Featured Finance Startup: Backbase
Our featured finance startup this week is Backbase, a software company. Backbase is a portal for commercial banking that streamlines online interactions with customers on multiple devices.
Backbase designs products that improve the lives of real people. Their vision and mission are as follows:
We have created the world’s leading lean customer experience platform. It has been designed to help you organize, create, and manage deeply relevant customer experiences across all channels, on any device to delight your customers, and deliver measurable business results. We believe that customer experience management is essential for today’s organizations to stand out from the crowd, stay relevant to their customers, and grow their business.
Our mission is to help organizations transition smoothly into truly customer-centric businesses by adopting the outside-in approach that has worked so well for us and our customers. We believe that every enterprise will find success through customer-centric innovation.
Recognition
Backbase software is used by enterprises of all sizes to create customer-centric digital experiences that drive self-service and engagement, fuel online revenues, and maximize their customer’s online experience. Global 2000 companies such as AIG, ABN Amro, Al Rajhi Bank, Bank of America, Barclays, Costco, Deutsche Bank, GE, ING, and Visa are standardizing on their lean portal technology.
Backbase has been placed in the Visionary quadrant of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portal technology. Visionaries demonstrate a firm grasp of emerging customer needs and the potential impact of new technology. Gartner coined the term ‘lean portal’ when talking about Backbase and stated that “the lean nature of Backbase Portal and its focus on widgets and WOA allows organizations to assemble and deploy portals rapidly, compared with other portal providers. Backbase has made a strong business out of reclaiming failed or stagnant portal initiatives founded on other Java-oriented vendors’ technologies. Customers report rapid deployment and development compared to traditional portal vendors.Backbase has many signature customers, some with multi-million-user portals. Healthy revenue growth and the number of licenses as a percentage of overall revenue reassure viability.”
Backbase was also praised in Gartner’s report, The Great Portal Divide, in which they stated that by “by 2015, widgets will surpass portlets as the most prevalent portal component model”. Additionally, Forrester Research recently published a report, called The Online Customer Engagement Software Ecosystem, in which Backbase is counted as one of the “New Breed of Customer Engagement Vendors”
Finance
Backbase provides the kind of technology that is changing the way people and businesses save, invest and manage their money.
Crain’s New York Business listed Backbase in a list of Startups that were showing off their products at FINOVATE in New York City recently. Crain’s states:
None of these New York startups is a bank, yet all are providing the kind of technology that is changing the way people and businesses save, invest and manage their money.
These companies at the intersection of finance and technology are among the leading-edge startups in what is perhaps the hottest corner of Silicon Alley, attracting investment money and selling out conferences like Finovate, which took place earlier this month in Manhattan.
Using the Internet, mobile technology and data analysis, these financial-technology startups are upending traditional models of lending, saving and bill payment. Some companies are competing with banks, using their technology to disrupt longtime lending practices; others, like firms that help detect fraud, could be acquired by banks. Still others could be the target of big tech companies looking to get into the burgeoning industry. These startups, for example, could enable consumers and small businesses to bypass banks, credit-card companies and payday lenders to meet their short-term needs.
By G+ Author: Elizabeth Steinfeldt.