As part of the Intersekt FinTech festival, Next Money ran the Melbourne semi-final of their 2018 Future FinTech pitch competition.
Ten startups presented, in the following order, in front of a panel of judges representing different parts of the Melbourne startup ecosystem:
Describing itself as “the future of finance”, and quoting the trendy mantra of “Data is the new oil”, BASIQ is an API marketplace for financial data. Designed to counter-balance “the Faustian pact” of big data, social media and search, and to compensate for the information asymmetry of bank-owned data, BASIQ espouses open banking, even though it is backed by two bank-related VC funds (NAB Ventures & Reinventure – see last week’s blog). With a focus on the needs of app developers, the commercial model is based on a licensing fee per user per transaction. Leveraging the AWS security layer (presumably to maintain privacy and data integrity), the pitch also mentioned “screen scraping” – so it wasn’t clear to me whether the data is only coming from publicly available sources? Currently, the platform only connects to financial institutions in Australia and New Zealand.
A participant in the FF17 Semi-Final earlier this year, Breezedocs is a robotic document processing solution. In short, it can read/scan, sort and extract relevant data from standard documents that need to be presented by customers in support of a loan application. Operating via an API, it can work with multiple document types and multiple formats: data can be structured, semi-structured, or even unstructured. The benefits for lenders and brokers are reduced loan approval times and increased conversion, with much
better CX for the loan applicant as well. The goal is to help the standard loan origination process to go paperless, and could be extended to life insurance, income protection insurance, and immigration and visa applications.
Doshii ensures that apps and POS solutions can connect to one another, via a common POS API platform. Apparently, there are 130 different POS providers in Australia, and many merchants use multiple services. Now backed by Reinventure, Doshii has a focus on the hospitality sector. The biggest challenge is physically connecting a POS to the API, so Doshii has developed a SDK. However, so far, only five of the 130 providers have signed up.
I hope I got this right, but egenda appears to be the new product name for the WordFlow solution for board agendas and meetings. Offering an “affordable web-based solution for every meeting”, the product is currently being trialed by a number of universities. The platform can convert PDF/word files into HTML, transforming and enriching them into a single secure website.
The panel asked how egenda compares to say, Google productivity suite or IntelligenceBank. A key aspect seems to be that egenda is platform agnostic – so it doesn’t matter the source of the document (or where it needs to be published to?). A key challenge in managing board papers is that it’s like herding cats – so a single but highly functional repository would sound attractive?
This US-based app is looking to launch in Australia. A phone-based financial decision app linked to a user’s bank account, it is designed to help with personalised goal-setting, budgeting and financial engagement. Asked whether it can support long-term goals, the pitch referred to data that suggests an increasing number of people are effectively living from pay-day to pay-day, and have no capacity to meet even the smallest of unexpected bills. Having attracted a grant from the Queensland government, they are currently experimenting with different customer acquisition models, but they hope to prove that with daily engagement, it is possible to build a long-term relationship.
With a tag line of “privacy protection power”, ID Exchange addresses a key issue of the “consent economy” – how to control who has access to your personal data, and how much, and for what purpose. With the whole notion of “trust” being challenged by decentralised and trustless solutions such as Blockchain applications; the plethora of data connections with the growth of IoT; and the regulatory framework around KYC, AML, CTF, data protection and privacy, there is a need for harmonised solutions. Under an “OptOut/OptIn” solution (from the website, it looks like this is a partnership with digi.me?), the idea is that users take more responsibility for managing their own data. ID Exchange offers a $20 subscription service – but unfortunately, based on the pitch, it was not clear what does this actually meant or included.
This is a platform for analysing credit and charge card transactions, to identify anomalies and reduce disputed charges. Currently with about 7.5% market penetration (based on merchant volumes?), it can help with fraud checks and spend analysis, by combining AI, crowd-sourcing and data science. But from the pitch, it wasn’t clear where the data is coming from. Also, a key part of the problem might be the data mismatch between card acquirers (merchant services) and card issuers (banks and financial institutions). Given that the growth in credit card fraud is coming from online shopping and CNP (card not present) purchases, it would seem that a better solution is to tighten procedures around these transactions?
Plenty describes itself as a “financial GPS”, and is designed to address the issue of poor financial awareness. Only 20% of people see a financial planner, but now with robo-advice tools, even personalised advice can be scalable. Essentially a self-directed financial planning tool, it is free for customers to create a basic financial plan and when searching for a mortgages. For a subscription fee, customers can begin to access other products and advisors, which generates commission-based fees to Plenty.
Another of these FinTechs to have featured in this blog before, as well as competing at FF17, Proviso makes “financial data frictionless”, in particular the loan application process. With 250,000 users per month, and 150 financial institutions signed up, their success can be ascribed to the way they standardise the data and the UX. Plus, they can access more data, from more sources, quicker. And then there are the analytics they can offer their institutional clients. In the future, there will be open banking APIs, plus insights, such as the categorisation of transaction types, affordability analysis, and decision-metrics.
This is a new platform that supports SME lending based on receivables, that also reduces the effort for SMEs seeking this form of financing. Given that cashflow issues are inextricably linked to insolvency risk, Trade Ledger has developed a unique credit assessment method, and is product-type agnostic. It also aims to offer automated solutions, with an emphasis on the digital UX of products, and use machine learning to generate a predictive probability of default (PPD). Currently the biggest challenge is in the multiple variations of bank credit and lending processes and models that need to be integrated or streamlined.
Of the ten pitches on view, I have to say that none really had a “wow” factor (although if Trade Ledger can scale their PPD model, and if ID Exchange spent a bit more time on defining their key message, both could be huge products). They were mostly worthy ideas, but still defined by current banking and finance procedures. Maybe these platforms need to do more with the transactional and customer data they generate or process, to uncover more opportunities. Or think about what they could do to disrupt adjacent markets? Anyway, on the night, Proviso proved the favourite with the judges.
Next week: Conclusions from the Intersekt Festival
Content in Context 