FinTech news in digital banking category

NY Mag piece detailed a lawsuit brought on by three former employees as well as alleged fabrications and inappropriate behavior on the part of Curtis. The startup also planned to build out a LGBTQ+ business marketplace and a platform that offered discounts and rewards when members shop at merchants whose actions support the queer community.

The vulnerability in Fortra’s GoAnywhere file-transfer software came to light on February 2 after security journalist Brian Krebs publicly shared details of Fortra’s security advisory because the tech company had put the advisory behind a login prompt.

The digital banking units, set up in collaboration with over 20 public and private banks, are brick-and-mortar outlets that are equipped with tablets and internet services to help individuals and small businesses open their savings accounts, access government identified schemes, perform verifications, make transactions and avail loans and insurance. India on Sunday launched 75 digital banking units in villages and small towns across the country in a move that it said will help bring financial services and literacy to more citizens. Availing banking services has traditionally been a struggle for people living in villages and small towns, said Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Even as more than a billion bank accounts exist in India, people living in remote areas have had to typically take a day off from the work to visit a nearby city for their banking related work.

To help fuel continued growth, the startup is announcing it has raised $67 million in a Series B funding round that included participation from Battery Ventures, Don Griffith, NFL player Drew Brees, Ferst Capital Partners, FinTLV, Next Play Capital, Operator Stack, Redpoint Ventures, Tencent, Tom Williams and Wedbush Capital.

Backbase — an Amsterdam-based startup that provides a platform that banks and others can use to better structure and leverage the data that they have, and to then use that to build more personalization and other new features into those banks’ customer-facing services — has raised €120 million ($128 million at today rates).

So lenders can use Indicina for credit scoring and bank sentiment analysis, getting access to ML-driven financial analytics and improved insights into consumers they currently don’t have and derisk unsecured loans.

In 2014, Riverwood Capital and Antonio Soares — who now serves as Dock’s CEO — bought out 100% of Conductor and essentially created the company that is Dock today. The company’s client base includes fintechs, retailers, banks and technology companies that are focused on not only improving the customer experience for the currently banked population, but also on helping bring previously unbanked and underbanked consumers into the digital payments and banking systems.

The margins might be thin on any digital payment — one reason why even a company that looks like it’s growing and doing a lot of business might still fail: The numbers need to be huge to work out in its profitable favor — but this is why so many payments companies work on vast scale, and why building in a number of extra valued-added services in hopes of them getting picked up by customers (and customers’ customers), as Stripe is doing here, is smart business, one way that it hopes to sustain itself for the long (and likely public) haul. Stripe has been making a number of acquisitions to bring in extra functionality into its platform to close up some of the gaps — for example almost exactly a year ago it acquired TaxJar to help automatically calculate sales tax and provide related tools to its customers — but it looks like Financial Connections was built in-house, but powered by MX and Finicity (as pointed out by Mary Ann here). Stripe’s selling point for these tools, beyond a more seamless integration with its other products, is that it helps its customers make more transactions. Details like these can in turn be used to help underwrite risk for loans; to track spending patterns and automatically pay bills; and more — in other words, financial data that’s useful or necessary to run financial transactions over other Stripe services like Stripe Connect, ACH payments or Stripe Capital-powered loans. Just yesterday, I wrote about an interesting startup called Kevin (okay, kevin.) that’s building a whole new set of payment rails and APIs for account-to-account payments that link straight into bank accounts, bypassing card rails and legacy account-to-account payment methods that are harder to implement.

Founded in 2007 by Perez and Oscar Garcia Mendoza, who now serves as chairman of Novopayment’s board, NovoPayment had been bootstrapped since inception until it raised its Series A round earlier this year, the company announced today. Novopayment has been focused since its founding on building out a tech stack that ties all the critical processes together for financial institutions to build out their digital banking services.

Umba said it brings a wide range of transparent and accessible financial products to those underserved by legacy banks across Africa — only 43% of the region’s population are account holders at financial institutions. However, the new funding will allow the company to test this out as it prepares to launch in new markets, including Egypt, Ghana and Kenya, where mobile money is prominent.

But while that seems to foreshadow that Lunar definitely has ambitions to move beyond its Nordic shores (with a name and stratospheric association to match that), the startup is actually still focused on building out services that ferret out what the incumbents are still not providing, to build those services into the Lunar platform, not least because he points out that Nordic consumers and businesses are some of the most lucrative not just in Europe but the world in terms of the value-added services they take, the money they transact with and so on.

American Express has launched its first all-digital consumer checking account, the company announced on Tuesday. The new offering, American Express Rewards Checking, is currently available for eligible U.S. Consumer Card Members. The launch comes as the emergence of digital banking services is causing traditional banks to enhance their digital strategies and offer more competitive banking \[…\]

Finclusion Group, a fintech that uses AI algorithms to provide financial services to African customers via an array of credit-centric products, has raised $20 million in debt and equity pre-Series A financing.

This, in fact, can also potentially provide a steer to Novo on what might be most popular and potentially worth considering as in-house products in the future, but for now it serves another couple of key purposes: it makes Novo more useful for its customers, and it provides more data sources to Novo to build future products.