Partnerships 

Ophelos Partners with Credit Card Startup, Yonder, for Ethical Debt Resolution

Ophelos, the technology firm building fairer debt resolution for businesses and their customers, announces its partnership with Yonder, a lifestyle credit card for millennial audiences. The partnership will see Ophelos transform how Yonder manages the support of customers who may find themselves in arrears. The startup, which is dedicated to building a modern credit solution, selected Ophelos as it reflected Yonder’s business values centred around fairness, transparency and customer respect.

Western Union Expands Collaboration with UK Post Office

Western Union announced that it is expanding its collaboration with the UK Post Office to provide retail cross-border money transfers. This alliance is part of the Company’s continued enhancement of its omni-channel offering, serving its customers across the full range of physical and digital touchpoints and channels. UK Post Office customers will now be able to benefit from Western Union’s omni-channel experience, choosing to send money to their families and loved ones overseas via Western Union’s UK Post Office digital services or in-person at 4,000 UK Post Office locations across the United Kingdom.

Allied Solutions Partners with Scienaptic AI to Deliver Enhanced Credit Decisioning Platfor

Allied Solutions, one of the largest providers of insurance, lending, risk management, and data enabled products to credit unions, has just launched a strategic collaboration with Scienaptic AI, leading AI-powered credit underwriting platform provider. The partnership will provide an enhanced, personalized loan decisioning platform that will enable credit unions to lend more, automate the lending processes and reduce lending risks.

METACO Partners with Brink’s to Strengthen Institutional Digital Asset Custody Capabilities

METACO, the leading provider of security-critical software and infrastructure to the digital asset ecosystem, has announced a partnership with Brink’s, the global leader in total cash management, route-based secure logistics and payment solutions. Brink’s extends METACO’s institutional digital asset custody services into the physical world through its internationally recognized secure logistics expertise and global network of vault locations. These capabilities provide financial institutions with an unparalleled, segregated, and fully distributed, disaster recovery solution for critical private key recovery backups.

Launches 

Zilch, the UK-based BNPL Unicorn, is Getting Ready for a US Launch

Prior to launching in the United States, Zilch, a London-based fintech, joined the Financial Technology Association (FTA) to encourage ethical innovation. When a transaction is complete, Zilch makes consumer credit judgments using open banking, corporate social responsibility, and behavioral data technology. Additionally, the fintech business was one of the first regulated buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) providers in the United Kingdom, with an emphasis on financial wellness and education.

Plum Launches Commission-free Stock Investing in the UK

Investment and saving app Plum has launched a new stock investing feature that allows customers to invest in fractional company shares, commission-free, making it one of the UK's most competitively priced investment platforms. For the first time ever, Plum’s customers will have access to some of the world’s best-known companies, with +500 top US businesses like Apple, Tesla, Nike and Microsoft included on release, and another 500 firms to be added imminently.

Spectrum Markets Unveils First On-venue European 24-5 Turbo Trading on Cryptocurrencies

Spectrum Markets, the pan-European trading venue for securitised derivatives, announced its product offering has widened to include cryptocurrencies as an underlying, with turbo warrants on Bitcoin and Ethereum now available. The new products expand Spectrum’s existing suite of Turbo24s and allow brokers to offer their clients long or short leveraged exposure to the price of the two most popular cryptocurrencies. This marks the first time financial institutions can offer European retail investor clients the opportunity to trade turbo warrants on cryptocurrencies, on-venue, 24 hours a day, five days a week.

Generation Life Launches Investment-linked Lifetime Annuity

Financial Risk Solutions (FRS), provider of investment administration software to asset owners and life and pensions companies worldwide, announced Generation Life, an Australian leading provider of tax-effective investment bonds, has launched an investment-linked lifetime annuity solution using FRS’s Invest|Pro™ as a key component of Generation Life’s technology supporting the lifetime annuity. FRS specifically adapted its award-winning unit-linked software platform to support the investment-linked annuity’s unit pricing requirements and to comply with Australian tax rules.

Finastra Managed Services Launches on Amazon Web Services

Finastra announces the launch of Finastra Managed Services (FMS) on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to enable banks and financial institutions to access FMS in the AWS cloud. FMS being available in the AWS cloud has already demonstrated its benefits, helping a large multi-national U.S. bank on the West Coast roll out its lending solution. Users of FMS in the AWS cloud benefit from increased efficiency and scalability, which improves spending and reduces carbon footprint. AWS empowers organizations to modernize their infrastructure, meet rapidly changing customer behaviors and expectations, and drive business growth.

Atom Bank Launches Quick Quote Tool for Instant, Indicative Business Loan Quotes

Atom bank is expanding Portal - their next generation broker gateway-  to include their innovative Quick Quote tool. This addition will allow brokers offering secured business loans to self-assess and create an indicative quote within the portal before submitting an application, whereas the traditional method requires brokers to contact the business development team for a quote. The Quick Quote tool can be used for trading businesses and investment cases and comes after Atom relaunched their standard secured business loan range in January, offering variable and fixed-rate loans between £2m and £5m, alongside their pre-existing RLS range.

Equifax Canada Launches Final Stage of Cloud Transformation with Borrowell

Equifax Canada officially launched the final stage of its cloud transformation with the migration of key partner Borrowell Inc.’s products and services to the new Equifax Cloud™. The result of Equifax, Inc.’s $1.5 billion technology and security transformation, the Equifax Cloud is a world-class enterprise-wide infrastructure tailored to highly regulated data workloads. Borrowell, the country’s leading financial marketplace and credit education company, is one of Equifax Canada’s largest data contributors and partners.

BingX Launches Innovative Blue Chip NFT Investing Through Crowdfunding

BingX, the world's leading social trading platform, is excited to launch its inaugural NFT crowdfunding project. This project enables our users to participate and own a fragment of blue-chip NFT through the power of the community. The NFT crowdfunding project which supports USDT/ETH pairings will be launched on the 29th of April, 2022, lasting for 14 days. During which, the NFT will be divided into multiple shards and users can choose to subscribe for a certain number of shards.

Australia’s Hay Group Launches Shaype

Australia’s Hay Group is launching Shaype to redefine what is possible in financial  innovation, fintech and embedded financial experiences. Since launching the Hay as a Service (HaaS) offering in 2020, the team and the  platform’s capabilities have grown and evolved reflecting the strong demand from  clients for better financial innovation solutions. The key attributes delivered to clients include project acceleration and derisking  technology execution for start-ups as well as established suppliers who can use  the powerful and flexible platform to bring new products to market.  

Merger & Acquisition

Sabanci Acquires OT Security Vendor Radiflow

Radiflow, an Israeli OT cybersecurity startup, announced that it is being acquired in a two-phase process by Sabanci Group, market leaders in the financial services, energy, and industrial sectors. The initial phase entails a $45  million primary and secondary investment in several installments to reach a majority stake in Radiflow. In the second phase, Sabanci intends to acquire a 100% stake in Radiflow by 2025. A recent increase in demand for comprehensive OT cybersecurity solutions has allowed for Radiflow to rapidly expand across the US and Europe, doubling its sales in 2021.

MyComplianceOffice Announces Close of Schwab Compliance Technologies Acquisition

MCO (MyComplianceOffice), a global provider of conduct risk and compliance technology, announced that the company has finalized its acquisition of Schwab Compliance Technologies (SCT), a solution that automates monitoring employee trading activity and administering a firm's Code of Ethics. The closing of the deal marks a meaningful step toward the company’s expansion and position as a leading authority on conduct risk and compliance technology.

Job Moves

Paul Stoddard Joins GoCardless as President

GoCardless has appointed Paul Stoddard, a former Mastercard executive, as president. Stoddart is an accomplished individual. He became president of Mastercard's New Payment Platforms following the acquisition of Vocalink, where he built and grew a business unit focused on expanding the card scheme's position in payments beyond cards to account-to-account payments. He previously co-led Barclaycard's Corporate Finance division. He worked for NatWest for ten years, most recently in their merchant acquisition and e-commerce division, Worldpay.

David Lambert Appointed CEO of Transact365

Transact365, a UK-based global payments platform powering merchants in emerging markets, has appointedDavid Lambert as its new CEO. An original co-founder and former Commercial Director at Transact365, Lambert will oversee the fintech’s expanding merchant customer base and card schemes. He will also work closely with the rest of the senior management team to expand the business into new markets and take advantage of new opportunities in the fast-evolving payments landscape.

Paycast Appoints Katrina Gordon as Head of Customer Success

Paycast, the marketplace payment engine and second venture of UK based fintech group SPG, has announced the appointment of Katrina Gordon as Head of Customer Success. The addition of Katrina to the Paycast team further develops the company’s focus on delivering the best outcomes for customers as part of its overarching customer-first strategy. In her role, Katrina will work with Paycast’s growing customer base to ensure they are receiving the delivery functions and support they need to achieve their business priorities, as well as developing the Paycast offering in line with customer desires.

Industry Veteran Pete Daffern Appointed Non-Executive Company Chair at Xceptor

Xceptor, the financial sector’s leading no-code software platform for data automation, announced the appointment of Pete Daffern as Non-Executive Company Chair. Pete brings over 30 years’ experience within the technology sector, having successfully grown numerous software businesses, including the creation of three companies which achieved market capitalisations of over $10BN. Pete was most recently CEO at Foresee, and prior to that President of Netsuite. Pete has operated at board level within multiple private equity and VC backed businesses.

Payabl. Appoints European Payment Expert as Chief Product Officer

Payabl., the European payments expert that enables businesses to take payments easily, reliably and securely, announces it has appointed Igor Skachkov as its new Chief Product Officer. Having worked within the payments industry for over 12 years, including at Klarna and Visa, Igor is experienced in card acquiring and issuing, Buy Now Pay Later, e-wallets, subscriptions and tokenized payments. With payabl.’s bold ambition to help merchants grow through innovative payments, Igor has been appointed to drive the company’s next phase of product development.

Paylink Solutions Team Expands with Two Senior Appointments

Fintech Paylink Solutions has expanded its senior team by a new head of operations and head of information security. Joe Clarke is now Head of Operations and is responsible for overseeing Paylink’s operations and IT services, managing key projects and delivering the performance management framework and new graduate scheme. Becky McClory has also been welcomed to Paylink as Head of Information Security and is now responsible for implementing, designing, managing and allocating all technology security measures across the business.

Wahed’s Female Leadership Expands as Juliana Abu Bakar Joins as Country Head of Wahed Malaysia

Wahed, a global fintech company that provides an efficient, reliable, and accessible way to invest, announcedthe appointment of Juliana Abu Bakar as Country Head of Wahed Technologies Sdn. Bhd. (Wahed Malaysia). Her responsibilities will include managing local offerings, implementing growth strategies and spearheading marketing and business development functions in Malaysia. Juliana Abu Bakar will be replacing Syakir Hashim - who has captained Wahed Malaysia from its inception. Syakir will be joining Wahed’s group management as its Senior Vice President of Business Operations.

Payer Announces New Chairman of the Board

Payer announced that Dominik Belloin, one of its board members, has been appointed as the new Chairman of the Board. Dominik Belloin succeeds Annika Javestad, who served in the role during the development phase. The appointment now awaits the approval of the FSA. Payer is a Swedish B2B payments company serving the European market. It provides end-to-end payment solutions for enterprise companies within verticals such as Industry, Bank & Finance and Digital Commerce.