Partnerships 

Bitfinex Collaborates with OpenPayd to enable SEPA Payments

Bitfinex, a state-of-the-art digital token trading platform, in collaboration with fiat on-ramp services provider OpenPayd, is enabling real-time Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) payments for euro-denominated deposits and withdrawals. The introduction of SEPA payments provides additional options for Bitfinex customers to deploy euros onto the platform. Through the new collaboration, customers will have the ability to pay in and pay out from their accounts near instantly.

HCL Technologies Expands Global Partnership with Avaloq to Accelerate Innovation in Digital Wealth Management

HCL Technologies (HCL), a leading global technology company, has expanded its global partnership with Avaloq, a leading provider of digital banking solutions. HCL will now develop a world-class lifecycle management center for Avaloq clients and invest in ongoing training and development for HCL teams working with Avaloq products. These investments will combine HCL’s deep domain knowledge in financial services with Avaloq’s expertise in digital wealth management technology, to accelerate innovation across the industry.

EBANX and VTEX Announce New Partnership for Cross-border Payments Collaboration in Latin America

EBANX, a payments fintech with a global presence, and VTEX, a digital commerce platform for large companies and retailers, announced an unprecedented partnership aimed at broadening cross-border payments for Brazilian e-commerce companies in Latin America. Through this union, Brazilian companies will be able to enjoy more than 100 payment methods in 15 countries across Latin America. According to the Beyond Borders study, in 2021, 68 percent of Latin American consumers were already e-commerce users – a rate well above the 45 percent in pre-pandemic years. As a result, it is estimated that in the last two years more than 150 million Latin Americans have purchased online for the first time.

Douugh Partners with Pinwheel for Automated Direct Deposit Switching in the US

Douugh Ltd, the banking ‘super app’ on a mission to help customers budget, save and invest their money to live financially healthier lives, announced a partnership with Pinwheel to facilitate automatic direct deposit switching for its US customers. Douugh’s customers are currently limited to manual direct deposit switching, a solution that has a lot of friction. Working with Pinwheel increases Douugh’s chances of becoming the primary bank account for many of its customers. It’s a big opportunity, considering 21% of consumers1 have their primary bank account in a neobank which is expected to increase to above 45% in the next two years.

ABN AMRO Bank Signs to Extend Partnership on the Temenos Banking Cloud

Dutch bank accelerates the pace of innovation and speed of software delivery with Continuous Deployment on the Temenos Banking Cloud. Dutch banking giant ABN AMRO Bank has signed a multi-year subscription extension with Temenos to support customer growth and business expansion on the Temenos Banking Cloud. The extended agreement includes access to Temenos Continuous Deployment as-a-service for the bank’s 22 DevOps teams. ABN AMRO Bank is a long-standing customer of Temenos, running its international corporate banking, private banking, and global international payment on Temenos open platform.

GO Partners With Scienaptic AI To Revolutionize Automotive Screening For Millions

Scienaptic AI, a leading global AI-powered credit decision platform provider, announced that GO, a first-of-its-kind car subscription, has partnered with the company to provide enhanced and faster decisions to its customers. In partnering, GO looks to increase the availability of its offering using transformative technology in its screening and decisioning process. GO provides consumers a cheaper and easier way to get their daily driver. GO thrives where other car subscriptions failed: Price. Through a complete reimagining of the car subscription model, GO saves customers around 20-30% per month compared to traditional car ownership.

nextmarkets Partners with Nuvei to Expand Internationally

Nuvei Corporation (“Nuvei” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: NVEI) (TSX: NVEI), the global payment technology partner of thriving brands, announces its partnership with nextmarkets, one of Europe’s most innovative commission-free online brokers. Through its proprietary payment platform, Nuvei will help solidify nextmarkets’ capabilities in the markets they already operate in, as well as power their expansion outside of Europe, as they continue to democratize the trading experience for people around the world.

Finaro and Payrexx Bring Samsung Pay to Switzerland with New Partnership

Finaro, global cross-border payment provider and fully licensed bank empowering international commerce through brilliantly simple payments, has announced a dynamic new partnership with Payrexx, the Swiss-based all-in-one cloud-based payment solution provider, to launch Samsung Pay for merchants in Switzerland. This ground-breaking move makes Finaro and Payrexx the largest companies to offer Samsung Pay in Switzerland, demonstrating the increasing importance of mobile commerce accessibility and cross-border ecommerce.

Launches 

Quontic Bank Launches First Ever Payments Ring in the United States

Quontic Bank announced that it has introduced the first-ever tap-to-pay mobile payment ring to the U.S. market. Quontic is an innovative, digital-first, and customer-centric bank on a mission to redefine how a bank and its customers conduct business. Customers are able to link the ring to one of Quontic's three market-leading checking accounts: High-Interest Checking, which can earn up to 1.01% APY; Bitcoin Rewards Checking, which earns 1.5% Bitcoin on all eligible purchases, and Cash Rewards Checking, which earns 1.5% cash back on all eligible purchases.

Surecomp Introduces Duplicate Financing Fraud Prevention as Industry Utility

Surecomp announced it is providing a new solution based on advanced cryptographic technology allowing financial institutions to mitigate the risk of duplicate financing fraud. The solution provides an effective invoice comparison process to identify whether finance has already been requested or whether there is any suspicious activity detected against a specific invoice, all while ensuring that no confidential information ever leaves the bank.

CrossTower Introduces Perpetual Futures Trading

CrossTower Inc., one of the world's fastest and leading crypto and digital asset exchanges, announced the launch of perpetual futures trading, now available on CrossTower’s Bermuda digital exchange. Perpetual futures are derivatives contracts that, unlike traditional futures contracts, are not limited to a predetermined expiration date. The product provides an opportunity for CrossTower’s growing customer base to take long and/or short positions, consistent with their portfolio and risk objectives.   

Bitget Launches Automated Bot Trading For Its Users

The automated bots technology is provided by Novum Global Ventures, the company behind CryptoHero, an award-winning crypto trading bot platform. CryptoHero provides various trading strategies through a simplified user-interface, while its Bots Marketplace also allows new users to familiarise with automated trading by using proven crypto bots created by experienced traders.Bitget is the chosen platform when it comes to derivatives trading, for more than two million crypto traders across 50 countries. As Bitget continues to grow its global footprint, increasing efforts are made to further improve its service offerings and provide a wide variety of trading solutions for its growing community.

Reassured Launches Digital Platform

The UK’s largest insurance broker, Reassured, has launched its new digital platform, offering customers the opportunity to directly purchase life insurance online, providing quick and easy access to financial protection.Along with Reassured Advice Limited, launched in 2021, this means that Reassured can now offer the full breadth of purchase routes for those seeking Protection, making the firm truly omnichannel. The digital proposition, launched in collaboration with established technology firm The IDOL, currently boasts six major insurers: Legal & General, Aviva, LV=, Zurich, AIG Life and Vitality Life and offers a genuine “buy now” process, based on a single underwriting question set and is fully customisable for use by partner firms on a white label basis.

Saving and Investing App Chip Adds Two New Investment Funds, Introduces Product-to-product Transfers, and Launches Auto-investing

Chip, on a mission to become the saving and investing super app, has added two new funds to its investment platform and introduced new features aimed at making investing simple. The app, which has saved its 500,000 users nearly £900 million to date, has added FTSE 100 Index Fund and S&P 500 Tech Fund to its existing roster of funds. The FTSE 100 Index fund allows users to invest in 100 of the largest companies in the UK, like Rolls Royce, Sainsbury’s and Vodafone, whereas the S&P 500 Tech Fund tracks big US tech companies from the S&P 500 index, like Microsoft, Apple, and Tesla. The two new index funds are available on the free standard Chip plan, and users can open them with just £1.

Longstanding Xero Director Launches Libeo in the UK

After several successful years of operation in France and across mainland Europe, business-to-business (B2B) payments specialist Libeo has officially launched in the UK market. Libeo is a firm European leader in digitized payments and is now moving into a more mature market in the realm of digital transformation. With the leadership of newly appointed Glen Foster, Managing Director for the UK and Northern Europe, the move will be powered by Libeo’s competitive advantage and its innovative differentiating features.

Sweatcoin to Launch SWEAT: the Token to Convert Physical Movement into Crypto

Sweatcoin, the London-based tech company on a mission to inspire a healthier planet by motivating people to move more, will announce the imminent launch of SWEAT: the Token at the Paris Blockchain Week Summit tomorrow. Sweatcoin’s ongoing mission is to launch a global currency based on the value of steps and movement. The 63+ million Sweatcoin users, who’ve walked over 20 trillion steps together, will have the opportunity to have their in-app sweatcoins matched 1:1 with SWEAT tokens at a token generation event (TGE) timed for this summer. This will be one of the biggest onboarding of people into crypto in history.

Alpha Fintech by PPRO Announces Launch of Fi911’s Intelligent SaaS Dispute Processing for Financial Institutions in Asia Pacific

Fi911, the leading dispute specialists and sister brand of Chargebacks911, and Alpha Fintech, a fintech pioneer aiming to evolve and simplify payments, announce their partnership. APAC regional acquirers and PSPs will be able to leverage the unrivaled Fi911 SaaS dispute management platform (“DisputeLab”), delivering turnkey intelligent automation and end-to-end processing. Global-branded cards issued in the Asia-Pacific region are expected to generate more than 288 billion purchase transactions in 2025, compared to 196 billion in 2020.  However, with rapid growth comes new fraud threats. The new partnership will enable Alpha Fintech to extend a fully managed software service, delivering much-needed scale and scope.

Mercuryo Launches Open Banking Payment Options, in Partnership With Volt

Mercuryo, a leading crypto payments company, has launched open banking payments within their cryptocurrency wallet, used by over two million global customers. The real-time account-to-account payments (A2A) will be facilitated by leading open payments gateway Volt and will provide Mercuryo wallet users, alongside their business partners, with single-click payment solutions via fiat. The partnership signifies another milestone use case for open banking payments, but also serves as a reminder of the growing demand and mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies worldwide, with Mercuryo becoming one of the first crypto-powered companies to incorporate open banking payments for consumers and businesses inside and outside of Europe.

Xignite Launches New ESG API For Digital Investments Platforms

Xignite, Inc., the leading provider of market data APIs to brokers and wealth managers, announced the launch of a new Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) data API in partnership with ESG Book, a global leader in ESG data and technology. Xignite’s brokerage, wealth, and media customers can now increase user engagement and retention with state-of-the-art sustainability trading products. As ESG investment has gone mainstream, today’s digital investors, institutional investors, and corporations alike require ESG data to help them answer questions that range from a company’s workforce diversity to its commitment to a net zero future.

Kippa Launches New Digital Payments Product for SMEs in Africa

Kippa, the fast-growing fintech start-up offering digital business and financial management solutions for SMEs in Africa, announces the launch of its second product, ‘Kippa Payments’, a digital payments solution enabling users to send and receive payments from customers and perform extended payments transactions automatically. Kippa Payments, which will be available to access within the existing Kippa app, is the second product launched by the firm since it was founded less than a year ago in June 2021.

Merger & Acquisition

Laiye Acquires Mindsay to Lead the Market Shift to Intelligent Automation

Global Intelligent Automation leader Laiye announced its acquisition of Mindsay, a leading European enterprise chatbot and voicebot platform. The addition of conversational artificial intelligence advances Laiye’s goal of becoming the leading provider of next-generation Intelligent Automation software worldwide. Laiye also plans to set up a new R&D hub in Paris. The Intelligent Automation market is burgeoning with Gartner predicting process-agnostic software tools such as RPA, AI, IDP, Chatbots and Process Mining supporting this market to hit nearly $46 billion by 2025.

Job Moves

Jumio Announces Industry Veteran Stuart Wells as Chief Technology Officer, Unveils New Jumio Innovation Lab

Jumio, the leading provider of orchestrated end-to-end identity proofing, eKYC and AML solutions, announcedthe appointment of Stuart Wells as the company’s new chief technology officer. In addition, Jumio unveiled its new Innovation Lab in San Diego. Wells joins Jumio’s executive team after nearly a decade at FICO, where he served as executive vice president and chief product & technology officer. He brings decades of technical leadership experience from leading companies in Silicon Valley such as Avaya, where he served as senior vice president and president of global communications solutions, and Sun Microsystems, where he served as executive vice president.

Muse Finance Appoints New CTO to Scale its Technology and the Business

Muse Finance - the business finance start-up - has hired Tarek AbdelKader as its Chief Technology Officer. As part of its ongoing strategic plans to scale in 2022, AbdelKader joins the fold as a seasoned CTO with previous experience at financial firms including The Co-Operative Bank and Think Money Group, plus software providers Blinx Solutions & Meta Software. Most notably, AbdelKader was critical in facilitating technology improvements for The Co-operative Financial Services, amounting to savings of £1 million per annum across approximately 10,000 loan settlement applications. 

NTT DATA UK Appoints Evelyn Healy as VP of Human Resources

NTT DATA UK, a leading global IT services provider, has announced that it has appointed Evelyn Healy as Vice President of Human Resources. Heading up the HR function across the UK, Healy will focus on creating a people-centered approach within the business while building and delivering organizational capability. Alongside this, Healy will also continue to drive forward NTT DATA’s commitment to diversity and inclusion following its recent recognition as a Financial Times Diversity Leader.

Greville Lucking Appointed CEO at AxeTrading

AxeTrading, the fixed income trading software company, announced the appointment of Greville Lucking as their new Chief Executive Officer. Greville has been with the firm since 2018 in the role of Head of Customer Support & Integration. Greville is an experienced business leader within the fixed income technology sector, having been the Chief Operating Officer of EMBonds until their acquisition by BGC Partners. He has previously held senior roles at Formicary and prior to that was with WestLB.

BVNK Appoints Maximilian von Both as Chief Legal, Risk and Compliance Officer

BVNK, the crypto-powered business banking and payments platform, announces the appointment of Maximilian von Both as Chief Legal, Risk and Compliance Officer as it looks to acquire the licences in the UK, Europe and other jurisdictions around the world that will enable it to operate as a fully-regulated banking and payments services provider. The BVNK business account enables customers to seamlessly bridge between fiat and cryptocurrencies to manage payments, international settlement, trading and custody requirements.

GreenBox POS Appoints Securities and Transactional Attorney Adele Hogan to Board of Directors

GreenBox POS ("GreenBox" or the "Company"), an emerging and rapidly growing Fintech company announced the appointment of Adele Hogan, a seasoned transactional lawyer, to its Board of Directors. Hogan will replace Carl Williams who is transitioning away from his Director role. Adele Hogan has over 30 years’ experience as a transactional lawyer with demonstrated leadership skills in over $200 billion of securities, mergers, contracts and deals closed. She is currently Partner and Co-Chair of the Corporate, Mergers & Securities Practice Group at Lucosky Brookman, leading mergers and capital markets transactions, including IPOs, SPACs, de-SPACs, corporate side of bankruptcies, securities, and derivatives.