FinAi Podcast

With some $350 billion in U.S. tax refunds given each year, three fintechs have teamed up for Tax Refund Unlock, a new service that offers consumers ongoing, incremental access to the money they would normally receive as a single payment after filing their annual tax returns. 

The partnership includes Salt Lake City-based Atomic, a provider of application programming interface (API) payroll integration whose direct deposits payroll offering covers about 75% of the U.S. workforce; Chicago-based financial services platform Klover; and San Francisco-based startup Column Tax, which provides personal income tax software.   

Tax Refund Unlock builds on an existing relationship between Atomic and Klover that allows users of the financial platform to access their incoming paychecks early. With Column Tax's income tax capabilities folded in, users will be able to complete a short tax questionnaire and link to their payroll data. The new solution projects users' tax refund total, which then becomes available to Klover users incrementally throughout the year, with an amount added to each paycheck. Members of Klover+, a premium service that costs $2.50 per month, will have access to the service at no additional charge. 

In this episode of "The Buzz" podcast, Lindsay Davis, head of markets at Atomic, tells Bank Automation News that the new service targets consumers who might typically access high-cost payday loans and are at risk of bank overdrafts. 

"People who've been working hourly jobs were severely hit" during the pandemic, Davis says, "and a lot of bills are about to come due." She notes that programs put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic such as rent or student loan forgiveness are expiring. 

Atomic was founded in 2019 and in October raised $22 million in a series A funding round, bringing its total to $38.6 million in funding. Klover was also founded in 2019 and has raised a total of $68 million in three funding rounds, according to Crunchbase, while Column Tax, founded in 2021, this month raised $5.1 million in a seed funding round, which it said it will use to expand Tax Refund Unlock adoption. 

As interest and investment in cryptocurrency spikes this year, banks and financial institutions (FIs) must decide whether and how to become involved, or potentially lose revenue and customers if they opt out. 

This is the message from Lawrence Pruss, senior vice president at Memphis, Tenn.-based Strategic Resource Management (SRM) in this week's episode of "The Buzz" podcast. SRM is a consulting firm for FIs and others in areas such as digital transformation, operational efficiency and payment technology. 

Banks and FIs can boost their revenue by offering crypto trading and custody services, among other services,  Pruss tells Bank Automation News. "The opportunity isn't just defending their deposits, but there's opportunities to drive non-interest income in terms of trading revenue," he says.   

There is also potential to attract new customers and increase customer engagement, Pruss notes, as well as help to retain existing clients. "That's an opportunity — when you've got those eyeballs on your mobile banking app — to be able to offer across all other sorts of products and services, maybe even education" on cryptocurrency, he tells BAN, which is still lacking in many cases. 

Banks and FIs have been contacting SRM regarding its new service, Cryptocurrency and Blockchain for Financial Services, which advises on the use cases of crypto and blockchain technology and how to set them up, to be sure they're not written out of the script, Pruss says. Decentralized finance, which has sprung out of cryptocurrency and its underpinning blockchain technology, connects lenders and borrowers while facilitating other financial transactions, all without the involvement of a bank. 

"We've got some real concern from our clients in terms of being disintermediated," Pruss says. "All of a sudden, you realize it's a very competitive environment."

Weekly Wrap discussion on how Temenos is accelerating innovation 

Core and digital banking provider boosts developer access, highlights use cases

In this week's "Weekly Wrap" podcast, the Bank Automation News team discusses some of the latest from core and digital banking solutions provider Temenos gleaned from its SCALE developer conference, where the company showcased how it is fostering innovation and bringing new fintech ideas to market faster. 

In a similar vein, the team addresses the newly available Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services and how MS partners are integrating their solutions — including building on top of Microsoft cloud computing power and software to enhance and expand their offerings. Finally, BAN explores some of the latest financial crime trends in markets and the broader financial services ecosystem, as seen by global market solutions provider Nasdaq. 

Find a discussion of these topics and more in today's episode of the "Weekly Wrap" with BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editor Aaron Marsh for the week ended Nov. 19, 2021.

This week, the Bank Automation News team discusses what banks are doing to make it possible for customers to invest in cryptocurrency and how financial institutions can leverage blockchain beyond crypto. 

The BAN team also drills down on the growing popularity of buy now, pay later solutions in Mexico, where BNPL is being marketed as a tool to help the underserved rather than a credit card replacement. Finally, BAN looks at how BMO’s cloud-first strategy is paying off. 

Find a discussion of these topics and more in today’s episode of the Weekly Wrap with JJ Hornblass, BAN Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and Associate Editor Aaron Marsh for the week ended Nov. 11, 2021.

The automation company WorkFusion, which offers a packaged solution to financial institutions and counts the $1.7 trillion Deutsche Bank and the $4.1 billion Carter Bank & Trust among its customers, will focus on shifting its own premise solution to the cloud. 

In this week’s episode of The Buzz, WorkFusion’s new CEO, Adam Famularo, discusses how the company is building out a software-as-a-service delivery model and offering financial services a cloud-based option, in addition to the managed services offering for banks to run behind their firewall. 

“We're investing a lot in cloud, that's going to be kind of, of course, our next evolution for our customers,” Famularo told Bank Automation News. “We already today can deliver and manage services, we already today can help them install in their own local cloud.” 

The New York-based WorkFusion was founded in 2011 and has raised   $341.3 million in funding over seven rounds. Their latest funding was raised on March9 from a Series F round totaling $220 million. 

Famularo came to the company from erwin, which specializes in data modeling and data governance. In this podcast, Famularo said how data flows is key to understanding the flow of work processes, which in turn is essential for automation. 

“Understanding your data is understanding the business processes that supported the data,” Famularo said. 

Artificial intelligence can pick up on patterns humans would ignore — patterns that can indicate crime in cross border payments, for instance. 

In this week’s episode of the Buzz, Yaron Hazan, vice president of regulatory affairs for cybercrime and big data analytics vendor ThetaRay, breaks down for Bank Automation News how the tool’s machine learning and AI discovered an unusual pattern in cross-border payments processed by a bank. The transactions were labeled as medical tourism but hid a much darker secret - child trafficking.  

Twenty-seven percent of human trafficking victims are children, according to the United Nations. By leveraging machine learning and AI technologies, financial institutions can help stop this and other horrific crime rings that he struggled to stop during his time in the Israeli military and law enforcement, Hazan says.   

“After 25 years of career of chasing bad guys, feeling that I'm one step ahead of them is a very good feeling,” Hazan says. “In terms of the industry, and even humanity, when we think about child trafficking, terrorist funding, and all these worst phenomena that we think that are impossible to manage to detect to fight against, I say it’s possible.”

The latest trend in digital banking customer experience is adding on-screen voice, which allows customers to switch from chat or other self-serve experiences to speaking with a person within a mobile app or digital banking site. 

In this week’s episode of “The Buzz” podcast, Dan Michaeli, CEO and co-founder of customer service platform Glia, tells Bank Automation News that on-screen voice allows customers to stay within the banking app, webpage or application, and transition to a customer service representative without starting from scratch.  

“Instead of displaying that number and having the customer member dial that phone number and leave the digital banking experience, leave the loan application, leave mobile banking and start from scratch in a telephony centric experience, they can click a button that says ‘talk to us now,’” Michaeli said. “The agent … can see in real time what the customer is doing, and then they can jump in and collaborate with the customer to guide them to resolution.” 

The New York-based Glia, which manages voice, video and browsing solutions and supports several chatbots, in September announced a partnership with financial services-focused chatbot vendor Kasisto. 

In this podcast, Michaeli and BAN discuss the “holy grail” of digital customer service and the mistake most financial institutions make, when it comes to digital customer service.