Say Hello to Our Spring 2016 Class of Startups
Bank Innovation INV, this blog’s fintech accelerator, is pleased today to announce the six extraordinary startups that have been admitted to its inaugural class.
The companies selected from applications received from startups around the world are:
The companies, chosen after a comprehensive review process that involved INV’s partners, touch on a broad array of profound trends in the fintech space, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain-based security and advanced app development. INV is a global, virtual accelerator — which is what allows INV to host companies in the spring cohort from not just Silicon Valley, but New York, Atlanta, London and Israel. The startups will be mentored by INV partners, which include Fiserv, US Bank, and BB&T Corp.
Here are details on our startups:
CrossCues
As banks, credit unions and other financial services companies go digital, they are compelled to stay in touch with their customers. They participate in transaction flows and interact with customers regularly — but what can they learn from these interactions? Can the FIs predict the financial needs and cater to those in a structured manner? These questions lie at the heart of CrossCues’ offerings.
Founded just last November, CrossCues’s objective is to help FIs understand their customers’ financial needs in a timely manner, and enable them to respond in a structured and consistent way across the organization. The problem the company is solving is to help FIs understand, target, engage and anticipate the consumers and businesses they serve. Further, CrossCues enables these FIs to identify actionable insights and establish relevant and consistent response across their teams.
The startup’s platform observes transaction patterns, digital behavior and public information of customers and employs machine learning to establish actionable intelligent and learned measures like changes in purchasing behavior, direct deposits, employment, etc. Using these measures, branches, call centers and account management teams within FIs can improve customer health, loyalty and engagement, while maintaining/improving their efficiency. Atlanta-based CrossCues’s initial focus is to track and improve customer success, personalize marketing and digital servicing.
Dyme
Dyme, founded in 2014 and based in San Francisco, turns spenders into savers using text messaging and unique tone/voice. This is text banking 2.0 and it eclipses the variations on automatic savings that other startups are pursuing. Dyme engages millennials and allows them to save (or redirect money) in around 10 seconds per transaction. Dyme offers next-generation text banking — a proven channel for customer usage and applicable across a wide breadth of financial services products.
GoldBean
GoldBean is an “investing for beginners” platform that gets people started with their first portfolio. The company converts credit card statements into adept portfolio advice. It’s a modern, data-driven take on the Peter Lynch motto “invest in what you know.” The GoldBean mission is to educate and empower its clients to be confident, self-directed investors. GoldBean, founded last September and based in New York, is an SEC-registered investment whose advice is algorithmically-based. Users can also find education and access to low-cost trades on its website.
There are plenty of services for the already-wealthy, and for confident investors, but for people looking to build their confidence, knowledge and, eventually, their sense of equity, there is a lack of simple, low-cost, education-first advisory services. GoldBean is currently in open beta, optimizing its product with active clients and as a low-cost employee benefit. It is also in the process of licensing its product as a white-label solution.
Building an investing platform for beginners is no small feat, and GoldBean is certainly addressing a great pressure point for many — and one yet to be addressed by the well-known investments startups to date.
Hermetic Security
Hermetic can convert password login to speedy two-factor login without the need for backend integration. The Hermetic Vault brings secure credential storage to any app on any device, simplifying authentication and privacy control for users and service providers alike. Sensitive user credentials like private keys, passwords, or payment card information are kept on device, easily accessible to their owners with just a 4-digit PIN, swipe pattern or fingerprint. Yet, these elements remain secure against brute force attacks, server hacking, and physical access attacks.
Hermetic’s system employs multiple lightweight servers which support instant vault unlock via a secure protocol. These servers are deployed at separate locations, so there is no way to unlock a vault without them. The vault unlock protocol, which involves several servers simultaneously, can only succeed if initiated with the correct access code. Servers themselves have “zero-knowledge,” which means they are never exposed to information about end users, their devices, vault contents, or vault access codes. Yet, they can identify attempts to repeatedly guess a vault’s access code, and block the attackers.
Hermetic’s protocol utilizes an advanced cryptographic threshold scheme, which ensures that vault unlock can only succeed if a sufficient number (the threshold) of servers are available. The scheme guarantees that attackers who obtain device state would be unable to learn anything useful about the vault contents or access code unless they also gain control of at least t servers, where t is the threshold. Moreover, even controlling all servers will yield no information about the vault contents or access code to anyone who does not control the device. Hence the multiplicity of servers guarantees high resistance to hacking, and the redundancy of servers (i.e. existence of more than t servers) provides high availability in face of faults, network partitions, and disasters.
In sum, Israel-based Hermetic’s distributed vault is an interesting take on the password problem — secure credential storage with a strong mobile bent. The company is a graduate of Citi Israel’s accelerator and was founded in 2013.
Spare
The SPARE. mobile network simplifies safe access for consumers to their money by employing a unique security system to create convenient access to your cash that is less expensive and much safer than third-party ATM’s. This “B2B2C” Virtual ATM Network Merchants creates an alternative to machine dispensing cash, without the need for ATMs on property and consumers and getting cash-back with their mobile device.
SPARE., based in Santa Monica, Calif., allows consumers to use their mobile device to request cash, locate the closest SPARE. merchant who can provide that cash, request the cash needed, and provide it on demand — without the need for elusive ATMs.
The trick is that SPARE. turns businesses into cash-dispensers, obviating the need for third-party ATM’s, which carry those hefty fees. Merchants end up recognizing additional revenue & increased foot traffic by giving out cash on demand. There is no need for expensive, unsecured, outdated and unsightly ATM’s in their place of business, anymore.
This disruption of the ATM networks has profound implications for the flow of capital and commerce. SPARE. has the potentially to completely recast how cash is accessed on a global basis.
We Are Briqs
Briqs was founded last June by leading professionals from the UK’s leading mobile financial technology products and services companies. Between them, the team has worked on the digital strategy, applications and mobile services for banks including Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, Santander, UBS, Bank of America, FIS and TSB, as well as enterprise mobility projects for companies such as BP, Centrica, Vodafone, Ericsson and Aviva. Based in London, Briqs brings together the best talent across digital mobility consultancy, user experience architecture, user interface design, product development, software engineering, testing and project management to design and build effective and delightful technology products for the financial services industry.
Briqs’ portfolio includes proprietary digital products, and those of specially selected partners, as well as bespoke development services. The Briqs product portfolio covers areas such as identity verification for on-boarding and financial literacy tools from which an entire new customer recruitment campaign could be developed. This combination allows Briqs’s clients to rapidly deploy unique digital solutions that improve experiences for their customers, and increase their productivity and efficiency. Its competitive advantage stems from technology propositions that are purposefully developed to be easily integrated within the banks’ IT environment. Briqs understands the challenges that a bank has to maintain competitiveness through innovation and the company is uniquely positioned to shorten the time to market and increase the customer satisfaction through the launching of services that are validated with thorough customer research and feedback.
Briqs offers next-generation, bespoke app development that aims to not just fulfill client requests, but push functionality and usability to new heights.
The INV startups are participating in a comprehensive mentorship program that will run through the end of the summer. The mentorship is supported by the accelerator’s partners, Fiserv and six financial institutions, about 20 mentors and nine API partners. The INV startups are expected to demo at future Bank Innovation events, in Tel Aviv or Silicon Valley.
