Backflip raised $15 million in a Series A funding round to grow its platform for real estate investors.
The company’s real estate and FinTech platform is designed to provide funding and tools to the entrepreneurs who flip a collective total of 400,000 houses per year in the United States, Backflip said in a Monday (April 29) press release.
“We put information, support and capital products designed for entrepreneurs in the hands of more individuals in an industry that has historically had too many barriers to successfully starting and scaling,” Backflip CEO Josh Ernst said in the release.
Backflip’s technology and capital solutions help members manage their investment pipelines, secure funding and grow their real estate businesses, according to the release. The company delivers real-time data through mobile and desktop apps, helping members source, track, comp and evaluate potential investments and secure project financing.
The funding round comes after the company crossed $10 million in net revenue run rate and is approaching profitability, the release said. Backflip has funded more than 900 homes, with members realizing an average gross profit of $82,000 per property and typically repaying their loans in six months.
Backflip’s latest funding round was led by FirstMark Capital, per the release.
The advent of digital tools and platforms has brought about a shift in the process of purchasing a home, PYMNTS reported April 5. Central to this digital transformation are all-in-one platforms that streamline the home buying experience. These apps use advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, augmented reality and data analytics to offer users personalized recommendations, virtual tours and financial planning assistance.
In another development in the space, Built said in March that it expanded its construction and real estate finance platform to meet the needs of real estate owners and developers. The platform now helps these professionals manage budgets, streamline invoicing and compliance, move money and make decisions.
The platform now integrates budget management; compliance and payables workflow; and draw requests. It also features vendor management and embedded payments to help complete development deals on time and within budget.
Standard Chartered has made a number of changes to its leadership team.
The British banking giant announced Tuesday (March 11) that it had appointed Roberto Hoornweg, head of financial markets, and Sunil Kaushal, regional CEO for Africa and the Middle East, to serve as co-heads of corporate and investment banking.
They replace Simon Cooper, who had held the job since 2018 and is leaving Standard Chartered to “pursue other interests,” the bank said Tuesday in announcing a broader series of changes to its executive team.
“These changes will ensure we have the strongest possible team in place, with clear accountabilities, to drive our transformation efforts and bring renewed intensity to our focus on increased growth and returns through each of our business lines,” CEO Bill Winters said.
In addition to the investment banking appointments, the company has also given Judy Hsu — its CEO for consumer, private and business banking — responsibility for greater China and the north Asia markets.
Ben Hung, currently the bank’s CEO for Asia, will take on the new role of president, while human resources head Tanuj Kapilashrami, will assume the newly-created position of chief strategy and talented officer, the announcement said.
A report by Reuters notes that sources say the shake-up marks Winters’ last push to revitalize Standard Chartered’s talent amid China’s weak economic outlook. The report also said the moves were a surprise, and that Cooper had been considered a possible successor for the CEO.
The moves follow similar changes made by JPMorgan Chase earlier this year to its leadership and organizational structure.
“The senior management changes and new alignments announced today will help the company serve clients even better as well as further develop the company’s most senior leaders,” the bank said in January.
Among the changes is the combination of JPMorgan’s major wholesale businesses of Global Investment Banking, Commercial Banking, Corporate Banking, and Markets, Securities Services and Global Payments in an expanded Commercial & Investment Bank.
“Combining these efforts will enhance and deepen the way the company can seamlessly deliver the world’s most complete set of wholesale banking products and solutions,” the bank said.
Elsewhere in the banking space, HSBC has begun efforts to hire around 50 more commercial bankers as it steps up lending to tech and healthcare startups.
“There’s this void in the market and we’re jumping into it,” Wyatt Crowell, head of U.S. commercial banking for HSBC, told Reuters. “It’s gone way better than I thought it was going to go, both in terms of the volume of deals and our win rate on the deals.”
Worldline has launched a consultancy service to help its eCommerce clients gain revenue and improve payment operations.
The service, announced Tuesday (Sept. 26), is designed to help businesses optimize existing operations and identify new markets where cross-border transactions and revenues “are rising rapidly,” the payments company said.
“In payments, add-on consultancy services have typically been offered in a very transactional fashion with the express aim of selling additional products,” Matias Fainbrum, vice president, Worldline Consulting Services, said in a news release.
“Worldline Consulting Services has been set up very differently. We are adding a bespoke, value-enhancing layer on top of our existing customer support so our customers can optimize the way they operate.”
According to the release, the service combines three offerings: solution design and checkout user experience, online payments authorization rate optimization, and multi-currency pricing and foreign exchange (FX) management.
PYMNTS spoke last month with Andrew Monroe, global head of gaming and media at Worldline, on the idea of “creating both a meaningful and efficient experience for consumers.”
However, he added that strategies for achieving that goal will vary from merchant to merchant, thanks to differences in local payment preferences and practices across markets and regions.
Still, from a payments standpoint, Monroe said optimizing the checkout process is the place to begin, with merchants developing a seamless checkout flow that reduces cart abandonment and lost sales.
“They should get enthralled by the goods or services they want to buy and then get it,” he said. “Everything in between is the merchant facilitating the checkout experience.”
And although creating seamless experiences often means removing friction from the eCommerce process, Monroe said a certain level of friction might be needed to garner consumers’ trust, depending on the goods or services being purchased and the consumer’s country of location.
“Sometimes it’s good to have no friction or minimal friction to enable them to slide through that checkout experience as quickly as possible,” he said. “Other times friction is necessary, or else consumers will drop off because they lose trust with the process.”
Also last month, PYMNTS talked with Guillaume Tournand, VP of growth and digital commerce at Worldline, about the difficulties facing companies when the realities of cross-border payments intrude on their commercial opportunities.
“The best value proposition that plays in the payment ecosystem is to unlock for merchants complex, international economies and opportunities by doing the heavy lifting that opens up the growth potential in a neat and convenient way,” Tournand said.
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and FundingShield have partnered to enhance accessibility to wire fraud prevention tools in the financial services industry.
With the increasing prevalence of cybersecurity risks, lenders are placing greater emphasis on data integrity to prevent potential frauds, the companies said in a Tuesday (Sept. 5) press release.
FundingShield offers an ecosystem of service provider source bank data, providing over 95% coverage in the industry, according to the release. By partnering with TCS, FundingShield can offer its cost-saving and risk-mitigating solutions to TCS clients, enabling them to maintain high standards in data integrity, bank account verification and counterparty compliance.
This collaboration allows TCS to leverage FundingShield’s expertise and provide enhanced protection to their clients, the release said.
“Wire fraud prevention has become a mandatory capability as part of any mortgage solution, protecting lending institutions from multi-million dollar risks to the third-party closing, title and settlement entities,” Santhosh Ananthakrishnan, global head of mortgage strategic initiatives at TCS, said in the release.
Ike Suri, CEO of FundingShield, added: “TCS’s global presence, business acumen and trusted relationships with the world’s largest financial institutions will allow FundingShield to deliver its innovative products straight to the banks who need them the most.”
TCS is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that has been assisting some of the world’s largest businesses in their transformation journeys for over 55 years, according to the press release. As part of the Tata group, India’s largest multinational business group, TCS operates in 55 countries.
In one recent development, TCS signed an 840 million pound (about $1.1 billion) contract with British pension plan Nest for an initial period of 10 years. The contract is aimed at improving Nest’s administration services and could potentially be worth 1.5 billion pounds (about $1.9 billion) if extended for the entire 18-year tenure.
FundingShield is a FinTech company that offers B2B and B2B2C solutions to combat wire and title fraud, settlement risk, closing agent compliance and cyber threats, the release said. Its user-centric, plug-and-play tools are scalable, secure and cloud-based, providing transaction-level coverage and reducing operating costs for real estate investors and mortgage finance companies in the United States.