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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
FICO and LigaData have partnered on a decision-as-a-service tool.
The two will make the new capabilities available to telecommunications firms in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
The decision-as-a-service solutions suite includes mobile lending, price optimization, collections optimization, subscriber segmentation, and fraud detection for communications service providers.
Data and analytics firm FICO and big data analytics company LigaData have come together in a move to bring decision-as-a-service capabilities to telecommunications firms in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
The two California-based companies will offer solutions that leverage data to help telcos increase revenues, decrease costs, and expand their offerings. Tools included in the decision-as-a-service solutions suite are mobile lending, price optimization, collections optimization, subscriber segmentation, and fraud detection for communications service providers.
“Together we plan to also help communications service providers grant loans in emerging markets, making it easier for consumers while increasing the digitization of the economy,” said FICO Vice President of Global Partners & Alliances Alexandre Graff.
FICO and LigaData envision that the tool will help telcos add new revenue streams and ultimately expand financial inclusion in emerging markets. “Our partnership with FICO will give communications service providers new tools to expand and compete in a data-driven marketplace,” explained LigaData CEO Bassel Ojjeh. “In addition, we will be bringing to market new solutions that can help communications service providers serve the large number of unbanked and underbanked communities in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.”
LigaData’s name follows the naming convention of major soccer teams such as Bundesliga, La Liga, and Liga MX and is a reference to the company’s league of data experts. LigaData offers two main products, Data Fabric, which helps telcos leverage data better understand their customers by breaking down silos, and Flare, which serves as a decisioning engine that breaks down the data to provide operational and subscriber insights. These solutions are used by over 30 mobile network operators, supporting over 350 million subscribers around the world.
Founded in 1956 and headquartered in California, FICO offers decisioning tools used by more than 650 clients, including nine of the top 10 U.S. banks and eight of the top 10 EMEA banks. The company was recently named Best Technology Provider for Data Analytics at the 2022 Credit Awards, and was identified as a leader in The Forrester Wave: AI Decisioning Platforms, Q2 2023 report.
Dynamic Planner, a risk-based financial planning firn based in the U.K., has secured what the company is calling a “significant investment” from private equity growth firm FPE Capital. Terms of the investment were not disclosed, but the additional funding is designed to help accelerate Dynamic Planner’s expansion plans in the U.K. and Europe.
Dynamic Planner CEO Ben Goss praised FPE Capital for not only for backing successful software companies in the past and helping them scale their businesses, but also for sharing values that Dynamic Planner holds dear. “They also share our vision for solving our industry’s major challenges through technology such as process digitization, customer experience, investing sustainably for future generations, and omni-channel financial planning in a post-pandemic world,” Goss said.
Making its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in London earlier this year, Dynamic Planner offers a single platform that enables financial advisory firms to match clients with investment portfolios that meet their individual needs and goals. The company’s technology provides client profiling to ensure that client preferences are accurately assessed and reflected in the portfolio composition process. Dynamic Planner also offers whole-of-market fund research, cash flow modeling, and pre-populated reports to make it easier for advisors to provide holistic, compliant investment portfolio reviews and reports. Via its SaaS platform, Dynamic Planner serves nearly 40% of wealth advice firms in the U.K., and more than 150 asset managers representing $300 billion (£250 billion) in assets. The company is on pace to surpass $12 million (£10 million) in annual recurring license revenues in 2022.
In addition to making its first appearance on the Finovate stage earlier this year, Dynamic Planner also launched its Client Access solution. Unveiled in March, the new offering leverages psychometric risk and sustainability profiling to make remote financial advice more precise and engaging.
“While remote advice is here to stay, it can be a challenge for advisors to make the process engaging or easy to understand for clients, as well as build deep relationships which ultimately result in better outcomes,” Dynamic Planner Sales & Marketing Director Yasmina Siadatan explained. Siadatan called the new solution “a fundamental piece of the hybrid advice puzzle.”
Headquartered in Reading, Berkshire, Dynamic Planner was founded in 2003. The company was named “Adviser Technology Provider of the Year” at the Money Marketing Awards in 2021 and, that same year, won top honors as the “Leading Independent Planning Tool Provider” at the Schroders U.K. Platform Awards.
Speaking of fintech in the U.K., a hearty congratulations to Starling Bank, the pioneering U.K.-based digital bank launched in 2014 by CEO Anne Boden. The bank announced this week that it had achieved its first full year of profitability, delivering a pre-tax profit of $38.4 million (£32.1 million). The news represents a major milestone for the company, which produced a pre-tax loss of $37.7 million (£31.5 million) the previous year.
“With our first full year of profitability, we’ve placed ourselves firmly in a category of one,” Boden said in a statement. “As an innovative digital bank with a sustainable business model and a strong balance sheet, we are generating our own capital and we stand apart from both the old banks and other challengers.”
A fully-licensed and regulated bank, Starling Bank offers personal, business, joint, euro and dollar current accounts, as well as a card for youth. Headquartered in London and maintaining offices in Southampton, Cardiff, and Dublin, Starling Bank also offers a B2B banking-as-a-service and software-as-a-service proposition, leveraging the same proprietary technology Starling uses to power its own operations.
Earlier this month, Starling Bank unveiled its Bills Manager solution for small businesses. The new feature gives small businesses greater flexibility when making Direct Debit or standing orders by taking funds from money set aside in one of their available Savings Spaces rather than from the business’ main account. The solution helps small businesses streamline their finances by making budget forecasting and cost management easier. Bills Manager seamlessly integrates with popular accounting platforms such as Xero and FreeAgent – both of which are available via the Starling Marketplace – as well as with Starling’s own bookkeeping solution I.
“Our small business customers requested this feature, so we’ve delivered,” Starling Bank Chief Banking Officer Helen Bierton said. “Uptake of Bills Manager has been strong among our personal current account customers and we’re confident it will help hundreds of thousands of small businesses better manage their money, too.”
Check out our conversation with Starling’s Boden moments after she delivered her keynote address at FinovateSpring in May.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Brazilian fintech Neon secured $80 million for its first Credit Right Investment Fund.
YAP Pakistan announced a strategic partnership with Faysal Bank in the wake of securing in-principle approval for an Electronic Money Institution license.
Open-Finance.ai partnered with FICO to leverage the company’s Blaze Advisor decision rules management system.
Israel-based Open-Finance.ai will integrate Blaze Advisor into its open banking platform to offer real-time credit assessments.
This news comes as “Israel is on the cusp of major banking reform with the introduction of open banking,” said FICO VP of Partner Management in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa Mark Farmer.
Analytic decisioning platform FICO and risk, finance, and compliance software company Open-Finance.ai have teamed up this week.
Under the agreement, Open-Finance.ai will integrate the FICO’s Blaze Advisor decision rules management system into its open banking platform. Using FICO’s technology, Open-Finance.ai will assist its financial services clients to save time on consumer credit assessments by leveraging real-time, analytically driven appraisals.
For Israel-based Open-Finance.ai, this comes just as open banking legislation is gaining traction. “Israel is on the cusp of major banking reform with the introduction of open banking,” said FICO VP of Partner Management in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa Mark Farmer. “Automating decisions allows lenders to increase the efficiency of the lending process without sacrificing risk management regulatory rigour. This will speed up lending, increase customer satisfaction, reduce operational costs and drive economic activity.”
Open-Finance.ai anticipates the move will help remove human bias from lending decisions, improve risk decisions, and expand access to credit to more people.
FICO’s Blaze Advisor gives businesses a solution to make smarter, more transparent business decisions by offering companies multiple methods for rule authoring, testing, deployment, and management. To make this work, Blaze Advisor provides decision trees, scorecards, decision tables, graphic decision flows, and customized templates. The technology also supports business performance monitoring.
“Manual processes, a conservative approach and significant regulation have been a drag on growth of the Israeli market,” said Open-Finance.ai Co-founder Shay Basson. “Now, we have an ability to manage risk instantly, based on multiple data sources to provide an instant, yet risk-aware decision to credit and insurance consumers.”
Founded in 1956 and headquartered in California, FICO offers decisioning tools used by more than 650 clients, including nine of the top 10 U.S. banks and eight of the top 10 EMEA banks. Last year, FICO launched a new loan origination solution called FICO Originations Solution that seeks to automate the entire customer journey.
Analytics and decision management technology company FICOlaunched a loan origination tool called FICO Originations Solution that automates the entire customer journey leveraging the FICO platform.
The cloud-based tool leverages FICO’s enterprise intelligence network to streamline and personalize loan originations. The new tool helps financial services providers do two key things. First, it helps remove friction from the customer experience. Second, it empowers loan originators by helping them make more precise origination decisions and better manage risk, ultimately helping them grow more profitable portfolios.
This enhanced decision-making is thanks in part to FICO’s data library that offers lenders access to 130+ global data sources. The ever-increasing data source helps firms make faster and better customer decisions.
The FICO Originations Solution starts with a completely digital onboarding experience. The tool considers an organization’s goals, including the types of borrowers they want to attract, their ideal conversion rate, and profitability goals. FICO offers simulation capabilities to test the user experience to determine if decreased friction results in increased fraud or if changing an application question increases the conversion rate.
FICO Originations Solutions’ customers have access to FICO’s suite of tools that includes interactive messages, fraud prevention capabilities, and pricing optimization.
“Financial services providers today need data-hungry, analytics-ready, agile, extensible systems in order to compete in a digital-first economy,” said FICO VP and Head of Product Management Tim Van Tassel. “FICO Originations Solution, Powered by FICO Platform provides the digital and analytic sophistication that enables financial institutions to offer the safety, convenience, and personalization that customers look for during the account opening process through their chosen channel, while closely managing customer-level risk.”
FICO was founded in 1956 and is headquartered in California. The company is best known for the consumer FICO score that is calculated based on information in credit reports maintained by Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. The company also offers fraud and compliance as well as debt collection and recovery solutions.
Barcelona, Spain-based Strands and Singapore’s credolab announced a partnership this week that will give banks a new solution to help their customers make better decisions with their finances. The collaboration will embed credolab’s credit scoring technology into Strands personal finance management platform, giving banks the real-time ability to obtain relevant customer insights with embedded risk assessments.
“Strands’ expertise in developing customizable digital money management solutions for banks will add great value to our clients globally,” credolab founder and CEO Peter Barcak said. “We are confident that our embedded technology will help Strands develop solutions to promote a more delightful way of banking that empowers customers with meaningful interactions, and makes them happier, more loyal, and more profitable.”
In their joint statement, Strands and credolab noted that retail banks often face challenges when it comes to improving customer engagement and providing long-term value to their customers. They blame a lack of relevant data, as well as the inability to generate significant insights into customer behavior and preferences. The integrated solution will serve as a “one-stop shop” for banks to realize new potential revenue sources by helping their customers be smarter with their money.
“By partnering with credolab, Strands is in a stronger position to deliver state of the art financial management solutions to banks worldwide,” Strands CEO Erik Brieva said. “This collaboration will allow us to embed next generation scoring technology into our AI-driven product suite, meeting financial institutions’ increasing demand for smart, highly customizable, and scalable FinTech white-label solutions.”
Credolab demonstrated its CredoScore technology at FinovateAsia 2018. This spring, the company has announced a collaboration with regional credit risk and decision analytics company Qarar to help the UAE-based company enhance its credit risk scoring processes.
Strands made its most recent Finovate appearance last month at FinovateAsia Digital. Teaming up with Tearsheet to publish its guide to “Banking as a Service,” in May, Strands began the year with news that CEO Brieva had been named to Analytics Insight’s Top 10 Most Inspiring CEOs.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Asia-Pacific
Voyager Innovations, the company behind Filipino-based payments app PayMaya, secured $167 million in funding to support the launch of a digital bank.
Vietnamese investment app Infina raised $2 million in seed funding from investors headquartered in Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, the U.S., and South Korea.
Brazilian cryptocurrency exchange Mercado Bitcoin raised $200 million in funding from the SoftBank Latin America Fund. The investment is the largest Series B round in Latin American history.
FICO announced this week that its latest credit risk solutionFICO Score 10 Suite will be available to lenders via the U.S. credit reporting agencies this summer. The new technology leverages trended credit bureau data to boost its predictive power, enabling lenders to make more precise decisions on credit risk.
The company said that the new Score 10 Suite could reduce the number of defaults in a lender’s portfolio by up to 10% for newly originated bankcards, and 9% among newly originated auto loans versus the previous, FICO Score 9. The new solution performs even better with newly originated mortgage loans, the company added, with a 17% reduction in defaults.
“FICO is a cornerstone for consumer lending decisions,” Jim Wehmann, executive vice president for Scores at FICO said. “We continuously innovate using the latest, most robust data, while maintaining consistency with previous models to ensure backward compatibility and minimize operational changes required to adopt a new score.”
The company is touting the use of trended data as one of the key enhancements of the new technology. Trended data provides a historical view of data like account balances which gives lenders a more complete understanding of how an applicant manages their finances. At the same time, FICO Score 10 maintains FICO Score minimum scoring criteria, and features backwards compatibility with previous versions of FICO Score. This helps ensure that lenders experience a seamless transition to the new offering with maximum ease of use and stability.
In addition to the emphasis on trended data, the new scoring regime also takes an interest in personal loans that the applicant may have. The increasing use of personal loans, to pay down credit card debt for example, has grown in recent years. MarketWatch noted earlier this week that personal loans are the fastest-growing debt category in the U.S. The takeaway is that FICO Score 10 will make it easier for those who are managing their finances well to avoid being penalized for instances when debt might spike due to a large, single-instance purchase. Meanwhile, those who are adding debt (personal loan, home equity loan, etc.) as a strategy to manage their debt may find the new scoring criteria more challenging.
FICO closed out 2019 with the release of two new products and an acquisition. In November, the company launched FICO Identity Proofing, a digital onboarding solution; and FICO User Authentication, a set of multi-factor authentication functionalities. Both new solutions were made possible by the company’s acquisition of security access provider EZMCOM that month.
An alum of our developers conference, FinDEVr New York 2016, FICO was founded as Fair Isaac Corporation in 1956. The company is based in San Jose, California.
Analytics and decision management technology company FICOannounced two new products this week as it snapped up security access provider EZMCOM. Transactional details of the acquisition were undisclosed.
The acquisition has facilitated the launch of FICO Identity Proofing, digital onboarding technology; and FICO User Authentication, a suite of multi-factor, biometric, and behavioral authentication capabilities.
EZMCOM was founded in 2006. The company’s identity proofing, biometric, behavioral and risk-based authentication technology is used by tier-1 banks across the globe, ultimately serving 60 million customers.
“As our clients expand their digital offerings, they are requesting more sophisticated identity proofing and authentication capabilities to complement our fraud, compliance, customer lifecycle, and customer engagement applications,” said FICO CTO Claus Moldt. “Behavioral and biometric authentication are becoming the gold standard to prevent identity spoofing and improve customer protection, while reducing friction. By adding this technology to our portfolio, we will provide our clients with a seamless approach to authentication and customer onboarding – across digital channels, mobile devices, servers and workstations.”
Founded in 1956 as Fair Isaac Corporation, FICO presented “Rapidly Deliver Contextually-Powered Stream Processing” at FinDEVr New York 2016.
Revolutunveils metal cards in silver and space grey.
Chief Administrative Officer of the Royal Bank of Scotland interviewsBioCatch CEO.
ITSectorinaugurates 6th Software Development Center that will focus on the financial sector, AI, and 5G.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
Technology from Tink helps power the new PFM app, DABOX, from Portuguese bank Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD).
Juvointroduces its Financial Identity-as-a-Service (FiDaaS) technology suite.
MXteams up with U.S. Bank to provide customers with secure access to their financial data.
FICOforges KYC/AML partnership with Dutch PSP Visma Connect.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
FICO and risk investigation solutions provider Arachnys partner to help FIs improve their client onboarding and record management processes.
Bill.comcelebrates grand opening of new Houston office.
Finicityships new Verification of Income and Employment (VOIE) solution using TXVerify technology.
SecureKeycollaborates with Digital Bazaar to streamline organizational identity proofing.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
Paysendannounces its new stablecoin will be available on the Stellar Network in June.
LoanScorecardforges partnership with Calyx Software, merging its SimpleCECL solution with Calyx’s Path LOS.
Digital Onboarding will join Best of Show winners Voleo and Neener Analytics as part of the fourth annual FIS Fintech Accelerator program.
Chartis Research recognizesFICO as a category leader in AI for Financial Services.
Judo Bank of Australia goes live with Temenos’ T24.
Xerolaunches new feature in the Xero Projects iOS app that suggests project time based on geolocation
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
Ixarisadds new Chief Legal and Compliance Officer Georg von Breven and Commercial Director Sean Ashton.
FICOunveils the latest version of its Decision Management Platform, FICO DMP.
Visalaunches a suite of beta APIs and tools to help developers design and test payment solutions.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
