The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup takes a look at the latest international fintech stories. This Thursday, we hear about OakNorth and ComplyAdvantage hooking up, in addition to a partnership for GoCardless and goDonate.
Launches & announcements
Mobile payments company Auka renames to Settle. The company says the change is in order to unify and best reflect its mobile payments product offering. In addition, its mission is to become the number one mobile payments platform in Europe.
Emirates NBD has launched a digital supply chain financing platform for its corporate and institutional clients. It says the smartSCF platform will offer businesses in the UAE a set of integrated, automated tools designed to enhance and simplify their supply chain collaborations while also optimising working capital and reducing transaction costs.
Dubai investment banking and asset management firm Shuaa Capital has unveiled three Sharia-compliant funds and already secured $75million of commitments. The three funds – Shuaa High Yield Sukuk Fund, Nujoom Aggressive Fund and Nujoom Balanced Fund – are part of Shuaa’s fund platform rolled out in Abu Dhabi’s international financial hub.
Appreciate, home of Love2shop, has launched a new digital gift card that enables businesses to reward and incentivise employees and customers instantaneously. Based on Mastercard, the Love2shop Contactless digital gift card can be used online or in-store through a mobile wallet with over 80 retailers and leisure providers. Digital gift cards instantly by email, text, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp to an unlimited number of recipients. Appreciate Group has collaborated with payments technology company CleverCards to develop the new offering to coincide with the rebrand of its B2B arm to ‘Appreciate, the home of Love2shop’.
Meanwhile, fintech Galaxy and Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) have launched a virtual hackathon for financial inclusion and regulatory collaboration in the Arab region, the Yalla Fintech 2020 Hackathon. Winning proposals in each theme will be awarded prize money of €5,000.00 to kick start the scaling of the solution.
FintechOS, the global technology provider for banks, insurance and financial services companies, has created and implemented a digital onboarding solution for OTP Bank Romania. It includes a current account available through a Mastercard debit card, with Internet and Mobile Banking services, all with zero costs to the user if the necessary sign up conditions are met. What’s more, customers no longer have to visit the bank branch in order to open an account with access to a card and internet banking services.
Plus, Suguba reveals eight startups are joining its second investment readiness programme in French-speaking West Africa. Bio Agripol, Mousso, Dothan, Eneza, CinetPay, Carfics, Shop Me Away and Kamtar will be joining the L’Afrique Excelle accelerator programme.
Mergers and acquisitions
Nexi, an Italian PayTech leader in digital payments and SIA, the Italian and European leader in payment technology and infrastructure services, have signed a memorandum of understanding regarding the integration of the two groups through the merger by incorporation of SIA into Nexi. SIA is controlled by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti through its subsidiary CDP Equity.
While, financial services network StoneX Group has completed its acquisition of online payments company Giroxx. With the name change to StoneX Financial, Giroxx is now officially integrated into StoneX’s larger global payments division.
Partnerships
Account-to-account payment solution provider Nuapay and Cybersource – Visa’s global payment management platform – have joined forces. Nuapay’s end-to-end cloud environment for collecting recurring payments has been integrated into Cybersource’s payment gateway.
Charities using the goDonate platform can soon offer GoCardless as a payment method. goDonate says it has partnered with the recurring payments fintech in order to make charity donations simpler and more convenient.
Our API means that charities can now collect payments quickly and seamlessly straight from donors’ bank accounts, resulting in a more predictable income and cash flow pipeline.
OakNorth Bank and ComplyAdvantage have joined forces to combat financial crime. Their partnership will ensure OakNorth is fully compliant with anti-money laundering regulations, as well as screen for risk at onboarding.
Emirates Islamic has forged a long-term strategic partnership with Mastercard to offer credit cards to the bank’s corporate banking clients. In addition, Emirates Islamic’s clients will also have full access to a range of Mastercard’s advisory services.
Cybersecurity solutions provider HUB Security teams with insurance broker Marsh to offer insured storage solution. Financial institutions can now store and manage digital assets, including cryptocurrency, on HUB’s platform and purchase up to $400million in ‘cold storage’ insurance through Marsh’s digital asset risk transfer team.
Meanwhile, fintech prepaid card issuer Tenpo has selected Paygilant to provide Chileans with robust digital fraud prevention. In addition, Paygilant says it supports Tenpo’s mission to ‘redefine the LATAM financial services market’.
Pan-European payment solution Lemonway, has partnered with Ripple to enable instant, more transparent and cost-effective European transactions. The payment solution company will now be able to provide instant payouts with reduced costs, which in turn allows marketplaces to offer more competitive payment services to merchants.
Saudi Arabian digital wallet, STCPay, has selected cloud-native, cloud-agnostic Temenos Payments and Temenos Transact running on a private cloud to achieve exponential growth and expand its digital payments capabilities. Temenos Payments provides Straight-Through Processing (STP) rates over 99% and will underpin STCPay’s digital customer experiences.
Finally, Tezos Gulf, the decentralised, public blockchain platform, has achieved certification recognising its features and governance is in alignment with Sharia standards.
Appointments
RGI Group, a portfolio company of private equity firm Corsair Capital, has hired Cécile André Leruste as group CEO. Leruste succeeds interim CEO Christophe Quesne. She most recently served as managing director for Accenture Global Banking.
Payments issuer processor Global Processing Services (GPS) has bolstered its executive leadership team with a trio of appointments. Richard Hodgson is now chief financial officer, Shaun Puckrin is chief product officer and Jerome Gudgeon is chief technology officer.
Their collective wealth of experience stands to enrich the team and propel us forward into the next stage of our evolution, which will see GPS deploying our payments processing technology into new territories.
First Derivatives, the capital markets experts, has tasked Nicholas Dolan with further accelerating its growth strategy. Dolan, who has considerable expertise in Calypso software, will focus on growth in North America, the UK, Australia and South Africa, as well as strengthening services in Newry, Ireland and Micassaga, Canada.
Funding raises
Genesis, the global financial markets software firm, has received a strategic investment from Citi via its Markets FinTech Investments and SPRINT groups to leverage Genesis’ “Low-Code Application Platform” (LCAP) to drive its key innovation priorities.
Spoon Guru the London-based AI-powered food search and discovery technology start-up, has announced that it has secured a Series A funding round with W23, the Venture Capital arm of Australia’s largest retailer, Woolworths Group. The multi-million dollar investment will be used to expand Spoon Guru’s footprint with retailers across APAC, North America and Europe, at a time when governments are putting a greater focus on the importance of food and health to boost national health.
Chargebee, the subscription billing and revenue operations platform powering thousands of fast-growth subscription businesses, today announced a new $55M Series F funding round led by Insight Partners. The current round of funding includes participation from existing investors, bringing the total funding raised to date to $105M. Chargebee provides the subscription platform used by thousands of businesses across the world, from startups to large businesses like Okta, Pret a Manger, and Envoy.
And Simply, the non-bank SME lender, has announced a fourth financing tranche from the British Business Bank to add to its existing ENABLE Funding facility. In total, the four rounds of financing will provide more than £230m of funding to smaller businesses across the UK. This is now the largest facility under the Bank’s ENABLE Funding programme, which aims to improve the supply of asset and lease finance to smaller UK businesses.
