Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform FinTech Automation (FTA) signed an agreement with Mastercard company Finicity on Tuesday (Jan. 4) to access consumer information for secure account validation and ownership when opening new accounts.
Consumers can now connect their primary accounts to deposit funds into a new investment account, which will minimize risk by verifying the owner of an existing account.
Read more here.
Financial services are going through a rapid digital evolution to keep up with the needs of digital-native consumers. The percentage of Americans who use fintech services daily rose from 37% in 2020 to 48% in 2021.
The first step in adopting a new fintech app is to set up a new account. Here is where you can lose those digital native consumers. Slow and time-consuming background checks, eligibility requirements, ACH microdeposits and inadequate credit scores are all major sources of friction and can cause abandonment of the account setup process. Integrating Finicity’s open banking data can reduce friction through secure account verification and eliminate frustrating delays.
“Secure account opening is crucial for financial institutions today. Open banking data can reduce the friction and mitigate the risk associated with digital account opening,” said Andy Sheehan, President and COO, of Finicity, a Mastercard company. “FTA’s integration of Finicity’s open banking platform will further empower consumers to take charge of their financial data and financial futures.”
FTA Partners with Finicity to Add Secure Account Verification and Automated Personal Financial Management Capabilities to IaaS
The agreement with Finicity provides FTA’s customers access to consumer-permissioned account data for secure account validation and ownership when opening new accounts. This allows consumers to connect their primary account to deposit funds into a new investment account. It signals the end of tedious validation methods like micro-deposits, which can take days to clear, and can minimize risk by verifying the ownership of an existing account.
“Integrating consumer-permissioned data from Finicity’s open banking network streamlines account opening and funding, making it safer, easier and faster, which reduces account opening abandonment for our customers,” said David Park, Founder and CEO of FinTech Automation. “It’s a great example of how open banking can improve banking and personal financial management offerings and their customer experience at the same time.”
FTA will also utilize consumer-permissioned data from Finicity’s open banking platform to give consumers a holistic picture of their finances across all their financial and wealth accounts by allowing customers to download all transactions from their wealth account into their personal financial management tool.
Fintech Automation’s Unified Business Platform
The first era of fintech dealt with helping consumers more effectively visualize what is happening with their money across their different account types. In essence, building a better user experience and user interface on top of each of the specific accounts, providing a more user-friendly experience to customers.
While digital apps and interfaces may have changed how consumers experience financial services, the underlying systems facilitating those products and services have not advanced. To meet this growing market opportunity, FTA and its open-loop FinServ Infrastructure-as-a-Service platform offers financial institutions and other fintech companies a banking, payment and wealth management core system of records, bridging multiple financial verticals.
The FTA platform can operate across several financial verticals while bearing the innate complexity, reducing the cost and difficulty of building and deploying financial applications. The platform will allow financial institutions and fintech companies to embed additional services into their existing offerings, providing a better customer experience and an opportunity to drive more profitability.
This enables FTA’s B2B customers to shift the burden of technology to FTA, focusing instead on relationships with customers and offering new types of services. A fast, easy, secure way to launch financial services such as banking, cards, wealth management and payments is critical to increasing customer engagement and revenue.
FTA’s platform offers a one-stop access point to various account types and services through a single point of entry. It also offers regulatory, compliance, and KYC/AML uniformly, while offering a suite of best-in-class providers through a single, secure integration with Finicity’s open banking platform.
Using consumer-permissioned data from Finicity’s open banking platform, FTA is helping FamilyWealthTM, a startup personal financial management and digital advisory firm, to power its growing range of digital financial services that leverage artificial intelligence and automation algorithms to make better financial decisions for their users. FamilyWealth will analyze data to understand users’ spending habits, financial goals and risk tolerance, building a data profile that is used to enhance decision-making while maximizing financial performance. Finance features will include automatically moving funds to the highest-yielding accounts, automating portfolio allocation or paying bills. Key to FamilyWealth to automate finance are improvements in AI and data accessibility, such as financial data including debt, income, spending and investments.
Visit FintechAutomation.com for more information about their Infrastructure as-a-Service platform. Or request a demo from a Finicity representative today.
Jack Henry & Associates, Inc.® is a leading provider of technology solutions and payment processing services primarily for the financial services industry. Jack Henry announced today that Finicity, Akoya, and Plaid are among the first open banking pioneers to integrate to the Banno Digital Platform using the Banno Digital Toolkit℠. This provides better security, privacy and transparency for the nearly 6 million consumers banking with the Banno Digital Platform by removing screen scraping.
Learn more about Finicity’s partnership with Jack Henry here.
Pentadata announced a partnership with Finicity to help developers crate apps that delive value-added services to merchants and consumers through payment card data. Consumers can permission acces to their data to make payments through apps, receive targeted discounts, and enable clients to present targeted digital offers to their members. Through the partnership, Pentadata customers can use account owner information, transaction aggregation and ACH solutions as part of Fincity’s Lend, Pay and Manage solutions. The data will help drive a better experience for millions of loyalty program members of Pentadata customers that include fintech apps, merchants and travel-related companies.
You can read the full press release here.
Latest API integration enables leading digital bank’s customers to securely connect to approved third-party apps and accounts
PASADENA, Calif. — July 21, 2021 — Finicity, a Mastercard company and leading provider of open banking solutions, announced today that it has signed a data access agreement with Green Dot (NYSE: GDOT), a digital bank and fintech focused on delivering trusted, best-in-class banking and payment solutions that seamlessly connect people to their money.
“We’re excited to announce Green Dot as the next in our data access agreements lineup,” said Steve Smith, CEO of Finicity. “The company is a big proponent of client empowerment, giving their banking clients the control to utilize their financial data to benefit them. This aligns well with Finicity’s mission to bring greater transparency to consumers to improve financial health and inclusion.”
The Finicity direct API experience will first be available through Green Dot’s flagship digital bank GO2bank and will allow customers to link their accounts to third-party apps that use Finicity’s secure data network and financial data – further enabling them to connect, manage and move their money in a secure and seamless environment.
“This integration enables customers to put their financial data to work for them by offering secure, seamless connections to tools and features that can have a meaningful impact,” said Abhijit Chaudhary, SVP and GM, Direct to Consumer Products, Green Dot. “The majority of Americans, and particularly low- to moderate-income consumers, can benefit from tools that help them feel more in control and connected to their money, and our partnership with Finicity is an exciting step in that direction.”
Through this agreement, Finicity is extending its leadership in direct data access through the use of an application programming interface (API). Finicity’s signed data access agreements with many of the nation’s largest financial institutions, credit card companies, and wealth management institutions currently cover 63% of their open banking platform traffic with direct API access. In addition, Finicity works with many of the most popular PFM (personal financial management) tools, as well as the largest lenders and most innovative payment providers, among other services.
To learn more about Finicity data services and their commitment to fast, reliable, and high-quality data, visit www.finicity.com.
About Finicity
Finicity, a Mastercard company, helps individuals, families, and organizations make smarter financial decisions through its safe and secure access to fast, high-quality data. The company provides a proven and trusted open banking platform that puts consumers in control of their financial data, transforming the way we experience money for everything from budgeting and payments to investing and lending. Finicity partners with influential financial institutions and disruptive fintech providers alike to give consumers a leg up in a complicated financial world, helping to improve financial literacy, expanding financial inclusion, and ultimately leading to better financial outcomes. Finicity is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. To learn more or test drive its API, visit www.finicity.com.
About Green Dot
Green Dot Corporation (NYSE: GDOT) is a financial technology and registered bank holding company committed to transforming the way people and businesses manage and move money, and making financial wellbeing and empowerment more accessible for all. Green Dot’s proprietary technology enables faster, more efficient electronic payments and money management, powering intuitive and seamless ways for people to spend, send, control and save their money. Through its retail and direct bank, Green Dot offers a broad set of financial products to consumers and businesses including debit, prepaid, checking, credit and payroll cards, as well as robust money processing services, tax refunds, cash deposits and disbursements. The company’s Banking as a Service (“BaaS”) platform enables a growing list of America’s most prominent consumer and technology companies to design and deploy their own customized banking and money movement solutions for customers and partners in the US and internationally. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Pasadena, CA, Green Dot has served more than 33 million customers directly, and now operates primarily as a “branchless bank” with more than 90,000 retail distribution locations nationwide. Green Dot Bank is a subsidiary of Green Dot Corporation and member of the FDIC. For more information about Green Dot’s products and services, please visit www.greendot.com.
SimpleNexus announced an integration with Finicity’s Mortgage Verification Service (MVS) that allows lenders to streamline the verification of applicants’ assets, income and employment using a single embedded service.
Finicity launched MVS in February. The service leverages consumer-permissioned bank and payroll data to provide accurate, real-time insight into a borrower’s current assets, income and employment in minutes, without any paperwork. MVS has helped lenders shave up to 12 days off the origination process and is accepted by both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, making loans eligible for rep and warrant relief.
SimpleNexus is the first mortgage point-of-sale (POS) platform to offer Finicity’s MVS as an integrated solution. Without ever leaving the SimpleNexus mobile app, borrowers can use MVS to complete asset, income and employment verification in a few simple steps that take just minutes to complete. Lenders receive validated payroll, paystub and bank account data in real time and can refresh the data within 10 days of the loan closing as needed to fulfill investor requirements.
Read the full release here.
Jack Henry & Associates, Inc. and Finicity, A Mastercard Company have partnered together to provide a direct integration to the Banno Digital Platform. The agreement enables community financial institutions to provide consumers with the freedom to control, access, and share their financial data, creating a real-time picture of their financial health.
Speaking of the agreement, Steve Smith, Head of Global Open Banking at Mastercard and CEO of Finicity said, “Finicity and Jack Henry share a goal of providing the industry with open banking standards that enable consumers to access, use, and benefit from their financial data. As highly regulated and highly connected companies, we’re in a position to help consumers make more informed financial decisions and improve their financial health.”
Southwest Business Corp., known as SWBC, has entered into a partnership with Finicity, a Mastercard company and Open Banking solutions provider. SWBC will use Finicity’s Open Banking platform Finicity Pay for instant account validation of online ACH payments
One thing we’ve learned this past year – if we didn’t already know – is how we pay, get paid, or otherwise move money, is changing. One almost wonders what the fate of paper money will be in the future. Until that is sorted out, we’ll continue exploring ways to improve the money movement process. That’s where open banking comes in. Through open banking we’re able to introduce new tools that secure and simplify the money experience. One area enhanced by open banking is Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments.
To that end, we’re very excited that industry innovator SWBC has chosen Finicity Pay™ for instant account verification of online Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments. This partnership simplifies the payment process while also satisfying Nacha’s new web debit rule, planned to take effect March 2021.
NACHA’s New Rules
Currently, ACH Originators of web debit entries are required to use a “commercially reasonable fraudulent transaction detection system” to screen web debits for fraud, according to Nacha’s website. This existing screening requirement will now be strengthened to make it clear that “account validation” is a solution designed to enhance fraud protection.
Specifically, originators of debits are responsible for validating accounts to ensure the account is legitimate and open prior to the first use of an account number or after changes to the account number by a customer. While the rule doesn’t require the account owner to match or be validated, Finicity Pay also enables companies to determine the account owner on file with the bank for heightened validation and further fraud prevention.
While there are many ways to validate accounts, Finicity’s open banking platform makes it easy to receive validation in real-time thanks to APIs and direct connections with financial institutions. Web debit originators don’t need to wait on manual verification, microdeposits, pre-notifications or any other service for dependable, accurate account verification.
How Finicity Pay Fits In
Finicity Pay will verify the essential account details, owners, and balances that are needed to charge, get paid, or set up an account with confidence. As a complete suite, Finicity Pay enables payments and validates funding sources. It can also seamlessly verify loan account details, including student loans, to detect eligibility for refinancing, loan consolidation, or to support employer student loan repayment and other benefit programs. This means that Finicity Pay both satisfies Nacha’s web debit rule but also speeds up the payment validation process and enhances fraud protection. Finicity and SWBC are Nacha Preferred Partners, recognized for offering products and services that align with Nacha’s core strategies to advance the ACH Network.
SWBC provides financial institutions, businesses and individuals a wide range of services, including insurance, mortgages, wealth management, employee benefits, among others, and is a valued addition to our list of providers.To read more about this announcement, please read the press release here. And to learn more about Finicity Pay, check out our website.
Finicity Pay creates secure payments ecosystem; meets 2021 Nacha requirements for ACH transactions, increased anti-fraud controls
SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – January 15, 2021 – Finicity, a Mastercard company and leading provider of open banking solutions, and SWBC, an international financial services company, announced today that SWBC will utilize Finicity Pay™ for instant account verification of online Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments to satisfy the National Automated Clearing House Association’s (Nacha) 2021 requirements for ACH transactions, which allows for stronger anti-fraud controls.
Finicity Pay, an integrated solution set of Finicity’s open banking platform, will help SWBC create a more secure ACH ecosystem through instant account verification, which verifies account status and details needed for an ACH transfer and supports the immediate execution of ACH transactions. The solution replaces older methods of verification such as micro-deposits and pre-notification. SWBC will utilize Finicity Connect, a simple, consumer-centric open banking experience, to enable their consumers to digitally authenticate and permission their bank account information to securely expedite an ACH bank payment.
“The Nacha 2021 rule is intended to provide stronger anti-fraud controls leading to a more secure payment experience,” said Finicity CEO and Co-founder Steve Smith. “Instant data verification is the best way to enable consumers to pay, get paid, or set up accounts. Our team is continually expanding our capabilities in money movement through our trusted open banking platform.”
SWBC provides financial institutions, businesses, and individuals a wide range of services, including insurance, mortgages, wealth management, employee benefits and more. Among its services, the company offers an enterprise payment solution platform for receiving payments—both ACH and card-based payments via call-center, website, interactive voice response (IVR), mobile, or cash.
“Providing secure and efficient access to the initiation of ACH payments is essential for today’s consumer,” said SWBC Vice President of Product Strategy Tucker Stovall. “Our partnership with Finicity will allow SWBC to deliver new security capabilities protecting consumers and the institutions that serve them. In addition, instant verification allows for speedy enrollment and immediate access to ACH transaction initiation, a significant improvement to the user experience.”
Nacha manages the development, administration and governance of the ACH Network, the backbone for the electronic movement of money and data in the United States. Finicity and SWBC are Nacha Preferred Partners, recognized for offering products and services that align with Nacha’s core strategies to advance the ACH Network.
Beginning in March 2021, Nacha will implement a new rule—referred to as the WEB Debit Rule—requiring businesses that debit funds via ACH for online orders to implement enhanced fraud protection through account verification.
Specifically, Nacha will require businesses to include, at minimum, account validation on first-use as part of a commercially reasonable fraudulent transaction detection system. Out of the core accepted types of verifications—manual, microdeposits, prenotes, database verification, and instant account verification—Finicity offers consumer-permissioned instant account verification that will be utilized by SWBC.
To learn more about Finicity, its data services, and its commitment to fast, reliable and high-quality data, visit www.finicity.com.
About Finicity
Finicity, a Mastercard company, helps individuals, families, and organizations make smarter financial decisions through safe and secure access to fast, high-quality data. The company provides a proven and trusted open banking platform that puts consumers in control of their financial data, transforming the way we experience money for everything from budgeting and payments to investing and lending. Finicity partners with influential financial institutions and disruptive fintech providers alike to give consumers a leg up in a complicated financial world, helping to improve financial literacy, expanding financial inclusion, and ultimately leading to better financial outcomes. Finicity is headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. To learn more or test drive its API, visit www.finicity.com.
About SWBC
As a diversified financial services company, SWBC provides financial institutions, businesses, and individuals a wide range of services, including insurance, mortgages, wealth management, employee benefits, and more. Headquartered in San Antonio, Texas, SWBC has partners and divisions across all 50 states and manages business around the world. No matter how wide its reach, SWBC always listens to its customers’ needs, analyzes their current situations, and recommends customized solutions. For more information about our innovative approach to personalized service, visit SWBC’s website at swbc.com.