D3 Banking to Launch Data-Driven Digital Platform in November

Data — big or small or in-between — is the foundation of delivering the best banking experience to customers. At least, that’s how D3 Banking sees it. The company is readying its data-driven digital banking platform for general availability in November.

D3 launched in beta at Finovate Spring 2013 and will introduce its money movement capabilities — P2P, bill payment, and wire transfers — at BAI Retail Delivery in November.

D3 recently concluded a Series C round of funding.

The company, formerly known as Lodo software, and before that OurCashFlow.com, began in the personal financial management (PFM) space, with a strong grounding in analytics. OurCashFlow sees widespread use as the PFM component of Jack Henry’s NetTeller platform. The arrangement began in 2010 and serves nearly 200 financial institutions.

Speaking to FI customers about incorporating PFM into their online banking, particularly in the sense of distributed tools and services rather than “PFM in a tab,” D3’s CEO Mark Vipond heard about confusing platforms bolted together – mobile, billpay, P2P — with separate vendors dedicated to maintaining each component.

“We continued to hear that banks wanted to replace all their online banking,” Vipond told Bank Innovation. “We heard that enough that we saw an opportunity with banks looking to refresh their digital channel. And we saw that analytics could be a differentiator for us.”

Building on its base of data and analytics from its PFM product, the company built a digital banking platform from the ground up, using HTML 5 and responsive design to optimize the site across devices. The platform is designed to be agnostic to operating systems and devices to work in any way banks want, even on existing bank apps through the platform’s API.

D3 has no mobile app of its own, but it may develop one to be whitelabeled once the platform launches, according to Vipond.

The transactional portion of the platform was already in D3’s PFM product. Money movement is another story, however. “Internal transfers [within the bank] are easy,” Vipond said. Outside the bank walls it gets more difficult, since connections are required to the various payment rails, some of which have APIs in place, but many of which do not.

D3’s platform will determine what is the most efficient and least expensive rail for the bank customer to use, but the user will be insulated from the decisioning process. “We’re separating the user experience from the payment rails,” Vipond said.

There will be additional charges to the user for expedited payments, Vipond said, noting that Amazon has accustomed people to idea of paying for speed.

“We want to control the entire user experience, control the data,” Vipond said. He clarified that the data is the bank’s and D3 does nothing with it but perform analytics and deliver it to the bank. He cautioned that not all providers are so free with the data they’re managing. “Once you use a third party provider, you’re giving up control of the data,” Vipond said.

D3 is targeting banks in the $2 billion to $40 billion asset range with data as its selling point.  Midsize banks just like smaller banks need help processing the mountains of data they accumulate. With affordable analytics coming from cheap hard drive space and cheap (or even free) software, insights are more affordable than ever. D3 is betting that data will matter more than bells and whistles, and it seems like a good bet.