Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Currencycloud CEO Mike Laven (Part 1)

This interview discusses opportunities surrounding the emerging trends in RegTech.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Currencycloud.

Mike Laven: I’m the CEO of Currencycloud, which is based in London. For quite some time, I’ve lived and worked back and forth between the Valley and London in the field of financial technology. Currencycloud was started five years ago in 2012. The initial vision was that businesses paid much too much for international payments. There are very good companies in the consumer space on international payments. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Tracy Metzger, COO of Vesta (Part 4)

Tracy Metzger: There is a need today to go out and find a consolidated way to leverage all of these different great technologies that are bespoke in their way of implementation. There is a need to find a way through a single point of interface, to leverage all of these great solutions, and make it easy for a merchant to adopt this technology without having to adopt this technology and without having to manage a myriad of different business relationships. It becomes difficult from an integration standpoint, on an ongoing change management standpoint. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Tracy Metzger, COO of Vesta (Part 3)

Tracy Metzger: Vesta processes anywhere from 300,000 to 500,000 transactions a day and up towards $18 billion in payments a year. We carry elements like their mobile devices and desktop devices. We know the operating systems, screen dimensions, their page viewing history on certain e-commerce websites, and their social reputation information where it’s applicable. There are so many different elements that we use to make a risk screen decision in a split second. If you think about it, Vesta started off focusing on prepaid cellular business 22 years ago. >>>

Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Tracy Metzger, COO of Vesta (Part 2)

Tracy Metzger: Whether it’s mobile carriers when they’re doing prepaid businesses where credit card acceptance immediately fulfills minutes to a phone, or digital goods companies like e-ticketing, or software downloads,  all these things have an after-market value. Those companies spend anywhere from 14% to 20% of their total SGNA on managing fraud. It’s a huge amount of cost.

One of the other by-products is it hurts the acceptance. This is because these internal operational departments, while doing their best through tools and technologies, tend to be risk-averse. They may sometimes take the caution on the air of not accepting a transaction because it may look risky, which creates a user experience issue. You have acceptance issues that create revenue offset problems. You have operational issues that create expense issues.

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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Tracy Metzger, COO of Vesta (Part 1)

There is a lot of fraud in online payments. This discussion explores the field, and Tracy also provides a pointer to a great open problem that an entrepreneur can look into.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing you and Vesta to our audience.

Tracy Metzger: I’m the COO of Vesta. I’m a 25-year veteran of the financial technology industry, primarily around payments and technology solutions in payments. Vesta is a 22-year-old financial technology company that focuses on payments and product >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Fang, President of Mobomo (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Have you seen a use case that you could talk about where such conversational interfaces are being applied to a business problem?

Ken Fang: One of the areas that we are working on with USCS is a pilot project where we built an Alexa interface for people to report. They have a web form where you can go ahead and enter in earthquake information. It’ll ask for your name, address, when you felt the earthquake, and how you strong you believed it to be. What we did was we built an Alexa app where you can do that through Alexa. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Fang, President of Mobomo (Part 2)

Ken Fang: The lucky thing is, we knew the event was coming, and we knew exactly when it was going to happen. We had to make sure that all of the infrastructure was in place. The nice thing about the cloud is, for the most part, it’s fairly elastic. It was able to scale up to meet the demand. Once the event was over, it could auto-scale back. That’s the beauty of this cloud technology. You’re only using what you need.

The hard part for NASA is budgeting. They didn’t know how many people were going to hit the site. They ended up transferring >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Ken Fang, President of Mobomo (Part 1)

What use cases are emerging at the cusp of mobile, cloud, AI chatbots and spoken interfaces? Read on for a thoughtful discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Mobomo.

Ken Fang: I’m the President of Mobomo. Mobomo is a mobile web cloud company. We help federal agencies as well as commercial organizations transform their business primarily through mobile web cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Your customer base is mostly federal agencies? >>>