Anodot’s automated business dashboards put big data in the hands of business people

bi and analytics, big data at Anodot

In many organizations, big data and analytics reside somewhere between the IT organization and marketing. That’s primarily because of the technical barriers around the stop-and-start nature of most analytics programs. To get an answer to a business question, someone — typically with some technical chops — has to write a query on the data to get at the answers.

That’s changing. For organizations to leverage the power of business intelligence and analytics, tools and systems are becoming easier to use and more real-time. Rita Sallam, research vp at Gartner, explained, “The BI&A market is in the final stages of a multiyear shift from IT-led, system-of-record reporting to pervasive, business-led, self-service analytics.” Once BI tools don’t require programming skills or a degree in statistics, their mainstreaming is practically guaranteed because they can add dollars to the bottom line.

One startup that’s taking this new approach is Anodot. I first heard of the firm in September (when it announced its most recent funding round), and I assumed the company was in cybersecurity because it does something it calls anomaly detection. But after speaking to David Drai, cofounder and CEO of the Israeli startup, it became much clearer that the company’s technology addresses big pain points in fintech.

Anodot’s machine learning looks at different buckets of data in an organization to establish a view of what normal looks like. So, if you’re processing credit cards, for example, Anodot examines approval rates across geographies to develop a model for what defines business as usual. Any deviation from the norm triggers alerts to relevant departments. The technology correlates abnormalities in the data to external events, like a new product launch, to see what’s causing them.

There’s no need to write hundreds of queries. “Our machine learning does this all for you,” said Drai, who previously cofounded Cotendo, which was bought by Akamai in 2011 for $268 million. “Anodot can answer two important questions for you: what’s happening and why.”

Credit Karma came to Anodot in 2016 with a specific problem. The company relies upon numerous funnels to ensure prospects and existing clients most efficiently interact with the firm’s credit scoring and monitoring service. All of a sudden, the revenue driven by a certain webpage dropped by over 50 percent over a three day period before the company could determine what was causing the problem.

“To test Anodot, we streamed a subset of six months of historical data to see if Anodot would find the same anomalies we had found manually, and it did,” said Pedro Silva, a senior product manager at Credit Karma. “It was clear very quickly that Anodot provides a ton of value to both business and technical teams.” After working with Anodot, Credit Karma quit further development of its own in-house solution to eliminate business incident detection latency.

Riskified is another fintech firm that uses Anodot’s real-time business dashboards. The company works with large retailers to prevent ecommerce fraud with instant approvals and full chargeback protection. Because it assumes the approval risk from its merchants, a break down in its risk models can be disastrous. The company looked to outside vendors for assistance.

“We think that someone focused on something specific will almost always do it better than generalists,” said Assaf Feldman, Riskified’s CTO. “Our customers know ecommerce really well but they turn to us for state of the art fraud protection. We’re all willing to pay for specialization.”

Tel Aviv-based Riskified uses Anodot to monitor internal signals of its fraud models and to make sure service levels are maintained for the product. The system’s alerts notify account managers if there are problems.

As Riskified looks to broaden its usage of Anodot across the company, fintech firms are taking a hard look at using new business intelligence and analytics tools in 2017.

 

The Startups: Who’s shaking things up (Week ending February 14, 2016)

fintech startups shaking things up

[alert type=yellow ]Every week, Tradestreaming highlights startups in the news, making things happen. The following is just part of this week’s news roundup. You can get these updates delivered direct to your inbox by signing up for the Tradestreaming newsletters.[/alert]

Startups raising/Investors investing

BBVA shuts in-house venture arm, pours $250m into new fintech VC Propel Venture Partners (TechCrunch)
The bank is shutting down its in-house venture arm, BBVA Ventures; and it is taking BBVA Ventures’ portfolio, the $100 million fund it had allocated to the group, and another $150 million, and putting all of it into a new VC called Propel Venture Partners.

More reading: What’s behind the BBVA restructuring (American Banker)

East Coast credit fund puts $250m to work on real estate crowdfunding’s Patch of Land platform (Finovate)
The investment comes in the form of an agreement to buy loans in a “forward flow arrangement,” and represents the credit fund’s first move into the P2P marketplace lending space.

WorldRemit gets $45m at a $500m valuation go grow its mobile money transfer business (TechCrunch)
A year after raising $100 million, London-based startup WorldRemit has picked up more funding. To compete against the likes of Western Union in the world of money transfers — and tap a remittance market that the World Bank estimates will be worth $610 billion in 2016 — the company has added another $45 million to its coffers.

Riskified nabs $25 million to fight ecommerce fraud (VentureBeat)
The Tel Aviv-based company promises its clients, which include Burberry and Viagogo, “instant, guaranteed approvals and peace of mind.” The Phoenix Insurance Company, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, and existing investors Genesis Partners and Entrée Capital also participated in the round. To date, Riskified has raised at least $31 million

Cloud data provider, Xignite closes $20m round (BusinessWire)
Xignite, the leading provider of market data cloud solutions for financial institutions and financial technology companies, today announced that it has raised $20.5 million in a Series C funding round led by Tokyo-based QUICK Corporation, part of the Nikkei Group and Japan’s largest financial information provider.

Robin And Saul Klein’s Localglobe backs online mortgage advisor Trussle (TechCrunch)
London-based Trussle, which raised £1.1 million, challenges the traditional mortgage broker with a tech-driven solution that advises customers on the best deal available, and helps manage the mortgage process if they choose to proceed.

As population becomes more diverse, funding options grow (Locavesting)
Diverse forms of capital are searching to invest in diverse types of entrepreneurs. Here are some various types of funders that invest in entrepreneurs from various backgrounds…

The Startups: Who’s shaking things up

LendingClub models misfire as loan write-offs top forecasts (Bloomberg)
A chart on one of the slides shows that write-off rates for a portion of five-year LendingClub loans were roughly 7 percent to 8 percent, compared with a forecast range of around 4 percent to 6 percent.

Fintech firms want to open accounts at the Bank of England
(Telegraph)
Payments and technology firms want the right to open bank accounts at the Bank of England, a right traditionally only given to banks and one which gives them access to the payments system

Berkshire Hathaway and Munich Re backstop Lemonade, startup P2P insurer (Intelligent Insurer)
“Consumer trust in the insurance system is at the heart of the insurance business, and is essential to the success of any new venture. With this collection of leading reinsurers, Lemonade’s customers will know this innovative venture is backed by some of the best and most established in the industry.”

Zenefits CEO ousted, compliance saga takes a turn: what’s next for the company? (Insurance Thought Leadership)
The CEO is out at Zenefits (one of the hottest fintech/insurtech/any tech startups) after it was found that 83% of the policies the company sold were done by unlicensed employees. Oops.

Britain’s ex-regulation chief thinks fintech P2P lending losses are going to be huge (BusinessInsider)
But according to Adair Turner, the former Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, which was abolished in 2013 to make way for the Financial Conduct Authority, consumers are taking huge risks when lending and borrowing via P2P services and the future fallout could be terrible.