• Pandemic impact on budgets during 2020 led to an average open banking spend of €32 million among European financial institutions compared to a projected €50-100 million
• Budgets have bounced back in 2021 – with investments in payment initiation topping the priority list for over two thirds (72%) of financial executives
• Use cases to improve customer experience and the onboarding process ranked joint second in importance (71%)

Sector lags behind on colocation, cloud and sustainability

Financial service enterprises are at the greatest risk of losing their competitive edge if they don’t take steps to digitally transform, according to new research commissioned by Telehouse International Corporation of Europe.

British Patient Capital has made a €30m commitment to Partech Growth II, which announced its final close today at €650m.

Partech is one of the most active tech-specialist venture capital firms in the world, and this latest fund is one of the largest growth funds in Europe. It aims to back between 12 and 15 digital scale-ups, investing between €20m and €70m in each business across sectors such as enterprise software, consumer, healthcare, financial services, education and other frontier technologies. 

New insights from ClearBank demonstrate industry demand for accessible and competitive multi-currency offering

Reward have announced the extension of their partnership with Visa to cover all the markets across Asia-Pacific. Building from their partnership in Europe, this deal now allows Visa cardholders to benefit from Reward merchant offer content, through Visa Offers eXchange, a marketplace that uses Visa transaction data to provide cardholders with more personalised merchant offers.   

Tarun will be responsible for shaping the strategic and long-term financial direction of the company

ZebPay, India’s most trusted and oldest crypto asset exchange, has announced the appointment of Tarun Jain as its Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Tarun will shape the strategic and long-term financial direction of ZebPay’s business. He will work closely with the organization’s leadership team to scale the organization and its systems for the next phase of growth.

The country has Asia’s highest internet penetration percentage, is ranked fifth worldwide for ease of doing business and saw cross-border ecommerce tally $9.5 billion in 2020

As the world moved indoors two years ago, the online payment space flourished. These are the biggest developments in 2021, and a brief look ahead.

This year, South Africans embraced e-commerce, mobile commerce and digital payments like never before - all four major banks have seen massive increases in these payment methods since the start of the pandemic. Absa, for one, says 66% of people now prefer electronic payments over cash.

Workday will help to digitally transform entire back-office

The Financial Ombudsman Service has gone live on Workday Financial Management and Workday Human Capital Management to help it to digitally transform its entire back office and the way it operates. 

The Financial Ombudsman Service was set up by Parliament in 2001 to resolve complaints between financial businesses and their customers. Every year over 1 million people contact the service.