Recent Press

Check out some nice mentions for Andera in the press recently:

• Front page Providence Journal article (article)
• TV Interview on WPRI's Newsmakers (video starts around 15:00)

BankSimple

We’re thrilled to become part of the customer experience revolution that’s brewing at BankSimple (see their blog post and our press release from today). It’s exactly the kind of innovation that we wanted to drive when we exposed our account opening system as a development platform. We’ll be powering the application and funding risk management components of their online application, staying behind the scenes so they can tightly control their user experience and integration with the rest of their online banking experience. They're still under wraps but we're as excited as everyone else to see what they've got cooking.

Top Five Reasons Why Risk Management Should Buy Into Online Account Opening

Andera's own Renee Chicoine was published today in the Credit Union Times arguing why a financial institution's risk management team should buy into online account opening. Click here for the full article.

Online account openers: cooks, dog lovers, and...gamblers?

I've become very excited about opportunities to leverage the power of our 500+ customer network. FortiFI is a great example of how we're doing that, and we've also started tapping the Network on behalf of clients to help them be more successful with online account opening through data and best practices. The research that’s out there today about online account openers is generally survey based, while ours is direct observation of actual online account openers. The ground truth.

Next week, we'll hold a Webinar to unveil some initial findings that many will find interesting, and the invite is below. Expect a lot more as we dive into insights based on demographics, product types, regional markets, institution type, etc.

In the last year, we have processed millions of online account applications for over 500 institutions. Recently, we studied consumers who applied online to learn what separates them from the general population--and even we were a little surprised by the results. Did you know that Online Account Openers are much more likely than their peers to be interested in cooking, dogs, travel, and...gambling?
 
Wait until you see what else we learned about their wealth and income… The research shows that online account checking account openers are, indeed, a unique and valuable group of consumers--that you can target. Interested in learning more?

Register Now for the Webinar!

In Search of Online Account Openers

Tuesday, June 21 at 2 pm ET

FortiFI featured by NetBanker

NetBanker had a nice write up this morning on FortiFI - check it out here.

FortiFI - The Official Announcement

Today we officially announced FortiFI, the latest addition to our suite of customer acquisition solutions for financial institutions (view press release here). FortiFI is a new kind of fraud prevention system that uses real-time data patterns to stop online account opening fraud before it's too late, and fills a gap in the market we've observed directly through experience and customer feedback.

In a nutshell, the idea is that our 500+ financial institution customers represent a significant portion of the banks and credit unions who open accounts online today, which gives us an incredible look down into application patterns that are only visible at wide scale.

For example, let's say a fraud ring steals a victim's credit file, and uses it to apply for checking accounts at a number of different financial institutions with the intent of overdrawing them or utilizing pre-approved loans. The individual banks take the losses, report the identity to the credit bureaus, and by then the fraud ring is on to the next victim.

FortiFI is able to intervene early on, before most banks get hit – when it sees patterns representing elements of common identities or usage patterns multiple times across our customer base, it is able to flag subsequent applications in real time and quarantine them before they get through. Of course sophisticated fraud rings use patterns that are more complex than a common identity, and the beauty of FortiFI is that it is tuned to pick up on subtleties, learns over time, and adapts to emerging patterns automatically as the fraudsters evolve.

FortiFI will be pre-integrated with our account opening platform, as well as available independently through an API within our developer platform so that financial institutions using home-grown or competitive account opening systems can integrate with it seamlessly.

Introducing FortiFI

Tomorrow at 2:00 EST, we'll be unveiling FortiFI, Andera's new fraud prevention service for online account opening. During this free Webinar event, Andrea Hunter from our product team will be introducing the product and its unique capabilities to reduce fraud by leveraging our network of 500+ financial institution customers.

Click here for the registration link: http://bit.ly/lqeZ7k

Growth Is Hard (Part 4)

Back in 2008, I wrote a series of posts called Growth Is Hard in which I put some context around the growing pains we were experiencing at the time. You can see the posts here, here, and here. At the time, we had grown quickly from 50 to 200 clients, and from 20 to 50 employees, and for a few months experienced some well-publicized capacity (both system and support) issues that thankfully were resolved.

Since then, we have not been perfect but have generally executed well and grown steadily. Yet here I am writing a new post called Growth Is Hard (Part 4)--so what gives? Several trends have emerged recently which could all be filed in the "good" category. Our pace of customer adoption has increased significantly (see my last post on reaching 500 customers). We are seeing great traction on some new products in the pipeline. Transaction volumes are increasing as a result of an improving economy and financial regulation causing higher levels of bank switching. We have expanded our team significantly with world-class people. All good, right?

In the long term, absolutely. But in the short term, we are going through some growing pains again. Some clients have experienced several brief periods of downtime over the past few months, including two partial outages on March 29th. Over the same period, our turnaround times on certain implementation and support projects have increased, in some cases to frustrating and frankly unacceptable levels. We've seen this movie before and should have recognized the signs earlier--always easier in hindsight--so I wanted to use this forum to describe what's happening and what we're doing about it.

To provide some context, we just reached 500 financial institution customers, and it was only eight months ago that we surpassed 400. To support this type of accelerating growth, we have been making very significant investments in people and infrastructure--for example, we:

• Are growing our headcount by more than 50% (from 60 to 90+ people), particularly within Client Services and Engineering
• Made major commitments in our roadmap to configuration tools, scalability, and a modular architecture
• Recently raised $10.5 million of fresh capital for future investment and to keep our balance sheet strong
• Are developing tools to turn around common change requests in days or hours; Later this year we will be running a pilot program to put these tools directly into our customers’ hands for instant turnaround
• Added or promoted several new key managers recently, including Ken Young as VP of Client Services, Fred Engel as Chief Operating Officer, Alayna Cohn as Director of IT, Alex Abramov as Chief Architect, Shawn Brandt as VP Engineering, Jamie Verdi as Director of Account Management, and Suzanne Reynolds as Director of Channel Accounts, all of whom have flawless execution as a primary objective and are focused on this every day.

Based on these steps, we expect steady progress and a return to normal service levels within the next 60 to 90 days, followed by constant improvement to new levels over the course of the year.

I know it's risky to talk about these issues in public and that some will choose to use the information against us. But transparency and trust are key values in our culture and we believe customers prefer knowing the real story and to know there are great people behind the scenes taking the issues seriously and working hard to make things better.

As always, customers and partners are welcome to call me directly at 401.574.4770 any time.