Newly-Forged Fintech Vendor Relationships Could Impact Credit Unions

New alliances and acquisitions in the fintech world would appear to have at least some influence on credit union members when it comes to payment processing, onboarding, voice banking and marketing.

Tampa, Fla.-based Best Innovation Group, which describes itself as a “credit union innovation catalyst,” and Braintree, Mass.-based fintech and data-driven solution provider Geezeo announced a partnership to bring additional capabilities to BIG’s Financial Innovation Voice Experience platform. The new features allow users of BIG’s FIVE voice banking platform to receive deeper behavioral insights into their financial activities at participating financial institutions by simply speaking to their Amazon Alexa and Google Home devices.

“As the leading provider of voice banking skills for financial institutions, BIG will continue expanding the functionality of our FIVE platform to support the needs of our credit union clients and their members,” John Best, founder and CEO of Best Innovation Group, said.

The new functionality, which is currently under development, will leverage Geezeo’s conversational software development kit and BIG’s integration with a participating financial institution’s core banking software to answer questions like “How much did I spend on groceries last month?” The functionality is anticipated to expand into more predictive questions ranging from “Can I afford to buy this suit?” to more significant expenditures like new car loans.

“The Internet of Things gives financial institutions the opportunity to deliver more personalized, intuitive services to customers,” Shawn Ward, Geezeo CEO, said. “Specifically, there is rapid growth in voice-enabled assistants as they are becoming part of consumers’ everyday lives.”

Austin, Texas-based digital banking firm Q2 Holdings, Inc. announced its acquisition of Atlanta-based Gro Solutions, a provider of account opening and digital sales and marketing solutions for financial institutions.

The Gro platform enables customers to make personalized recommendations and cross-sell products—from deposit accounts to loans for both retail and business clients. Gro’s solution combines advanced, multichannel account opening with targeted marketing capabilities as well as a shopping cart experience.

“With Q2’s recent acquisitions of Cloud Lending and now Gro—combined with our leading, secure digital banking platform—we are delivering powerful solutions for the financial services vertical to provide exceptional experiences needed to keep pace with the high expectations of today’s account holder,” Matt Flake, CEO of Q2, said.

Phoenix-based payment solution provider BillingTree, announced an integration with St. George, Utah-based TCN, which supplies cloud contact center technology. The two-way partnership combines BillingTree’s integration with TCN’s IVR; and the TCN cloud contact center platform to provide TCN customers with access to BillingTree’s IVR payment gateway. Additionally, through TCN’s omnichannel texting feature, AgentSMS, contact center agents can send customers payment reminders and direct links to facilitate payments, connecting them directly with BillingTree Payrazr mobile payment solutions.

“We are proud to partner with leading technology and payment processing providers, such as BillingTree, to offer our customers convenient and seamless ways to process payments across any channel,” Terrel Bird, co-founder and CEO of TCN, said. “Flexible and on demand consumer enabled communications with payment acceptance is strategically significant to the success of client engagement and revenue management activities. This partnership comes at a time when interest in voice enabled experiences such as Alexa, Siri and Cortana are at an all-time high,” Russ Palay, director of product at BillingTree, said.

New York City-based digital identity verification provider Socure and San Francisco-based digital identity management company ForgeRock announced their strategic partnership to deliver a frictionless user experience for customers from initial onboarding through the complete lifecycle of their digital relationship. The combination of Socure’s AI-based risk scoring and ForgeRock’s comprehensive identity and access management platform enables real-time digital identity verification, access and authorization decisions with speed and accuracy.

“Providing new customers a 100% digital, frictionless account opening experience, while meeting know-your-customer requirements and preventing fraud is simply not possible using traditional identity verification methods,” Johnny Ayers, Co-Founder & SVP for Socure, held. “The account registration process is the first impression you give a customer about what it is like to do business with you, you can hook them or lose them forever at that moment,” Ben Goodman, vice president, global strategy and innovation at ForgeRock commented.