Employee benefit and reward pioneer Ben has raised $2.5m in a round led by Cherry Ventures and Seedcamp. The round was also supported by notable FinTech and HRTech angel investors including Paul Forster of Indeed.com, Taavet Hinrikus of Transferwise, Carlos Gonzalez-Cadenas of GoCardless (now Index Ventures), Philip Reynolds of Workday, and Matt Robinson of Nested.

Montagu Private Equity (“Montagu”), a leading European private equity firm, today announces it has agreed to acquire a majority position in ITRS Group (“ITRS”), a leading global provider of real-time monitoring and analytics software from TA Associates (“TA”), who will remain a minority holder alongside Montagu and Management. Completion is expected next month, subject to customary closing requirements. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. 

Regulation and operational efficiency requirements are driving a move away from traditional Periodic Review (PR), towards real-time, ongoing customer due diligence - also known as continual or perpetual KYC. However, even with the benefits it promises (reduced caseloads, improved customer experience, less costs etc) adoption amongst financial services has been slow.

LedgerEdge, the next-generation ecosystem for corporate bond trading, announces it has selected Yaala Labs, a provider of cloud-native capital markets infrastructure, to support its technology delivery. The partnership will enable LedgerEdge to launch a global corporate bond trading venue built on distributed ledger technology, expected in the second half of 2021.

Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) received Plug and Play’s Global Innovation Award for its innovation efforts and active engagement with fintechs and startups through its partnership programs. Despite the difficult situation in 2020, RBI and its subsidiary banks have entered multiple long-term collaborations with fintechs.

MobiKwik, India’s largest digital credit platform, today announced a strategic partnership with Home Credit India, a local arm of the international consumer finance provider Home Credit Group with operations spanning in 9 countries across Europe and Asia to launch ‘Home Credit Money’. A mobile application-based wallet, Home Credit Money provides integrated end-to-end digital experience to its customers for their daily life payments and borrowing needs.

M.Video-Eldorado Group, Russia’s largest electronics and household appliances retailer, and state-run Sber, the country’s largest bank, agreed to jointly develop goods.ru, a marketplace that brings together Russia’s leading online stores.

AccessFintech, a leading fintech company evolving the financial operating model through data and workflow collaboration, announces the appointment of Paynter Higgins as Executive Vice President for Global Enterprise Sales and Sarah Lloyd Parry as Executive Vice President for Marketing.

LAB577, an established software firm at the nexus of emerging technology and financial services, has today announced that 

Acronis, a global leader in cyber protection, today issued a warning that, based on their research of recent cyberattack trends and existing business practices, organisations around the world currently face a global threat to data privacy and security. The company announced its findings on European Data Protection Day to alert organisations that immediate action is needed to avoid costly attacks.