In the rapidly evolving world of fintechs, cutting-edge intermediaries that seek to disrupt traditional banking or cater to underserved niches, success depends on rigorous customer screening and proactive regulatory compliance, according to Vladislav (Slava) Solodkiy, cofounder and CEO of Puerto Rico-based Arival Bank. Solodkiy is also managing partner at Life.SREDA, a Singapore-based venture capital firm that over the past six years has invested in more than 20 fintech startups and successfully exited from nine. He has documented his journey from a fintech investor to a founder of a digital bank in his book, The First Fintech Bank’s Arival – From Book to Bank in 12 Months.

Arival claims to be the first digital fintech bank to be focused on small businesses, the so-called “gig economy” of entrepreneurs, freelancers and startups, and small and medium-sized business enterprises that use crypto currencies to receive and pay money. While it may be difficult to identify the ‘bad guys’ among those customers — who could be money launderers or others with dubious backgrounds — prompt reporting of problem cases to regulators and remedial action to prevent future occurrences could save fintechs from hefty fines, according to Solodkiy and Arival’s chief operating officer, Jeremy Berger. Arival is now in the process of securing a federal banking license in the U.S. and exploring similar licenses in Europe and Asia. Solodkiy and Berger shared insights into their strategies for Arival Bank and the road ahead for fintechs in an interview with Knowledge@Wharton.

Knowledge@Wharton:  How did you come to write this book, and how did that lead to building a bank?

Vladislav Solodkiy:  The first edition of the book summarizes five years of my experience in the fintech industry. The second, updated edition, reflects comments from readers, including industry experts. Our investments and exits are well known in the fintech industry, because we publish our Money of the Future reports. Many people, after reading our reports, asked me to predict the next big thing in the fintech industry. That is how I came up this idea of the book, where I tried to predict and imagine what could happen in fintech over the next few years.

Knowledge@Wharton:  What does the fintech bank of the future look like? How is it different from a traditional bank in terms of its opportunities and its risks?

Solodkiy:  When neo-banks or challenger banks like Simple Bank (in Portland, Oregon) came to the market, they were very different in comparison with traditional banks, and relied on online channels of distribution. (Neo-banks typically do not have banking licenses and partner with traditional banks, while challenger banks – called so for “challenging” traditional banking – possess bank licenses and target areas underserved by bigger, traditional banks.) However, they had a branch-oriented approach. [As their customer], you first must go to the physical branch to sign a few papers to start your relationship with the bank, and after that you can use the bank’s other products and services including online access.

The first wave of neo-banks and challenger banks started with a mobile-first approach. You could download your bank’s app from the Apple Store or Google Play and start your relationships without any obligation to visit a physical branch, or to sign any physical documents. You could begin the relationship immediately and start using the bank’s services.

The first wave of digital banks provided basic products and services such as money transfers. But this approach does not provide you as the customer an ability to replace your traditional bank because your traditional bank could deliver up to 20 product verticals to cover all your possible needs.

“Three awards in three weeks is good sign from the universe that we are doing something new and attractive for our audience.” –Vladislav Solodkiy

The second wave of digital banks, which I describe in my book, could replace traditional banks for you as a customer, and deliver all possible products and services. I describe the different ways for new players to deliver those services, and different scenarios for the market itself, and how to build or even to imagine these banks.

Knowledge@Wharton:  What was the significance of the name of the bank?

Solodkiy:  When Jeremy Berger, co-founder and chief operations officer of Arival Bank, and I decided to build this bank, we also started to think about how to brand and name this bank. Jeremy is only 24 years old, and the youngest digital banker in the world at this moment. We took this game of words, like the arrival of the first fintech bank.

We have won three fintech awards in three weeks. (In October 2018, Arival Bank won an award at the FinovateAsia conference in Hong Kong. A week later, it won the FintechInn competition in Vilnius, Lithuania, organized by Central Bank of Lithuania. Next, it won the silver at the 2018 Driven x Design award of the London Design Awards.) I think three awards in three weeks is a good sign from the universe that we are doing something new and attractive for our audience.

Knowledge@Wharton:  Why do you think Arival Bank won these awards? What is it about the bank that appealed to the judges in all three locations?

Jeremy Berger:  Three key elements of our bank attract businesses and judges. The first is we have a heavy approach in our compliance and our KYC (Know Your Customer) processes. We are targeting underbanked businesses, if you will, like SMEs, startups, freelancers, charity organizations, and even crypto-related businesses.

The second is the way we deliver products and services. We have an open API banking approach. (APIs, or application programming interfaces, allow different pieces of software to work with each other, making it possible for third party developers to develop solutions to problems.) This means we can partner with hot fintechs in the market and deliver their products and services that are designed for business customers. Third, we have an authentic strategy in terms of interacting with customers. We don’t believe in chatbots; we believe in having this authentic communication that is transparent. We make a big effort in understanding our customers and their day-to-day business needs.

Knowledge@Wharton:  What led you to launch Arival Bank in Puerto Rico? What challenges did you face initially in setting up the bank? Are there any special regulatory issues in setting up a fintech bank in the U.S. compared with other countries?

Berger:  My background relates to Puerto Rico. I went to university in South Florida, and so I was familiar with some of the opportunities emerging in Puerto Rico. After [Hurricane Maria] struck in 2017, the Puerto Rico economy was looking for rejuvenation, and fintech might be a natural remedy for economic boosts. The government has been extremely vocal in encouraging startups to come set up shop here, and in looking for fintechs, VCs, and so forth.

Initially, after we started getting all this traction and publicity with Slava’s book, we looked at 20 or 30 smaller banks in Europe and the U.S., in terms of buying them. But then we realized buying a bank doesn’t happen overnight. The amount of resources, capital and time it takes is equivalent to building it from scratch and going through the licensing process. So, we started looking at different jurisdictions.

In Asia, Hong Kong offers a virtual banking license; the U.K. has an e-money license, and in different places in Europe there are EMIs, or e-money institutions. The more due diligence we did, the more we realized that a lot of the banking systems globally try to emulate the U.S. market, in terms of its sophistication and its durability. Everything was leading us back to the U.S. market.

“The Puerto Rico economy was looking for rejuvenation, and fintech might be a natural remedy for economic boosts.” –Jeremy Berger

I am not going to say [the U.S. banking industry] is the most innovative, because it is not, and it is not due to lack of innovative minds; it is because of how competitive the playing field is. There are almost 9,000 small or community banks in the U.S., so it is hard for banks to come out on top. In countries like Italy, Poland, and even in Africa, you see many innovative digital banks.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, and it is under the U.S. federal banking system, so there are many advantages and benefits of being in the Puerto Rican banking system, [including] allowing a gateway to the U.S. market. The U.S. is the hardest market to get into. We thought that if we are going to do it right and we want the integrity and the credibility going forward, why not start with the hardest market? That is how we identified Puerto Rico as the initial entry point.

At the same time, we are already expanding into different markets. The EMI license in the EU is certainly on our agenda. We hope to apply for that at the end of this year. We are also looking at [securing an] e-money license in the U.K. We want to move as global as fast as possible.

Solodkiy:  We also are in negotiations with regulators in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai. The U.S. is like the mother market for us. Digital banking started in the U.S.

Knowledge@Wharton:  How do you think about who your customers are, and how do you use data and analytics to gain a competitive advantage over traditional banks?

Berger:  The story of Arival started about a year-and-a-half ago when our VC fund, Life.SREDA, was approached by hundreds of different businesses with the same problem. Some banks were closing and freezing their accounts, and crypto-related businesses, freelancers, startups, independent contractors, and even charity organizations were facing this challenge of being disconnected from the banking system.

After three or four months of research, we understood that the problem was universal. You could read stories any day of the week that banks in Australia, Thailand, Israel, and the U.S. were closing or freezing the accounts of those businesses. That is how we identified them as our target customers.

We know there is huge demand and opportunity, but we want to make sure we are targeting an exclusive class – those that have obtainable data, where we can evaluate their risk ratings. We evaluate them in terms of customer retention or longevity. We believe that data is the driving force of the future of banking.

Solodkiy:  When you decide to build a licensed bank, the regulator – the Federal Reserve –– will listen to your innovative ideas and your predictions for the fintech industry. But 99% of their questions will be on compliance, compliance, compliance. The disrupters mostly care about innovation, but regulators must gauge the risk, and [protect] the citizens of the country.

When we told the regulator about the types of customers we want to serve, their immediately answer was ‘It is an interesting idea, and for sure it is not forbidden, but you have to understand that these are high-risk clients.’ They referred to not only crypto-related customers, but also charity funds, legal sellers of weed in different U.S. states, and other businesses excluded from banking system.

When you decide to work with such high-risk clients, you must show [the regulator] that you are able to implement all the technologies in KYC and AML (anti-money laundering) to track origin of their money and their social connections. It is everything about big-data analysis – not only transactional data and financial data, but also social data, the devices they use, their friends, colleagues, and family members, who the senders and receivers of money are, who their colleagues are and other social connections.

“The more due diligence we did, the more we realized that a lot of the banking systems globally try to emulate the U.S. market, in terms of its sophistication and its durability.” –Jeremy Berger

Fourteen banks came to us when they found how we go about our compliance processes and asked us if they could use our compliance as a service instead of setting up their own compliance department. One of 10 biggest companies in the world that I cannot name came to us and asked us if they could use our KYC model [for their processes in] ‘know your employees’, ‘know your partners’, ‘know your businesses’, and ‘know your customers’. One of the biggest messenger companies, which has several hundreds of millions of users, asked if they could use our compliance model.

Knowledge@Wharton:  How do you ensure compliance with banking regulations, especially the Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering rules, as you pursue new opportunities with high- risk clients like crypto-businesses?

Berger:  From the get-go we had to be transparent and open with the regulators. From day one we made it clear that these are the kinds of businesses we want to go after. At the same time, we are not a crypto bank, so we share a lot of similarities with traditional banks in terms of fiat [currency] transactions and such like.

Going back to your question regarding compliance, we had to engage some of the top names in the compliance consulting world. In addition, it is important to understand the three most important things in compliance: customer, product, and geography. That is basically about who your customers are, what they want from you, and where they are located. Once you obtain this information during the KYC process, you put them into your risk matrix, which should tell you the risk rating. Based on this risk rating, you proceed internally with due diligence with KYC verifications that you need to validate for every customer that you either want to onboard or not.

Going back to this old school compliance model is important. At the same time it is crucial to understand where compliance is heading. Right now, with traditional banks, most of us can agree it is very time consuming, costly and done manually most of the time. It is not designed for high-risk businesses.

We have made it our goal and priority to develop compliance that is designed for these kinds of businesses. We show them that we understand the businesses, what they are doing day to day, what kind of investors they interact with, what kind of auditing should we expect from them, and what kind of business plans we evaluate as being feasible.

At the same time, we are looking ahead. Three, five or eight years down the road, we see a big level of deep tech, machine learning and data analytics in banking, because we want to remedy the faults you see now with traditional banks. If we could automate many of these processes, it will make compliance a lot easier, and increase the chances of us effectively onboarding high-risk businesses.

Solodkiy: [First], before creating this cutting-edge solution for ourselves, we tried to become a customer for other compliance firms. We found that while many companies were trying to provide solutions and technologies for the KYC process, only few provide solutions for the Know Your Business, or KYB process.

Second, all compliance firms focus on the onboarding process. But 80% to 90% of these ‘bad guys’ can be verified as ‘bad guys’ only when they proceed with a transaction. This is clear from recent investigations by the U.S. government in money laundering cases. The real bad guys – or the big money laundering specialists – will be able for sure to successfully proceed with your onboarding process. But where you could find them, track them, and cage them is only during ongoing compliance. Only a few companies worldwide provide solutions not only for onboarding verification but also for ongoing compliance.

“For all banks across the world, compliance is expensive and a headache. For our bank, it is a passion and we have a real love for it.” –Vladislav Solodkiy

The reporting and the architecture of your compliance process are also important. An open API-based technology could be used not only by yourself but also by other companies, including other startups. In the beginning, we created our architecture as open architecture, based on open APIs. A third-party player could use each element, including our compliance solution.

For all banks across the world, compliance is expensive and a headache. For our bank, it is a passion and we have a real love for it. It is one of the biggest income streams for the bank.

Knowledge@Wharton: How do you work with other institutions as part of the financial services ecosystem? Do you see other banks as competitors, or as partners, or both? How do you manage your relationships with them?

Berger: Many banks have approached us. We don’t see them as competitors. If anything, we want to create a learning platform, to educate one another, because certainly they know some things that we don’t, and we know some things that they don’t. This book is about how fintechs and banks need to collaborate and cooperate. There are many benefits and advantages to doing that, whether in monetization strategies, or market share, or sharing customers and referral agreements.

In terms of how we want to work with banks, we are looking at sub-licensing for expansion into different markets that are a little bit more conservative, especially in places in Asia, such as in Japan or in Singapore, where we are talking with some banks passively in terms of partnerships there.

It’s not that we have this anti-mentality against traditional banks. Of course, we want to do something a little bit differently, and we think this fintech banking strategy is real, and the time for it is now. That said, we don’t have an active approach in terms of partnering with [traditional] banks yet, but we certainly see some potential down the road.

Knowledge@Wharton:  What are the biggest risks you foresee for Arival bank in the future? How will you mitigate those risks?

Solodkiy:  The biggest risk is to onboard the wrong client, and wrong money from hidden sources of funds. We want to be super-transparent to regulators and other counterparts across the financial markets when we onboard the wrong customers.

[Two aspects are important here.] First, who will spot the mistake [when you onboard an undesirable customer]? If it is you or your bank, it is a plus for your karma. If the regulator [discovers that], it is a minus [for your bank]. Second, [a lot depends on] how fast you share information about such cases with the regulator. If you do it immediately, and in a transparent manner, it is a plus for your karma. If you wait a few months, or even years – like it happened recently with several banks – you could face fines from the regulator of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Third, it is important for the regulator to know what you have done before to predict and to hedge such risks. The fourth aspect is about what you will do after that the event. How would you upgrade your internal processes, compliance requirements and compliance technologies to avoid such risks with other clients?

If you can [satisfactorily] answer those four questions, nobody will punish you, because regulators in the U.S. and in other jurisdictions understand that you cannot protect 100% your business from potential enemies. Some wrong people will try to use your brand for their illegal plans.

The post From Book to Bank: How a Fintech Firm Found Its Calling appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

To be part of the conversation, join us at our inaugural Digital Banking Asia Summit 2019, part of the 2019 Future Banking week, to explore how you can structure your digital-first banking strategies to become future-ready.

The post How the Banking Status Quo is Being Challenged in the Age of Fintech and APIs appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

At 24 years old, most people graduate college, consider different careers options and think about what they want to achieve in their professional lives.

But for every rule, there is an exception. Some 24-year-olds run successful businesses. And some even build their own banks.

We know at least two such exceptions: Ollie Purdue (25) and Jeremy Berger (24).

They have at least two things in common: both are young (obviously), and both have co-founded digital banking startups. And most importantly, both entrepreneurs are similar in their innovative and inclusive approach to banking.

Unlike Jeremy Berger’s Arival, Ollie Purdue’s Loot is actually not a bank: it is a digital current account provider, created by 22-year-old Purdue in 2015 as a smart-money management app for students, aimed at making their money tracking and saving experience better.  

“From day one this was at the heart of every decision we made: to make life easier for our users”, – Purdue says, “While banks have many other roles, our job is to provide a digital current account and so we can really focus on how to make this experience as simple and enjoyable as possible for our users.”

While Loot is thriving in the U.K., another young entrepreneur is on a similar, albeit different mission. To make banking more accessible and enjoyable, 24-year-old Jeremy Berger went even further than digital accounts: he decided to create a bank targeting underbanked businesses. The first digital fintech bank for SMEs.

Jeremy’s story is quite remarkable. In 2017, he decided to move to Singapore on a blind leap of faith and a hunch that he wanted to immerse himself into the Singaporean startup & venture capital ecosystem. Shortly thereafter, he took the Singapore community by storm and co-founded Arival Bank, which he has built from the ground up. Just like Ollie Purdue, Jeremy raised money, developed the team, and managed to prevail during the many challenges of starting a bank from scratch.

He applied for banking license in the US, and now finds himself in the same process in Europe, which is no easy task for a young 24-year-old. Jeremy won the coveted best of show award at Finovate, the equivalent of an Oscar in the fintech world. The same month, he led the way again as Arival came home winners not only from the Fintech Inn pitching competition (the largest fintech conference in the Baltics), but also at the London Design Awards.

“It is not important how innovative your technology will be, or how you will “disrupt” the market,” Jeremy says in his article “Starting a bank at 24 years old” which recently went viral, “The simple things are more vital: who you are, how well you understand your future customers, how your experience and reputation will help the regulator believe you are not an accidental player.”

Both entrepreneurs aim at solving the real problems of real people they have encountered in real lives: whether it be the negative personal experience with money management apps or the discrimination of startups by traditional banks. While Loot is successfully targeting individual users, Arival’s clients are small and medium-sized businesses from the US & abroad, underserved by banks.

Despite catering to different audiences, Ollie Purdue and Jeremy Berger are similar in their desire to make customer onboarding quick and simple, and 100% compliant, with anti-fraud and money-laundering protection.

Through passion, resiliency and an unparalleled work ethic, both entrepreneurs have turned their projects into some of the world’s hottest digital banking startups and validated themselves amongst the rising young stars in fintech. It might not be long before their products become integral part of our daily lives.

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To know more about Arival Bank, meet Jeremy Berger in person at TechCrunch Disrupt in Berlin (Nov 29-30, 2018) or find him on LinkedIn.

The post Meet the world’s youngest digital bankers: Jeremy Berger (24) & Ollie Purdue (25) appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

“The Future of Digital Banking: Asia-Pacific” was hosted by Marketforce on March 21 and 22, 2017 in Singapore. The conference managed to bring together an interesting set of C-suite, senior bankers, industry experts, tech companies and the startup community.

Bankers that presented during the conference not only included Singapore banks like DBS and UOB but others such as ANZ, HengFeng, HSBC, Garanti, Krungsri Bank and the Co-Operative Bank. Startups included Instarem, StashAway, Moxtra, Timo, Dianrong, Kashmi, Onelyst, Coinpip, UangTeman and Dynatrace. The conference also had speakers from Celent, PwC, Forester, Misys, Prudential, Google, Facebook, SAP, Comarch, Visa, Mastercard, IIA Indonesia and R3.

The two-day event provided a platform to share the most exciting developments in banking and how it would affect the future for banks, FinTechs and customers. FinTech accelerators in Singapore like FinLab and Startupbootcamp also spoke about how banks can look outside of themselves and partner with FinTechs to combine expertise for the customer. During the conference, tech giants like Google and Facebook shared insights and trends about consumer behavior and how the financial industry can benefit from them. In this article, we have highlighted a few of those findings from Google and Facebook.

Google was represented by Katherine Unson who leads Consumer Insights & Business Strategy in Financial Services for APAC. She shared Google’s latest insights from an upcoming report. “Think with Google” provides tools and research that can be used by companies and industries to step in with Google data before products or marketing campaigns are designed. Findings from the report suggest that financial services are under-indexing the total industry in terms of searches on mobile. Travel, CPG, other industries have about 50–60% search traffic on mobile compared to 30% in financial services. The low mobile search traffic results could be attributed to a circular problem of banks not wanting to fix their mobile experience leading to fewer people searching for financial products using smartphones while the other more behavioral challenge could be consumers feeling uncomfortable putting their information on a less serious device like a mobile

Katherine shared how Singaporeans are searching for financial products on Google. A trend that is seen in Singapore is around consumers already searching for brands they know against searching for a category (Standard Chartered Credit Card vs. “Credit Card”). Two out of three consumers already have a brand in mind when they go online and this can be attributed to the fact that consumers have already seen a billboard, print ad, flyer or a physical bank because of the small proximity of the city. In terms of the categories within financial services that lead the demand or the intent to buy:

• General banking is the biggest with online banking as the major chunk. Local banks have the largest volume with DBS as number one followed by OCBC and UOB. OCBC and UOB have a high probability of being searched in the same session as DBS indicating that they are in the same consideration set for Singaporeans. POSB, on the other hand, has a very distinct value proposition and so is typically not searched in the same session.

• International banks have a smaller volume and strive to get their own value proposition within the market. Interestingly, Standard Chartered is a bit overlapping with the local banks because they launched a specific campaign last year that focused on deposit and savings which are the key factors of three local banks (DBS, OCBC and UOB).

• For general banking, like online banking or branch banking, the subcategory that grew the last year was wealth management. The reason for this is the huge push by the Singapore government and the startup ecosystem last year that involved a rise in business loans, asset management and other areas related to wealth management.

• The biggest consumer product identified from the Google search data was credit cards with miles based benefits being the most sought after rewards. On analyzing the top searches for credit cards and the need for it, travel is at the highest at 42%.

• In terms of loans and lending, business loans were seen to grow the fastest. The biggest category is home loans but it was the slowest growing.

• Insurance is quite interesting because it has a lot to do with the barrier to online entry along with the fact that life insurance, health insurance and related products are quite complicated. Travel insurance is first, followed by auto insurance and life insurance.

• Travel insurance is interesting because of its low barrier to entry to having a full online experience. Travel insurance is bundled up with sites like Expedia, etc. and also provided by airlines and hotels. Therefore, various channels are available for purchasing travel insurance with good online fulfillment along with the most demand for it. Three out of four Singaporeans have a brand in mind for travel insurance.

• For wealth management, Singapore comes second for all the investment related searches in key financial hubs with Hong Kong at the top of the list. Tokyo is at the third position, New York at forth and London at fifth. Mobile is playing a really interesting role as an auxiliary wealth advisor and driving this behavior as a research and updating device. While for other products such as loans or life insurance, there is a gap in the fulfillment of actually buying or securing using the mobile device.

Katherine mentioned that with the abundance of consumer insights that are now available, bankers can follow an inside-out approach while designing experiences and look at customers from a holistic point of view. People are not looking for banks or financial products but rather for a way to reach their life goals like building a house or educating their kids.

Rowan Spinks, Client Partner in Financial Services in SE Asia for Facebook spoke about the five key consumer trends that are happening across all industries and how they also apply to financial services:

• Mobile-First: About 90% of actual consumption of Facebook in most markets is mobile-first. In Singapore, 65% of Facebook consumers are mobile only. Mobile is offering new opportunities for businesses since it on throughout the day and consumers today have far more media moments than ever before.
• Personalization: Three-quarters of consumers are expecting personalization from products and brands. Over three-quarters of banking and insurance consumers say that these kinds of promotions encourage them to buy. About 71% of consumers prefer ads that are tailored to their needs and 90% of business leaders think that customization and personalization are the keys to having a competitive edge.
• Video Is Exploding: This is happening as devices are getting some sophisticated. Mobile users are 1.5 times more likely to watch a video as compared to desktop users and they will spend five times longer with video content than with static content.
• Instant Experiences: Consumers are demanding instant experiences and if a site or content takes more than four seconds to load, half of the people will leave and on mobile, this time is even less.
• Multichannel: The consumer journey today is multichannel. Within banking, two-thirds of the customers are multichannel. About 60% of financial interactions have started on mobile and 56% of those move to a computer since people have to fill lengthy forms and upload documents, etc., in the financial industry and so, the common behavior is to head back to a PC. Due to this behavior, it is hard to understand the impact of mobile on the consumer journey.

As per Rowan, these trends are leading to transformational business change. Facebook provides several tools such as Custom Audience, Instant Articles, Canvas and others that businesses can use to create better experiences for their customers. Therefore, we see that financial institutions can harness consumer data to better know their customers and engage with them.

The post Insights from Google and Facebook at the Future of Digital Banking, Asia Pacific – Hosted by MarketForce appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

According to a global quarterly report by KPMG, last year, USD $24.7 billion was invested in FinTech companies across the globe. India too has witnessed a flurry of venture capital investments, particularly in the areas of SME lending, P2P lending, mobile wallets, payment services and robo-advisory. As a venture capital firm investing in startups “impacting the masses,” we have a deep interest in FinTech companies that can integrate large sections of the population into the formal financial infrastructure by providing more than just access to finance. One such exciting segment is insurance technology (or InsurTech) i.e., leveraging technology to make insurance more affordable and accessible. 

Finally, a new era for insurance?

One of the oldest and most conventional industries, insurance has witnessed minimal disruption, other than online aggregators like CoverFox and PolicyBazaar that allow customers to compare policies from various providers on one platform. Large players continue to enjoy high bargaining power and dominate the industry. Until recently, insurance has been a “push-product” wherein agents must convince buyers to buy policies. However, startups are now experimenting with different approaches to claims management, underwriting and risk management, sales and distribution; all with the aim of developing more customized offerings to customers and reducing the providers’ costs in the process as well. The underlying hope is that these improvements will lead to ease and convenience that would change the cost dynamics in the industry.

From microinsurance to P2P insurance, companies in the West are developing innovative business models that could thrive in India.

Bringing the P2P model into insurance 

While there are several companies trying to adopt the P2P model, one of the earliest companies that successfully implemented it into the insurance industry was Germany-based Friendsurance that began operations in 2010.

P2P insurance was conceived as a concept, to tackle two critical sales barriers in the insurance industry – high premiums and lack of transparency. Friendsurance groups customers with similar insurance needs and policies, pooling part of their premium which is used to settle small claims, as and when they arise. In the likely scenario that there are no claims for the defined period, members of the group get back a portion of their money from the pool. In the event of a larger claim that amounts to more than the pooled amount, the insurance company settles it. Therefore, members are always completely covered and end up paying lower premiums because of being paid back the unclaimed amount. An unheard practice in this age-old industry!

How well does this work? Friendsurance indicates that nearly 80% of its customers received some money back from their paid premiums. One customer received as much as $680 or 40% of the paid premiums back over a period of three years! Currently, this model is available for certain categories including auto insurance, legal expenses and electronic insurance but the possibilities and use cases are endless.

On-demand insurance for the growing on-demand service industry

Over the last 5–7 years, India has seen a remarkable increase in on-demand services from cabs to concierges that have created significant jobs for the “bottom of pyramid” population, increasing their incomes and improving their overall quality of living. All these improvements should ideally include an affordable insurance plan covering them, at least when they are on the job. The current issue is, however, insurance – if it exists at all – is in the company’s name and mainly covers the risks to the company. Can the on-demand concept be adapted to the insurance world, allowing for greater flexibility in duration and affordability of coverage?

Slice Labs based in New York makes this possible with just a few taps through its mobile app. Currently, the company offers insurance coverage to rideshare Uber drivers who opt to be covered once their trips start and home owners who rent out their homes on Airbnb and only want to be covered for the exact days that someone is occupying their house. These insurance contracts are therefore offered on a transactional basis with Slice doing the back-end work; they also design and price the contracts while insurance firms, partnered with the company, provide the actual coverage. This model can be easily replicated and scaled to cover the multitude of jobs that have erupted in India, allowing large sections of the population to be covered as well as opening previously untended markets for insurance companies.

Jumping on the microfinance bandwagon: Microinsurance 

Micro-finance changed the face of financial inclusion dramatically making much-needed credit easily available for the majority of India’s population. A similar concept in the insurance industry is evolving through the pioneering work of Swedish company Milvik AB, operating as Bima Microinsurance that has developed a platform making insurance available to first generation insurance buyers through a plug and play technology integrated into the mobile operators’ infrastructure and paid for using prepaid credit or postpaid mobile bills. Bima offers life, accident and health insurance cover at affordable rates (as little as $0.02 per day), all delivered through mobile technology and an easy, responsive claims management system that promises a 72-hour turnaround. They also offer pay-as-you-go insurance and have recently launched mobile health services, giving consumers access to doctors and consultations over the phone.

Bima’s numbers are quite impressive, proving that there is a need for this in the global market and that consumers are willing to pay for insurance as long it is reasonable and convenient. They have already successfully reached 24 million customers across 16 countries. What’s noteworthy is that 90% of their customers are accessing insurance for the first time in their lives!

Takeaways for India

While the companies mentioned in this article, may or may not cater to low-income sections, the intention of this article is to steer focus on how these disruptive business models that leverage advanced technology can and must be adapted in India. According to National Health Profile 2015, published by the Central Bureau of Health Intelligence, less than 20% of Indians are covered with the most basic health insurance. While there may be several reasons for this abysmal penetration of insurance among the masses, it is indeed possible to significantly increase this number, if Indian startups create similar options in the market.

First appeared at LTP

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Bitcoin and blockchain companies are popping up in numerous sectors, including financial services, social, intellectual property, and IoT.

Funding to the sector has gone from almost no investment in 2012 to over $500M in each of the past two years. Corporations and their venture arms, especially those in financial services, have entered the fray in large numbers, looking to blockchain and distributed ledger solutions to address pain points that include data reconciliation, clearance, and settlement, among other issues. Major global banks and financial intermediaries are working closely with blockchain companies using the new technology to revamp legacy systems and infrastructure.

We used the CB Insights database to identify 95 privately held bitcoin and blockchain companies and organized them into ten categories, based on each company’s primary product, line of business, and/or use case.

Our market map includes both bitcoin and blockchain startups. Blockchains are cryptographically secured, distributed ledgers, first developed as the underlying technology for the bitcoin cryptocurrency. Bitcoin companies offer products or services related to the trading, storing, or usage of bitcoin, while blockchain-based companies develop solutions that apply blockchain technology across sectors and verticals.

Please note companies often straddle multiple categories. We categorize each company based on its primary use case or most apparent line of business. Bitcoin and blockchain consortia are not included on this market map.

Category Definitions

Wallets & Money Services: Wallet companies primarily develop secure software wallets in which to store cryptocurrency. Money services companies primarily operate cryptocurrency remittance or money transfer platforms. Often, wallet companies double as money services companies by providing platforms for the purchasing, sending, and receiving of cryptocurrencies. Additionally, while wallet and money services companies may provide cryptocurrency exchanges, the exchanges are primarily a means to load the wallet and not the company’s primary line of business. Xapo, a wallet company that also provides fully insured, underground cryptocurrency cold-storage security via its Vault platform, has received approximately $40M in venture funding and also serves as the bitcoin storage solution for Grayscale’s pending Bitcoin Investment Trust ETF.

Exchanges & Cryptocurrency Trading: Exchanges and Cryptocurrency Trading refers to companies that build cryptocurrency exchanges or cryptocurrency trading platforms, where consumers, businesses, and professionals can exchange cryptocurrencies for traditional fiat currencies or other stores of value. Of note, exchanges and cryptocurrency trading platforms differ in terms of their respective target audiences; exchanges generally target consumers, while trading platforms target professional investors and investment funds transacting in larger volume. Polychain Capital is a hedge fund that invests in cryptocurrencies and other blockchain-based assets, and has received $10M in Series A funding from smart money VC investors Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures.

P2P Marketplaces & P2P Lending: P2P marketplaces primarily operate blockchain-based, peer-to-peer marketplace platforms, where users can exchange goods directly and without the use of an intermediary. P2P lending refers to companies that develop blockchain-based, peer-to-peer lending platforms which allow users to engage in lending transactions with peers, as opposed to traditional financial institutions. Atlas is developing a peer-to-peer mobile banking platform for geographies with limited or under-developed financial infrastructure, and has received $3M in three seed investment rounds. OpenBazaar, a bitcoin peer-to-peer marketplace that takes no middlemen fees, recently closed on a $3M Series A funding round that included Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures as co-investors.

Merchant Services: Merchant services refers to companies that primarily develop cryptocurrency and blockchain solutions for merchants and sellers. This category includes blockchain-based rewards programs, cryptocurrency point-of-sale kiosks, and merchant-directed blockchain consulting services. To reduce chargebacks and increase margins for businesses, Coinify offers physical point-of-sale kiosks, online shopping cart integrations, and payment buttons that allow merchants and consumers to transact in cryptocurrencies. The company has raised $4M in a 2016 Series A round.

Enterprise Services & Currencies: Blockchain services companies primarily develop blockchain operating systems, APIs, and protocols intended for multiple and varied use cases, or companies that act as general-purpose blockchain consultants, typically for enterprises. Blockchain currencies refers to companies that build unique and custom cryptocurrencies and tokens. Gem is building a blockchain operating system and API for the financial, healthcare, and manufacturing sectors, among others, and has received $10M in total funding from seed and Series A rounds.

Social & Browsers: Social companies primarily develop blockchain-based social networks. Browser companies primarily build blockchain-secured web browsers, often including microtransaction capabilities. Reveal is building a social network where advertisers pay users micropayments denominated in the company’s cryptographic currency for the right to advertise to those users, and has received $1.6M from the sector’s top investors by deal count, Digital Currency Group and Boost VC. Brave is taking a similar approach with its web browser, allowing users to pay content providers and publishers through micropayments as an alternative to advertising, and has raised $7M in two rounds.

Storage, Security & Regulatory: Storage companies that primarily store data with blockchain-secured technology. Security & regulatory companies assess risk from and to blockchains, build secondary security systems, blockchain security applications, or monitor cryptocurrencies for criminal activity by assembling an audit-trail of cryptocurrency addresses. Chainalysis assists financial institutions and enterprises with AML (anti-money laundering) and KYC (know your customer) compliance for clients who transact in cryptocurrencies, and has raised $1.7M in two seed rounds.

Cryptocurrency Mining: Mining equipment & services refers to companies that primarily build or operate hardware, software, cloud-based pools, and other services for the mining of cryptocurrencies. Miners receive financial renumeration from cryptocurrency networks for maintaining the networks. Netherlands-based BitFury Group sells and develops hardware and software for cryptocurrency mining in addition to consulting for enterprises and governments in implementing blockchain solutions. The company raised the largest round of 2017 thus far, a $30M Series C from first-time sector investor, China Credit Limited Holdings.

IoT, Identity & Content Management: IoT companies primarily assign physical assets blockchain-secured digital signatures and establish trusted networks by which these physical assets can communicate. As an example, an IoT-connected shipment could move from point to point, with package information continuously updated on a secure blockchain shared by all interested parties. Identity companies primarily build identity management applications for consumers to record and secure identification data. Content companies primarily operate blockchain-based content platforms, whereby publishers and creators establish immutable rights and ownership of content and engage in microtransactions for the usage of content. These three subcategories are grouped together because they append digital signatures for physical objects and unique content to the blockchain. Ascribe offers a blockchain platform where creators can keep full and attributable control of assets while sharing or selling them, and has raised $2M in seed funding.

Capital Markets & Financial Services: Capital markets & financial services refers to companies that primarily develop solutions for financial institutions and intermediaries to address issues of clearance, settlement, and data management, among others, as well as to companies that build new blockchain-based investment vehicles. Funderbeam has created a blockchain-based platform for the trading and funding of shares of private companies, and has raised $4.6M in four seed rounds, the last of which included Draper Associates. We also include investors such as Digital Currency Group in this category because the company acts as both an investor and developer of blockchain and cryptocurrency applications, including operating Genesis Trading and the Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust.

See the full company list below:

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First appeared at CB Insights

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Nigel Morris thinks a lot about language.

A common language — a lingua franca, as Morris calls it — is what allows the former co-founder of Capital One to collaborate effectively with his partners and employees at QED Investors, the Alexandria, Va.-based venture capital firm he founded in 2007.

Banks typically don’t share a language with the fintechs in which he now invests, says Morris, and this difference lies at the heart of the disconnect he often sees between these two groups.

As QED’s managing partner, Morris has made it his mission to bridge that linguistic and cultural divide, connecting the firm’s portfolio companies, which include Credit Karma, Prosper, GreenSky and SoFi, to financial institutions.

“There was no grand plan,” he said of his decision to become an investor after a decade building Capital One and two subsequent years spent broadening his outlook on the boards of The Economist and London Business School. “I’m making this up as I go along.”

The truth is that he was too much of an operator to have felt fulfilled doing anything but helping companies grow.

American Banker recently caught up with Morris to learn more about the lessons he took away from Capital One, his view of the fintech space and QED’s efforts to connect fintechs and banks.

What follows is our interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.

How did you become a venture capitalist? What did you learn at Capital One that has helped guide you as an investor in disruptive fintech startups?

NIGEL MORRIS: The Capital One diaspora is incredibly rich and vibrant, and here in Alexandria we are in the epicenter of it. Ideas started to come to us, and people started to come to us, and I said, “Look, maybe we should learn how to be investors.” I knew how to recognize and enable talent, because that was a key pillar of Capital One’s model. And I knew enough about financial services to recognize where the profit pools were. We started to make some investments in 2006, 2007 — but only on a very small scale, all our own money. I teamed up with Frank Rothman, the chief risk officer at Capital One. We started to put together a crackerjack team at QED — all ex-Capital One operators, all bringing incredibly unique, functional skills to the table, and who all speak the same language. We’re able to use shorthand to communicate with each other, and we all grew up together and have an incredible bond of trust. That, to me, is incredibly important in an investment environment where you have to trust people’s judgment.

What are some of the key investments QED has made?

We led the Series A round when Credit Karma had only a very small number of customers and a valuation that was only a few tens of millions, which was fantastic. Now, of course, it has 63 million customers. We saw the incredible benefit of it, creating transparency and empowerment for the consumer and a way of being able to deliver that consistently and monetize it.

In that same era, we invested early in SoFi—we saw the power of that model, of being able to offer student-loan consolidation to people who have gone to great schools and did very monetizable college degrees.

We invested in GreenSky very early—we led the A round there. That’s gone incredibly well. We were an early investor in Braintree, which developed Venmo, so we got to see that in action and were part of scaling it.

We’ve been really lucky. We get tremendous positive selection of really great companies coming to us, and saying, “I think you at QED offer something really unique, given your backgrounds, and we’re in the mood to listen.”

You still see yourself as a kind of operator masquerading as an investor. How does that stance show itself in your relationships with QED’s portfolio companies?

We are very open with our portfolio companies about our modus operandi during the mating process. I will sit down and say, “Look, if you just want money, we’re not the place to go to. Other people have much deeper pockets and may be less vigilant and much more willing to take bets. But if you really want partnership, and you want to have people come to the table with you in a really open, positive way and look to help you build your business, and take the risk out of building something out of the ground, this could be a useful conversation.”

The best relationships we have are where the CEO can call me up and say, “Nigel, I think I’ve really screwed up.” Or, “Nigel, I don’t know what to do.” Those conversations are often very hard to have in the boardroom, and as a company matures and you have more professional money that’s invested, it’s even harder, and board meetings sadly become more perfunctory than content-oriented. We work a lot with our portfolio companies on what are the really big issues, how can we help you navigate them? What resources can we bring in terms of experience, analytical skills, relationships and partnerships? The ones who like that approach come to us, and the ones who don’t like it, I think that’s great, they can go off and do other things.

What are the major opportunities in fintech right now? 

What we’re seeing, when we really have unbridled, genuine conversations, [is that] people will say, “Look, the banks have some really important assets.” What do they have? They’ve got low-cost, robust deposits. Many of them don’t know how to lend very well, but they have deposits. They have regulatory access and, by and large, very effective compliance machinery, which is really important in this environment. They have customer bases. Now, some of them are good at selling, some of them are not; they’re a whole lot more nervous about their cross-selling practices post-Wells Fargo, but they do have large customer bases. And, lastly, they have lots of earnings and have high profitability.

But what they don’t have is a lot of things that the fintechs have. They start with, “I’ve got branches. What can I sell you?” rather than “Who’s my potential consumer and what problem am I trying to solve, and can I do it remotely via a mobile phone?” Historically, the banks’ strategy has been to be all things to all people, everywhere, all the time. That’s not a strategy. A strategy is what you decide not to do.

Fintechs are increasingly playing in parts of the value chain where the banks aren’t so good. Here’s an example — 25 years ago, when Capital One came out of the ground, the national players like Capital One—followed by Citi and Chase and Bank of America—put many of the megaregionals out of the consumer lending space. They just couldn’t compete in credit cards and installment loans. They never developed the DNA. A generation has gone by and they don’t have that in their repertoire. But they have lots of deposits. So what we’re seeing is the banks, particularly the big regionals, are beginning to team with the fintech companies that are originators of loans—think Lending Club, think Prosper, think OnDeck Capital. The value chain is starting to splinter, and the progressive banks are starting to say, “We don’t have to be all things to everybody. We can recognize that other entities, fintechs, have enormous skills and we’re going to figure out how to get two plus two to equal five.” There are reasons why that hasn’t taken off in quite the way that some people had predicted, but it can be done.

So what we have now, I think, is two very separate ecosystems that have very complementary skills and that are attempting to talk to each other. But it’s a real challenge, because the banks fear the fintechs, because fintechs don’t speak the same language, they don’t have the same history, the same DNA, and they fear that the fintechs will cause downstream issues with the regulatory climate, and any force majeure with the regulators has to be avoided at all costs. And, candidly, the fintechs have real trouble relating to the banks. They can’t navigate them well, they don’t understand the banks what the banks are saying. The fintechs can often come off as arrogant and complacent with banks that are really fearful about looking after the family jewels. They don’t speak the same language.

So you see opportunity for QED Investors in trying to bridge the two. 

At QED we have a foot in both worlds. We’ve forged in the last six months two groundbreaking relationships—one with Fifth Third in Cincinnati and one with ScotiaBank in Toronto. We recognize the tremendous assets that they bring, we trust them and know the people there, and they recognize that we have a view into and an ability to curate fintech ideas and companies that they should be looking at and figuring out how to leverage, rather than them attempting to de novo all of this themselves.

Banks have tremendous assets, but they can’t compete easily with the fintechs. The fintechs have tremendous assets, but they don’t have the things banks have that can help them scale. Starting from that fundamental premise, we’ve said, “At QED, how can we be catalysts to create a win-win-win?” It’s a win for Fifth Third because we can bring curated, evaluated, fintechs to the table, where we can say, “Look, this is what these folks are really good at and here’s why you should listen; and here’s how the assets you have can enable them and you can profit from it and it can bring real value to your customer base.” There’s also a win for the fintech, because the fintech covets the assets of Fifth Third but doesn’t know how to navigate Fifth Third very easily, and doesn’t know how to tell its story in a way that facilitates the digestion of what the startup’s business model is. The fintech is often much more adroit at pitching venture capital than at pitching banks, and they’re very different story lines. And the third win is for us, because if the portfolio company wins by being able to grow and scale, then we’ve added value to our portfolio, and we’ve built tighter relationships with the Fifth Thirds or the Scotias, and therefore they’re more willing to listen to new ideas that we bring to the table.

How are the bank partnerships going so far? 

We have relationships consummated with both of them. This is a pretty innovative structure, so we didn’t forge it overnight. Fifth Third has invested in GreenSky, one of our portfolio companies; they made a large investment there. They’ve also invested in ApplePie Capital, which is another portfolio company—one that we curated and brought to Fifth Third, which is a franchise lending model, and that’s gone very well. Fifth Third just invested in AvidXchange, which is a payments business, and they invested there alongside us. So I can point to three in the last three or four months where Fifth Third has engaged.

Our focus with Scotia is much more on Latin America. Scotia has an enormous footprint in all of the LatAm and Central American countries outside of Brazil. We’ve made four or five investments in Brazil solo, but we’re looking to partner with Scotia in LatAm, and we’re talking about half a dozen really interesting companies that we are looking to have work with Scotia as we speak. So I can’t speak to specific consummations with Scotia, but I can tell you that there’s an enormous amount of energy and commitment. They have dedicated people who are working with us, and we’re spending quite a bit of time up there in Toronto. My partner, Bill Cilluffo, just spent two weeks running around Latin America talking to Scotia people on the ground in Peru, and in Colombia, and in Mexico, looking for those kinds of opportunities. It’s got a lot of promise.

First appeared at American Banker

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Online lending service for students SoFi (Social Finance Inc.) is close to raising about $500 million in a funding round expected to be led by private equity firm SilverLake Partners to bolster the expansion of its online lending businesses and personal financial services. The investment round should include several Asian investors like Japan’s SoftBank and others. The new international group will purchase SoFi’s loans as well as take an equity stake. The fundraising round values SoFi at $4.3 billion, higher than its previous valuation of $3.2 billion. 

Closely held SoFi started out in 2011 by refinancing student loans. In 2015, San Francisco-based SoFi issued $5 billion in loans. That had grown to more than $15.5 billion by early this year. It’s since chased a much wider vision, expanding into personal loans, mortgages, wealth management and life insurance. Earlier this month, SoFi acquired mobile bankingstartup Zenbanx for about $100 million. Expansion and scaling to neobanking as complimentary FinTech vertical is a very trendy step right now.

Online student loans represent another very interesting niche. Such players as Affirm and Credible have already started to expand their product lines to provide not only personal loans but student loans too. American public company SoFi, a market leader, actively expands its business model to B2C (not only student loans but mortgages as well) and B2B (Credit Opportunities Fund, created by SoFi, allows institutional and private investors acquire pooled loans from SoFi and other players) segments. The fund has recently sold a portfolio with AAA rating by Moody’s worth $380M, which sounds like an investment opportunity for pension and insurance funds.

However, the size of SoFi makes it unwieldy over time – and it opens doors to such players as CommonBond (which has recently acquired PFM startup Gradible), Affirm, ClimbCredit and Earnest (all of them being approximately the same size). Smaller players follow the leaders – LendKey, Credible and LendEDU, for example, have already launched their student loans’ refinancing programs.

There is a pool of interesting projects focusing on particular needs (and behavioral trends) of some client groups. SelfScore, for example, allows international students to build a credit history in the US by issuing them credit cards – and this is a niche of up to 1M borrowers a year.

Noteworthy, this sector is actively developing only in the US despite the fact that student loans are a burning issue everywhere. Only British Future Finance (has raised $13M in equity and $143M of working capital to finance credit disbursement and expanded to the German market recently), Indian Buddy and Indonesian Cicil (all of them are very small startups) are developing in this field. This is strange considering that people from Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea spend a considerable amount of money for their education.

First appeared at LTP

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A week after lauding JD.com Inc.’s finance affiliate for moving into new and growing businesses (auto insurance), I should probably pause to add a caveat: tread carefully.

Chinese regulators have begun investigating JD Finance over allegations it breached securities laws. The arm of the unprofitable e-commerce provider allegedly underwrote unapproved securities via its “Bai Na” service, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter. Other possible infractions include misleading and defrauding customers through its promotions, according to the report.

This brings to mind Baidu Inc.’s brush with controversy last year. Except that instead of a brush, the search-engine provider careened head on into trouble with customers and regulators because of its medical and health-care advertising. The result was a drop in sales and a plunge in share price, from which it recovered. What Baidu is still struggling to come back from is the damage to its business model as stricter rules hit advertising and limit the pool of companies that can conceivably promote services on its sites.

JD Finance is operating in a very crowded market, which is why the move into auto insurance makes sense. Yet pushing the envelope in areas such as peer-to-peer lending and investment products is a strategic risk that doesn’t always swing a company’s way.

It looks like JD Finance saw the storm coming, saying in a statement that it “temporarily stopped offering one product in January as part of our ongoing efforts to improve customer experience.” The company also told Bloomberg that it conducts strict oversight to ensure legal compliance.

Whether or not JD Finance broke the law, or is alone in doing so, is almost irrelevant. The fact is that they’re now in regulators’ sights and that could crimp expansion as executives ensure every i is dotted and every t crossed.

When Baidu was ensnared last year, I argued the company will come out stronger. The stock’s 18 percent rise from a post-controversy low shows that to be correct. The same might be said for JD Finance, but first it needs to get through the storm and hope it doesn’t lose significant ground to competitors in the meantime.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

First appeared at Bloomberg

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The LTP Team has been following the blockchain-focused ecosystem for quite a while now and have seen very interesting a promising players providing solutions for authentication, blockchain-as-a-service, open-source blockchain, application development, mobile wallets, compliance, trading and investment, etc. This time, let’s look at some of the most promising blockchain companies providing enterprise-grade solutions:

AlphaPoint Distributed Ledger Platform is a private, permissioned protocol that leverages the inherent benefits of the blockchain – immutability, strong cryptography, instantaneous clearing – but makes significant improvements. Unlike traditional blockchains, ADLP allows firms complete control over their data and acts as a general-purpose platform for deploying financial applications.

Applied Blockchain is a blockchain applications development company, focusing on DLT and smart contracts. Based in the Level39 Fintech Accelerator in Canary Wharf, London, Applied Blockchain has developed a blockchain agnostic application and privacy framework that sits on top of any underlying blockchain platform to improve development efficiency, add workflow functionality and future-proof solutions to work with the best available technology.

Avalanchain offers a Data-as-a-Stream blockchain platform. Enterprises can create as many Chains as they like with each Stream being a separate Chain of digitally signed events.

BigchainDB allows developers and enterprise to deploy blockchain proof-of-concepts, platforms and applications with a scalable blockchain database, supporting a wide range of industries and use cases.

Blockchain Foundry offers scalable, secure and robust enterprise blockchain platform for prototyping and production deployment.

BlockCypher is the infrastructure fabric for blockchain applications. Its’ modular, cloud-optimized architecture is enterprise-grade for scalability, performance and reliability.

Bloq delivers enterprise-grade blockchain technology to leading companies worldwide. The company delivers enterprise-grade layers of key software infrastructure to power blockchain applications.

Chain Core is enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure that enables organizations to build better financial services from the ground up.

Chain Reactor is an enterprise blockchain company providing a high performance, permissioned blockchain enablement platform. Complex data management and node support for SQL and NoSQL databases allows Chainreactor to be used in conjunction with existing systems.

ChainThat is a technology-focused start-up that specializes in the delivery of blockchain-based enterprise distributed applications and products across different industry verticals. The company’s mission is to provide services and solutions that leverage new decentralized technologies to enable a step-change in peer-to-peer processing; to realize the benefits of centralized processing but with game-changing improvements to costs, speed and data quality.

ChromaWay offers blockchain as a platform for financial institutions and is working on a smart contract platform that allows for digitizing and representing workflows in a secure, private and efficient way. The platform has been built for colored coins and is currently being used for many real-world transactions on the bitcoin network.

Ciphrex is a cryptocurrency platform specialized in blockchain technology, digital currency protocols and decentralized consensus networks. The company has developed products that include mSIGNA, a multisignature bitcoin wallet, and CoinSocket, an enterprise-grade development platform.

Colu is a blockchain technology platform for enterprises and developers providing a powerful toolbox for building blockchain-based applications. Through Colu’s application municipal authorities, governmental entities and other organizations can engage directly with independent local businesses to drive local entrepreneurship and growth. Strengthening the relationship with residents and businesses helps preserves the local culture & uniqueness of the city and creates incentives for locals to stick around.

Credits is a blockchain platform provider offering a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) with tools for building secure and scalable blockchains to power enterprise applications.

Epiphyte provides a blockchain-powered SaaS service that delivers instant settlement and DVP (delivery versus payment) for financial trades. The company develops enterprise software allowing banks and other financial institutions to securely integrate with the Bitcoin and crypto-finance industry. Epiphyte provides a range of turnkey SaaS products in addition to consulting and regulatory services.

Guardtime builds products leveraging KSI to solve hard problems. Examples include anti-tamper hardware designed to resist nation-state reverse engineering, a replacement for RSA digital signatures that is resistant to quantum computational attack, cryptographic provenance for software supply chains and deterministic data loss prevention.

Interbit is an enterprise grade blockchain platform that enables applications to be built, managed, and run on a blockchain. Interbit is extraordinarily lightweight, allows fine-grained access control to keep data private and restricted to particular nodes, and enables scalability through indefinitely extendable blockchain networks. Interbit empowers organizations across industries to introduce blockchain technology to their businesses. By building core business functions on Interbit, organizations minimize workflows, integration issues, en route to future-readying their businesses.

Libra Enterprise is the connective tissue enabling business professionals to utilize blockchain tech. Libra’s platform consists of three solution layers: integration, interaction, and interface, which solve the problems of system compatibility, information consumption, and user comfort. Together these complementary solutions enable an end-to-end system. Depending on client use case, each solution can operate independently.

Monax is the company behind eris, the first application platform built from the ground up to provide a logical base for developers and devOps to build, test, and run ecosystem applications. It is designed to support multiple blockchain nodes connected to multiple blockchain networks with different smart contract interpreters all seamlessly connected to other microservices necessary to build, test, and run the ecosystem application such as key management systems and distributed data lakes.Monax sells legally compliant smart contract-based SDKs to accelerate businesses’ time to market with sophisticated ecosystem applications.

Nuco offers enterprise-grade blockchain infrastructure – a modular architecture built and designed with security, performance, and scalability as priority features. Nuco enables users to deploy a network with the ideal components for any specific use case and industry requirement.

Openchain is an open-source distributed ledger technology. It is suited for organizations wishing to issue and manage digital assets in a robust, secure and scalable way.

OTCXN offers enterprise-class, high-performance Blockchain fabric to support a wide variety of use cases for global firms building custom applications. OTC Exchange Network’s (OTCXN) total end-to-end solution includes a suite of real-time services, such as collateral management, pre-trade credit checks, liquidation risk management, counterparty risk and liquidity management, instantaneous clearing and settlement, and post-trade messaging including netting based on inbound messages for trades done away from the network.

PeerNova has developed a technology platform that provides immutability and data integrity for use in financial services applications, such as compliance and audit. Inspired by blockchain, its patent-pending technology enables the use of immutable ledgers and databases in real-time. Traditional applications of blockchains involve decentralized ledgers, distributed consensus protocols, and anonymous users. PeerNova’s solution is built for commercial usage by enabling the same type of data integrity and immutability for financial ledgers without needing to decentralize the ledger or allowing anonymous users to participate.

SolidX provides blockchain-based software solutions relating to the indelible recording of records, transfer of assets, and identity. In 2016, SolidX announced the launch of Vida, the world’s first full-stack identity solution using blockchain technology. Vida provides enterprises with robust identity management capabilities without the need to hold personal identifying information. Vida is the first service of its kind to provide one identity across numerous applications, streamlining permissioned access to data and services without shared-secret based access mechanisms (e.g., usernames and passwords, government ID numbers, etc.).

Symbiont is a smart contracts platform for institutional applications of distributed ledger technology. The company has developed a platform that allows financial market participants to create programmable versions of traditional securities that take the form of Smart Securities: self-executing digital contracts that are stored in a distributed ledger. The platform allows users to issue, manage, locate, and trade Smart Securities efficiently in a single, global, peer-to-peer financial network.

TradeBlock is a provider of institutional trading tools for digital currencies.

Tymlez delivers blockchain-based enterprise solutions. The company’s smart enterprise blockchain platform enables business owners to easily adopt disruptive technologies in their existing environment or use the software to become a disruptor themselves. Tymlez does it in a variety of fields, such as but not limited to: (Micro) payments; Loyalty systems; Peer2Peer-transactions; IoT and blockchain; Digital Asset Management; Digital Rights Management.

XNotes Alliance is a technology company and member organization that provides business-driven, currency agnostic and energy-efficient enterprise class blockchain-based solutions. The company empowers organizations to run more efficiently and more securely while reducing costs.

First appeared at LTP

Photo credit:http://www.moniquemorrow.com

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