Author: azeeadmin

Six months ago, Roman, the cloud pharmacy for erectile dysfunction, dropped the ‘man’ to become ‘Ro.’ At the same time, the company raised a monstrous Series A funding round of $88 million and unveiled Zero, a product meant to help people quit smoking, a root cause of ED.

Now, Ro is addressing a different demographic. Today, it announces ‘Rory,’ a line of products for menopausal women. In total, Rory offers six products treating four conditions, with prices starting at $13 per month. Prescription medication and supplements for hot flashes, over-the-counter treatments for insomnia, prescription vaginal estrogen cream and an all-natural water-based lubricant for vaginal dryness, and Latisse, which helps grow eyelashes, are available for purchase and direct-to-consumer delivery.

All of these conditions, including hair loss and insomnia, can be associated with menopause, or the process, typically at midlife, in which a woman stops menstruating.

To use Rory, which launches in 47 states today, women must complete an online doctor’s visit before they can be prescribed a personalized treatment plan. Rory is also launching a Facebook group and an online community, called Roar, for menopausal women to provide support to one another and to discuss topics from sex positions that help with vaginal dryness to how to sleep better at night.

“We aren’t used to talking about issues like vaginal dryness,” Rory co-founder Rachel Blank told TechCrunch. “Right now, we have [millions] of women experiencing menopause. They are walking around and frankly, their vagina hurts and they are uncomfortable. Really, what we are building at Rory is a lot of the educational content around this to let women know they have choices and they can take control during this phase of life where they feel like their bodies are rebelling against them.”

Rory’s leadership team. From left to right: Melynda Barnes, Rachel Blank and Ro co-founder and CEO Zachariah Reitano.

Unsurprisingly, the Ro founders are all male. In order to launch Rory, the trio — Rob Schutz, Saman Rahmanian and Zachariah Reitano — had to bring on talent knowledgeable of women’s health. Rachel Blank, a former investor at General Catalyst, an investor in Ro, seemed like a natural choice. Blank joined Ro full-time in the fall after learning about the company’s long-term vision to create personalize healthcare for everyone. General Catalyst, for its part, had been an investor in Ro since its August 2017 seed round.

“I was watching their pitch and having had that experience myself and listening to the founders of Ro talk about how much of a difference this platform could make in the lives of men with stigmatized conditions, it really resonated with me that this could really be a powerful tool for women as well,” Blank said.

Blank herself was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome, a hormonal disorder that can cause the development of a number of cysts in the ovaries, at 21-years-old. She is joined by Rory clinical director Melynda Barnes, a surgeon and otolaryngologist, and Ro co-founder and chief executive officer Zachariah Reitano, who oversees Ro’s growing portfolio of spinout brands.

Ro has raised just over $90 million in venture capital funding to date, hitting a valuation of $154 million with its Series A, according to PitchBook. Its investors include Initialized Capital, Box Group and Slow Ventures, as well as angels like Y Combinator partner Aaron Harris, Benchmark’s Scott Belsky and the chief executives of Casper, Code Academy and Pill Pack.

The seven African-focused companies which presented as part of Y Combinator’s 200 strong cohort of Winter 2019 class of 200 startups may seem like a small percentage for such a large class, but it represents the growing significance of African ventures in YC’s universe.

Since 2016, the Silicon Valley accelerator—that provides seed funds and mentorship for early stage startups—has backed 25 companies located in Africa and another 10 with an Africa product focus, according to YC spokesperson Lindsay Amos.

Past YC Africa alumns covered here at TechCrunch include payments startup Paystack, logistics firm Kobo360, and VOD startup Afrostream (now shuttered).

Of the 7 Africa-oriented YC class who presented at demo day 2019, 5 originated in Nigeria and 1 in Tanzania. All 7 are fintech ventures with products targeted across currency trading, agriculture, healthcare, and education.

Here’s the skinny on the Africa focused startups that presented at Demo Day 2019.

Nala (Tanzania): A fintech service building internet-free mobile payments for Africa. Nala lets users pay bills, do p2p payments, and purchase cell phone minutes without an internet connection. The startup’s app is one of Google PlayStore’s Top Free Finance Apps in Tanzania, according to founder Benjamin Fernandes. Nala plans to leverage the seed funding and exposure from YC participation to raise additional capital to close its first seed round, he told TechCrunch.

54gene (Nigeria): 54gene aims to be the 23andMe for Africa. The company says that competitor data is limited because their users are mostly white. By focusing on Africa, the company can help detect and identify DNA markers that might otherwise go overlooked. Co-founder Abasi Ene-Obong has a PhD in cancer biology from the University of London.

VertoFX (UK): VertoFX is a B2B currency marketplace and international payment provider for frontier markets with an initial target market of Africa. The platform allows businesses to gain easy access to foreign currencies and make international payments seamlessly, providing clients with real-time and cheaper exchange rates, liquidity, and faster settlement periods. VertoFX’s founders are ex-bankers Anthony Oduwole and Ola Oyetayo. In an email to TechCrunch Oduu said there are currently 18 currencies on the platform and the ability to settle in 120 countries, including China and the U.S. 

Thrive Agric (Nigeria): The company helps smallholder farmers in Nigeria access crowdfunded loans to help grow their crops, as well as help them sell their produce. The company has worked with 14,000 farmers to date, with plans to reach 1,000,000 farmers across Africa by 2022 in what it says is a $54 billion market opportunity.

CredPal (Nigeria): A credit card company that allows consumers in Africa to make purchases across online and offline merchants and pay in fixed monthly installments. CredPal touts it cards as having the convenience of a credit card and the simplicity of fixed monthly repayments. The purpose is reducing the financial pressure faced by consumers in Africa and also improving their standard of living. The scope is Africa and it is currently operational in Nigeria. Founders are Fehintolu Olaogun and Olorunfemi Jegede.

Schoolable (Nigeria): Provides simple finance solutions for schools in Africa. There are 65 million students in Africa attending private schools, but tuition payments can be a pain point for parents paying for their child’s education. That’s because tuition payments are often due upfront and it’s more difficult than it should be for schools to keep track of payments. Schoolable is creating an invoicing app that helps ensure parents make payments on time, while also using the app to save directly for tuition.

Wallet.NG (Nigeria): A fintech app that allows people to send money to friends or family and pay bills with only the recipient’s phone number. Wallet helps users keep track of their spending through financial reporting available on the app.

As enterprises adopt cloud-native technologies like containers to build their applications, the next question they often have to ask themselves is how they adapt their data storage and management practices to this new reality, too. One of the companies in this business is the four-year-old Portworx, which has managed to attract customers like Lufthansa Systems, GE Digital and HPE with its cloud-native storage and data-management platform for the Kubernetes container orchestration platform.

Portworx today announced that it has raised a $27 million Series C funding round led by  Sapphire Ventures and the ventures arm of Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company. Existing investors Mayfield Fund and GE Ventures also participated, as well as new investors Cisco, HPE and NetApp, which clearly have a strategic interest in bringing Portworx’s storage offering to their own customers, too, and partnering with the company.

Portworx’s tools make it easier for developers to migrate data, create backups and recover them after an issue. The service supports most popular databases, including Cassandra, Redis and MySQL, but also other storage services. Essentially, it creates a storage layer for database containers or other stateful containers that your apps can then access, no matter where they run or where the data resides.

“As the cloud-native stack matures, Portworx’s leadership in the data layer is really what is highlighted by our funding,” Portworx CEO and co-founder Murli Thirumale told me. “We clearly have a significant number of customers, there is a lot of customer growth, our partner network is growing. What you are seeing is that within that cloud-native ecosystem, we have the maximum number of production deployments and that momentum is something we’re continuing to fuel and fund with this round.”

As Portworx CEO and co-founder Murli Thirumale told me, the company expanded its customer base by over 100 percent last year and increased its total bookings by 376 percent year-over-year. That’s obviously the kind of growth that investors want to see. Thirumale noted, though, that the company wasn’t under any pressure to raise at this point. “We were seeing such strong growth momentum that we knew we need the money to fuel the growth.” That means expanding the company’s sales force, especially internationally, as well as its support team to help its new customers manage their data lifecycle.

In addition to today’s funding round, Portworx also today announced the latest version of its flagship Portworx Enterprise platform, which now includes new data security and disaster recovery functions. These include improved role-based access controls that go beyond what Kubernetes traditionally offers (and that integrate with existing enterprise systems). The new disaster recovery tools now allow enterprises to make incremental backups to data centers that sit in different geographical locations. Maybe more importantly, Portworx now also lets users automatically save data in two nearby data centers zones as updates happen. That’s meant o enable use cases where zero data loss would be acceptable in the case of an outage. With this, a company could automatically backup data from a database that sits in Azure Germany Central and back it up to AWS Europe Frankfurt, for example.

Over the past several years, the law enforcement community has grown increasingly concerned about the conduct of digital investigations as technology providers enhance the security protections of their offerings—what some of my former colleagues refer to as “going dark.”

Data once readily accessible to law enforcement is now encrypted, protecting consumers’ data from hackers and criminals. However, these efforts have also had what Android’s security chief called the “unintended side effect” of also making this data inaccessible to law enforcement. Consequently, many in the law enforcement community want the ability to compel providers to allow them to bypass these protections, often citing physical and national security concerns.

I know first-hand the challenges facing law enforcement, but these concerns must be addressed in a broader security context, one that takes into consideration the privacy and security needs of industry and our citizens in addition to those raised by law enforcement.

Perhaps the best example of the law enforcement community’s preferred solution is Australia’s recently passed Assistance and Access Bill, an overly-broad law that allows Australian authorities to compel service providers, such as Google and Facebook, to re-engineer their products and bypass encryption protections to allow law enforcement to access customer data.

While the bill includes limited restrictions on law enforcement requests, the vague definitions and concentrated authorities give the Australian government sweeping powers that ultimately undermine the security and privacy of the very citizens they aim to protect. Major tech companies, such as Apple and Facebook, agree and have been working to resist the Australian legislation and a similar bill in the UK.

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Newly created encryption backdoors and work-arounds will become the target of criminals, hackers, and hostile nation states, offering new opportunities for data compromise and attack through the newly created tools and the flawed code that inevitably accompanies some of them. These vulnerabilities undermine providers’ efforts to secure their customers’ data, creating new and powerful vulnerabilities even as companies struggle to address existing ones.

And these vulnerabilities would not only impact private citizens, but governments as well, including services and devices used by the law enforcement and national security communities. This comes amidst government efforts to significantly increase corporate responsibility for the security of customer data through laws such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. Who will consumers, or the government, blame when a government-mandated backdoor is used by hackers to compromise user data? Who will be responsible for the damage?

Companies have a fiduciary responsibility to protect their customers’ data, which not only includes personally identifiable information (PII), but their intellectual property, financial data, and national security secrets.

Worse, the vulnerabilities created under laws such as the Assistance and Access Bill would be subject almost exclusively to the decisions of law enforcement authorities, leaving companies unable to make their own decisions about the security of their products. How can we expect a company to protect customer data when their most fundamental security decisions are out of their hands?

Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Thus far law enforcement has chosen to downplay, if not ignore, these concerns—focusing singularly on getting the information they need. This is understandable—a law enforcement officer should use every power available to them to solve a case, just as I did when I served as a State Trooper and as a FBI Special Agent, including when I served as Executive Assistant Director (EAD) overseeing the San Bernardino terror attack case during my final months in 2015.

Decisions regarding these types of sweeping powers should not and cannot be left solely to law enforcement. It is up to the private sector, and our government, to weigh competing security and privacy interests. Our government cannot sacrifice the ability of companies and citizens to properly secure their data and systems’ security in the name of often vague physical and national security concerns, especially when there are other ways to remedy the concerns of law enforcement.

That said, these security responsibilities cut both ways. Recent data breaches demonstrate that many companies have a long way to go to adequately protect their customers’ data. Companies cannot reasonably cry foul over the negative security impacts of proposed law enforcement data access while continuing to neglect and undermine the security of their own users’ data.

Providers and the law enforcement community should be held to robust security standards that ensure the security of our citizens and their data—we need legal restrictions on how government accesses private data and on how private companies collect and use the same data.

There may not be an easy answer to the “going dark” issue, but it is time for all of us, in government and the private sector, to understand that enhanced data security through properly implemented encryption and data use policies is in everyone’s best interest.

The “extra ordinary” access sought by law enforcement cannot exist in a vacuum—it will have far reaching and significant impacts well beyond the narrow confines of a single investigation. It is time for a serious conversation between law enforcement and the private sector to recognize that their security interests are two sides of the same coin.

Sight Reliable Engineering (SRE) is an extension of DevOps designed for more complex environments. The problem is that this type of approach is difficult to implement and has usually only been in reach of large companies, requiring custom software. Blameless, a Bay Area startup, wants to put it reach of everyone. It emerged from stealth today with an SRE platform for the masses and around $20 million in funding.

For starters, the company announced two rounds of funding with $3.6 million in seed money last April and a $16.5 million Series A investment more recently in January. Investors included Accel,  Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.

Company co-founder and CEO Ashar Rizqi knows first-hand just how difficult it is to implement an SRE system. He built custom systems for Box and Mulesoft before launching Blameless two years ago. He and his co-founder COO Lyon Wong saw a gap in the market where companies who wanted to implement SRE were being limited because of a lack of tooling and decided to build it themselves.

Rizqi says SRE changes the way you work and interact and Blameless gives structure to that change. “It changes the way you communicate, prioritize and work, but we’re adding data and metrics to support that shift” he said.

Screenshot: Blameless

As companies move to containers and continuous delivery models, it brings a level of complexity to managing the developers, who are working to maintain the delivery schedule, and operations, who must make sure the latest builds get out with a minimum of bugs. It’s not easy to manage, especially given the speed involved.

Over time, the bugs build up and the blame circulates around the DevOps team as they surface. The company name comes because their platform should remove blame from the equation by providing the tooling to get deeper visibility into all aspects of the delivery model.

At that point, companies can understand more clearly the kinds of compromises they need to make to get products out the door, rather than randomly building up this technical debt over time. This is exacerbated by the fact that companies are building their software from a variety of sources, whether open source or API services, and it’s hard to know the impact that external code is having on your product.

“Technical debt is accelerating as there is greater reliability on micro services. It’s a black box. You don’t own all the lines of code you are executing,” Rizqi explained. His company’s solution is designed to help with that problem.

The company currently has 23 employees and 20 customers including DigitalOcean and Home Depot.

The European Commission has just announced another antitrust fine for Google .

The latest fine — $1.49BN — relates to its search ad brokering business which competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager noted today is “by far” the company’s main source of revenue.

“Today’s decision is about how Google abused its domiance to stop website’s using brokers other than the AdSense platform,” she said, noting that the Commission looked at more than 200 agreements and found at least one clause that harmed competition.

“There was no reason for Google to include these restrictive clauses in its contracts other than to keep rivals out of the market,” she added.

The Commission found three types of anti-competitive restriction in Google’s contracts — including the company requiring its ads to have premium placement.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment.

This story is developing… refresh for updates

It’s the third Commission antitrust penalty for Google, following the $5BN fine for anti-competitive behaviors attached to Android last summer and a $2.7BN penalty for Google Shopping antitrust violations in mid 2017.

In recent years Vestager has also flagged concerns about several other Google products, including travel search, image search and maps. Though no formal probes have yet been announced.

The latest EU antitrust decision against Google relates specifically to Google AdSense ads that appear on third party sites as a result of a search made on those sites.

The Commission made a formal Statement of Objections against AdSense in 2016, when it identified several practices it believed violated antitrust rules after investigating complaints.

Its objections included that Google required exclusivity in AdSense site search deals, mandating that third parties do not source search ads from its competitors; that Google required third parties to take a minimum number of search ads from it, with premium placement for them; and that Google required sites to seek approval from it before making any changes that might involve competing ads.

The Commission noted at the time that exclusivity practices had been in place since 2006, before being gradually replaced by Google from 2009 in most contracts — with the requirement of premium placement/minimum ads and the right for Google to authorise competing ads.

“The Commission is concerned that the practices have artificially reduced choice and stifled innovation in the market throughout the period,” it wrote then. “They have artificially reduced the opportunities for Google’s competitors on this commercially important market, and therefore the ability of third party websites to invest in providing consumers with choice and innovative services.”

You can read more on the background to the AdSense complaint (and Google Shopping) in our report from 2016 here.

Since being hit with a wave of antitrust scrutiny and action in Europe Google has been forced to tweak product and make some changes to its business practices. Though it’s far from clear it’s done enough to stave off further regulatory intervention if the end-goal is to promote effective competition.

Google’s latest Android tweaks — announced just yesterday — attempt to address complaints that its default browser and search settings on the smartphone platform box out competition by preferring its own browser over rival browsers.

In a blog post dated March 19 Google said it will start asking Android users to choose which browser and search apps they wish to use, with the change slated as coming in the next months.

Last fall it also made changes to the licensing terms of Android to allow device makers to unbundle its apps — for a fee.

While in fall 2017 Google tweaked how it displays search results for products in Europe.

Although it was later accused of creating a ‘fake’ price comparison site scheme to create the allusion of a thriving market.

In all these EU antitrust cases complaints against Google have not gone away.

Rather complainants continue to couch the company’s self-styled compliance ‘remedies’ as a joke.

Yet with antitrust and political scrutiny of Google and other tech giants stepping up domestically as well as internationally, any self-serving competition ‘fixes’ are operating on borrowed time.

Moreover figleafs will likely increase pressure for more radical regulatory intervention — such as a break up of Google…

It’s therefore likely no coincidence that — in a more recent browser-related update — the search giant quietly expanded search engine choices in Chrome, adding privacy-focused rival DuckDuckGo’s search engine to the lists of options it promotes to users in more than 60 markets with the latest Chromium stable release, as well as French pro-privacy Qwant as an option in its home market.

This change was welcomed by both DuckDuckGo and Qwant.

Though the latter told us it still recommends its users use Firefox or Brave, rather than Google’s Chrome browser.

3D printer manufacturer Markforged has raised another round of funding. Summit Partners is leading the $82 million Series D round with Matrix Partners, Microsoft’s Venture Arm, Next47 and Porsche SE also participating.

When you think about 3D printers, chances are you’re thinking about microwave-sized, plastic-focused 3D printers for hobbyists. Markforged is basically at the other end of the spectrum, focused on expensive 3D printers for industrial use cases.

In addition to increased precision, Markforged can manufacture parts in strong materials, such as carbon fiber, kevlar or stainless steel. And it can greatly impacts your manufacturing process.

For instance, you can prototype your next products with a Markforged printer. Instead of getting sample parts from third-party companies, you can manufacture your parts in house. If you’re not going to sell hundreds of thousands of products, you could even consider using Markforged to produce parts for your commercial products.

If you work in an industry that requires a ton of different parts but don’t need a lot of inventory, you could also consider using a 3D printer to manufacture parts whenever you need them.

Markforged has a full-stack approach and controls everything from the 3D printer, software and materials. Once you’re done designing your CAD 3D model, you can send it to your fleet of printers. The company’s application also lets you manage different versions of the same part and collaborate with other people.

According to the company’s website, Markforged has attracted 4,000 customers, such as Canon, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, General Motors, Volkswagen and Adidas. The company has shipped 2,500 printers in 2018.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to do more of the same — you can expect mass production printers and more materials in the future. Eventually, Markforged wants to make it cheaper to manufacture parts at scale instead of producing those parts through other means.

Tandem Bank, the U.K. challenger bank, is launching a new savings account powered by its “Autosavings” feature designed to make it easier to save.

Paying 0.5 percent interest, the Tandem Autosavings account is effectively a flexible savings bank account built on top of Tandem’s existing bank account aggregation app and the various credit cards it offers. Based on a number of rules, it will automatically put money aside based on your spending habits and what its algorithm deems you can afford.

The first rule, known as “Round Ups,” will move the change from small purchases to your Tandem Autosavings account, enabling you to round-up to the next pound across spending on all of your connected bank accounts.

The second rule, dubbed “Safe To Save,” claims to use machine learning to calculate how much you can save based on the income and outgoings of your connected accounts. Within the Tandem app you can set your saving level using a slider from minimum to maximum savings, which aims to save between 5 and 15 percent of your income.

Outside of these rules, you can also choose to top up your Tandem Autosavings account at anytime. Money moved across to your Tandem Autosavings account is pulled via the debit card you have added to the app and transactions are processed by Stripe, as we previously reported.

“We spend a huge amount of time speaking with our users, understanding the challenges they face with their money, and what we can do to help,” Tandem’s Matt Ford tells me. “A consistent theme which arose for many of our users was the need to save. People either felt like they were unable to save at all (as they battle through to the end of the month), or were trying to save, but spending got in the way and they were unable to reach their goals fast enough”.

Ford says that Autosavings aims to solve these problems by drawing on “behavioural economics principles”. The idea is that by helping customers save small amounts each time they spend, Tandem is initiating a savings behaviour for customers who may have previously felt unable to save.

“Similarly, for those who need an extra boost, we have a rule called ‘safe to save’ which, based on a forecast of upcoming spending and bills, helps sweep any spare cash automatically aside into an interest-bearing Tandem savings account… We’re planning to roll out additional rules over time to find new ways to help customers kickstart and accelerate their savings behaviour”.

Perhaps crucially, Ford says that Tandem doesn’t “sweep” money immediately. Instead, savings are first added to a “virtual pot” that builds throughout the week, before moving across into your Tandem account.

“With a quick swipe, customers can remove any savings items added to the pot before it leaves their current account, and they get a push notification before the money movement occurs so they can ensure that they are comfortable with the saving amount,” he explains. “Also, for people who have aggregated their current account and have the safe to save rule activated, we’re continually monitoring on a day-to-day basis how much a customer can afford to save based on their sending and account balance”.

Meanwhile, Tandem has picked up pace over the last 18 months. Most recently the company launched a credit card for people who find it hard to quality for one. It followed the launch of a competitive fixed savings product, pitting it against a whole host of incumbent and challenger banks, and the original Tandem credit card offering cash-back and low FX rates.

All of Tandem’s products are managed via the Tandem mobile app, which also acts as a Personal Finance Manager (PFM), including letting you aggregate your non-Tandem bank account data from other bank accounts or credit cards you might have.

Like a plethora of fintechs, Tandem’s broader strategy is to become your financial control centre and connect you to and offer various financial services. These are either products of its own or through partnerships with other fintech startups and more established providers.

Tandem Bank, the U.K. challenger bank, is launching a new savings account powered by its “Autosavings” feature designed to make it easier to save.

Paying 0.5 percent interest, the Tandem Autosavings account is effectively a flexible savings bank account built on top of Tandem’s existing bank account aggregation app and the various credit cards it offers. Based on a number of rules, it will automatically put money aside based on your spending habits and what its algorithm deems you can afford.

The first rule, known as “Round Ups,” will move the change from small purchases to your Tandem Autosavings account, enabling you to round-up to the next pound across spending on all of your connected bank accounts.

The second rule, dubbed “Safe To Save,” claims to use machine learning to calculate how much you can save based on the income and outgoings of your connected accounts. Within the Tandem app you can set your saving level using a slider from minimum to maximum savings, which aims to save between 5 and 15 percent of your income.

Outside of these rules, you can also choose to top up your Tandem Autosavings account at anytime. Money moved across to your Tandem Autosavings account is pulled via the debit card you have added to the app and transactions are processed by Stripe, as we previously reported.

“We spend a huge amount of time speaking with our users, understanding the challenges they face with their money, and what we can do to help,” Tandem’s Matt Ford tells me. “A consistent theme which arose for many of our users was the need to save. People either felt like they were unable to save at all (as they battle through to the end of the month), or were trying to save, but spending got in the way and they were unable to reach their goals fast enough”.

Ford says that Autosavings aims to solve these problems by drawing on “behavioural economics principles”. The idea is that by helping customers save small amounts each time they spend, Tandem is initiating a savings behaviour for customers who may have previously felt unable to save.

“Similarly, for those who need an extra boost, we have a rule called ‘safe to save’ which, based on a forecast of upcoming spending and bills, helps sweep any spare cash automatically aside into an interest-bearing Tandem savings account… We’re planning to roll out additional rules over time to find new ways to help customers kickstart and accelerate their savings behaviour”.

Perhaps crucially, Ford says that Tandem doesn’t “sweep” money immediately. Instead, savings are first added to a “virtual pot” that builds throughout the week, before moving across into your Tandem account.

“With a quick swipe, customers can remove any savings items added to the pot before it leaves their current account, and they get a push notification before the money movement occurs so they can ensure that they are comfortable with the saving amount,” he explains. “Also, for people who have aggregated their current account and have the safe to save rule activated, we’re continually monitoring on a day-to-day basis how much a customer can afford to save based on their sending and account balance”.

Meanwhile, Tandem has picked up pace over the last 18 months. Most recently the company launched a credit card for people who find it hard to quality for one. It followed the launch of a competitive fixed savings product, pitting it against a whole host of incumbent and challenger banks, and the original Tandem credit card offering cash-back and low FX rates.

All of Tandem’s products are managed via the Tandem mobile app, which also acts as a Personal Finance Manager (PFM), including letting you aggregate your non-Tandem bank account data from other bank accounts or credit cards you might have.

Like a plethora of fintechs, Tandem’s broader strategy is to become your financial control centre and connect you to and offer various financial services. These are either products of its own or through partnerships with other fintech startups and more established providers.

Google is widely expected to be handed a third antitrust fine in Europe this week, with reports suggesting the European Commission’s decision in its long-running investigation of AdSense could land later today.

Right on cue the search giant has PRed another Android product tweak — which it bills as “supporting choice and competition in Europe”.

In the coming months Google says it will start prompting users of existing and new Android devices in Europe to ask which browser and search apps they would like to use.

This follows licensing changes for Android in Europe which Google announced last fall, following the Commission’s $5BN antitrust fine for anti-competitive behavior related to how it operates the dominant smartphone OS.

tl;dr competition regulation can shift policy and product.

Albeit, the devil will be in the detail of Google’s self-imposed ‘remedy’ for Android browser and search apps.

Which means how exactly the user is prompted will be key — given tech giants are well-versed in the manipulative arts of dark pattern design, enabling them to create ‘consent’ flows that deliver their desired outcome.

A ‘choice’ designed in such a way — based on wording, button/text size and color, timing of prompt and so on — to promote Google’s preferred browser and search app choice by subtly encouraging Android users to stick with its default apps may not actually end up being much of a ‘choice’.

According to Reuters the prompt will surface to Android users via the Play Store. (Though the version of Google’s blog post we read did not include that detail.)

Using the Play Store for the prompt would require an Android device to have Google’s app store pre-loaded — and licensing tweaks made to the OS in Europe last year were supposedly intended to enable OEMs to choose to unbundle Google apps from Android forks. Ergo making only the Play Store the route for enabling choice would be rather contradictory.

Add to that Google has the advantage of massive brand dominance here, thanks to its kingpin position in search, browsers and smartphone platforms.

So again the consumer decision is weighted in its favor. Or, to put it another way: ‘This is Google; it can afford to offer a ‘choice’.’

In its blog post getting out ahead of the Commission’s looming AdSense ruling, Google’s SVP of global affairs, Kent Walker, writes that the company has been “listening carefully to the feedback we’re getting” vis-a-vis competition.

Though the search giant is actually appealing both antitrust decisions. (The other being a $2.7BN fine it got slapped with two years ago for promoting its own shopping comparison service and demoting rivals’.)

“After the Commission’s July 2018 decision, we changed the licensing model for the Google apps we build for use on Android phones, creating new, separate licenses for Google Play, the Google Chrome browser, and for Google Search,” Walker continues. “In doing so, we maintained the freedom for phone makers to install any alternative app alongside a Google app.”

Other opinions are available on those changes too.

Such as French pro-privacy Google search rival Qwant, which last year told us how those licensing changes still make it essentially impossible for smartphone makers to profit off of devices that don’t bake in Google apps by default. (More recently Qwant’s founder condensed the situation to “it’s a joke“.)

Qwant and another European startup Jolla, which leads development of an Android alternative smartphone platform called Sailfish — and is also a competition complainant against Google in Europe — want regulators to step in and do more.

The Commission has said it is closely monitoring changes made by Google to determine whether or not the company has complied with its orders to stop anti-competitive behavior.

So the jury is still out on whether any of these various tweaks sum to compliance. (Google says so but that’s as you’d expect — and certainly doesn’t mean the Commission will agree.)

In its Android decision last summer the Commission judged that Google’s practices harmed competition and “further innovation” in the wider mobile space, i.e. beyond Internet search — because it prevented other mobile browsers from competing effectively with its pre-installed Chrome browser.

So browser choice is a key component here. And ‘effective competition’ is the bar Google’s homebrew ‘remedies’ will have to meet.

The company will be hoping its latest Android tweaks steer off further Commission antitrust action. Or at least generate more fuzz and fuel for its long-game legal appeal.

Current EU competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, has flagged for years that the division is also fielding complaints about other Google products, including travel search, image search and maps. So Google could face fresh antitrust investigations in future, even as the last of the first batch is about to wrap up.

The FT reports that Android users in the European economic area last week started seeing links to rival websites appearing above Google’s answer box for searches for products, jobs or businesses — with the rival links appearing above paid results links to Google’s own services.

The newspaper points out that tweak is similar to a change promoted by Google in 2013, when it was trying to resolve EU antitrust concerns under the prior commissioner, Joaquín Almunia.

However rivals at the time complained the tweak was insufficient. The Commission subsequently agreed — and under Vestager’s tenure went on to hit Google with antitrust fines.

Walker doesn’t mention these any of additional antitrust complaints swirling around Google’s business in Europe, choosing to focus on highlighting changes it’s made in response to the two extant Commission antitrust rulings.

“After the Commission’s July 2018 decision, we changed the licensing model for the Google apps we build for use on Android phones, creating new, separate licenses for Google Play, the Google Chrome browser, and for Google Search. In doing so, we maintained the freedom for phone makers to install any alternative app alongside a Google app,” he writes.

Nor does he make mention of a recent change Google quietly made to the lists of default search engine choices in its Chrome browser — which expanded the “choice” he claims the company offers by surfacing more rivals. (The biggest beneficiary of that tweak is privacy search rival DuckDuckGo, which suddenly got added to the Chrome search engine lists in around 60 markets. Qwant also got added as a default choice in France.)

Talking about Android specifically Walker instead takes a subtle indirect swipe at iOS maker Apple — which now finds itself the target of competition complaints in Europe, via music streaming rival Spotify, and is potentially facing a Commission probe of its own (albeit, iOS’ marketshare in Europe is tiny vs Android). So top deflecting Google.

“On Android phones, you’ve always been able to install any search engine or browser you want, irrespective of what came pre-installed on the phone when you bought it. In fact, a typical Android phone user will usually install around 50 additional apps on their phone,” Walker writes, drawing attention to the fact that Apple does not offer iOS users as much of a literal choice as Google does.

“Now we’ll also do more to ensure that Android phone owners know about the wide choice of browsers and search engines available to download to their phones,” he adds, saying: “This will involve asking users of existing and new Android devices in Europe which browser and search apps they would like to use.”

We’ve reached out to Commission for comment, and to Google with questions about the design of its incoming browser and search app prompts in Europe and will update this report with any response.