The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup sees a partnership for Trade Ledger and Virgin Money, while Allica Bank secures £55million funding.
Partnerships
Fintech Trade Ledger has bagged a three year contract with Virgin Money to help transform its business lending services. At the heart of the partnership is the delivery of a digital decisioning platform that will reduce business loan application through to decision from five days to 20 minutes, as well as freeing up a significant amount of relationship manager time to reinvest with customers.
Finastra has forged a partnership with Lozenge Analytics, offering the capabilities to Fusion KTP customers. The combined solution, available in the cloud or on-premise, is available to clients in France and the Benelux region, with the potential to expand into other geographies in the future.
Fintech benchmarking platform TISAtech has also unveiled new partnerships. MasterCard, Amazon Web Service, R3 and Yodlee join TISAtech’s NEBULA Development Panel. TISAtech members can now access fintech-focused support, including cloud services, developer tools and financial services.
Fintech payments and credit company MarketFinance has partnered with Funding Options to join its real-time lending platform Funding Cloud. Funding Cloud enables lenders to bridge the SME funding gap by providing businesses with the best finance options on the market, at speed and powered by technology.
Funding
Fintech challenger bank Allica Bank has secured £55million in additional funding. The latest funding builds on £110million Series B funding round in November 2021 – and boosts total funding to £285million. The additional funding will fuel Allica’s continued growth. British Business Investments provided £30million Tier 2 capital facility, while Allica has also received £25million in equity commitments from existing investors.
UK tech companies have raised more venture capital funding in the first five months of 2022 than in the whole of 2020. This puts the UK second to the US globally when it comes to startup investment and means that UK startups are outperforming those in China, France and India, when it comes to attracting funding, according to data by Dealroom.
Swoop, the one-stop money shop for businesses, has raised £5.4million in a Series A funding round to accelerate international expansion. Revenues at Swoop are forecast to increase by 450 per cent this year. The round includes investment from Velocity, Arab Bank Ventures, IAG as well as WeHo Venture.
Bits of Stock, the stock rewards platform, raises $4.4million in seed funding from Keen Venture Partners and Yellow Accelerator by Snap Inc. It plans to use the funding to double its size and onboard more than 200 brands in the next 12 months. The fintech is currently working with 60 brands, including Adidas, KFC, Nike and Zara.
Meanwhile, Molten Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in and developing high growth technology businesses, has led a $20million Series A funding round in Airbank, the finance management platform. The money raised will be used to expand its team, invest in significant product and technical developments, as well as expand into several new markets.
Regtech Clausematch has closed a $10.8million strategic funding round led by Lytical Ventures and joined by Flashpoint and Sony Innovation Fund. The new financing will be used to increase the company’s commercial activities in the US and invest in its product, technology, and data science teams. The new funds bring the total investment to date to over $20million.
Job moves
Titanbay, the private markets investment platform, has appointed Mark Adams to the role of chief product officer. He joins from Mobysoft and also previously worked at UBS Investment Bank. Titanbay says Adams’ expertise will be invaluable it scales its business’ product offerings to marry up with new partnerships.
Sheila Al-Rowaily has become the first woman to join the board of directors of Saudi Central Bank. Al-Rowaily is the CEO of Wisayah Investment Co and is also a board member of Saudi Aramco Power Co. and Hassana Investment Co.
Meanwhile, Global Processing Services (GPS) has unveiled Cameron Cox as chief transformation officer. In this newly created role, Cox will shape GPS’ strategic integrated payments business initiatives to capture new international growth opportunities. Earlier this year, GPS announced a significant capital injection of over $400million.
Techfin provider Pannovate has named Ian Staniforth as group chief operating officer. He is tasked with powering up Pannovate’s payments and banking solutions to next-gen status. Staniforth is also an ambassador for The Payments Association and a judge for the Pay360 Awards.
More job moves
Encompass Corporation has unveiled a new global sales leadership team to power its growth. Phillip Sertel, formerly from FICO and Oracle, is regional head of sales for Europe. While Bob DeLaney will act as regional head of sales for UK&I. The news follows a significant capital raise of £25million for Encompass. The raise is being used to accelerate international expansion plans, including offices in New York and Amsterdam.
CoinFund, a web3 and blockchain focused investment firm, names Margaret Gabriel as head of talent. Gabriel will partner with CoinFund portfolio companies to help them strategically invest in and grow their teams, as well as support CoinFund’s global talent acquisition and leadership development strategy.
Finshark has unveiled Maricar Tuazon as its new compliance manager. She will handle processes around its core business ‘and keep the legal and ethical integrity intact’. According to the company, she will be “sniffing out legal breaches like a hungry white shark”.
Fnality International, a consortium of global financial institutions, has appointed Olga Zoutendijk as chairwoman of its board. She will oversee Fnality International’s development and the rollout of its international, regulated network of distributed financial market infrastructures (dFMIs), the first of which is scheduled for later this year.
Company updates
Carbon, a credit led Pan-African digital bank, has launched Carbon Zero, a buy now, pay later web app. Based on affordability, Carbon Zero allows customers to spend up to N2.5million. Carbon Zero also charges zero per cent interest on all purchases which are repaid on time and in full in three instalments.
Nucleus365, a UK-based payment institution offering a centralised platform for global payment processing, FX and connected banking, has launched. Nucleus365 offers an integrated payment solution for merchants seeking to access new and emerging markets.
Finally, Zamlink, a provider of electronic transaction management solutions, is rebranding to E-Switch, following its takeover by EFT Corporation. E-Switch provides infrastructure to enable electronic transactions between banks and financial institutions in Zambia, gives access to more than 1,000 ATMs on its network.
