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Finovate Blog
Tracking fintech, banking & financial services innovations since 1994
We’ve made it to the halfway mark of 2024, which leaves us six months to finish off our 2024 initiatives. While the news usually slows down in July, however, some of the drama between banks and regulators is heating up. Stay tuned to read this week’s news as we post updates and evolutions.
Sezzle is expanding its Payment Streaks loyalty program to Canada.
The program uses a gamified approach to reward shoppers for on-time payments.
The program is not available in Quebec.
Just in time for Canada day (which is July 1, for those who may not celebrate), buy now, pay later (BNPL) technology provider Sezzleannounced it is expanding its Payment Streaks loyalty program to users in Canada, with the exception of shoppers in Quebec.
Sezzle launched Payment Streaks in May of this year to reward consumers for consistent and timely payments. Through the gamified approach, when users consistently make their payments on time over the course of 90 days, they qualify to advance through to the next loyalty tier. The loyalty tiers offer a range of benefits to users, including entries in monthly giveaways and bonuses for friend referrals.
“Launching Payment Streaks for our Canadian users is a game-changer in promoting financial responsibility and customer satisfaction,” said Sezzle Canada GM Patrick Chan. “By turning on-time payments into a rewarding journey, we’re empowering users to manage their finances wisely while enjoying exclusive perks.”
Failed or rescheduled payments, or payments associated with refunded or canceled orders, do not qualify for streaks. Long-term financing payments and payments charged back by banks are also excluded from streaks. In the case of a failed payment, however, Sezzle allows users that resolve the issue within the same day to stay in their existing loyalty tier.
“By gamifying timely payments, we’re not only encouraging smart spending habits but also creating a more engaged community of shoppers. For merchants, this means stronger customer loyalty and trust, ultimately driving growth and success.” said Chan. “As we introduce Payment Streaks to Canadian users, we are reinforcing our commitment to shaping a future where financial empowerment is accessible to all.”
As one of the original BNPL players, Sezzle was founded in 2016. The company went public on the Australian Stock exchange in 2019 and shortly thereafter benefitted from the BNPL growth of 2020. Sezzle listed on the Nasdaq in August of 2023 and has a current market capitalization of $464 million.
Chime plans to acquire Salt Labs, an employee savings and rewards program to help companies motivate their workforces.
Along with the acquisition, Chime is launching Chime Enterprise, a new business unit that will help Chime grow users via the employer channel.
Salt Labs Founder and CEO Jason Lee will lead Chime Enterprise.
Challenger bank Chime made an acquisition today that will help it expand into the enterprise arena. The San Francisco-based digital bank announced today that it has acquired Salt Labs, an employee savings and rewards program to help companies motivate their workforces.
Salt was founded in 2022 to offer enterprises a new way to incentivize their hourly employees. The company helps mitigate turnover while engaging employees by allowing workers to earn one “Salt Asset” for each hour they work. If they stay with the company for long enough, employees can exchange accumulated Salt Assets for a special purchase, college fund distribution, or an investment.
Until now, Chime has strictly offered services directly to end consumers. With the acquisition of Salt, however, Chime will make a move to acquire new users through their employers. Salt Founder and CEO and Founder of DailyPay Jason Lee will lead Chime’s new business unit, Chime Enterprise, to help Chime grow its client base via the employer channel.
“This is a one-of-a-kind opportunity for Chime to acquire an innovative employee rewards company that has key employer relationships, and a founding team that has created some of the most disruptive technology in the enterprise earned wage access space,” said Chime COO Mark Troughton. “Through this acquisition, we will aim to partner directly with employers to reach millions of consumers and introduce them to the Chime platform. We look forward to leveraging Salt Labs’ existing relationships with employers and building upon the Chime MyPay earned wage access platform to further address the needs of everyday people.”
Chime is well known in fintech for offering tools and services that cater to its low-to-middle income target market. In addition to its earned wage access tool that allows users to receive their paycheck up to two days earlier when they set up direct deposit, Chime also offers a credit-building tool and a feature that will spot users up to $200 to avoid account overdrafts.
Chime did not publicly disclose the acquisition amount. However, some sources report that the deal, which is expected to be finalized later this week, could close for as much as $173 million after Chime provides an up-front payment of $14 million.
“We’ve always believed that financial progress begins with employment and should be centered around the primary financial account,” said Lee. “We are thrilled to be part of this next stage of growth at Chime and to build Chime Enterprise alongside the incredible team at Chime.”
Earnix and digital business and IT services company NTT DATA announced a new collaboration.
The partnership will help property and casualty insurers enhance the pricing, rating, and underwriting process, as well as increase policy personalization.
Israel-based Earnix made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2016.
Financial services solutions provider Earnix has announced a collaboration with digital business and IT services company NTT DATA. The partnership will enable Earnix to give property and casualty insurance carriers intelligent solutions for pricing, rating, underwriting, and policy personalization. The integration, combined with NTT DATA’s pedigree in data migration, will accelerate insurers’ time to market and enhance their ability to put data to work in fostering innovation.
“We take pride in driving transformative change in the insurance industry with AI-powered solutions,” said SVP of Insurance Services at NTT DATA North America Rob Baughman. “By integrating our products and services, we help clients achieve long-term success and identify opportunities for growth.”
Earnix and NTT DATA are joining forces at a time when the international insurance analytics market is expected to grow from $11 billion, where it stood in 2022, to $35 billion by 2030, an annual rate of more than 15%. Accompanying this growth is an expectation from insurance consumers for products that are more relevant and tailored to their needs. Earnix has leveraged AI to address these preferences, enhancing the rate-making process and creating personalized experiences by incorporating real-time feedback.
“Our partnership with NTT DATA is a game changer for insurers,” Earnix Head of Business Development Ruth Fisk said. “Bringing together their powerhouse expertise in data management and pricing modernization with the strength of the Earnix platform, we can equip insurers with the insight and flexibility to respond quickly to shifting market needs.”
NTT DATA first demoed its technology on the Finovate stage at FinovateSpring 2018, and returned the following year to demo its latest innovation at FinovateFall in New York. The Tokyo, Japan-based company serves 75% of the Fortune Global 100 with business and technology services including consulting, data and AI, and industry solutions. NTT DATA also assists in the development, implementation, and management of applications, infrastructure, and connectivity.
Headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, and founded in 2001, Earnix made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2016. In the years since, Earnix has grown into a major provider of cloud-based intelligent solutions for analytical underwriting, dynamic pricing, product personalization, and customer engagement. The company’s solution for insurers inserts a new SaaS layer into the firm’s existing tech stack, adding both intelligence and agility to the pricing, rating, and underwriting process. For banks and lenders, Earnix offers a digital decisioning solution that enables lenders to manage portfolio risk, loan profitability, origination volume, speed to market, and regulatory compliance.
With customers in more than 35 countries across six continents, Earnix has raised more than $100 million in funding from investors including Vintage Investment Partners and Israel Growth Partners. Insurance and fintech industry veteran Robin Gilthorpe joined the company as CEO in February of last year.
Payments company Tyro has announced a new partnership with StoreConnect
The partnership adds integrated payments to StoreConnect POS, the first POS solution build on Salesforce for SMEs.
Australia-based Tyro Payments made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2017.
A new partnership between paytech Tyro and StoreConnect will launch integrated payments on the first point-of-sale solution built on Salesforce. The solution, StoreConnect POS, is designed for small to medium-sized businesses and offers an e-commerce website, POS terminal, cash drawer, and receipt printer. Built on Sales Cloud, all components of StoreConnect POS fully integrate with Tyro to enable merchants to accept payments natively from within StoreConnect’s Salesforce POS.
“At Tyro, we believe nothing should get in the way of success for Australian businesses,” Tyro Payments Chief Growth Officer Deanne Bannatyne said. “We’re so thrilled to be able to work with StoreConnect to power this Australian-first innovation, to help more merchants take payments seamlessly with an exciting all-in-one POS solution.”
Bannatye noted that the integration also will enable Australian business owners who use Salesforce for CRM to benefit from deeper insights into their customers and streamlined operations. StoreConnect is available as a self-install SaaS package on the Salesforce AppExchange and is suitable for mid-market firms and non-profit organizations, as well as SMEs.
“We’ve been on a mission to build StoreConnect to be a powerful tool to help SMEs around the world to remain competitive,” StoreConnect founder and CEO Mikel Lindsaar said, “and we’ve delivered on that mission with our Point-of-Sale release here in Australia.”
Tyro made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2017. Headquartered in Sydney, Australia, and founded in 2003, the company today is Australia’s largest EFTPOS provider of all Authorized Deposit-taking Institutions (ADIs) – aside from the country’s big four banks. With more than 68,000 customers throughout Australia, Tyro processed more than $34 billion in transaction value in fiscal year 2022.
The company’s partnership news with StoreConnect comes just days after the paytech announced that it has teamed up with real-time payments and loyalty platform Hello Clever. The partnership enables shoppers at more than 70,000 merchants on Tyro’s network to redeem instant cashback rewards in person and online via Hello Clever.
Tyro has raised more than $103 million from investors including Ellerston Capital and TDM Asset Management. Jonathan Davey is CEO.
In partnership with Avaloq, Liechtenstein-based international private bank LGT has implemented a new standard to give financial intermediaries real-time access to investment positions and transaction data.
The new standard, OpenWealth API, was implemented in collaboration with Synpulse8, the integration specialist of Synpulse.
Based in Switzerland, Avaloq won Best of Show at FinovateAsia 2018.
In collaboration with Avaloq and Synpulse8, Liechtenstein-based private bank LGT has implemented a new standard that will make it easier to provide financial intermediaries with real-time access to LGT’s investment positions and transaction data. The new standard is called OpenWealth API and will help the custodian bank better serve its customer base of independent asset managers, multi-family offices, and fund companies with customized investment solutions, personal advice, and fast order processing.
“With this latest joint innovation, LGT is taking a leading role in helping to create a more interconnected financial marketplace while enhancing the value that financial intermediaries deliver for their investors,” Avaloq Chief Technology Officer Martin Büchi explained.
The partnership between Avaloq and LGT extends back nearly 20 years, when the bank first adopted Avaloq’s core banking solution, Avaloq Core. The OpenWealth implementation was conducted in partnership with technology and integration specialist Synpulse8, a division of Synpulse. Synpulse is the founder and orchestrator of the OpenWealth Association, the standardization body for OpenWealth. The standardized connectivity made possible by OpenWealth will lower operational risks for financials and empowers intermediaries to keep their platforms updated with more timely and accurate data than can be provided via daily batch processing.
“The standardized solution will ensure that our partners have access to the latest data to better serve their clients,” LGT Bank AG Executive Board member Markus Werner said. “We look forward to strengthening our long-term partnership with Avaloq in the coming years and to continuing our joint development activities for enhanced connectivity with financial intermediaries globally.”
Founded in 1985, Avaloq provides technology solutions to private banks and wealth managers, investment managers, retail and commercial banks, as well as challenger and neobanks. The Switzerland-based company won Best of Show at FinovateAsia 2018, and has since grown into an international financial services solutions provider with more than 160 clients in 35 countries and $4.4 trillion (CHF 4 trillion) in client assets managed by Avaloq software.
The company’s signature solution is Avaloq Core, a core banking solution for private banks and wealth managers. Avaloq also offers three standalone digital products lines: Avaloq Engage, Avaloq Wealth, and Avaloq Insight. Avaloq Engage helps institutions boost client engagement. Avaloq Wealth supports the entire client journey in wealth management from prospect to trusted relationship. Avaloq Insight offers technical and business users access to insightful data from their banking systems. Avaloq was acquired by Japan-based NEC Corporation in the fall of 2020.
This spring, Avaloq announced the retirement of Co-CEO Thomas Beck, with Martin Greweldinger taking over the role of Avaloq Group CEO. Beck had served as Co-CEO with Greweldinger since the spring of 2021, having joined the company in 2012.
“We are an infrastructure platform that’s really leading the modernization of credit data and credit data transmission,” Widhalm said in his Finovate Podcast conversation earlier this month. “There’s a significant amount of value to be uncovered within the ecosystem right now, specifically around credit data, and that’s what Bloom has set out to do.”
Headquartered in New York City and founded in 2016, Bloom Credit is a B2B credit data infrastructure platform. The company is building the next generation of rails for “all things credit data,” including transmission and compliant storage. Bloom’s technology helps facilitate the extension of affordable credit to the millions of consumers who are either subprime borrowers or have thin/no file with major credit agencies.
Watch Bloom Credit’s Best of Show winning demo from FinovateSpring 2024.
Most recently, Greg Palmer sat down with Kalyani Ramadurgam, CEO of Kobalt Labs, to discuss third-party regulations, the rise of AI, and the broader regulatory environment for fintechs, banks, and financial services companies. Episode 219.
“We automate all things third party diligence,” Ramadurgam explained. “When I say third party diligence that usually includes everything from vendor risk assessment all the way to monitoring, as well as partner and merchant risk assessment – whether you’re a partner bank or a fintech that’s looking to do business with new entities.”
New York City-based Kobalt Labs enables FIs to accelerate and fortify compliance operations. The company’s technology also provides automatic alignment with the latest regulations in privacy, lending, money movement, BSA/AML, ACH, and more. At FinovateSpring this year, Kobalt Labs demoed its AI-powered co-pilot that streamlines this process. The company was founded in 2023.
Watch Kobalt Labs’ Best of Show winning demo from FinovateSpring 2024.
As 2024 works its way toward halftime, we’re seeing an uptick in partnership and collaboration activity from crypto to regtech. Check back all week long for updates on the latest in fintech news.
DataVisorenhances multi-tenancy capabilities for scalable, secure, and flexible fraud and AML solutions.
E-Commerce
Klarnadivests its Klarna Checkout (KCO) division for $520 million.
Regtech
E-document management platform A-Cube APIannounces collaboration with Salt Edge to facilitate compliant document digitization.
DeFi
Decentralized finance (DeFi) platform 1inchpartners with Web3 security provider Blockaid.
Embedded finance
Cotribute, an embedded fintech platform serving credit unions, partners with APCU and Center Parc Credit Union to launch an automated digital account opening solution.
Embedded finance platform for technology purchases Gyngerraises $20 million in a Series A round led by PayPal Ventures.
Banking-as-a-Service
Payments and financial solutions provider Finzlypartners with Frost Bank to bring FedNow and RTP Instant Payments to business and retail customers.
This week’s edition of Finovate Global looks at recent fintech developments in Mexico.
Mexican digital payments and commerce enablement platform Clipannounced a major investment this week. The company, which offers a suite of payments and other financial services solutions to small and medium-sized businesses in Mexico, has raised $100 million in new funding. The capital came courtesy of investment funds managed by Morgan Stanley Tactical Value and an unnamed West Coast mutual fund manager.
In a statement, the company noted that the funds raised value the company “in line” with the company’s Series D round from 2021. That round, led by SoftBank Latin America Fund and Viking Global Investors, added $250 million to Clip’s coffers and gave the Mexican fintech a valuation of “nearly $2 billion.”
Clip Founder and CEO Adolfo Babatz praised this week’s investment as “a testament to Clip’s opportunity to continue to lead the digital transformation of Mexico’s commerce ecosystem.” Babatz continued, “More broadly, (the investment) provides even further validation of our mission to open access to digital payments, financial services, and technology solutions to SMBs in the country. We are excited to leverage this financing round to continue to expand and strengthen our offerings to empower more stakeholders across Mexico’s economy.”
With offices in both Mexico City and Buenos Aires, Argentina, Clip offers a range of solutions to enable SMBs to accept digital payments, sell goods and services online, secure financing, and streamline their operations. The company will use the new capital to accelerate product development and support its efforts to leverage technology to enhance financial inclusion in Mexico. Clip was founded in 2012.
Speaking of financial inclusion in Mexico, Latin American open finance platform Belvo and Citibanamex, the second largest bank in the country, have forged a new partnership designed to put open finance to work in bringing credit access to the unbanked.
Via the collaboration, Citibanamex will extend credit and credit card options to applicants without credit histories. Instead of traditional underwriting, the bank will review factors such as outstanding debt levels and the number of credit applications outstanding, as well as leverage Belvo’s open finance technology to secure income verification for applicants whose data is otherwise difficult to retrieve.
“At Citibanamex, we are continuously seeking financial inclusion solutions to facilitate access to banking products for individuals who have not been able to benefit from current solutions,” Citibanamex Director of Digital Business Development Miguel Lavalle said. “With this new functionality, it will be easier for our customers to verify their income, making credit opening processes more agile.”
Belvo’s open finance and payments platform helps financial institutions and their customers benefit from user-permissioned, secure data sharing. The platform validates employment histories, as recorded by employers, to the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS). This enables banks, fintechs, and financial services companies to process financial data and initiate payments directly from users’s accounts.
“This is pioneering and exciting work, aligned with our mission to help financial innovators create new, more efficient, and inclusive experiences for their users,” Belvo General Director, Mexico, Federica Gregorini said. “We are excited to see how financial entities in Mexico are betting on open finance models due to their positive impact on reducing the gap in access to financial services.”
Headquartered in Mexico City, Belvo was founded in 2019. Last month, the company launched its employment data aggregation solution in Colombia. The launch followed Belvo’s partnership with Colombian digital wallet Nequi, a move considered to be a significant advance for the cause of user-permissioned, secure data sharing.
“This connection via API is just the first of many other integrations that will come soon, which portends a promising future in the development of Open Finance in Colombia and in the region,” Belvo’s General Director in Colombia, David Ballesteros, said.
Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.
Latin America and the Caribbean
Uruguayan cross-border payment platform dLocal forged a partnership with Lithuanian gaming marketplace Eneba.
Brazil-based fintech Celcoin raised $125 million in funding in a round led by Summit Partners.
PayGoal, a fintech based in Argentina, teamed up with Paraguayan acquirer Bancard to launch contactless payments solution Tokefon in Paraguay.
Asia-Pacific
Open finance technology provider Brankas and Global Finteq forged a strategic partnership to launch Lending-as-a-Service (LaaS) platforms in the Philippines.
South Korean fintech Travel Wallet secured $10 million in funding from U.S.-based VC firm Lightspeed Venture Partners.
SumUp and Adyen have joined forces to bring faster payouts to small-to-medium sized enterprises (SMEs).
The partnership will help SumUp offer more of its SME clients access to funds within minutes of a sale.
Faster access to funds will help reduce SMEs’ reliance on large working capital reserves and will improve their cash flow.
Payment acceptance company SumUp and payments technology company Adyen have joined forces this week to offer near-instant settlements to more small and micro merchants in Europe and the U.K.
The partnership will help SumUp bring same day settlements to even more of SumUp’s small-to-medium sized enterprise (SME) clients, offering them the access to funds within minutes of a sale. The companies anticipate that the faster access to funds will help reduce SMEs’ reliance on large working capital reserves and will improve their cash flow.
“This partnership is one of a kind as we join forces as major payments players to give SMEs the ability to settle at incredible speeds,” said Adyen President EMEA Alexa von Bismarck. “Cash flow is of the utmost importance for small business owners, and we are proud of being selected by SumUp as their partner on this mission.”
Adyen was founded in 2006 and brings end-to-end payment capabilities, data enhancements, and financial products in a single solution. The company, which processed $820 billion (€767.5 billion) in volume in 2022, serves a range of businesses across the globe, including Facebook, Uber, H&M, eBay, and Microsoft.
SumUp’s platform includes many of the business financial management tools and services that small businesses need to manage and run their businesses, including in-person and remote payment acceptance, card terminals, point-of-sale registers, a business account and card, online store hosting, and invoicing tools. Founded in 2012, SumUp serves 4 million merchants in 36 markets.
“Over the last 10 years, we established the de facto market standard for card acceptance and financial technology for merchants in 36 markets,” said SumUp Co-founder and COO Marc-Alexander Christ. “This partnership will allow us to keep pushing boundaries and continue providing our merchants with the best solutions to manage their business, be it payments, software or financial services. We are excited to amplify our ecosystem of tools and services for small, medium and even enterprise merchants.”
The rapid evolution of technology turned regulatory compliance into a daunting frontier. Firms are not only required to keep up with changing technologies, but they also need to stay on top of increasingly complex requirements. Priya V. Misra, who sits at the forefront of this arena, is a pioneer in using LLMs to do the heavy lifting when it comes to compliance.
We recently spoke with Misra about his latest venture, the current regulatory environment, the landscape of LLMs, and advice for leveraging GenAI tools.
Tell us about EKAI and the problem you are trying to solve.
Priya V Misra: EKAI is the first AI compliance ‘co-worker’ for risk and finance professionals. The newer regulations are more complex and reporting on them is more frequent. Compliance platforms of the past are not able to cope with these new kind of reporting requirements. As a private SaaS platform, our proprietary AI software addresses the newer compliance requirements with ease. Our platform is designed to support the compliance plan development and sit at the holistic level for the Chief Compliance Officer and managers to digitally manage their compliance and prepare for regulation engagements and compliance submissions to the regulator. We are currently focusing on newer regulations like Operational Resilience, Consumer Duty, and ESG.
EKAI provides a natural language chat interface to make it easy to use. We believe that as the nature of data has evolved, compliance professionals in financial services also need enhanced systems and tools for this new normal to enable them to support the business and meet the requirements of regulators in a cost effective way. We tested the model with the United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority as part of their sandbox and found regulator alignment for a tool such as our own to aid the industry in meeting their compliance requirements.
Banks and fintechs have always faced regulatory challenges. Why have concerns around regulation been so heightened in the past few months?
Misra: The concerns around regulation have been heightened in the past few months due to a fundamental shift in different kinds of regulations. The newer regulations are moving from ‘what’ to ‘how’. This basically means that organizations need to show the evidence of compliance, the ‘how’ they are meeting the compliance and not just ‘what’ their compliance approach is. The regulation horizon we see is placing consumer protection at the heart. This could be multi-jurisdictional with the advent of the Consumer Duty regulation in the U.K., to follow similar types of regulations in Europe. For the industry, we see the impacts on costs from being able to handle the multiple and, at times, competing priorities between regulations and maintaining business-as-usual in an environment still competitive for talent. Tools like EKAI offer compliance professionals in financial services better oversight on how they are performing from a delivery perspective against the compliance requirements across multiple programs.
How have you seen the conversation around GenAI and LLMs evolve in the financial services industry in the last year-and-a-half?
Misra: The conversation around GenAI and LLMs in the financial services industry has evolved in the right direction. The initial trepidation has now been met with wider adoption, with at least of ChatGPT opening the doorway for productivity enhancements from more business intelligence software like EKAI sitting at the intersection of compliance. EKAI has pioneered the use of the Small Language Model (SLM) for AI in corporate usage. SLMs de-risk AI implementation and provide a way to progressively deploy features. SLMs are eco-friendly as they require lower GPU usage and are quicker to train.
Apart from EKAI’s application of GenAI, what is the most powerful application of GenAI for financial services you have seen?
Misra: One of the most widely implemented GenAI applications within financial services that I have seen is in customer support. The power of GenAI lies in its ability to use company-specific information for answering customer queries and intelligently switch to a human counterpart for sensitive queries.
How do LLMs compare to traditional methods of regulatory compliance and risk assessment in terms of efficiency and accuracy?
Misra: The traditional methods of regulatory compliance work for traditional regulations. The data for these regulations was structured and mainly consisted of numbers. LLMs and GenAI are critical in compliance moving forward. They can handle unstructured data of documents, messages, and transcripts. This gives the organizations a strong foundation to build and use compliance platforms.
What advice would you offer firms who are avoiding GenAI tools because of regulatory and compliance concerns?
Misra: Every industry will be impacted by GenAI and/or LLMs eventually. I would advise them to embrace it selectively because it is coming anyway. The GenAI Act coming into force in Europe in the upcoming months will transform the landscape from a sort of ‘wild west’ into one with the types of benchmarks and controls that will ensure its wider and confident adoption across industries in a way that an industrial revolution is supposed to, transforming skillsets and producing efficiency gains future generations should benefit from.
Commerzbank is leveraging Pliant to offer physical and virtual cards to its corporate banking suite.
Corporate-card-as-a-service company Pliant allows banks to issue virtual and physical corporate cards with backend controls and a management and visibility platform.
Pliant has raised $180 million, including a recent $19 million Series A round led by PayPal Ventures.
German bank Commerzbank has expanded its card portfolio to include corporate cards. The bank has tapped corporate-card-as-a-service provider Pliant for technology that will offer its small-to-medium-sized business clients a corporate credit card solution.
Commerzbank’s business customers will be able to digitally manage both physical and virtual credit cards and employee-issued credit cards. Customers will be able to integrate the new cards into their billing processes starting in the third quarter of 2024.
“The expansion of our product portfolio in the card sector underlines our claim to be the first point of contact for business customers in Germany. With our new digital credit card solution, we enable our customers to make their billing processes more efficient and thus save costs and time,” said Commerzbank Head of Value Stream Accounts and Payment Methods in Private and Small-Business Customers segment Tobias Knoll.
Pliant allows banks to issue virtual and physical corporate cards that allow customers to restrict card usage based on time range or purposes, set individual limits for their employees, track card expenditures in real-time, and manage receipt capture and accounting tasks.
“Our hypothesis at Pliant has always been that long-term success is only possible in cooperation with banks,” said Pliant CEO Malte Rau. “That is why we are pleased to support Commerzbank as a strong partner of small- and medium-sized business customers in Germany with an innovative credit card solution.”
Berlin-based Pliant was founded in 2020 and has since raised $180 million, including a recent $19 million Series A round led by PayPal Ventures. Last year, Pliant acquired business financial management platform Friday Finance for an undisclosed amount.
