Berlin, Germany-based “tech company with a banking license” solarisBank has secured $67 million in funding (€60 million). The Series C round was led by HV Holtzbrinck Ventures and Storm Ventures, and featured participation from a wide number of investors including BBVA, ABN Amro, SBI Group, Global Brain, Hegus, and Lakestar. Also participating in the oversubscribed round were Vulcan Capital and Samsung Catalyst Fund.

The investment takes the company’s total funding to more than $180 million (€160 million), and will be used to help fuel Solarisbank’s continued expansion throughout Europe. Since 2017, the company has doubled its revenues every year, and grown its product portfolio to include solutions like decoupled debit cards and post-purchase installment products. With more than 400,000 end-customer accounts as of the end of the first half of 2020, the company also announced that it will expand its operations in the cryptocurrency space via its subsidiary solaris Digital Assets.

“solarisBank is continuing its impressive growth and the current financing round will help us to expedite building a pan-European platform,” solarisBank CEO Dr. Roland Folz said in a statement. He added, “We are the leading platform for Banking-as-a-Service in Europe and are excited that this exceptional group of new investors will now be a part of our journey.”

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More on MENA Fintech

Last week we reported on a study that highlighted the fintech innovations that were most likely to drive financial inclusion in the MENA region. This week we note another report on fintech in the Middle East and Northern Africa, this time from Deloitte, which noted a growing appetite for fintech solutions from the region’s banking customers.

At the same time, Deloitte Digital’s Middle East FinTech Study, released in June, cautioned that further fintech development in the region faces challenges with regard to financing, and a wariness from traditional banks toward engaging fintechs. The latter issue in particular reflects what the report authors – Rushdi Duqah and Anthony Yazitzis – call “a certain degree of contradiction and dichotomy.”

“Customer behavior across the Middle East, especially in KSA, is characterized by a willingness to adopt innovative solutions offered by banks,” Duqah and Yazitzis observed. The two highlighted P2P money transfers, account aggregation, and roboadvisory as three such areas. “However, banks are not leveraging the full suite of FinTech solutions/features to address customer’s needs and requirements to enhance the daily banking journey and experience,” they wrote.

Read the full report to see how “harmonization and trust” are the path forward for financial services companies, fintechs, and banks in the Middle East and Northern Africa.

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What’s Next for Wirecard?

We reported on the crisis facing Germany’s Wirecard two weeks ago in Finovate Global. Company CEO Markus Braun stepped down amid reports that Wirecard could not account for $2.1 billion in cash, and concerns that the company was “the victim of fraud of considerable proportions.”

This week we learned that Braun has been arrested – though since released on bail – and that Deutsche Bank has engaged with the now-bankrupt company and is considering providing financial support. A report in Bloomberg noted that Deutsche Bank had conducted talks with Wirecard last spring (referred to as “preliminary discussions” that were quickly concluded) and that, despite its woes, Wirecard could be a potentially attractive acquisition target thanks to its partnerships with Visa, Mastercard, and JCB International.

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Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• Billed as “the grand fintech consolidation,” TechCabal takes a look at MFS Africa’s purchase of SME digital payments provider Beyonic.
• Nigerian fintech Wallets Africa locks in new funding from investors including Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel.
• The East African makes the case for Kenya as a top destination for venture capital in Africa.

Central and Eastern Europe

• Top banking-as-a-service platform solarisBank raises $67 million (€ 60 million) in Series C funding.
• Electronic payment network Paysera expands to Kosovo.
• Azerbaijan’s Xalq Bank launches Compass Plus’ open development platform, TranzAxis.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Digital property management and rent collection platform Ajar earns UAE’s Most Trusted Fintech in 2020 honors from APAC Business Headlines.
• UAE’s central bank and the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM) announce the start of their annual Fintech Abu Dhabi Innovation Challenge for fintechs developing solutions for local small businesses.
• Dubai’s Mamo Pay earns spot in Visa’s Finech Fast Track Program.

Central and Southern Asia

• Transfast, a U.S.-based cross-border payments company, partners with Pakistan’s Habib Bank to enable money transfers to Pakistan.
• Bangalore, India-based fintech Zeta announces expansion into Vietnam and the Philippines.
• Indian gold lending startup, Rupeek, unveils zero contact gold loan kiosks to support touchless financing amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Mexican fintech ePesos announces $21 million debt financing round with Accial Capital.
• BizCapital, a lending startup based in Brazil, raises $12 million in funding thanks to an investment from Germany development finance institution, DEG.
• Credit Suisse buys 35% of Brazilian digital bank modalmais.

Asia-Pacific

• Myanmar Citizens Bank (MCB Bank) issues MPU-JCB co-branded debit cards.
• Razer’s fintech arm, Razer Fintech launches new initiative to support local businesses in Malaysia during the global health care crisis of COVID-19.
• KrASIA profiles Indonesian fintech Akulaku, which offers online credit, wealth management, and digital banking services in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Malaysia.

To speake of the woe that has befallen Wirecard …

The international fintech community received an unexpected jolt on Friday on news that the CEO of Wirecard, Markus Braun, was stepping down. Braun’s resignation comes amid reports that the German digital financial platform he has led since 2002 cannot account for $2.1 billion in cash, and a delay in the release of its 2019 financial report. Reuters reported that the company admits it could be have been “the victim of fraud of considerable proportions.”

Up until recently Wirecard appeared poised for success as a leading European payment processor for both consumers and businesses. The company reported revenues of $2.2 billion in 2018 and, by the fall of that year, had reached a valuation of $26.9 billion.

But suspicious of the company deepened early last year. A Financial Times report in January alleging suspicious financial activity in Singapore, and the announcement of an official investigation by Singapore authorities a month later, tarnished Wirecard’s image despite the company’s denials. This was followed by claims of further questionable financial activity – this time in Ireland – in October.

In this week’s news, auditors at EY, formerly known as Ernst & Young, were not able to locate cash at two Asian banks – Bank of the Philippine Islands and BDO Unibank – where Wirecard said $2 billion had been deposited. Both banks have denied having a business relationship with Wirecard. Moreover, documents indicating that such a relationship did exist, according to BDO, were falsified and bore forged signatures.

In a statement, Wirecard announced that James Freis, who was recently appointed to the company’s management board, will serve as interim CEO. the Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, known as BaFin, is investigating.

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Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Brazil-based SME lender BizCapital raises $12 million in Series B funding to support development of new products.
• Banco Sabadell partners with IBM to enhances its digital banking operations in Mexico.
• Banco Safra, based in Brazil, to deploy ACI Worldwide’s UP Retail Payments solution and UP Framework.

Asia-Pacific

• Vietnam Plus reports surge in contactless payments in Vietnam.
• Crowdfund Insider investigates the rise of Sharia fintech in Indonesia.
• Malaysian fintech Curlec, which helps businesses manage recurring payments and cash flow, secures investment from 500 Startups.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• South African open banking startup – and FinovateAfrica alum – truID announces seed funding.
• Nigeria’s Chipper Cash secures $13.8 million in Series A funding.
• WapiPay, a fintech based in Kenya and Singapore that provides platform-to-platform integration for virtual and global accounts, raises seed funding via accelerator network FutureHub.

Central and Eastern Europe

• Estonia’s Planet42 announces $2.4 million seed round led by Change Ventures. The company helps facilitate automobile access for the underbanked in South Africa.
• Russia’s Tinkoff teams up with online marketplace goods.ru.
• Boku acquires Estonia-based mobile payments company Fortumo in deal valued at $45 million.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• UAE-based Buy Now Pay Later e-commerce company Postpay introduces a trio of new installment payment options.
• The Fintech Times takes a look at the state of the fintech and financial services industry in Lebanon.
• Tpay Mobile, based in Dubai, acquires Turkish payments company Payguru.

Central and Southern Asia

• Cryptocurrency exchange Binance joins the Indian Tech Association.
• Kaspi, an e-commerce banking app based in Kazakhstan, to expand to Azerbaijan and other neighboring countries.
• India Infoline launches #IIFLDisrupt, an initiative to help early-stage Indian fintechs during the COVID-19 crisis.
• India-based Buy Now Pay Later company Tabby raises $7 million in funding to support expansion into Saudi Arabia.

Photo by Alisha Lubben from Pexels

Courtesy of a round featuring new investor WSV – a joint venture fund of Walden International and Korean firm SKTA – online financing solutions marketplace BankBazaar has raised $6 million in new equity funding. The company will use the capital, which adds to an existing Series D round, to help market its contactless personal finance solutions as it continues its expansion in India.

In a blog post at the company’s website, company CEO Adhil Shetty noted that the current global public health crisis is fueling pre-existing trends in favor of contactless transactions. “In the post COVID-19 world, the demand for contactless finance is going to grow exponentially,” Shetty said. “(T)his round of funding will help us accelerate our plans to implement contactless access to credit.” He added that the investment, which also featured participation from the company’s existing investors Amazon, Sequoia India, Experian, and Eight Roads, represents an endorsement of the company’s “vision of contactless finance as the future of personal finance” as well as BankBazaar’s ability to make that happen.

An alum of FinovateAsia (learn about our upcoming all digital FinovateAsia event next month), BankBazaar offers an unbiased online marketplace for instant, customized rate quotes on a variety of credit products from loans to credit cards. The company, called “the Credit Karma of India” by WSV General Partner Andrew Kau, is headquartered in Chennai, India, and was founded in 2008.

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Also adding new capital to its coffers is Tink, the open banking enablement platform based in Stockholm, Sweden. The company, most recently demoing its technology on our stage at FinovateEurope last year, announced this week that it has received a strategic investment from PayPal. This week’s funding, amount not disclosed, represents the second time PayPal has invested in the company; PayPal made its first strategic investment in Tink in June 2019.

As part of the agreement, PayPal will integrate Tink’s open banking and account aggregation technology into some of its customer-facing user experiences. The extended agreement between the two companies now includes all countries within the European Economic Area (EEA).

“PayPal is one of the world’s leading finech companies, serving more than 330 million consumers and merchants in more than 200 markets worldwide,” Tink co-founder and CEO Daniel Kjellén said. He added, “as Europe’s leading open banking platform, we are looking forward to continuing to support PayPal as they extend and enhance their services across the whole of Europe.”

It is an understatement to say that Tink has had a big year on the capital-raising front. The company began the year closing a $100 million round led by a pair of new investors Dawn Capital of London and HMI Capital of San Francisco. In addition to the company’s funding news, Tink partnered with Nordea to integrate its technology into the bank’s mobile app, acquired Spanish account aggregation specialist – and fellow Finovate alum – Eurobits Technologies, and teamed up with BNP Paribas to become the firm’s preferred partner in Europe.

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Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world.

Central and Southern Asia

• DBS Bank India teams up with TCIL to facilitate real-time payments for truck drivers.
• BankBazaar raises $6 million in new funding.
• Hindustan Times profiles Hyderabad-based fintech Quickcredit.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Latin American open banking startup Belvo raises $10 million in new funding from Founders Fund and Kaszek Ventures.
• On-demand insurance technology leader Trov partners with Seguros Sura Brazil to bring on-demand insurance to Brazil.
• Santander InnoVentures leads $5 million funding round for Latin American alternative lender a55.

Asia-Pacific

• A few weeks ago we wrote about the rise of QR-code payments in many markets around the world. This week brings news that Japan’s JCB has partnered with FIS to power its cross-border QR code payments, initially between Vietnam and Thailand.
• Aleta Planet and Zhongguo Remittance partner to launch new online money transfer service, Aleta China Express, to make it easier to send money from Singapore to China.
• Gojek, an Indonesian ride hailing service turned payments and financial services superapp, earns investment from Facebook and PayPal.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• Nigerian digital bank Sparkle launched this week after securing its license from the Central Bank of Nigeria.
• Forbes profiles Fara Ashiru Jituboh, co-founder, CEO, and CTO of Nigeria-based financial services “super-connector” Okra.
• 6DOT60 introduces its digital rands platform in South Africa.

Central and Eastern Europe

• Cloud banking platform Mambu partners with low-code platform provider VeriTran.
• Sovcombank of Russia unveils online mortgage loans.
• Alior Bank looks for for mobile-banking focused startups to fill the ranks of this year’s ten-week accelerator program.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• MoneyGram announces strategic partnership with Al Rajhi Bank, the largest Islamic bank in the world, to support money transfer services in Saudi Arabia.
• Dubai-based fintech JinglePay goes live as the latest neobank in the UAE.
• OneSpan to provide mobile app security for Turkish bank, DenizBank.

This week on Finovate Global we feature an interview with Beerud Sheth, co-founder and CEO of smart messaging platform, Gupshup. We talked with Mr. Sheth about the smart messaging business and its relationship to driving payments in India. We also discussed the current state of Indian fintech more broadly, including an update on Prime Minister Modi’s goal to improve financial services through a combination of better payments technology and new digital identity solutions.

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Finovate: Tell us about Gupshup and the role of smart messaging in enabling payments in India.

Beerud Sheth: Gupshup is a smart messaging platform. We use messaging as a platform to make it easier to use other services such as e-commerce, payments, and more. Messaging enables one-click payments, which makes it easier for consumers to keep up with their busy financial lives. For example, they can pay bills instantly without missing deadlines, manage recurring payments, make a digital payment to an offline merchant, or pay friends quickly and easily.

Finovate: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. Why did you decide to launch the company?

Sheth: My name is Beerud Sheth – co-founder and CEO of messaging and AI-building company Gupshup, based in Silicon Valley. We are primarily focused on automating enterprises’ messaging processes across multiple channels using a single API. I am responsible for the overall strategy, execution, and growth of Gupshup.

I also founded Elance, the world’s largest online services marketplace, and also have played various leadership roles at different stages of the company’s growth.

Before founding Elance, I worked in the financial services industry, modeling, structuring, and trading fixed income securities and derivatives at Merrill Lynch and, before that, at Citicorp Securities. My graduate research, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, involved developing autonomous learning software agents for personalized news filtering.

I earned an M.S. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where I was awarded the Institute Silver Medal. I am a frequent speaker at industry events as well as a holder of two technology patents.

Finovate: You recently won a $100,000 Grand Challenge competition sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Can you tell us about this contest? Why did you get involved in this event and how do you think it will help promote your technology and solution?

Sheth: The Gates Foundation in partnership with National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) sponsored a competition to discover new ideas to enable payments for the next billion users – who use low-end feature-phone devices. It attracted over 750 participant companies from around the world. They announced a couple of weeks ago that Gupshup won the 1^st prize. Our key insight was that for payments to work well, the primary focus has to be on the user experience. If users have to remember and type in numerous digits, it will never work for users that may not be tech-savvy or have low-end devices.

Gupshup used its expertise in messaging to enable a one-click payment experience. The message contains the entire context about the payment, freeing up the user to do nothing else except authorizing the payment. Gupshup is now working with enterprises and device manufacturers to roll this out to consumers.

Finovate: Your winning entry was a solution called the Smart Feature Phone. What does the phone do and who is the primary market for it?

Sheth: The Smart Feature Phone brings smartphone like capabilities to the feature phone. The target users are the next billion feature-phone users in emerging markets that are left out of the digital ecosystem.

The key feature is the use of messaging to enable chatbots and payments on the feature phone. Chatbots and the Bot Store have the same impact on feature phones as Apps and App Stores did on smartphones. It opens up a wide range of use cases including commerce, gaming, entertainment, sports, etc. Payments enable the monetization of these activities.

Finovate: Can you tell us a little about your partnership with Amazon?

Sheth: Gupshup partnered with Amazon Registry Services to enable customers to validate their bots and register a domain name with Amazon’s BOT Registry.

Without getting too technical, this means users who own, operate, or manage bots published using Gupshup’s tool will be able to be found by end-users no matter what platform or framework they use now or in the future, something previously unavailable for bot owners.

Finovate: You’ve also leveraged your technology to help during the global coronavirus public health crisis. Can you tell us a little about the “COVID bot” you’ve created?

Sheth: CareMe Health, a Chennai-based tele-health company, the National Health Mission of Tamil Nadu and American company Gupshup, worked together in implementing a multi-language WhatsApp-based chatbot readily accessible by millions of citizens in Tamil Nadu and the world over.

The bot, named Careme Bot, is designed to:

• Educate the users on the health hazards of COVID-19
• Provide emergency helplines and information on testing centers
• Facilitate self-reporting
• Provide up-to-the-minute updates on the COVID pandemic

The creators of Careme Bot are Dr. Arun Babu and Dr. Vasanth Kattalai Kailasam- Chief Medical Officer, Interventional Pain Physician at Northern Light Health, Maine, USAGK, CTO of the company. Check out screenshots of the Careme Bot here.

Finovate: What do you find most interesting about the Indian fintech scene right now? What is it about the fintech scene in India that you think would surprise people outside of India?

Sheth: The scale of a billion-user market would surprise people outside India. India is leapfrogging its way to advanced fintech services since the consumer has been capital-starved for a long time. Indians tend to be conservative about debt which makes them generally creditworthy. However, the financial delivery systems have been lacking, which is now changing because of new technology and startups.

Finovate: You mentioned that one goal of your solution is to help realize the JAM initiative proposed by Indian Prime Minister Modi. Could you elaborate a little on this vision and why it is important?

Sheth: Prime Minister Modi’s vision is to transform India by making sure no citizen is left behind. Three initiatives, in particular, are critical enablers: Jan-dhan (a layer of free, basic financial and payment services for every citizen), Aadhar (unique, biometric-linked identity, like SSN + fingerprints, for every individual) and Mobile (delivery of government services through ubiquitous mobile phones).

The missing piece was the enablement of financial services on low-end feature phones. This problem has now been solved by the Gupshup solution.

Finovate: What can we expect from Gupshup over the balance of 2020 and into the next year?

Sheth: Gupshup is singularly focused on its vision of “smart messaging” i.e., leveraging the power of messaging tools to enable richer services. As people’s lives get increasingly busy and complex, messaging apps, with their ubiquity, simplicity, and richness, are uniquely positioned to be the glue that ties it all together. Gupshup will keep rolling out new components of this over-arching vision.

China is dominating geopolitical headlines – from the country’s unique challenge with COVID-19 to tensions with Hong Kong and the United States as Chinese leaders gather for the country’s annual National People’s Congress.

But fintech observers would do well to consider developments in China’s neighbor to the southwest, India, whose fintech sector continues to challenge China’s in terms of investment.

In the first quarter of 2020, fintech investment in India again outpaced fintech investment in China. GlobalData, a data and analytics company, released an analysis this week that showed Q1 2020 fintech investment in China came in at “approximately $270 million” while, in India, fintech investment in the first quarter of this year topped $330 million. GlobalData analyst Ayushi Tandon noted that the global pandemic had played a role in dampening VC enthusiasm for fintech investment overall this year so far, and that India had benefitted on a relative basis from this easing of investor passions.

Deal volume showed the same preferences in the first quarter, with 26 deals closed in China in Q1 compared to 37 deals in India.

VC investment in the two countries differed in terms of startup maturity and sub-sector, as well. In China, there has been more investment in cross-sector fintech startups that were looking to scale. In India, payments and lending were the top sectors, and seed funding dominated the quarter’s investments. GlobalData’s report noted that fintechs involved in analytics were the biggest recipients of VC funding in both nations.

India’s fintech industry certainly had the wind in its sails coming into this year. According to research from Accenture, investment in Indian fintechs grew from $1.9 billion over 193 deals in 2018 to $3.7 billion over 198 deals in 2019. The country began to successfully compete with China in terms of fintech investment last year.

Founded in 2016 and headquartered in London, U.K., GlobalData was formed by a consortium of established data and analytics providers. Covering a wide range of industries – from banking and payments to insurance, aerospace, and technology – GlobalData serves financial institutions, government agencies, and corporations, providing thought leadership and analysis, as well as proprietary analytic frameworks to help them make data-driven decisions.

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Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• NEC Payments and stc Bahrain, a telecommunications company based in Bahrain, partner to launch new virtual prepaid Mastercard offering.
• JinglePay, neobank based in Dubai, announces plans for launch.
• Emirates NBD collaborates with proptech startup Urban to offer financing program for property rentals in UAE.

Central and Southern Asia

• Lendingkart, an online lender based in India, raised more than $42 million in Series D funding.
• Indian SME accounting app Khatabook raises $60 million in Series C funding.
• SadaPay, a fintech based in Pakistan, wins approval to launch a mobile wallet.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Brazil unveils new regulations enabling banks, payments institutions, and other licensed companies to share customer data.
• Koibanx, a fintech based in Argentina, announces plans to expand to Mexico.
• Colombian lender ADDI raises $15 million in round led by Quona Capital.

Asia-Pacific

• Philippines-based mobile wallet GCash to support cashless payments system for taxi service in Manila.
• Samsung Pay and Malaysia-based e-wallet Boost team up to support cashless payments in Malaysia.
• Ant Financial invests $73.5 million in mobile financial services company Wave Money.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• South African business payments platform Peach Payments locks in growth funding with investment round led by UW Ventures.
• Nigerian fintech Carbon goes live with new social banking service.
• CompariSure, a fintech startup from South Africa, raises funding from UW Ventures.

Central and Eastern Europe

• Billon partners with Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) to pilot a DLT-based national currency.
• EU Startups features CEE fintechs Crypterium, Humaniq, Revolut, and ANNA in its list of promising startups with Russian founders.
• Financier Worldwide looks at AML and financial crime in Romania.

Top image designed by Freepik