MX, a Utah-based software firm developing a suite of aggregation and analysis tools for financial institutions, today revealed that it’s secured $100 million in series B financing, bringing the firm’s total raised to $175 million following a $75 million series C round last year. Battery Ventures led the round, which saw participation from a raft of new investors H.I.G. Capital, Point72 Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, and Cross Creek Capital; existing investors Industry Ventures, Digital Garage, TTV Capital, and Commerce Ventures; and customers National Bank of Canada and Washington Federal.
The cash infusion comes as year-over-year revenue growth remains steady at 65% and as MX’s client base eclipses 1,800 financial institutions, including 40 of the top 50 digital banking providers and 15% of banks and credit unions in the U.S. (among them Ally, BBVA, BECU, Hughes Federal Credit Union, National Bank, and ATB Financial). CEO Ryan Caldwell tells VentureBeat that user growth rose 10% in the past two years and that MX is both cash-flow positive and profitable.
“MX has been growing rapidly while operating profitably the past two years. We are at an inflection point and this funding will help fuel our growth exponentially,” said Caldwell, a former enterprise risk services analyst in Deloitte’s security services group who founded MX in 2011 with Brandon Dewitt. “The strategic partners we selected give us even deeper market expertise while broadening our reach throughout the financial services industry. The investment further validates and gives fuel to MX’s vision to empower the world to be financially strong by changing the way financial institutions serve their customers — all starting with clean data.”
MX credits much of its success with a processing flow that begins with collecting, enhancing, and analyzing data and ends with presenting and acting on it. To that end, MX draws on links to over 16,000 financial institutions in the U.S. and Canada with over 48,000 connections to translate jargony transaction descriptions into plain English, and to add automatic categorization to transaction feeds. All the while, cloud-hosted dashboards afford visibility into which payments are classified as bills, direct deposit, and fees so that managers can targeted users with special offers and campaigns.
MX claims that in one test, its algorithms achieved categorization accuracy rates of over 90%, or 30 percentage points higher than the closest competitor.
MonyMap with Pulse — MX’s personal financial management product — provides end users with insights and financial advice across checking accounts, credit cards, loans, and more. Proactive alerts prompt account holders to reduce their spending when they exceed predefined budget thresholds, and to investigate recurring payments that appear to be anomalously high one month. Banks and financial firms gain access to a library of over 120 built-in categories to create unique spending visualizations, and can tap tools that help to aggregate accounts and keep tabs on users’ net worths and debt management.
MX provides a mobile white-label in Helios by MX, which boasts proactive alerting tools in addition to integration with vendor features like RDC and peer-to-peer payments. Customers can deploy adaptive offers using in-app notifications and embedded banners, the efficacy of which they can track in real time. And perhaps better still, Helios apps are cross-platform compatible with Windows, iOS, Android, and more, developed from a single codebase and optimized for each operating system.
MX additionally offers an account and identity verification solution that cross-references end users’ account and routing information and that checks pertinent information like names, phone numbers, address information, and more. Its analytics service — Insight — contains more than 100 preloaded interactive visualizations that show interest rates, engagement, account types, logins by month, accounts per user, and other data, and that collates data from users’ internal and external accounts for competitive analysis.
According to Battery Ventures general partner Michael Brown, financial institutions have experienced four times growth in digital engagement and five times growth in deposits as a result of MX’s data.
“Data is becoming more important in every industry, including financial services, and we are thrilled to support MX in its mission to leverage modern data to help drive better customer experience and engagement for banks and credit unions; it leads to financial strength for everyone,” said Brown, a new MX board member. “The company is powering some of the top financial institutions in the world and has the potential to become an important disruptor in the fintech industry.”
Source: VentureBeat
