Solarisbank Launches Women’s Network to Fight Fintech’s Gender Gap
As part of an effort to close the gender gap in the fintech industry, Berlin, Germany-based banking-as-a-service platform Solarisbank has launched a new “women’s network” called Futura. Part of the company’s holistic Nature, People, Business (NPB) framework, Futura is currently organizing events such as discussion panels and training sessions for women looking to enter the fintech industry.
Futura also has a “heal thyself” component. The company has overhauled its recruitment process to be more inclusive, changing language and encouraging recruitment agencies to reach out to more female applicants. Solarisbank has pledged to reach at least 30% female representation by 2024.
“At Solarisbank, we decided to take a deliberate stand to improve gender equity in our industry,” Futura initiator and VP of Onboarding and Integration, Alex Gessner said. “We launched Futura to make fintech more inclusive for everyone – women, men, and non-binary people. It’s encouraging to see so much support for our initiative, and the market response to our first activities has shown the need for such a network.”
German fintech Express Group raises €25m in Series A funding
Express Group, a Hamburg, Germany-based startup dedicated to making tax preparation easier for working and middle class families, has secured $27 million (€25 million) in Series A funding. The investment round was led by Insight Partners and Project A Ventures. The funds will be used to help grow Express Group’s business internationally as well as to fuel future product launches.
ExpressSteur, the initial product from Express Group, leverages AI to enable accounting companies, tax consultants, and lawyers to process tax cases in minutes. The solution brings machine learning and automation to a process that is typically manually-dominated, making the tax preparation process easier, faster, and more accurate. The product helped the company grow to a Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) run rate of more than $49 million (€45 million) in less than 12 months.
Express Group was founded in 2019 by Maximilian Lambsdorff, Dennis Konrad, Konstantin Loebner, Mehdi Afridi, and Andreas Santoro.
New partnership marries recurring payments and subscription management
Dutch payment processor Mollie has announced a collaboration with U.S.-based subscription management platform Recharge that will offer an end-to-end, one-stop solution for managing recurring payments and subscriptions. The partnership will make it easy for users to leverage Recharge’s APIs to integrate recurring payments into Magento, WooCommerce, or other standalone webshop. The integration will also support deploying and managing subscriptions, as well as offer a retention suite to automatically retry payments in the event of failure, an enhanced self-serve customer experience with personalized transactional notifications, and real-time insights into revenues, customers, and subscriptions.
“We’re really excited to be able to offer merchants the opportunity to implement fully powered subscriptions with Recharge easily,” Mollie CCO Ken Serdons said. “Seamless effortless payments brought to recurring ecommerce means an increase in lifetime value and average order value, and at a time of unprecedented ecommerce growth and ambition, we’re able to meet and surpass customer expectations.”
Headquartered in Amsterdam, Mollie is one of Europe’s fastest-growing payment service providers (PSPs). Founded in 2004, the company this year has forged partnerships with WooCommerce and carmaker Mazda. Mollie launched its SaaS payment platform in March.
Recharge was founded in 2014 by Oisin O’Connor (CEO) and Mike Flynn (CTO). Today, the company powers subscriptions for more than 15,000 merchants serving 50 million subscribers, and has processed more than $10 billion in transactions. In May of last year, the Santa Monica, California-based firm secured a Series B investment of $277 million in growth capital, giving the company a valuation of $2.1 billion.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Asia-Pacific
- Australian fintech Airwallex launched its business expense management solution.
- Philippines-based PayMaya introduced a new cryptocurrency trading functionality on its finance app.
- Singapore announced tighter cryptocurrency laws for businesses requiring compliance with AML and anti-terrorism regulations.
Sub-Saharan Africa
- Pan-African fintech ImaliPay raised $3 million in seed funding to bring financial services to gig economy workers.
- Paysend announced a technology partnership with mobile money service Afrimoney to enable money transfers to Gambia and Sierra Leone.
- African logistics service and payments company Jumia partnered with UPS to help the international shipping company expand in the region.
Central and Eastern Europe
- Berlin, Germany-based fintech finmarie launched its investment app dedicated toward financial planning for women.
- Piraeus announced plans to launch a new independent digital bank for customers in Greece.
- Ecommerce company Nikulipe partnered with Lithuanian identity verification and fraud prevention company iDenfy.
Middle East and Northern Africa
- Jordan’s Al Rajhi Bank chose digital banking solutions from ICS Financial Systems.
- Israel’s ThetaRay integrated the screening system from Screena into its SaaS transaction monitoring solution, SONAR
- UAE-based PopID and Visa announced a partnership to launch payment via facial verification in the MENA region.
Central and Southern Asia
- Indian bank Axis Bank teams up with The Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH) to support female financial inclusion.
- JS Bank announced a partnership with digital lending fintech AdalFi to bring real-time order financing to SME businesses in Pakistan.
- Indian banking technology company – and Finovate Best of Show winner – Zeta announced a five-year strategic partnership with Mastercard.
Latin America and the Caribbean
- Mexican investment platform Flink announced plans to debut in Colombia in June of this year.
- Latin American payments company PayRetailers acquired two online payment platforms: Chile’s Paygol and Colombia’s Pago Digital.
- Adapta Bank, a new digital challenger bank, launched in Brazil.