Cards International attended Finovate Europe on 7 February and some noteworthy start-ups and other edgy companies paraded their solutions they believe will change the world cards and payments. We take a look at who is hot and whom you should look out for in 2012.
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miiCard
Cards International has already written about miiCard a few months ago, having identified it up as a start-up the industry should watch out for.
If you do not already know, miiCard aims to build online passports, or, in their own words, an internet identity. This should come in handy, given the rapidly increasing urgency to provide efficient anti-money laundering (AML) solutions and comply Know Your Customer (KYC) standards.
miiCards solution complies with AML and KYC standard requirements, which James Varga, CEO of miiCard says allows a merchant or another institution to identify customers with a level of assurance that they are who they say they are. This process reduces operational costs, yet increases conversions, because it eliminates processing fees for opening a current account, for instance, or does not require the customer to identity themselves physically.
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By GlobalDatamiiCard uses Yodlees global account aggregation for its service and each point of the identity authentication process is checked daily for accuracy and suitability.
At Finovate, Varga announced that miiCard had expanded its distribution network to cover India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and North America.
Next in line may well be Russia, Varga told Cards International. He revealed that a Russian bank is kicking off a pilot project using miiCard soon, although he refrained from saying which banks and when.
Ixaris
Ixaris is an electronic payments company, and unveiled its Opn CardWorks product at Finovate. It has been around since 2003 and has acquired over 1m registered users to date, issuing millions of virtual and plastic cards worldwide. As of end-2010, its transaction volume totalled $200m and it generated revenues of $13.6m equal to an 85% increase on the year ago.
Its application enables businesses to set up a personalised prepaid card programme and embed it into their own online and mobile payment services.
Ixaris said its solution, Opn Cardworks, is the only service that allows customers to rapidly create a fully customisable prepaid card programme, be it virtual or plastic, out of the box.
Ixaris focuses on open-loop prepaid card programmes that are compatible with both Visa and MasterCard. In 2003, it introduced Visas first virtual prepaid card.
Opn Cardworks will provide all of the infrastructure and supporting services, including all the necessary banking partners as well as a risk and compliance platform to ensure customers meet obligations such as know your customer (KYC) checks.
John Chaplin, president of Ixaris, told Cards International: We manage the risk on an integrated basis. We do the risk management across the platform.
Most financial institution manage the risk on domestic ACH payments in one place and card payments in another. What we do is, we manage the risk across the whole programme.
So I would argue that what we do is a lot less risky than doing it all individually.
The UK-based company said its solution will offer clients an effective and faster-to-market alternative to the more mainstream card services available today.
CardWorks comes with an application programme interface (API) which supports integration into websites and mobile apps while allowing clients to embed the card programme in their own applications.
The solution also allows clients to monitor activity on cards and advise customers of their balance in real-time along with their transactional history.
ValidSoft
Granted, ValidSoft has been around since 2003, so it really is no newcomer. What is interesting about this company is its product VALid, a voice biometric-based authentication solution for mobile banking. It was launched in late 2011, and at Finovate, ValidSoft demonstrated why the product is relevant now.
VALid uses out-of-band, real-time voice based solutions to identify and validate transactions. Emmanuelle Filsjean, global head of marketing, told Cards International that ValidSoft focuses on two key features:
One aspect is that mobile phones provide multiple layers to banking, each of which needs to be validated. ValidSoft focuses on four factors for payments security, including the mobile phone (who does it belong to), a password, who the user is (voice biometrics) and where the user is or is not.
The other key aspect is out-of-band authentication. This means two separate networks work together to authenticate a user and/or transaction.
The company describes its product as such: Our product as used for Online Banking, with all the same visible and invisible protection, including Pseudo Device Theft, is configured specifically for mobile banking use. This means no keying of OTPs into the phone, and even a completely hands-free model using speech recognition if required. Biometric voice verification can also be layered for even greater security. Our product combines usability, portability, and security that will drive the adoption of M-banking."
Voice biometrics are a growing area in banking solutions and Intelligent Environments predicts that there will be an explosion of voice recognition apps and rapid uptake of voice command services for everyday tasks such as banking in the next two years.
Such services could replace Card Not Present authentication methods and change the way the cards industry conducts is business.
Etronika
If you go on Etronikas website, the first thing you are presented with is the statement We make invisible sophisticated business products.
The Lithuania-based IT company has been around for the past ten year and focuses on developing electronic banking, digital identity, and smart retailing solutions. It is little known outside the Baltics, but its key partners include DNB bank and Omintel, which is part of the TeliaSonera Group. At Finovate, it demonstrated its Banktron product, which it will launch during the second quarter of the year.
Banktron is a financial application that recognises your face, congratulates you, analyses your voice to identify you and navigates you into online banking sort of like an avatar. It is a Microsoft Kinect-based online banking application with which the user can choose the most convenient authentication method, whether that is voice, using a motion-activated userinterface or the good old keyboard.
Just like in the case of ValidSoft, this should be a company to keep in mind, especially given that the Baltics states have had incredible growth rates in terms of GDP
Cardlytics
Cardlytics specialises in transaction-driven marketing solutions. It was set up in 2008 and launched its advertising programme in October last year. Through the merchant-facing portal, banks can market loyalty solutions to their customers based on their individual purchasing history. The platform is funded by merchants who sign up to the programme, making Cardlytics the middle man between the retailer, bank and customer. The software tracks a customers spending attitude and behaviour, taking into account the amount spent, where it was spent and when and how often. The product has caught the attention of investors in Silicon Valley, as well as Boston, raising more than $60m in venture capital. It currently reaches 70m households in the US.
Kabbage
Most people are not fond of cabbage, but this company promises to be more to your liking. It was founded in 2009 and at Finovate, unveiled Kabbage ScoreKard. The ScoreKard targets online merchants who can get an overview of how their business is doing on a dashboard. They can also generate a sort of credit score based on how healthy their store is and, according to the result, can ask for an advance payment. Kabbage said that over the next twelve months, it is looking to introduce other related products targeting SMEs.
As e-commerce continues to grow and more and more merchants are migrating, or expanding, into the virtual world, Kabbage could become both a competitor for SME-shy banks, or a suitable partner via which banks can attract growing SMEs.
