This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.
Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
Modern SaaS banking platform Mambu has secured an investment of $266 million (€235 million) in a Series E round led by EQT Growth. The funding, the largest to date for a banking software platform according to Mambu, gives the Berlin, Germany-based company a valuation of $5.5 billion (€4.9 billion).
“This latest round of funding will allow us to accelerate our plans in expanding our mission-critical banking platform to further enable composable business models which are agile and continuously evolving,” Mambu co-founder and CEO Eugene Danilkis said. Additionally, the company will use the new capital to expand its global footprint to support an international customer base that is currently active in 65 countries.
More than 50 million end users rely on Mambu’s technology every day. In Q3 of 2021, Mambu produced year-on-year growth of more than 1.2x. Also this year, the company has signed 40+ customers, with more than 55% of its new customers headquartered outside of Europe. Among the company’s more recent partnerships are its alliance with Capgemini to offer BaaS in the Asia-Pacific region, and its collaboration with Germany-based Raisin Bank, which launched its own BaaS offering using Mambu’s cloud banking platform. Other major deployments included N26, Raiffeisen Bank, and ABN Amro.
Founded in 2011 – and a Finovate alum since 2013 – Mambu most recently demonstrated its technology on the Finovate stage this September at FinovateFall. At the event, the company provided a birds-eye view of its SaaS cloud banking platform, showing how users can open an account, create and launch new solutions in minutes, and leverage integrations with Salesforce, Stripe, Marqeta, and others to include KYC, fraud and identity verification, CRM, and other services.
“Our vision in creating Mambu was always to create an industry-leading platform that will enable more than a billion people to have brilliant banking experiences,” Danilkis said in a statement accompanying this week’s funding announcement. “We want to be able to empower our customers to create any financial product anywhere in the world and create amazing customer experiences.”
In a round led by Warburg Pincus, Insight Partners, and Bow Wave Capital Management, Philippines-based mobile payment company Mynt has secured $300 million in new funding. The investment, which also featured participation from Itai Tsiddon, Amplo Ventures, Globe Telecom, and Ayala Corporation, gives Mynt a valuation of more than $2 billion and solidifying the company’s status as the biggest technology unicorn based in the Philippines.
“We have been able to continuously expand by introducing game-changing innovations while improving our profitability profile,” Mynt president and CEO Martha Sazon. “We are excited about our new partnership with Warburg, Insight, Itali Tsiddon, and Amplo, as they each bring strategic value to our team in the pursuit of our vision towards finance for all.”
Owned by Philippine mobile operator Globe Telecom, Mynt is the company behind the GCash app. The popular solution enables customers to buy prepaid airtime; pay bills at more than 600 partner billers throughout the Philippines; send and receive money anywhere in the country; as well as access savings, credit, insurance, and investment products and services. GCash currently has more than 48 million users.
Most recently, Mynt has piloted a new cash loan offering, GLoan, that enables qualified borrowers to take out loans of up to PHP25,000 (approximately $500 USD) that can be repaid over 12 months. GLoan joins the company’s GCredit offering, which disburses more than PHP1 billion ($200 million USD) in loans every month and has disbursed PHP15 billion ($3 billion USD) as of June of this year. Mynt notes that its GCredit solution has the best repayment rates with the lowest number of past-due and non-performing loans locally. Unsurprisingly, Mynt is also looking to offer Buy Now Pay Later services “within the year” as well.
Mynt’s GCash is also one of the growing number of financial apps to incorporate pro-environmental functionality into its solution. The app has a feature, GForest, that serves as a gamified environmental stewardship program that enables users to convert points earned from using GCash into a virtual tree. These virtual trees are then planted as actual trees in specific locations in the Philippines. Mynt says that it has 8.7 million users of GForest within the GCash app.
Founded in 2015, Mynt has been recognized as a leader in the digital transformation of payments and other financial services in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic. With nearly half the country’s population using its technology, Mynt is on pace to reach a gross transaction value of PHP3 trillion, more than triple of what was achieved last year. The company has reported peak daily app log-ins of 19 million and daily active transactions of 12 million.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Low-code fintech platform provider Veritran has secured a strategic growth investment from Trivest Partners, a private equity fund based in Miami, Florida. The specific amount of the investment was not disclosed, but the company did report that funding gives the Buenos Aires, Argentina-based firm a valuation of $225 million.
“Today marks a major milestone for Veritran’s team, as we embark upon a new chapter of becoming the next fintech unicorn,” Veritran CEO and co-founder Marcelo Gonzalez said, “while continuing to democratize access to the digital economy.” Gonzalez highlighted Trivest Partners’ successful track record of working with “founder-owned businesses” and said the collaboration would help Veritran expand “into new geographies and reach new customers.”
Founded in 2005 and maintaining offices in the U.S., Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, Peru, and Guatemala, Veritran offers a low-code platform that helps companies integrate new, enabling technologies into their legacy systems. Companies looking to enhance customer engagement via digital channels ranging from mobile banking and digital wallets seek out Veritran’s technology to future-proof their retail and corporate banking operations, as well as digital payments and onboarding processes.
With 50 bank clients and 25 million users, Veritran processes 25 billion transactions a year on its platform. In August, the company announced that it had partnered with Visa to promote push payments, tokenization, and Click to Pay projects in Latin America and the Caribbean. The previous month, Veritran teamed up with behavioral biometric-based online fraud detection platform Revelock to help banks reduce fraud losses and call center costs. The partnership with Revelock – a Feedzai company – followed Veritran’s collaboration with another biometric technology company, FaceTec, which brought its facial recognition technology to the Buenos Aires-based firm’s low code platform.
Veritran’s funding announcement comes less than a month before it makes its return to the Finovate stage at FinovateFall in New York. The company will join what may be the largest contingent of Latin America-based fintechs ever assembled at a Finovate event (see below).
FinovateFall 2021 takes place at the Marriott Marquis Times Square in New York City, September 13 through 15. For more information, including how to attend our autumn fintech conference live or on-demand, visit our FinovateFall hub today.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
From the snap election called by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to the country’s recently expressed eagerness to accept refugees in the wake of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, there have been more than a few reasons for the Great White North to make news headlines of late.
Now fintech fans in particular have another reason to pay attention to what’s going on in the chronically under-discussed nation. FreshBooks, a cloud accounting software company based in Toronto, Ontario, has raised $130 million in new funding. This gives the firm a valuation of more than $1 billion, becoming Canada’s latest fintech unicorn.
FreshBooks CEO Don Epperson said that the funding, which included $50 million in debt financing, was an “injection of confidence” in the company’s mission to help small businesses digitize their accounting operations. Epperson added that the capital will fuel investment in markets that are experiencing significant increases in regulation and help those small business owners better “manage their finances” by “simplifying workflows.”
The Series E round was led by long-time FreshBooks investor Accomplice. Also participating in the funding were J.P. Morgan, Gaingels, BMO, and Manulife. New investor Barclays, one of FreshBooks’ platform partners, was also involved in the financing.
Founded in 2003, FreshBooks is active in more than 160 countries, including Croatia, Mexico, the Netherlands, and the U.S. – as well as its native Canada. The company’s technology has helped more than 30 million people better manage their finances, billing operations, and payments, while increasing customer engagement with its ten-time Stevie award-winning customer support. In July, the company announced that it was teaming up with the Ontario government in a data-sharing partnership to help understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on small businesses. In May, FreshBooks co-founder Mike McDerment was featured in Profiles in Leadership where he discussed the company’s origins from its humble beginnings in “his parents’ basement” to the 500-employee company that is now among the top cloud accounting software firms in the world.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
The fintech industry in Latin America is among the world’s most vibrant. From the initiatives in Mexico to provide a legal framework that will enable local fintechs to flourish, to the innovations in central bank digital currencies in the Caribbean, to the rising fintech giants like Nubank in Brazil, financial technology is making a major difference in the lives of a growing number of Latin Americans.
For this week’s Finovate Global: Voices, we caught up with Ximena Aleman, co-founder and Chief Business Development Officer of Prometeo, to discuss fintech in Latin America and the power of open banking to improve financial wellness and create opportunity in the region.
Please tell us a little about Prometeo and what drove you to co-launch the company.
Ximena Aleman: Prometeo is a fintech company striving to create an open and connected financial market in Latin America (LATAM). We are building a huge highway of financial information across financial institutions and countries in LATAM. Prometeo is the largest Open Banking API platform in the region disrupting the financial sector in México, Colombia, Brazil, and six more countries. We provide a single point of access to information, transactions, and payments across more than 30 financial institutions and 45 APIs in nine countries of LATAM.
As LATAM entrepreneurs, we are well aware of the tech gap in the financial sector between underdeveloped and developed countries. In particular, the lack of adequate tech infrastructure. So we decided to approach this as an opportunity to build not only a great solution but also a path towards financial access for the region.
What are the drivers of open banking in Latin America?
Aleman: Open Banking is a disruptive innovation that reframes the way banking is carried out. Transactions and communications between customers and institutions are going from taking place behind closed doors to transparent exchanges in the public square. It is no wonder that traditional financial institutions initially viewed the practice with a measure of bemusement or even suspicion.
However, there has been a marked shift in their thinking. Adoption has been slower in Latin America than in other parts of the world, but most of the open banking biggest names in the region have headquarters abroad. Open banking has been a hot topic globally; Latin American associates have taken note and ushered in the conversation.
Another factor that has changed the playbook is the COVID-19 pandemic. The restrictions on daily life and public interactions have forced even the most hard-rooted, traditional financial institutions to review their digital transformation strategies. If customers can’t visit branches, digital channels become the sole venue of exchange.
What do you think it will take to get more women in leadership and founding roles in fintech?
Aleman: I think that as we move forward to a more “gender-balanced” society we have to rethink our financial exchanges from a gender perspective, too. There’s little offered in the financial sector for women and little by little some female fintech entrepreneurs are developing solutions for this segment (for instance, Emma Sanchez’s neobank for women, Jefa). If the startup ecosystem understands that half of the world’s population has been historically financially underserved, and the huge opportunity this is, it won’t take long for women to start developing custom-made products for that segment.
You have said two of the biggest challenges to diversity in fintech are funding and technical training. What can and should be done about this?
Aleman: The gap between VC investments in startups led by women is significant versus those led by men. In the last 10 years, fintech companies led by women have raised 1% of the total investment in fintech. The disparity is really significant.
I believe this gap is multifactorial: historically, the financial and the technology worlds were dominated by men. Also, among VC funds, women in the decision-making process are just a few in number and, per my own experience, men really value having another man as their counterpart.
There’s a lot we can all do: all the stakeholders involved in the fintech sector should make their own changes and push to close the gap. As women, we have to create our support network on every front, talk to mentors, female start-up groups, and above all, be confident and trust your knowledge, your experience, and your ability to navigate through hostile environments. If you feel you are not strong enough in certain areas, seek training. Technical training and really knowing your business is key to build confidence and close this gap.
One of the biggest reasons why women receive less VC investment than men is that so few of them make up decision-makers in VC funds.
How has the pandemic impacted the work you do and the communities you serve?
Aleman: Open Banking has seen a rise in LATAM in the past year, so our business vertical – as everything related to digital transformation in the financial sector – has been benefited by how the pandemic reshaped human interactions. However, no one in LATAM can be a stranger to the economic challenges we are facing today and ahead. There have been huge increases in unemployment, debt, etc. In Uruguay, a year after the pandemic, surfing what might be the country’s second wave of COVID-19 cases, early in the morning in the small towns in the countryside, you will bump into people waiting in line just in one shop, in the local microfinance branch, to ask for credit or pay their debt.
There are many who do not know much about Uruguay. What do you think more people should know about the country?
Aleman: Of course. I’m very proud of my country. We are a small country down in South America, between Argentina and Brazil. We are popular for the quality of our meat and football players, but as noticeable as that is, we are a growing tech hub, in particular for financial services. Uruguay has a long history of providing high-tech software to the financial sector, for instance, we host four banking core software companies (Infocorp, Topsystems, Bantotal, and Mantentia – that was recently bought by Technisys). Most recently, we joined the fintech wave with great B2B solutions like Bankingly or our first local unicorn, dLocal. I think it is worth mentioning the government’s efforts to promote entrepreneurship through the Innovation Agency (ANII) and Development Agency (ANDE). We are well aware that Prometeo was possible thanks to their support and as a startup, we are a result of the whole ecosystem pushing us to grow.
What can we expect from Prometeo over the balance of 2021?
Aleman: We are pushing hard for Open Banking adoption in Brazil, México, and Colombia. For those countries, it’s a challenging shift so we want to provide the best possible solution. That’s why we are releasing a payment feature that allows automated payments across banks in those countries. At the same time, we are on a mission to provide full coverage across LATAM. So this year it’s all about expansion, coding, and growth!
Learn more about fintech in Latin America and the work of Prometeo.
A just-announced partnership between two Finovate alums – Mambu and Signicat – will bring digitized identity management services to banks, fintechs, and financial service providers across Europe. The collaboration between the SaaS banking platform and the digital identity company is designed to help institutions in the region leverage innovations in identity management to boost customer acquisition, enhance the customer experience, and defend against identity fraud.
The single-API integration between Signicat’s identity platform and Mambu will enable users to apply a variety of digital identity verification solutions to a range of processes, including onboarding, identity authentication, and e-signatures. In their joint statement, both companies highlighted abandonment as one challenge the new integration will help companies meet. They noted that 63% of consumers in Europe quit at least one financial app in the last year, citing research conducted by Signicat.
At the same time, the integration also will help companies deal with the new environment for cybercrime, particularly identity fraud, which has flourished in the work-from-home, COVID-19 era. “Identity fraud continues to be a major threat to businesses across the globe and damages trust,” Mambu Managing Director for EMEA Eelco-Jan Boonstra said. “And with everyone working from home – the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this. Therefore financial service providers are relying on customer trust and loyalty more than ever.”
Asger Hattel, who took over as Signicat’s CEO in January of last year, underscored the way the pandemic had accelerated pre-existing trends toward digitization. “Global lockdowns have turned a desire for digital services into an urgent need,” Hattel said. “Our research into consumer attitudes towards onboarding show that financial service providers are struggling to keep up with consumer’s digital demands – and it is costing them customers.”
Mambu’s partnership with Signicat comes in the wake of the Mambu’s $132+ million (€110 million) fundraising last month – which brought the company’s total valuation to more than $2 billion (€1.7 billion). Also last month, Mambu announced the addition of new Chief Financial Officer Langley Eide. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Berlin, Germany, Mambu is an alum of both our Finovate conferences – debuting in 2013 at FinovateAsia – and our event for developers and engineers – FinDEVr New York, in 2016.
Based in Trondheim, Norway, Signicat specializes in providing identity assurance worldwide, enabling banks to leverage existing customer identity to accelerate onboarding, improve access to services, and connect users, devices, and more across channels and markets. A Finovate alum since 2017, Signicat has raised $8.8 million in funding from investors including Horizon 2020, Viking Venture, and Secure Identity Holding.
There’s not much room in 2021 for 2020-style pessimism. Sure, if you look, you can find plenty of things to be negative about so far this year. However, one aspect of 2021 that’s giving fintechs hope is the recent uptick in valuations across the fintech sector.
Despite last year’s global events, many fintechs received valuations exceeding $1 billion. In fact, in December 2020 alone, four fintechs, including eToro, Creditas, PhonePE, and GoCardless, received unicorn status.
This year seems to be off to a similarly bullish start, with four fintechs becoming unicorns in just the first three weeks of 2021:
Digit Insurance
India-based Digit Insurance became India’s first unicorn of 2021 after the country saw 11 new unicorns in 2020. Just 15 days into the new year, and after raising $18.5 million, Digit Insurance unveiled a new valuation of $1.9 billion.
Divvy
Spend management startup Divvy received a valuation of $1.6 billion after its Series D round on January 5. The $165 million came from new investors PayPal Ventures, Whale Rock, Schonfeld, and previous backers NEA, Insight Venture Partners, Acrew, and Pelion. The pandemic has spurred increased traffic to Utah-based Divvy; the startup has experienced a 500% increase in monthly sign-ups since March 2020.
Mambu
SaaS banking platform Mambuearned its unicorn title after landing a $135 million investment on January 7. The boost gave the Germany-based company a post-money valuation of just over $2 billion. Mambu will use the funds to increase its presence in Brazil, Japan, and the U.S.
MX
The second fintech unicorn to come out of Lehi, Utah is fintech data company MX. Founded in 2010, MX raised $300 million in Series C funding on January 13, bringing the company’s total capital to $505 billion and boosting its valuation to $1.9 billion. Company CEO Ryan Caldwell said that MX will use the funds to hire more staff and improve its data collection and enhancement capabilities.
SaaS banking platform Mambu is even more prepared to support the banking-as-a service trend that’s sweeping the fintech industry. That’s because the Germany-based company received $135 million (€110 million) in new funding this week.
The investment was led by TCV, followed by new contributors Tiger Global and Arena Holdings and existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Runa Capital, and Acton Capital Partners. TCV General Partner, John Doran, will join Mambu’s board of directors.
The company also disclosed a new valuation of more than $2 billion (€1.7 billion), which places it in the fintech unicorn club (two-times over!).
Mambu will use the funds to accelerate growth and boost its presence across the globe. Specifically, the company announced intentions to deepen its footprint in Brazil, Japan, and the U.S.
“As an increasing number of challenger and established banks sign on to prepare themselves to thrive in the fintech era, we have, and will continue to provide them with a world-class platform on which to build modern, agile customer-centric businesses,” said Mambu CEO and Co-founder Eugene Danilkis. “This latest funding round allows us to accelerate our mission to make banking better for a billion people around the world and address one of the largest, most complex global market opportunities that’s still in the infancy of cloud.”
Mambu was founded in 2011 and emerged as one of the pioneering players to move banking software to the cloud. Since then, the company has seen success from its concept of composable banking that allows clients to build a banking experience to suit their needs without being tied to a specific vendor, product, or technology. This shift away from legacy core banking platforms, along with plug-and-play integrations, helps banks future-proof their systems to better serve their customers. Among Mambu’s customers are ABN AMRO, N26, OakNorth, Orange, and Santander.
Today’s news comes after a strong period of growth for Mambu. The company has seen around 100% YoY growth and is planning to support it by doubling its team to more than 1,000 by next year.
A pair of Finovate alums have joined forces to help a leading financial platform in Asia launch a lending solution as part of its planned expansion in the region.
German cloud banking platform provider Mambu and alternative credit score provider CredoLab have announced a partnership with GoBear, a financial services platform based in Singapore. The company, founded in 2015 as a metasearch engine and now operating as a financial services platform that has served more than 55 million consumers, plans to expand into the Philippines later this year. Technology from Mambu will power the core system in GoBear’s lending architecture, with CredoLab’s credit scoring helping ensure the company is able to bring financing to those communities that need it most – and often struggle to secure it.
“Having access to responsible credit should be a financial right for all,” GoBear Chief Lending Officer Mike Singh said. “Tapping into fintech solutions like Mambu’s and CredoLab’s brings us one step closer to making this a reality for the region’s 296 million unbanked or underbanked.”
The tripartite partnership was the result of a pair of relationships; Mambu and CredoLab have been long-time partners, while CredoLab and GoBear collaborated as recently as November 2018, when the two companies worked together on a credit solution for the underbanked.
“In less than five years of operation, GoBear has built a stellar reputation as a leading financial services platform and we envisage great things for the company as it continues to build its lending business,” Mambu Managing Director for APAC Myles Bertrand said. He pointed out that the company’s technology would enable GoBear to readily add new products while maintaining a high level of customer service.
CredoLab CEO Peter Barcak pointed to his company’s SDK, API, and alternative credit score – which leverages metadata from smartphone usage – as powerful tools for companies like GoBear that are trying to serve a broader array of customers. “Our ability to generate a credit score for customers who cannot prove their creditworthiness in the conventional financial system makes us uniquely positioned to support GoBear as they diversify their business and move into lending in a controlled way.”
Finovate alums since 2013 and 2018 respectively, both Mambu and CredoLab made their Finovate debuts at FinovateAsia events. Mambu demonstrated its technology the year we held our Asian conference in Singapore. CredoLab unveiled its CredoScore the year we held FinovateAsia in Hong Kong.
Speaking of FinovateAsia, remember that our new, all-digital FinovateAsia conference begins next week. Check out our FinovateAsia hub for more details!
Mambu, the cloud-based banking platform based in Germany, is partnering with U.K. business banking platform Tide to power the company’s revolving credit facilities and overdrafts for small businesses.
“There is a need to be flexible, agile, and customer-centric in the design of financial products,” Managing Director of Mambu EMEA Eelco-Jan Boonstra explained. “Legacy technology constraints can undermine even the best innovation strategy.”
The collaboration will enable Tide to overhaul its product suite in order to better serve customers in a number of locations around the world. This includes offering larger overdrafts, credit cards, and invoice financing, as well as enabling Tide members to lend to each other leveraging solutions managed by Mambu.
“When today’s customers evaluate financial institutions, they no longer compare different banks, they compare experiences,” Boonstra said. “We see this partnership approach as the future of banking technology.”
Regtech is all the rage in fintech these days. From helping businesses negotiate a wave of new regulation – from GDPR to PSD2 – to empowering firms to combat fraud, companies involved in developing technologies to ensure that businesses are getting and staying compliant are enjoying rare attention from the rest of the industry.
A recent review of top regtech startups in Europe in Fintech News was an example of the light increasingly shining on these companies and their vital role in supporting a fintech industry that a growing number of financial services customers – and other businesses – are relying on.
The review cited research from KPMG that anticipates regtech spending in 2022 climbing to $76 billion. Analysis from XAnge, a European VC firm, finds approximately 140 regtech startups in the E.U., divided fairly equally between compliance management, KYC/AML, and risk management solutions.
We were especially please to see that, of the ten regtech startups highlighted in the feature, four of the companies are Finovate alums. Apiax and NetGuardians, which most recently demoed at FinovateEurope and at FinovateAsia respectively, both hail from Switzerland. Apiax, recently profiled here on the Finovate blog, offers a comprehensive compliance solution that leverages APIs to integrate its compliance rules into digital processes. NetGuardians focuses on Big Data and uses it to help banks fight fraud and automate compliance.
Also earning recognition on the top European regtech list was Ireland’s Fenergo. The company, founded in 2009 and having made its Finovate debut back in 2012, specializes in client onboarding and account opening solutions for banks and financial services companies. Just this week, Fenergo announced that it was launching a new remote account opening solution in both the EMEA and APAC regions.
Half of the companies on Fintech News’ regtech roster are from the U.K. The Finovate alum among this group, Onfido, leverages automated machine learning, optical character recognition (OCR), and other technologies to provide identity verification to combat fraud. Demoing its technology at both FinovateEurope and FinovateFall in 2018, the company earlier this month announced a major $100 million fundraising that brought the company’s total capital to more than $182 million.
“We’ve naturally chosen the grow-fast path because we strongly feel that the time to solve the digital access problem is overdue, and urgently needs to be solved, for good,” Onfido CEO and co-founder Husayn Kassai said. “We didn’t fundraise to just get to the next milestone, we need the funding as we’re changing the world.”
The Buy Now Pay Later Revolution is sweeping the world. Check out Finovate Senior Research Analyst Julie Muhn’s coverage of Tencent’s $300 million investment in Australia-based Afterpay this week:
Tencent’s move comes shortly after its rival Ant Financial took a minority stake in Afterpay competitor Klarna. Afterpay has 3x the web traffic of Klarna and 1.5x the traffic of its other major competitor Affirm.
The buy-now-pay-later segment of fintech has been heating up this year, despite– or perhaps because of– the current economic and health crises.
Here is our weekly look at fintech around the world.
Asia-Pacific
V Capital, and advisory firm based in Malaysia, and U.S.-based Cross River Bank partner to apply for a digital banking license in the country.
Hong Kong-based Oriente, a fintech that provides digital infrastructure for financial services, secures $50 million in its still-open Series B round.
South Korean cryptocurrency startup Childly teams up with blockchain analysis company Chainalysis.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Nigerian fintech startup Okra, which facilitates the exchange of real-time financial between banks, customers, and apps, locks in $1 million in pre-seed funding in a round led by TLcom Capital.
Flutterwave, based in San Francisco, California and Lagos, Nigeria, introduces new portal for African e-commerce merchants.
Visa and Kenya’s Pesapal team up to support connected digital payments.
Central and Eastern Europe
Resistant AI, a cybersecurity startup based in the Czech Republic, raises $2.75 million in funding.
Azer Turk Bank (ATB), based in Azerbaijan, deploys technology from Lithuania’s Ashburn to manage EFTPOS networks.
Germany’s Celonis leverages its process mining platform to develop new AI-powered accounts payable solution.
Middle East and Northern Africa
Egypt’s Commercial International Bank acquires 51% stake in Kenya’s Mayfair Bank.
BenefitPay, Bahrain’s national electronic wallet, announces 1257% increase in remittance volume in March.
Tata Consultancy Services to launch a digital only bank in Israel.
Central and Southern Asia
Indian cryptocurrency exchange CoinDCX announces trading availability of two native tokens from Crypto.com, MCO and CRO, on its platform.
Amazon launches new credit service, AmazonPay Later, in India.
India-based ecommerce firm Paytm unveils contactless dining solution for restaurants in the coronavirus era.
Latin America and the Caribbean
paysafecard brings its payments platform, Paysafe, to Paraguay.
Latin Post looks at the use of fintech apps in Mexico.
The combination of cloud banking platform Mambu and international money transfer firm TransferWise will enable Mambu customers to offer fast, inexpensive, and transparent international money transfers at the real exchange rate. Mambu will leverage TransferWise’s TransferWise for Banks solution via API, giving its clients an out-of-the-box solution that allows them to focus on building a quality user experience and expanding their offerings.
“By plugging into our API, Mambu just became the world’s number one cloud banking provider to use for international payments,” TransferWise co-founder and CEO Kristo Käärmann said. “From their first day in business, banks gain significant advantages over their competitors, benefiting from the speed and convenience of TransferWise’s services.”
Mambu CTO/CPO Ben Goldin praised TransferWise’s innovations in global money transfer and highlighted the way the partnership will enable Mambu’s customers to take advantage of opportunities around the world. “We were impressed how TransferWise has established itself around the globe spanning infrastructure platform in a highly complex regulatory environment which aligns with our aims,” Goldin said. “We aim to offer best-in-class banking services through our cloud platform and are pleased that international banking is no longer of any concern for our customers.”
A Finovate alum since 2013, TransferWise has forged partnerships with companies like Alipay to enable fund transfers to China, and brought its TransferWise for Banks technology to Canada courtesy of a partnership with EQ Bank. Founded in 2010, the U.K.-based company moves more than $5 billion every month, has more than seven million customers, and estimates that it saves its users $1.5 billion in money that would otherwise be paid in hidden fees every year.
Transferwise has raised more than $772 million in total funding. BlackRock, Lone Pine Capital, LHV Ventures, and Andreessen Horowitz are among the company’s investors.
Germany’s Mambu offers a cloud banking platform that enables users to quickly build, launch, and service loan, deposit, and other financial products. Since its inception in 2011, the company has partnered with challenger banks like N26 and, more recently, teamed up with digital consultancy Mobiquity to provide its digital banking solutions to more financial institutions and fintechs.
“Our partnership with Mambu allows us to extend our service offering to the core banking layer, next to our existing solutions and serve our clients full circle on all layers,” Mobiquity Client Strategy Partner Paul van Dommelenn said. He referred to Mambu as having “a reputation as the most successful next-generation core banking provider.”
Mambu has raised $45.4 million (€42 million) in funding. The company is an alum of both our primary Finovate conference as well as our developers conference, FinDEVr.
Splititforges new strategic partnerships with Malaysian payment solution provider iPay88 and global payments company BlueSnap.
This post will be updated throughout the day as news and developments emerge. You can also follow all the alumni news headlines on the Finovate Twitter account.
