Qapital Secures $30M in New Financing via PRNewswire
Create personal Alexa skills in minutes via Amazon
Win gear to boost your content creation via YouTube
Welcome to a new FPPad fintech briefing, Here are the top fintech stories you need to know today.
Qapital Raises $30 Million
The savings and goal-setting app Qapital announced it raised $30 million dollars in new capital this week, bringing its total fundraising to just over $47 million, according to data from Crunchbase. Qapital launched in the US in 2015 and helps users automate their savings using rules like automatic transaction round-ups, forced savings when shopping at specific stores, perhaps for your frequent coffee splurges, and also integrates with If This Then That to trigger savings for almost any event you can think of.
While its unfortunate that Qapital does not pay interest on savings held in customer accounts, the app does encourage its users to refer their friends to Qapital by paying a $5 referral fee for each new sign up.
Amazon Publishes Skill Blueprints for Alexa Skills
Do you want to try your hand at making personal skills for Amazon Alexa, but don’t know how? This week, Amazon released a new feature called Skill Blueprints, which allows Amazon Echo owners to choose from twenty pre-built skill templates to customize your own voice experience. Select from Blueprints like frequently asked questions for your houseguests, custom flash card quizzes, adventure stories for your kids, and more. The Skill Blueprints are a quick and easy way Echo owners can get more utility out of the voice command devices, which I believe is the next frontier in the client experience between financial advisers and their clients.
Win Gear for Video and Podcast Production
And finally, would you like to win some free gear to boost the production quality of your videos and podcasts? Then head over to the FPPad YouTube channel to see our videos from the 2018 NAB Show, where I’m giving away a Joby GripTight Action Kit for your mobile phone, a Grip Gear Movie Maker Kit, and a free one-year subscription to the Soundstripe music licensing service.
All you have to do is give each video a thumbs up, subscribe to the FPPad YouTube channel, and leave a comment on each video to be eligible to win.
Head over to fppad.com/flashbriefing to find the links to my videos from the NAB Show as well as the other links to today’s top stories.
I’m Bill Winterberg, and those are your fintech headlines for today from FPPad.com. Check back in with me later for more fintech news.
