing that data, benchmarking it, and then implementing a strategic plan to improve and optimise the given process. The type of data across the payment landscape is wide-ranging. It includes issuer responses or extended decline information, gateway configuration or transaction type flagging, and acquirer set-up, right through to
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Customers want to make transactions as quickly and easily as possible, using payment methods that they are familiar with
WHO WE ARE emerchantpay is a leading online, mobile and POS payment service provider. We help ecommerce businesses of all sizes and sectors accept payments via multiple customer touch points. emerchantpay is registered as an authorised electronic money institution (EMI) and has the UK Financial Conduct Authority’s permission to issue emoney and provide payment services. We facilitate online payments for a variety of business sectors. Designed to increase conversions, our offering includes robust payment processing technology, coupled with popular alternative payment methods and
currency usage and preferred local payment method process flow and responses. Currently, not enough businesses utilise their data to gain insight into how their existing systems are performing. Merchants can benefit from approximately 25 per cent reduction in chargebacks, just by analysing data and applying intelligent rules around fraud, and then closely monitoring and scoring transactions against these rules. A number of small tweaks across payment infrastructures can add up to big operational and financial benefits. We help businesses drive payments performance, from the payment gateway and payment page optimisation, through to managing chargebacks and detecting and preventing fraud. In each instance, businesses across all sectors can make significant improvements to their business (higher acceptance rates, fewer fraud cases, reduced costs, etc) by analysing their current data to make more informed, strategic decisions around performance.
AT A GLANCE a range of acquiring services. Whether looking to improve conversions, minimise costs or optimise risk, our dedicated relationship managers work closely with online businesses to help them achieve their goals. Through personalised and in-depth analysis of the current payments ecosystem, we identify key areas for modification, making the most of online revenues for businesses of all sizes. It is a single global payments integration/solution, designed for online/offline businesses looking to make the most of their revenue emerchantpay was recently nominated for the top 50 fastest growing companies in the UK and the North East.
COMPANY:
emerchantpay FOUNDED: 2002 CATEGORY: Payments service provider KEY PERSONNEL:
Jonas Reynisson, CEO HEAD OFFICE: North Shields, UK PRESENCE IN: UK and Europe TEL: +44 (0) 20 7152 4202 WEBSITE: www.emerchantpay.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ emerchantpay-ltd/ TWITTER: @emerchantpay
WHAT WE DO ‘Online payments technology for efficiency-driven businesses’
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OPEN FOR BUSINESS MYPINPAD’s pioneering Open mPOS has the ability to transform payments for SME retailers, says David Poole, Global Head of Mobile POS Solutions A shift in online shopping has contributed to a well-documented decline in the number of high street outlets. One of the main drivers of this trend is that ordering a product online is simply easier and more convenient for customers. However, even with the odds seemingly stacked against them, small and medium-sized retailers are expected to thrive over the next few years, due to their flexibility and ability to adapt. So how can they be supported to make the most of the opportunities presented to them? The answer, at least in part, lies in the experience that a customer has when buying a product or service. When a sale in-store (and indeed online) is clunky and time consuming, the likelihood of a customer abandoning their purchase increases; up to 70 per cent will wait five minutes or less before cancelling a purchase and leaving the store. On the other hand, when a customer receives helpful advice and support from a sales associate from the minute they
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walk in until the moment they pay, retailers will likely see units sold shoot up by as much as 30 per cent. This is all positive news, but how can retailers do this in practice, and what simple measures can they put in place to streamline their point-of-sale processes to improve the shopping experience?
INNOVATE THE PAYMENT EXPERIENCE The changes that technology has enabled over the past decade have brought about a significant adjustment of consumer expectations. Consumer demands are evolving across almost every industry, but where payments are concerned, consumers are actively seeking less friction, more efficiency and increased security and accuracy. The consumer of today is carrying less cash than ever before, heavily favouring card and mobile payments. But it doesn’t stop there; consumers are also seeking much richer in-store experiences that are personalised, more time-effective and that
enable them to get back to their lives with as little friction as possible. The Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) has acknowledged that mobile and tablet-based POS solutions are key enablers for the continued growth of card payments. In January 2018, it released the software-based PIN Entry on COTS (SPoC) standard for developing applications that utilise software PIN on consumer off-the-shelf (COTS) devices. SPoC opens the pathway to developing tablet and mobile-based payment solutions that are simple and fast for an acceptable price.
OPEN MPOS – THE NEXT GENERATION This year, MYPINPAD introduced its revolutionary technology, Open mPOS, a complete mPOS authentication platform that has been built for the needs of today’s merchant and designed to remove complexities of PCI software-based PIN entry on COTS certification for payment service providers (PSPs)
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TFP50#MYPINPAD and acquirers. MYPINPAD aims to become the world’s first PCI SPoC certified vendor that is compliant within the published PCI standard. Open mPOS is a solution that is ideal for PSPs and acquirers with an existing payments or mPOS platform. It is a complete mPOS authentication platform that uniquely enables the deployment of PIN on mobile technologies. MYPINPAD has ring-fenced components within the scope of the PCI SPoC standard to remove complexity of PCI certification and ongoing compliance and has created simple integration application programming interfaces (APIs) for rapid adoption of this technology. By eliminating the need for a hardware-based PIN pad, MYPINPAD
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By eliminating the need for a hardware-based PIN pad, MYPINPAD enables merchants to utilise smaller, lower-cost card reading devices
enables merchants to utilise smaller, lower-cost card reading devices. In doing so, a significant barrier to entry for merchants is combatted with the significantly reduced device cost.
MY 2019 For MYPINPAD, Open mPOS will be pivotal in responding to the complex and ever-changing needs of retailers and, by proxy, their customers. With pilots already in the market, 2019 represents a major step forward for the payments industry on the path towards achieving card scheme ambitions to grow the number of payment acceptance points worldwide. As the number of points of sale that accept new payment methods grows, the faster the method will become widely accepted. Eventually, open mPOS will be the standard. The benefit for retailers is that customers will become accustomed to interacting with new payment acceptance technology and will feel comfortable inputting their card
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PIN in to merchant-owned smart devices. Transactions are made conveniently, with a portable device that means customers can pay for their goods while interacting with a sales representative. For retailers, this means that sales can be locked down while the customer is receptive and, ultimately, result in increased profit margins. This removal of complexity and certification hurdles enables all merchants to deploy a PIN on mobile solution simply and quickly.
RECRUITING THE BEST IN TECH TALENT MYPINPAD aims to be the first fully certified PCI SPoC solution in market and, following a recent £15million investment into the company, it will be able ‘to scale up’ to meet these goals. To continue the innovation already seen at MYPINPAD, the Welsh-based company will be growing its workforce. It will be doing so in the heart of Wales’ burgeoning tech sector; Cardiff, a city that has an offering for tech professionals that is second to none. The planned vacancies at the Cardiff offices include highly skilled Android, iOS, operations and services developers, and technical sales support consultants. MYPINPAD’s recruitment plans reflect
recent Welsh government figures, which reveal that it’s a great time for tech in the country. There are more than 1,500 homegrown tech businesses located in Wales, contributing a staggering £8.2billion to the Welsh economy, plus, a further £1billion recently invested in the sector. South Wales has been named the fastest growing location for financial and professional services in the UK.
PAYMENTS AND BEYOND So, what impact will innovative payment solutions have on the wider payments industry? The innovations being created at MYPINPAD are, without doubt, a comprehensive solution to many of the current issues facing the payments industry. They can also be harnessed by other users. For example, a convenient mobile authentication solution currently being used to verify a customer paying at the till could be applied to cross-border control or to verify gamers online. MYPINPAD is committed to continuously investing in research and development to expand its product and service offerings, and to remain at the forefront of thinking about emerging payment acceptance and authentication technologies.
WHO WE ARE
AT A GLANCE
MYPINPAD is a global leader in payment and authentication software solutions. Its proprietary touchscreen technology secures the input of sensitive information to smart devices, creating a trusted and hardened environment that protects consumer data.
COMPANY: MYPINPAD
MYPINPAD builds innovative, scalable solutions that remove the complexity of payment acceptance and customer authentication.
WHAT WE DO ‘Enable secure, multi-factor authentication for unsecured touchscreen devices, such as smartphones and tablets’
FOUNDED: 2012 CATEGORY:
Payment and authentication services KEY PERSONNEL:
David Poole, Global Head of Mobile POS Solutions (above) HEAD OFFICE: Cardiff PRESENCE: Global TEL: +44 (0)2920 674 437 WEBSITE: www.mypinpad.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ mypinpad-ltd-/ TWITTER: @myPINpad
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TFP50#FENERGO
THE SINGLE CLIENT VIEW – AND HOW WE FIND IT TFP50#EARTHPORT
CEO Marc Murphy on how Fenergo plans to enhance client lifecycle management for financial institutions
The next 12 months promise to be game-changing for financial institutions as they continue to digitalise operations and roll out advanced technologies to deliver better customer experiences.
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In the middle of all this, you’ll find Fenergo running through all digital clients’ journeys as they navigate banks’ internal processes to become fully onboarded in a timely and efficient manner. Here are five things you can expect from Fenergo in the coming year:
Entering new markets With a global footprint in corporate and institutional banking, Fenergo will deliver next-generation client lifecycle management (CLM) technologies to corporate, business and retail banks, asset managers and private and wealth management firms, all of which seek to deliver a simple, consistent, personalised client experience.
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Delivering digital client journeys The financial services industry is a hive of digitalisation activity, with every financial institution undergoing some level of digital transformation to create sustainable competitive advantage. Fenergo is at the forefront of this activity, helping our clients digitalise middle- and back-office tasks to create back-to-front efficiencies that translate into fast, efficient and compliant customer service. Fenergo CLM achieves this by seamlessly managing all client journeys, across multiple channels to deliver simple, consistent and personalised customer experiences and faster time-to-revenue for the institution.
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Connecting the ecosystem A central theme in the drive towards digitalisation involves connecting the end-to-end ecosystem of providers that make up the client lifecycle. In addition to centralising (or federating) client data across our clients’ organisations, Fenergo provides advanced application programming interfaces (APIs) to connect them to a wide range of external data providers (anti-money laundering, know-your-customer, entity data providers), data aggregators and utilities. Our out-of-the-box APIs also connect all bank channels (website, mobile, client portal, branch), technologies (customer relationship management or CRM, compliance, internal data repositories, external data providers, downstream systems) and teams (onboarding, compliance, data, legal, credit), creating a straight-through ecosystem that delivers a single client view and fully orchestrated client journey. Fenergo has gone live with new integrations with service providers across the client lifecycle, including Salesforce (CRM), Dun & Bradstreet and Lexis Nexis. We’ll be adding new entity data and screening providers in 2019.
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WHO WE ARE
AT A GLANCE
Fenergo is a leading provider of client lifecycle management, anti-money laundering/ know-your-customer compliance and client data management solutions for investment, corporate, commercial and private financial institutions. With 100 per cent focus on financial services, Fenergo’s regulatory analysts and research and development teams are solely committed to solving and addressing the challenges faced by such institutions. We help them to efficiently manage the end-to-end regulatory onboarding and entity data management processes. Our intelligent rules-driven solution ensures compliance with multiple regulatory frameworks and supports
the collection, centralisation and sharing of client and counterparty data and documentation across the institution. By expediting compliance and improving operational efficiencies, Fenergo’s solutions can onboard clients faster, improve time to revenue and enhance the overall client experience. Our solution connects seamlessly with all the major data providers to consume this data and enrich, process and route it to the right internal systems, ensuring a single client view. Fenergo has a unique breadth of global regulatory coverage (from AML and KYC regulations to tax compliance obligations, and common reporting standards to global OTC derivative reforms). Our focus is to future-proof clients against regulatory change.
COMPANY: Fenergo FOUNDED: 2009
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CATEGORY: Client
lifecycle management KEY PERSONNEL: Marc Murphy, CEO (right) HEAD OFFICE: Dublin PRESENCE IN: Ireland, London, Tokyo, Madrid, Boston, New York, Sydney, Abu Dhabi, Toronto, Wroclaw, Singapore and Hong Kong TEL: +35 31 901 3600 WEBSITE: www.fenergo.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/fenergo/ TWITTER: @fenergo
WHAT WE DO ‘At the heart of client lifecycle management’
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Compliance by design
Compliance remains one of the most challenging areas for banks when onboarding new clients or products. The process needs to be carefully designed and orchestrated to create a fully auditable process, efficiently executed. Fenergo’s compliance-by-design approach involves collaborating with our global regulatory forums, an active community of senior compliance professionals from client organisations, to provide direct input into Fenergo’s regulatory and product roadmaps. The forum members help to design, interpret and bring to market compliance solutions for enhanced or emerging regulations. In 2018, this group helped us launch new solutions for the second Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II), the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and FinCEN Final Rule (CDD) compliance. Over the coming months, they will help us bring to market solutions for Securities Financing Transactions Regulation (SFTR), 5th EU Money Laundering Directive, UK ringfencing rules, EMIR Regulatory Fitness and Performance (REFIT), as well as providing guidance over Brexit.
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Delivering returns
Ultimately, the reason why financial institutions choose Fenergo is because our solutions deliver true return on investment (ROI). We will continue to invest in leading-edge technologies to accelerate operational processes and deliver more efficiencies. Some of our core ROI benefits that we currently offer financial institutions include: ■ 82 per cent faster client onboarding ■ Ability to re-use 75 per cent of existing client data/documentation ■ 37 per cent headcount efficiencies on KYC reviews ■ 80 per cent reduction in regulatory change management costs
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TFP50#SPHONIC
UNLOCKING COMPLIANCE From startups to established FIs, Sphonic leads fintechs and banks through the regulatory maze of KYC, AML, fraud management and authentication with a single, customisable API
As a compliance officer or fraud manager, navigating the solutions market can be as challenging as the problems they are trying to solve. This is where Sphonic plays a vital role with its core Workflow Manager (WFM) technology. It gives access to more than 80 of the world’s leading risk management products through a single, customised application programming interface (API) and Sphonic’s proprietorial Workflow engine. WFM wasn’t created to be an API gateway, there is no innovation in that. Rather, it’s about data contextualisation and making sense of the information presented from the various data points in a workflow. What is the context of a device being in location ‘X’, a mobile roaming in location ‘Y’ and an email created three days ago? With a client being able to utilise any of the 80-plus vendors in the network through Sphonic’s contractual relationships or their own, flexibility is a key factor in enabling compelling solutions for some of the leading digital players across the globe.
INNOVATION THROUGH CLIENT COLLABORATION Alongside the technology, the team at Sphonic works with its clients to help them understand the value of new innovations in data, how to maximise the use of existing services and why augmentation makes all the difference. These sentiments were echoed by one of
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Sphonic’s major clients, Phil Rivers, VP of Operations at Funding Circle, who said: “The fraud system built with Sphonic has allowed us to introduce more robust controls globally with the added benefit that they can scale with us and keep up with the ever-changing fraud landscape. Their consultative approach and genuine expertise have proved to be a real asset.” We see banks and fintechs constantly interested in evaluating and deploying new innovations in the risk management space, but that eternal battle of IT prioritisation often prevents such deployments ever taking off. We developed WFM to enable such firms to access these innovations through a single integration point, along with our data standardisation, normalisation and contextualisation capabilities, which can only be delivered through years of experience in understanding data and approaching this as a compliance/risk management practitioner. Sphonic supports its clients through a collaborative customisation process, which means they are totally involved in the way Workflows are designed and configured, along with the vendor services that are deployed. This level of transparency is key in order to determine what data points drive decisions within the WFM platform. There are many black-box regtech products on the market that return a simple score, yes/no result or other
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binary information, but we live in a world of false positives, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and increasing levels of fines for anti-money laundering (AML) breaches. So knowing what drives decisionmaking in risk management platforms is a key contribution that we are making, giving the industry the level of insight that the client-side demands and consumers expect.
UNDERSTANDING THE VALUE OF DATA In an era where data breaches are often brutal, where full personal data attributes and even transactional history are available to criminals, traditional methods to verify consumers and their transactions are often limiting. When breaches happen, the level of personal identifiable information available to the criminal will generally help them pass the traditional checks that many organisations perform. But with Sphonic we pioneered introducing multi-factor, anti-impersonation checks as part of know your customer/know your business (KYC/KYB) processes as far back as 2012. Our methodology is important because of the way data is waterfalled
and independent of each data vendor within a workflow call. Fraudsters can often learn how to break a unique vendor’s controls, but when you augment this with multiple checks in a single decision stream, it creates additional barriers to a criminal that would make attempting to break the system unviable and too high-risk.
THE VALUE OF SPHONIC’S GROWING PRODUCT SUITE WFM can work across a variety of use-cases, e.g. global KYC and KYB, AML and fraud transactional monitoring and consumer authentication. It really does allow a bank or a fintech to have ‘all your regtech in one place’, the rationale being that you can only truly understand your
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You can only truly understand your good customers and bad actors by removing data silos and leveraging data insight from origination to downstream transactional processes
WHO WE ARE Sphonic is a London-based regtech business focussed on the delivery of emerging risk management and authentication technologies to a global client base via its innovative Workflow Management platform. We pioneered the approach to augmenting digital insight with traditional KYC checks, providing a sophisticated solution to meet the demands of fast-moving digital commerce. Sphonic has subsequently added data visualisation capabilities through its Case Manager product, enabling near real-time assessment of platform and vendor performance, while also
good customers and bad actors by removing data silos and leveraging data insight from origination to downstream transactional processes. It appeals to many of the fast-growing fintechs in particular, who are keen to embrace the innovation in our platform. In 2019, we anticipate more interest from large banks, too, given our current work with some of them. Sphonic’s work will be further enhanced next year with the deployment of its new Case Management tool. The ability to provide real-time and reliable actionable intelligence is something of a Holy Grail for many organisations but, by deploying WFM to perform actions such as KYC/KYB and transactional monitoring, firms will be able to approve genuine customers efficiently and reject bad actors as early as possible. With the demands of the digital space growing in 2019 with the introduction of the revised Payments Services Directive (PSD2) and planning for the 5th AML Directive, Sphonic will continue to support the financial services industry with its compelling technology and valuable insights as a reliable and trusted partner.
AT A GLANCE providing real-time AML and fraud monitoring capability via the live Workflow Manager data stream. Workflow Manager enables access to innovations from more than 80 leading global vendors in areas such as global ID and verification, politically exposed persons (PEPs) and sanctions data, device fingerprinting, mobile profiling, email verification, geo-location, behavioural biometrics, through its agnostic platform. With these capabilities, Sphonic allows financial services firms to bring all their regtech into one place, covering KYC, AML, fraud management and authentication, via a single API.
COMPANY: Sphonic FOUNDED: 2012 CATEGORY: Regtech KEY PERSONNEL:
Founder Andy Lee (right) HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: Lisbon, Portugal TEL: +44 (0) 20 7256 2043 WEBSITE: www.sphonic.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ sphonic-solutions/ TWITTER: @sphonic
WHAT WE DO ‘All your regtech in one place’ www.thepower50.com
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TFP50#PIXELPIN
A NEW WAY TO
LOG IN TO YOUR LIFE! A picture tells a thousand words, but cybersecurity company PixelPin is using it to replace just one – your password. And it’s saving fintechs time and money
The fintech sector is expanding its scope, including digitising online transactions, smart contracts, using blockchain technology and robot advisors. As companies grow in this sector, the risk of not knowing your customer increases. From a cybersecurity standpoint, Daniel Cohen, director of RSA’s fraud and risk intelligence unit, explains that ‘for cybercriminals, digitisation means everything is becoming more accessible and, as a result, fraud is becoming easier’. Fintech companies have to wonder what measures should they adopt in order to protect their customers and even their employees from being hijacked in their own online environment.
THE PROBLEM WITH TRADITIONAL PASSWORDS The cybersecurity literature expands on the importance of creating high entropy passwords. The problem with these is that humans have a short memory when it comes to managing multiple account logins and more complex written passwords. This results in weak passwords being created by most users and more susceptibility to attacks. The science of memory confirms that pictures are far superior to textual information. Studies have shown that people can remember more than 2,500 images and reproduce all of them with 90 per cent accuracy, making the case for 65 per cent recall index, while textual information is remembered only for 10% index. This is known as the picture superiority effect and has been explained by D.L. Nelson’s sensory semantic theory, which states that pictures are perceptually more distinct from one another than words, hence using them increases the likelihood of memory retrieval. The same theory explains why pictures encrypt meaning more directly than words into the human mind, having a greater impact on recall and retrieval. In the same sphere of research, Allan Paivio’s dual code theory explains that visual and verbal processes in the human mind act upon
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different stimuli. While pictures create both visual and verbal encoding, words suffer from the visual stimuli cypher, making them harder to remember. All this impacts a company’s financial performance, as password retrieval options amount to lost time and productivity from help desk clerks or lost additional resources to identify the user in need of password recovery (costly SMS, etc). In a US-based survey, it was calculated that around $420 per employee per year is lost to password management. Forrester research has put the cost of resetting passwords for users at $70, while Gartner estimates that 20 to 50 per cent of all help desk calls are for password resets.
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Humans have a short memory when it comes to managing multiple account logins and more complex written passwords PixelPin offers the alternative to the memorability issue, by replacing traditional word-based passwords with unique and memorable pictures as a safer form of authentication in fintech systems.
A CASE FOR BIOMETRICS? Fingerprints, retina scans, facial recognition, voice recognition and more biometric solution are coming to market as an alternative to the traditional password. The issue surrounding biometrics is that they are not 100 per cent effective due to human error, cannot account for various life situations and are dependent upon the user’s device. Biometrics might eventually prove to be the solution to the password conundrum, but the technology is still in its infancy and is a long way from becoming mainstream. Part of the root issue with biometrics is its complexity to implement, both from a cost and time stand point. For this cybersecurity solution to be implemented, additional hardware with biometrics sensory readers and deciphering sensory reader software are
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needed, together with a secure biometric database. On top of the cost attached to implementing this new technology, some have moral concerns regarding who gets access to our biologic data. When it comes to fingerprint or voice scanning, social hacking and tech hacking could leverage the same biometric technology to steal the identity of the individuals using it.
PIXELPIN’S SOLUTION PixelPin leverages on the weaknesses of both traditional and biometric passwords, by enabling a new technology for authentication, using some of the best security authority encryption protocols, namely AES 256, RSA 4096 and TLS connection. The significance of AES 256 and its protection is the amount of operations that would be needed to hack the system. It would take billions of years on current hardware frameworks to decipher the keys without previous knowledge of them – as seen in the biclique attack, where it required 2254.4 operations. By choosing PixelPin, fintech companies can benefit from a secure login solution
with only one picture and four points (passpoints). First, the user enters their email and selects a picture, either from PixelPin’s gallery or by uploading their own. Second, the user selects four secret points on the picture that will become their secret passpoints for future logins. Third, the user goes to their inbox and verifies their email address with a six-digit verification code. Simple, right? PixelPin offers both a desktop and mobile solution for their clients. We highly recommend choosing a picture with many points of interest. A personal picture that tells a story has shown to provide an easy way of memorising picture password. Our current login success rate is more than 90 per cent, which compares very well to passwords that score 30 per cent. It is becoming the login of choice for 18- to 30-year-old users. PixelPin is a strong, secure technology alternative to traditional, character-based passwords, which is aimed at unifying and centralising all fintech logins into a more secure and stable environment, thereby reducing the risk of cybernetic attacks.
WHO WE ARE
AT A GLANCE
PixelPin provides businesses with a secure and personal authentication solution that uses pictures to replace passwords and PINS.
COMPANY: PixelPin Ltd
It can be delivered either on public Cloud, on-premises or FIDO (Fast Identity Online). It removes the major password weaknesses of phishing and database hacks whilst giving users a simple, memorable solution that does not need to be written down. PixelPin also delivers strong authentication, providing a two-factor solution using time-based, one-time passwords. The business benefits are that the solution is highly engaging, considerably reduces the hacking risks and reduces costs from password resets and lost customers.
FOUNDED: 2012 CATEGORY:
Cybersecurity authentication KEY PERSONNEL: Geoff Anderson, CEO (right) HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: Cheltenham and Tokyo (coming soon) TEL: +44 (0) 20 3468 5265 WEBSITE: www.pixelpin.io/ LINKEDIN: www.linkedin.com/ company/pixelpin-ltd/ TWITTER: @PixelPin
WHAT WE DO ‘Goodbye passwords. Log in with a picture’ TheFintechPower50 85
TFP50#MCLEAR
RUNNING RINGS AROUND THE COMPETITION! TFP50#EARTHPORT
The company behind the world’s first smart ring has its sartorial eye on the UK market as it refashions payments with wearable tech McLEAR is the leading wearable technology company for payments and security – and the inventor of the smart ring. The company was founded in 2012 in the UK and released NFC Ring® to the world in mid-2013 – kick-starting the entire smart ring space. Our innovation made it possible for a ring to provide access control, personal interaction and make contactless payments with the touch of a hand. It works using a passive near-field communication (NFC) tag in an innovative form with a very small antenna and inlay. We use several different NFC ICs, depending on application and design. Our product then works with NFC-compatible readers and terminals. It was the world’s first contactless payment ring. With hundreds of thousands of patented smart rings sold worldwide, all Europay, Mastercard and Visa (EMV) certified, innovative hardware and software technology solutions developed and plenty of intellectual property under our belt, we’re at the forefront of smart ring wearable technology. Through our strong partnerships we continues to push boundaries and create more opportunities throughout the fintech world. We enable our partners to enter the wearable space and deploy an innovative, robust, fashionable payment solution to its customer base.
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Our ring can be used as a companion or stand-alone device to make your customers’ lives a little easier. There’s no need to carry money when out for a jog in the morning, no need to reach for a wallet or phone when dashing through the Underground. Just raise a hand, tap the ring and away you go. The McLEAR smart ring is made of a durable, comfortable-to-wear ceramic, which is drop resistant to two metres. It is stress-tested and scratch resistant. The texture is very smooth and the design is sleek and fashionable. We’ve made it hypoallergenic, so anyone can wear it.
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The era of payment change is well underway… the ring is fast becoming the choice of payment instrument for thousands of people The ring is available direct to consumers with a prepaid digital wallet, reloadable account. Look out for our consumer launch in the UK this December! Our accompanying mobile apps allow your customers to keep an eye on your spending, track expenses, spend online and pause or lock a lost or stolen ring for extra piece of mind. Our goal is to make people’s lifestyle easier and more convenient. It’s simple, really.
The era of payment change is well underway. With an increased focus on technology, faster payment methods and a more demanding user base, the ring is fast becoming the choice of payment instrument for thousands of people, backed by financial institutions that are keen to promote their innovative position within the financial services industry. Our team of experts works closely with regulators, financial institutes and retailers to ensure our product is compliant, resilient and continuously improving to meet the needs of our customers and partners. We strive to innovate every step of the way. Our business-to-business channel has furnished us with much experience and allows us to work closely with the leading financial institutions around the world to deliver wearable payment solutions and products that are adaptable to meet local needs and service requirements. We bring user-friendly, innovative and fashionable, wearable solutions to our banking partners to help grow their business and inject a much-needed user experience update. Contact us if you’d like to join the wearable payments revolution and we’ll send you a sample.
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WHO WE ARE We are a leading wearable technology company for payments, security and fashion globally. Using a ring to pay is much quicker than using a credit or debit card. After experiencing the ease of use and convenience of making payments with a wave of the hand, it’s hard rejoining the slow lane. In this way we increase our clients’ customer retention. Our innovative form factor has also been proven to increase the number of consumer transactions through ease of use. We can produce rings in many colours and finishes. Our material science teams
AT A GLANCE are constantly developing techniques and colour styles of rings. Want to offer rings in your own brand? Get in touch and see what we can do. The McLEAR Ecosystem includes our accompanying mobile apps, allowing your customers to keep an eye on spending, track expenses, spend online and pause or lock a lost or stolen ring. We have a long development pipeline of features that we are integrating into the connected application ecosystem to generate long-term consumer engagement and desirability.
COMPANY: McLEAR FOUNDED: 2012 CATEGORY: Wearable financial service products and big data capture KEY PERSONNEL: Daniel Blondell, COO (right) HEAD OFFICE: Bradford, UK OFFICES IN: London, Tokyo, Los Angeles and Shenzhen WEBSITE: www.mclear.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/mclear/ TWITTER: @mclearco
WHAT WE DO 'Fashion and technology brought together to produce smart rings with contactless payments' www.thepower50.com
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INFLUENCER#CHRISTINE LAGARDE
FINTECH: A BRAVE NEW WORLD FOR THE FINANCIAL SECTOR? You can fear it or embrace it, change is coming and it raises many questions, says the head of the International Monetary Fund
From smartphones to Cloud computing, technology is rapidly changing virtually every facet of society, including communications, business and government. The financial world is no exception. For example, we need to define the legal status of a virtual currency, or digital token. We need to combat money laundering and terrorist financing by figuring out how best to perform customer due diligence on virtual currency transfers. Fintech also has macroeconomic implications that need to be better understood as we develop policies to help the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) member countries navigate this rapidly changing environment.
SOARING INVESTMENT Financial technology, or fintech – a term that encompasses products, developers and operators of alternative financial systems – is challenging traditional business models. And it is growing rapidly. According to one recent estimate, fintech investment quadrupled from 2010 to 2015, to $19billion annually. Fintech innovation has come in many shapes and
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forms – from peer-to-peer lending, to high-frequency trading, to big data and robotics. There are many success stories. Think of cell phone-based banking in Kenya and China, which is bringing millions of people who were previously unbanked into the mainstream financial system. Think of the virtual currency exchanges that allow people in developing countries to transfer money across borders, quickly and cheaply. All this calls for more creative thinking. How exactly will these technologies change the financial world? Will they completely transform it? Will banks be replaced by blockchain-based systems that facilitate peer-to-peer transactions? Will artificial intelligence reduce the need for trained professionals? And if so, can smart machines provide better financial advice to investors? The truth is: we do not know yet. Significant investment is going into fintech, but most of its real-world applications are still being tested.
REGULATORY CHALLENGES And the regulatory challenges are just emerging. For instance, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin can be used to make anonymous cross-border transfers – which increases the risk of money laundering and terrorist financing. Another risk – over the medium term – is the potential impact on financial stability brought about by the entry of new types of financial services providers into the market. Questions abound. Should new technologies – often driven by algorithms – be subject to the same type of regulation used in the past? Or are new regulatory approaches needed for evolving technologies? Can the forces of
innovation help reduce risks and maximise benefits? Some jurisdictions are taking a creative and far-sighted approach to regulation by establishing fintech sandboxes, such as the Regulatory Laboratory in Abu Dhabi and the Fintech Supervisory Sandbox in Hong Kong. These initiatives are designed to promote innovation by allowing new technologies to be developed and tested in a closely supervised environment. Here at the IMF, we are closely monitoring fintech developments. Last year, we published a paper on virtual currencies, focussing on the regulatory, financial and monetary implications. We have since broadened our focus to cover blockchain applications more generally. And we have recently established a High-level Advisory Panel of Leaders in Fintech to help us understand developments in the field. We expect to publish a new study on fintech in May. All this amounts to a brave new world for the financial sector. For some, that means a frightening vision of the future – much like the world described by Aldous Huxley. But one could also think of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Miranda’s more positive vision: “O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world.”
AT A GLANCE Christine Lagarde (left) is Managing Director of the 189-nation International Monetary Fund (IMF). LOCATION: Washington, USA WEBSITE: www.imf.org LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/in/ christinelagarde TWITTER: @Lagarde
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TFP50#CHRIS SKINNER
BECOMING A DIGITAL BANK: THE HOW AND WHY In this Q&A, veteran influencer and best-selling author Chris Skinner delivers a roadmap for Western fintechs TFP50: Your most recent book, Digital Human, concentrates on artificial technology (AI) in one particular use case in financial services. Can you give us other examples of where it’s being successful deployed? CHRIS SKINNER: My fave example of AI
being used in finserv right now is what JP Morgan is doing with its investment markets in the US. It’s using AI for best execution. Best execution is when you receive an instruction to request the purchase or sale of a stock, and the bank must guarantee that they will do that at the best cost, at the right price with the best speed, which is incredibly difficult for humans to do, but becomes incredibly easy if you use AI. It’s a huge differentiatior for JP Morgan as a bank. I am seeing a lot more of that going on with the big tech giants, though. You’re right, a third of my book, Digital Human, is dedicated to a case study on Alipay and Ant Financial. They are handling an average of 125,000 transactions per second, using AI to ensure that every transaction is bona fide, and all the risk, compliance and fraud issues are built into their technologies through AI to monitor them. On Single’s Day last year, Alipay processed more than $2billion of transactions in the first two minutes. It averaged out to 256,000 transactions a second. For context, Visa handles about 2,000 per second, so Alipay’s scale is incredible. TFP50: Chinese tech companies appear to be far outstripping the progress being made in Europe and the US. What do you think we’re lacking? CS: I think both European and American
tech firms are constrained by their existing parameters of vision, and a lot of that is based on a legacy infrastructure
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of cards and chequebooks. We have this constraint of thinking ‘how do we take what we’ve got and make it cheaper and faster with technology?’. The countries in the southern hemisphere start from scratch. Their citizens aren’t using plastic, so they can take this technology and make this super cheap, fast and capable. For example, in 2016 the Chinese transacted $5trillion through mobile wallets, mainly WeChat Pay and Alipay. In 2017 they transacted $15trillion. The US, in the meantime, has just about gotten to $150billion in 2017 through Zelle and Venmo. The scale is because China doesn’t ‘get’ plastic. When I last visited China, I went to the convenience store to pick up a few things and when I showed them my Western credit card, they looked at me like I’m an idiot. They don’t take contact payments or chip and PIN. What they do take, is QR codes from a mobile phone or, as a last resort, cash. It’s because they can leapfrog ahead to use these inclusive technologies. TFP50: You’ve spoken about diversity in the industry before, or lack of it. What should fintechs and Western organisations be doing better? CS: When I talk about fintech, I tend to talk
about it being a parent-child relationship. The financial markets are full of older people who want to keep everything as it is, while the child, the tech, wants to reinvent everything, reimagine everything and to start all over again. How those two come together is quite the challenge. What we see with fintechs is a lot of imagination with code that you don’t see coming out of the banks. The average age of the people who found those companies is in the 20s. If you know code and you know how to develop the vision around code, then you can create a
AT A GLANCE Chris Skinner is an independent commentator on the financial markets and fintech and the voice behind the Finanser.com blog. He is author of the bestselling books Digital Bank, ValueWeb and its new sequel Digital Human. He is chair of the European networking forum, The Financial Services Club, and Nordic Finance Innovation, as well as being a non-executive director of the fintech consultancy firm, 11:FS. WEBSITE: chrisskinner.global TWITTER: @Chris_Skinner
hugely differentiated offer, overnight. So the challenge for the parents, for financial markets and banks, is how to work with these visionary young coders, who see a radically different world, and how to bring them in as partners with equal stature. It’s very hard for a bank to do that when it’s run by bankers. Accenture analysed the biggest banks in the world and found 94 per cent of their leaders have never had any technology experience. How can you create a bank when you’ve only got bankers and not digital people? This is the reason why most banks think that ‘going digital’ is just rolling out an app, when in fact digital is reinventing the fabric and foundation of the bank from the ground up. There are not many banking leaders who get that.
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TFP50#SALARYFITS
A new channel to promote
FINANCIAL INCLUSION SalaryFits is empowering employees through their salaries by enabling access to fair and sustainable financial products
Employee financial wellbeing is fundamental to enhance engagement and productivity in the workplace. Moreover, employers have a unique chance to be supportive and careful about their employees’ financial health. With that in mind, SalaryFits has partnered with responsible financial institutions and employers to promote sustainable credit offerings, insurance and other financial products to employees.
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SalaryFits is a London-based financial technology company that brings financial inclusion to more than four million individuals across several countries, including Brazil, Mexico, the UK, Portugal, Italy and India. SalaryFits’ technology enables financial institutions to reach millions of workers from companies that are keen on promoting financial wellness. These offerings boost
employees’ financial health, resulting in more engagement, productivity and lower turnover rates in the workplace. Additionally, SalaryFits’ solution enables these individuals to pay for financial benefits via a salary deduction process, resulting in more accessible financial products with no additional costs or workload for the HR. It is all about creating an enhanced channel for fair and sustainable product offerings: employer support is key for workers to have access to products
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TFP50#DYDYYDYD and services that would not otherwise be available to them or for which they would have to afford unsustainable pricing structures. According to The Daily Telegraph newspaper in the UK, workplace loans providers can offer an APR of 4.9 per cent, compared to up to 1,000 per cent interest rate charged by payday loans firms, for example. SalaryFits’ technology allows companies to offer access to competitive financial products as part of their employee benefits package, together with an automated salary-linked payment feature at no additional cost to employers or to employees. With a solution like this, financial providers can benefit from a cost-effective commercial channel and technology platform through which they will have better (and convenient) access to information, lower transaction costs, lower default rates and, moreover, significantly lower costs of acquisition. As a result, financial providers will be able to access, through a unique solution, an environment in which they can better understand consumers’ ability to pay, rely on the stability of their work relationship and have the reassurance of the
willingness-to-pay element as a result of repayments made via salary deduction. Financial providers, such as lenders, insurers and investment providers, find in SalaryFits a way to interact with millions of potential clients as well as to highlight their social responsibilities by promoting health and wellbeing in the work environment. They also count on the
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In the UK, workplace loans providers can offer an APR of 4.9 per cent compared to up to 1,000 per cent by payday loans firms support of employers to promote their products and services as a preferred choice and to identify the profile and required personal information of employees. These conditions, together with the payment straight from the payroll feature, bring several advantages to financial providers, including a reduced default risk and lower operational costs. As Délber Lage, CEO of the company, explains: “It is quite interesting to see how
WHO WE ARE SalaryFits is focussed on empowering individuals through their salaries. By leveraging the existing relationship that employees have with their employers, SalaryFits allows different ranges of providers to offer fairer financial products compared to the ones available in the market. The solution connects the product offerings from financial institutions to the payroll of companies, providing real-time employees’ information (basic profile
AT A GLANCE data, salaries, employment status, etc) as well as allowing financial providers to collect payments/instalments directly from the salaries of these individuals. The company’s Cloud-based platform currently manages more than five million financial contracts every month, worth more than $22billion, and offers products from more than 70 financial institutions globally. In the UK, SalaryFits has already onboard 11 employers with 198,000 employees since it went live in the last quarter of 2017.
WHAT WE DO ‘Making sustainable financial offerings a reality’ – working with financial institutions willing to offer salary-linked products and corporates aiming to increase their financial wellbeing offerings to employees at no cost www.thepower50.com
we can benefit from leveraging on the existing relationship between those three players and create an innovative solution that is simple, effective and that brings benefits for all parties involved. This gives us the confidence to build something that is going to be sustainable and able to promote relevant changes in the way that financial products are offered to underserved consumers.” Based on this scenario, SalaryFits’ mission is to promote financial wellness and inclusion as well as to empower individuals. “Employers are a valuable channel for reaching an underserved but financially stable population,” says Lage. “With our platform, workers can access unique, more sustainable and less bureaucratic financial benefits, improving the way employees manage their financials. At the same time, employers rely on our technology to improve the financial health of their employees, in addition, to promote a more engaged and productive work environment.”
COMPANY: SalaryFits FOUNDED: 2016 CATEGORY:
Sustainable lending KEY PERSONNEL:
CEO Délber Lage (right) HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: Lisbon, Mexico City, Milan and Gurgaon TEL: +44 7460714617 WEBSITE: www.salaryfits.com LINKEDIN: linkedin/company/salaryfits TWITTER: @salaryfits
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TFP50#VERRENCY
TFP50#EARTHPORT
ADDING VALUE TO PAYMENTS
David Link, Founder and CEO of Verrency, explains the impact its software-as-a-service is having on finance – and incumbents in particular The banking and finance sector was always going to be fertile ground for nimble fintechs, able to gate crash on an industry that is often paralysed by legacy systems and slow to adapt to new technology. Innovation within payments in particular has accelerated over the past few years. There are three forces currently driving the sector:
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1
3
2
The battle between startups and incumbents is often seen as coming down to whether the incumbent gets innovation before the startup gets distribution. Verrency, however, does not
Constantly changing customer expectations require banks to have frictionless interactions and deliver new services quickly while maintaining high levels of trust Banks are hamstrung in their ability to deliver payments innovation due to ageing infrastructure, high costs of change and not having a culture of innovation
Fintechs are agile and have great solutions, however they don’t have distribution to a large percentage of the population to drive change
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believe this to be the case. Traditional banks and fintechs collaborating is the best path to long-term growth for both. This is where technology from Verrency comes into its own. Verrency was developed to act as a ‘turbocharger’ that gives issuers a low-cost model to offer a whole host of new payment services without having to modify their existing infrastructure. Verrency focusses on providing value directly to the issuer, which is where innovation is generally the slowest and most expensive in the majority of financial institutions. David Link, the Founder and CEO of Verrency, says banks are at risk of losing the ability to influence customers at the point of payment, which is the nexus of interaction that a retail customer has with his/her bank. “This situation is being intensified by Open Banking and by larger consumer platforms moving sideways into the market. For instance, this has already happened in China with Alipay and WeChat Pay, and we can see that all of the value-added services are delivered by point-of-sale linkages,” the former, long-serving Accenture veteran says. “The banks are in real danger of being relegated to a position of utility funders. Western banks that don’t act now to better engage their customers by delivering greater value-added services are going to soon lose what little differentiation they currently enjoy. “However, as banks move to better engage their customers, they are often severely hindered by their legacy payment systems. Modifying or replacing payment systems is very costly and requires considerable investment. This is why Verrency was developed and why it is being so well received around the globe.” Established in 2016, Verrency now has a global team of 26 with a focus on the US, UK, Asia and Australia. Link has also been able to build one of the most highly-credentialled payments teams on his advisory board, including Michael Kennedy, former executive at Wells Fargo as well as founder and former CEO of clearXchange (now Zelle); Royal Cole, Executive Vice President and Head of North America for Worldpay, a global
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leader in integrated omni-commerce payments, processing more than 40 billion credit and debit card transactions annually; and Jeff Portelli, Global Head of Banking Operations at eNett, with more than two decades of international experience in the payments industry, working directly with banks, retailers and government partners across Australasia,
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The banks are in real danger of being relegated to a position of utility funders Asia Pacific and the Middle East and Africa. These all serve alongside a number of other payment luminaries. Fundamental to setting up its business foundation this year is V+, which is Verrency’s partnership arm for signing and certifying third parties. V+ provides a gateway for banks to connect fintechs into their environment and distribute to
its customers live in the payments flow. To date, V+ has secured more than 20 partners, including ComplyAdvantage, DriveWealth and Goodworld. Verrency delivers its services to both traditional and neo banks, placing it in a unique position in the marketplace. Link says: “We enable issuing banks to deliver their payment innovation agendas faster and more cost effectively. Delivery of customer-centric banking services is critical for these banks to grow faster than their competitors and to stay relevant to market.” He sees a bright future for Verrency. “We have great technology, a great executive team, great clients and a payments advisory board that is second to none. We expect 2019 to be a watershed year for us as we help issuing banks innovate and better collaborate with fintechs to deliver compelling payment experiences to their customers.”
WHO WE ARE
AT A GLANCE
Verrency is a fintech payments platform that enables issuers to acquire and retain customers and provide greater control and connectability. It puts card issuers/financial institutions at the centre of innovation.
COMPANY: Verrency
Through a single connection, issuers can dramatically increase their ability and speed to test, deliver and drive compelling payment experiences for their customers. The platform also acts as a gateway to enable issuers to work more closely with payment/loyalty-related fintechs to deliver their services. Verrency works seamlessly with an issuer’s existing payments infrastructure/messaging standards and requires no merchant integration. Verrency is the first fintech to have been accepted into the Plug and Play accelerator programme across three geographies – Silicon Valley, Singapore and, now, Frankfurt.
FOUNDED: 2016 CATEGORY:
Payments innovation KEY PERSONNEL:
David Link, CEO and Founder (right) HEAD OFFICE: Melbourne, Australia OFFICES IN: Melbourne, Sydney, London, San Francisco and Singapore WEBSITE: www.verrency.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/verrency TWITTER: twitter.com/verrency
WHAT WE DO ‘Deliver payment and fintech innovation to banks without complex merchant or backend integration’ TheFintechPower50 93
UNLOCKING PAYMENTS WITH BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY
Nuggets’ co-founders Alastair Johnson and Seema Khinda Johnson believe they have found a way to restore trust by giving consumers their own data key Nuggets was born out of a need to answer some of the foremost issues plaguing retail (particularly ecommerce) today. The past year should serve as a wake up call to everyone believing their data is safe in the hands of third parties – from Equifax exposing the data of 143 million Americans, to Cambridge Analytica siphoning personal information from an estimated 87 million Facebook users for the purposes of political microtargeting, it’s clear that the illusion of privacy when interacting with businesses gives a false sense of security. The problem is aggravated due to the archaic infrastructure we’ve grown accustomed to. Too many merchants and consumers delegate the security of their data to centralised servers, which become central points of failure with troves of sensitive user information (from card details and physical addresses to social security numbers) all stored in a large ‘data silo’. A number of things could go wrong ranging from accidental leakage, or deliberate internal/external efforts by malicious actors to compromise the
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information. Such repositories are highly lucrative and amalgamating all of this data in one place provides criminals with a lucrative target (whether they wish to use it for fraud and identity theft or sell it on to others). The Nuggets’ solution is designed to combat the problems arising from this architecture in order to reduce the frequency of fraud, chargebacks and false positives. Harnessing the power of bleeding-edge blockchain technology, zero-knowledge storage and biometric security, the platform ensures that users remain self-sovereign and that their data is kept safe in a digital vault owned only by them. The benefits to consumers are clear – no dependence on businesses to safeguard sensitive information, no need to
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We’re optimistic for the role that decentralisation will play in ensuring self-sovereignty over one’s own payments
remember username/password combinations (authentication is done via biometrics) and a more seamless checkout experience (no filling out potentially insecure web forms with addresses, phone numbers and card details). Biometrics are the natural progression away from the otherwise weak username/ password keypair. All too often, individuals set poor passwords that are repeated across sites that are highly vulnerable to brute-force attacks. Conversely, setting strong 32-plus character passwords is often too inconvenient for many and these can quickly be forgotten. With fingerprint authentication, a high-entropy login can be generated, one that won’t be forgotten or compromised. Combined with blockchain architecture, it’s the perfect way to create an encrypted personal Cloud, accessible only to the individual who owns it. For merchants, the benefits of switching to blockchain-based infrastructures are beginning to become increasingly clear. On the one hand, there’s the UI/UX improvements – as mentioned above, repeatedly filling out forms any time a
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TFP50#NUGGETS payment needs to be made is often laborious for consumers and has been found to aggravate the ‘abandoned shopping cart’ phenomenon, which is responsible for an estimated loss of £18billion in profits for retailers in the UK alone. With a secure and simple payment system such as Nuggets, sensitive information would need to be entered only once (upon initialising the app) before any subsequent payment could be made with a single touch when the app is prompted. Another compelling reason for merchants to adopt Nuggets is the advent of mounting regulatory pressures that heavily penalise poor practices surrounding the storage of customer data. The most prominent of these is undoubtedly the recently enacted General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which punishes compliance failure with fines beginning at €10million (and up to four per cent of the company’s annual revenue). In order to comply, businesses must allocate both capital and manpower to ensuring their data handling activities adhere to stringent regulations. While large corporations are better equipped, insofar as the resources expended to keep up, smaller merchants are often incapable of doing the same (meaning they must either reject European customers, risk facing fines arising from lack of compliance, or shut down their operations as a result). The Nuggets offering provides a cost-effective and much easier way to navigate the regulatory minefield – merchants cannot be penalised if they aren’t holding customer data. As such, it’s an important fintech solution to level the playing field and prevent legislative side-effects from disincentivising smaller businesses from operating. With the advanced technology that is zero-knowledge storage, individuals can execute payments without ever needing to share card details, instead relying on token attestations on a decentralised network to confirm the validity of the payment (essentially, proving without revealing). We’re incredibly optimistic for the future of finance, and the role that decentralisation will play in ensuring self-sovereignty over one’s own payments. The reception the Nuggets platform has
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received in Asia is huge – we’ve recently partnered with QFPay, the mobile payments processor for giants WeChat and Alipay, which boast 800 million and 400 million users, respectively. On the European front, the project has received backing from the Mayor of London, and was recently selected for the Lafayette Plug and Play accelerator – following in the footsteps of previous candidates that include PayPal and Dropbox. Mobile payments are well on their way to replacing cash as we move towards a cashless society. Open banking directives, such as the revised Payments Services Directive (PSD2) are laying the foundations for a plethora of new opportunities for fintech innovators – the utmost priority, we believe, should be working to build secure and socially
scalable applications for users to transact between themselves and with merchants, both online and offline. With open banking, the decades of secure infrastructure built by major banks can now be leveraged by startups and established businesses alike to experiment with new payment and wealth management applications. We have at our disposal a suite of technologies than can eradicate outdated and high-risk infrastructures, replacing them with user-oriented solutions for payments and identity management. We’re on the brink of the shift to a new financial paradigm, and we’re thrilled with the progress the Nuggets team has made towards ushering in a new era.
WHO WE ARE
AT A GLANCE
For consumers, Nuggets offers one simple, purely biometric way to pay, login or verify ID. No usernames. No passwords. No tracking and selling of your activity.
COMPANY: Nuggets
For businesses, Nuggets means the end of vast, vulnerable customer databases, minimising regulatory risks. If you’re not holding data, it can’t be breached. It will hugely reduce losses from fraud, false positives and fraudulent charge-backs, while increasing revenue, conversion and loyalty. Nuggets is agnostic, and will be available across ecommerce platforms and payment gateways. Co-founded by Alastair Johnson and Seema Khinda Johnson, the Nuggets board has recently been joined by Visa’s former managing director Kevin Jenkins, himself a pioneer in the payments sector, as a non-exec. Nuggets has recently agreed partnerships with QF Pay, Storiqa, CPChain and Credits. Our Alpha is currently being tested by users around the globe with login and payment already working and ID verification to be added shortly.
FOUNDED: 2016 CATEGORY: Login, payment, ID verification, delivery authentication, loyalty and rewards KEY PERSONNEL:
Alastair Johnson (above), Co-founder & CEO and Seema Khinda Johnson (right), Co-Founder & COO HEAD OFFICE: London PRESENCE IN: Europe TEL: +44 (0)208 133 5461 WEBSITE: https:/nuggets.life/ LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/nuggets TWITTER: @nuggetsPAYandID
WHAT WE DO ‘Pay, login and verify – without sharing your data’ – Nuggets is the one-stop shop ecommerce payments and ID platform TheFintechPower50 95
TFP50#WIREX
TFP50#EARTHPORT
A GRADUAL PROCESS
How companies like Wirex facilitate the use of more effective payments network To say that the finance industry is on the brink of upheaval is disingenuous; it’s in a constant state of change, driven by political, economic and technological forces. Occasionally, innovations and events can dramatically alter its direction – the dismantling of the Bretton Woods system, the internet and 2008’s financial meltdown are among the most disruptive examples. The mantle of ‘disruptor’ has
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since been placed firmly at the feet of cryptocurrency and its accompanying distributed ledger technology. “Many people argue that cryptocurrency is the most influential agent of change in finance,” says Dmitry Lazarichev, co-founder of leading digital payments platform Wirex. “We’re only starting to get an idea of the extent to which decentralised, digital currency can change how we manage our money.”
Pavel Matveev, Wirex co-founder believes the token economy is the future for payments but that mainstream cryptocurrency adoption is unlikely to occur overnight. Firms that help to bridge the gap between conventional banking systems and cryptocurrency, providing flexibility to the consumer to choose between different payment options, are likely to have the greatest impact on mainstream acceptance.
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spend their digital coins like conventional money using the Wirex Visa card. This hybrid approach represents a more palatable proposition for retailers whilst giving the public a practical way to utilise their crypto investments.
FINANCIAL SERVICES It’s easy to become preoccupied by the promise of financial freedom that crypto and its underlying technology offers to consumers. Often overlooked are the benefits of integrating blockchain technology within conventional finance. The most significant use case for cryptocurrency adoption occurs in the payments industry. Blockchain technology allows customers and institutions to make cross-border transactions that are faster, cheaper and more secure.
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“Wirex allows anyone to explore digital currency in a regulated environment,” continues Matveev. “Users can enjoy the advantages of traditional money management seamlessly integrated with crypto functionality. It’s the best of both.” There are several ways in which this increased integration of traditional and digital currency is likely to manifest itself over the year ahead:
RETAIL Crypto idealists herald an age where cryptocurrency can be used to pay for everything from groceries to a new home. In reality, volatile market movements make retailers reluctant to accept cryptocurrencies as a means of payment. Platforms like Wirex help address this tricky issue. By allowing instant exchange between crypto (BTC, LTC, XRP, ETH, XLM, Waves, Nano, WLO, DAI) and more than 10 traditional currencies, Wirex leaves the choice up to the customers on how they want to pay, and lets users convert and
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We’re only starting to get an idea of the extent to which decentralised, digital currency can change how we manage our money Matveev says stable coins play a big part in contributing to a more effective payment network: “Stable coins bring all the benefits of cryptocurrency without the volatility and, combined with a robust security layer, it can provide the transparency and assurance needed for the movement of money across countries.” Payment providers and financial firms are already snapping it up. IBM blockchain is an example and Wirex’s recent partnership with Stellar is an important milestone on the road to widespread adoption. It’s clear that cryptocurrency won’t hit the mainstream overnight, though. A comprehensive switch to decentralised digital currency is likely to be a gradual process. After all, the technology has had little time to mature since Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008. Trailblazers like Wirex stand to play a pivotal role in the process – uniting existing banking
systems with disruptive blockchain technology to deliver a more effective payment network for financial institutions and consumers alike.
WHO WE ARE Wirex is a UK, FCA-licenced global leader in digital money solutions for individuals and businesses. We have spent the past four years building our own secure software platform – this bespoke technology has translated into a fast, secure and efficient platform to help bridge the gap between cryptocurrencies and everyday spending.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: Wirex FOUNDED: 2014 CATEGORY: Crypto and
traditional currency management KEY PERSONNEL:
Co-founders Dmitry Lazarichev (above) and Pavel Matveev (right) HEAD OFFICE: London COUNTRIES AND REGIONS PRESENT IN:
EEA, APAC, North America TEL: +44 (0)207 877 0027 WEBSITE: wirexapp.com/ LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/ wirex-limited TWITTER: @wirexapp
WHAT WE DO ‘Crypto and traditional currency in the palm of your hand’ – Wirex bridges the gap between crypto and everyday spending TheFintechPower50 97
G N I X I F CROSS-BORDER
PAYMENTS
Technology is just a tool, it’s how you use it that counts – and online cross-border payments Azimo is deploying it to democratise financial services Fintech exists because incumbent financial services are slow, complicated and poorly adapted to a 21st-Century customer needs. Good innovators take an existing product, analyse its flaws, simplify it, check if it provides value to users and then release. The best innovators continue this process throughout the entire lifecycle of their product. Those that don’t are eventually disrupted and replaced themselves in a life cycle that is getting shorter all the time. Azimo’s vision is to ‘use technology to democratise financial services, making them
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affordable and available to all’. To do this, we need to understand the global money transfer process better than our competitors and simplify it with every release. Azimo has always aimed to be ‘more tech than fin’, but while our engineering team is the engine room of our business, no project is ever purely technical. Engineers cannot only focus on building software because software is just a tool. The engineering team should be focussed on solving customer problems and being a growth partner for the rest of the company. It’s not been easy, but in six years we’ve built Azimo to a company that moves billions of dollars around the world. And we’ve learned more than we ever believed possible. So, here are the key engineering principles gleaned from our journey. It’s our manifesto for changing the world of cross-border payments. THE TEAM Software is a just a tool. You can buy it, you can copy it and your competitors will be using the same Cloud
products that you use. The differentiator in software development is your team. If your team simply writes good code, you might make a decent product. If your team deeply understands the problems of your users, you will make a great product. To create an environment where motivated, skilful developers deliver value to customers, we offer every engineer autonomy, mastery and purpose. AUTONOMY Once we agree as a business on the nature of a problem, engineers have autonomy to choose the solution they think works the best. Because our engineers are divided up into small mission teams, every team member has a voice when solving a problem or deciding on an approach. MASTERY Mastery is defined as the desire to keep improving something that’s important to us. Yet even the best people with the greatest extrinsic motivation need guidance and tuition to improve. That’s why each team has a tech lead
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– the one and only level of hierarchy in our engineering department. The tech lead is responsible for helping teams to cooperate, offering guidance to other engineers and helping partners across the business to understand the engineering process. PURPOSE We hire people that believe in our vision and care about changing the world of financial services, about things like financial inclusion. A sense of purpose, of belief in the mission is critical in every member of staff we hire. To maintain that sense of purpose, we are very transparent. Every team should be able to see how their work contributes to achieving the company’s vision. No decisions or results are kept secret. Everyone at the company has access to the same data as the CEO. Goal-setting systems also help individuals understand and define their own purpose. DATA We’ve all heard the definitions of a ‘data-driven company’. But what does it actually mean? To us, it’s about:
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THE OUTCOME A thousand pie charts aren’t worth one happy user. If you can’t demonstrate precisely how your changes improved the life of a customer, you aren’t data-driven.
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DATA, NOT OPINIONS Being data-driven means changing the culture of your business. If your employees have all the tools to access information but still wait for their boss’s opinion before acting, you’re doing it wrong. At Azimo, everyone is a part-time data analyst. Everyone should be able to win an argument with data, no matter whether with a colleague or senior management.
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GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT It’s become fashionable to store as much data as you can collect. If you’re not careful, however, you will quickly find it impossible to separate signal from noise. Keep the data, by all means, but only process that which your qualitative insight and your increased understanding of your business and your customers tells you is important. That way, you won’t be inundated by irrelevance.
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If your team simply writes good code, you might make a decent product. If your team deeply understands the problems of your users, you will make a great product AUTOMATION At Azimo, we’ve built an entire business on automation and usability. Our customers see a user-friendly, elegant app or website that allows them to send money anywhere in the world within a few minutes. From a platform perspective, however, we’ve integrated dozens of application programming interfaces (APIs), services and partners to make what was a laborious, manual process into a fast, seamless one. This involves everything from integrating with a card payment system to a bespoke banking system. A user of Azimo can make a pound sterling card transaction in London at
WHO WE ARE Azimo was founded in 2012 with the vision of using technology to democratise financial services, making them affordable and available to all. With a focus on speed, security and reduced cost, the company is challenging banks and offline money transfer providers across Europe. Azimo’s apps and website have won several awards for design and usability. Two-thirds of the company’s transactions are made on mobile devices. The iOS and Android apps have been featured or highlighted by Apple and Google in the App Store and Google Play respectively. In 2018 Azimo was recognised by The Sunday Times Tech Track 100 as one of Britain’s fastest-growing technology companies and has won numerous technology and finance industry awards.
TFP50#AZIMO 4pm on a Sunday, their loved one can collect the money in Filipino pesos at a supermarket in Manila within the hour. Without automation, this would be impossible. SCALABILITY Being able to scale is crucial in a fast-growing business like Azimo. We have a simple rule: technology follows architecture and architecture should address real problems. If we start at the top with proper domain design, we can use the right tools to solve the right problems. In addition, our technology-agnostic approach means we can use different languages (PHP, JS, Java, Scala) in different areas of our ecosystem. We also have to process multiple money transfers in parallel. To do this, we have to integrate with many partners in both a synchronous and asynchronous way. The natural solution is an event-driven architecture, based on microservices. Azimo employs 128 people across its offices in London, Krakow and Amsterdam. With a payout network that serves 200 countries and territories worldwide, it is one of the world’s largest digital money transfer platforms.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: Azimo FOUNDED: 2012 CATEGORY: Digital cross-border payments KEY PERSONNEL:
CEO Michael Kent (right) HEAD OFFICE: London OFFICES IN: Krakow WEBSITE: www.azimo.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/company/azimo TWITTER: @Azimo
WHAT WE DO ‘Faster, safer money transfers’ TheFintechPower50 99
TFP50#ZAFIN
SETTING BANKING FREE TO THRIVE Don Halliwell Sr, Director of Zafin, explains how the company can help banks escape the legacy mindset and thrive in a new operating environment
From new digital infrastructures and an enhanced ability to process data, to new regulations being explored on virtually every continent, it’s clear that open banking will transform not only how banks do business, but the global banking market as opportunities are created for companies and developers to compete in the financial services sector. While it would be easy for banks to see this as a threat, in reality, it’s a clear pathway to digital transformation. To meet the greater competition and innovation from non-banking institutions, traditional banks will need to develop new operating models to remain competitive and thrive. It’s by developing a clear framework for how to proceed in these unknown times that the biggest benefit for banks will come: uncovering and capitalising on data while opening up unexplored value chains. With new technology, banks will be able to better access and mine the data they
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already own to create the individualised services their customers want, but often turn to non-traditional financial institutions to provide, such as financial apps and portals. The bottom line is, open banking is about to ignite the financial data revolution, and it will benefit banks in the long run. They must now innovate by leveraging powerful pricing and product execution systems, like Zafin’s, along the way, lest they become nothing more than account vessels.
source for traditional services. It’s within this structure that banks have been able to thwart larger competition and retain control over all customer information.
WHAT IS OPEN BANKING? The banking industry currently operates under an ageing model, in which banks have maintained total control over the information they collect concerning their customers. This gives banks the opportunity to own the market by becoming the only
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Open banking seeks to change that, by creating an open system in which customer data can be easily, yet securely, accessed and used by different financial providers. This means banks will no longer have the luxury of keeping data siloed to preserve a customer’s loyalty. Primarily transferred through application programming interfaces (APIs), data sharing gives customers access to their own banking data in real-time to change the way they make transactions, invest and save. Through this increased access to data, customers will have a larger visibility of the market. Being able to compare prices from different providers will allow them to own their data and choose to do business with institutions they trust. In this highly competitive market, banks will be challenged to develop more innovative solutions and value propositions. To succeed, they’ll need to show how customer-centric their systems truly are, which begins with overcoming and mastering the new data-sharing sector.
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protect customers from phoney transactions. It’s through encrypted and aggregated data that banks can create a robust system. By thoroughly vetting potential API partners, banks can ensure their customers aren’t subject to advertising or predatory lending. Although the inherent risks of data sharing do exist, it’s critical for banks to know that by developing these processes and governance, they can overcome the challenges. When done correctly, banks an deliver increased security through enhanced know-your-customer capabilities and create deeper relationships.
Banks must leverage powerful pricing and product execution systems, lest they become account vessels
THE CURRENT RISK IN DATA SHARING Banks have traditionally viewed the protection of customer data as their responsibility, so as open banking regulations continue to evolve, banks are very resistant to these new regulations. Even though APIs have been around for years and have seen success in other industries, banks must overcome the lack of security regulations in place to ensure customer data is protectedfrom phoney third-party organisations. In an industry where data sharing has always been on a risk-and-permission basis, there will need to be a shift in the security landscape in order for open banking to be successful. As more competition enters the market, banks will need to have a system to
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DRIVING EXPECTATIONS AND EXPERIENCES THROUGH DATA Open banking is simply a framework that helps banks on their digital journey. As more technologically focussed competitors enter the market, banks will need to understand the importance of their digital channel. Integrating digital solutions with legacy systems is a time-consuming challenge, forcing banks to compromise on other customer-centric strategies. Open banking will cause customers to demand extremely personalised services. Incorporating digital platforms will allow banks to offer advanced features, such as a product catalogue that includes dynamic, flexible and event-driven pricing capabilities. Through these features and more, banks can utilise data to differentiate themselves from the competition. Specifically, banks can take their services even further to offer financial and non-financial products. Rather than simply offering an auto loan, banks can offer the entire value chain to help customers buy a car at the lowest price. It’s through APIs and their ability to connect customers’ current financial data with the offerings of a car dealership, for example, that banks can form partnerships to drive purchases outside of their typical scope.
Additionally, life events have always been a valuable way to understand the greatest impact on a customer, but banks haven’t been able to leverage that in the past. Harnessing the power of digital platforms will allow banks to link this raw customer data to personalised events to drive loyalty. This will take banks away from a fragmented view of their customers to translating multiple customer experiences into one single action. With hyper-personalised analytic-driven platforms, banks can successfully navigate their customers’ data like never before.
TAKING A DIGITALLY FOCUSSED STEP FORWARD Banks are facing an unprecedented level of change. Those that wish to survive must focus on their digital strategy. Those that choose not to or evolve later will be faced with an additional challenge of third-party players and fintech companies attempting to lure away customers with innovative solutions. Banks that embrace open banking from the start will set themselves apart and show their value early on.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: Zafin FOUNDED: 2002 CATEGORY: Relationship pricing software KEY PERSONNEL: Al Karim Somji, Group CEO and Founder (RIGHT) HEAD OFFICE: Toronto, Canada OFFICES IN: Canada, UK, USA and India WEBSITE: zafin.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/zafin/ TWITTER: @Zafin
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TFP50#CURVE
AHEAD OF THE TFP50#EARTHPORT
CURVE
Curve’s unique ‘operating system for money’ connects all your plastic to one smart card and an even smarter app Curve is on a mission to free people’s money by simplifying and unifying their finances. It taps into a global consumer insight and provides a unique solution. People spend their waking hours earning money and managing that money makes them stressed and tense. They spend it recklessly or squirrel it away fearfully. Their financial life is fragmented and they don’t feel in control of it. Curve believes that consumers should feel in control of their finances and the solution is not another bank or service. The solution is to put all your finances in one place, so you can make smart choices on how to spend, send, see and save. The innovation lies in fundamentally shaping new experiences with money – combining the banks you know and love today with the best financial products and services in the market in a friction-free way. Curve’s unique technology allows them to bridge various gaps that prevented innovative products like Apple Pay from gaining traction in the market: Curve is the only ‘Operating System For Money’. That is because it literally created this new market through innovation in
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regulation, scheme rules and technology. Curve has no direct competition. No other fintech can claim that they are the one platform for all your bank accounts, cards, and wallets. Curve is ‘connecting money’ by creating an over-the top interface, streaming the way you spend, send, see and save money. The beauty of it is that it does not require you to displace money. Instead, it connects all your money into one interface with read/write permissions. The vision is long term. There are three stages of product evolution, each driven by a core enabling technology, forming an over the top distribution layer for financial products and services under a new market condition that unleashes latent supply and is creating new demand. Curve is a truly global proposition. As it is built on the trusted Mastercard network, it is accepted anywhere that Mastercard is – by more than 35 million merchants. Curve also helps customers get smarter with their money through a number of built-in features.
No other fitnech can claim that they are the one platform for all your bank accounts, cards and wallets
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■ Its unique ‘All-Your-Cards-In-One’ technology means a customer can
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load all their cards into the app and spend through all of them with just one card With real-time notifications, customers can immediately see if their card has been used without their permission and they can immediately lock/unlock the card from the app With Curve, all of a customer’s cards are commission-free. They use their cards via Curve and its technology automatically converts any foreign currency at the best bank rate In a world’s-first, customers can tap the ‘Go Back in Time’ option to switch the card used for a transaction after the purchase was made. They can also instantly earn Reward points in-app when they shop at 50 major brands. They can spend the points at any time Insights and one spend view allows you to see how you’re spending across all your accounts, automatically categorised Customers can integrate the various accounting softwares, as well as receiving email receipts (similar to Uber’s system)
In January 2018, Curve launched out of beta and to all consumers in the UK. To date, Curve has managed to win over 250,000 customers.
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WHO WE ARE
AT A GLANCE
We built Curve on one simple truth: the world doesn’t need another bank – customers need a better way to control their money.
COMPANY: Curve
That’s why Curve puts all their finances in one place, right at their fingertips, so they can make smart choices on how to spend, send, see and save. Our customers describe Curve as ‘best new financial product’, “absolutely brilliant’ and ‘makes wallets smaller and lives easier’ (TrustPilot reviews, 2018).
WHAT WE DO ‘All your cards in one’ – so you’re free to live the life you want
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FOUNDED: 2016 CATEGORY: We’re
building a new category – an Operating System for Money! KEY PERSONNEL:
Shachar Bialick, Founder (above) HEAD OFFICE: London PRESENCE: UK and Europe WEBSITE: www.curve.app LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/curve-ltd-/ TWITTER: @imaginecurve
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TFP50#MAMBU
LAUNCHING SPEED BOATS FROM CRUISE SHIPS: HOW INCUMBENTS CAN TAKE ON FINTECH CHALLENGERS Leading software-as-a-service banking engine Mambu is helping a flotilla of dynamic spinoffs set sail on the digital high seas. ‘Captain of the Fleet’, CEO Eugene Danilkis, explains the strategy Digital technology has changed financial services. It has facilitated innovation, increased competition and made the digital customer experience the key differentiator. While this is good for customers, established institutions have realised that spending years and millions on building an ecosystem expecting the technology, customer experience and product mix to last for the next decade, no longer works. They know realised that tech-enabled competitors pose a strategic threat. Standing still is not an option, so they have to evolve. The new route being adopted by many banks is no longer transformation, but instead transition: launching greenfield tech-enabled businesses to capture market opportunities and pave the path to a lower-risk and higher-reward technological evolution.
THE STRATEGIC THREAT Competitors possess the characteristics that are increasingly important to
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consumers and shareholders alike. They are lean, agile, provide a best-in-class customer experience and are able to grow and scale rapidly. This embodies a strategic threat, with McKinsey estimating that legacy financial institutions will see profits decline by up to 60 per cent by 2025 if they fail to evolve – a figure which should be motivating incumbents to look outside of traditional practices for growth and sustainability.
OPERATING LIKE A FINTECH Not all new entrants are startups. Large tech companies are starting their own banking and lending businesses, leveraging their resources and existing customer bases to expand into new markets and launch new products. Many of these companies have one distinctive characteristic in common: they are operating like fintechs, working independently of their parent organisation, adopting a new culture and using the latest technology to improve the customer experience.
GROWTH OPPORTUNITIES While banks can continue to rely on the upper end of the market to provide steady revenue streams, long-term growth lies in geographic expansion, improving customer experience and focussing on underserved markets and SMEs. Millennials and digital natives have turned away from traditional banks in search of mobile alternatives. They are drawn to the best products and experience, and banks with the right level of service can win over this large market. Mobile-only banks, such as N26, are leading the way. Their strategy is simple: offer customers the best digitised products on one platform. It has helped them triple their customer base to 1.5 million. What’s most impressive about their growth is it is primarily based on referrals from existing customers, underlining the importance of a positive experience. SME lending also offers a significant opportunity for growth. The European Commission’s SME Performance Review
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estimated just under 23 million small and medium enterprises generated €3.9trillion in value add and employed 90 million people in 2016, and McKinsey has identified a $350billion untapped lending opportunity within this sector. This growth sector has seen numerous new entrants who are using digital technology to navigate a complex lending environment. If banks and lenders are willing to change their thinking and take a digital approach now, they can benefit from the same opportunities as they have a distinct advantage: the ability to leverage their balance sheet to help them navigate a rapidly evolving market.
LAUNCHING SPEEDBOATS
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One path to growth is acquisition but this is an expensive option, complicated by having to find a company with the right fit for the business. There are also only few acquisitions to go around, and making old and new cultures and processes work, while retaining the top talent of the fintech after their big payday, has always been a challenge in acquisitions. Given the technology available, a cleaner option is to build a digital banking spinoff that can operate like a fintech. If we look at established banks as cruise ships – large, expensive to operate, process heavy and slow to manoeuvre – the spinoff can be seen as a speedboat – independent, cost-effective, agile and lean. It can be launched within 12 months, unrestricted by geography and able to penetrate new markets. A spinoff has to be seen as an investment in an innovation arm, created to address a specific market need and unimpeded by traditional organisational processes. Given the freedom, it could leap ahead technologically by prioritising application programming interfaces (APIs), automation, Cloud and mobile-first thinking and be able to demonstrate results and customer impact in a short period of time.
Banks can derive value by leveraging technology to streamline operations, automate processes and significantly reduce overall cost of doing business. Accessing the very technology used by the new players allows them more focus externally on clients and service instead of internal systems and processes.
NEW PEOPLE, THINKING AND PROCESSES Technology, while a differentiator, is just one cog in the machine. Real transformation is only possible with a change of people, thinking and processes. This means new leadership, incentivised to drive success of the spinoff and not conflicted between the bigger organisation and the new venture. This leadership has to instil a culture of innovation and continuous change from the start to enable it to act like a startup without being held back by legacy processes.
A spinoff has to be seen as an investment in an innovation arm, created to address a specific market need and unimpeded by traditional organisational processes
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FIRST MOVER ADVANTAGE
This speedboat approach is already gathering pace with established institutions seeing the first mover advantage and launching spinoffs to grow outside of traditional structures. We have been working with large European banks, which are launching digital spin-offs. ABN AMRO’s New10 and TBC Bank’s Space are just two examples. New10 went from concept to launch in 10 months and Space took just eight months. They saw the opportunity in the market and chose to take a digital approach to reach this underserved sector. The digital banks operate like fintechs and, using agile and lean technology that allows them to go to market quickly, tailor their products to specific market and regulatory needs, and scale operations.
LEARN FROM THE MARKET Banks and lenders cannot keep moving in the same direction if they want to see themselves as relevant and innovative.
They need a long-term strategic approach, not a tactical fix. Through digital spinoffs, they can allow themselves the flexibility to play at speeds at which startups operate with increased time to value. Those currently on cruise ships have the opportunity to launch a speedboat or two. The key is to learn from what works best in the market and build on that, eliminate aspects that did not go as smoothly, then change tack. This is what innovation is about: the ability to explore and quickly iterate on what works in the market and, in the process, they will be redesigning banking for the 21st Century.
WHO WE ARE Launched in 2011, Mambu powers more than 6,000 loan and deposit products, which serve more than four million end customers. With more than 250 live operations in nearly 60 countries, ranging from fintech revolutionaries to traditional banks, Mambu is helping financial institutions evolve and thrive.
AT A GLANCE COMPANY: Mambu FOUNDED: 2011 CATEGORY:
Software-as-a-service banking engine KEY PERSONNEL:
Eugene Danilkis, CEO (above) HEAD OFFICE: Berlin OFFICES IN: Dresden, Lași, London, Amsterdam, Singapore, Miami and Sydney WEBSITE: mambu.com LINKEDIN: linkedin.com/ company/mambu/ TWITTER: @Mambu_com
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TFP50#CONTRIBUTORS’ INDEX
OUR PARTNERS B-Hive Department of International Trade Emerging Payments Association Sky Parlour Metro Bank Invest HK
11 7 9 13
THE INFLUENCERS Duena Blomstrom Ghela Boskovich Haytham Kaddoura Brett King Christine Lagarde Jim Marous Devie Mohan Chris Skinner Ruth Wandhöfer
70 54 55 36 88 20 37 89 21
5 15
THE FINTECHS Apply Financial Azimo Banking Circle Bottomline Technologies BUD Curve Earthport eMerchantPay Fenergo Form3 The Glue iGTB Instantor Jaroona Chain Judopay Kompli-Global Mambu McClear Monese MYPINPAD N26
28 98 18 38 62 102 16 76 80 66 74 22 40 30 26 44 104 86 68 78 52
Nuggets OneVisage ONPEX Paybase Paysafe Pendo Systems PixelPin Recordsure Revolut SalaryFits Signicat SmartStream Sphonic Starling Bank UniZest Verrency Viva Wallet Wirex Zafin
94 32 34 50 60 58 84 42 46 90 72 24 82 56 64 92 48 96 100
O F F I C I A L & S U P P O R T I N G PA R T N E R S
THE FINTECH POWER 50 – WORKING ALONGSIDE EXCELLENCE...
FOUNDER Jason Williams CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER Mark Walker CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER Christophe Langlois EDITOR Sue Scott ART DIRECTOR Chris Swales
FEATURE WRITERS David Firth Tracy Fletcher Alex King Natalie Marchant Swati Sanyal Tarafd
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SmartStream-STP
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