Email

Daon Announces Strategic Partnership with Giesecke+Devrient

Daon Announces Strategic Partnership with Giesecke+Devrient
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daon
  • Digital identity company Daon has forged a strategic partnership with security technology firm Giesecke+Devrient (G+D).
  • The partnership will combine Daon’s identity verification and biometric authentication technology with Giesecke+Devrient’s digital security product suite.
  • Founded in 2000, Daon made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2016 in New York.

Digital identity specialist Daon and security technology company Giesecke+Devrient announced a strategic partnership this week. The agreement will combine G+D’s offerings with Daon’s identity verification (IDV) and biometric authentication capabilities, enhancing Giesecke+Devrient’s security product suite and bringing Daon’s IDV and biometric solutions to a broader range of customers.

“G+D has a long history of innovation across a wide range of security solutions ranging from bank cards to Central Bank Digital Currency; they launched the first commercial SIM card and delivered the world’s first commercial eSIM,” Daon CEO Tom Grissen said. “We are proud of Daon’s collaboration with G+D which facilitates the introduction of new scalable, secure identity verification and biometric solutions to millions of users across a wide range of industries and use cases.”

The partnership between Giesecke+Devrient and Daon will provide companies—including those in financial services and in merchant ecosystems—with identity continuity throughout the entire customer journey, from onboarding to recovery. In addition to offering fraud prevention tools like biometric watchlists and technologies such as deepfake detection, the partnership will also enable companies to offer advanced verification and eSIM capabilities to mobile operators. Matching Daon’s TrustX platform with G+D’s eSIM management platform will give mobile network operators (MNOs) a single solution for securing eSIM issuance and portability.

“Security has always been at the core of G+D’s mission. By combining Daon’s leadership in digital identity trust with G+D’s expertise in secure digital transactions, this global partnership delivers more than just protection—it enables seamless identity continuity across all customer touchpoints,” Giesecke+Devrient CDO Gabriel von Mitschke-Collande said. “Our layered approach provides multiple opportunities to detect and prevent fraud, while ensuring full compliance with regulatory and accessibility standards. Together, we’re setting a new benchmark for both security and user experience in digital identity.”

Munich, Germany-based Giesecke+Devrient offers solutions for digital security, financial platforms, and currency technology. An innovator in the card and digital payments industry, G+D orchestrates real world payment and banking experiences with human-centered security technology. With a workforce of more than 14,000, G+D has 123 subsidiaries and joint ventures in 40 countries. The firm counts more than 700 commercial banks around the world and 145 central banks among its partners. Founded in 1852, the company generated a turnover of three billion euros in fiscal year 2023.

Founded in 2000 and headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia, Daon made its Finovate debut at FinovateFall 2016 in New York. In the near-decade since then, the company has secured more than two billion identities. Daon conducts more than 250 million daily authentications and serves hundreds of millions of users on six continents.

Daon’s partnership news with Giesecke+Devrient comes weeks after the company announced that it was working with financial services digital transformation solutions provider Digital.FI. Together, the two companies will provide small- and medium-sized financial institutions with enterprise-level identity continuity, enabling them to provide secure, frictionless member experiences across every channel.

Also this spring, Daon reported that it had entered a strategic partnership with conversational intelligence for customer experience (CX) innovator CallMiner. The collaboration will combine advanced identity verification with AI-powered conversation analytics to help streamline the identification process for call centers while providing active fraud prevention via real-time voice analysis and biometric identifiers.

Photo by Andreas Leindecker

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Circle Officially Launches its IPO

Circle Officially Launches its IPO
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Daily news
  • Circle has officially launched its IPO, aiming to raise $624 million at a $6 billion valuation under the ticker CRCL on the NYSE.
  • The company may use the proceeds to expand globally, strengthen compliance, and develop new tokenized financial products as it competes with Tether and other stablecoin issuers.
  • The IPO announcement comes four years after Circle’s failed SPAC attempt in 2021.

Stablecoin issuer and infrastructure company Circle is bringing positive news to fintech this week. The Massachusetts-based company announced the launch of its IPO.

The announcement comes four years after initially trying to go public via a $9 billion special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in 2021 with Concord Acquisition Corp. The agreement was terminated in 2022 due to regulatory hurdles and shifting market conditions. The direct IPO route that Circle ultimately settled on is a better way to provide more transparency and stability for investors.

Proceeds from Circle’s IPO could fuel its international expansion, strengthen compliance efforts, and support the development of new tokenized financial products. These investments will be essential as Circle competes with traditional payment networks, other stablecoin issuers such as Tether, and new stablecoins that come online.

Circle is looking to raise about $624 million at a valuation around $6 billion on the New York Stock Exchange and will be traded under the ticker CRCL. The shares are expected to be priced between $24 and $26 per share, which will value Circle at around $5.65 billion.

Circle was founded in 2013 and is best known for launching USDC, a fully reserved, dollar-backed stablecoin that has $62 billion in circulation and has facilitated more than $28 trillion in on-chain settlement volume since launching in 2018.

One crypto player that is potentially set to benefit from Circle’s success is crypto exchange and wallet Coinbase, which cofounded USDC and has a 50% revenue sharing agreement with Circle. Additionally, Coinbase takes home 100% of the interest earned by USDC products on its platform. Coinbase went public in 2021 via an $86 billion direct listing on the NASDAQ under the ticker COIN. In comparison, Circle’s $6 billion IPO is significantly smaller.

Circle’s IPO comes at a time when the US is providing clearer regulatory frameworks for stablecoins, and demand for tokenized assets is growing in the traditional finance space. The move also signals rising investor confidence in digital assets and showcases how the use of stablecoins is maturing.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

ACI Worldwide Unveils Centralized Payment Hub, ACI Connetic

ACI Worldwide Unveils Centralized Payment Hub, ACI Connetic
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, Alumni News
  • ACI Worldwide introduced its new, centralized payment hub, ACI Connetic.
  • The new offering integrates the capabilities of major global payment networks including Swift cross-border and RTGS payments into a single, cloud-based platform.
  • Headquartered in Florida, ACI Worldwide has been a Finovate alum since 2011.

ACI Connetic, ACI Worldwide’s new centralized payment hub, was unveiled this week. The solution integrates major global networks’ payment capabilities—including Swift cross-border payments, RTGS payments including Target2, SEPA Instant RT1, and TIPS payments, with more capabilities to be integrated later. This brings account-to-account (A2A) payments, card payments, and AI-powered fraud prevention into a unified, cloud-native platform that gives banks an easier, faster, and more cost-effective way to modernize their payment infrastructures.

“ACI Connetic is not just a new product, it is a new standard for how banks must operate in the digital economy and approach payments transformation,” ACI Worldwide CEO and President Thomas Warsop said. “Against the backdrop of increasing payments complexity, the rise of new technologies and a shifting regulatory environment, ACI Connetic empowers financial institutions to unlock new revenue opportunities and navigate compliance in order to drive growth and financial inclusion.”

Already gaining traction with financial institutions in both the US and Europe, ACI Connetic enables these businesses to consolidate siloed systems and benefit from a centralized approach to processing all payment types. The offering comes as Datos Insights recently championed the benefits of centralized payment processing. In its report, Datos contended that centralized payment processing streamlines operations, enhances efficiency, and helps support growth. ACI noted that it is already working with the world’s leading clearing and settlement systems including the Bank of England, Pay.UK, ECB, EBA Clearing, and Stet, as well as Swift, the US Federal Reserve, and The Clearing House to integrate their payment functionalities into ACI Connetic.

“We built ACI Connetic to give banks a future-proof foundation to meet the ever-increasing demand for faster, smarter, and secure payments,” ACI Worldwide head of product for banking and intermediaries, Scotty Perkins, said. “Built for scalability, intelligence, and resilience, ACI Connetic empowers banks to reduce complexity, accelerate product innovation, and deliver new solutions to their customers in an unprecedented way and at unprecedented speed.”

ACI Worldwide has been a Finovate alum since 2011, when the company joined MShift on stage at FinovateFall in New York. ACI Worldwide is also an alum of our developers conference, participating in FinDEVr Silicon Valley in 2016. Today, the company serves the top 10 banks in the world, enables 80,000+ merchants directly and through PSPs, and provides services such as billpay and payments intelligence. ACI Worldwide has more than 6,000 customers around the world, and annually processes 25 billion cloud transactions and 225+ billion consumer transactions.

ACI Worldwide’s new product news comes just days after the company announced that CIMB Bank had selected its technology to combine all its account-to-account transactions—real-time, ACH, RTGS, and cross-border—in a single payments platform. CIMB Bank is the second largest financial services provider in Malaysia and one of the leading banking groups in the ASEAN region.

Photo by DΛVΞ GΛRCIΛ

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Worldpay Partners with BVNK to Enable Stablecoin Payouts

Worldpay Partners with BVNK to Enable Stablecoin Payouts
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Alumni profile, WorldPay
  • Worldpay is partnering with BVNK to enable stablecoin payouts for businesses across 180+ markets.
  • The integration simplifies stablecoin adoption for traditional companies by embedding BVNK’s wallet infrastructure into Worldpay’s existing payouts platform.
  • The move reflects broader momentum in stablecoin adoption, following similar initiatives from R3, Solana, Circle, Mastercard, and MoonPay, as demand for faster, borderless, and more efficient payment solutions increases.

Payments and banking services company Worldpay and multi-rail payments infrastructure platform BVNK are teaming up this week to help businesses across the globe use stablecoins for payouts.

Worldpay is leveraging BVNK’s embedded wallet infrastructure to allow its commercial clients across more than 180 markets to pay customers, contractors, creators, sellers, and other third parties using stablecoins in near-real-time.

By integrating with BVNK, Worldpay is making stablecoin payments accessible to organizations that lack expertise in decentralized finance. Under the new partnership, businesses will not need to hold or handle any digital assets themselves in order to pay with them.

Worldpay business clients can access the new stablecoin payout service through their existing integration with Worldpay’s payouts platform. The company plans to pilot stablecoins on the platform in the second half of this year.

With 135 fiat currencies currently available on its platform, Worldpay began offering stablecoin settlement in 2022, allowing merchants in a limited number of geographical regions to receive payments in USDC. In 2023, the company piloted a project with Visa to receive funds more quickly from the network. 

“We’re delighted to work with BVNK to bring this enterprise-grade stablecoin payout solution to market,” said Worldpay SVP, Head of Payouts John McNaught. “With a history of delivering innovative payout solutions, we are excited to meet the rising interest from clients seeking faster, more efficient global payment methods.”

The partnership, which BVNK calls “an important milestone,” will help BVNK bridge traditional and digital payment systems, ultimately creating a more accessible, efficient financial ecosystem.

The move reflects growing demand for faster, borderless payments, especially for global payout platforms paying gig workers, creators, or remote teams. Stablecoins offer the speed of crypto with the stability of fiat, reducing delays and costs in cross-border transactions.

As demand for stable DeFi increases, so have the solutions facilitating mainstream adoption. Recently, we’ve seen a partnership between R3 and Solana, Circle’s launch of the Circle Payments Network, and a collaboration between Mastercard and Moonpay, all of which exemplify the trend of traditional finance converging with blockchain-based solutions to make stablecoin payments more accessible, secure, and scalable for everyday business use.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News

Fintech Rundown: A Rapid Review of Weekly News
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Eltropy, Fenergo, Fintech Rundown, Plaid, Sikoia, WorldPay

As the holiday-shortened week begins, we’re learning that analysts expect UK hiring in fintech to boom in 2025. Meanwhile in the US, is the CFPB about to “86” open banking?

We’ll keep you covered on all the latest fintech news here in Finovate’s Fintech Rundown!

Payments

Fintech platform Adyen goes live with Tap-to-Pay on iPhone in seven European markets.

Flywire accepted into global luxury travel group Virtuoso.

Palla secures $14.5 million Series A funding to drive expansion and innovation in cross-border payments.

DeFi / Crypto

Worldpay teams up with BVNK to offer stablecoin payouts.

Volante Labs launches Volante Card, a Web3-enabled prepaid card for salary payments.

Cryptocurrency exchange Bitget unveils yield-bearing stablecoin asset, BGUSD.

Garanti BBVA Crypto goes live with its new mobile app.

Investing / Wealth Management

River Valley Credit Union partners with InvestiFi to offer cryptocurrency and securities investing.

Blend360 and Fin Capital partner to accelerate enterprise innovation.

Hidden Road launches digital asset swaps prime brokerage for the US market.

Identity management

Identity verification specialist Sikoia wins the 2024 Innovation Labs programme, along with Credit Canary and Aperidata.

Metro Credit Union partners with Illuma to enhance security and streamline member authentication.

Communications

Eltropy launches office phone to unify telephony for CFIs.

Customer data

Plaid introduces Transactions for Business to help power real-time business tools.

Fraud and security

ParaScript enhances check fraud detection capabilities with advanced endorsement reading feature.

Fenergo launches FinCrime operating system with Agentic AI layer to supercharge productivity.

Photo by Rohi Bernard Codillo

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Finovate Global Germany: Funding for Startups and Financing for Sellers

Finovate Global Germany: Funding for Startups and Financing for Sellers
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: ACI Worldwide, Finovate Global, Temenos, WorldPay

This week’s edition of Finovate Global showcases fintech news from companies operating in Germany.

Aufinity raised $26 million in Series C funding

A specialist in the field of payment management for the automotive market, Aufinity Group announced this week that it has successfully completed a $26 million Series C round of funding. The round was led by BlackFin Capital Partners, and featured re-investments from current investors PayPal Ventures and Seaya Ventures. The German fintech will use the funds to power its European expansion and to help forge partnerships with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs).

“With this round, we are focusing on accelerating our growth across Europe even further, “Aufinity Group Co-Founder and CEO Lasse Diener said. “Through new strategic partnerships with leading OEMs and by continuing our focus on dealerships, we are preparing to redefine the industry standard for the whole of Europe.”

Aufinity Group’s eponymous platform offers car dealers and OEMs a digital payment management solution that is optimized and white-label-capable. The technology serves both vehicle sales and after-sales, and features optimized payment processes to provide faster incoming payments, greater liquidity and efficiency, and a superior customer experience. Founded in 2018, Aufinity Group is headquartered in Cologne; the company pointed to growing demand for its technology and a successful expansion to Italy and Spain in 2024 in explaining its goal to pursue more international markets in 2025.

“Our core business in Germany is already solidly positioned,” Diener added. “However, the high level of interest from the international market has prompted us to push ahead with our expansion into more countries earlier than planned, which is a great market confirmation for our business and platform.”

YouLend and eBay Germany team up to help finance marketplace sellers

Embedded financing platform YouLend has partnered with eBay Germany to provide integrated financing to sellers on the platform. Part of the eBay Seller Capital Program, the partnership will enable German eBay sellers to access pre-approved financing of up to €2 million ($2.26 million). Financing is based on the sellers’ performance data, and does not require an additional, separate application process.

“Sellers benefit from a chain reaction: quicker inventory restocks, improved product listing, or targeted marketing leading to greater visibility, higher sales, and more growth opportunities—all of which can be financed through YouLend,” Leonard Strigel, YouLend General Manager Germany, said. “This cycle of funding, growth, and reinvestment helps increase seller revenues.”

The partnership will give sellers personalized, pre-approved financing offers, informing them of exactly how much capital they are eligible for before they apply for funding. Direct integration of YouLend’s technology into the eBay platform supports a seamless application process that is “simple, digital, and reliable,” Strigel added.

Founded in 2016, YouLend launched in the UK and Ireland in 2018, entered Europe in 2022, and went live in the US the following year. In 2024, YouLend announced a £4 billion financing investment from J.P. Morgan.

eBay has maintained a presence in Germany since the company’s 1999 takeover of auction platform Alando. eBay Germany currently has more than 150 million visits per month.

German expense management platform Circula secured €15 million

An extended Series A round has given Berlin-based, AI-powered expense management platform Circula €15 million ($17 million) to help bring autonomous finance workflows to medium-sized business in Germany and beyond. The investment will enable the firm to boost its AI capabilities and offer additional automation features for finance teams.

Participating in the funding were existing investors Alstin Capital, Capnamic Ventures, Peak Capital, Wenvest Capital, and Storm Ventures. CIBC Innovation Banking also participated in the investment.

“We have a clear goal: to become Germany’s AI-based champion in expense and spend management for small and medium-sized businesses,” Circula CEO Nikolai Skatchkov said. “With hundreds of millions of euros in transaction volume, hundreds of thousands of active users, and the trust of countless tax advisory firms, we are in an ideal position to realize our vision of a seamless workday for finance teams in the coming years.”

Circula, founded in 2017, counts firms such as Aston Martin, DATEV, and Securitas among its customers. The company’s modular SaaS platform streamlines business expense management with features including AI-powered receipt capture, automated tax-compliant data extraction, and real-time booking verification. More than 150,000 workers throughout Europe rely on Circula’s technology to manage their business travel expenses, credit card transactions, employee benefits, and more.

Circula’s announcement comes at a time when less than 9% of medium-sized businesses in Germany report fully automating their expense workflows, according to research from ERP firm Diamant. In contrast, Circula captures 70%+ of employee expenses when they happen, and enables companies to reduce manual work by 80% and reduce monthly closing cycles.

“Circula is transforming traditional paperwork into smart, AI-powered processes—setting new standards in digital expense management,” CIBC Innovation Banking Director Charlotte Goggin said. “We are excited to support this growth.”

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Asia-Pacific

  • CIMB Bank, Malaysia’s second largest financial services provider, teamed up with payments technology innovator ACI Worldwide.
  • Singapore-based payments platform Airwallex raised $300 million in Series F funding at a valuation of $6.2 billion.
  • Philippine-based universal bank EastWest Bank turned to Temenos to modernize its core.

Sub-Saharan Africa

Central and Eastern Europe

Middle East and Northern Africa

  • Payment infrastructure company areeba and digital banking solutions provider Foo forge strategic partnership to enhance digital payments in the Middle East.
  • Zawya looked at how the Qi card is bringing greater digitization to Iraq’s financial services industry.
  • Egyptian-based digital lending marketplace Qardy agreed to be acquired by Catalyst Partners Middle East (CPME) via SPAC.

Central and Southern Asia

Latin America and the Caribbean

Photo by anna-m. w.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

R3 and Solana Team Up, Merging TradFi and DeFi 

R3 and Solana Team Up, Merging TradFi and DeFi 
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Daily news, R3
  • R3 and Solana have partnered to bring regulated financial institutions and real-world assets (RWAs) onto Solana’s public blockchain, aiming to bridge TradFi and DeFi ecosystems.
  • The integration enables native interoperability between R3’s Corda platform, private networks, and Solana, supporting tokenized assets, stablecoin settlement, and compliance.
  • R3 announced that Solana Foundation President Lily Liu is joining its board.

Traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi) are slowly beginning to merge. Today’s partnership between distributed ledger technology company R3 and Web3 infrastructure player Solana is a step in this direction. The two have teamed up to bring financial institutions and their real-world assets onto Solana’s public blockchain.

R3 was founded in 2014 to offer real-world asset (RWA) tokenization and interoperability solutions. Today, R3 is helping digitize markets by bridging its on-chain RWA ecosystem with DeFi. Today, the company has over $10 billion in regulated assets on-chain across its platforms.

“After years of laying the groundwork, R3 is ready to bring our experience and our network of regulated financial institutions towards a new public future with one of the best and most trusted public ecosystems—Solana,” said R3 CEO David E. Rutter. “This is more than a milestone; it’s a strategic realignment for the entire industry. We know DeFi isn’t coming to TradFi, so it’s up to us to build the connective infrastructure that links these two ecosystems. This is about adapting to deliver real-world utility, institutional-grade readiness, and shaping the long-term future of regulated markets.”

As one of the most used public blockchains, Solana boasts low transaction fees, speed, scalability, and a global ecosystem. With favorable regulation and increased investor confidence, the companies have seen financial institutions become increasingly comfortable leveraging public networks.

Integrating with Solana’s blockchain will enable R3’s on-chain assets to meet the growing demand on public networks and unlock new settlement options like stablecoins. Unlike traditional approaches, R3’s tokenized RWAs can be confirmed directly on Solana Mainnet.

Additionally, Solana and R3 will enable native interoperability between its existing Corda platform, other private networks, and Solana. This will help bridge the gap between permissioned and public blockchain ecosystems, ultimately enabling regulated financial institutions to benefit from the openness and efficiency of Solana while maintaining compliance, security, and control of their assets.  

As part of today’s announcement, Solana Foundation President Lily Liu will join R3’s Board of Directors.

“This is a major step forward for the institutional adoption of public blockchain,” said Liu. “R3’s decision to bring its regulated financial network onto Solana is powerful validation that public blockchains have reached institutional readiness. With Solana’s unmatched performance, enterprise-grade permissioning, and growing roster of regulated assets, we’re not just witnessing convergence between TradFi and DeFi—we’re enabling it. This collaboration signifies that the future of capital markets will be built on public infrastructure. We’re thrilled that the Solana ecosystem is leading the way.”

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Talking Fintech: A Preview of Interviews, Q&As and Conversations from FinovateSpring

Talking Fintech: A Preview of Interviews, Q&As and Conversations from FinovateSpring
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: FinovateSpring 2025, Interview, Streamly

Over the three days of FinovateSpring earlier this month, Finovate analysts and their partners hosted a number of off-stage interviews with CEOs of demoing companies, keynote speakers, event sponsors, and more. Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll begin rolling out these conversations here on the Finovate blog as part of our Streamly Speaker Series interviews.

For now, here’s a quick preview of what we’ve got in store for you:

Senior Research Analyst Julie Muhn in conversation with:

John Iannarelli, The Voice of Cyber & Security, FBI John

Rob Thatcher, Founder and CEO, BankShift

Yamini Sagar, CEO and Founder, Instarails

Javier Pérez García, Global Director, VASS Financial Services

Research Analyst David Penn in conversation with:

Bhoomika Ghosh, Senior Tech Product Lead, Amazon Prime

Jim McCarthy, Founder and Chairman, McCarthy Hatch

Jackie Wylie, Head of Marketing, Middesk

Brandon Min, Founder and CEO, Herd Security

Will Dolan, President, TAPP Engine

Aman Kaur, Corporate Sales Manager, Americas, DataSniper

Mohammad Rashid, SVP, Head of Fintech Innovation, Tavant

William Mills, CEO and Creative Director, William Mills Agency, in conversation with:

Adrian Nazari, CEO, Sesame

Christy Wong and Michael Larson, VP of Business Development and COO, covet.life

Sharon Gai, Author, Culture Fluid

Steven Ramirez, CEO of Beyond the Arc, in conversation with:

Christopher Hollins, Global Head of Product Sales and Design, SVB, a division of First Citizens Bank

Alisa Rusanoff, Head of Credit / Trade Finance, Crescendo Asset Management

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Circle Goes Live with the Circle Payments Network

Circle Goes Live with the Circle Payments Network
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: Daily news
  • Circle has launched the Circle Payments Network (CPN) to modernize the $190 trillion cross-border payments market with blockchain-based, near-instant settlement.
  • CPN enables financial institutions to securely exchange payment instructions and settle transactions using USDC on public blockchains.
  • Circle’s initial focus with CPN is on high-value, underserved global trade corridors.

Stablecoin issuer and infrastructure company Circle unveiled this week that the Circle Payments Network (CPN) mainnet is now live. With CPN, Circle is hoping to disrupt the $190 trillion cross-border market and bring stablecoins mainstream for cross-border payments.

“The launch of CPN represents a leap forward for global payments infrastructure toward an architecture where interoperability, compliance, speed, and cost-efficiency are emphasized,” said Circle VP of Product Management Sunil Sharma. “We are just getting started. As more institutions integrate with CPN, we look forward to powering new use cases, and advancing this new standard for global value exchange.”

Cross-border payments currently depend on legacy infrastructure that is fragmented, slow, and manual. With CPN’s compliance-first payments coordination protocol, financial institutions can exchange payment instructions securely while settling transactions on open, public blockchains in near-real-time.

According to the World Bank, cross-border payments can take up to five days to settle and cost an average of 6.3% per transaction. CPN’s near-instant settlement and cost-efficiency could significantly reduce both time and expense, especially for businesses operating across emerging markets.

CPN combines the reliability of traditional payment systems with the benefits of blockchain rails, which adds openness and speed. With CPN, Circle hopes to bring the benefits of blockchain settlement in global commercial payments. Network participants can enroll as originating financial institutions (OFIs) and/or beneficiary financial institutions (BFIs) for:

  • B2B supplier payments
  • Cross-border remittances
  • Treasury and global cash consolidations
  • Recurring enterprise payments, including subscriptions 
  • Payroll and mass disbursements

CPN hinges on demand for dollar-backed stablecoins from international markets in which access to fiat dollars is expensive and slow. Because of this, Circle is currently focusing CPN on serving organizations transacting in high-value, underserved global trade corridors that rely on fiat dollars. Active partners in the CPN mainnet include Alfred Pay, Tazapay, Redotpay, and Conduit.

“Throughout 2025,” added Sharma, “we will continue to explore and focus on providers who can serve additional markets that could potentially include Nigeria, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Colombia, India, the United Arab Emirates, China, Turkey, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Argentina.”

Circle was founded in 2013 and is best known for launching USDC, a fully reserved, dollar-backed stablecoin that has facilitated over $28 trillion in on-chain settlement volume since launching in 2018.

With the launch of CPN, Circle is positioning itself not just as a stablecoin issuer, but as a global payments infrastructure provider. As adoption grows and more institutions join the network, Circle’s compliance-first, blockchain-native approach could help to bring stablecoins into the traditional financial system.

Photo by Jimmy Chan

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Stratyfy Teams Up with Parlay to Help SMEs Access Capital

Stratyfy Teams Up with Parlay to Help SMEs Access Capital
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Stratyfy
  • New York-based credit decisioning company Stratyfy forged a strategic partnership with loan intelligence system Parlay Finance.
  • Together the two companies will help banks and other financial institutions provide a more seamless onboarding and underwriting experience for their small business borrowers.
  • Stratyfy won Best of Show in its most recent Finovate appearance at FinovateFall 2022. Parlay demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2024.

Credit decisioning specialist Stratyfy and loan intelligence system Parlay Finance announced a strategic partnership this week. The alliance will offer frictionless onboarding and underwriting experiences that enable more banks to serve a larger number of qualified small business borrowers. The combination of Stratyfy and Parlay’s technology will also give small businesses actionable insights they need in order to more easily secure funding.

“Our technology is designed to help lenders make better credit decisions by uncovering signals often overlooked by traditional approaches,” Stratyfy CEO Laura Kornhauser said. “Combining that with Parlay’s strength in surfacing opportunities and accelerating small businesses through the loan application process is a powerful match.”

Stratyfy provides AI-powered solutions for credit, compliance, and fraud teams to help them modernize lending. A specialist in decision optimization for financial institutions, Stratyfy helps lenders access new markets, reduce costs, and encourage growth with less risk. Parlay’s AI-powered platform streamlines digital onboarding, verification, and qualification to enable lenders to more efficiently provide Small Business Administration (SBA) and small business loans. The company’s technology integrates with loan origination systems to increase both volume and profitability.

Combined, the two solutions provide an underwriting solution that automates workflows, boosts performance, and enhances risk-adjusted returns. The partnership has already yielded results with teams from Stratyfy and Parlay collaborating on a joint client engagement: a community lender seeking to increase success rates for entrepreneurs who have been historically underbanked.

“Parlay empowers lenders to digitally onboard and verify small business information while providing applicants with personalized financial insights,” Parlay Finance CEO Alex McLeod said. “Teaming up with Stratyfy extends that value through the full credit lifecycle, helping lenders match with and support the businesses they’re best suited to serve.”

Headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, Parlay Finance demonstrated its technology at FinovateSpring 2024 in San Francisco. The company showed how its embedded fintech software, Parlay Protocol, helps financial institutions generate more high-quality loans and provides technical assistance to small business applicants. Lenders working with Parlay have benefited from a 64% boost in approved loans and an 87% reduction in manual, underwriting workloads. Most recently, Parlay announced a partnership with Mastercard and JAM FINTOP to expand its services nationwide.

New York-based Stratyfy won Best of Show in its most recent Finovate appearance at FinovateFall 2022. At the conference, the company demonstrated its UnBias technology that enables financial institutions and fintechs to discover and undo bias in complex financial decisions including during the underwriting process.

Photo by Chevanon Photography

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

4 Companies Bringing Agentic AI to Checkout

4 Companies Bringing Agentic AI to Checkout
By Julie Muhn (@julieschicktanz) Posted on
Categories: List series, Thought Leadership

Agentic AI agents, autonomous agents that act on behalf of users with minimal input, are not just coming to financial services. They’re already here. One of the most compelling use cases for Agentic AI is at checkout, where commerce, AI, and payments converge at the point where consumers make their purchase decisions.

In the past few weeks, three Agentic AI shopping and checkout announcements from major payments and technology players have made news headlines. So far, Google, Visa, and Mastercard are leading the Agentic AI payments charge, with PayPal and Perplexity not far behind. Here’s a look at what each company is doing.

Google’s AI-powered shopping agents

Google announced its AI Shopping Mode yesterday, a new online shopping experience that allows users to browse 50 billion product listings and buy the item they want using Google’s new agentic checkout at a price that fits their budget. Shoppers set their preferences by selecting “track price” on a preferred product listing and set the right size, color, and the amount they want to spend. If the item’s price drops into the user’s pre-selected price range, they receive a push notification and can have the agentic shopping agent buy the item for them with the push of a button.

Google is embedding an AI assistant into every step of the purchasing process, from browsing to payment, and is making the checkout experience hyper-personal, with less friction.

Visa’s intelligent commerce and agentic AI

Visa unveiled its Visa Intelligent Commerce tool last month. The new initiative will empower AI agents to deliver personalized and secure shopping experiences for consumers at scale. The program will equip AI agents to seamlessly manage key phases of the shopping journey, from product discovery, to purchasing, to post-purchase product management.

Unlike Google, Visa will offer APIs and SDKs that will provide third parties a suite of payments tools, including tokenization, authentication, and transaction controls, to embed into their own apps. In this sense, Visa is not just planning to launch a new checkout tool, it is building infrastructure for a world where the AI agent is the end customer.

Mastercard’s agentic payments through Agent Pay

Mastercard announced Agent Pay, a payment framework for agent-driven commerce, 24 hours before Visa’s agentic AI announcement hit the wires. Mastercard’s tool aims to make payments smarter, more secure, and more personal by embedding them directly into the product recommendations generated by GenAI platforms.

When paired with Mastercard’s tokenization technology, Agent Pay will not only add security, but will also help retailers identify and validate customers to offer a more meaningful and consistent shopping experience. Overall, Mastercard is pioneering a payment model where AI, not the consumer, initiates the purchase.

Perplexity x PayPal

Earlier this month, GenAI-powered search engine Perplexity partnered with PayPal to enable in-chat shopping. Shoppers will be able to check out instantly with PayPal or Venmo when they ask Perplexity to find a product, book travel, or buy tickets. The entire process will be powered by PayPal’s account linking, secure tokenized wallet, and emerging passkey checkout flows, which could eliminate the need for passwords.

While it is not a formal “agentic” platform, the move shows that large language models (LLMs) are starting to transact directly and the partnership is a good example of how chat interfaces are evolving into commerce platforms. The announcement serves as a preview of agentic commerce where LLMs initiate and complete purchases in a single conversational flow.

Overall, these announcements signal a major shift in ecommerce. The online point-of-sale is moving from a consumer-initiated process to an AI-initiated transaction. At the outset, regulation, identity, fraud, and explainability will be a large challenge. Still, the shift to agentic commerce is well underway, and the companies building today’s infrastructure are setting the rules and structure for how agentic AI commerce will work in the future.

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Quadient and Nuvei Forge Strategic Technology Partnership

Quadient and Nuvei Forge Strategic Technology Partnership
By David Penn Posted on
Categories: Alumni News, Quadient
  • Business automation platform Quadient has inked a strategic partnership with payments company Nuvei.
  • The partnership will integrate Nuvei’s advanced payment processing technology into Quadient’s cloud-based Accounts Receivable (AR) and Accounts Payable (AP) automation solutions.
  • Headquartered in France, Quadient most recently demoed its technology on the Finovate stage at FinovateEurope 2018.

France-based business automation platform Quadient has announced a strategic partnership with payments company Nuvei. The collaboration is designed to enhance cloud payment capabilities for businesses around the world, and will integrate Nuvei’s advanced payment processing technology into Quadient’s cloud-based Accounts Receivable (AR) and Accounts Payable (AP) automation solutions.

“We’re empowering businesses to modernize and take control of their financial processes,” Quadient Chief Solution Officer, Digital, Chris Hartigan said. “With our cloud platform, we’re helping businesses streamline workflows, gain deeper financial insights, and build stronger relationships with customers and suppliers, driving efficiency and sustainable growth to succeed in an increasingly digital and regulated marketplace.”

Integrating advanced global payment capabilities with customer onboarding, pay-ins and payouts, and risk management, Quadient helps businesses better manage cash flow, align payment terms, and move away from manual and siloed processes to streamlined, more efficient workflows. This is a challenge for more than half of small- and medium-sized businesses that rely on fragmented processes to handle their finances. To address this, Quadient offers a unified, scalable, cloud-based platform that automates accounts receivable and accounts payable over multiple currencies, payment options, and geographic regions.

“By integrating our advanced payment processing technology into Quadient’s cloud platform, we’re enabling businesses to seamlessly manage transactions across multiple currencies and payment methods through a single, unified solution,” Nuvei Chair and CEO Philip Fayer said. “We look forward to supporting Quadient as it empowers its customers with customized solutions to accelerate their growth.”

Founded in 2003, Nuvei offers modular, flexible, and scalable technologies that enable companies to accept next-generation payments, provide pay-outs, and take advantage of card issuing, banking, risk, and fraud management services. Headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, Nuvei supports 150+ currencies, more than 700 payment methods, and operates in 50+ local markets and 200+ global markets. Philip Fayer is Chair and CEO.

Quadient made its Finovate debut in 2013, as GMC Software. The company rebranded to Quadient in 2017 and returned to the Finovate stage that year and again in 2018. Quadient’s partnership news comes just days after the company reported that it was working with Stasher, a UK-based luggage storage platform. The partnership will help significantly expand Stasher’s network in the UK, giving travelers in major UK cities such as London, Birmingham, York, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Cardiff, and Manchester secure and accessible luggage storage via 1,640+ Parcel Pending by Quadient smart lockers.

Quadient currently has more than 25,700 smart locker units installed in the US, Japan, and Europe. The company hopes to deploy 40,000 units by 2030.

Photo by Maël BALLAND

Share this:

Send Post Twitter LinkedIn Facebook