The Fintech Fix – Weekly Roundup 03/11/2021

The Fintech Fix, Week 3: 

Welcome to the third week of The Fintech Fix, where we cover the biggest stories of the financial week! Whether it’s the next groundbreaking advancement in Blockchain technology, a new CEO creating an economic revolution or an upcoming startup generating a huge following, this is the place to keep up with the breaking news of the future. 

Hot Topics – We have so much financial news to cover this week! But just in case you missed some of the big stories last week, catch up now!

Revolut dominated headlines in this week’s roundup with their launch of a limited-edition poppy card. Working with the Royal British Legion and Visa, the card is attainable with a minimum donation of £5 to the Royal British Legion and is decorated with a red poppy on a white background to symbolise remembrance and hope for a peaceful future. 

A new report from Mambu, a leading SaaS banking platform, and Google Cloud revealed that artificial intelligence will truly reshape the world of banking as we know it. Whilst this belief has circulated amongst the industry already, The ‘Bank of the Future’ whitepaper identified ubiquitous banking as the next frontier in the digital financial revolution. The whitepaper also highlighted that the three building blocks to enable this future are customer-centric strategy, value-based AI use cases and composable technology architecture. Is this the pathway to delivering up to $1 trillion of additional value each year to the global banking industry?  

Valentina Kristensen from Oaknorth Bank and Andrew Renshaw from Feedzai delivered an interesting discussion regarding how to build a bank from the ground up. Both organisations commented on the importance of utilising artificial intelligence and cloud based platforms to their ultimate effect to create a seamless, efficient and futuristic version of banking that the world leans more towards, as echoed above by Mambu and Google Cloud. 

Metro Bank kicked off its first start-up ‘Magic Makers’ accelerator programme, developed with the innovation specialist L Marks, and the initial results look very promising. The programme is initially a 10-week immersive Magic Makers’ programme. Surfly, Solidatus and PolyAI are all halfway through this stage of the programme, and have commented on the benefits that the collaboration has triggered. Daniel Saunders, Chief Executive of L Marks, said that ‘we look forward to seeing the solutions and relationships developing further to accelerate the future of banking.’ This project follows on from Metro Bank’s established reputation for furthering inclusivity and innovation in the workplace, shown in their partnership with BAME Recruitment earlier in the year. 

Klarna continued to make big moves in the market, reflected this time by their acquisition of PriceRunner. PriceRunner will bring new features in the form of product reviews, discovery and price comparisons to the Klarna app for its 90 million global consumers. Mike Lindahl, PriceRunner’s CEO, commented that ‘we see Klarna as the ideal partner to accelerate growth and achieve our long term vision to become the most loved comparison shopping service in the world.’ David Fock, Klarna’s Chief Product Officer, shared this sentiment, stating that ‘the acquisition will serve to strengthen our bank, card and payment services and support a competitive global landscape.’

UK wealth managers stated their top priority at the moment is defending customers against cyber threats and improving customer experience, a recent report shows. The report, commissioned by Mobiquity, saw that 37% of wealth managers, out of the 100 wealth management executives that were surveyed,  believed that tackling these issues would be the ‘keys to success’, and achievable through further adoption of digital technologies to improve client servicing driven by the COVID-19 environment. Matthew Williamson, VP of Mobiquity, commented that ‘as wealth managers continue to adopt technologies such as client wealth management dashboards, video conferencing and AI, they must also ensure they have a robust security framework that keeps both company and consumer data safe.’ 

ING’s Global Director of Payments, Evelien Witlox, joined the FF Virtual Arena to discuss what the next chapter in payments is. Some key conclusions emerged, notably that banks can stay competitive in the payments industry by offering faster payments, increased amount of data sets per payment and new services, continent per continent before connecting the data to enhance a worldwide infrastructure. 

FV Bank, a US licensed challenger bank and digital asset custodian, has been approved as a Principal Member of Visa which opens up a thrilling opportunity. FV is set to launch cryptocurrency linked Visa card programs, a key milestone in offering traditional banking services alongside digital asset custody. FV Co Founder, Nitin Agarwal, commented that ‘there is a huge demand for customers who do not want to sell their crypto but want access to spendable funds’, and so the vertically integrated solution will provide clients with a hybrid service to hold fiat and digital assets in the same account, as well as seamless conversion of those assets.

Minna Technologies announced that they have been selected as one of the Inclusive Fintech 50, powered by the Center for Financial Inclusion. The 50 fintechs were selected from a pool of 377 eligible applications operating in over 77 countries based on four criteria; inclusivity, innovation, scale potential and traction. With Minna’s infrastructure providing transparency to consumers, empowering them to move to conscious consumption after they were plagued by subscription fatigue, their inclusion was well deserved. 

MoonPay, the global payments solution for cryptocurrency, and The HBAR Foundation revealed that US customers in most states can now purchase the Hedera network’s native token, HBAR, through MoonPay’s platform. This token could prove extremely valuable given the success of the Hedera network, which offers 10,000 transactions per second, near real-time settlement and is built around a core pillar of environmental sustainability and carbon neutrality. To Shayne Higdon, CEO and Executive Director of The HBAR Foundation, ‘this is an important step towards wider acceptance of the Hedera network as the platform of choice for developers.’

The 2021 EPA Awards continued to generate hype across the industry. Attended by over 750 of the most influential individuals in Fintech, the night was filled with celebrations for the payment industry and marked the reopening of in-person celebrations. Watch the content we filmed for the event!

Visa has also strategically invested in Deserve, a fintech transforming credit cards into mobile-centric software, to expand access to Deserve’s credit-card-as-a-service for financial institutions. With this, credit cards could live on mobiles, not wallets, therefore furthering their usability and convenience. ‘This investment validates the industry’s embrace of a digital-first, embedded approach driven by APIs and SDKs’, said Kalpesh Kapadia, Co Founder and CEO of Deserve. 

Transfer News – this week marked the exciting announcement of Tommy Fransson as the new CEO of Valour. Fransson joins from Nordic Growth Market where he acted as Deputy CEO for 10 years. The appointment follows Valour’s exponential growth since its launch last December, with Assets Under Management currently at over US$290 million!

Big Partnerships To Watch – Verto, the B2B payments platform, and ClearBank, the cloud-based clearing bank, have partnered together to create seamless cross-border payments solutions for underserved UK and European businesses. This will connect UK and European SMEs with a multi-currency bank account and FX solutions, further eliminating barriers to cross-border payments. By solving this pain point in the B2B global payments industry, the marketplace could grow to nearly $200 trillion by 2028. ClearBank continued to expand their portfolio, by partnering with Paynetics, the regulated e-money services provider, to deliver real-time execution of transactions. They are definitely one to watch for the innovations in the payments industry!

Velo Labs and Inception have also partnered, revolutionizing the Southeast Asian remittance scene. Velo Labs is a blockchain based cross-border settlement technology company, and so the partnership will move Inception’s traditional, legacy settlement systems to the more efficient blockchain starting this quarter. This will improve the speed  and lower the fees associated with customer transactions, ‘raising the standard of financial inclusion and mobility’, according to Mike Kennedy, CEO of Velo Labs. 

Nium, leading global payments platform, and utu, travel technology company, recently joined forces too, in order to unlock cash rewards and more for globetrotting shoppers. The launch of the virtual utu Tax Free Card and mobile app allows travellers shopping abroad to upsize their tax-free shopping refunds by up to 25%, with the options to choose to upsize from air miles, hotel paints, retail vouchers as well as cash refunds. The world embraced digital convenience during COVID. As travel reopens, that convenience has to be maintained for us to progress as a society; socially and financially.

Funding – it’s a quieter week regarding funding to report so far in November. APLYid received NZD $7 million in investment funding to take its customer onboarding software around the world. Last month APLYid also opened their UK office, and the funding will aim to help more global businesses stay compliant whilst providing a seamless customer onboarding experience against the threat of fraud. This will particularly help SMEs, as Russell Smith, CEO and Co Founder of APLYid, says that ‘the flexibility of our technology means we can offer smaller organisations an out of the box solution to help them immediately.’

Checkbook also recorded securing $10 million in Series A funding. PJ Gupta, CEO and Founder of the company, said that ‘our mission is to solve the challenges of push payments by building a payouts platform for the digital age. By building a seamless online recipient experience, we’re completing the last mile of payments.’ 

So that’s your weekly Fintech Fix! Stay tuned for next week’s dose so that you can stay up to date with the biggest stories of the future, right here in the present.