Anti-money-laundering pioneers SmartSearch this Sunday achieved 15^th position in the Sunday Times Profit Track list. The list recognises the British companies with the fastest-growing profits over the last three years.

SmartSearch’s success comes on the back of an increase of more than 80% in profits over the past year, and a sixfold rise over the three-year period looked at by the Sunday Times.

CLS, a market infrastructure group delivering settlement, processing and data solutions, announced today that Keith Tippell has been appointed as the new Head of Product.

He will be responsible for overseeing CLS’s existing product suite and all new product development in the Settlement and Processing business lines.

PXP Financial, the global expert in acquiring and payment processing, today announces four major new hires. Following a successful expansion into the US earlier in 2020, PXP Financial welcomes Arne Matthias as Chief Operating Officer, and Anschana Caravaca as Head of Gaming to the team. Additionally, Dave Janse joins as Head of Business Development, and Armin Pichler as Head of HR.

Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) has named Alison Pain as chief technology officer (CTO) for the Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA) region.

Nigerian fintech platform Okra has secured a $1mn pre-seed fundraise from TLcom Ca

Konsentus today announced that two senior members of the commercial team at the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE), have joined Konsentus as VP, Business Development, to scale up operations as Open Banking takes off across the UK and Europe.

Paul Hughes, most recently, Head of Business Development at the OBIE, also held senior positions at Vocalink, U.S. Bankcorp (Elavon), RBS and Barclays. He is joined by Peter Mortlock, a senior Sales Executive from OBIE whose extensive payments experience includes roles with Vocalink, Snatch and Verifone.

Today the British Business Bank has announced that it has approved four new lenders for accreditation under the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS), which provides financial support to smaller businesses (SMEs) across the UK that are losing revenue and seeing their cashflow disrupted, as a result of the Covid-19 outbreak. The new CBILS lenders are Allied Irish Bank (GB)/AIB (NI), ThinCats, Paragon Bank and IGF (Independent Growth Finance).

Banks and other financial services organizations have been investing in big data for years. From purchasing data, to collecting it at various points along the customer journey, they have an overabundance of valuable customer and even employee information at their fingertips. Ideally, this would be used to optimize operations, analyze customer behavior and grow employee engagement, among other things.

Financial IT:  Please introduce us to Modularbank

Vilve: Modularbank is a new entrant into the UK Fintech scene. We provide a flexible banking platform, allowing any business to rapidly offer seamless, tailored financial services to its customers. 

The company was launched in 2018 by a small group of Estonian financial IT pioneers and entrepreneurs. Modularbank is a spin-off from another Estonian fintech: Icefire, which is responsible for the infrastructure of the Estonian tax system and which has successfully built more than 15 banks and financial institutions.