Fintech News Abounds During Conferences & Trade Shows

With conferences and industry trade shows in full swing, there have been many technology announcements lately. Here is a brief rundown of some fintech news that could affect credit unions now and down the road.

Salt Lake City, Utah-based POPi/o Mobile Video Cloud announced its release of an in-video chat integration-ready remote deposit capture feature, as well as a redesigned mobile interface.

“Our mission is to evolve the video banking experience of the future,” POPi/o founder & CEO Gene Pranger, who created the concept of video banking with the Interactive Teller Machine, said. “By adding transactional support on top of sales and service, POPi/o helps financial institutions create a complete branch experience, defined by highly valuable interactions in every video engagement.”

POPi/o’s patented platform facilitates banking tasks including document approvals and applications, secure document exchanges, and consultations. With the release of its RDC-compatible software, POPi/o now also enables check image captures and supply to RDC vendors during video sessions. POPi/o president/COO Jed Taylor, added. “These new features enable the consumer to create a new account and fund it in one seamless interaction with the assistance of a video-based agent.”

The application’s new mobile interface refresh also supports transaction-based teams and routing while streamlining actions and platform navigation. POPi/o’s executive dashboard and support center also provide advanced management functions and detailed call histories to help improve performance through streamlined communication and analytics.

New York-based STASH, described as one of the U.S.’s fastest growing financial platforms, announced its mobile-first banking services launch in partnership with Green Dot Corporation and its subsidiary bank, Green Dot Bank. The launch follows the company’s Series E fundraising of $65 million.

As part of the launch, STASH is rolling out Stock-Back, a rewards program that invests for customers as they spend. Stock-Back act like points, but they can grow. Customers automatically earn fractional shares of stock on qualified purchases by using their STASH debit card.

For example, if consumers buy meals at a local restaurant, make purchases at local bookstores, or pay parking meters, they earn Stock-Back in a STASH-approved ETF. When customers shop at Chipotle, T-Mobile, Amazon or Walmart they earn a piece of each companies’ publicly traded stock. All Stock-Back rewards will be invested in customers’ STASH personal investment accounts.

“Stock-Back is our way of utilizing STASH’s smart, [patent-pending] technology to help people build better financial habits and invest in their future.” Ed Robinson, co-founder and president, said. He added, STASH’s ability to give customers the opportunity to save and build portfolios that mirror their spending behavior and preferences is incredibly powerful. “During the testing period, we saw an overwhelmingly positive response from users as they pay ordinary bills like Netflix, and in return received Netflix stock.”

According to the announcement, the program will quickly ramp up in rewards when layered with exclusive offers and partner deals. At launch, the Stock-Back Rewards program will give customers a base reward of .125% for every qualifying purchase in the respective publicly-traded stock or an investment in a STASH-approved ETF.

STASH’s banking services, powered by Green Dot’s Banking as a Service Platform, includes a debit account with no overdraft or monthly maintenance fees, access to a large network of free ATMs nationwide, as well as ASAP Direct Deposit, which enables customers to get paid up to two days early.

Hopkinton, Mass.-based Dell EMC announced ECS 3.3, the latest version of its enterprise-ready object storage system. This update contains software enhancements designed to enable its customers to accelerate their data-driven initiatives. ECS provides customers with a flexible solution to capture, store, protect and manage unstructured data with cloud-like capabilities and ease of use. According to the notice, with ECS, customers can retain complete control of data, reduce security vulnerabilities and meet strict compliance requirements, all at a lower total-cost-of-ownership than public cloud services.

The latest enhancements include: meeting security and compliance mandates with improved enterprise-grade features such as external key management, STIG hardening, and NFS WORM compliance; proactive management of the storage infrastructure with enhanced data visibility via capacity monitoring improvements, custom alerts and metric exports; the unlocking of new insights from data faster than ever before through accelerated time-to-insights for developers, enabled via new features such as prefix search for Amazon S3 and faster S3 list execution; and modernizing the storage infrastructure by leveraging the streamlined platform capabilities for legacy object platforms such as EMC Atmos and Centera via seamless retention policy migration and cloud gateway tool unification.

The $2.4 billion Lancaster, S.C. Founders Federal Credit Union uses ECS as its cloud storage for artificial intelligence, IoT and cloud native apps, which helps ensure compliance and security at a corporate level, requiring fewer resources to operate their infrastructure.