Welcome to The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup on Tuesday 21 March.
Partnerships
ConTe.it Prestiti, a new venture in the credit sector of Admiral Group Italy, has partnered with Tink, the European open banking platform. The fintech platform has embedded Tink’s Income Check product into its current offering, in order to make more accurate affordability assessments. Tink’s technology will enable ConTe.it Prestiti to roll-out and expand its lending offering across Italy.
Purpl, a remittance and cash out aggregator, announces a go-live on Mambu’s cloud-native banking platform. Having secured its digital wallet licence, Purpl’s new offering will provide Lebanese citizens at home and abroad with seamless ways of transacting.
Digital asset investment company ABO Digital has formed a partnership with AllianceBlock, a provider of blockchain infrastructure that bridges traditional finance and decentralised finance, to offer tokenised structured products for institutions and crypto projects and institutions seeking alternative forms of financing.
OCR Labs is partnering with Mvine, a British tech company delivering next-generation platforms that power the digital economy. This partnership enables Mvine’s digital identity infrastructure to benefit from OCR Labs Global’s digital identity verification services. The move reinforces the respective go-to-market offerings of both OCR Labs Global and Mvine to scale up commercial activity and expand in the UK B2B market.
PERX, a Norwegian P2P crowdlending platform, has partnered with Neonomics. Through this partnership, PERX can enable open banking payments on its platform through Neonomics’ open banking Checkout solution, to increase efficiency and security in its payments.
Fiserv, a provider of payments and financial services technology solutions, has partnered with Central Payments, a banking-as-a-service provider. The collaboration helps fintechs, enterprise businesses and payment facilitators to bring financial products and services to market with greater speed and growth potential. It combines Fiserv’s technology stack with Central Payments’ API marketplace.
Funding and investments
Fintech Two has revealed its €18million Series A, bringing total capital raised to €28million. The round was led by Shine Capital and Antler, with participation also from Sequoia Capital, Day One Ventures, Alumni Ventures, LocalGlobe, The Visionaries Club and Alliance VC. Since launching in Q2 2021, Two has grown 243 per cent quarterly and wins 79 per cent of competitive sales processes.
Payabli, a payments infrastructure company, has raised $12million in seed funding. The round was led by TTV Capital, Fika Ventures, Bling Capital, Louis Beryl (Rocketplace, Earnest) and Ershad Jamil. The company has earmarked the funds for furthering streamlining and enhancing its implementation process for software companies. It will also invest in the continual innovation, stability and security of its product.
Monite, an API-first embedded finance workflows startup, has secured an aggregate $10million in Seed financing to help platforms working with SMBs capitalise on hassle-free B2B payments automation for their clients. Monite recently closed $5million in Seed funding in a round led by Third Prime. This investment follows a $5million Seed led by Point72 Ventures in early 2022
Carbonable has raised $1.2million in a seed round led by Ethereal Ventures and La Poste Ventures. Its client base includes pharmaceutical, media, Web3 and consulting companies such as Pierre Fabre and Argent Wallet. The funds will be used to grow the team and R&D efforts, as well as manage more international biodiversity projects and strengthen collaboration with industry leaders.
Meanwhile, Sav, a firm in the personal savings space, has closed a pre-seed funding round, raising $750,000 in the capital. The funding was raised from angel investors and fintech leaders in the MENA region.
Research and insights
Fourty-five per cent of investors do not have a good understanding of how their investments are taxed, according to a survey of more than 750 UK-based retail investors. Investment platform Shojin also found that 37 per cent of investors believe tax efficiency will play a bigger role in their investment strategies amid rising inflation and the economic slowdown.
Searches for ‘how to start trading’ have increased 203 per cent worldwide since 2004, reveals research from CMC Markets. Searches for ‘stock trading tips’ have also increased by 204 per cent worldwide over the past five years. ‘How to get into trading’ increased 178 per cent, while searches for ‘trading tips’ have risen by 195 per cent.
Six out of 10 European businesses say navigating tax complexity is the biggest challenge in payroll processing. That is according to research from SD Worx, a European HR and people solutions provider. Fewer than a third of European companies are only using cloud technology to manage their payroll. While one-tenth of the companies surveyed are combining cloud and on-premise software.
Yapily reveals businesses are potentially losing up to £656million in missed revenue at the last mile. The research found that 52 per cent of those surveyed have ditched at least one online purchase in the last 12 months due to a poor experience at the online checkout. Forty-one per cent of Brits want to see businesses offer more convenient and easier payment methods at checkout.
Job moves
IS2, an independent digital trading and distribution platform for the schemes market, appoints Joe Sultana as commercial director. Sultana was latterly director at e-Zee Insurance Solutions. Prior to that he was COO at Applied Systems Europe. IS2 delivers digital solutions for insurers, insurtechs, MGAs and brokers.
AI provider Axyon AI, has appointed Massimo Tosato as advisory committee member. Tosato will join Axyon AI’s committee to support the Italian AI fintech with its growth and development. The company collaborates closely with the AI and computer sciences faculty at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
Workday, which offers enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, has appointed Laurence Leyden as vice president of its UKI Financial Services Industry (FSI) team. Leyden has held various senior roles at financial institutions including Barclays, HSBC and Lloyds Banking Group.
Planixs, a provider of real-time, intraday cash, collateral and liquidity management solutions, has named Nick Jepson as chief revenue officer. He has worked alongside Planixs rolling out the company’s Realiti® intraday cash and liquidity management solution at UK and European banking firms and has also served as its chief customer officer since 2021.
Jon Lukomnik has joined investor fintech Tumelo as an advisor. He will provide strategic guidance and support as Tumelo pursues its mission to democratise shareholder voting. Lukomnik has previously consulted to institutional investors with aggregate assets of $1trillion.
Bristol-based invoice finance provider Optimum Finance has appointed David Tugwell as an account executive to support its lead generation and new business team. He has worked in the client services and banking industries for 18 years, having latterly been a branch manager for Barclays.
Ezra, the microlending fintech, has unveiled Andrew Goodrich as its chief risk officer. This appointment is a key milestone in Ezra’s expansion strategy to support the financially underserved in emerging economies. He will oversee the data engineering, predictive analytics, and credit risk/fraud functions at Ezra.
