Blog - Page 46 of 1285

Finovate Global Canada: Wealthsimple’s $10 Billion Valuation and a Look at Investment Trends

By David Penn Posted on October 31, 2025
Categories: Coinbase, Finovate Global, Nubank, Salt Edge, Tink

This week's edition of Finovate Global features recent fintech news from Canada. Wealthsimple secures $750 million at valuation of $10 billion Canadian fintech Wealthsimple has raised CAD $750 million at a post-money valuation of CAD $10 billion. The funding round includes both a CAD $550 million primary offering and a secondary offering of up to CAD $200 million. Dragoneer Investment Group and GIC led the round, which also featured participation from new investor Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) as well as existing investors Power Corporation of Canada, IGM Financial Inc. ICONIQ, Greylock, and Meritech. "This raise reflects deep confidence from new and returning investors in our mission and our role as a defining Canadian company," Wealthsimple Co-Founder and CEO Michael Katchen said. "We were intentional in choosing partners committed to the long-term future of Wealthsimple. These are well-respected, global leaders with a proven track record (of) scaling category…

Breaking Through the Verification Barrier: How Middesk Simplifies Risk & Identity

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 30, 2025
Categories: FinovateFall 2025, Middesk, Speaker series

Digital businesses in the modern era span geography, product types, and regulatory regimes, making the process of verifying identities and assessing risk difficult. Today, we're highlighting a conversation that digs into how platforms can assess risk at scale by embedding identity and risk intelligence into a single workflow. At FinovateFall earlier this year, I spoke with Kate Young, Marketing Manager at Middesk, a company specializing in identity verification and onboarding automation. During our conversation, Kate discussed identity and onboarding challenges, how platforms distinguish legitimate enterprises from fraudulent ones, and the importance of embedding risk intelligence and KYB tools into the onboarding and lending processes. The interview touches on real-world use cases, ROI metrics, and what it takes to move from spreadsheets to APIs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96Ql7zdfEPU "There’s still this... trust gap between all of the businesses and the changes that they make both legitimately and illegitimately and the understanding of those financial…

Walmart’s OnePay Selects DriveWealth to Power Embedded Investing

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 30, 2025
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, DriveWealth

Walmart's OnePay digital banking platform is partnering with DriveWealth to launch OnePay Invest, giving users access to stock and ETF trading within their existing app. Since acquiring fintechs Even and ONE, Walmart has built OnePay into a full-service app offering savings, credit-building, BNPL, and now investing. Integrating DriveWealth’s brokerage-as-a-service APIs, OnePay lowers the barrier to entry for first-time investors and strengthens Walmart’s bid to become a one-stop financial hub for everyday consumers. Digital trading and brokerage company DriveWealth scored a partnership this week with Walmart's digital banking platform OnePay, which will leverage DriveWealth's brokerage-as-a-service offering to launch OnePay Invest. Walmart launched OnePay in January 2021 through a partnership with Ribbit Capital. In January 2022, Walmart expanded OnePay’s capabilities by acquiring two fintech platforms, Even and ONE, which helped Walmart create a more comprehensive financial services app. Since then, Walmart has been actively building up OnePay to compete with top fintech startups by…

Devexperts Unveils New AI-Powered Data Analysis Tool Acomotrade

By David Penn Posted on October 30, 2025
Categories: Alumni News, Devexperts

Capital markets software developer Devexperts launched its latest AI-powered data analysis solution, Acomotrade, this week. The new offering is designed to help online trading platforms better engage new users, most of whom rarely become the kind of active traders these platforms rely on. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and founded in 2002, Devexperts demonstrated its technology at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016. For all the excitement experienced when markets are soaring toward new highs, life for brokerage companies can actually be more complicated. While trading volumes are climbing, the fact of the matter is that many of the new traders and investors who decide to start participating in the market often don't end up sticking around very long at all. The average new user lifetime on a trading platform is less than six months—to say nothing of those traders who abandon the platform shortly after registering, never even placing…

Morgan Stanley Acquires Private Company Trading Platform EquityZen

By David Penn Posted on October 29, 2025
Categories: Alumni News, EquityZen, Mergers & Acquisitions

Morgan Stanley has agreed to acquire private company trading platform EquityZen. Terms of the transaction were not immediately available. The acquisition will help Morgan Stanley offer a full suite of solutions for its private company and wealth management clients, including cap table solutions, tender and liquidity programs, direct and co-investment opportunities, and secondary trading. EquityZen made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2016. The company is headquartered in New York. One of the biggest challenges in the world of private company investing is dealing with the liquidity gap that can arise between private companies and their stakeholders when stakeholders seek access to cash before companies are ready to officially exit via public offering or acquisition. As more and more companies stay private longer, an opportunity has developed for innovators that can not only democratize access to private market investments, but can also serve the interests of employees seeking liquidity, companies requiring…

Barclays to Acquire Lending Company Best Egg

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 28, 2025
Categories: Barclays, Daily news, Mergers & Acquisitions

Barclays' US consumer banking subsidiary, Barclays Bank Delaware, is acquiring Best Egg for $800 million. Barclays aims to use the purchase to diversify its US consumer business and strengthen its presence in unsecured lending. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026. Barclays' US consumer banking subsidiary, Barclays Bank Delaware, unveiled plans this week to expand its US footprint, acquiring personal loan origination company Best Egg. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026 for $800 million. Best Egg offers a direct-to-consumer personal loan origination platform that specializes in lending to prime borrowers. Since it was founded in 2013, the Delaware-based company has facilitated over $40 billion in personal loans to more than two million customers. By the end of this year, Best Egg will have facilitated more than $7 billion in personal loan originations. Best Egg currently services approximately $11 billion…

Thredd Taps LoanPro for New Credit Offering

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 28, 2025
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, LoanPro

Digital payment solutions company Thredd has teamed up with lending and credit platform LoanPro this week. The UK-based company will leverage LoanPro's credit platform to underpin its new suite of credit solutions, which will allow it to deliver full-stack embedded issuing and processing capabilities. Thredd was founded in 2007 and offers real-time card issuing and processing capabilities to help clients personalize and differentiate their credit offerings. Integrating LoanPro's composable credit infrastructure into its offerings will help Thredd expand further into the credit and lending space, enabling clients to launch and manage credit programs with greater flexibility and speed. Commenting on the partnership, Thredd CEO Jim McCarthy emphasized the growing importance of credit-led innovation in embedded finance. "Credit-based value propositions drive not only more opportunities for both B2B and B2C verticals, but also generate more revenue for issuers, fintechs, and enterprises," said McCarthy. "LoanPro’s platform solves much of the inherent complexity…

GoodData Brings Data Intelligence and Agentic AI to Financial Services

By David Penn Posted on October 28, 2025
Categories: Alumni News, GoodData

Data intelligence platform GoodData has unveiled a suite of finance-focused applications for its recently launched composable AI platform. The company's new offering combines its AI Lake, AI Hub, and AI Apps into a single platform that will give financial institutions the tools they need in order to build and deploy AI agents. Founded in 2007 and headquartered in San Francisco, California, GoodData most recently demoed its technology at FinovateFall 2017 in New York. The challenge of managing unstructured and unorganized data across multiple platforms—let alone turning that data into actionable insights—is a difficult one for financial institutions. And for those firms looking to take advantage of AI to add personalization, greater efficiency, and agility to their operations, these data management challenges are all the more acute. Add to this the unique regulatory and data governance demands in financial services, including transparency and auditability, and it is clear to see why…

FinovateEurope 2026: AI, Cybersecurity, Stablecoins, Quantum Computing and More!

By David Penn Posted on October 27, 2025
Categories: FinovateEurope 2026

The initial agenda for FinovateEurope 2026—February 10 and February 11 at the Intercontinental O2 in London—has just been released. And while there are still plenty of elements to be added to the two-day event, we are already seeing the contours of a conference that will help attendees better understand the opportunities in emerging technologies like quantum computing, learn the latest strategies for fighting fraud and financial crime, and find the most effective use cases for both AI and digital assets like stablecoins. There's plenty to share in the weeks to come. For now, here are six of the early highlights from Days One and Two. Day One: All About AI Boom, bubble, or something else entirely, the AI revolution in technology continues to be one of the defining characteristics of innovation in our times. To this end, the first day of FinovateEurope 2026 will feature a number of sessions dedicated…

Prove’s New Verified Agent Solution Brings Trust and Verification for Autonomous Agents

By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on October 27, 2025
Categories: Daily news

As AI agents begin transacting on behalf of users, traditional payment and identity models fall short of providing the trust these systems require. Prove is introducing its Verified Agent solution that links verified identity, intent, payment credentials, and consent through a cryptographically backed chain of custody for every autonomous transaction. By replacing weak verification methods with multi-factor authentication and cryptographic proof, Prove aims to make agentic commerce safe enough to scale globally. There has been plenty of hype around agentic commerce this fall, but many of the announcements surrounding agentic shopping and payments have leap-frogged an important issue: agent identity verification. Digital identity company Prove is helping to solve this issue today with its new launch, the Prove Verified Agent, which aims to provide a trust and verification layer for autonomous agents acting on behalf of consumers and businesses. The new Verified Agent tool works by creating an end-to-end chain…

Qolo Announces Strategic Alignment with Huntington Bank, Launches Connected Deposits

By David Penn Posted on October 27, 2025
Categories: Funding, Qolo

Modern treasury solutions company Qolo has forged a "strategic alignment" with Huntington National Bank. The alignment comes as the two companies unveiled a new virtual account management (VAM) platform, Connected Deposits, and follows a strategic investment Huntington made in Qolo earlier this year. Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Qolo made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2022 in New York. There is a wide range of challenges facing banks when it comes to treasury management these days. Interest rate uncertainty, rising regulatory scrutiny and compliance costs, working capital optimization, and technology challenges—from modernization to cybersecurity—are all issues that have made treasury management that much more difficult for CFOs, treasury managers, and their teams. Over the summer, PwC published its 2025 Global Treasury Survey which showed how "the role of treasury continues to evolve into a more strategic, innovative and data-driven partner" that is a fundamental part of value creation for businesses.…