Based in Hong Kong FinverseAmbitious goal is to enable open banking throughout the Asia Pacific region. The startup has recently exited stealth mode with $ 1.8 million in seed funding and lives in four markets (Hong Kong, Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam) currently connected to 30 banks. Founder and CEO Stephane Lesaffre tells that Finverse plans to launch in one new market each quarter, with the goal of covering about 75% of consumer and small business banks in each region. He said he was.
Participants in the Finverse seed round included Febe Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, SixThirty, Venturra and angel investors.
Finverse is a type of fintech that develops APIs that facilitate the sharing of financial data. The most prominent examples are: Plaid With the United States Tink When Truelayer In Europe (Finverse seed funding included angel investments from Truelayer employees).
Prior to launching Finverse in 2020, Lesaffre was Senior Product Manager for Financial Data Integration at NerdWallet, using account aggregation APIs such as Plaid and legacy player Yodlee.
Lesaffre said he won the US market because Plaid is reliable and developer-friendly. It didn’t offer as much data coverage as Yodlee, but “what it did was a very focused dataset and it’s very easy to build. My ultimate from Nerd Wallet. Learning is that bad data is really worse than no data. “
Finverse wants to do the same in the Asia Pacific region by building reliable APIs and data integration. “Basically, we’re basically a consent-based datapipe, and consumers allow Finverse to connect to their account and share it with another FinTech or financial institution.” Lesaffre said.
This can include information about your account, balances, transaction history, and bank statements. With access to this data, financial institutions can understand consumer assets and liabilities, perform income estimates, credit checks, repayment capacity measurements, and more.
According to Lesaffre, Finverse’s early hires are mostly FinTech start-ups, including buying now with a small business lending provider and paying for the service later.
Although Finverse’s API can be used for a wide range of use cases, most of today’s potential clients are focused on consumer or SME lending. Many of them want to move from a very manual process where applicants need to upload documents to a digitized credit decision that takes just one minute.
Finverse currently focuses on bank consumers, or those with traditional bank accounts and credit history, but plans to add digital wallets, neobanks, and other less traditional institutions in the future. is. Future use cases will include financial tracking as more and more people in Asia begin to use electronic wallets, investment apps and online banking accounts.
“In the case of small digital banks, we know that many customers have different primary accounts in large banks, so many small banks can get a complete picture of their consumers. I really want it. ” Resaffle. “One way to do this is to allow consumers to track all their accounts in one place.”
Another use case for Finverse’s API is cross-border payment validation, compliance, and KYC.
Other open banking startups focused on Southeast Asia include Brankas and Finantier. Rezafre said Finverse’s approach is different because it targets the entire Asia-Pacific region rather than focusing on a specific market. The new funds will be used to grow the engineering and business development teams.
Open banking startup Finverse wants to build the Asia-Pacific region’s Plaid – TechCrunch Source link Open banking startup Finverse wants to build the Asia-Pacific region’s Plaid –
Source: TechCrunch
