Weekly Wrap: Automation wins big in recent fintech funding rounds

This week, Bank Automation News saw a flurry of funding rounds for automation-related fintechs, including a $220 million Series F round for the intelligent automation company WorkFusion. The New York-based WorkFusion uses artificial intelligence (AI) and robots to automate document-heavy processes in highly regulated industries. The company plans to use the funds to explore further into cloud-based automation, AI and no-code solutions, CEO Alex Lyashok told BAN . This week also saw the Dutch multinational bank ING increase its investment in automation technology provider Flowcast by $3 million, bringing ING's total funding of Flowcast to more than $10 million. The two also revealed a partnership to pilot an AI-based platform that will continuously assess loans for potential defaults. Finally, Zeni, a fintech that automates accounting and bookkeeping processes for startups, raised $13.5 million in a Series A funding round on Tuesday. Zeni manages more than $200 million in funds monthly for more than 100 startups and processed more than $300 million in transaction volume in its first year, according to its co-founder and CEO Swapnil Shinde. Shinde expects processing volume to jump to $1 billion during the next 12 months. Find this and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap, featuring BAN editors Bianca Chan and Loraine Lawson, for the week ending March 12, 2021. Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com . Subscribe to The Buzz Podcast on iTunes , Spotify , or download the episode . The following is a transcript generated by AI technology that has been lightly edited but still contains errors. Bianca Chan Hi, everyone. I'm Bianca Chan and welcome to The Buzz from Bank Automation News, where we explore how automation technology is transforming the banking industry. This is a weekly wrap for what's happening in the industry this week. And before beginning, I'd like to give a big thanks to our bn sponsor and advertiser MX, thank you so much for your support. I'm pleased to be joined by Loraine Lawson, associate editor to Bank Automation News. It is March 12, 2021. And here are the biggest news items from our editorial team this week. Loraine, I know you've covered a couple of funding rounds, some big some small. Tell me what you learned from your conversation with WorkFusion CEO.Loraine Lawson Yes, WorkFusion just raised 220 million to expand its research and development into cloud-based automation, artificial intelligence and working on using AI to create a no-code solution. This is for them. There was a huge funding round, obviously, in series F. And it was led by Georgia Ian, which is a Toronto based FinTech investment firm that specializes in data being used in trustful ways. Previously, they had raised 121 point 3,000,006 funding rounds. So this is huge news for them.Bianca Chan Oh, yeah, this one blew all the other combined out of the water.Loraine Lawson their customer base includes ditch fake Scotia Bank and Carter Bank and Trust. And they said that they talked about their AI platform. It's it's one that watches what workers do to learn from them how to automate the routine. So that's how they tie him with automation.Bianca Chan That's a huge trend we've seen with like process discovery and having that kind of like Big Brother technology type surveillance that we've kind of seen in the past, I think culturally speaking, do you think that bank employees have kind of gotten over that idea of, you know, always being watched to optimize processes? Or like, what do you think that's playing out at banks like,Loraine Lawson I what I hear over and over from people is that people are very scared about the technology. When it first comes on board. They're there, you know, we think about robots, and we think about the Terminator or something. But when they see the reality, they often like it, because it automates things that were really repetitive. That, you know, maybe were being outsourced even to other countries, because it was a low tech level task really, that you're just typing in doing data entry, basically, or cutting and pasting so that employees end up liking automation.Bianca Chan And so this move further into Cloud and AI. Was that surprising to you? Are is that kind of expected? I know you've been covering a lot of the intersection between automation and AI specifically. And we've, we've covered some news around cloud computing and automation as well. I mean, what's your take there? Is that the natural kind of progression for workfusion to go?Loraine Lawson Well, they already are cloud based. So it's more for them about diving deeper into Cloud based and ai ai. They think they can go further and increase their speed and reduce their cost. So you know, what is it the chips become twice as fast every so many years? Was that Moore's law? Anyway, I can't remember what it's called right now. But you know, so looking at that kind of process for technology, you know, how I think we'll see more of that, like how can we leverage AI to be quicker and cheaper.Bianca Chan And you covered another, another partnership with some investment involved with IMG and flow cast Tell us about that.Loraine Lawson So I N G is Enter to partnership with locust and they're they're piloting a new platform that will basically automatically underwrite loans on an ongoing basis. So they'll constantly assess loans to see if they're in danger of default, or to see if the credit rating has changed on that loan holder. Yeah, talking about Big Brother, but but the goal is actually some goods to help keep people from defaulting on their loans because as the spokesperson said, it's a relatively inefficient and broken process. We have now where a loan defaults that it goes into collection, the bank isn't happy, the lender isn't happy. So if they can catch them earlier in the process of their financial struggles, they can help restructure the loans or offer them other options other than defaulting. So it's an interesting pilot. Yeah,Bianca Chan in theory that makes complete sense to me, but Practically speaking, I mean, they're continuously kind of monitoring or underwriting the loan, how often is that data that they're underwriting it? How often? Is it being updated? You know, like if we're getting data from the credit bureaus, let's say, and that's, and that's updated, who knows how often but let's say at best, like a daily, you know, what are the what's the return on, on that sort of continuous monitoring? Loraine Lawson Well, actually, as I understand it, they use transactional data that the bank already has. And that actually is a pretty wealthy store of data that often is underutilized by banks. So, you know, I assume it won't be hitting, I either didn't ask them, I should have asked them if they will be hitting those credit reports. But what I gathered from my interview with him was they were actually using instructional data. And then financial accounting data helps inform the logarithm. Bianca Chan I see that makes a lot more sense. So let's say like if I had a loan note with Bank A, and they see that in my checking account, I'm like withdrawing the amount, and maybe I'm going overdraft or, you know, those funds are kind of getting drawn out, they might be able to connect some dots and say, Hey, she might not be able to make her payment this month. Loraine Lawson Right. And it's important to remember this is a pilot, so I'm sure there'll be some things for them to work through, as they do it. But as part of that partnership, i n g did give the company an additional $3 million. So the FinTech startup has now raised over 14 point 2 million. That's in seven funding rounds counting imgs donation, Bianca Chan base, is this. I am Jesus the first time the bank is investing in flow cast or, or? Loraine Lawson Well, I'm glad you asked that. No, it is not. They have invested more than 20 million in flow cast, they actually lead it series a funding round. So that's a that's a deep partnership. They're Bianca Chan interesting, cool. I've also covered a funding round this week, right in between, right in between the amounts of yours. It was this accounting and bookkeeping, automation startup called zenni. They automate a lot of like, CFO related services, so like, Bill, pay, invoice, receipt, rent, reconciliation, budgeting, they also incorporate some AI to provide some like, our like AI driven insights on this dashboard, for you know, more real time data, and reporting. So they raised 13 point 5 million in their series A, and it's quite an interesting space. So they, their customers are other startups. And when you think about the market opportunity for, you know, startups with a small number of employees, they outsource a lot of their accounting services to other firms. And so when you think about it, and I did a little bit of reporting, through some reports and other research out there, it seems like a decently big market opportunity. I mean, if you if you think about it, I think what if I want to count it was like the global accounting services market will hit like 573 billion this year. So thinking about kind of the space to grow. So that's kind of where the CEOs had was at thinking about, you know, growing at scale, but also growing gracefully. So looking at building out their product and technology teams with the new money, and then also kind of building out their bench, their bench strength in terms of accountants and CFO experts. So it's kind of it'll be interesting to kind of watch their progress there. Obviously, there's a lot of room to grow. But it'd be interesting to keep up, it sounds like they're, they're on track to grow actually quite a bit in the next year, I think they have more than 100 startup customers processed more than 300 million transaction volume in its first year, and they're expecting to more than triple that. They're expecting to process 1 billion in the next 12 months. So that's based on the scale at which they are or the rate at which they are growing their customer base. And then also the rate at which their customers are growing as well. Loraine Lawson Oh, you know, that at scale, I keep hearing that from these companies that it's important to grow at scale that you know, and that's, that's a big data thing, being able to deal with that fast data that unstructured data, you got to be, you know, be able to handle that sort of scale now. So yeah, Bianca Chan grow too quickly, kind of, you've seen that with some other companies where they've just You know, how haven't set a strong foundation and then it kind of ballooned and then popped. So that's definitely something I think automation definitely plays a role in that and kind of, you know, being able to develop and grow, produce products and services at scale, kind of leveraging the technology rather than needing to hire, you know, a whole new person to kind of take over a role. Loraine Lawson Sure. Bianca Chan So what do you have on tap for next week? Loraine Lawson Well, next week, I'm going to be writing about mortgage lending and automating that little news from from that on that front. And then I'm talking with Anoop gala for our Premium Plus webinar, we're talking about ROI for automation, and creating a dynamic customer experience. Very exciting. Well, Bianca Chan we have to keep our eyes peeled for that. I think that's a great place to wrap up. Thank you so much for joining us on the weekly wrap. For more podcasts content, check out bank automation news.com and search the buzz from Bank automation news on iTunes and Spotify. Thank you so much, Lorraine, and see you next week.

Weekly Wrap: Automation wins big in recent fintech funding rounds

WorkFusion, Flowcast and Zeni raise millions

Capital One test-drives a partner integration to reduce false transaction declines

Core solutions provider Technisys buys Kona for AI capabilities

Core solutions provider Technisys buys Kona for AI capabilities

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Weekly Wrap: Automation wins big in recent fintech funding rounds

WorkFusion, Flowcast and Zeni raise millions

Capital One test-drives a partner integration to reduce false transaction declines

Core solutions provider Technisys buys Kona for AI capabilities

Core solutions provider Technisys buys Kona for AI capabilities

EMERGING FINTECH DIRECTORY

FinAi Podcast

SPONSORED

Build an Antifragile Strategy to Outperform the Market

How AI and Product Experts Turn Fuzzy Requirements Into Focused Dev-ready Roadmaps

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