The crossover and application of finance and technology (fintech) has become essential in providing financial services for both businesses and consumers today. While it experienced a decline in 2020, the UK fintech industry saw a tremendous growth of 331% in the span of a year, leading up to £2 billion in investments. With such a positive trajectory, the industry can only be expected to flourish.

Equity investment in the UK’s smaller businesses increased by 9% in 2020 to £8.8bn, the highest amount since the Beauhurst data series began in 2011, reveals the British Business Bank’s annual Small Business Equity Tracker, published today. The strong momentum continued into Q1 2021, with the total value of equity investment in smaller businesses reaching £4.5bn, by far the highest amount ever recorded in a single quarter.

Checkout.com, the leading cloud-based payments solutions provider, announces its largest acquisition to date of Estonian software development firm, Icefire. 

British Patient Capital comments on the British Business Bank’s Small Business Equity Tracker which reveals the average pre-money valuation of a growth stage private company reached over £100m. At £100.8m in 2020 this is an increase of 92% compared to 2019. In growth stage tech companies, the increase on 2019 levels was more pronounced, rising by 102% to reach £124m.

Isomer Capital is pleased to announce the first close of “Isomer Capital Opportunities”. The new co-investment fund is backed by British Business Investments, through its Managed Funds Programme, amongst other global institutions. 

Clients get access to best-of-breed payments orchestration and cloud-based acquiring.

Industry leading payment orchestration platform IXOPAY, partners with Silverflow, the global payments technology company. This partnership will allow IXOPAY clients to upgrade their card payments process by switching to cloud based acquiring.

US Retail Sales Drop; PPI Prices Rise, EUR Flat, AUD Slips

Upflow has raised $15m to revolutionize how B2B companies get paid. The company provides a SaaS solution that enables companies to radically modernize their entire cash-cycle, and effortlessly collect customer payments. Upflow now processes more than $200m worth of invoices a month, for over 1.5m transacting companies.

Earlier this month, The Bank of Thailand contracted with a firm they tasked with developing a proof-of-concept for a Thai CBDC, settling on development costs of 10 million baht. This announcement comes as other countries are busy planning for their own financial futures. Recently, Ghana announced that the country is approaching the pilot testing phase for its own CBDC, while the president of El Salvador announced that he aimed to make Bitcoin an official currency for his Central American nation.

ESG has gone mainstream but the journey to adoption is full of complex and difficult challenges.  At the heart of the mission is technology and data.

Data management for ESG is a newly emerging and dynamic area.  Both buy-side and sell-side financial institutions cite data as one of the most intractable problems they face in implementing ESG.