Iceland’s financial services industry has changed rapidly over the past couple of years with fintech solutions at the forefront of these changes.
Innovative fintech solutions are provided by the three largest commercial banks in the country, namely Landsbankinn, Íslandsbanki, and Arion Bank, but also by a growing list of independent businesses and startups which are leveraging cutting-edge technologies including artificial intelligence and blockchain to reinvent the sector.
The following are 9 fintech startups in Iceland to keep a close eye on.
Meniga
Founded in 2009, Meniga provides white-label digital banking solutions. Its award-winning products enable the world’s largest financial institutions to improve their online and mobile digital environment, enriching the customer experience of over 65 million digital banking users across 30 countries. Meniga has developed a framework for next-generation digital banking around advanced data consolidation and enrichment, meaningful customer engagement and new revenue opportunities.
Meniga’s portfolio of products includes personal finance management, automated real-time notifications, predictive analytics and personalized engagement technologies, targeted rewards and consumer data analytics.
Meniga has offices in Reykjavik, London, Stockholm, Helsinki, Warsaw, Barcelona and Singapore.
Monerium
Founded in 2015, Monerium is a regulated financial services company that aims to make currency more accessible, secure, and simple to transact. It is the world’s first and only company authorized to issue regulated e-money on blockchain.
Using e-money issued by Monerium, individuals and businesses can store and send programmable digital currency online without going through traditional financial institutions and payment providers.
Memento
Memento is a digital wallet specialist offering next-generation social payment platforms for banks.
The company is the developer of Kass, the payments app white-labeled by Íslandsbanki in 2016. Kass is designed to solve all payment needs within one wallet service, including paying friends, splitting costs, buying online or instore and more.
The solution has received numerous accolades and awards. It was named Best of Show at Finovate 2017 and won the Icelandic Web Awards in January 2017.
Greiðslumiðlun
Founded in 2012, Greiðslumiðlun offers registration and payment solutions for businesses, organizations and government agencies.
Among the solutions that the company offers and operates are Pei, a comprehensive mobile payments solution, Nóri, an online registration and payments system for sports clubs, courses, schools and municipalities, and Redo, a subscription system with a variety of payment options.
Authenteq
Authenteq provides an omni-channel identity verification and know-your-customer (KYC) solution that allows end-users to verify their identity through any channel without compromising their privacy.
The solution is fully automated and works seamlessly throughout desktop and mobile channels. For mobile, customers can integrate the process directly into their own apps through Authenteq’s App-in-App SDK, or can use the standalone Authenteq app.
Karolina Fund
Karolina Fund is a project management and crowdfunding platform for creative projects. Launched in 2012, the platform aims to become a next generation crowdsourcing and crowdfunding community. Its mission is to connect ideas, funds and talent to make creative projects possible that individuals can’t do alone.
Each project has a funding goal and a specific time limit set by the creator. In return for pledges to projects, creators offer rewards. If a project is successfully funded Karolina Fund takes a 8,5% success fee from total funds collected.
Payday
Payday, a service of software company Divot, makes invoicing and the return of public taxes for freelancers and small companies easy.
In a simple and straightforward way, users can create invoices that automatically appear in their Internet banking. Payday monitors the status of these invoices and when they are paid the user can choose to pay out salaries. Payday then takes care of returning all public taxes, including income tax, pension and VAT, automatically.
Lucinity
Lucinity is an intelligent anti-money laundering (AML) solution company that helps clients detect suspicious behavior patterns and improve review efficiency.
Lucinity provides a surveillance cloud solution that leverages the power of augmented intelligence to reduce process waste and improve regulatory compliance.
The company boasts a team of experts in compliance, AML, finance and tech, who held senior positions at Citigroup, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and NICE Systems, to name a few.
Invector
Invector is a provider of asset valuation data to the financial services industry. The company’s mission is to achieve accuracy in the pricing of disparate assets in markets with low trading frequency and to make the results useful in financial risk management.
Invector’s first two products, Pricepoint RRE and Pricepoint Cars, are geared towards mortgages and automotive loans. Making available optimal price updates at arbitrarily frequent intervals together with the full portfolio variance-covariance matrix, the Pricepoint systems establish a robust empirical foundation for sophisticated risk-management and pricing in asset-backed lending.
