HSBC Asset Management, the investment arm of Britain’s HSBC Group, has led a seed round of $4 million in Singapore’s customer intelligence and risk assessment startup Bizbaz, the two said Friday.
Founded in June 2019, Bizbaz offers its proprietary customer intelligence and risk management solutions to banks, insurance companies and fintech startups. The startup has attracted nearly 20 people with backgrounds in behavioral science, health tech, AI and data.
“The problem we’re trying to solve is to empower and enable, whether they are a financial institution, a fintech company or any kind of a B2C company that’s trying to acquire or onboard new customers,” said Hayk Hakobyan, CEO and co-founder of Bizbaz, in an interview with TechCrunch.
In several Asian countries, as high as 80% of the local population does not have credit bureau data and scores to help banks and companies understand their financial position and efficiently underwrite their lending. Bizbaz is attempting to solve this issue by exploring alternative ways to build credit profiles of individuals.
Several firms in Asia are taking a similar approach today, sifting through people's social media profiles and telco records. Hakobyan said this kind of research requires high accuracy, and some industry practices raise privacy concerns.
In contrast, Bizbaz looks at the available data attributes, including social media profiles and the apps people have installed — and frequently use — on their smartphones. It can also assess someone’s personality and their ability to bear risk by speaking with them for 45 seconds if they don’t have a smartphone, Hakobyan claimed.
Analyzing individuals’ risk appetite through their multiple digital footprints helps the startup limit the instances of false positives and flag people trying to trick the system.
“Of course, false positives cannot be 0% because theoretically, you cannot eliminate all this kind of cases, but we do as most as can be done technologically to potentially eliminate or diminish the chances of that by very extensively training our data systems before even the test, during the test and by the time they reach the actual deployment,” Hakobyan noted.
Bizbaz has different templates based on countries and industries. It also tailor-made its solutions by incorporating data from its clients to meet their specific demands — rather than using a single offering for all its customers.
The development team at Bizbaz mainly works from the Middle East, while its data team is in India and its sales, business development and product teams operate from Southeast Asia.
The investment from HSBC, which doesn't typically back early-stage startups, is noteworthy for Bizbaz. Hakobyan said the startup's suite of solutions — and support from New Jersey-based VC firm SOSV — helped inked the deal.
“In ASEAN, the middle class is expected to more than double between now and 2030, to reach 334 million people. Financial services are likely to expand at the same pace if not faster. Our investment in Bizbaz provides a compelling exposure to this market shift in the region and other developing economies. It will support the development of its technology, which overcomes the major obstacle of on-boarding clients with no previous financial records,” said Remi Bourrette, head of Venture Investments, HSBC Asset Management, in a prepared statement.
The startup is exploring to deploy its solutions within parts of HSBC in Asia and Europe, Hakobyan said, adding that it would continue to have the autonomy and the ability to bring in other partners as well as customers including new banks and insurance companies.
Bizbaz plans to spend 20-30% of its fresh funding on outreach and marketing as it has so far generated sales through word of mouth and references. The startup also aims to upgrade its Web presence, recruit more data and software developers as well as data and behavioral analysts and spend some resources on product development, Hakobyan told TechCrunch.
Paul Redbourn, a senior advisor and chief of staff at Bizbaz, said the startup organically made a positive month-on-month growth in revenues.
The all-equity round also saw the participation of Southeast Asian venture capital firm Vynn Capital and new angel investors alongside follow-on investments from SOSV and existing angel investors. Before the latest round, Bizbaz raised $300,000 in an angel round.
The Swiss franc is not highly valued despite its nominal rise, Swiss National Bank Chairman Thomas Jordan told a Swiss newspaper, adding the central bank intended to be deliberately vague about how it sees the safe-haven currency. His comments come as the SNB focuses on using franc strength to fight inflation after years of currency intervention and negative interest rates to keep a lid on the franc for fear it would cripple the export-dependent economy.
(Reuters) -Canada's main stock index ended flat in volatile trading on the last day of a quarter that has been plagued with worries around economic growth and hawkish central bank policy actions. The Toronto Stock Exchange's S&P/TSX composite index provisionally ended up 2.38 points, or 0.01%, at 18,444.22, after climbing to the day's high of 18,685.04. "It does look like pretty much the whole market is braced for recession," said Elvis Picardo, portfolio manager at Luft Financial, iA Private Wealth.
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NEW YORK (AP) — You'll no longer be able to store your precious coins, jewelry and paperwork at JPMorgan Chase & Co., as the bank has stopped opening new safety deposit boxes for customers. A spokesman for the bank said Chase decided late last year to stop offering new deposit boxes to customers as a “business decision” but declined to share specifics. Customers who have a box with Chase will be able to keep the box as long as the branch stays open, but they will not be able to open a new one at
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On September 29th, 2022, the three-day Global Tobacco and Nicotine Forum 2022 (GTNF) with the theme of "ACCESSING INNOVATION", successfully held at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington DC,USA.
Kroger said it has made several attempts since February to negotiate with the pharmacy benefit manager for a "more equitable and fair contract that lowers cost, increases access, and delivers greater transparency, but there has been little to no progress to date". Kroger said more than 90% of Kroger Health's customers will not be affected by a termination of the deal, but if a new agreement is not reached by Dec. 31, most Express Scripts' commercial customers won't be able to fill prescriptions at Kroger stores.
Procrastinating beats selling out, but rebalancing is even better
MEXICO CITY (AP) — A massive trove of emails from Mexico’s Defense Department is among electronic communications taken by a group of hackers from military and police agencies across several Latin American countries, Mexico's president confirmed Friday. The acknowledgement by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador comes after Chile’s government said last week that emails had been taken from its Joint Chiefs of Staff. The Mexican president spoke at his daily news conference following a local media
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HELSINKI (AP) — Latvia held a general election Saturday amid divisions over Russia's attack on Ukraine among the Baltic country’s sizable ethnic-Russian minority. An exit poll predicted that the center-right will win the most votes but whoever forms the next government will face huge war-induced energy concerns. A joint exit poll forecast that center-right New Unity party of Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins would win the election, capturing 22.5% of the vote. The poll was done by the Riga Stradin
Ben & Jerry's says parent company Unilever Plc wrongly transferred brand names out of reach of its independent board more than 20 years ago in an updated lawsuit over its business in Israel filed on Friday in federal court. The Vermont ice cream maker says that Unilever "covertly" moved its trademarks to a Unilever business unit in 2000 and 2001, a move that violated a merger agreement with the consumer goods conglomerate. Ben & Jerry's originally filed the lawsuit against a Unilever subsidiary in July to try to block the sale of its business in Israel and the West Bank to a local licensee, Avi Zinger.
LONDON (Reuters) -Ratings agency Standard & Poor's cut the outlook for its AA credit rating for British sovereign debt on Friday to "negative" from "stable" as it judged Prime Minister Liz Truss's tax cut plans would cause debt to keep rising. Finance minister Kwasi Kwarteng announced around 45 billion pounds ($50 billion) of permanent, unfunded tax cuts on Sept. 23 as well as costly temporary subsidies to household and business energy bills, sending sterling and bond markets into a tailspin. S&P – which ranks British government debt one notch higher than rivals Moody's and Fitch – said it saw British public debt on an upward trajectory, in contrast to a previous forecast that it would fall as a share of gross domestic product from 2023.
Peloton Interactive Inc has reached a settlement of a lawsuit in which Lululemon Athletica Inc accused the exercise bike maker of infringing its patents by developing a line of apparel for women. Without admitting wrongdoing, Peloton has agreed to phase out "certain designs" that Lululemon had objected to in a lawsuit, the companies said in a joint statement on Friday. "The parties have negotiated a mutually agreeable settlement, and are pleased the matters could be resolved amicably, resulting in dismissal of the pending litigation between them," the companies said.
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