FinovateEurope’s Alumni Alley: Backbase Rebrands, Boku Booms, and SecureKey Finds Alternative in Acquisition

This week we started our celebration of FinovateEurope’s earliest alums. In honor of FinovateEurope’s Alumni Alley Showcase – a brand new function designed to focus on the improvements of FinovateEurope alums – we’re highlighting the businesses that launched their improvements to Finovate’s European viewers greater than a decade in the past – and are nonetheless among the many prime innovators in fintech at this time.

Go to our FinovateEurope Alumni Alley Showcase hub to be taught extra about this particular alternative for FinovateEurope alums.

Based in 2003, Backbase has been demonstrating its fintech improvements on the Finovate stage for greater than a decade. Making its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in 2011, the corporate made its most up-to-date on-stage look at FinovateFall in 2021, demoing the Backbase Engagement Banking Platform. In that ten years, the Amsterdam-based firm was awarded Better of Present on 4 events, together with three from the corporate’s demos at our conferences in London.

From its origins as a Financial institution 2.0 innovator, serving to banks reap the benefits of the rising shopper curiosity in on-line and cellular banking, to its present incarnation as an Engagement Banking specialist, Backbase has demonstrated a constant mission of enabling FIs to show rising applied sciences into alternatives for higher customer support and engagement. The corporate’s official rebrand this fall solely underscores a lot of what Backbase has been about all alongside.

“Our confirmed progress mannequin has introduced us to the place we’re at this time and it’s time to evolve our branding to mirror that progress,” Backbase founder and CEO Jouk Pleiter stated. “Backbase is the innovation companion enabling conventional banks and credit score unions to take the leap into the platform period, and we’re simply getting began.”

Most lately, Backbase introduced an expanded relationship with Boston, Massachusetts-based Japanese Financial institution ($22 billion in belongings). The establishment deployed Backbase-as-a-Service (BaaS) and Backbase’s Engagement Banking Platform to allow it to supply new digital banking options.

When Finovate audiences first met Boku at FinovateEurope 2011, the San Francisco-based firm had 60 workers and $40 million in fairness funding. At the moment, the direct cellular funds firm is a publicly traded entity with greater than 300 workers and a market capitalization of greater than $390 million. Boku processes greater than 9 billion in funds yearly, and consists of a number of the largest digital manufacturers – from Google and Spotify to Netflix and Microsoft – as clients of what it payments as the biggest cellular funds community on this planet.

Boku was among the many fintechs to acknowledge early on the potential cellular funds needed to carry monetary providers to un- and underbanked customers that owned cell phones, however didn’t personal bank cards or conventional financial institution accounts that will allow them to take part in on-line commerce. The corporate launched cellular pockets funds within the Philippines in 2012, introduced cellular funds to Sony’s PlayStation Retailer in 2014 and, in 2020, acquired the Estonia-based service billing firm Fortumo for $41 million.

This fall, Boku introduced that it’ll provide Amazon.com with its digital pockets and different native cost strategies as a part of a brand new, multi-year settlement. Boku CEO Jon Prideaux stated that the partnership helped reinforce the corporate’s “strategic transfer” into digital pockets funds.

Greater than ten years after SecureKey gained Better of Present at FinovateEurope 2011 for its authentication expertise that leveraged contactless playing cards to streamline the net checkout course of, the Toronto, Ontario-based firm introduced that it had agreed to be acquired by NortonLifeLock’s digital safety and privateness agency, Avast.

“SecureKey’s imaginative and prescient has been to revolutionize the best way customers and organizations strategy identification and the sharing of private data within the digital age,” SecureKey CEO Greg Wolfond stated when the acquisition was introduced this spring. “By working intently with governments, monetary establishments, and companies, we’ve a longtime monitor file of trusted and mature identification networks that present customers with the safe digital capabilities they deserve.”

SecureKey’s digital identification expertise allows greater than 200 million safe transactions a 12 months internationally. Previous to the acquisition, SecureKey additionally had made main inroads in serving to organizations and establishments, together with governments, embrace trendy authentication applied sciences. The corporate’s Verified.Me distributed digital identification verification community and Authorities Signal-In by Verified.Me present safe and handy login choices to a whole lot of presidency providers and purposes on-line. Each authentication providers are offered by Interac underneath an unique Canadian licensing settlement.

Photograph by Chris Panas