The London Institute of Banking & Finance (LIBF), in partnership with Fintech Diversity Radar, is offering five scholarships to promote gender diversity in fintech and digital banking.

Scholarships to study on LIBF’s next Certified Fintech Practitioner (CFP) course will be offered to five women already working in fintech, digital banking or the wider financial services sector. Available as a fee waiver for the course, each scholarship is worth £800.

Lightspeed (NYSE: LSPD) (TSX: LSPD), a leading provider of cloud-based, omnichannel commerce platforms, announced today it will integrate Google tools directly into its platform, to help independent businesses globally as they safely re-open and expand their in-store capacity.

Maviance PLC (www.smobilpay.cm), a Cameroon-based fintech, announced today that it has closed its Seed investment round of USD 3 million from the pan-African digital payments hub MFS Africa, which comes on board as a strategic investor. Maviance will use the new funding to increase its footprint in its Cameroon and to expand into other countries in the central African economic region (CEMAC).   

We’ve heard many stories about companies that went broke in times of crisis, but also many examples of how businesses flourished in bad times, doing better on vital financial parameters and outperforming their competitors.

The same can be said of individuals. Extraordinary leaders know that how they fight a war often determines whether they will emerge triumphant.

In this post, I’d like to share a success story of one outstanding woman and her principles that helped her become successful.

Curve, the fast-growing financial super app, today announces it’s launching a new crowdfunding round to enable its growing customer base to invest, as it fuels its expansion into the US and further into Europe. The campaign is set to go live later in May.

Having secured £72.5 million from a leading group of international investors as part of its successful Series C round, Curve is now extending the opportunity to its customers and wider community to take part in the next stage of its ambitious growth strategy.

Nationwide, the world’s largest building society, has partnered with leading technology provider Form3 and will be connecting to their cloud-native payments platform to simplify and reinforce the Society’s payments infrastructure. 

In August 2020, Nationwide was one of the first financial services providers in the UK to invest in Form3 via its Ventures Fund, recognising the potential of their platform. Now the organisation will become one of the first major financial services organisation in the UK to adopt Form3’s platform.

Multiply AI, the UK’s first fully-automated financial app provider, today announced the removal of its monthly subscription fee for Unity Mutual Lifetime ISA (LISA) customers – and launched a customer referral bonus scheme for easy access account holders.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) announces advances in artificial intelligence (AI), hybrid cloud, and quantum computing at the company's Think conference at 12:00 p.m. ET today. The innovations highlight IBM's role in helping its clients and partners accelerate their digital transformations, return to work smarter, and build strategic ecosystems that can drive better business outcomes.

Commerzbank will be cooperating with the Franco-German financial services group ODDO BHF in the area of equities. As part of its Strategy 2024, Commerzbank has announced that it will be reviewing the possibility of cooperation with potential partners for the areas of equity trading and equity research. The aim is to become more efficient and to offer Corporate Clients an even better platform for placement of their shares. “This cooperation means that our capital markets business will be aligned even more consistently with the needs of our core clients.

With increasing competitive pressures from small and agile Fintech firms, financial institutions are scrambling to modernize legacy systems to become truly data-driven.  However, Gartner predicts that by 2023, 90% of applications will still not be updated to run on new flexible system architectures.