A ‘zero-fraud’ guarantee for online money transfers? One company tries to make it work

Zero-fraud might seem a mythic promise for the constantly targeted payments remittance business. And yet, one financial technology startup offers just that.

Financial tech upstart Ingo Money began offering digital money transfer and risk services last month. With the increasing global nature of digital commerce and financial remittance, fraud is also on the rise here, hence offers of IT security are key.

As the Pymnts.com website reported, Ingo Money brought its inbound digital transfer and risk services to market in May, taking a novel approach to fraud and risk management: an application programming interface (API) that promises limited fraud. The company’s chief product officer told Pyments.com that it does this by collecting customer risk attributes from the client and, in the background, watches for telltale signs of fraud.

“Money can make people moody,” according to a tweet from TechCrunch writer Natasha Mascarenhas, on June 6. “There are layers of privilege, or lack thereof, that can make even the simplest conversation about bills feel like baggage to deal with. Translate that discomfort to relationships and it can feel like an awkward — and fragmented — dance on who pays which bill when (and how).”

CEO and co-founder Kahlil Lalji of startup Ivella launched a split account product that raised $3.5 million in funding from Anthemis, Financial Venture Studio and Soma Capital. Other investors include Y Combinator, DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder and Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia.

Lalji, who helped creators with digital content before jumping into the fintech world, said that the startup was “born out of his own frustration at the expectation that couples would just use Venmo unless they were married.”

With a shared card, couples can set ratios — maybe prorate what percent of each bill someone pays depending on their income — and Ivella will automatically split any transactions made using the Ivella debit card.

According to Lalji: “We have some real-time decision logic to determine what are the balances of these two user accounts? Can both users support their end of the payment based off of their default split? If so, move the money and then send back an approval.”

“The place that a lot of people fall short, just like a lot of fintech falls short, is that they don’t break the mold of what banking looks and feels like,” Lalji said. “And because we’re focused specifically on couples, we want to build a product that feels not so sterile and not just like a bank.”