Blockchain-powered payments platform Paystand has raised $20 million in Series B funding. The investment, which the company will use to grow its products and services, as well as sales, marketing, and engineering teams, featured the participation of both new and existing investors.
“We made a promise to reboot commercial finance because it’s insecure, inefficient, and built on trustless networks and technology,” Paystand CEO Jeremy Almond said. “Today markets another step towards realizing that vision and transforming enterprise finance.”
Paystand seeks to do for complicated commercial payments what Venmo has done for P2P transactions. By digitizing and automating a company’s cash cycle, Paystand’s payments-as-a-service platform helps businesses become more capital efficient, streamlines back office operations, and allows them to offer innovative payment experiences.
Paystand participated in our developer’s conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley, in 2014. With offices in both Scotts Valley, California, and Guadalajara, Mexico, the company has added 80 new large enterprise customers in the last 24 months.
Last week we shared news of FinovateEurope alum Opentech and its partnership with Mastercard.
Now we can add that Swiss Bankers Prepaid Services has teamed up with Opentech to launch its latest money sending service, Send. The new offering is based on Opentech’s OpenPay Send solution which, as we learned last week, leverages the Mastercard Send platform to give users a convenient, “use-case agnostic” way to transfer money to locations around the world.
Swiss Bankers’ Send can be readily activated after a quick KYC process that only takes a few minutes via the mobile app. The solution is is available to all Swiss citizens who are Swiss Bankers cardholders.
Highlighting the rise of P2P payments as a preference for both domestic and international payments, Swiss Bankers CEO Hans-Jorg Widiger praised the partnership with Opentech. “Seizing this opportunity is a crucial step for us to remark and consolidate our positioning as a customer-driven, trustable and innovative company,” he said. “With Send we faced this challenge, relying on our long-dated partnership with Mastercard and Opentech to provide our customers with a distinctive solution in line with our quality standards.”
See Opentech demo its OpenPay Send solution at FinovateEurope this week in Berlin, Germany. Get your tickets today.
Here is our weekly roundup of the latest news from our Finovate alumni.
- Sensibill announces Tom Shen as its new chairman.
- Identity verification and authentication solution provider Jumio partners with CIMB Bank Philippines.
- U.K. open banking platform AccountScore teams up with SME lender Simply.
- Kabbage unveils new SME cash flow management offering, Kabbage Payments.
- Veridium introduces its facial recognition technology, vFace.
- International Money Express (Intermex) chooses Ripple to power cross-border payments between the U.S. and Mexico.
Check out our latest round of FinovateEurope Sneak Peeks featuring SONECT, EcoTree, Lokky, Quppy, Bambu, Altilia, Authlete, Bankish, ANNA, and MODIFI!
- Azimo secures €20 million ($22 million) in debt financing from European Investment Bank.
- CollegeBacker goes live with its free mobile app that helps low and middle-income families prepare for higher education costs.
- ETFLogic launches the latest version of its Insights Analytics Platform.
- Yseop unveils Augmented Analyst, a new, automated report generation platform for the enterprise that leverages Natural Language Generation (NLG).
- Feedzai helps SafetyPay protect its customers from fraud with its AI-powered technology.
- Best of Show winner Zogo picks up Finsiders ‘Risk Taker’ Award for Charlotte, North Carolina-based fintechs.
Alumni Features and Profiles
Sofi Secures The Bancorp as Debit Card Issuer – Financial services startup SoFi is partnering with The Bancorp to serve as the company’s backend banking provider and card issuer for SoFi Money.
Fiserv Partners with Hong Kong Digital Bank Pioneer ZA Bank – ZA Bank, will use the company’s VisionPLUS global payment software, which supports the entire card payment lifecycle from origination and issuance to settlement and customer service.
Worldline to Acquire Ingenico in $8.6 Billion Deal – The combination of Worldline and Ingenico will create the world’s fourth largest payment services provider with 20,000 workers in 50 countries serving nearly one million merchants and 1,200 financial institutions.
Also on Finovate.com
Everything Fintech at Davos 2020 – We combed through the agenda to bring you a view of the discussions through a fintech lens. Here’s a summary of some of the most interesting fintech-related topics covered at the global event.
Finovate Launches New Gender Diversity Stream at FinovateEurope – FinovateEurope is innovative for us in a number of ways. This year we will debut our Women in Fintech stream.
Fintech and the Case for Senior-Based Solutions – Ensuring that the online and mobile worlds are a safer place for seniors is one of the important contributions that technology can make.
Can Amazon Help Goldman Sachs Get its Groove Back? – According to reporting in both the Financial Times and on CNBC, Amazon and Goldman Sachs are discussing a partnership that would enable the investment bank to offer loans directly to merchants via Amazon’s platform.