Author: David Penn

DriveWealth Forges Partnership with Plaid

DriveWealth Forges Partnership with Plaid
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, DriveWealth, Plaid

It’s getting hard not to wonder if Plaid is better off as a bachelor …

Last week, we highlighted how the financial data connectivity platform rebounded from its failed union with Visa to launch a range of new initiatives including new offerings (new income verification solution Plaid Income), new partners, and a diversity-oriented accelerator program, FinRise.

Today brings news that Plaid has teamed up with global brokerage infrastructure platform – and fellow Finovate alum – DriveWealth. Courtesy of a single API integration, customers of both firms will be able to streamline and simplify the online investment account funding process for their clients.

“The combination of DriveWealth and Plaid to enable anyone from fintechs and banks to investment advisors and RIAs to quickly and securely add investment capabilities to their current offerings, via a simple API, will give more consumers equal access to investing in the U.S. markets,” DriveWealth CEO Bob Cortright said.

The integration will enable customers of both DriveWealth and Plaid to authenticate end user bank accounts using Plaid’s technology, and leverage tokenization to provide fast and secure verification of bank funding sources using DriveWealth’s API. The combination not only improves the ACH success rate, it also boosts transparency into the fund transfer process while safeguarding client data.

Plaid Head of Revenue Paul Williamson credited the wealth management industry for its advances in technology in recent years. But he pointed out that there is still more friction in the process than there needs to be. “Companies like DriveWealth are changing that and this partnership combines to power of Plaid with DriveWealth to make digital investing experiences even easier,” Williamson said.

In addition to this week’s partnership with DriveWealth, Plaid also announced that it is working with Dun & Bradstreet to bring the benefits of alternative data to small business credit risk analysis. The new integration will enable small business owners to safely share financial account information and potentially improve their credit profile with the commercial credit reporting agency.

“Small businesses need all the support they can get, and this integration makes the process of creating and building a business credit profile secure and simple, which can lead to better access to financing and more business opportunities,” Global Head of Policy at Plaid John Pitts said.

And by the way, Plaid is not the only fintech in today’s partnership announcement that is populating the headlines of late. DriveWealth began 2021 with the acquisition of institutional broker dealer Cuttone & Company. The deal will bring additional market and regulatory expertise to the Chatham, New Jersey-based brokerage infrastructure API provider – as well as a network of institutional trading partners.

More recently, DriveWealth teamed up with Aghaz to support the Seattle-based roboadvisor’s investment app for Muslim customers, partnered with cross-border roboadvisor Hemista to bring fractional share investing in both U.S. and Indian stocks to Indian ex-pats, and collaborated with GenZ-focused investment app Alinea.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

FinovateEurope: Customer Experience, Collaboration, and the Post-COVID Era

FinovateEurope: Customer Experience, Collaboration, and the Post-COVID Era
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateEurope 2021

The post-COVID era of fintech will be defined by a renewed commitment to the customer experience – both digital and in-person. Add to this an eagerness to find and work with new partners, new markets, and new communities and you have a glimpse at what we saw in fintech’s future at FinovateEurope this month.

Among our demoing companies we saw innovators like Meniga that have developed solutions to help financial institutions better engage their increasingly climate-conscious customers. iProov, a multiple-time Best of Show winner, followed up a demonstration of its biometric authentication solution with a post-Demo Q&A conversation on how the technology is being applied in the fight against COVID-19. Finovate newcomer Cobase, which provides bank connectivity and treasury management solutions to corporates, shared insights into its decision to pivot toward also offering a white-label version of its platform to banks.

There was a moment, before COVID, when fintech’s perennial “Year of the Customer” declaration was in danger of becoming a bit of a cliche. Clearly, COVID turned that potential cliche into a real crisis in financial services as institutions were, due lockdowns and quarantines, literally cut off from their customers. Customer service strategies that had been perfectly appropriate – even innovative – a year ago, were obsolete in a matter of weeks.

How fintechs and financial services companies, internally, with their customers and members, and with each other, responded to this challenge was understandably the overarching theme of FinovateEurope. What we learned was that, in virtually every case, it was an embrace of both digital and human capital that enabled companies large and small to continue to serve their customers. And by taking advantage of a widening range of channels including voice and chatbot, and upgrading their capacity to effectively manage a higher volume and sophistication of digital transactions and activity, these institutions are well-positioned to outperform as the threat of the pandemic subsides.

A large part of this outperformance may well come from a renewed sense of the power of partnerships. The collaborations between financial institutions and fintechs to help facilitate relief funding to small businesses and individuals during the COVID crisis are not likely to be forgotten when the days of mask-wearing and social distancing are gone. And as the Meniga example shows, we should be equally observant to those heterodox partnerships; ones, for example, that add lifestyle offerings rather than just traditional financial solutions. As competition grows – including competition with Big Tech – these brand-redefining partnerships may become a more common response for fintechs and financial services companies, in Europe as well as in the rest of the world.

For more on FinovateEurope, check out the FinovateEurope eMagazine!

And last but not least, congratulations to the winners of Best of Show for FinovateEurope 2021: Dbilia, Proptee, and Quantum Metric.

Photo by anna-m. w. from Pexels

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Avanti Closes $37 Million Round En Route to Digital Asset Bank Launch

Avanti Closes $37 Million Round En Route to Digital Asset Bank Launch
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Daily news, Funding, Women in Fintech

Avanti Financial Group has put the final touches on a deal that will bring the firm that much closer to its goal of launching a digital asset bank.

Late last week, Avanti announced that it had closed a Series A round, raising $37 million from a wide swathe of institutional investors, cryptocurrency companies, family offices, and angel investors.

The investment takes Avanti’s total capital to $44 million. Launched last year, Avanti secured $5 million in angel funding last June in a round led by the University of Wyoming Foundation and featuring participation from Morgan Creek Digital, Blockchain Capital, and Digital Currency Group. The new financing will fund the necessary regulatory capital for Avanti’s digital asset bank, as well as support engineering and operating expenses.

“Our roadmap includes offering API-based U.S. dollar payment services for wires, ACH, and SWIFT; issuance of our tokenized, programmable U.S. dollar called Avit; and custody and on-/off-ramp services for bitcoin and other digital assets,” Avanti founder and CEO Caitlin Long said. Long highlighted the number of customer inquiries (2,500+) that Avanti had received since it secured a bank charter back in the fall of 2020 and said that those looking to become a part of the firm’s digital asset bank should expect a launch “soon.”

Headquartered in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Avanti sees itself as a bridge between traditional banking and a world in which digital assets are bought, sold, and trusted as thoroughly as fiat currencies. A software platform with a bank charter, Avanti gives customers a strong regulatory environment compared to other digital asset companies, including a full-reserve requirement for dollar deposits and resources like its tokenized dollar, Avit, to help solve painpoints in the payments process.

Trace Meyer, who formed the consortium that led Avanti’s Series A, praised Avanti’s “potent, institutional-quality human capital.” A Bitcoin investor and early adopter, Meyer emphasized that both smart regulation and “experienced, competent operators” are critical to the institutionalization of digital assets, and said that Avanti was “well-positioned to competently answer questions that most in the industry have not even thought about.”

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Fabrick, Open Banking, and an Update on Fintech in Italy

Fabrick, Open Banking, and an Update on Fintech in Italy
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finastra, Finovate Global, MODIFI

Last week, we leveraged the occasion of French alum Ledger’s new, cryptocurrency-focused, business division to bring readers up to speed on the latest in French fintech. This week, news from Fabrick, a financial services company based in Milan (and a sponsor of the just-concluded FinovateEurope Digital) offers us a similar opportunity to catch up with innovations in fintech in Italy.

Fabrick announced this week that it had forged a partnership with Microsoft Italia. The collaboration will enable the open banking financial services provider to leverage cloud computing and other new technologies to develop solutions that help accelerate digital transformation in financial services. As part of the alliance, Fabrick’s offering will become a part of the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace and enable the company to better market its technology to the enterprise sector. Fabrick’s personal financial management solution is already available on Microsoft’s marketplace.

“For us, the partnership with Microsoft represents an extraordinary opportunity to grow and strengthen our positioning in the market,” Fabrick CEO Paolo Zaccardi said. “We have found a valuable ally who, like us, has seen in technological evolution and Open Finance a new way to innovate the delivery of corporate services for the end user.”

Founded in 2017, Fabrick is an open banking ecosystem and a regulated TPP. Within digital payments, channel innovation, and open banking, Fabrick helps enrich the offerings of banks, processors, and fintechs. With customers including Bankart, HDI Assicurazioni, and illimity, Fabrick made fintech headlines earlier this year via collaborations with DizmeID Foundation for a hackathon based on innovations in digital identity, and with Banca Progetto and Faire to help the Italian challenger bank offer an instant lending service for small and medium-sized businesses.

“We are particularly enthusiastic about this collaboration because it testifies to the validity of the ecosystem proposed by Fabrick,” Zaccardi said when the partnership was announced last month. “On the one hand (we have) the capacity of our platform, through which the service will be implemented, and on the other the important synergies that arise within our community Fintech District, of which Faire is part and through which we have begun to collaborate with them.”

Like France, which we looked at last week, Italy has a fintech industry that is often overlooked in the broader conversation on European financial technology. To this end, this week’s Finovate Global Reports turns to the Fintech District and its The Italian Fintech Guide 2020 for a peek into “the most promising fintech companies operating in Italy.”

According to Fintech District, Italy had 345 fintech startups as of the end of 2019. It is a young industry – with most startups at an intermediate stage of growth and with less than one million in capital raised. Additionally, these fintech teams have members who are, on average, less than 32 years old. As with most regions, fintechs in Italy have increasingly been looking to enhance the digital capabilities of incumbent banks and insurance companies – as well as developing B2C solutions for Italian consumers. Open banking has helped accelerate this trend, and companies like Fabrick have been among those helping banks and third party solution providers connect and innovate together.

To learn more about fintech in Italy, check out IBS Intelligence’s 5 Italian FinTech companies transforming the financial sector from last fall. For a more inclusive look, consider Italian entrepreneur Claudio Bedino’s Top 100 FinTech leaders and influencers in Italy that appeared a year before IBS Intelligence’s roundup.

In recent years, our FinovateEurope conferences have featured a number of alums headquartered in Italy, as well. Ten of these companies, along with the year of their most recent Finovate appearance and their home city, are listed below.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Central and Eastern Europe

Middle East and Northern Africa

Central and Southern Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

Asia-Pacific

  • Gimo, a fintech startup that serves underbanked workers in Vietnam, received seed funding from ThinkZone Ventures, BK Fund, and others strategic investors.
  • Jakarta, Indonesia-based insurtech, Qoala, acquired Thai insurech FairDee in bid to expand into the Thailand market.
  • Malaysia Debt Ventures and Kenanga partnered to launch a new $73 million fund to back new fintechs and stimulate the VC industry in Malaysia.

Photo by Emily Geibel from Pexels

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

FinovateEurope Best of Show Winners Announced

By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Best of Show, Dbilia, FinovateEurope 2021, Proptee, Quantum Metric

Our first all-digital European fintech conference is in the books. And given a little extra time to resolve a truly historic number of tied votes, our attendees have decided which companies will take home our Best of Show trophies for FinovateEurope 2021.

This year’s winners are:

Dbilia for its digital memorabilia that leverages blockchain and NFTs to enable fans to invest in creatives. Video.

Proptee for its global property app that helps reinvent the way people invest in real estate. Video.

Quantum Metric for its technology that helps retail banks differentiate on the digital experience, improve digital adoption, and enhance internal efficiencies. Video.

Thanks to all of our demoing companies, our partners and sponsors, and to you, our attendees in the fintech and financial services community. Be sure to stay in touch with the Finovate blog in the days and weeks to come for more information on our “Spring Collection” of webinars, networking opportunities, and upcoming conferences – including FinovateSpring in May.

Notes on methodology:
1. Only audience members NOT associated with demoing companies were eligible to vote. Finovate employees did not vote.
2. Attendees were encouraged to note their favorites during each day. At the end of the last demo, they chose their three favorites.
3. The exact written instructions given to attendees: “Please rate (the companies) on the basis of demo quality and potential impact of the innovation demoed.”
4. The three companies appearing on the highest percentage of submitted ballots were named “Best of Show.”
5. Go here for a list of previous Best of Show winners through 2014. Best of Show winners from our 2015 through 2020 conferences are below:
FinovateEurope 2015
FinovateSpring 2015
FinovateFall 2015
FinovateEurope 2016
FinovateSpring 2016
FinovateFall 2016
FinovateAsia 2016
FinovateEurope 2017
FinovateSpring 2017
FinovateFall 2017
FinovateAsia 2017
FinovateMiddleEast 2018
FinovateEurope 2018
FinovateSpring 2018
FinovateFall 2018
FinovateAsia 2018
FinovateAfrica 2018
FinovateEurope 2019
FinovateSpring 2019
FinovateFall 2019
FinovateAsia 2019
FinovateMiddleEast 2019

FinovateEurope 2020

FinovateFall 2020

FinovateWest 2020

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Plaid Introduces the Inaugural Cohort of its New Fintech Accelerator

Plaid Introduces the Inaugural Cohort of its New Fintech Accelerator
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Diversity in Fintech, Plaid

Not letting any grass grow beneath its feet in the wake of the U.S. Justice department’s decision to block its acquisition by Visa, fintech infrastucture company Plaid has since launched its FinRise incubator to support early-stage founders who are members of ethnic minority groups.

“While technology has come a long way to level the playing field, the reality is that many minority-owned businesses are still frequently denied access to some of the most basic resources needed to start and grow their businesses,” Nell Malone and Bhargavi Kamakshivalli wrote on the Plaid blog when the program was announced in January. Highlighting in particular the plight of African-American owned businesses as noted in a report from the Small Business Administration, Malone and Kamakshivalli wrote: “It is a shared responsibility to help power a financial system that works for everyone, and we recognize that one way to achieve that is to support and promote a diverse ecosystem of entrepreneurs.”

All this makes today’s announcement that FinRise has chosen the first companies to participate in its accelerator program that much more exciting for supporters of financial inclusion and diversity. Out of more than 100 applications, five early-stage fintechs were selected, offering solutions in everything from identity verification and authentication to financial wellness and lending.

The qualifications for consideration were startups with at least one founder who is African-American, indigenous, or a “person of color,” has two or more employees, and is post-seed, pre-Series B in its funding status. The members of the incoming class are below:

Global Data Consortium: a global identity verification API that provides KYC and eKYC services for businesses

Guidefi: a financial wellness marketplace to help members of ethnic minority groups connect with “vetted, culturally-attuned” financial advisors

OfColor: a financial wellness program that offers personalized PFM and loans to help ethnic minority employees maximize their 401(k) contributions

Walnut: a point-of-sale lending platform that works with healthcare providers to make it easier for patients to pay for their medical bills

Zeta: a financial wellness company that specializes in PFM solutions for couples and families

FinRise begins with a three-day bootcamp of workshops covering issues ranging from regulatory and policy concerns to marketing and communications strategy. After the bootcamp, startups will be paired with Plaid mentors to help them further develop and scale their products. The nine-month program consists of workshops and networking opportunities with accelerator partners, as well as discounts on services offered by Plaid network partners. Even those startups not selected for the accelerator this session will be eligible for discounts and credits from companies supporting the program.

FinRise’s network partners include: Alloy, AWS Activate, Brex, Fintrail, FS Vector, Hummingbird, Very Good Security, and Zendesk.

Photo by RF._.studio from Pexels

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Feedzai Raises $200 Million, Earns Unicorn Status with Billion Plus Valuation

Feedzai Raises $200 Million, Earns Unicorn Status with Billion Plus Valuation
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Feedzai, Funding

Financial crime fighter Feedzai has secured a growth investment of $200 million. Product development, partner strategy, and global expansion are three Feedzai priorities that will be accelerated by the new investment.

The Series D round was led by KKR, and featured participation from existing investors Sapphire Ventures and Citi Ventures. The company’s total capital now stands north of $277 million, having most recently raised $50 million in a 2017 Series C round.

“This new investment delivers on our mission to keep commerce safe by further developing our single machine learning cloud platform for all four stages of the customer risk journey: prevention, detection, remediation, and compliance,” Feedzai CEO Nuno Sebastiao wrote on the company blog this week. “Focusing on the entirety of the risk lifecycle,” he added, “allows us to partner with financial services in a radically new way at every step of the journey.”

The funding also gives the risk management platform a valuation “well over $1 billion” the company noted in its funding announcement.

Partnered with some of the largest financial institutions in the world – including four of the five largest banks in North America, Feedzai leverages its risk management platform to monitor activity at companies with more than 800 million customers in 190 countries. The firm’s platform leverages machine learning and AI to help companies defend themselves from financial crimes including money laundering, detecting fraud in less than three milliseconds.

A Finovate alum since 2014, Feedzai unveiled its Feedzai Fairband solution earlier this month. Feedzai Fairband is an AutoML algorithm-based technology that automatically discovers less biased machine learning models while increasing model fairness by as much as 93% on average. Dubbed “the world’s most advanced AI fairness framework,” Feedzai Fairband enables financial institutions to accommodate their customers fairly and without the bias that even the most carefully-designed AI models may still hold.

“Feedzai Fairband is one of the biggest milestones in the financial services industry as it presents a low-cost, no-friction framework to address one of the biggest problems of our era – AI bias,” Feedzai Chief Scientist Dr. Pedro Bizrro said. “By creating the most advanced framework for AI fairness, Feedzai is allowing financial institutions to incorporate a critical piece of technology that addresses a problem under close public scrutiny with proven damaging effects across the globe. Building accurate and fairer models will be less challenging from now on.”

Named to Techround’s roster of the top 50 fintech companies in the U.K. in February, Feedzai highlighted the “skyrocketing” rise in fraud attacks in 2020 in its Financial Crime Report Q1, 2021, released earlier this month.

“2020 was a year of rapid growth in financial crime. Fraudsters tried to take advantage of the convergence between a fast-paced digital environment and a new wave of inexperienced consumers to perpetrate a multitude of attacks that created a significant uptick in fraud,” Jaime Ferreira, Senior Director of Global Data Science at Feedzai said in the report. “Financial institutions need to further invest in technologies to protect their customers while developing educational approaches. Robust technology and informed consumers are a powerful combination when fighting financial crime.”

Feedzai began the year with an announcement that Latin America’s largest investment bank, BTG Pactual, will implement Feedzai’s financial crime management technology.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Jumio Makes History with $150 Million Investment in Digital Identity

Jumio Makes History with $150 Million Investment in Digital Identity
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, Funding, Jumio

In the biggest fundraising for an identity verification company to date, Jumio has locked in an investment of $150 million. The funding comes courtesy of Great Hill Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in investments in “high-growth, disruptive companies.” The investment takes Jumio’s total funding to more than $255 million, according to Crunchbase.

“Jumio’s innovations helped establish the identity verification market, and the need to establish someone’s digital identity remotely has never been greater,” Jumio CEO Robert Prigge said. The company plans to use the new capital to automate its identity verification solutions, expand the breadth of its Jumio KYX Platform, and further build out the platform’s suite of AML compliance solutions.

As part of the investment, Great Hill Partners’ Nick Cayer and Matt Vettel will join Jumio’s Board of Directors. Cayer, who has been with Great Hill since 2006, praised the company as “the de factor global leader in online identity verification, fraud detection, and compliance.” He added that given the mandate many institutions have to digitize processes such as onboarding and KYC monitoring, firms like Jumio can play a key role in helping them keep pace with the growing volume of digital and mobile-based transactions.

Making its Finovate debut in 2013 and being acquired by Centana Growth Partners in 2016, Jumio has verified more than 300 million identities issued by 200+ countries and territories since inception in 2010. With customers and partners in a wide range of verticals – from financial services and the sharing economy to retail, travel, and online gaming – Jumio leverages AI, biometrics, machine learning, and certified liveness detection to help ensure that customers are who they claim to be. Jumio’s KYX Platform, launched last fall, provides organizations with an end-to-end identity verification and eKYC solution that enables them to onboard new accounts safely and accurately, keep existing accounts secure, and meet their compliance obligations with regards to KYC, AML, and GDPR.

“Digital transformation is more than a buzzword. It’s today’s business imperative,” Prigge said. “To succeed, organizations must transform quickly and do it in ways that build trust, security, and satisfaction. Businesses can tailor the Jumio KYX Platform to fit their unique needs and risks and tap into services that accelerate digital transformation without sacrificing security and convenience.”

Learn more about how Jumio fights deep fakes and bots in our interview from last summer featuring company VP of Marketing, Dean Nicolls.

Photo by asim alnamat from Pexels

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Crypto Infrastructure Specialist Fireblocks Raises $133 Million

Crypto Infrastructure Specialist Fireblocks Raises $133 Million
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Daily news

Anybody else old enough to remember the argument that while blockchain technology probably had value, actual cryptocurrencies were already passé?

In a round led by Coatue, Ribbit, and Stripes, digital asset infrastructure specialist Fireblocks has secured $133 million in new capital to power its mission to make it easier for banks to get into the digital asset space.

“Fintechs and banks require not only a specialized custody and settlement infrastructure to ensure customer funds are safely managed, but (also) a platform that enables new lines of digital offerings,” Fireblocks CEO Michael Shaulov said. He noted that while the company has no plans to become an actual bank itself, “we believe our infrastructure will lend itself perfectly to power an entirely new era of financial services.”

Also participating in the round as strategic investors were The Bank of New York Mellon and SVB. A number of Fireblocks existing investors also contributed to the round, including Paradigm, Galaxy Digital, Swisscom Ventures, Tenaya Capital and Cyberstarts Ventures. The investment brings the fintech’s total capital raised to $179 million.

Founded in 2018, Fireblocks launched as a digital assets infrastructure company helping crypto-based institutions and exchanges move, store, and issue digital assets. As interest in digital assets – especially cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum – has surged, Fireblocks has begun to leverage its talent and technology in digital assets to enable banks and other financial institutions to bring cryptocurrency access to their customers. By linking to its Fireblocks’ platform, banks and fintechs will be able to deploy a wide range of solutions – from custody, tokenization, and asset management to trading, lending, and payments – on both public and private blockchain networks.

The company’s investors highlighted Fireblocks’ capacity to enable banks and other financial institutions to efficiently and securely take advantage of the opportunity of and interest in digital assets. CEO of Asset Servicing and Head of Digital for BNY Mellon Roman Regelman said that bridging the gap between traditional and digital assets is “foundational to the future of custody.” Coatue Managing Partner Kris Fredrickson concurred: “our belief (is) that a new financial ecosystem is emerging and (companies) like Fireblocks are essential.”

Last month, Fireblocks announced a partnership with digital payment- platform-as-a-service company, First. Together, the companies introduced a secure wallet and infrastructure solution to enable financial institutions to facilitate transactions via the Diem network. Fireblocks began the year collaborating with global fintech Ibanera to help its customers safely transfer crypto funds in real-time.

Since inception, Fireblocks has secured the transfer of more than $400 billion in digital assets. The company is headquartered in New York City.

Photo by Min An from Pexels

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Austria’s BitPanda Reaches Unicorn Status; A Look at the Latest in French Fintech

Austria’s BitPanda Reaches Unicorn Status; A Look at the Latest in French Fintech
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Finovate Global

Still looking for evidence that cryptocurrencies have arrived? The $170 million raised this week by Austrian digital asset neobroker Bitpanda is a testament to both the surging interest in cryptocurrencies as well as the vitality of fintech innovation in the CEE countries.

Bitpanda’s Series B round earned the company a valuation of $1.2 billion, giving Austria its first fintech unicorn. The Vienna-based company, founded in 2014 by co-CEOs Eric Demuth and Paul Klanschek, along with CTO Christian Trummer, plans to use the capital to add to the types of investments available on its platform, as well as expand to more markets in Europe.

This latest funding round was led by Valar Ventures and featured participation from partners of DST Global. The round is more than triple the amount raised by Bitpanda in its Series A financing back in September, which was also led by Valar Ventures (SpeedInvest of Vienna was an investor in the round, as well). The capital arrives the same week that Bitpanda announced that it had reached a new milestone of more than two million registered users on its Bitpanda and Bitpanda Pro platforms.

Bitpanda enables cryptocurrency investors and traders to buy, sell, save, and send more than 50 digital assets including Bitcoin and Ethereum. The neobroker also offers the world’s first real crypto index and a Bitpanda Card that enables Bitpanda accountholders to spend their digital assets as easily as they spend their cash.

With FinovateEurope right around the corner, we’ve got more than a little continental fintech on the mind these days. This week we take a quick look at fintech news from France, a country whose fintech industry is often overlooked in the broader conversation on European fintech.

Earlier this week, we learned that Finovate alum Ledger was launching a new business division dedicated to taking advantage of growing institutional interest in cryptocurrencies. Headquartered in Paris and founded in 2013, the company announced that its Ledger Enterprise Solutions unit will support enterprise adoption of the company’s core custody technology, Ledger Vault, as well as advise institutional clients with regards to technology implementation, security, and governance of digital asset portfolios.

On the French fintech funding beat, PayFit, a payroll and HR platform launched in France in 2016, announced that it has secured $107 million (EUR 90 million) in Series D funding. The investment was led by Eurzeo Growth, Large Venture, and BPI France, and featured participation from the company’s existing investors Accel, Frst, and individual investor Xavier Niel.

The company said that the capital will help support its comprehensive HR solution for SMEs and enable the company – which also operates in Spain, Germany, the U.K., and Italy – to “increase headcount from 550 to 800” by the end of 2021.

PayFit serves more than 5,000 small businesses, and includes Revolut, Starling Bank, and Treatwell among its customers. The company experienced growth of 40% in 2020 – a pace PayFit anticipates doubling this year – and credited much of this “hypergrowth” to the digital imperative brought on by the COVID-19 crisis.

“As a result of the pandemic, HR professionals have faced a much higher workload and unfamiliar challenges,” PayFit co-founder and CEO Firmin Zocchetto said. “They have had to deal with various issues, including supporting the company’s management with the implementation of remote work policies and ensuring employee wellbeing through new initiatives.”

Zocchetto said that there are “tens of millions of SMEs” that are ready for digital transformation. “The market is huge, and our ambition remains the same: to become the point of reference for payroll and HR management for all SMEs,” he said.

Striking another note in the funding beat, French fintech Silvr announced a EUR 3 million seed investment this week. The company, launched last year by Nima Karimi and Gregory Tappero, provides financing for digital businesses that cannot access traditional bank financing and want to raise equity capital.

Silvr offers a revenue-based financing model based on the performance of the financed company, an approach that contrasts with both traditional asset-based lending and fundraising models. Karimi has said that Silvr’s strategy offers a new option for SMEs in France, calling it simpler and more transparent.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Asia-Pacific

Sub-Saharan Africa

Central and Eastern Europe

  • SEON, a Hungarian startup helps companies weed out false accounts and prevent fraudulent transactions, secured $12 million (EUR 10 million) in funding. The round is Hungary’s largest Series A funding to date.
  • Lithuanian fintech FINCI has gone live with Temenos’ Payments and Transact core banking solutions.
  • Estonian financial services company LVH invested GBP 4.45 million in U.K.-based B-North, which is building a SME lending bank.

Middle East and Northern Africa

Central and Southern Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

Photo by Tim Abee from Pexels

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

FinovateEurope 2021 Launches Next Week

FinovateEurope 2021 Launches Next Week
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateEurope 2021

FinovateEurope is right around the corner! Our all-digital, interactive fintech conference begins March 23 at 9am Central European Time and continues through March 25. Visit our registration page today to save your spot!

FinovateEurope will feature our signature format of innovative fintech demonstrations and in-depth, insightful keynotes, panel discussions, and debates on some of our industry’s most important topics and critical themes. To learn more about our demoing companies, check out our Sneak Peek Series. For more on our thought leadership content, here’s a short, day-by-day summary of what to look out for.

March 23: Martes / Dienstag / Wtorek / Tuesday

Kicking off the event on Day One of FinovateEurope are keynote addresses from Katharina Lueth of Raisin UK, Joe Lichtenberg of InterSystems, and a conversation between HSBC’s Steve Suarez and Louise Beaumont of the Open Banking Working Group.

The afternoon will feature a number of panel discussions and roundtables covering topics such as open innovation and strategic partnerships, the future of hybrid digital customer experience, and leveraging agility to thrive at times of crisis. The day will end with a conversation on digital engagement in the post-COVID era.

March 24: Mercredi / Onsdag / Quarta-feira / Wednesday

On Day Two, FinovateEurope begins with a keynote on open innovation and open banking, and continues with a pair of Mastermind Keynotes from Alex James of GoCompare and Alex Thomson of Quantum Metric, as well as from Annerie Vreugdenhil, Chief Innovation Officer with ING. In addition to a keynote on sustainable finance, the afternoon on Day Two will be devoted to panel conversations on the shift to digital payments and preserving “the human touch” in the digital financial world.

March 25: Donderdag / Giovedì / Čtvrtek / Thursday

The final day of FinovateEurope will feature some of our conference’s most popular sessions, such as our Analyst All Stars presentation. This year, our All Stars include Jost Hoppermann of Forrester, Zil Bareisis of Celent, and Vinod Jain of Aite Group. Day Three will also tackle the growth of morgagetech by way of a Mastermind Keynote from Floris van der Kolk of Ohpen and Rik Douwes of Link Asset Services. Rounding out the day will be a venture capital panel discussion on investment trends in the post-COVID era. This conversation will feature Citi Ventures’ Luis Valdich, Silicon Valley Bank’s Claire Palmer, SixThirty Ventures’ Samarth Shekar, and Mouro Capital’s Manuel Silva Martinez.

See our full agenda. And make sure you reserve your spot today for our first, Europe-themed, all-digital, fintech event!

Photo by Claudia Schmalz from Pexels

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

NYMBUS Picks Red Hat as Cloud Platform Partner

NYMBUS Picks Red Hat as Cloud Platform Partner
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, NYMBUS

Financial services platform NYMBUS has selected the cloud platform from open source solution provider Red Hat for its digital banking ecosystem. The platform, Red Hat OpenShift, will enable Nymbus to help its community bank and credit union customers accelerate their digital transformations.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we bank, possibly forever,” Nymbus CEO Jeffery Kendall said. “It provided the push for local banks and credit unions to establish more secure, flexible, end-to-end digital banking solutions.” Kendall added that the partnership with Red Hat would give Nymbus’ partners more “freedom of choice” in the way they implemented their cloud banking strategies as well as the “multi-cloud uptime” Kendall said was “critical for the banking industry.”

Courtesy of the new partnership, Nymbus customers will be able to deploy and launch a turnkey, digital bank-in-a-box – running on OpenShift – on whatever cloud platform they prefer. The open source, cloud-agnostic nature of Red Hat’s solution helps institutions avoid being dependent on a sole vendor, which can impede innovation.

“Cloud technology is reshaping the way banking services are created and delivered in our digital world,” Red Hat VP and Global Head of Financial Services Richard Harmon said. “It is providing service providers the ability to quickly adapt to market changes and make it easier for community banks and credit unions to consume new software. We are excited to work with Nymbus to bring the innovation of open source and cloud technology to the market. Nymbus truly embraces the open source way of working, and we are looking forward to contributing to their success.”

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Miami Beach, Florida, Nymbus most recently demonstrated its technology on the Finovate stage in 2019 as part of FinovateFall. The company began this year with a pair of C-suite hires – Chief Alliance Officer Sarah Howell and Chief Product Officer Larry McClanahan – a new partnership with NYDIG to support bitcoin banking, and a $53 million Series C funding round that took the company’s total capital to more than $98 million.

Photo by Darkhanbaatar Baasanjav from Pexels

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook