• Lunar introduced Moonrise, a standalone enterprise payments offering to help organizations scale in the Nordic region’s notably complex payments ecosystem.
• Lunar expects that the BaaS market will grow 3.3x to €100 billion in five years.
• Lunar anticipates that Moonrise will help to lower barriers to entry for companies operating in the Nordics, which will not only foster innovation and competition, but also help to offer consumers better services and pricing options.

Nordic challenger bank Lunar launched a new, enterprise payments offering this week. The standalone product, called Moonrise, aims to simplify financial connectivity for payment businesses looking to scale in the Nordics.

Moonrise helps fintechs, challenger banks, and global payments providers navigate the Nordic payments landscape. Denmark, Norway, and Sweden each have unique clearing systems and infrastructure requirements, which creates a complex payments environment. “By breaking down these barriers,” the company’s blog post explained, “we’re creating new opportunities for players who want to innovate and compete in a region traditionally dominated by legacy institutions.”

Moonrise’s API builds on Lunar’s existing infrastructure, which currently processes over 10,000 transactions daily and supports $5.3 billion (€5 billion) in transaction volume.

“The transition to Moonrise reflects Lunar’s strategic focus on growth and innovation,” the blog post said. “By taking the first steps towards creating a standalone entity, we’re giving our enterprise payments division the agility and resources it needs to thrive while also allowing our retail banking arm to continue its successful trajectory.”

Lunar launched in 2015 as a digital bank catering to both retail and commercial clients. The Denmark-based company received its banking license in 2019 and offers personal checking accounts with debit cards, youth accounts, in-app PFM tools, an investing platform, and a BNPL tool that can be retroactively applied to purchases. On the commercial side, Lunar offers business bank accounts, automated bookkeeping, cash flow analytics, expense management tools, loans, insurance, and more.

Launching Moonrise will allow Lunar to pursue the BaaS market, which is expected to reach 100 billion Euros, growing 3.3x over the next five years. Structuring Moonrise as a separate entity will allow both companies to grow in their own direction, without straining the resources of either one.

Lunar recognizes the potential that the BaaS market has to drive innovation and competition in the payments world. By nature, BaaS tools lower the barriers to entry, especially in a challenging market like the Nordics. This will help to increase competition and create an environment in which legacy institutions must innovate to keep pace.

Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash

• Israel-based Justt has introduced platform upgrades, including multilingual dispute management and centralized chargeback approval, aimed at simplifying cross-border disputes and improving efficiency for global merchants.
• The new features allow merchants to set custom rules for recurring disputes and manage chargebacks centrally through Justt’s interface.
• As chargeback volumes are projected to rise 42% by 2026, Justt’s AI-driven tools offer merchants an automated way to handle cases such as friendly fraud.

Justt, an Israel-based company leveraging AI to automate the chargeback process, unveiled some major platform upgrades this week. Among the changes are multilingual dispute management and centralized chargeback approval.

Justt’s newly launched multilingual dispute management offers automatic translation for dispute evidence. The company anticipates that this feature will simplify cross-border disputes by removing language barriers and ultimately allow Justt to better serve global merchants.

The centralized dispute resolution allows merchants to approve chargebacks through Justt’s interface instead of managing chargebacks in a fragmented way using multiple Payment Service Providers. As part of this, the company also allows merchants to set their own custom rules for recurring disputes, enabling them to automate cases that are predictable and better allocate resources to complex disputes.

Justt anticipates that this change will not only simplify the chargeback approval process, but will also reduce administrative load and speed up dispute decisions to give merchants real-time control over approvals.

“We are fundamentally changing how merchants manage chargebacks,” said Ofir Tahor, CEO of Justt. “This is a significant step in our mission to equip merchants with AI-driven tools, allowing them to simplify complex challenges and focus on growing their businesses.”

Justt was founded in 2020 to help merchants resolve illegitimate chargebacks by using AI to boost recovery rates. The company’s platform integrates with over 40 payment service providers, including Stripe, PayPal, and American Express. Merchants can use Justt’s platform to view and manage all chargeback-related data in one place, and quickly resolve the dispute process. Justt has raised a total of $11 million from investors including Former PayPal President David Marcus and Citi Ventures.

Since the increase in ecommerce activity has taken off in the past five years, there has been a substantial increase in chargeback volumes. According to Mastercard, chargeback volumes will reach 337 million by 2026, which represents a 42% increase from 2023 levels. This rise can be attributed to the growing complexity of the dispute resolution process as well as friendly fraud, where consumers dispute legitimate transactions. Friendly fraud rates, according to Chargebacks911, have been growing “at somewhere around the 40% rate” every year.

For merchants, chargebacks result in direct financial losses as well as reputation damages, while banks — who have to protect consumers while being fair to merchants — face operational burdens. Looking ahead, the chargebacks puzzle will become more complicated. That’s because, as third party providers like Justt advance their practices using AI, the rise in real-time payments will create headaches by providing more opportunities for both legitimate and illegitimate chargebacks to take place.

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich

• Deel has acquired U.K.-based international funds transfer company Atlantic Money. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
• The acquisition marks Deel’s ninth acquisition.
• Deel will leverage Atlantic Money’s expertise to enhance its global payroll solutions, enabling businesses to send secure international payouts.

Payroll and compliance company Deel has acquired international funds transfer company Atlantic Money. Terms of the deal, which was announced late last week, were not disclosed.

According to California-based Deel, acquiring Atlantic Money will help strengthen Deel’s payments infrastructure in Europe and offer it more fintech expertise. This is Deel’s ninth acquisition and its fourth one this year. Atlantic Money joins remote work management platform Hofy, payroll and HR platform PaySpace, and employee enablement platform Zavvy — Deel’s three other acquisitions this year.

Founded in 2020, U.K.-based Atlantic Money helps users send money internationally with a transparent fee structure. The company charges a flat, £3 ($3.80) fee for money transfers and claims to be, on average, 10x cheaper than its competitor Wise. Unlike Wise, however, Atlantic Money is much more limited in scope. The company only facilitates funds transfers among 10 countries, while Wise allows users to send funds to nearly 90 countries. Since its inception, Atlantic Money has moved over half a billion pounds for 10,000+ customers, helping them save “millions” in fees.

According to Atlantic Money Co-Founder and CEO Neeraj Baid, Deel will leverage the money transfer firm’s expertise and infrastructure to help businesses send payouts to international workforces. “Deel’s mission is to make running a global business as easy as running a local one, and that includes helping workers make global payments securely and easily,” said Baid. “Our team looks forward to working alongside Deel’s experts to share insights and develop technologies that will benefit companies managing international workforces.”

Deel was founded in 2018 and enables companies to hire employees across the globe and pay them in more than 150 currencies. In addition to facilitating payroll, the company helps companies manage global workforces, hire contractors, relocate workers, and more. Deel was valued at $12 billion in May of 2022 and has raised a total of $680 million in funding.

Photo by Matthias Groeneveld