Fintech
Renovus Capital Partners | January 05, 2024
Renovus Capital Partners announced an investment in Behavioral Framework, a leading provider of applied behavior analysis (ABA) therapy for children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).
Framework was founded in 2017 in Rockville, Maryland by Angela West, with the mission of helping children diagnosed with autism and their families understand, improve, and lead functional, productive lives. Behavioral Framework's best-in-class clinical model leverages the scientific principles of ABA, a family-focused mindset, and an organization-wide commitment to excellence to unlock each child's potential. Pathways, a division of Behavioral Framework, provides autism diagnostic services. Behavioral Framework's dedicated team serves children and families across Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC.
"We're thrilled to welcome Renovus to Behavioral Framework and usher in the next chapter of our growth as we continue to build a world-class autism services organization focused squarely on the needs of our clients and their families," said Kyle West, Behavioral Framework CEO. "There is a critical need nationwide for autism diagnostics and ABA therapy. Operating from our shared values and vision, the Renovus team will help us accelerate our growth and provide life-changing diagnostics and therapy to as many children and families as possible."
"Kyle and Angela have established a strong leadership position in the growing ABA space with a unique focus on compassion for the people they serve and achieving measurable results on their behalf," said Jesse Serventi, Founding Partner at Renovus. "We are proud to support a passionate team as we seek to advance the important impact Behavioral Framework is making in the lives of children and families affected by autism, while growing to reach new communities."
"Our success in helping our clients achieve meaningful outcomes is built around holding ourselves to the absolute highest standards, individualized care, and a family focus," said Angela West, Behavioral Framework Chief Clinical Officer. "Our decades of experience have taught us that strong leadership combined with research-based programming and compassionate care are fundamental keys to better outcomes for patients on their path to independence. Renovus shares this commitment and we look forward to their support in the coming years."
A team led by senior banker Erika Haanpaa of Cain Brothers, a division of KeyBanc Capital Markets, served as exclusive financial advisor to Behavioral Framework.
About Behavioral Framework
Behavioral Framework is a leading provider of autism diagnostic services and ABA therapy in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC. Since 2017, Behavioral Framework has provided clinically exceptional care and measurable client outcomes for thousands of children diagnosed with autism and their families. Our team of dedicated behavioral experts is committed to providing our diverse community with consistent, quality care based on decades of research and best practices. Passion motivates us, progress sustains us, and measurable results help our clients reach their lifelong potential.
About Renovus Capital Partners
Founded in 2010, Renovus Capital Partners is a lower middle-market private equity firm specializing in the Knowledge and Talent industries. From its base in the Philadelphia area, Renovus manages over $1 billion across its three sector focused funds and other strategies. The firm's current portfolio includes over 25 U.S. based businesses specializing in education and training, healthcare services, technology services and professional services. Renovus typically partners with founder-led businesses, leveraging its experience within the industry and access to debt and equity capital to make operational improvements, recruit top talent, pursue add-on acquisitions and oversee strategic growth initiatives.
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Financial Management
Finix | January 10, 2024
Finix, the payments technology provider enabling businesses to accept and send payments online or in-person, announced the launch of Payouts, its latest standalone product line. Payouts enables businesses across all industries to efficiently send money at scale, regardless of whether they utilize the broader Finix payments platform.
Businesses often encounter challenges when they need to disburse funds due to siloed payment flows and needing to manage multiple vendor relationships to send and receive payments through various payment methods. In addition, businesses can be delayed waiting for bank approvals and integration resources. Now, Finix Payouts enables fast and reliable money movement–to one or many recipients at once–via a single developer-friendly API. Payouts has many use cases such as business-to-business (B2B) account payables, gig economy wages, insurance claims, tax refunds, sales commissions, tips, contractor payouts, and more.
"Businesses can encounter many challenges when sending money at scale. Teams may face cumbersome technical integrations, manual payment operation workflows, and cash flow challenges, which can create a reconciliation nightmare," said Richie Serna, CEO and co-founder of Finix. "With Finix Payouts, companies of all sizes can get started in a few hours, configure their payment flows and methods to satisfy their business needs, help alleviate complications and intermediaries, and start sending money without spending an extensive amount of time or resources. Instead, they can focus on what matters most: their product, customers, and business growth."
"Launching this separate product line, Payouts, is further evidence that Finix is continually and rapidly evolving to meet the dynamic needs of businesses," said Anthony Sharett, President of Pathward®, N.A. and Pathward Financial, Inc. "Pathward is proud to deepen our partnership with Finix and continue working together to broaden accessibility to the financial system."
Finix will utilize Mastercard Send™ and Visa Direct to enable card-based payouts allowing U.S. businesses to quickly send money to bank accounts or eligible cards.
Key features of Payouts include
24/7 Card Payout Availability
Disburse funds to cards in near real-time1, 365 days a year – including weekends and holidays.
Real-time Bank Account Validation
With Finix's integrations, businesses can get up and running quickly and seamlessly link and validate bank accounts in real-time.
Flexible Payment Maximums Based on Industry:
Businesses can have custom disbursement limits for push-to-card and bank transfers to effortlessly scale their processes.
All-in-One Platform
By integrating with Finix's complete solution, users can send payments via ACH, real-time payments, and to cards with Mastercard Send™ and Visa Direct, in a single API.
Embedded Compliance
Finix conducts the necessary compliance checks on recipients ahead of sending money between parties.
Reliable, Detailed Reporting
Businesses can manage their payout services with out of the box tools, customizable reporting, and detailed recordkeeping.
"In today's digital environment, it's vital that businesses of all sizes can securely access and send funds in near real-time, whenever and wherever their work takes them," said Silvana Hernandez, Executive Vice President, Product and Engineering, North America, Mastercard. "By working with Finix, we're helping businesses meet the demands of our always-on digital world, enabling them to seamlessly integrate Mastercard Send into their day-to-day operations to move money safer, faster and more efficiently."
"Visa Direct provides a single point of access and reach to over 8.5B+ endpoints capability, including 3B+ eligible cards, 3B+ bank accounts and 2.5B+ wallets around the world," said Yanilsa Gonzalez-Ore, North America Head, Visa Direct. "This collaboration reflects our shared commitment to streamlining global money movement and we're excited to bring streamlined disbursement capabilities to more businesses across the U.S., enabled by Visa Direct."
About Finix
Finix is a full-stack payment processor and infrastructure provider powering customers such as Clubessential, Passport, and Kabbage. From startups to publicly traded companies, Finix offers everything needed to deliver a world-class payments experience. Leading software platforms, marketplaces, retail, and e-commerce businesses use Finix's universal payments API and dashboard to accept payments, automate workflows, enhance customer experiences, and quickly grow revenue.
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Payments
Plooto | January 16, 2024
Plooto, a leading payment automation solution for small-to-midsized businesses (SMBs), has launched a payment orchestration offering that is custom-designed to support the complex workflows and security requirements of rapidly scaling businesses.
As the size and operational complexity of businesses increase, the risk of fraud and human error grows. This leads businesses to implement more rigorous security and control policies to keep the management of cash flow secure and reliable, placing additional burdens on finance teams including time, effort, and resources spent upgrading or building in-house solutions.
Similar challenges extend to accounting and bookkeeping firms, as their robust compliance processes and corresponding reputation are critical drivers of growth. Firms' ability to retain and expand client accounts hinges not only on strong relationships but also on their adherence to rigorous compliance standards, especially when it comes to financial data protection.
With this launch, Plooto brings to market the first solution in Canada to address these unique cash management challenges faced by midsize enterprises. This offering is priced at a competitive rate as organizations often cite cost as a barrier to adoption of cash management solutions. As volume and complexity of operations increase, businesses can trust Plooto to scale their needs seamlessly without straining their resources.
Coupling end-to-end payment automation with stringent security controls and seamless connection to enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, Plooto is now capable of helping even more businesses scale efficiently within their ecosystem.
Building upon Plooto’s core offering of simplified, all-in-one payables and receivables automation, new capabilities include
Dual Controls: Limits human error and protects against fraud through comprehensive approvals on changes to sensitive financial information Single Sign-On: Enterprise-level safeguards that enable security personnel to manage both user access to sensitive data and removal from a centralized hub as teams scale Integration with Oracle Netsuite: Seamless two-way sync automates reconciliation protecting against costly human error, reducing billable hours, and helping finance teams save time
"Our new offering enables finance teams to easily scale their workflows and gain the visibility they crucially need into their cash flow,” says Hamed Abbasi, Co-Founder and CEO of Plooto. “I’m thrilled that Plooto is expanding how we support growing SMBs, and that we are the first company to fill this critical gap for Canadian businesses.”
Having recently been awarded with Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500™ and Technology Fast 50™ designations for a staggering 3-year 433% growth rate, Plooto continues to provide industry-leading support for SMBs with a platform that enhances cash management through its all-in-one payment automation. Plooto has also recently expanded its leadership team, bringing extensive experience from major financial services companies such as Varo Bank, Xero, and PayPal.
About Plooto
Plooto partners with growing small-to-midsize businesses to give them complete control over their cash management. The all-in-one payment automation platform securely automates all payable and receivable workflows, offers extensive payment capabilities, and seamless integration with accounting software to automatically reconcile invoices. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Toronto, Plooto serves over 10,000 North American businesses, and integrates with top accounting software platforms Quickbooks, Xero, and NetSuite. Simplifying complex processes at scale, Plooto is the financial engine businesses rely on to achieve their growth potential.
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Payments
ServiceNow | January 25, 2024
ServiceNow the leading digital workflow company making the world work better for everyone, announced a five-year strategic alliance with Visa, a world leader in digital payments, to transform payment services. The initial phase includes the launch of ServiceNow Disputes Management, Built with Visa—a single, connected disputes resolution solution for issuers.
Managing disputes currently involves multiple systems and teams, and many financial institutions often use siloed solutions that are not fully integrated with one another. This disconnected approach creates complexity, delays crediting and resolving disputes, can create potential losses, and ultimately, impacts the customer experience. ServiceNow Disputes Management, Built with Visa is a streamlined solution that blends the best of ServiceNow’s AI-first platform and the company’s Financial Services Operations solution with Visa’s deep technology investments. Each year, Visa helps prevent $30 billion in fraud for consumers and small businesses using cutting edge technology, including tokenization and AI, deployed throughout the entire payments ecosystem, including disputes management.
“At the heart of our alliance is a commitment to build industry-leading products that help financial institutions boost employee productivity, create great customer experiences, and drive business growth,” said John Ball, senior vice president and general manager, customer and industry workflows, ServiceNow. “By making Visa’s services available through ServiceNow’s intelligent, AI-first platform, we’re powering innovation and setting a new standard in the payments industry.”
“Solving customer pain points is core to our business at Visa, and collaborating with an industry leader like ServiceNow will allow us to help issuer partners resolve disputes more efficiently,” said Vanessa Colella, global head of innovation and digital partnerships, Visa. “ServiceNow and Visa look forward to offering clients the latest technology solutions, so they can focus on delivering an excellent experience for their customers.”
ServiceNow Disputes Management, Built with Visa will unite the entire dispute management process – from the first indication that a charge is questionable to early resolution, investigation, and final resolution. It includes a single experience for solving disputes so that employees can have high quality engagements with cardholders, as well as dashboards, automation, alerts, and the ability to audit all transactions.
Two standout features enhance its efficiency: a modern, user-friendly low code platform that allows financial institutions to make swift updates to their disputes management process, and generative AI-powered experiences that improve customer intake and agent investigation. The solution also incorporates ongoing changes to disputes rules and applies industry best practices for processes, workflows, and staying ahead of fraud.
“Banks should prioritize their CX efforts around the drivers that most influence customer loyalty. For example, resolving problems and issues quickly remains one of the most important drivers of CX and retention for many banks,” wrote Alyson Clarke, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “Banks that adopt modern and flexible digital banking processing platforms will find it easier and faster to deliver innovative (and profitable) customer solutions.”1
ServiceNow is committed to revolutionizing financial services with new products and services. This initial integration marks the beginning of a more extensive, multi-phased relationship between Visa and ServiceNow. The companies will continue to build new solutions and will distribute Visa products and services to joint customers. Together, ServiceNow and Visa will help clients improve dispute management.
1Forrester, Consumer Banking Trends, 2024: Trends Shaping Retail Consumer Banking In The Current Economic Climate, Jan 17, 2024
About ServiceNow
ServiceNow makes the world work better for everyone. Our cloud‑based platform and solutions help digitize and unify organizations so that they can find smarter, faster, better ways to make work flow. So employees and customers can be more connected, more innovative, and more agile. And we can all create the future we imagine. The world works with ServiceNowTM.
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