The Fintech Fix Weekly Roundup 28/04/2022

Welcome to The Fintech Fix! We cover the biggest stories of the financial week, whether it’s the next groundbreaking trend in cryptocurrency or Blockchain technology, a new partnership about to change the global, economic landscape or an upcoming startup generating a huge following. 

Hot Topics –  A question, would you exercise to earn crypto? In our biggest story this week, we dive into the world of health and fitness with London-based tech company Sweatcoin. The crypto disruptor has launched a new token, SWEAT, which converts physical movement into crypto. This is in an effort to encourage people to be more physically active and health-conscious in the face of a global obesity crisis. Through this new offering, Sweatcoin’s burgeoning 63+million users will be able to convert their sweatcoins 1:1 with these Ethereum-built tokens at a Token Generation Event this summer, marking the biggest onboarding of customers in Crypto history. 

Keeping on the topic of new customer-centric innovations, Mastercard has announced the launch of an enhanced identity solution to improve the online shopping experience as well as combat digital fraud head-on. This feature was developed in collaboration with Microsoft. 

With first-party fraud being a global $50 billion issue, Mastercard is Enhancing its Digital Transaction Insights solution by utilising stronger authentication and real-time decision intelligence capabilities. Using both Mastercard’s network insights and the merchant’s data, the solution can validate a consumer’s identity, thus providing financial institutions with another layer of data to safeguard their transactions. Online merchants can now open themselves up to a mass of customers, with less doubt of being swindled. 

In internal company news, this week brings the launch of our 7th issue of The Insurtech Magazine! With discussion around automation and its use cases, and blockchain and its durability, we take a hard look at the insurance industry’s hottests topics. Among all new technologies and solutions introduced into the sector this quarter, embedded insurance has been the crowning innovation for insurance in recent years. With the likes of Amazon and Tesla now integrating insurance into their product buyer’s journey, embedded or ‘bundled’ insurance is fast becoming a standard for eCommerce. We caught up with the likes of Penni.io and tigerlab about this new enterprise, and how it is changing the industry. 

“With embedded insurance, you can hit millions of customers a day for the same cost as one agent, and, while you may have a lower conversion rate, the numbers are higher,” said Simon Bentholm, the Chief Customer Officer of Penni.io. 

Big Partnerships To Watch – The last week has been huge for payments and insurance, with big firms uniting on a global scale. Insurance company MSIG Singapore has partnered with SaaS provider Merimen to further accelerate the digitalisation of its claims management processes and workflows. MSIG will adopt Merimen’s eClaims platform to streamline the claims process for over 50 products across 10 insurance classes, on both personal and commercial business lines. Like many big insurers at the moment, MSIG is using AI to design a system with plug-and-play functionality. 

We sail across to the Americas where Citi’s Treasury and Trade Solutions (TTS) has entered an agreement with Ebanx to expand the letters eCommerce offering to Citi’s institutional customers in Latin America. Ebanx platform will open the floodgates for alternative payments for 11 countries, including Argentina, Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru. Leveraging Ebanx, merchants will be able to collect payments from credit cards, e-wallets and local methods, and consumers will have the freedom to choose their preferred method of payment. It’s a win-win for both sides of the transaction. 

“As we focus on expanding our digital commerce footprint in today’s increasingly complex payments landscape, our mission is to deliver digitally-enabled solutions that address the evolving needs of our diverse institutional client base, especially our direct-to-consumer (D2C) clients,” said Steve Donovan, head of TTS at Citi Latin America.

North of Latin America, U.S. Bank announced its collaboration with Apex Fintech Solutions in evolving the safe movement of money between individual investors and broker-dealers. Using Apex’s real-time payment solution, brokerages can offer their investors a streamlined process that will enable instant funding of their brokerage accounts. U.S. Bank and Apex have been in fervent collaboration in recent months to enhance the speed and seamless access of U.S.’s payment solutions. 

Funding – When we think of the titans of the Fintech ecosystem, Starling Bank is front and centre. The digital challenger bank has recently completed internal fundraising of $130.5 million at a pre-money valuation of more than £2.5 billion. “This will enable us to continue our growth and to build a war chest for acquisitions. We are looking at a number of potential targets,” a spokesperson said.

Starling has yet to reveal any details on its future acquisitions, with its first acquisition last year of Fleet mortgages, and its recent eyeballing of specialist lender Kensington, the bullseye is ranging close to the mortgage lending space. With a surplus of $400 million in their arsenal, a historic acquisition is definitely on the cards for Starling. 

Our final story of the fix follows lease and location management startup Leasecake, which secured $12 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by New York firm PeakSpan Capital. The cloud-based operating system allows tenants, brokers, and landlords to manage location-related services, including lease management and accounting, and insurance agreements. This funding will enable the company to expand its customer base, develop more offerings, and venture out into European and Latin American markets. 

“Over the past year we experienced significant demand from businesses of all sizes leveraging our solution to become more efficient, collaborative and nimble,” said Taj Adhav, CEO and co-founder of Leasecake.