You might not know who Killer Mike is and what is his connection to digital banking.
Killer Mike is a hard-core hip-hop rapper who is known as a social and political activist, with a strong stance on social inequality and systemic racism. Killer Mike has recently launched his own digital banking platform for Black and Latinx people – Greenwood’s digital bank. Greenwood digital banks’ mission is to serve Black, Latinx, and other communities that have historically struggled to gain capital.
Like its US counterparts Chime, Aspiration Money Lion, and Vero, Greenwood is a digital bank whose financial services – including checking and savings accounts, mobile deposits, and peer-to-peer transfers – are fulfilled almost entirely mobile and online. Unlike its financial brethren, Greenwood’s target audiences are Black and Latinx communities and anyone else who wants to support Black-owned businesses.
Greenwood is a cool example of the quiet financial revolution that sweeping the world – socially inspired fintech organizations. Whether they are challenger banks, neo banks, digital banks – their value propositions cater to specific customer segments— dissatisfied, underbanked, or unbanked, and often with basic banking needs. These customers share similar expectations in what they seek: transparency (e.g., no hidden or excessive fees); ease (no lengthy, paper-based documentation, endless branch or phone queues); and accessibility (banking services wherever, whenever) in their experience.
In the past 5 years over 1500 such financial institutions have mushroomed throughout the world. These digital-based disrupters have impacted the banking ecosystem and have altered the financial landscape forever. Moreover, the Coronavirus Pandemonic has intensified the need for online and mobile banking, making the need for digital banking more prominent.
The increasing popularity of online and mobile banking channels has also opened new vulnerabilities and new opportunities for fraudsters. 2020 has been a particularly difficult year for financial institutions when it comes to fraud.
According to a recent report in the first half of 2020 “21 % of all fraud, attacks were waged on mobile transactions in the first half of the year and 37 % of them originated from mobile devices” (PAYMENTS, Oct. 2020).
While in the past fraud prevention and authentication was rather a simple process in a brick and mortar setting, digital fraud prevention and authentication becomes more complicated. In the digital world authentication is based on a “digital claim”, a person is stating that she is who she is. As such, today’s financial institutions require new tools to authenticate a person’s identity, tools that balance risk with other factors such as convenience, the velocity of transactions. Legacy based solutions such as SMS OTP, Captcha, username/password are simply no longer relevant. The shift to digital now requires financial transactions to include a fine-balance between security, usability, and privacy.
This is where Paygilant comes in.
Paygilant is a frictionless digital banking and payment fraud prevention solution that is designed to eliminate the trade-off between strong fraud prevention, frictionless authentication, and user privacy.
Paygilant enables financial institutions to boost their revenue, by enhancing the user experience and preventing fraud before the transaction occurs. It’s an easy-to-integrate patented technology, utilizes six proprietary Intelligence Sets, which work in harmony to deliver value from day one. Paygilant simply triggers a real-time “risky” score when fraud is detected, and a “safe” one when a legitimate customer has been authenticated.
Paygilant would be a perfect fit for Killer Mike’s Greenwood bank, and all another challenger/neo banks on the rise.
