Paysafe, a leading payments platform, announces the extension of its collaboration with Visa, a world leader in digital payments, to integrate Visa Network Tokens, as an alternative to primary credit and debit card account numbers. The new valued added Network Tokenisation Service adds an additional layer of protection for cardholders without impeding the user journey, resulting in a seamless payments experience and higher authorization rates.

Visa Network Tokens update expired card numbers in real-time, eliminating unnecessary declines and ensuring recurring payment subscriptions remain uninterrupted. These Visa-generated network tokens are securely transmitted and stored by Paysafe in lieu of card PANs, reducing the risk of fraudulent activities due to data breaches or man in the middle attacks.

The integration allows merchants to access the Visa Network Tokenisation Service through Paysafe’s Single Payments API, providing enhanced security when conducting customer-initiated payments, merchant-initiated payments, refunds, original credit transfers, and standalone credit transfers within Europe.

Daniel Fagan, SVP Product, Merchant Solutions, at Paysafe, commented: “As eCommerce continues to grow and transactions increasingly take place online, offering consumers a smooth and secure payment experience is key to customer retention. We are proud to work with Visa to provide this value-added network tokenization service to our merchants, integrating an extra layer of protection for their customers and significantly enhancing their payment journey.”

Mehret Habteab, SVP Product & Solutions Europe at Visa added: “Visa Network Tokens help deliver a compelling digital payments experience that can help reduce fraud and increase authorisation rates by 5%. We are excited to collaborate with Paysafe in Europe, to allow people and businesses to benefit from this easier and more secure way to pay.”

Cardlytics, an advertising platform in banks’ digital channels, has today announced it has partnered with Monzo to deliver targeted promotions and cashback rewards to its over 8 million customers across the UK. 

The partnership will enable Monzo - the UK’s fastest-growing digital bank - to deliver cashback rewards for customers with daily targeting based on consumer spending and location, ensuring clear personalization to drive value for customers and sales for brands. 

Monzo will be the first bank globally to deploy Cardlytics’ new cloud-based platform, hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which provides a slick user experience for the bank, as well as delivering cashback notifications to consumers in real-time as they spend.  

Cardlytics will join the Monzo cashback rewards programme in early 2024. 

“We’re thrilled to announce our partnership with Monzo, providing cashback rewards to its customers at a time where all spending is more heavily scrutinized,” Campbell Shaw, head of UK banking partnerships at Cardlytics, said. “As the first banking platform to deploy our new cloud-based platform, Monzo customers will benefit from cashback rewards in real-time as they spend. 

“We look forward to helping Monzo customers save money on their spending, as part of the bank’s efforts to support during the continued high cost-cost of livingaw added.   

Global analytics software leader FICO today announced that StepChange, the UK’s leading debt advice charity, will use FICO® Platform to help assess people in problem debt. StepChange will use the flexibility and hyper-personalisation platform to recommend the best individual outcome to each consumer, with the aim of helping them to become debt-free.

“As part of our back-office transformation, we saw the need to improve the flexibility and capability of our existing decision engine to be able to centralize our logic from three disparate systems — our old rules platform did not give us the capabilities we need to be fit for the future” said Matt Bentley, head of change and enterprise architecture at StepChange. “We also needed to simplify the management of strategies and do more rigorous testing of new strategies. After a review of the market, we found that FICO Platform gave us the greatest capabilities in all these areas. The charity’s  commitment to continuing to provide hyper-personalized debt advice and being able to explain customer decisions in real-time  enables us to achieve the best outcome for every consumer.”

FICO® Platform enables firms to ingest data, develop deep new insights with AI and ML, make hyper-personalized decisions at scale, and achieve world-class business outcomes. It is uniquely suited to maximize customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term retention.

“It’s important to us that FICO® Platform has a microservice-oriented architecture — we can call up the decision service when needed in our processes,” Bentley said. “This is a much more manageable approach that fits perfectly in our new IT ecosystem. We will be able to pull in more data sets than our legacy system can handle, improving our customer advice. FICO Platform is also a very user-friendly platform, which reduces our training needs.”

“StepChange performs an incredibly important public service by providing free debt advice in an impartial way to anyone who needs it,” said Matt Cox, vice president and general manager for FICO in EMEA. “That service has never been more important than now, when inflation is high, energy costs are rising and many people find it hard to manage their payments and debt. We are proud to partner with them to make sure people can get the most relevant, most personalized recommendations possible.”

Nexi, the European PayTech, and Microsoft have strengthened their partnership for the digitisation of payments in Europe, first announced in July 2022. The expanded partnership will see Nexi integrate its digital payment solutions (both in-store and online) within Microsoft solutions, in particular in the Commercial Marketplace, Microsoft's catalogue of solutions and products for developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISV) platforms, available in more than 100 countries and regions.

Through the partnership, ISVs will be able to provide SMEs and enterprises with comprehensive and vertical management solutions, which will allow them to integrate omni-channel payment acceptance within sophisticated purchasing experiences and business management tools.

ISVs and software developers will be able to leverage the strengths of Nexi's solutions, including easy integration, and the availability of 'features' such as national debit circuits, scalability, security and tailored partner support. Thanks to Nexi's integrated payments solutions, ISVs will be able to focus on the user experience and completeness of software solutions, with the PayTech managing complexities including regulatory issues, which are typical of the payments universe.

Microsoft will continue on its path of integrated solutions to support developers, for example in the field of artificial intelligence, working with Nexi to develop features for new use cases like embedded finance.

The two companies will launch joint go-to-market and communication activities, following a one-stop-to-digital approach, including partner evangelisation and technical training activities. The plan will start in Italy and then be extended to other key markets in Europe, such as Germany.

"Digital payments are crucial for the digitisation of businesses and the European economy, so it is imperative that we provide SMEs and companies with comprehensive and integrated management solutions, ” says Roberto Catanzaro, Merchant Solutions Director of Nexi Group.  “In this sense, a key step in our strategy is to offer ISVs and software platforms the ability to easily integrate digital payment solutions, leveraging the completeness, scalability, security and support of Nexi solutions. Working with a partner like Microsoft gives us the chance to reach all players leveraging Microsoft solutions and co-create more complete integrated payments and embedded finance solutions.”

"Digital payments innovation can unlock increasingly simple and immediate experiences for customers, benefiting financial institutions, businesses and consumers,” said Vincenzo Esposito, Managing Director of Microsoft Italy. “Nexi will leverage cloud and AI together with our partner ecosystem to extend its digital payment solutions. In addition to the benefits for end users, this collaboration can certainly accelerate innovation across the industry, generating new opportunities for businesses, partners and startups. Microsoft will also benefit from Nexi's capabilities and solutions for e-commerce in a growing number of markets."

With career patterns changing and workers likely to have an average of 12 roles throughout their careers, it’s to be expected that retirement savers will likely have numerous pension pots.

Yet according to new research from Moneyhub, the award-winning data and payments platform built on Open Banking and Open Finance principles, around one in eight (13%) pension savers don’t think it is worth their time and effort to combine pensions, with a further 14% preferring to actively leave their pension pots separate.

These attitudes run the risk of savers potentially leaving their retirement savings in poor-yielding investments or forgetting a number of their pension pots altogether. Indeed, recent research has shown that around 88% of individuals with workplace pensions have at least one pension that remains unclaimed and there is an estimated £26.6bn of lost pension pots in total.  

It could be argued that the challenges consumers face when trying to locate lost or old pensions and their overall lack of clarity around pensions, could be behind these numbers. A further 8% are unaware that they could combine their pensions into one.

Moneyhub found that only 13% of pension savers have already consolidated their pensions and a further 23% plan to combine their pensions in the future. The concept of consolidation was most popular with people aged between 25 and 34, with 16% already having done so, and 42% planning to. However, if the process isn’t intuitive or proves cumbersome there is the risk that many put this task further down their to-do list.

The Government’s Pensions Dashboard will help users track down their lost pensions, but won’t encourage or offer consolidation as a next step. Moneyhub points to commercial dashboards as the answer to the overall problem. Commercial pensions dashboards enhance the overall dashboard offering; users can locate all pensions and can be taken through a range of follow-up services, including consolidation, and retirement modeling, alongside an overall understanding of their financial universe and the actions they need to take to ensure consumers have better results in retirement.

Mark Horwood-James, MD of Moneyhub Personal Finance Technology comments:

“Structural challenges within the UK pension market such as fragmentation and low consumer engagement are driving inefficiencies and undermining savers’ ability to achieve decent retirement savings. With workers having longer careers and numerous roles throughout their working lives, they are ending up with multiple pensions.

“The research is clear. There is a troubling inertia when it comes to consolidating multiple pots. Combining pensions into one can make it easier to manage; from having more choice over your investments to paying lower fees. The Government’s Pensions Dashboard will be a great milestone; it will however be the providers that embrace Open Finance technologies, like Moneyhub’s, alongside the dashboard, that will be the winners. They will be able to break down the barriers to engagement and ease the process of consolidating pension pots. Commercial dashboards will allow users to see their pensions alongside all their other financial products enabling them to have sight of the whole of their financial universe, make more informed financial decisions, and take action, which in turn will create better later-life financial outcomes.

“Moneyhub’s Personal Finance Technology platform, used by the likes of Aon, Mercer, and Standard Life, is already able to help consumers find their pensions and help them better understand what they can expect when it comes to their retirement finances. Tools like our retirement modeler can help users plan and adjust their habits utilizing their individual saving and spending data. While the industry waits on the delivery of the government’s dashboard and central architecture, the technology to facilitate a dashboard experience and the follow-on actions needed is already available.”

GC Exchange FZE (GCEX), part of the GCEX Group, has been granted an Operational VASP Licence for VA Broker Dealer services from Dubai’s Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority (VARA).

GCEX, which opened its Dubai office in July 2022 and received its MVP (Minimal Viable Product) Preparatory License from VARA in February 2023, can now start market operations as a Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) in the Emirate of Dubai, enabling brokers, hedge funds, family offices, and professional traders to access its deep liquidity in digital assets and range of technology solutions.

GCEX facilitates institutional access to digital assets through its proprietary XplorDigital trading solutions, which comprises a technology-agnostic platform covering regulation, regulated custody, the safety of funds, tier 1 liquidity, and technology (both back-end and front-end).  GCEX only partners with regulated institutional digital custody and staking providers and always segregates client funds.

Mehtap Önder, Managing Director, GCEX in Dubai, commented, “VARA is leading the way in the global digital asset industry, and we are extremely proud to be one of the first firms to receive a VASP Operating Licence to provide Virtual Asset Broker-Dealer services and the first firm to gain approval to operate with a client money account, highlighting our focus on client protection.

“Being a regulated entity in the region is important to us – it’s the ideal way to demonstrate our commitment to adhering to international standards and implementing robust processes, with transparency and investor protection at the core of our offering. This is a major milestone for our business and is critical to GCEX’s growth strategy, enabling us to have a stronger presence in the region.”                                         

GCEX Group enables institutional clients to access deep liquidity in FX and CFDs on digital assets, as well as digital assets spot trading and conversion as well as a broad range of trading solutions. Headquartered in London, with multiple offices across the globe, GCEX is regulated by the UK’s FCA and registered with the Danish FSA. True Global Ventures are investors in GCEX.

Feedzai a financial crime and risk management solution, and Mastercard – a global technology company in the payments industry - are combining technologies to increase crypto fraud protection for hundreds of millions of consumers. 

Today, an estimated 40% of scam transactions exit directly from a bank account to a crypto exchange. According to Feedzai’s recent report, The State of Global Anti Money Laundering (AML) Compliance Report 2023, the monitoring of cryptocurrency effectively is still one of the biggest challenges for financial institutions.

Addressing the need to implement effective AML solutions, Feedzai and Mastercard will collaborate to integrate Mastercard’s world-leading crypto intelligence solution, Ciphertrace Armada into Feedzai’s unique RiskOps platform. RiskOps analyzes transaction data totaling over $1.7 trillion annually and offers a comprehensive suite of AI-based solutions designed to stop fraud and financial crime at the source – allowing banks to be alerted in nanoseconds when a transaction appears fraudulent. 

Ciphertrace Armada allows banks, crypto exchanges, wallets, crypto ATMS and other Virtual Asset Service Providers (VASPs) to better assess the fraud risk in digital asset transactions. In pairing these technologies together, Feedzai’s customers, who collectively protect over 900 million consumers globally, will now be able to identify and prevent transactions involving fraudulent crypto exchanges before they occur.

The partnership comes just months after Mastercard announced its new solution that helps banks identify scams in account-to-account payments. Using AI, Mastercard Consumer Fraud Risk enables banks to intervene in real time and to stop a payment before funds leave a victim’s account.

The combined intelligence means that financial institutions can stop transactions involving high risk and potentially fraudulent crypto exchanges in real time, alerting the customer to the risk before money leaves their account.

Nuno Sebastião, CEO of Feedzai said, “Mastercard’s commitment to protecting its global customer base from fraud aligns perfectly with Feedzai’s mission. Criminals use crypto as part of their scam strategies, with the scam proceeds often ending up being funneled to an unauthorized or otherwise risky crypto exchange. It also continues to remain a challenge for AML professionals as criminals become ever more sophisticated and money laundering techniques advance.  This global partnership will further empower banks to protect their customers’ against the risks associated with crypto and instill further trust in the ecosystem.” 

Ajay Bhalla, president of Cyber and Intelligence at Mastercard said: “This is an exciting step in our journey to secure the digital ecosystem. We’re providing financial institutions with the insights they need to be able to prevent transactions involving fraudulent crypto exchanges. We are delighted that, through this new partnership, we are able to go further, by helping to stop fraud and payments to scams before they take place, giving customers more choice, security and, most importantly, reinforcing trust.”