The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup delivers the latest fintech updates from around the world on Thursday 8 November 2022.
Job moves
Balance, a B2B checkout for B2B payments, has hired fintech executive Kim Loftis as its VP of customer growth. Loftis joins Balance following its $56million Series B fundraise to help merchants and marketplaces scale ecommerce payments with instant financing and a B2B checkout.F
Fintech Baton has appointed Alistair Griffiths as director of EMEA sales. Griffiths will be based in London focusing on new business acquisition across all Baton solutions in the region. He previously served as senior sales executive of post-trade solutions at FIS Global.
European payments solutions provider MANGOPAY has appointed a new CTO Ronen Benchetrit. He joins the team Bumble, and prior to this, was the CTO for a UK challenger bank and pioneering peer-to-peer lender Zopa. He also has three decades of experience working and leading agile product engineering and cloud teams globally at scale-up companies.
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) has named Nashira Spencer as chief security officer. Spencer served the last six years as CISO and, most recently, CTO at Anywhere Real Estate (formerly Realogy. Spencer will ensure a comprehensive and holistic approach to risk management and resilience across the organisation.
Funding updates
Partior, a blockchain-powered technology provider, has completed a Series A funding round led by Standard Chartered with additional participation from DBS, J.P. Morgan and Temasek. Standard Chartered will also join the Partior network, one of its integrated Euro settlement banks, accelerating the deployment of blockchain across the bank’s global financial network.
London-based ethical lender Plend has raised £40million in seed funding with new investors including Active Partners, plus Velocity Juice, Sivo and the founders from Monzo, Starling Bank and Oodle Car Finance. The seed round also includes existing pre-seed investors Ascension, Tomahawk VC, DD Venture Capital and Haatch who have doubled-down on their original commitments in the wake of post-launch growth and above expected loan performance.
Pyypl, the MEA focused financial services platform and Hub71 company, has closed its target Series B raise of $20million. Pyypl is considering opening a second tranche for further investment due to interest from investors. The funding will enable the company to further expand its reach across the MEA region.
Evo has secured an additional £750,000 of seed funding, supported by GroVentive, to continue its growth strategy in the UK’s £30billion rental sector. By digitising property repairs, maintenance and compliance services, Evo saves landlords significant costs, removes the hassle from property management and improves the tenant experience.
Quona Capital has closed its latest fund Fund III at $332million. This is the third fund from Quona Capital since its inception, bringing the firm’s aggregate committed capital to over $745million. Quona Capital is a venture firm focused on fintech that can expand access for underserved customers and small businesses in emerging markets including India and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
Partnerships
DivideBuy has forged a partnership with CRM platform Salesforce to offer instant onboarding for DivideBuy’s merchants and partners. The partnership promises to ‘break records’ in merchant onboarding times, accelerating the uptake of POS finance among customers in more verticals.
Help AG, the cybersecurity arm of e& enterprise has teamed up with ExtraHop, a cloud-native network intelligence firm, to provide customers in UAE and KSA with enhanced cybersecurity solutions. To mark their collaboration, Help AG and ExtraHop signed an agreement at the 2022 edition of the Gulf Information Technology Exhibition (GITEX), the Middle East tech and networking event held annually in Dubai.
Talos has joined forces with Amber Group to unlock greater access to liquidity on the Talos platform through the integration of Amber’s digital asset platform, WhaleFin. The partnership comes as Talos continues to expand its business and solidify its presence in Asia Pacific.
BlueSnap, the payment orchestration platform, has expanded its partnership with e-commerce agency objectsource to support online sellers across Europe. The paytech firm has teamed up with the London-based consultancy to enhance its integration with shopping cart plug-in Magento /Adobe Commerce, adding new payment methods GooglePay and ApplePay, iDeal and Sofort.
Fexco and Cashflows announce partnership to deliver a full end-to-end dynamic currency solution for ATM providers across Europe. This partnership sees Cashflows offer new and existing ATM clients the Fexco Treasury DCC solution from launch, potentially connecting to more than 20,000 ATMs across Europe.
