The People Who Plan to Change Financial Services

This article originally published inside The FinTech Issue of Bank Director digital magazine.

The world is filled with technology companies hoping to transform the financial industry. Of course, very few of them will. Not all ideas can overcome the substantial hurdles to become major commercial successes. We are not proposing here at Bank Director digital magazine to tell you who will be a success and who won’t be. But we do want to introduce you to some of the entrepreneurs who are proposing to reshape the world as we know it. These are people whose ideas are re-envisioning platforms and processes, people who are simplifying, unifying and upsetting conventional practices. These entrepreneurs really are shaking up traditional boundaries to help us all think about banking a little differently.

Christian Ruppe and Jared Kopelman

They are creating the driverless car of banking.

Using machine learning, this duo, who met as students at the College of Charleston, have built a platform for banks and credit unions to help millennials save without even thinking about it. Frustrated that fellow college students would get on a budget and then abandon it a few weeks later, 22-year-old Ruppe thought he could make the attainment of financial stability easier. Achieving financial health takes discipline and focus, like weight loss. But Ruppe reasoned that technology could help with financial health so it wasn’t so dependent on discipline and focus. If he could come up with a way to automate savings, debt payments and investments, many more people could realize the benefits of compounding over time to create wealth. “We are the self-driving car of banking,’’ Ruppe says.

There are several other automated savings applications on the market that use machine learning, such as Digit and Qapital, but most of those are sold directly to consumers, rather than through a financial institution. Monotto’s private label approach means the customer doesn’t pay for the product and never knows the platform doesn’t come from the bank. Monotto, a play on the words “money” and “auto,” can be integrated into mobile banking or online applications, sending well timed messages about refinancing the mortgage or buying a house, for example. Bear State Financial in Little Rock, Arkansas, a $2.2 billion asset bank, already has agreed to pilot the program. When customers sign up, the algorithm learns from their spending patterns and automatically pulls differing amounts from their checking accounts into their savings account using the bank’s core banking software, taking into consideration each customer’s transaction history. Individuals can set savings goals, such as buying a house or a car, and the platform will automatically save for them. For now, Monotto has received funding from friends and family, as well as an FIS-funded accelerator program. Eventually, the founders envision a platform that will also help you invest and pay down debt.

“You have someone who is solving a problem [for society] but figuring out how to solve it for the bank, as well,” says Patrick Rivenbark, the vice president of strategic partnerships at Let’s Talk Payments, a research and news site.

Zander Rafael

This student lender calculates the school’s ROI to determine eligibility for a loan.

With the rising cost of tuition, students who take out loans end up with an average of $30,000 in debt after college, leading to rising rates of delinquency. But what’s holding the schools accountable?

Alexander “Zander” Rafael, 32, and his team created Climb Credit in 2014 to service student loans based on the returns the college provides its graduates. This places Climb among a menagerie of fintech startups, like SoFi, LendEDU and CampusLogic, all trying to serve the student loan market.

Climb, which funds its loans through investors, stands out because it only works with schools that have a record of landing students jobs that “pay them enough to [cover the] cost of tuition,” says Rafael. In addition to evaluating the student, Climb also assesses the schools. If the institution passes Climb’s graduation and return on investment analysis, then its students are eligible for Climb loans and the school takes on some of the risk of the loan, receiving more money if more students pay them back.

Climb has grown by focusing on more non-traditional learning environments, like coding boot camps, where students invest $10,000 for a yearlong program to learn web development. According to Climb’s analysis, many of these students land jobs that pay up to $70,000. “The return was very strong,” says Rafael. Climb now works with 70 schools, including some two and four-year university programs.

Schools benefit because they can accept students that lack cosigners and who otherwise may have struggled to find a private loan elsewhere. Climb charges an average of 9 percent APR for the loans, but it can range from 7.59 percent to 23.41 percent.

With a $400 million lending capacity, Climb has raised a Series-A funding round of $2 million. But the idea has shown early promise, as Rafael adds that profitability is “within line of sight.”

Ashish Gadnis

Could this man be the Henry Ford of identity?

What if you could unlock trillions of dollars of wealth that could be associated with individuals around the globe? What sort of opportunities would be there for banks and businesses of all sorts? BanQu cofounder Ashish Gadnis saw first hand the problem facing billions of people worldwide who don’t have a bank account when he tried to help one woman farmer in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “The banker said, —We won’t bank her, but we’ll bank you, Mr. Gadnis,’” a native of India who grew up in poverty himself. “They wouldn’t recognize her identity,’’ he says, despite the fact that she owned a farm and had income every year from her harvest. Gadnis and cofounders Hamse Warfe and Jeff Keiser say this is a problem that confronts 2.7 billion people around the world who don’t have access to bank accounts or credit because they don’t have a verifiable identity. Gadnis, who wore a giant cross in lieu of a tie to a recent conference, promises to change all that by providing a way for people to create their own digital transaction-based identity through an open ledger system, or blockchain. Others in their network can verify transactions such as the buying and selling of a harvest, or the granting of a job. He estimates that approximately 5,000 people, some of them living in refugee camps in the Middle East, are using the technology to create a digital identity for themselves that could open up future opportunities to obtain credit and enter the global economy.

It’s not a nonprofit company, as you might think. BanQu is in the middle of a Series A venture capital funding round, and envisions banks and other financial institutions paying for the platform so they can access potential customers. It’s free to users. Like other tech entrepreneurs, he is optimistic about the potential of his platform, perhaps wildly so. “The key to ending poverty is now within our reach,’’ he says. But he has quite a few admirers, including Jimmy Lenz, the head of predictive analytics for wealth and investment management at Wells Fargo & Co. Gadnis has credibility, Lenz says, as he sold a successful tech company called Forward Hindsight to McGladrey in 2012. “When I think about Ashish, I think about Henry Ford. We think about Henry Ford for the cars. But really, his greatest achievement was the assembly line, the process.”

Nathan Richardson, Gaspard De Dreuzy and Serge Kreiker

These entrepreneurs provide anywhere, anytime trading for brokerage houses and wealth management firms.

All three of these individuals have well established backgrounds in technology, including Richardson, who was formerly head of Yahoo! Finance. Now, they are using application programming interfaces, or APIs, to try to make it easier to trade no matter the platform or where you are. Instead of logging into a brokerage firm’s website, Trade It sits on any website and lets you trade your brokerage account inside the website of a publisher or other company, such as Bloomberg. Although many banks have yet to sign up to use the app, the company is licensing the software to brokerage houses and Citi Ventures, the venture capital arm of Citigroup, invested $4 million into the company in 2015. “The thing that impressed us is taking financial services to our customers in the environment they are in, rather than expecting them to come to us,’’ says Ramneek Gupta, the managing director and co-head of global venture investing for Citi Ventures.

Publishers like the app because it doesn’t take the customer outside of their site. Brokerages like it because they can reach their customers anywhere. “If you think about 70 percent of consumers under the age of 40 who trust Google and Facebook more than their financial institution, why wouldn’t you want to put your product there?” says Richardson.

Gupta thinks this speaks to the future of financial services. “You have already seen it elsewhere,’’ he says. “You can order Uber from inside Google Maps.”