Welcome to The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup on Tuesday 27 June 2023.
Industry hires
Privalgo, a London-based payments and FX provider, appoints Kajal Pankhania as its new director of people and culture, as well as Ilan Cohen as CFO. Pankhania was previously head of people at Xe, while Cohen has experience in fintech and ecommerce including AI and gaming.
CV VC, a global blockchain technology venture capital firm, adds Yvonne Bettkober and Philipp Rösler to its board of directors. The new board members will support the company’s mission to accelerate global transformation through the utility of blockchain technology.
Paytrix has appointed Nick Tubb as its global head of sales. Tubb was most recently Banking Circle’s global head of FX sales. In his new role, he will focus on further developing and executing Paytrix’s sales strategy, and scaling the commercial team to support the company’s international expansion.
Asia-based crypto staking firm RockX has named Paul Mischenko as its head of Americas. He previously served as the head of FX (Americas) for HSBC Bank. Mischenko will help RockX’s clients drive the integration of digital assets and traditional finance in both South and North America.
Data management product company Intix hires Kurt Florus as its new chief technology officer. Most recently, he was CTO and a board member at Bluebee, the cloud-based platform for genetic information management. Florus takes over from current CTO and Intix co-founder Wouter Van Santvliet.
Alto, a self-directed individual retirement account (IRA) platform that enables individuals to invest in alternative assets using their retirement funds, has appointed Scott Harrigan as CEO of Alto Securities and Oliver Plattner as chief product and technology officer. They will drive product innovation and transformative business strategies, including Alto’s recently launched capital raise platform.
Partnerships
BIP Group has forged a partnership with Credo AI to help clients address the emerging need to govern AI solutions responsibly. BIP said the collaboration will ensure that clients can continue to maximise the potential of AI, minimise any potential risk and achieve quality at scale.
Danske Bank enters strategic partnership with Infosys. As part of the partnership, Danske Bank will sell Danske IT, a fully-owned subsidiary of Danske Bank, headquartered in Bengaluru, India, to Infosys. The sale of Danske IT does not include plans for redundancies.
Endava, a provider of digital transformation and intelligent automation services, has partnered with insurance payments platform Imburse. The partnership will strengthen Endava’s ability to support businesses on their digitalisation, innovation and migration projects, through new technologies and enhanced payment solutions.
FIS has established a partnership with Visa to enable eligible Worldpay from FIS UK merchants to accept payments using the Visa Instalments checkout functionality for the first time. Worldpay is the first merchant acquirer to offer Visa Instalments as an option at checkout in the UK while HSBC UK becomes the first card issuer in the UK to offer the service to its credit card customers.
Portugese bank Novobanco partners with Feedzai – it will implement Feedzai’s Risk-Ops platform to optimise user experience while adding enhanced protection to its customers against financial crime. An ongoing programme of investment sees Novobanco use Feedzai’s Digital Trust and Transaction Fraud for Banking (TFB) solutions.
Additional partnerships
FICO, a global analytic software company, has joined forces with Belvo, the open finance data and payments platform, to expand credit access in Latin America. The two firms will develop an interpretable and explainable machine learning model to provide a score based on consumer-permissioned transaction-level data. It aims to increase credit access for consumers, as well as improve banks’ risk management.
Cornèrcard partners with regtech Rivero to digitalise its card scheme compliance processes. The partnership will significantly increase the efficiency of the Swiss bank’s compliance operations, reducing laborious processes and introducing guaranteed quality control. Specifically, Cornèrcard has adopted Rivero’s card scheme compliance platform Kajo.
Fintech startup Mia-FinTech has partnered with passwordless authentication platform Futurae to give customers access to advanced authentication and authorisation services for digital identity management. By partnering with Futurae, Mia-FinTech aims to streamline how companies authenticate transactions as well as safeguard sensitive data.
Product updates
Digits, a producer of small-business finance workflow software, has launched Digits AI: a secure, accurate, business-specific finance AI. Digits AI empowers business owners, accountants, and finance teams with real-time financial planning and analysis, insights, and visualisations. It connects to QuickBooks and over 10,000 financial institutions.
PayU, an online payment service provider, has integrated two new payments methods – Mastercard Click to Pay as well as Capitec Pay. The integration enables merchants to reduce checkout abandonment and fraud via seamless and secure authentication.
Fireblocks, an enterprise platform to manage digital asset operations, has announced new capabilities to expand support for banking and financial institutions. They can be integrated into institution’s existing IT infrastructure and security policies, helping them seamlessly onboard into digital assets.
Funding and investments
Mypinpad, a mobile card payments acceptance and identity authentication solutions provider, enjoys an investment round of $13million led by fintech investor Crossfin Holdings to help expansion and scale up its payments and authentication SaaS offerings. Mypinpad will also benefit from partnerships with other companies within Crossfin’s portfolio.
Investment platform TreasurySpring has raised $29million in Series B funding led by Balderton Capital. Mubadala Capital also participated in the round, alongside previous investors ETFS Capital, MMC Ventures and Anthemis Group. The new funding enables the company to continue to scale its product, sales, marketing and tech teams, as well as expand its product offering and accelerate international expansion.
Lloyds Banking Group has invested £2million in Fennech, a next-gen corporate banking platform for financial institutions and corporates. Lloyds’ Fintech Investment team focuses on identifying and exploring opportunities for investment into fintech at Seed to Series B. Fennech will use the funding for product development.
European games industry startup SuperScale bags $5.4million in a Series A funding round. The company offers game developers as well as publishers an SaaS data analytics platform and data science driven professional services. The funding will enable SuperScale to expand its services aimed at transforming commercial effectiveness across a game’s entire infrastructure.
Resistant AI extends Series A to $27.6million with funding from Notion Capital. The new investment adds to funding from GV, Index Ventures, Credo Ventures, as well as Seedcamp. It also builds on Resistant AI’s expansion of its product, team and geographical presence.
