The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup this Thursday sees Series E success for banking platform Mambu while fintech Curve appoints a new chief technology officer.
Funding and investments
Mambu, the SaaS cloud banking platform, has raised €235million at €4.9billion valuation. The Series E round is led by EQT Growth. Mambu will use its fresh funding to further accelerate innovation in its next-generation platform, rolling out both new functional as well as technical capabilities. The company will also continue to expand its global footprint and customer success model to further support its international customer base.
MAJORITY, a mobile banking service for migrants to the US, has raised $27million in its Series A funding round. Led by Valar Ventures, other investors include Avid Ventures and Heartcore Capital. Through 2021, MAJORITY says it was able to save members of its Cuban community an average of $21 a month through its remittances, calling, mobile credits and local discounts.
JellyFi, a DeFi lending protocol, has closed a seed funding round of $4.4million. The round was led by Lemniscap with ParaFi Capital, Tioga Capital, White Star Capital, DeFiance Capital, True Ventures, Digital Currency Group, Genesis, Divergence Ventures and AngelDAO also taking part. The funds will support JellyFi’s growth through R&D and key hires as well as performing multiple audits.
Saudi-based expense management fintech platform NQOODLET has raised $1million in a pre-seed funding round. It will use the funds to build its infrastructure and launch its card and platform. NQOODLET provides a digital platform targeting allowing SMEs to manage their expenses, purchases and register bills directly into one consolidated platform through the corporate cards given to the employees.
More investment news
Digital Finance Group (DFG) has enjoyed a $1.5million private funding round as the head investor for Rivet, an Ethereum infrastructure service. The funding will grow the Rivet team, develop its product and enable it to provide more services for its users.
Fintech group SPG, which owns Shieldpay and Paycast, has raised a $34million Series A. It includes strategic funding from Mastercard and Marqeta. Other significant Investors in SPG also include Elliott Management, CreditEase and Techstars. The fresh capital will scale Shieldpay and also fuel Paycast in its early stage of growth.
Tradeshift has secured more than $200million in funding and debt from a combination of existing and new investors. These include Koch Industries, IDC Ventures, LUN Partners, Private Shares and Fuel Capital. The capital will be used to optimise Tradeshift growth and balance sheet to continue scaling the business.
Partnerships
Worldline has partnered with social e-commerce platform Joom to manage payments in multiple European countries. Joom is the first marketplace to offer European merchants access to the Russian market. It gives customers the option to choose a payment mean that suits them best, improving checkout conversation rates, as well as customer engagement and loyalty.
Mortgage technology provider Twenty7Tec has integrated its CloudTwenty7 platform with Pepper Money. It lets advisers submit mortgage applications to Pepper Money without leaving the system, avoiding duplication and promising to speed up cases.
Meanwhile, TrueLayer, the open banking platform, has collaborated with events self service platform Citizen Ticket. With TrueLayer, it can provide digitally-native payments to customers that securely connect a purchasers’ bank account to the event organiser through the Citizen Ticket platform, using biometric methods such as fingerprint or Face ID to authenticate a payment.
Zip, the BNPL company, has agreed a global alliance with Sabre Corporation, a software firm in the travel industry. Zip has integrated into Sabre’s global distribution system to let global travel partners accept Zip. The integrated solution aims to give simplicity of payment choice at checkout.
Fintech Swiipr has partnered with Paynetics for the issuance of its innovative airline payment products. Together they will take on the growing demand from airlines for a better way to handle travel disruption through digital technologies.
Further partnerships and collaborations
Arete Wealth, a broker-dealer, and Masterworks, a provider of art investment securities, have launched an affiliated branch office in New York. The two-year agreement helps Masterworks reach a live audience while also enabling Arete to expand its offering of alternative investments to clients.
Zafin has joined the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center. This collaboration is designed to help financial institutions running on IBM Z to quickly modernise their systems and processes by externalising core product and pricing applications using Zafin’s platform.
Banque de France (BdF), Swiss National Bank (SNB) and Bank for International Settlements’ (BIS) Innovation Hub have successfully completed Project Jura. The experiment in cross-border wholesale CBDC, is in collaboration with Accenture, Credit Suisse, Natixis, R3, SIX Digital Exchange as well as UBS. Project Jura explored cross-border settlement of tokenised assets in central bank digital currencies on a distributed ledger technology enabled platform.
Raisin Bank AG is teaming up with ComplyAdvantage to scale its anti-money laundering programme. ComplyAdvantage’s customer screening and monitoring and transaction monitoring solutions lets Raisin Bank make continuous improvements to its anti-money laundering procedures.
Finally, SimCorp and Domos FS partner to offer a cross asset solution covering public and private markets. The partnership is further reinforced by SimCorp taking an initial minority stake in Domos FS. The new offering includes machine learning assisted document processing, intelligent cashflow forecasting, daily exposure calculation, a next generation investor portal, standardised partnership accounting and automated regulatory reporting.
Product and launches
HashKey Group, a digital asset financial services group in Asia, has launched an online education platform. HashKey Academy helps institutions and financial service professionals navigate the digital asset market. The first course Introduction to Tokenisation is now available, free of charge.
While Klarna has introduced a browser extension, which had been in beta testing with more than 100,000 consumers. The extension lets consumers shop with Klarna’s flexible payment options on their desktop at every online store, even if the retailer is not yet a Klarna partner. Its recent acquisition of Piggy will power this new offering.
Job appointments
Railsbank, the embedded finance experiences platform, has appointed Danna Gurbaxani as its new head of customer success for UK and Europe. She joins from Salesforce where she was director in the customer success group for its Marketing Cloud business.
Dipti Kachru becomes global chief marketing officer at Broadridge Financial Solutions on 18 January. She will lead brand and digital strategy, product positioning, lead generation and thought leadership. Kachru joins from J.P. Morgan where she served as chief marketing officer for wealth management.
Meanwhile, Edfundo, the upcoming money management app for kids in the UAE, has appointed three key specialists to its advisory board – Saleh AlHammad, David Parker and Susan Furness. Edfundo said it is already leveraging their expertise to ensure a successful Q1 launch in 2022, as well as app development.
Global fintech Curve has named Eric Molitor as chief technology officer. He was previously VP of engineering at Improbable. Prior to that, Molitor also worked at Amazon, leading its engineering departments and product and brand integration. Curve recently secured $95million in a Series C funding, taking total funding to $175million+.
Digital payments firm Zip (formerly Quadpay) has unveiled Levi Aron as its chief growth officer in the US. Aron will head up Zip’s corporate strategy, sales excellence, and new digital market-driven innovation initiatives. Most recently, Aron was the chief revenue officer for New York-based SevenRooms.
Finally, fintech Greenlight has announced several key executive hires to further accelerate the company’s growth. Brian Dong is named chief financial officer, Sameera Rao as chief technology officer while Will Yu joins as chief operating officer. The company also revealed it has surpassed $100million in annualised recurring revenue and more than doubled its customer base within the past year.
Mergers and acquistions
Dock, a provider of fintech infrastructure in Latin America, has completed the acquisition of Cacao. The card processing solutions provider in Mexico will now be branded also as Dock. The deal expands Dock’s regional footprint and advances its goal of becoming a primary fintech services provider across all of Latin America.
Rapyd, the fintech-as-a-service company, has agreed to acquire Neat, a cross-border trade enabling platform for SMBs and startups. Terms of the deal are subject to regulatory approval. Neat’s services, capabilities and licences will be integrated into Rapyd’s platform.
Jumio has announced its strategic acquisition of 4Stop, the data marketplace and orchestration hub. The acquisition follows the launch of Jumio’s intuitive no-code orchestration layer for its KYX platform. Following the deal, organisations can manage the entire customer identity lifecycle within a single, unified platform.
Company updates
Tonik, a Filipino neobank, has surpassed $100million in consumer deposits within eight months of launch. Tonik also recently launched its first lending product called Quick Loan. The digital loan product is designed to serve the vast unbanked and underbanked Filipino middle class with a quick and affordable bank loans.
AllianceBlock has joined the renowned Open Wealth Association. The Open Wealth Association aims to define, maintain and operationalise the open API standard for the global wealth management community. The AllianceBlock product suite lets banks, institutions and wealthtechs gain access to DeFi.
Meanwhile, PayU, the fintech business of Prosus, enjoys patent success. Its patent technology to improve payments routing and approval, has been accepted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The technology has been available on PayU’s platform since 2016.
bunq will become the first European digital bank to start offering mortgages. The challenger has teamed up with Dutch lending platform Tulp to deliver the service. Mortgages will initially be available in the Netherlands from early 2022.
