Transforming the digital payment experience with IBM Cloud

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According to Computerworld, financial technology has been around virtually as long as the financial services industry itself. But since the economic crisis of 2008, a new breed of disruptors has challenged traditional ecommerce providers with more efficient services.

Here’s how four fintech companies are shaking up payments with IBM Cloud.

Australian digital-only bank improves the customer home loan experience

In the world of digital banking, bigger isn’t always necessarily better.

Australian digital-only bank UBank is aiming to deliver a simpler, better, smarter customer experience.

Growing its home loan customer base is a key objective for UBank, so it’s imperative to continuously refine and improve the application experience to make it as easy as possible for customers. UBank implemented RoboChat, the first chatbot in Australia to help customers with their online home applications.

UBank built an orchestration layer on the IBM Cloud that connects with the IBM Watson Conversation API to its current live chat solution, LiveEngage by LivePerson. RoboChat operates on the UBank website and effectively acts as an additional staff member with a specific set of skills within the site’s existing live chat capability.

Read more about how UBank partnered with IBM.

Cloud-based receipt management enhances mobile banking

How many times have you looked at your bank statement, noticed a line item like “WITHDRAW / POS 0217 2013 975246 MARSHALLS #1199” and racked your brain trying to figure out what you bought?

You likely had to dig through your wallet for the paper receipt (if you even kept it) or rummage through your inbox for the electronic copy. No longer.

Now, when banks incorporate the receipt management capabilities of Sensibill into their mobile apps, customers can see purchase details and more in the palms of their hands. Sensibill integrates with banks’ existing mobile apps and web interfaces for an easier way to keep track of purchases, expenses and budgeting.

When a customer takes a picture of a receipt with a smartphone, the picture is sent to the Sensibill service based in the IBM Cloud. Sensibill then extracts the data and creates an enhanced smart receipt.

Sensibill’s smart receipt system can remind users about return and warranty information, as well as pull information about the merchant, including a contact number and address. The company uses a proprietary algorithm to process any receipt with a high level of accuracy.

Paygilant prevents mobile payment fraud with IBM Cloud technology

People around the world do almost everything with their mobile devices. Paying for purchases with them is just another use case that makes sense. In fact, according to Grand View Research, the global mobile wallet market is expected to reach $7,581.91 billion by 2024.

That’s why the issuers - banks, financial markets, communications service providers, mobile payment providers, merchants - want to be part of this trend. They’re developing and promoting their mobile wallet and payments apps to the market and appealing to their channels and installed customer bases, which increases mobile payment use. It’s just a matter of time before plastic cards will be replaced entirely by mobile payments.

The promise of the mobile wallet is convenience, but what usually happens is customers are forced to authenticate almost every purchase. This is because the traditional legacy system of banks, developed more than 20 years ago, does not provide visibility into transactions on mobile devices. And with privacy regulations, banks are unable to collect certain information from users that is critical to assess the risk of payment.

Authenticating every transaction really isn’t convenient after all. Too many false positives, combined with the operational costs of call centers to create an inefficient approach to fighting fraud.

A portmanteau of “payment” and “vigilant,” the name Paygilant says in a word what the company does: detects fraud at the point of payment with an innovative mobile payment solution. Paygilant had a transformational vision for the mobile payment space. To make it a reality, the company joined the IBM Alpha Zone accelerator program, which is an intensive, 20-week program for startups to develop solutions with onsite support, mentoring and technical training. Paygilant engineers worked closely with the Alpha Zone team to create a highly scalable architecture comprising various IBM products and services.

Read the rest of the story.

Mobile payment cloud provider powers some of North America’s largest banks

Dream Payments enables merchants of all sizes to sell anywhere using mobile devices. The fintech company offers a cloud-based payment platform coupled with a mobile point of sale device that a seller can off the shelf, and start taking any type of payment within 20 minutes.

During the past year, the company has begun onboarding financial services customers. Dream Payments provides its mobile payment cloud platform as a white-label solution that can be customized with features that financial enterprises want. It’s highly configurable and helps enterprises compete by turning different features off or on, then adding certain modifications. The platform now powers some of the largest banks in North America.

As Dream Payments transformed into a mobile payment cloud provider, its leaders realized that it was going to have to deploy environments over and over.

Dream Payments executives looked at several cloud data center providers. Because Dream Payments has other IBM software and hardware in place, leaders decided to grow the partnership with IBM. The fintech company can now quickly provision an IBM Cloud bare metal server in its choice of IBM data center.

Find out more about Dream Payments and why it partnered with IBM.

Learn more about how you can build secure, engaging solutions that integrate existing IT with IBM Cloud.