Fintech startup Revolut is slowly making traditional bank accounts irrelevant. The company is adding direct debits in EUR to make it easier to pay for utilities and subscription services.

While Revolut is currently applying for a banking license, the company has already been adding everything you need to replace your bank account with a Revolut account.

The company started with an e-wallet in multiple currencies combined with a MasterCard. This way, you can upload money to your Revolut account in your local currency and then send and spend money in multiple currencies.

But when it comes to spending money, Revolut users have been limited to card payments so far. And yet, many countries ask you to pay your electricity or phone bill using direct debits.

Back in July 2017, Revolut gave you a personal IBAN in EUR and GBP. And now, you can hand your banking details to any subscription service in EUR so that they can debit your Revolut account directly.

And that’s about all you need to know. Revolut now has 1.5 million customers and many different services. You can buy travel insurance, phone insurance and cryptocurrencies through the Revolut app. Eventually, Revolut wants to become the financial hub on your phone.

The citizens of Sierra Leone went to the polls on March 7 but this time something was different: the country recorded votes at 70% of the polling to the blockchain using a technology that is the first of its kind in actual practice.

The tech, created by Leonardo Gammar of Agora, anonymously stored votes in an immutable ledger, thereby offering instant access to the election results.

“Anonymized votes/ballots are being recorded on Agora’s blockchain, which will be publicly available for any interested party to review, count and validate,” said Gammar. “This is the first time a government election is using blockchain technology.”

“Sierra Leone wishes to create an environment of trust with the voters in a contentious election, especially looking at how the election will be publicly viewed post-election. By using blockchain as a means to immutably record ballots and results, the country hopes to create legitimacy around the election and reduce fall-out from opposition parties,” he said.

Why is this interesting? While this is little more than a proof of concept – it is not a complete voting record but instead captured a seemingly acceptable plurality of votes – it’s fascinating to see the technology be implemented in Sierra Leone, a country of about 7.4 million people. The goal ultimately is to reduce voting costs by cutting out paper ballots as well as reducing corruption in the voting process.

Gammar, for his part, sees the value of a decentralizes system.

“We’re the only company in the world that has built a fully-functional blockchain voting platform. Other electronic voting machines are ‘block boxes’ that have been increasingly shown to be vulnerable to security attacks. For that reason, many US states and foreign nations have been moving back to paper,” he said. “If you believe that most countries will use some form of digital voting 50 years from now, then blockchain is the only technology that has been created which can provide an end-to-end verifiable and fully-transparent voting solution for this future.”

One election in one country isn’t a movement – yet. However, Gammar and his team plan on expanding their product to other African countries and, eventually, to the rest of the world.

As for the election it is still unclear who won and there will be a run-off election on March 27. The winner will succeed President Ernest Bai Koroma who has run the country for a full decade.

TypingDNA has a new approach to verifying your identity based on how you type.

The startup, which is part of the current class at Techstars NYC, is pitching this as an alternative to two-factor authentication — namely, the security feature that sends unique codes to a separate device (usually your phone) to make sure someone else isn’t logging in with your password.

The problem with two factor? TypingDNA Raul Popa put it simply: “It’s a bad user experience … Nobody wants to use a different device.” (I know that TechCrunch writers have had two-factor issues of their own, like when they’re trying to log in on an airplane and can’t connect their phone.)

So TypingDNA allows users to verify their identity without having to whip out their phone. Instead, they just enter their name and password into a window, then TypingDNA will analyze their typing and confirm that it’s really them.

The startup’s business model revolves around working with partners to incorporate the technology, but it’s also launching a free Chrome extension that works as an alternative to two-factor authentication on a wide range of services, including Amazon Web Services, Coinbase and Gmail.

Popa said TypingDNA measures two key aspects of your typing: How long it takes you to reach a key and how long you keep the key pressed down. Apparently these patterns are unique; Popa showed me that the system could tell the difference between his typing and mine, and you can test it out for yourself on the TypingDNA website.

He also said that the company can adjust the strictness of the system, getting the rate of false positives as low as 0.1 percent. In the case of the Chrome authenticator, Popa said, “We minimize the false acceptance rate” — so you might get rejected if you’re typing in an unusual position, or if there’s some other reason you’re typing slower or faster than usual. But in that case, the authenticator will just ask you to try again.

And again, you can use the Chrome extension on a variety of sites. Most two-factor options allow to confirm confirm a device using a QR code, which TypingDNA can grab. The two-factor codes are then sent to the TypingDNA extension (the codes are stored locally on your computer, not the company’s servers), and they’re revealed once you’ve verified your identity with the aforementioned typing.

You can visit TypingDNA to learn more and download the extension.

Now Spotify listens to you instead of the other way around. Spotify has a new voice search interface that lets you say “Play my Discover Weekly,” “Show Calvin Harris” or “Play some upbeat pop” to pull up music.

A Spotify spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that this is “Just a test for now,” as only a small subset of users have access currently, but the company noted there would be more details to share later. The test was first spotted by Hunter Owens. Thanks to him we have a video demo of the feature below that shows pretty solid speech recognition and the ability to access music several different ways.

Voice control could make Spotify easier to use while on the go using microphone headphones or in the house if you’re not holding your phone. It might also help users paralyzed by the infinite choices posed by the Spotify search box by letting them simply call out a genre or some other category of songs. Spotify briefly tested but never rolled out a very rough design of “driving mode” controls a year ago. [Update: TechCrunch reader Ishan Agrawal dug into the Spotify Android APK, and discovered that there are separate files for driving and voice search modes, indicating that the new voice interface isn’t just an iteration on driving mode.]

Down the line, Spotify could perhaps develop its own voice interface for smart speakers from other companies or that it potentially builds itself. That would relieve it from depending on Apple’s Siri for HomePod, Google’s Assistant for Home or Amazon’s Alexa for Echo — all of which have accompanying music streaming services that compete with Spotify. Apple chose to make its HomePod speaker Apple Music-only, cutting out Spotify. Its Siri service similarly won’t let people make commands inside third-party apps, so you can ask your iPhone to play a certain song on Apple Music, but not Spotify.

To date, Spotify has only worked with manufacturers to build its Spotify Connect features into boomboxes and home stereos from companies like Bose, rather than creating its own hardware. If it chooses to make Spotify-branded speakers, it might need some of its own voice technology to power them.

Spotify is preparing for a direct listing that will make the company public without a traditional IPO. That means forgoing some of the marketing circus that usually surrounds a company’s debut. That means Spotify may be even more eager to experiment with features or strategies that could be future money-makers so that public investors see growth potential. Breaking into voice directly instead of via its competitors could provide that ‘x-factor.’

For more on Spotify’s not-an-IPO, check out our feature story:

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Yanai Oron, General Partner at Vertex Ventures, who took us through his firm’s investment focus on deep technology ventures in Israel. The...

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You’re probably familiar with quizzes from online publishers like BuzzFeed. But what if a quiz could actually help you sort through tough decisions and complex topics, not just which Sex and the City character or Disney princess you most closely resemble?

That’s basically what Y Combinator -backed startup called Delphia is promising. CEO Clifton van der Linden said the company works with publishers to create applications that help their readers make decisions.

Van der Linden is a Ph.D. candidate in the political science department at the University of Toronto, and he first built an application called Vote Compass, which tells users how their political views line up with election candidates. (In the United States, Vote Compass was released in partnership with Vox.)

Now, however, Delphia is working to bring a similar approach to non-political questions, like helping kids decide which college to attend, or helping adults figure out the workplace culture that would best fit them.

When I brought up the comparison to BuzzFeed quizzes, van der Linden didn’t exactly reject it. In fact, he admitted that they were one of his inspirations, but he added, “Let me qualify that heavily” — because he said Delphia’s applications use artificial intelligence and data science. Instead of just creating a basic decision tree (this set of answers leads to this quiz result), the company’s actually building out models that show how each question and answer is related to overall satisfaction.

For example, in the case of the university-choosing application, van der Linden said, “We’ve gone out and surveyed tens of thousands of recent graduates of universities with a very long survey to train a model that will predict the right fit for people.” And the applications improve as more people participate: “Everyone who uses those tools, when they’re finished, they’re actually contributing to that learning model and making it smarter and smarter.”

That might seem like a lot of work to put into what amounts to a feature on a website, but van der Linden said it usually pays off for publishers (who either pay Delphia a licensing fee or split the advertising revenue): “It’s a great new form of personalized, innovative content for users.”

Vote Compass, for example, resulted in an average of eight to 10 minutes of engagement time for each participant. And the data from the applications can provide fuel for more content, like this Vox article showing that Trump’s supporters in the 2016 election were more liberal than he was on most issues.

So van der Linden also compared Delphia to survey companies like Gallup, but he said, “None of them ever paired it with machine learning.”

Beyond helping publishers create engaging content, van der Linden is hoping to answer “a really fundamental question in the information age: When we’re faced with so much data and information, how do people make rational decisions?”

“We want to help people navigate decisions in as many decision spaces as we can get into,” he added.

Delphia is a graduate of the Creative Destruction Lab and has also raised funding from Golden Venture Partners.

Naeem Ishaq is leaving his role as chief financial officer of bulk e-commerce company Boxed.

Ishaq joined Boxed in 2016, following a stint as head of finance, strategy and risk at Square. A Boxed spokesperson confirmed Ishaq’s departure, and sent the following statement from CEO Chieh Huang:

Naeem is a world-class financial talent. Over the last two years, he has been indispensable in helping build and grow Boxed to what it is today. We will miss his energy, focus and enthusiasm for our company. Perhaps his greatest legacy is building a well-versed finance team that will continue to focus on evolving the Boxed platform.

I want to thank Naeem for his contribution to Boxed and wish him well on his future endeavors.

Boxed says it’s currently looking for another CFO.

“The last two years I’ve spent at Boxed have been some of the most thrilling of my career,” Ishaq said in a statement (also provided by Boxed). “We achieved much of what I set out to accomplish when I joined. Boxed … has tremendous opportunities ahead and I look forward to rooting [for] them as they continue to grow.”

The news comes less than a week after Bloomberg reported that Boxed had rejected a $400 million acquisition offer from Kroger. Other retailers, including Amazon, Target and Costco, were also rumored to be interested.

When I called Ishaq, he said he’s joining a company in the financial technology industry, but declined get more specific (I guess that’ll be announced separately). He also said his departure is unconnected to those acquisition stories.

“This is more about an opportunity that came up that frankly, I’m super excited about,” he said. “Boxed is extremely well-positioned … I don’t think [my departure] diminishes that at all. It’s a personal choice for me.”

Rob Schultz, Managing Partner at Serra Ventures, discusses catering to startups in under-served geographies. His point of view aligns with what we’ve heard from some other investors.

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