AimBrain’s vision of the future is that any device you interact with will know that it’s actually you, without the need to remember passwords. Founded in Edinburgh by a team of ex-Toshiba, Google, ARM, European Space Agency and CERN engineers, its software tracks and learns how a person interacts with mobile devices, from typing speed to how hard they press or where they swipe. This lets banks and payment processors know if their users really are who they say they are.

Algomi created a bond information network that enables all market participants to securely and intelligently harness data to make valuable financial trading connections. Its proprietary product, Honeycomb, is a network that allows buyside firms to find out which dealers are best placed to find matches for their bond orders. In March 2017 Algomi announced a $10M strategic investment from Euronext which will enable corporate bond traders to access Algomi's innovated bond information network on a global basis.

Barzahlen makes online shopping, playing or travel booking possible for cash users. Germany’s largest private cash-payment infrastructure, with over 9000 stores, has a vision to replace the classic bank branch and has partnered with German, Number26 to provide customers with a retail-based branch network. Barzahlen is expanding to other industries and sectors and is now actively involved in insurance and telecommunication. By the end of 2015, Barzahlen expanded the retail partner network network by adding about 3000 REWE stores.

BehavioSec transforms behaviour into a transparent additional layer of security by monitoring, in real-time, the way users interact with their devices. BehavioSec’s technology recognises if a conflicting user is operating a device by monitoring the environment, rhythms, and interaction patterns that are unique to each user. The solution is designed to enhance security without impacting the user experience. With offices in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, BehavioSec is currently deployed across Northern Europe retail banks protecting over 1,5 billion transactions per year.

In January 2018, BehavioSec raised $17.5M in a Series B funding in an investment round led by Trident Capital Cybersecurity, whose Managing Directors, J. Alberto Yépez and Ken Gonzalez, will join BehavioSec’s board of directors. The round also saw contributions from ABN AMRO and Cisco Investments, in addition to returning investors Conor Venture Partners and Octopus Ventures. Behaviosec will use the investment to expand global operations and relocate corporate HQ to the US.

Behavox has good reason to look forward to 2016. The two-year-old business, whose behavioural analysis monitors changes to the way a trader communicates, signed up the most technologically committed hedge fund in the market as a client in 2015 and is being courted by investment banks and VCs alike. Currently funded by friends and family, the London business also expanded its team from 9 to 14 and is planning new offices in Singapore and New York in 2016.

Customers of Bima typically live on less than $10 a day and fewer than half have bank accounts. The Swedish Microfinance pioneer has developed a bespoke portfolio of over 40 microinsurance & mobile health products which it distributes in emerging markets such as Ghana for as little as 35 cents a month using mobile technology and an agent network. Its expansion across emerging markets in Africa, Asia and Latin America has served over 20 million customers in just five years and it currently attracts 500k new customers per month.

Bitnet is the first Bitcoin payment processor designed for both merchants and PSPs. Founded in Belfast by a highly experienced team, and with offices in the US, Bitnet has already partnered with several payment processors and large e-commerce websites, including Zooz, Limonetik, and Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten. In 2015 it forged its largest partnership yet with PAY.ON, enabling Bitcoin acceptance for over a hundred PSPs globally.
Partners say: “Merchants benefit from a digital payment method that expands their business to a new customer base, generating a new revenue stream without significant implementation costs.”

Founded in 2011, the ‘world’s most popular Bitcoin wallet ‘now has 6 million users, $30.5m funding from investors such as Lightspeed and the title ‘London Scale-up of the Year’. In 2015 the first Bitcoin company to hit 5 million users, doubled the number of transactions processing through its wallets and APIs, opened new offices in London, New York & Luxembourg and was named one of ‘the Best Companies in the World to Work for’.

Bought By Many uses the power of the collective – ‘crowdbuying’ – to negotiate better deals from insurance companies for large groups of customers with niche needs. As well as collecting a slew of innovation awards, the social insurance solution now has over 143,000 members over 277 groups, and saves members an average of 18.6%.

Having someone’s mobile, getting hold of their pin and biometric fingerprint is still not enough to impersonate someone, says Callsign. The platform’s military-grade security, with over 50 analytics captured and processed in real-time, delivers a powerf.ul cyber intelligence capability that provides a clear view of which user, at which location and on what device, is performing a given transaction

Cognia’s secure cloud-compliance solutions help enterprise customers in verticals such as finance, energy, healthcare and retail to capture, record, control, analyse communications and protect payment-card data. Backed by investors that include Vodafone and Swisscom, it was the first company to develop enterprise-grade mobile recording solutions and achieve PCI DSS Level 1 accreditation globally on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform.

Contego believes that embracing RegTech solutions can have a transformative positive effect on business and should be seen as a a competitive advantage. The company helps financial services, property and FinTech firms to improve and automate Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) checks and processes. Its single risk-scoring platform can handle complex, multi-entity fraud detection and compliance checks in real time, all delivered via a single API, which expedites and improves customer onboarding. With partnerships including IBM, Amazon Web Services, and C6 Group, Contego has invested heavily in recent months to strengthen its international data sets. In December 2016, the RegTech acquired Working Status Ltd, the comprehensive software solution for Right-to-Work compliance and Human Resources management.

Credit Benchmark delivers greater visibility into credit risk via an entirely new source of wholesale credit risk data. Using an innovative crowd-sourced approach, the company publishes monthly consensus credit indicators on Sovereigns, Financial Institutions, Corporates and SMEs by aggregating and anonymizing the internal credit risk assessments of the world’s leading banks. Practitioners in the capital markets benefit from greater transparency with unique credit indicators generated from actual risk takers in the marketplace, as well as access to otherwise unrated entities, including a large number of operating subsidiary companies.

Digital Shadows has come a long way since Accenture Innovation Lab London in 2011, announcing a $26M Series C funding round in September 2017. Its flagship product, SearchLight, is a continuous real-time scan of more than 100 million data sources online and on the deep and dark web — cross referencing customer specific data with the monitored sources to flag up instances where data might have inadvertently been posted online, for instance, or where a data breach or other unwanted disclosure might be occurring. The service also monitors any threat-related chatter about the company, such as potential hackers discussing specific attack vectors.

In May 2018, Digital Shadows announced its new "Shadow Search" capability, available as part of its flagship, award-winning SearchLight service.Shadow Search enables instant access to Digital Shadows' comprehensive collection of historical and evolving threat intelligence assets, and expert security sources, including leading security blogs and news, enabling SearchLight subscribers the ability to better manage third-party risk, investigate security incidents, monitor trends, and enrich threat hunting of client-specific indicators and threat actors jeopardising their business, brand and reputation.

Elliptic Vault is the world’s first insured Bitcoin custody service and the first Bitcoin company to receive a global standard for financial reporting. Its proprietary identity database delivers auditable proof of identity for over 10,000,000 addresses. Clients have used the platform to assess risk on more than $1bn in transactions, generate suspicious activity reports, and prevent fraudulent transactions.

Ethereum’s decentralised blockchain and digital currency Ether are becoming widely used tools for building decentralised apps. In January, R3 announced the completion of a distributed ledger experiment involving eleven of the world’s biggest banks, connected on an R3-managed private peer-to-peer distributed ledger underpinned by Ethereum technology.

Developer of a global digital ledger platform designed to track and protect valuable assets. The company's digital ledger uses blockchain technology and a distributed ledger system to reduce fraud-related instances of valuables and generate more leads or provide evidence of compliance to industry standards, enabling manufacturers and jewelry retailers to gain digital asset analysis.

The platform combines a rich forensic approach to identify and track asset provenance to provide confidence in the transparency driven across global supply chains.

The company has raised $30M to date as of July 2020. Post valuation £46.99M as of March 2018.

Dublin-based Fenergo helps institutions manage the end-to-end regulatory onboarding and entity data management processes. In 2015, it received the biggest ever investment in an Irish Tech ($75m).

In September 2017 Fenergo reported a sharp rise in turnover to end March 2017, and announced that it would create 100 new jobs in its push to achieve $100M revenue by 2019. In May 2018, Fenergo announced a strategic partnership with Delta Capita, the international business and technology consulting and managed service provider. This will provide the financial industry with new managed service solutions for solving client onboarding, regulatory compliance, and entity data management challenges.

With a name derived from the Latin word for trust, Fidor has been re-imagining banking since 2009. In Germany, the online bank has around 100,000 clients and more than 300,000 community members who actively participate in the bank’s decision-making processes – a strategy that underpins Fidor’s innovative platform. In September 2015, Celent’s “Model Bank of the Year” launched in the UK. It also announced a current account that is free to open and run and made a contactless debit card available for the first time in 2016. Fidor's online platform includes virtual currencies trading, social media banking, Facebook and Twitter payments. Available initially in Germany, Fidor has expanded into the US, UK and Russia. 2014 also saw the company integrate with the Ripple payment network (Ripple is the open-source payments protocol for free and instant exchange of any form of money or value).

Five Degrees has developed a next generation core banking software platform designed for existing banks as well as new ones. Five Degrees provide a fully automated banking services hub supporting any segment, product or channel through a rich middleoffice environment, connected to any (legacy) back-office of choice. Matrix, (the company’s proprietary technology) offers an agile customer centric architecture that supports banking operations in a future proof manner, significantly lowering cost whilst enhancing agility in the banking environment. Matrix is a proven fully automated (STP) core business process management (BPM) banking solution ready for SaaS and (private) cloud setups.

FundApps' makes compliance simple for some of the world's largest financial institutions, including asset managers, hedge funds, pension funds and banks. Blending innovative technology with regulatory insight, FundApps' team of compliance experts write and maintain over 500 rules in more than 90 jurisdictions so its clients don't have to. Over $2.5T in client assets are analysed by FundApps every day. FundApps provides three services: Shareholding Disclosure, Position Limits and Investment Restrictions.

InvoiceSharing provides SMEs with a low-cost invoice accounting platform that doubles as a platform for invoice financing. The Rotterdam-based business’s Accounting Robot won the “most innovative solution for accountants 2016” at the Getwalk event in The Netherlands, voted by accountants.

iwoca is one of Europe’s fastest growing credit providers, offering short-term credit facilities of up to £100,000. Businesses sign up online, passing their trading data through integrations with high-street banks, ecommerce platforms, and more. Iwoca’s proprietary risk model allows us to make fair, fast and flexible decisions, cutting underwriting costs by 90% whilst increasing approval rates and offering a simpler customer experience. To date Iwoca has issued over £70M to businesses across the UK, Germany, Spain and Poland and is opening our “credit-as-a-service” platform to strategic partners such as Alibaba, allowing them to finance their customers directly.

Having taken three and a half years to hit $1Bn in transactions, the London-based FX management solution hit its next billion dollars in just eight months. With more than 2,000 corporate clients, 70+ employees and growth of over 200% in 2015, Kantox was also the first financial institution to integrate free and automatic SWIFT messaging into its service, allowing complete traceability of funds transferred. It also secured $11m investment in Series B funding.

Founded by veterans in the cyber industry, Kaymera delivers a highly sophisticated defence system to protect organizations, governments and individuals from all mobile security threats, while supporting freedom of use on popular smartphone models. In February 2016, it announced a $10m funding round as it continues to secure business from tier-one banks, and includes governments, global law firms and family offices among its fast-growing client base.

Knip’s mobile insurance manager bundles customers’ insurance products into one app which had seen 330k downloads in Germany and Switzerland by Oct 2015. Customers get an overview of their insurances, see how much they have to pay for each one, when they have to pay and for how long their insurance contract is valid. The Swiss start-up also secured $15.7m Series B, the largest FinTech investment in Switzerland to date. Knip builds its own backend and data science to automatically provide advice on better, cheaper and missing insurance coverage and by being a full stack broker that owns the entire insurance broker process.

The UK's leading marketplace for property finance, LendInvest turned a profit (£3.4M) for the third time in three years of trading in 2016. LendInvest spun out of Montello, an offline short-term mortgage lender, in 2013 to improve the process of getting a mortgage, and to make mortgages an accessible asset class for every investor. Today LendInvest investors have lent over £1Bn to help borrowers buy, build or renovate almost 4,000 properties making LendInvest one of the fastest-growing online lending businesses in the world. The company also has significant institutional backing, including a £17M ($25M) Series B investment from Atomico, the VC fund led by Skype founder, Niklas Zennstrom.

Mambu is the core engine powering digital first banking and lending. The lean SaaS alternative to cumbersome core banking systems, Mambu helps clients to successfully start new business ventures, transform existing operations, launch new products and expand into new markets. It provides financial institutions of all sizes with the agility to rapidly design, launch, service and scale their banking and lending portfoli. Its technology powers over 5000 loan and deposit products which serve over 3M end customers. With more thatn 180 live operations in over 40 countries, Mambu is helping financial institutions evolve and thrive in the digital age. In 2017 it received Amazon Web Services accreditation, started operations in Singapore and opened a US office in Miami.

MarketInvoice is the world's largest peer-to-peer invoice finance platform. Launched in 2011, based in London and Manchester, MarketInvoice has funded over 70,000 invoices worth £1.3B to thousands of UK businesses (at 1st June 2017). In March 2017, the business appointed Zopa founder Giles Andrews as Chairman and announced its intent tomove into the factoring business, providing larger firms with a credit line against their order pipeline. In May 2017, MarketInvoice announced an agreement with Banco BNI Europa (BNI), which will now provide £45M in funding annually on the marketplace to fund working capital for MarketInvoice customers.

Meniga is the European market leader of the white-label Personal Finance Management (PFM) and next-generation online banking solutions. Meniga helps multiple retail banks across the world create mutually beneficial digital relationships with their customers by dramatically improving their online and mobile banking user experience. In April 2017, Meniga raised $7.98M in new funding, bringing the total raised to $22.7M. In June 2017, Meniga announced that Islandsbanki, one of Iceland's leading banks, has deployed its Card Linked Offer (CLO) program to provide their digital banking customers with personalised and relevant discounts from local merchants.

Bitcoin-inspired payments platformMonetas’ advanced crypto-transaction technology uses a Blockchain secured digital notary to enable all kinds of financial and legal transactions, public or private, worldwide. In 2015, the Zug-based business partnered with the Tunisian Post Office and DigitUs to offer nationwide access to instant, secure, and affordable merchant payments and remittances. Monetas is currently working with several African partners to provide coverage to 12 markets in 2016. These partnerships will bring more than 300 million people into a future of financial inclusion.

The smartphone-first German “Bank of the Future” won 80,000 users within one year of launch and expanded into 6 new European territories. The digital bank is already defying a key FinTech trend by “re”-bundling, forming strategic partnerships with other FinTechs, including Barzahlen and TransferWise. Tie-ups with other financial services are on the cards, as Number26 looks to become an essential financial gateway across Europe.

Onfido, developer of a verification platform intended to automate the identity verification process.

Deploying AI and using Government IDs and facial biometrics to ensure that IDs are a genuine match with the users presenting them. Onfido powers over 1,500 fintech, banking and marketplace clients globally—helping them onboard more users while reducing risk.

The company raised GBP 65.19 million of Series C2 venture funding in a deal led by Salesforce Ventures and SBI Investment in April 2019.

The funds will be used to consolidate the company's core market in the USA, accelerate expansion into high-growth regions including Europe and South-East Asia, as well as advance product development.

The Personetics Predictive Analytics platform empowers banks to analyse vast amounts of customer data on-the-fly to accurately identify and anticipate individual customer needs. In January, the Tel Aviv based company with offices in London and New York announced that it had signed several seven-figure contracts with major global banks and card issuers that will extend the deployment of its personalized digital banking technology to over 15 million users.

Personetics say:The banks we are working with are seeing an impressive lift in satisfaction and engagement rates as a result of delivering personalized insights and advice to their digital customers.

Pockit provides underserved and unbanked consumers in the UK an account into which they can get salary/benefits paid or fund with cash at 28,000 locations in the UK. A card allows them to transact online and on the high street, pay bills and share money with friends/family. The London-based business now has 60,000 customers and processed £30m in 2015 – a year which saw it grow 500% on almost every metric: customers, money in, money out, balances held on account and revenue. Pockit also signed distribution partnerships with two housing associations in the UK and one of the largest recruitment companies to allow its temporary contractors (200,000) to get paid into Pockit accounts.

With $40m disbursed to date and 3887 students funded, Prodigy Finance considers itself a social enterprise. 75% of its student borrowers come from the developing world and 34% from BRIC nations alone. The majority return to their home countries after graduation, bringing back global business networks and learning to develop their home regions. So far, Prodigy Finance has funded at least 8 entrepreneurs who have created jobs in, India, Canada and the UK.

Property Partner allows anyone to invest in an individual property of their choice, with as little or as much they wish, so that they can own a share, receive rental income and access capital growth. As of March 2016, the London based business, just over 12 months old, had crowdfunded 170 properties with a total of more than £25m invested on the platform. Over £4m had been invested on its unique secondary market, which allows investors to trade property shares with other investors, and exit the market at a time and price of their choosing.

Backed by Allianz and Anthemis Group, and formed by experienced re-insurance executives, QuanTemplate emerged from Barclays Techstars’ first cohort in 2013 and secured $7.8m Series A investment September 2015. Through QuanTemplate’s secure web-based platform, underwriters and brokers can conduct all operational activities required to trade in the $4.6tn insurance market (6.7% of global GDP), while optimising their risk in real-time, all the time.

Director Says: QuanTemplate’s dedicated insurance software will assist in unlocking the enormous wealth of data that its clients hold, and transform the analytics process.

Raisan is a financial marketplace that provides customers with access to the profitable deposit rates across Europe.

The companys platform allows users the option to choose savings and investments products, ranging from overnight flexible savings to long-term deposits and other offers from dozens of institutions across Europe, enabling individuals and businesses to earn higher returns by depositing money in different countries with higher interest rates.

RateSetter is a marketplace where the rates are set by investors and borrowers. The platform hit a number of significant milestones in 2017 including collecting £1bn of repayments, investors having now earned more than £60m in total interest and more than £1.75bn of loans being delivered to borrowers across the UK. Ratesetter launched the first P2P SIPP option in 2016 and expects to launch its Innovative Finance ISA later this year. Its TrustPilot score is 9.8 from 2500+ reviews.

Ravelin examines visitor and payment data in real time, telling systems which customers to allow, prevent or flag for review. From an idea in January 2015, Ravelin has acquired 13 staff, 2 rounds of funding totalling £1.6m from leading FinTech investors, and a customer base of 12 companies, including some of the leading names in the on-demand economy. On the technical front Ravelin has built a super-scalable platform on the cloud, and developed ML models that are reducing fraud by over 50% MoM.

Revolut is digital banking application designed to help in global money transfer.

The application compares live exchange rates for multiple currencies and makes transfers directly to other's bank accounts, as well as helps its users to track and optimize their monthly expenses, buy and sell crypto currencies, enabling consumers to send, spend and exchange money instantly across a secured environment.

Previously, the company raised $250 million of Series C venture funding in a deal led by DST Global in April 2018, putting the company's pre-money valuation at $1.45 billion.

Spotcap assesses the real-time performance of businesses to grant short-term credit lines and loans to SME businesses. The company uses credit-scoring technology that directly evaluates real-life business data to provide fast and flexible financing. Headquartered in Berlin, with local offices in Madrid, Amsterdam, and Sydney, the Rocket internet-backed company raised its third funding round in 18 months when it secured $31.5m in February to further fuel international expansion.

Suade’s regulatory software allows banks to achieve continuous compliance, manage their costs and easily conduct regulatory analysis. In 2016 it launched the FIRE Data Format, an open source project to create a standard for regulatory data, sponsored by the European Commission and the ODI. The London-based RegTech pioneer keeps growing its team and increasing its revenue. Suade is bridging the regulatory gap through modern technology that allows for new methods of supervision.

Compliance teams use Sybenetix Enterprise Behavioural Analytics to analyse all trades and unusual behaviour, automatically flagging and investigating suspicious activities. In the past year, the London-based FinTech has added tier-one banks and the world’s largest hedge fund to its client base. It also secured a coveted place on Accenture’s Innovation Lab in Hong Kong. The Enterprise Behavioural Analytics platform is used by leading hedge funds, banks and asset managers to systematically improve investment performance and conduct management. Behaviour profiling algorithms and real-time decision support tools, enable investment professionals to improve success rates, capital allocation, stock selection and timing. Financial institutions use Sybenetix to measure and manage skills, counter behavioural biases and poor conduct, to transform standards of performance and reputation management.

Big Data pioneer SynerScope sees data as a means, not an end. The Netherlands-based business is winning clients in Banking, Insurance, and Cyber Security and has partnerships with Amazon, Google, SAP and Dell. SynerScope develops technology stacks designed to deal with the ever-growing variety of structured and unstructured data and has partnered with Hortonworks for Hadoop.

Panel says: One to watch as its technology and capabilities get tested by some of the larger banks and insurance service providers.

Tradle puts the user in control of their KYC process and data using the blockchain. An alumnus of StartupBootCamp’s FinTech Accelerator, Tradle launched its first app, Trust in Motion (TiM), to allow users to start a secure line of communications and go on-the-record to exchange documents, verifications, attributions and agreements. Resulting records are stored securely and irrevocably with global permission-less access and high resilience to hackers, spying and take down demands. Tradle claims to be the first solution to put the user in control of their KYC process and data, and allow banks to make that process and data easily auditable to regulators.

Traxpay moves real money in real time, delivering the rich data businesses need to get transparency and control over their transactions. It is integrated directly into existing ERP, purchasing and invoicing systems, enabling a complete end-to-end solution for B2B transactions. Traders on B2B networks using its solution can change any and every element of a payment transaction at any stage of the process, from the moment a payment instruction is initiated straight through to final settlement and clearing.

London-based Weaveworks enables dev/ops teams to create, monitor and control microservices without lock-in to one specific container platform. Weave stands the traditional infrastructure-centric model on its head. Instead of provisioning infrastructure and then fitting applications to it, Weave starts with an application and moulds the necessary infrastructure around it.

Our panel put it this way: For banks to continue to play a leading role in the increasingly mobile and smartphone centred world of their customers, containerization will be one of the principle application models they need to adopt. Weaveworks is developing technologies that will greatly assist in this and is “one to watch.”

Yoyo lets users automatically collect points and stamps without the hassle of having to think about it. Users instantly receive vouchers for rewards and in-app purchases, and get digital receipts sent straight to their phones. For the retailer, Yoyo provides insight and the integrated marketing tools they need to reach targeted customer segments, drive sales, increase revenue, and offer an elevated customer experience. Yoyo Wallet is the fastest growing and largest multi-retailer mobile wallet in the UK and recently won Retail Systems’ 2015 Mobile Technology System of the Year. In July 2014, Yoyo was named as one of the Top 10 hottest startups in London by WIRED UK magazine.