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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
A holiday-filled week that began with Father’s Day, continues through Juneteenth, and brings us the first official day of summer.
Don’t be surprised if this week yields a lower than usual fintech news flow as the temperatures rise and the days stretch long. We’ll keep you posted if you decide to step outside and enjoy the season.
Payments
Uruguayan cross-border payment platform dLocalforged a partnership with Lithuanian gaming marketplace Eneba.
Digital payments platform CleverCardsraises $8.5 million (€8 million).
Shift4acquires a majority stake in Vectron Systems, one of the largest European suppliers of point-of-sale (POS) systems to the restaurant and hospitality verticals.
This week’s edition of Finovate Global looks at recent fintech developments in Egypt.
Egyptian fintech Sahl raised $6 million in funding
An investment of $6 million will help Cairo-based fintech Sahl pursue its expansion in Saudi Arabia. The funds – courtesy of a Series A round led by Ayady for Investment and Development and featuring participation from existing investors Egypt Pay, Delta Electronic Systems, and E-Finance – will also help support Sahl’s mobile bill payment platform.
Sahl enables users to pay for more than 50 services, including electricity, water, mobile bill payments, and more via NFC-enabled, rechargeable prepaid cards. The firm also offers B2B solutions: the company’s Services Gateway serves as a central hub to aggregate billpay services for other payment processors and digital apps, while Sahl’s Acceptance solution helps businesses accept online payments. Founded in 2020, Sahl is among the few Egyptian companies to directly integrate with government agencies and telecom operators.
Ultimately, the company plans to grow into a more comprehensive financial services provider. For now, Sahl’s growth strategy involves becoming the dominant force in the payments market for utilities companies – a market worth EGP 250 billion a year.
“At Sahl, we are committed to addressing the challenges faced by consumers in utility payments, starting with electricity and expanding to water, gas, telecom, and various other essential services,” Sahl CEO Abdullah Assal said. “Our innovative use of NFC technology eliminates the need for consumers to leave their homes to charge prepaid cards, saving valuable time and effort.”
Sahl serves more than 12 million customers a month and 15 million households in Egypt.
HSBC Egypt to launch $31.5 million fund for SME-based fintechs
You don’t have to be Sahl to feel as if good funding fortunes are coming your way. HSBC Egypt will launch a new $31.5 million (EGP 1.5 billion) fund dedicated to small and medium-sized businesses in the fintech sector. The fund, which will be managed by EFG Holding, has secured approval from the Central Bank of Egypt (CBE) as well as the backing of financial institutions such as the Suez Canal Bank. The fund is slated to go live in Q3 of 2024.
The focus on fintech is designed to take advantage of the spread of digital banking and payments in the region. But the initiative is part of a grander strategy by HSBC to encourage technological innovation and spur economic growth in Egypt.
Established in 1982, HSBC Bank Egypt supports a network of 100 branches and 20 mini-bank units throughout the country. The largest foreign bank in Egypt, HSBC Bank Egypt has total assets of approximately $7 billion and a market share of 7%.
Banknbox Egypt announced multiple strategic partnerships
Digital services and paytech provider Banknbox Egypt has inked strategic partnerships with banks and fintechs in eight countries so far in 2024. Backed by the Central Bank of Egypt, Banknbox has teamed up with firms and financial institutions in countries ranging from Iraq and Libya to Moldova and a number of African countries.
“We would like to thank the CBE for its continuous support in ensuring that Banknbox achieves its vision of transforming Egypt into a regional hub,” Banknbox Chairperson and Managing Director Bassem Mahmoud said.
Banknbox is a regional payment solutions and processor offering issuing and acquiring services, as well as value-added services such as billpay and fraud management. The company also offers integrated digital banking services, including mobile and internet banking, electronic wallets, eKYC and encoding services, and more. Founded in 2008 and headquartered in Cairo, Banknbox began the year partnering with SWFT, a banking and finance platform for SMEs. The strategic partnership will give SMEs a suite of innovative banking solutions and tools for smart cash flow management.
“We believe that by uniting efforts with SWFT, we can revolutionize the way SMEs manage their finances,” Mahmoud said. “It’s a new opportunity for Banknbox to provide more services to the Egyptian market, relying on its regional platform in Egypt to serve companies and banks in the region. This strategic cooperation complements the company’s successes in achieving growth rates in the Egyptian market.”
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Central and Southern Asia
International e-wallet service provider and payment gateway STICPAY integrated with India’s real-time payments system, UPI.
Pakistan-based consultancy Dellsons Associates partnered with UAE-based NymCards to expand into Pakistan and the Middle East.
Indian digital lending platform Fibe raised $90 million in Series E funding.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Payments orchestration platform Paysecure announced a strategic alliance with a55 as part of its expansion plans in Latin America.
What challenges are small and medium-sized businesses facing when it comes to getting the capital they need when they need it? What role does technology – especially enabling technologies like automation and AI – play in helping make it easier for entrepreneurs and SMBs to access critical financing?
This week, Finovate VP and host of the Finovate Podcast Greg Palmer spoke with Marius Silvasan, CEO of eCapital, to discuss these and other issues important to small businesses and the financial services companies that serve them.
“SMBs in this current market are under pressure,” Silvansan explained in his Finovate Podcast interview. “They are challenged. And the reason behind that is we’ve come from an environment in which inflation is coming down, but has been high over the last year-and-a-half. We’ve come from an environment in which borrowing costs were near zero – and they’ve increased substantially over the last several years. And the labor market has been very tight, so it’s been tough for SMBs to hire, it’s been tough for SMBs to retain qualified personnel. So that’s made the environment for SMBs quite challenging over the several years.”
Headquartered in Miami, Florida, eCapital helps small and medium-sized businesses secure the financing they need in order to grow. Founded in 2006, eCapital offers a wide range of financing solutions including freight and invoice factoring, payroll funding, asset-back lending, equipment refinancing, and lines of credit.
Bud Financial, a data intelligence platform, has joined the open banking network of Akoya.
The move will help Bud Financial market its personalization solution and data insights to financial institutions.
Bud made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2023 in New York last year.
Data intelligence platform Bud Financialhas joined the U.S. open banking ecosystem of Akoya. The move will make it easier for the company to enable financial services companies to offer their customers hyper-personalized financial experiences. The new resources will also help FIs take advantage of new growth and revenue opportunities.
“We’re really excited to bring together Bud’s AI banking personalization with Akoya’s unique data aggregation capabilities,” Bud CEO and Co-Founder Ed Maslaveckas said. “Banks and fintechs that work with Bud can leverage a full stack solution, bringing all consumer data into one place with access to tools that understand the data. This means anyone within a financial institution can create hyper-personalized experiences or insights, improving cross and up-sell of products.”
The combination of Bud’s AI-powered data enrichment techniques and Akoya’s secure and scalable open finance network of trusted data providers will offer FIs a number of major benefits. These include the ability to offer personalization at scale, enhanced personal finance management, data-driven risk management and cash flow analytics, as well as other efficiency gains that are achievable thanks to deep insights into customer data.
“Increased transparency, enhanced customer experiences, and streamlined operations are just a few of the ways this partnership will deliver real value,” Akoya CEO Behram Panthaki said.
Bud is the second Finovate alum that Boston, Massachusetts-based Akoya has partnered with this year. Last month, Akoya announced a strategic partnership with white-label data platform 9Spokes, which won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2023. 9Spokes aggregates permissioned business data from multiple sources to help companies improve financial management and strategic decision-making. The Auckland, New Zealand-based firm was founded in 2012.
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in New York, Bud made its Finovate debut last year at FinovateFall in New York. At the conference, the company showed how its generative AI platform can transform bank data into a comprehensive financial picture with customer-level, transaction-level, and portfolio-level insights to power better decision-making. Bud securely enriches 300 million transactions a month and boasts that “zero” of its 100+ employees across four countries have access to client data.
Social investing and trading platform eToro has partnered with social media platform X.
eToro will publish investment education content on X, leveraging investment experts and thought leaders from its eToro Academy.
Founded in 2007, eToro has won Finovate Best of Show awards on each of its six Finovate appearances.
It may not be a step on the road to making X a payments superapp, but the decision to partner with eToro to publish investment education content on the social media platform is among the most interesting fintech/financial-related moves from X to date.
eToro and X announced this week that they are working together to provide investment content on the social media platform via video, posts, and Spaces. The content will consist of insights and analysis from thought leaders from the investing community who will discuss a combination of breaking financial news, top trends in finance and investing, as well as investment fundamentals live on the platform. The material will be free to all X users and will be available in the U.S. and the U.K., as well as in France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and the UAE.
“We believe that there is power in shared knowledge,” eToro Co-founder and CEO Yoni Assia said. “It’s why we created a collaborative, social investment platform, and it’s why we prioritize financial education through our eToro Academy. Having been long-term collaborators with X, we are delighted to extend our partnership to provide more opportunities for financial learning and the sharing of investment insights on X.”
The partnership announcement comes with a renewed agreement for title sponsorship for X’s real-time Cashtag feature. This feature provides charting tools and data from TradingView on stocks, cryptocurrencies, and other assets, as well as the ability to trade and invest with eToro.
“Bringing eToro Academy to X is testament to the strength of the partnership we have built together and the continued growth of the financial investment conversation on X,” the social media platform’s CEO Linda Yaccarino said. “The continued success of our collaboration will bring more high-quality video content to the service, building on our innovation around cashtags and new features.”
To Yaccarino’s point about the growth of what used to be called “fintwit,” it’s worth knowing that there were more than 1.4 billion posts on X last year that were about trading or investing. This figure reflected year-over-year growth of 54%.
“We know that an increasing number of people turn to social media for accessible, relevant financial content,” Assia said. “It provides a forum for many who were excluded by more traditional channels. Partnering with X will enable us to deliver the very best in financial education to a global audience.”
Founded in 2007, eToro supports more than 35 million registered users and investors on its trading and investing platform. The company offers a collaborative investing community to help investors and traders learn the skills and develop the tools they need in order to reach their financial goals, whether through traditional assets or non-traditional assets. One of Finovate’s earliest and most popular alums, eToro won Best of Show in each of its six Finovate appearances from 2011 through 2017.
Munich, Germany-based Hawk announced an extension of its Series B funding round this week.
The amount of the extension was not disclosed. But the anti-financial crime regtech said that the investment did increase its valuation.
Hawk made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring in 2022.
Germany-based regtech Hawkannounced an extension of its Series B funding round. The amount of the extension was not disclosed, but the company noted that the investment did significantly boost its valuation. The extension included funding from Rabo Investments, and also featured participation from existing investors BlackFin Capital Partners, Sands Capital, DN, Picus, and Coalition. Hawk will use the additional capital to fuel international growth and to help the firm meet growing demand for its AI-powered anti-financial crime solutions.
“We’re honored that Rabobank has recognized the significance of our technology and joins us in building a global market-leading enterprise, while also benefiting first-hand from our solutions and experience,” Hawk CEO Tobias Schweiger said. “I would also like to gratefully thank our existing investors for their ongoing support and look forward to continuing our partnership.”
Hawk, which rebranded from “Hawk AI” earlier this year, offers anti-money laundering (AML) and counter-the-financing-of-terrorism (CTF) technology that leverages explainable AI to detect more financial crime and reduce false positives. In fact, the company’s AI-powered technology delivers a 3x to 5x increase in risk detection and a 70% average reduction in the number of false positives. Banks, payments companies, and other financial services firms benefit from the ability to combine AML transaction monitoring, payment screening, and (Perpetual KYC) pKYC in a single solution that also includes powerful fraud prevention capabilities.
“Rabobank has been working with machine learning applications for many years,” Rabo Investments Managing Director Martijn Scholtes said. “What impressed us most about Hawk is that they’re delivering compelling results using explainable AI. Their advanced screening, detection, and monitoring capabilities align very well with our mission to build a more secure and robust financial ecosystem.”
Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Munich, Germany, Hawk AI made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2022. At the conference, the company demoed its AML Surveillance Suite, which leverages traditional rule-based models and AI to provide financial institutions with next generation AML compliance. “AI should be used to achieve three major outcomes,” Hawk GM of North America Steve Liú explained at the event, “one, finding suspicious and risky behavior that peer rule systems simply cannot; two, decrease the number of false positives drastically by using behavioral profiling on top of existing rules; and third, that all of this is fully explainable for operators and auditors, and available to our users on a platform allowing for secure information sharing.”
Hawk began the year by appointing former HSBC executive Michael Shearer as its Chief Solution Officer. Less than a month later, the company introduced new APAC General Manager Robin Lee, formerly of Napier. In February, Hawk won the XCelent Advanced Technology 2024 award and, in May, the company earned a spot on the 2024 FinTech Global Fincrime Tech 50.
Earlier this year, we looked at how the drive for real-time payments in the West could benefit from studying the successes of India’s real-time payments network, UPI. Last week, we learned that there is at least one country in the Western hemisphere that’s taking us up on our suggestion and that country isn’t the United States, it’s Peru.
Launched in 2016, the National Payments Corporation of India’s United Payments Interface was built to support both peer-to-peer payments and transactions with merchants via mobile phone. The initiative has been hugely successful; in 2023, the number of UPI transactions exceeded 100 billion. The Indian government boasts that more digital transactions are completed in India than in any other country in the world.
Now, it looks like Peru is getting into the act. The Central Reserve Bank of Peru (BCRP) and India’s NPCI International Payments Limited (NIPL) have signed a deal to deploy a real-time payments system in Peru based on India’s UPI. This partnership makes Peru the first country in South America to adopt the technology. The development is a major feather in the cap of India’s fintech industry and another great example of how countries in Latin America are embracing fintech innovation to promote financial inclusion.
“This will undoubtedly offer new and accessible payment services to everyone, especially the unbanked population of Peru, complementing the existing payments industry,” BCRP governor Julio Velarde said. He referred to the partnership as a “significant step in strengthening and modernizing our payments system, aiming to expand access to digital payments in Peru.”
NIPL was launched in 2020 as the international arm of NCPI. Earlier this year, NIPL teamed up with French payments company Lyra Network to bring UPI payments to France. Outside of India, the UPI system is currently supported in Sri Lanka, Mauritius, the UAE, Singapore, Bhutan, and Nepal. Last month, NIPL announced that it was working to bring a UPI-type payment system to Namibia.
The arrival of UPI-based real-time payments in Peru will also bring innovations including QR code payments, biometric authentication, and AI-powered fraud detection. Alleviating the reliance on cash and enhancing financial inclusion and digital financial literacy are among the goals of the initiative.
It’s worth noting that Peru has made significant strides in helping move its citizens from the ranks of the un- and underbanked to full participants in the country’s financial system. In 2015, the number of adults with at least one financial product was approximately 35%. By 2020, this number had increased to more than 43% – and this was before the government’s pandemic-era decision that created millions of bank accounts for unbanked Peruvians to help facilitate aid payments.
Nevertheless, Peruvians remain relatively unbanked compared to those in neighboring countries. The unbanked constitute only 30% of the Brazilian population and only 26% of Chile’s. With a population of more than 32 million, Peru has its work cut out for it. But now, courtesy of NPCI, the third-largest nation in South America has help.
“We will be working together to address our common objective of promoting digital payments, financial inclusion, cost optimization, and transparency in the payment landscape, with scope for further scalability and adaptability, to embrace future technological advancements and market demands,” NPCI International CEO Ritesh Shukla said. “Once live, Peruvian citizens will gain access to an unparalleled level of convenience, security, and efficiency in financial transactions.”
For more on fintech news from around the world, be sure to check out our Finovate Global column, published every Friday afternoon.
Austin, Texas-based cybersecurity firm SpyCloud has raised $35 million in financing.
The capital will be used to expand the company’s solutions to help businesses investigate and defend themselves against cybercrime in general and account takeover fraud in specific.
SpyCloud won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2017 in New York.
In a round led by CIBC Innovation Banking, Texas-based cybersecurity company SpyCloud has secured $35 million in growth financing. The investment follows SpyCloud’s $110 million Series D fundraising from August 2023, and will be used to expand the firm’s solutions to help businesses investigate and defend themselves against financial crime.
“As the threat landscape continues to evolve, it’s imperative that digital identities are well protected since they’re the entry point for so many targeted attacks,” SpyCloud CEO and Co-Founder Ted Ross said. “Building automated solutions that combat cybercrime has been our vision since day one, and the financing we received from CIBC Innovation Banking will allow us to continue innovating and growing.”
SpyCloud’s total capital raised stands at more than $203 million, according to Crunchbase. CIBC Innovation Banking is the investment division of Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce.
SpyCloud specializes in helping firms combat account takeover. The company’s platform scans and analyzes data from breaches, devices infected with malware, and the dark web to find employee login credentials that have been exposed. SpyCloud leverages this data to provide companies with actionable insights to enable them to blunt fraud losses, stop ransomware attacks, and fully investigate cybercrime incidents as they occur.
With customers ranging from Uber, Zscaler, and Samsonite to LendingTree, Canva, and the University of Oklahoma, SpyCloud recaptures 40 million exposed assets every week. The company’s technology seamlessly integrates into a variety of identity response and orchestration systems including Active Directory, Okta, Microsoft Sentinel, Splunk, and more.
Founded in 2016, SpyCloud won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2017 in New York. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, the company has more than 550 customers around the world and has recaptured more than 560 billion identity assets. This spring, SpyCloud released its 2024 SpyCloud Identity Exposure Report, which indicated that more than 60% of all data breaches in 2023 were malware related.
“Threat actors are linking together identity records from hundreds of sources to impersonate their victims,” SpyCloud Chief Product Officer explained, “making it extremely difficult for platforms to differentiate between legitimate users and criminals.”
To this end, the report indicates that there is plenty that individuals can do to make it harder for them to be the victim of stolen credentials. Foremost among these strategies is better password hygiene. SpyCloud recaptured nearly 1.8 billion passwords from dark web sources in 2023 alone – a year-over-year increase of more than 80%. Unfortunately, it is not difficult to see how. Beneath a subhead titled, “The U.S. government continues to struggle with bad password practices,” the report observed “the most common passwords associated with .gov emails were password, pass1, and 123456.”
This week’s edition of Finovate Global takes a look at recent developments in the fintech industry of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Thndr, a digital investment platform based in Egypt, announced an expansion to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) this week. The expansion comes after the company secured a Category 3A license with retail endorsement from the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) Financial Services Regulatory Authority (FSRA). Thndr will initially offer investors in the UAE direct access to U.S.-listed securities, such as stocks, including fractional shares, as well as exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
“We at Thndr are thrilled to announce our official entry into the UAE market,” Thndr UAE General Manager Salah Kaddoura said. “We’d like to express our sincere gratitude to the FSRA for their openness and for welcoming Thndr to the UAE’s dynamic financial landscape.”
Founded in 2020 and a graduate of the Y Combinator accelerator, Thndr got its start as a commission-free, mobile trading platform for stocks, bonds, and funds. That year, Thndr became the first firm to earn a brokerage license in Egypt since 2008. The company went on to launch a new solution to enable trading in mutual funds and, in 2022, raised $20 million to fuel regional expansion.
With more than three million downloads and 500,000 active monthly users, Thndr notes that Egyptians traded $1.8 billion on its platform in 2023. As of this April, Thndr accounted for 8.5% of all retail transactions in the market. The company also reported that 87% of its users are first-time investors. “I take pride in seeing how our commitment to these principles has democratized investing to all Egyptians,” Kaddoura said, “and can’t wait for what we have in store for the UAE.”
du Pay, the digital payments division of UAE-based telecommunications company du, has formalized a partnership with digital payments giant Visa. The partnership will enable du Pay to issue Visa cards, grow its suite of financial solutions, and bring greater versatility to the du Pay platform.
“We are committed to making payment processes faster, simpler, and more secure while simultaneously enhancing financial inclusion,” du Pay CEO Nicholas Levi said. “The strategic collaboration is poised to accelerate digital empowerment with a focus on inclusivity and serve the needs of those without traditional banking services, ensuring simplified access to products.” For its part, Visa highlighted the impact of the partnership – and du Pay’s new prepaid Visa card – on the growth of digital commerce in the region.
du launched its du Pay solution earlier this year. The technology, available in six languages, offers international money transfers, P2P transfers, billpay, and a unique IBAN for each customer. The company plans to add a card feature “soon.”
Clarity on the role of Open Finance in the fintech and financial services industry of the UAE has arrived in the form of a new, comprehensive framework issued by the country’s Central Bank (CBUAE). The framework provides guidance on how to regulate licensing, supervision, and operation of Open Finance and has already received positive reviews from industry participants.
The CBUAE earned especially high marks for its emphasis on security and customer consent. One observer, Women in Crypto Arabia founder Zina Ashour said the framework “puts power back in the hands of the consumer.” Others, such as Tarabut Gateway CEO Abdulla Almoayed, were grateful for the regulatory clarity and certainty, adding that the “reduction in ambiguity” will enable his firm “to invest in the UAE with supreme confidence.”
Still further plaudits came for the comprehensive nature of the CBUAE’s decision. The UAE’s Open Finance Regulation includes, for example, both Open Banking and Open Insurance, as Global Ventures partner Said Murad observed. Murad also appreciated the fact that the regulation requires all entities licensed by the CBUAE to comply with its requirements for data sharing and service initiation.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Middle East and Northern Africa
Brokerage-as-a-Service innovator DriveWealthforged new partnership with Turkish fintech Papara.
Crédit Agricole Next Bank has launched a new lead management platform and CRM courtesy of a partnership with InvestGlass.
The new offering will help the bank deal with new customer growth and increasing linguistic diversity among its clients and employees.
Switzerland-based InvestGlass most recently demoed its sales and compliance automation technology at FinovateEurope in February.
Courtesy of a partnership with sales and compliance automation solution provider InvestGlass, Crédit Agricole Next Bank has launched its new lead management platform and CRM. The offering, unveiled this spring, will help the institution enhance the customer experience as well as automate internal processes for employees.
“The deployment of InvestGlass within Crédit Agricole Next Bank represents more than just a technical improvement,” Crédit Agricole Next Bank Deputy Director of Development Maxime Charton said. “It’s a cultural transformation that allows the bank to continue innovating and improving its digital journeys for the benefit of its clients.”
One of the key ways that Crédit Agricole Next Bank will leverage its new technology is to help the firm deal with the linguistic diversity that characterizes both its customers and staff. With more than four languages to contend with, the institution will benefit from InvestGlass’s flexibility and automation capabilities, which will enable Crédit Agricole Next Bank to provide personalized experiences even as its clientele grows.
Additionally, InvestGlass will help the institution fulfill its goal of digitalizing the lead management process, with appointment scheduling, prospect flow automation, and mailing tools integrated into the platform. This will make it easier for Crédit Agricole Next Bank to monitor and manage its communications more effectively across multiple channels.
“InvestGlass allows us to optimize our operational efficiency while significantly improving our clients’ experience,” Crédit Agricole Next Bank Director of Online Agency Stephane Graeffly said.
Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, InvestGlass made its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope in 2016 and returned to the Finovate stage most recently for FinovateEurope earlier this year. At the conference, the company demonstrated its automation solution for sales and compliance that helps banks, brokers, government agencies, and crypto companies become more productive with a non-U.S. CRM option.
InvestGlass’s partnership announcement comes a month after the company unveiled a pair of new AI solutions, Copilot and Mistral, to help businesses convert unstructured data into conversational knowledge and actionable insights. Copilot is the cloud-based option that allows companies to use their OpenAI API key. Mistral is InvestGlass’s local server/on-premise offering.
InvestGlass was founded in 2014. Alexandre Gaillard is CEO.
The U.S. House of Representatives wanted it. The Senate wanted it. Much, if not all, of the cryptocurrency industry wanted it. But on Friday, President Biden made good on his threat to veto a resolution that sought to loosen regulations regarding how financial institutions hold digital assets on their balance sheets.
“My administration will not support measures that jeopardize the well-being of consumers and investors,” President Biden said in a statement. “Appropriate guardrails that protect consumers and investors are necessary to harness the potential benefits and opportunities of crypto-asset innovation.”
The issue at hand was a repeal of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Staff Accounting Bulletin 121. This bulletin was designed to compel financial institutions that are holding digital assets to keep those assets on their own balance sheets. Those backing the repeal – which included both Republicans and Democrats – claimed that the current policy was too restrictive and made it harder for financial institutions to work with cryptocurrency businesses.
The decision has enraged some and led observers to suggest that digital assets could become an issue in this year’s presidential election. Likely Republican Party nominee Donald Trump reportedly referred to the Democratic Party’s apparent distaste for crypto at a recent event – during which the former president promoted his own digital asset, a non-fungible token (NFT).
Whether Biden’s cautious approach to crypto will be a political liability in November remains to be seen. Crypto industry polls indicate that more than 20% of voters in swing states consider crypto a “major issue.” At the same time, a 2023 Pew Research Center Survey showed that most Americans continue to have major concerns about the safety and reliability of digital assets.
Blockchain and crypto solutions company Ripple has teamed up with cross-border payments solutions provider for regulated institutions, Clear Junction. The partnership will enable Clear Junction to facilitate instant and secure GBP and EUR-denominated payout coverage for Ripple’s payment clients – with additional currencies to be added later in the year.
Cassie Craddock, Ripple’s Managing Director for Europe, praised Clear Junction’s ability to support all of Ripple’s use cases. “Clear Junction already has strong relationships with a number of our existing clients, and its management team has many years of experience in cross-border payments and banking,” Craddock said.
Making its Finovate debut in 2013 as OpenCoin, Ripple has grown into a major cryptocurrency and blockchain technology firm with hundreds of customers in 55+ countries and payout capabilities in 80+ markets. Businesses rely on Ripple’s enterprise blockchain solutions to source crypto assets, facilitate instant payments, engage new audiences, grow revenues, and more.
The partnership news with Clear Junction comes in the wake of Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse’s suggestion that an exchange-traded fund (ETF) based on Ripple’s XRP coin is “inevitable.” Also, somewhat apropos of our opening story, Ripple recently donated $25 million to Fairshake, a super PAC dedicated to pro-crypto political advocacy in 2024.
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is investigating the use of wholesale central bank digital currencies (wCBDCs) to improve instant cross-border payments. The new initiative is called Project Rialto and is a collaboration between the BIS Innovation Hub Eurosystem and Singapore Centres, along with a number of central banks. The project takes its name from a famous bridge in Venice, Italy, that spans the banks of the Grand Canal.
“Decentralized solutions, CBDC and interlinked payment infrastructures are considered promising avenues to improve cross-border payments,” the BIS noted in a statement. “How they interact has not yet been explored and could yield answers that advance cross-border payments globally.”
Wholesale CBDCs differ from retail CBDCs in that the latter is designed for use by the general public. Wholesale CBDCs are used by banks and other licensed financial institutions for interbank payments and securities settlements. A third type of CBDC, hybrid CBDCs, combine features of both wholesale and retail CBDCs. All CBDCs offer greater efficiency compared to traditional trade and settlement methods, reducing operational expenses, enhancing transparency, and improving the overall reliability of transactions.
Deutsche Bank announced this week that it is partnering with Austrian cryptocurrency brokerage Bitpanda. Deutsche Bank will process customer deposits and withdrawals for the broker, and has agreed to give local bank account numbers to Bitpanda users in Germany.
The move is a significant one for the industry. Crypto businesses have found it challenging to find banking partners in the wake of high-profile collapses of crypto-friendly banks in 2023, like Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate Capital Corporation.
That said, Deutsche Bank considers this a “very cautious” initial step. While the partnership does mean that fiat currency deposits and withdrawals from Bitpanda will flow through Deutsche Bank, the bank is not involved in the movement of any crypto assets. As Deutsche Bank Global Head of Cash Management Ole Matthiessen explained to Reuters, the bank will merely assist clients with their ingoing and outgoing transactions while supporting Bitpanda’s treasury and payments process.
Bitpanda was founded in 2014. The company has more than four million users on its platform, which offers trading and investing in cryptocurrencies, fractional shares of stock, and precious metals. This week’s announcement builds on Bitpanda’s existing relationship with Deutsche Bank for its cross-currency operations in Austria and Spain.
Be sure to check out this week’s Finovate Weekly newsletter on LinkedIn featuring a pair of crypto/blockchain-related articles!
U.K.-based insurtech Eleos has secured $4 million in seed funding.
The round was led by Fuel Ventures and Indico Capital. Early-stage investor APX also participated.
Eleos made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateEurope in London.
Eleos, an insurtech and income protection provider based in the U.K., has raised $4 million in seed funding. Fuel Ventures and Indico Capital led the round, with Berlin-based early-stage investor APX also participating. Eleos made its Finovate debut earlier this year at FinovateEurope in London.
“With our new funding we will launch more lines of insurance in the life and disability verticals and strike more distribution partnerships in the U.K.” Eleos CEO and Co-Founder Kiruba Eswaran said. “Part of the funding is also earmarked to launch operations in the U.S.”
Eleos embeds white-labelled life insurance and income protection into the online journeys of financial brands. These services and products give Eleos’s partners the ability to benefit from new revenue streams as well as more thorough customer engagement and greater customer retention. Eleos’s FCA authorization also provides its partners – companies like Loqbox, CreditSpring, and Updraft – with full regulatory coverage. Eleos customers also get a variety of free benefits, including 24/7 remote GP services and mental health support.
Fuel Ventures founder Mark Pearson credited Eleos for its experience, understanding of the industry, and access to a substantial market. “With Eleos we’ve found all three and we believe their products encapsulate our thinking about the insurance space – giving people easy access on familiar platforms.”
Founded in 2023, Eleos has already served more than 20,000 customers in the U.K. The company offers personalized and dynamic quotes for its insurance product, and enables potential customers to choose an affordable monthly payment plan and buy their insurance policy in minutes. Additionally, Eleos’s income protection solution helps individuals cover their essential expenses in the event of an illness or injury that requires long-term sick leave. Currently offering embedded insurance for brands, Eleos is planning to offer insurance policies directly to individuals in the future.
“The insurtech market has plenty of room to grow and Eleos is targeting areas which are not only sizable but overlooked by other current players globally,” Indico Capital Partners Managing General Partner Stephan Morais said.
