Fintech, Finance, Technology, Banking Highlights – 14 August 2018
Q2 Holdings Enters Agreement to Acquire Cloud Lending
Q2 Holdings, a provider of secure, experience-driven digital banking solutions for community-focused financial institutions, has announced an agreement to acquire San Mateo, California-based Cloud Lending, a privately-held SaaS company that provides an integrated end-to-end lending and leasing platform.
Through their platform, Cloud Lending helps lenders close more loans, generate more revenue and provide a better experience to borrowers throughout the loan process.
“By acquiring Cloud Lending, we will be able to help our community and regional financial institutions more effectively manage and grow their lending portfolios—their fundamental income-generating activity,” said Matt Flake, CEO of Q2. “There’s a substantial market opportunity for digital lending, and the addition of Cloud Lending’s talented team and next-generation technology solutions will help Q2 expand our footprint in existing markets, as well as enter new ones.”
As a part of Q2 Holdings, Inc., Cloud Lending will benefit from the scale, infrastructure and resources of its larger parent company.
“The inspiration for Cloud Lending came from our first-hand experience with the impact credit can make in the life of an individual or business,” said Snehal Fulzele, CEO of Cloud Lending, Inc. “This partnership means more lenders will provide greater access to credit for more people and businesses across the globe. Cloud Lending’s team members are excited to partner with Q2 and to continue delivering on our proven track record of innovation in digital lending and leasing.”
Mines Raises $13M to Escalate the Micro-lending Battle with Paylater and Others
Mines, a fintech startup re-inventing credit in emerging markets, has closed a Series A round of $13M led by The Rise Fund, a global fund managed by TPG Growth.
Also participating are Velocity Capital, Western Technology Investments, First Ally Capital, X/Seed Capital, NYCA Partners, Persistent Capital, Singularity Investments, Trans Sahara Investments, and the Bank of Industry. Mines plans to use its investment for talent acquisition, continued growth in Africa, and expansion to South America and South-East Asia.
Mines provides a Credit-as-a-Service digital platform that enables institutions in emerging markets to offer credit products to their customers; no smartphone is required. Leveraging their own data sets, domestic institutions are able to serve loans to customers ignored by available credit systems and open up entirely new revenue opportunities.
“There are more than 3 billion adults globally without access to credit. Our vision is that every one of them will have instant access to credit in the next 10 years.” explains Ekechi Nwokah, Mines CEO. “We believe the best way to realize this vision is to partner with banks, retailers and mobile operators and power digital credit products tailored to their markets so they can create the customers of tomorrow, today.”
Raiz Chooses Versive’s AI-powered Cybersecurity Solution to Strengthen Financial Security and Compliance
Versive, Inc., an award-winning AI-based cybersecurity company, today announced that Raiz Invest Limited (Raiz), a mobile first micro-investment platform based in Australia, is using the Versive Security Engine (VSE) to help protect sensitive customer data and comply with financial regulations.
Raiz provides customers an easy way to regularly invest either small or large amounts in one of six portfolios of varying risk levels. The company has 164,000 active customers in Australia, and approximately $200 million in funds under management, growing at over 20 percent each quarter.
As a fast-growing financial company, Raiz wanted to increase its level of security. The company already offers bank-level security to consumers through the app to ensure customer data is held securely. In addition, Raiz recently listed on the Australian Stock Exchange and VSE is a critical component of their compliance with financial regulations. Partnering with Versive was a key step in achieving these goals.
The Versive Security Engine is built on a proprietary machine-learning platform that enables it to identify subtle patterns across massive volumes of data. VSE automatically exposes the activities that all adversaries must engage in to accomplish their mission: internal reconnaissance, collection and exfiltration. This strategic framework significantly reduces false positives so that VSE delivers only a handful of high-fidelity ThreatCases per week so that Raiz’s cybersecurity team can focus on defeating the most serious threats before damage is done.