By collaborating with Subsquid, peaq aims to transform the Web2-based Internet of Things (IoT) into the Web3 Economy of Things, giving people real, trustless ownership over machines and the machine economy.

peaq, the decentralized Web3 network powering the Economy of Things (EoT), has announced a partnership with Subsquid, a blockchain data processing solution that empowers Web3 builders and analysts with its development framework for robust, natively multichain APIs. Through the partnership, peaq and Subsquid are building upon their shared vision to offer better infrastructure for a decentralized future. 

Leonard Dorlöchter, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at peaq, commented: “Having on-chain data easily and quickly accessible to builders of decentralized applications is essential for peaq's mission to provide the best possible Web3 infrastructure for the Machine Economy. Thanks to its highly efficient indexing system, Subsquid enables that and is thus an essential building block for developing, deploying, and maintaining highly user-friendly applications on the peaq network.”

By leveraging Subsquid’s data processing solutions and capabilities to advance its blockchain network, peaq steps closer to achieving its vision of building the foundations for the machine economy. Building upon the concept of Web2’s IoT to create the EoT for Web3, peaq offers a purpose-built blockchain network that will enable anybody to own a stake in the machine economy and profit from it. This means that as our relationship with machines advances, with robots, autonomous vehicles and other devices taking on an increasing number of tasks traditionally performed by humans; anybody will be able to benefit and generate income from machines.

peaq is making it easier, faster, and more resource-efficient for builders of the machine economy to develop, deploy and maintain user-friendly decentralized applications for machines. Playing a significant role in this innovation, Subsquid has published documentation that can support developers building on peaq’s Substrate-based blockchain network, to ensure they are up to speed with the Subsquid development framework for backend infrastructure. 

Subsquid, which strives to be the data backbone of the blockchain world, has long been inspired by peaq’s vision to build the EoT. In a future where humans can have real, trustless ownership over machines and technological devices, a great deal of on-chain data will need to be handled quickly and efficiently. Subsquid will work to ensure that dApp development and data analytics on peaq’s unique blockchain environment isn’t just possible, but that it is also easy. 

Dmitry Zhelezov, CEO and Co-founder of Subsquid, said: “Connected devices are already a constant presence in our daily lives. As we transition globally to Web3, it is essential that we take these things with us. The peaq team is doing amazing work finding ways to bring together technologies like NFTs, decentralized identities, and DeFi to accelerate a robust, censorship-resistant Economy of Things. We’re absolutely thrilled to be providing data infrastructure to this growing ecosystem.” 

Figures published by the AIC today show that the amount of money invested into VCTs for the 2021/22 tax year has broken through £1 billion for the first time, raising £1.13 billion. That’s 65% more than in 2020/21, and 45% more than 2005/06, previously the biggest fundraising year on record. 

VCTs are one of the best ways investors can get exposure to the UK’s increasing number of privately owned high-growth companies. To receive VCT funding a company must be young, usually less than seven years old, typically have gross assets of £15 million or less, and fewer than 250 full-time employees. Investors are typically wealthier individuals, who are able to claim back  tax relief in order to offset the higher risks of investing in younger businesses. 

Alex Davies, CEO and Founder of Wealth Club said: “While the last two years have been incredibly challenging for many businesses, VCTs have been a shining light – enabling young companies to access the funds they need to flourish and grow, creating new jobs and strengthening economic growth.

Having crossed the £1 billion mark VCTs have finally edged into the mainstream. Packed with some of the fastest growing and most exciting early stage UK businesses they have become a viable alternative to pensions for the many wealthier investors now effectively frozen out of pensions thanks to restrictions brought in by successive governments during the last 12 years.”

Key VCT stats 

• The most popular offers filled well in advance of tax year end, with 13 of the year’s 27 offers fully subscribed by the end of March.
• This year’s biggest fundraise was £200 million (Octopus Titan VCT) – up from £120 million last year.
• The year set two records for fastest selling fundraises. First Amati AIM VCT took £8m per day in summer 2021, opening its offer on Friday 30 July and closing on Wednesday 4 Aug having raised £40 million. Then in January 2022, Mobeus VCTs filled their £35 million raise within 24 hours – the fastest fundraise by a wide margin.
• AIM VCTs were in particularly high demand during the year, with £170 million raised across four offers – 68% more than the previous year.
• Research by the AIC revealed that 88% of VCT investors said that it was important to them that VCTs help support the UK economy. 84% said that by using VCTs they’re helping UK entrepreneurs.
• The average VCT client is 58 years old, and the average amount invested into VCTs by women in the last tax year was £28,681 across an average of 2.4 VCTs and £42,457 for men across 3.1 VCTs.
• The average amount invested in to one VCT by Wealth Club clients is £13,000. 

CloudTrade, an Advanced company, the leading provider of e-invoicing and complex data capture services, is celebrating a significant milestone in its partnership with SAP Ariba. CloudTrade announces that £2.5bn worth of invoices have been processed via its platform since 2018, when the CloudTrade and SAP Ariba Standard PDF Invoice conversion application was released. 

CloudTrade was acquired by Advanced, the leading provider of business software and services, in October 2021 and continues to drive investment and grow its relationship with SAP Ariba. Advanced’s expanding portfolio of solutions across Finance and Spend Management positions it well to support its customers and partners like SAP Ariba, to overcome more and more of the business challenges they face.

Nathan Ollier, Vice President of ERP for Advanced, explains: “SAP Ariba offers the World’s supply chain the opportunity to trade fully electronically, helping businesses of all sizes to achieve digital transformation and optimal scalability. The size of Ariba Network is unparalleled and, thanks to CloudTrade’s suite of unique, proprietary e-invoicing solutions, the methods by which the buyers and suppliers can transact are massively enhanced, so much so that £2.5bn worth of invoices have now been processed via CloudTrade’s platform, since the solution was launched on Ariba Network in 2018.”

Today CloudTrade offers a suite of solutions, available via the SAP® App Centre independently or as a solution suite. Those tools provide Ariba users with a single, affordable solution for the automation of all their inbound invoices, including PDF’s and images, low and high volume. CloudTrade’s solutions include:

• CloudTrade’s PDF Invoicing for Ariba Network, which extends the reach of electronic invoicing and enables medium volume senders and upwards (suppliers that submit over 100+ invoices per annum) to transact digitally on Ariba Network. Removing the need for suppliers to do PO Flip or undertake lengthy technical setups or use error prone OCR.

• PDF Invoicing Customizations PDF Invoicing Customizations reads, converts, and enriches machine generated PDF data to a format required by both Ariba Network and the buyer’s finance application. This can include additional fields or validation needed by the buyer to allow them to upload the document and data to their downstream processes.

• CloudTrade’s Two-way PO match and invoice enrichment service allows a buyer’s PO data to be accessed via the SAP Ariba published Open PO API, so the suppliers invoice can be checked and verified against a PO and mandatory fields before creating an SAP Ariba compliant cXML file for automated downstream processing.

• CloudTrade’s Buyer ANID Email Insertion delivers a customized, unmonitored service to automatically populate the subject line of the email with the sender’s ANID number to speed up identification checks, without any system changes from either the sender or buyer.

• CloudTrade Invoice conversion Services (CICS) for OpenICS add-on enables SAP Ariba users to process image files, alongside data PDF’s and Word, XLS and XML format invoices using CloudTrade’s patented technology, without making any operational or technical changes. CICS also ensures any specific extraction requirements and validation rules are met before the invoice is uploaded to Ariba network.

New add-ons are also set to be launched later this year to further enhance CloudTrade’s existing PDF universal data capture and conversion solutions for senders and receivers of any application generated documents.

Ollier continues: “CloudTrade’s unique, patented technology enables Ariba users to move past their reliance on paper or labor-intensive manual processing, to transact digitally with their trading partners, irrespective of their size or technical maturity. CloudTrade is the only solution available to Ariba Network that can be tailored to a business’s specific requirements and can fully automate the processing of invoices on the network, while maintaining optimum levels of data quality.”

CloudTrade’s rapid invoice automation enables submission and receipt of invoices from supplier to buyer with ease. A supplier simply emails or uploads the invoice (as produced from their billing system as standard) and it is converted to an Ariba Network compliant invoice for automated processing.

Nathan Ollier concludes: “We are immensely proud of our ongoing partnership with SAP Ariba, who CloudTrade have been working with since 2018, and the assistance the team have brought to Ariba Network during that time. CloudTrade has built an integrated, cloud-based service which offers an additional channel for users to automate their P2P processes, relieving many of the labor-intensive processes involved in running a modern business, including the error-prone re-keying of invoices, without sacrificing data completeness or accuracy. The team and I look forward to enabling more of the network to transact digitally and reap the rewards of automating their back-office functions.”

Over 850+ customers globally around the world trust CloudTrade with $20bn worth of documents as their application generated document automation tool, alongside over 50 partners. Founded in 2010 to offer a fresh approach to electronic document processing. CloudTrade forms an integral part of several global business service provider’s solutions.

Ontario launch marks the next step for payment experts after successful US expansion.

PXP Financial Inc., the US subsidiary of PXP Financial Ltd., an expert in global acquiring, payment, fraud and data analysis services, has today announced its arrival in Canada.

Ontario is the next key territory for sports betting since New Jersey became one of the first states to legalise sports betting and online wagering after a 2018 Supreme Court decision. As the largest populated province in Canada, representing 40% of the population, it is the ideal base from which PXP Financial can help shape the future of online gaming in the country.

PXP Financial is supporting sports betting and gaming entertainment companies with its expansion plans by providing a state-of-the-art, all-in-one, full-service gateway solution and service with a single API integration that connects all alternative payment and card solutions across multiple US states, and now into Canada.

This makes managing the payment process across multiple territories simpler while rolling out, as there is no need for multiple integrations.

Commenting on the announcement, Kamran Hedjri, CEO at PXP Financial says: “After our success launching across the USA, Canada seems like the next natural step for our continued growth. Sports betting in Canada is expected to increase by billions in the next five years and our launch into Ontario is set to be the blueprint for a new online gaming framework, which will set the trend for overall gaming regulation in Canada.”

The announcement comes as the government of Ontario officially launched its new online gaming market, including online casinos and esports betting sites, on 4 April. iGaming Ontario (IGO), a subsidiary of the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario (AGCO), introduces new standards for gaming operators. Ontario is the first province in Canada to permit private companies to operate in online gaming. The provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan are also taking some steps to open up the market to private sector businesses.

To find out more about the PXP Financial family of companies please visit: pxpfinancial.com

·         Recharge’s APIs will enable the integration of subscription management and recurring payments into platforms such as Magento, WooCommerce and standalone webshops

·         The solution is available across all European markets Mollie services (EEA, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom)

Mollie, one of the fastest-growing payment service providers in Europe, today announced its partnership with leading subscription management solution, Recharge, to offer an API-first, end-to-end subscription solution that provides unprecedented support for recurring payments and subscription management. The partnership provides cutting-edge innovation to subscription-based ecommerce businesses and is now available across all markets that Mollie services.

Recharge’s API enables the integration of recurring payments into standalone webshops, and platforms such as Magento, WooCommerce, and additional ecommerce platforms to come. Merchants will be able to customise and quickly incorporate a subscription program, including options of adding one-time products, managing recurring purchases, skipping deliveries, or swapping product capabilities. Users can also automatically retry payments if they fail to be processed and leverage the Recharge interface to automate smart dunning and winback workflows.

As well as providing unparalleled support directly to merchants, the integration helps create a better subscription experience for customers. Customers are able to manage their subscriptions via a personalised subscription management portal. Merchants can send personalised notifications to keep consumers in control and informed, and have access to real-time analytics with insights into revenue, customers, and subscriptions to better understand and meet customer needs.

Ken Serdons, Chief Commercial Officer at Mollie, said, “We’re really excited to be able to offer merchants the opportunity to easily implement fully-powered subscriptions with Recharge. Seamless, effortless payments brought to recurring ecommerce means an increase in lifetime value and average order value, and at a time of unprecedented ecommerce growth and ambition, we’re able to meet and surpass customer expectations.”

“What we’re seeing is a continued momentum towards modular commerce,” said Oisin O’Connor, CEO and Co-Founder at Recharge. “Partnering with Mollie allows us to continue meeting ecommerce businesses where they are and provide the most seamless way for them to have a recurring payments and subscription management solution, all in one place.”

For more information, or to sign up for this service, please see here.

• The London-based event will welcome 150 guests including funds, businesses and delegates from the crypto and traditional markets

BEQUANT, the digital asset prime brokerage and exchange, is pleased to announce it is hosting a market-first crypto capital introduction forum in London on the 26 April 2022. 

The forum will bring together a selection of professional fund managers operating across multiple strategies, including Market Neutral Digital Currency Arbitrage, DEFI Market Neutral Yield Farming and Volatility & Skew Arbitrage. 

The crypto market has grown from a value of $767bn to $2.22tr from the start of 2021 to the end of the year as more businesses look to raise capital to establish themselves in this burgeoning market, many are struggling to find the right sources of capital for them. BEQUANT is launching its inaugural capital introduction forum to help these businesses and investors find their next partners.

Delegates can register their interest and join a selected group of fund managers and investors for an afternoon of networking, problem-solving and learning with a packed agenda. 

The agenda will include presentations from each of the funds, panel discussions, a fireside conversation and a presentation from BEQUANT CEO George Zarya on BEQUANT’s prime brokerage platform, BEQUANT Pro.

George Zarya, Founder and CEO, BEQUANT, commented “The crypto market has grown exponentially over the last three years and we are thrilled to be able to facilitate the first capital introduction forum to aid further growth of the digital asset space.”

“These types of events have been common in the traditional finance space and we feel now is the perfect time to help growing businesses connect with our prime brokerage clients to help realize their funding strategies in the crypto space. We look forward to welcoming everyone to the event on 26 April.”

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW), owner and operator of Westfield shopping centres across the US, the UK and Continental Europe, has today announced the expansion of its international brand partnership with Clearpay, a leader in “Buy Now, Pay Later” payments. 

Clearpay will become URW’s “Buy Now, Pay Later” brand partner with a programme of consumer advertising and experiential activity at the brand’s London flagship centres, Westfield London and Westfield Stratford.   

Since July 2021, URW and Clearpay, under Clearplay’s U.S. brand Afterpay, have jointly invested in successful new technology-driven customer experiences, retail innovation, events, experiential media, and on-premise advertising in the U.S. 

Grace Charge, Head of Brand Experience and Partnerships, Europe at Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield said: “We are delighted to welcome Clearpay to Westfield London and Westfield Stratford City bringing a new way to shop in store to many retailers whilst offering customers increased choice and flexibility in how they shop. Through our international partnership, Clearpay will now be able to engage with almost half a billion Westfield customers across our network of centres in the US and UK, combined. We look forward to developing more innovative and exciting experiential activity with Clearpay in the UK and beyond.” 

Rich Bayer, UK Country Manager, Clearpay, said: “Our flexible pay-in-four solution saved our customers up to £28 million in credit card fees last year in the UK alone and drove £739 million in incremental sales for UK merchants. By extending our partnership with URW to the UK, we are giving consumers the ability to spend responsibly  via our flexible payment option, while also supporting brands to drive incremental sales across URW’s portfolio of centres.” 

The UK element of the partnership recently launched with in-centre advertising and will be followed by key campaigns including activations during upcoming London Fashion Week events, of which Clearpay is Principal Partner.

In the US, Westfield and Afterpay have partnered to drive foot-traffic into merchant doors with custom campaigns including an augmented reality scavenger hunt, and ShopsLA, a consumer and merchant partner experience at Westfield Century City during New York Fashion Week.

BlueSnap now offers three products to allow flexibility and speed to market for software platforms looking to drive new revenue while enhancing user experience in global markets. 

BlueSnap, a global payment orchestration platform committed to helping B2B and B2C businesses accept and optimize payments around the world, has launched its Embedded Payments and Payfac-as-a-Service offering for software platforms looking to scale their customer base globally. 

BlueSnap has been helping software platforms monetise their payments for several years with their Integrated Payments for Platforms. The new Embedded Payments and Payfac-as-a-Service suite expands and innovates on this to include three new products: BlueSnap Dash™, BlueSnap Relay™ and BlueSnap Flex™. These solutions are designed to help software platforms drive revenue growth, enhance the user experience, and increase product retention.

BlueSnap developed these products to give software companies the flexibility to choose which model of embedded payments suits their specific needs. BlueSnap is one of very few providers worldwide to support the global payment facilitation model. 

Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap, said: “The traditional development cycle for payments processing infrastructure and global licensing takes up to three years in-house. This extended time to market puts software companies at risk of falling behind competitors and losing traction with customers. BlueSnap is on a mission to help empower platforms to reach customers globally and profit from a key, but often overlooked, part of the customer journey - payments.

That’s why we’ve developed three tailored solutions for businesses so that they can crawl, walk, or run on their journey to become payment facilitators - choosing the best option for their growth cycle and the unique needs of their company.”

• BlueSnap Dash™ : The fastest speed-to-market offering, this is BlueSnap’s hosted turnkey solution.  

• BlueSnap Relay™: The quick-to-market, white-label Payfac-as-a-Service offering shields businesses from risk while simultaneously letting them brand it their way. 

• BlueSnap Flex™:  The branded Payfac-as-a-Service solution that leverages BlueSnap’s APIs while giving software platforms complete control. 

The expansion comes amid growing demand for embedded payments among software firms worldwide, with the industry set to grow by over 40% to reach $124 billion in 2022. 

According to BlueSnap research, over 2 in 5 tech leaders are now considering becoming payment facilitators. And the vast majority (88%) would opt to embed third-party technology into their platform instead of building a payment facilitation solution from the ground up. 

BlueSnap’s Embedded Payments and Payfac-as-a-Service solutions enable companies to build and implement their own branded payment experiences globally, which can increase revenue for their business through payment monetisation. Software platforms leveraging BlueSnap’s Embedded Payments and Payfac-as-a-Service solutions are able to build more meaningful revenue streams because of the ability to profit from payments revenue as well as increase customer retention. According to research from JPMorgan., software platforms can see a two to five time increase in revenue per customer using embedded payments.

This means that any Independent Software Vendor (ISV) can become a payment facilitator without wasting time, money, and resources building a solution from scratch. It also significantly reduces the risk for software platforms by alleviating the responsibility of meeting and tracking complex regulatory guidelines and compliance rules.

BlueSnap’s Embedded Payments and Payfac-as-a-Service is part of their All-in-One Payment Orchestration Platform which helps businesses accept payments globally..  The platform provides a comprehensive back-end solutions that simplifies the complexity of payments, managing the full process from start to finish. With one integration and contract, businesses can sell in over 200 regions with access to local card acquiring in 47 countries, 100+ currencies and 100+ global payment types, including popular eWallets, automated accounts receivable, world-class fraud protection and chargeback management, built-in solutions for regulation and tax compliance, and unified global reporting.

To learn more about BlueSnap’s Embedded Payments and Payfac-as-a-Service solutions, please visit https://bit.ly/3ttuLRK 

The FCA has released a new report unveiling their strategy for the next three years, from 2022 to 2025. The Strategy contains a number of commitments and plans to mitigate fraud, market abuse, money laundering, sanction evasion and terrorist financing.

Notably, the FCA committed to being more proactive with their supervision, and will continue to closely scrutinise firms at the authorisation gateway so that they meet the correct standards before allowed to proceed further. It will also continue to monitor social media for suspicious advertising which may indicate fraud, and continue its work to take down illegal advertising.

The FCA also recognised the role of cryptocurrency to money laundering in the UK, and stated that it will supervise cryptoasset firm compliance with Money Laundering Regulations, and intervene where cryptoasset firms are at risk of being used as conduits for illegal activity, or where firms pose harm to consumers or market integrity.

Furthermore, the FCA revealed that it is increasingly ‘data-led’, particularly when it comes to systems and controls, and are therefore able to detect financial crime faster, disrupt and pursue firms and individuals, and remove FCA regulated fraudsters from the financial system more effectively.

They will also continue to prosecute money laundering and fraud where possible, and work closely with its partners to drive a system-wide response to stopping and preventing financial crime.

Speaking on this new commitment, regulation industry expert, Dr. Henry Balani, Global Head of Industry & Regulatory Affairs for Encompass Corporation, comments:

“Financial crime in the UK is surging exponentially. Whilst it’s positive to see the FCA ramping up the pressure against money launderers and fraudsters, there is no doubt that more must be done to put a significant dent in the dirty money that is channelled through the UK.

“The regulatory landscape is constantly evolving, with sanctions against Russian assets being the latest issue that banks must address. Tackling financial crime requires a concerted effort from all factions in the system - from the regulator to the business, firm or individual.

“To ensure AML and KYC processes are robust, and they can respond to regulatory changes quickly and efficiently, firms should look to the sophisticated technology at their disposal as a matter of priority. RegTech will continue to play a key role the fight against financial crime and its benefits are becoming increasingly clear."

For more information, read the full strategy report here: https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/corporate/our-strategy-2022-25.pdf