To find out what’s new on the horizon for fintech, Bank Automation News spoke with Matt Carbonara, managing director for the enterprise practice at fintech incubator and investor Citi Ventures.

A division of $2.4 trillion Citi, Citi Ventures invests in fintech startups and helps test, refine and launch solutions in automation, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), cloud, developer tools and other technologies.

“We try to understand the gaps that [fintechs] have around all those areas,” Carbonara said. In the last decade, Citi Ventures has made investments in some 110 companies that it believes could win Citi’s business and deliver a return on investment.

Here are three fintechs in which Citi Ventures has recently invested:

Skan.ai

Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., Skan.ai offers process discovery technology that draws on human-digital interactions to map, model and manage business processes.

A bank is essentially a collection of processes, Carbonara told BAN, and before they can be made more efficient, automated or reengineered, “you need to understand the processes and what you have.”

Skan.ai, founded in 2018, places a digital agent on end users’ desktops, mapping out the applications that users employ and which fields they use. This can also be done anonymously. For example, a user might take data from a field in customer relationship management software and place it in enterprise resource planning software.

The goal is to identify like processes that end-users employ and determine which are most efficient, as well as what could be automated.

Skan.ai has raised a total of $14 million in two funding rounds, according to Crunchbase, and in addition to Citi, it counts among its clients insurers Cigna and Unum, and investment and wealth management broker-dealer LPL Financial.

Nylas

Nylas, founded in 2013 and headquartered in San Francisco, has built an application programming interface (API) platform designed to connect to all email, calendar and contacts providers.

“That is a key enterprise data store that isn’t easy to integrate with but has a lot of valuable information” that can be particularly useful for developers, Carbonara said. It’s not only accessing that data but also being able to manipulate it, he added, or determine specific elements such as the sentiment of an email.

Nylas’s tech “makes it easy for companies to access that type of data, either externally or internally facing, to automate scheduling, build scheduling into applications and automate sending calendar invites,” Carbonara said.

Nylas has raised a total of $175 million in seven funding rounds, Crunchbase reports, and Citi Ventures participated in two of those.

Anvil

San Francisco-based Anvil has a paperwork automation platform that lets businesses design simplified online customer experiences and uses the tagline, “paperwork without the paper or the work.”

“If I have a paper process for customers when they’re getting onboarded or a PDF that customers complete and fax or email to me — something like that — Anvil lets you create a web form that the customer can interact with digitally via mobile or a traditional web interface,” Carbonara told BAN.

The idea is to allow developers at financial and other organizations to digitize and automate paper processes quickly and easily, he said.

The company was founded in 2018 and has raised a total of $5 million in one funding round, according to Crunchbase.

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