When it comes to taking advantage of the best that the world’s fintech has to offer, you won’t find financial services companies in Canada sleeping on the job. This week in the country’s payments space, Toronto, Ontario-based Versapay announced its acquisition of Solupay, a contactless payments company based in Ohio. We also learned that FinovateEurope alum unblu, which offers a digital conversational platform for FIs from its headquarters in Basel Switzerland, had teamed up with Calgary, Alberta-based digital technology solutions provider Celero.

By the end of the week, Canada’s largest credit education company, Borrowell, announced that it was partnering with multiple Finovate Best of Show winner MX. Borrowell, the first company in Canada to offer free credit scores via its partnership with Equifax, has launched a new bill tracking feature called Boost on its app. The company will use MX’s data cleansing technology to improve Boost’s analysis of user spending behavior to help users make better financial planning decisions.

“With MX, Borrowell is giving its customers greater clarity into how they can become more financially strong as a means to increasing credit strength,” MX Chief Customer Officer Nate Gardner said. “It is exactly this kind of innovation, partnership and money experience that MX loves to enable through our powerful data platform.”

Last week we featured an extended Q&A with Eric Rosenthal, Vice President and Managing Director for the Americas with Rapyd. If you’re interested in learning more about the fintech ecosystem in one of the most overlooked regions of the world, our conversation with Eric Rosenthal is a great place to start.

With that in mind, congratulations to Mexican challenger bank Klar, which raised $15 million in Series A funding in a round led by Prosus Ventures this week. Founded in 2019, Klar now has approximately $72 million in total debt and equity financing, and noted that the new capital will help the company build its engineering capabilities in its hubs in Berlin and Mexico.

“Klar is making credit accessible to all Mexicans, including those with no credit history,” Klar co-founder and Chief Financial Officer Daniel Autrique said. “We help people build credit by looking at how and where they spend their money, instead of being stuck with traditional credit scores that are backward looking and obsolete.” The company said that, since inception, it has issued more than 25,000 lines of credit among its 200,000 customers.

Here is our look at fintech around the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• Stripe makes inroads in Africa with acquisition of Paystack.
• A partnership between Standard Bank, Mastercard, and Google will help SMEs in Africa offer their services online as well as accept digital payments.
• Trading Technologies teams up with Cape Town-based Applied Derivatives, which will distribute the TT platform from South Africa.

Central and Eastern Europe

• PayRay, a factoring company based in Lithuania, receives banking license and begins banking operations in its home country.
• Lithuanian online payments firm Interpaylink partners with iDenfy to provide remote user identification.
• Advapay, a digital core banking platform provider based in Estonia, teams up with U.K.-based identity verification platform Sumsub.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Cairo, Egypt-based financial wellness platform NowPay raises $2.1 million in seed funding.
• Central Bank of Bahrain launches the region’s first digital fintech lab, FinHub 973.
• Commercial Bank of Dubai introduces cards and accounts for low-income consumers courtesy of partnership with Now Money.

Central and Southern Asia

• Indian payments processor Razorpay secures $100 million in Series D funding, earning a valuation just over one billion.
• Mastercard announces partnership with Indian regtech Signzy to bring the company’s video KYC technology to its banking customers.
• Indian fintech Open partners with Equitas Small Finance Bank and Visa to offer business debit card.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Brazilian payment solutions provider Ebanx announces expansion of operations into five countries in Central and South America.
• Venio, a mobile app that provides financing to the unbanked, goes live in Mexico.
• Chile’s third largest bank, Banco de Crédito e Inversiones (BCI), partners with Temenos to launch new corporate bank in Peru.

Asia-Pacific

• The People’s Bank of China holds lottery to distribute millions in digital yuan valued at $1.5 million.
• Vietnamese online payment portal AppotaPay scores payment intermediary license from State Bank of Vietnam.
• PayMaya, a mobile payments platform based in the Philippines, launches new mobile payment device PayMaya One Lite, that enables acceptance of a range of digital payment types.

Photo by James Wheeler from Pexels