Monument (or the “Bank”) today announced that it has successfully completed its Series B funding round, having raised over $50 million (£40+m) , backed by a combination of existing and new investors. Since its inception, Monument has raised in excess of £100 million in equity capital, consistently achieving successive ‘up-rounds’. Positioned well with its ground-breaking technology, exceptional team, and well-capitalised backers, Monument is set to continue on its journey of innovation and growth.

The completion of the Series B round follows on from Monument’s strategic partnership with Dubai Investments announced earlier in the year, as part of which the company acquired approximately 9% equity of the Bank.  As part of the increasingly active partnership with Dubai Investments, the UAE-headquartered investment company has meaningfully increased its investment in the Bank, seeking to double its stake in the Bank, subject to regulatory approval.Anchor

Monument remains thankful to all its shareholders for their continued conviction in Monument’s unique positioning and capabilities to address the underserved mass-affluent community with trillions in wealth in the UK and tens of trillions globally. This commitment involves providing exceptional client service, which is enabled by its superior technology, and its rapidly evolving suite of financial products and lifestyle offerings, redefining the future of banking.

Ian Rand, Monument’s Chief Executive Officer, said: “We are pleased to have successfully completed the Series B funding round. The milestone is another testament to our investors’ continued belief in the Bank’s strategy, as we continue to move forward in our journey and accelerate our path to profitability, targeting monthly profitability in the second half of 2024.”

“Monument remains committed to serving the overlooked ‘mass affluent’ segment in the UK, and eventually beyond the UK, having launched new features and products to further enhance the client experience. Most recently we launched Notice savings accounts, built in 6 weeks following feedback from mass affluent clients who are seeking a wide range of options to meet their various financial goals. Looking ahead, the Bank continues to plan new product launches to expand its ability to help clients meet their needs.”

“The business’ growth continues to accelerate, with assets exceeding £700m, 335% growth year to date.  Our proposition and quality of service has successfully attracted mass affluent clients, with our average balance now over £60,000, enabling us to scale with a laser-sharp focus on our community.”

Since the start of 2022, Monument has been growing a thriving network of members, offering an unparalleled level of service, as clients can reach the UK-based team through the app with email, video, chat, or call, with over 90% of calls answered within 20 seconds.  The App also provides clients access to a financial experience that goes beyond banking with Monument Lifestyle. Launched earlier this year, it offers in excess of 35 services designed to save busy professionals, entrepreneurs and their families’ time and money searching for ways to reach their wealth creation potential and enjoy life doing things they love with the people they cherish.

Fiona Pollard, Chair of Monument said: “The successful closure of this funding round not only reaffirms our vision but also highlights Monument's substantial and resilient growth amid persistent environmental challenges. As Monument thrives in this dynamic landscape, it's fitting to acknowledge the firm's nimbleness in pursuing rapidly evolving opportunities within the large, overlooked market segment it targets.”

Mintoo Bhandari, Founder of Monument, said: “Our strengthened partnership with Dubai Investments is a meaningful step in advancing our strategic plans, allowing us to leverage technological capabilities, expand operations, and increase influence in international markets. The successful conclusion of this funding round is a testament to the robust relationship we've built, and I am confident it will continue to grow, enabling us to capitalize on both current and future opportunities in the months and years ahead.”

Khalid Bin Kalban, Vice Chairman and CEO, Dubai Investments. said: “Dubai Investments’ increased stake in Monument Bank, not only reiterates the Group’s confidence in the bank’s potential but also its strategy and vision. Monument Bank's resilience and successful capital raise rounds exemplify their promising growth trajectory, and the bank's progress in monetizing its technology and business service verticals demonstrates its commitment to innovation and customer-centric solutions. This investment also solidifies Dubai Investment’s presence in the dynamic digital banking landscape and aligns with the Group’s vision to foster international collaborations.”

Worldline, a global leader in payments services, has been selected by the Goethe-Institut, Germany’s cultural institute, operating worldwide, to provide optimised payment experiences to its consumers through integrated local payment methods in respective currencies.

Operating through 158 branches in 98 countries around the world, the Goethe-Institut has been promoting knowledge of the German language and fostering international cultural collaborations since 1951.   

Worldline has tailored its market-leading payment solution for the Goethe-Institut to include insightful performance analytics alongside unified reporting. Combining a personal and consultative approach to achieve the best possible experience, Worldline’s full-service solution will enable local processing via a payment orchestration layer based on proprietary smart routing technology. This will allow one contract, one integration, and one financial flow throughout the payment processing journey.

Incorporating a number of key features, the Goethe-Institut will be able to accommodate all the local market nuances and characteristics encountered across its highly diverse user base. With flexible and tailored reporting, the Goethe-Institut will also enjoy enhanced payment efficiency and commensurate augmented financial performance. The addition of the Worldline Payment Orchestration offering will also bring the additional benefit and comfort of easy access to local partners and acquirers. Worldline’s solution ensures that the Goethe-Institut and its payments platform remain fully compliant with all necessary regulations and data security standards.

Kym Lukins, Commercial Director Digital Goods & Services at Worldline commented: "This has been an exciting challenge for Worldline. The Goethe-Institut is world-renowned and operates in nearly 100 countries. With exacting standards and complex requirements, we are delighted to offer the Institut market-leading solutions that will benefit both them and their international customer base.” 

Birgit Weckerle, Head of Marketing and Sales at Goethe-Institut added: “Worldline understands that payments are not just functional but can also enhance customer experience and business growth. Its tailored advice and solutions have helped us gain insights into our payment performance, improve collaboration with our partners, and make process improvements that help us better serve our customers around the globe.”

TrueLayer, Europe’s leading open banking payments network, today announces its new payments app is now live in the Shopify App Store, allowing UK and EU merchants to add open banking payments to their checkout.

Electronics retailer Maplin has gone live with the app, with further partners to be announced soon.

The move brings the industry-leading open banking network to the prominent e-commerce platform, enabling merchants to add instant bank payments to their website in a matter of hours. As a result, they can quickly benefit from a faster, more secure payment option at a fraction of the cost of cards or PayPal.

In turn, customers benefit from a smoother, safer and faster experience. TrueLayer’s open banking payments are digitally native and require no manual data entry. Customers’ details auto-populate directly from their bank account, reducing the likelihood of payment failure and removing friction. Payments leverage biometric authentication to verify customers’ identity, providing bank-level security with every payment. 

Powered by instant payment rails, open banking payments also allow for real-time settlement of funds. This gives merchants added assurance that they can ship orders to the customer without the risk of fraud associated with card payments. It also enables businesses to process refunds faster, which establishes trust and loyalty with their customers. Research from TrueLayer and YouGov shows that 4 in 5 shoppers expect a refund within a week or sooner.

The app, designed in partnership with Shopify agency Eastside Co, comes as TrueLayer continues to establish connections with e-commerce giants. Recently, they became the first European open banking option for payment giant Stripe.

Open banking payments continue to make inroads with both merchants and consumers. Monthly payment volumes have doubled in the past year, reaching 11.4 million in July alone. 

Michael Brown, Head of Ecommerce at TrueLayer said: “Businesses throughout the UK and Europe rely on Shopify to power their payments. As Europe’s leading open banking platform, we’re excited to give those merchants the fast, cost-effective open banking payments they need to provide an exceptional experience to their customers.”

Ollie Marshall, Managing Director at Maplin said: “We partnered with TrueLayer because we wanted to give our customers a fast, seamless way to complete their purchases while cutting down on card processing fees. Integrating open banking payments through their Shopify app was a breeze, and we’re excited to continue working with TrueLayer to make things even smoother for our shoppers.”

Jason Stokes, CEO at Eastside Co said: “At a time when e-commerce customers demand a seamless shopping experience, open banking payments can help businesses make their checkouts fast, smooth and secure. With consumer adoption rising each month, open banking has the potential to drive payment innovation for retailers large and small. We’re proud to partner with TrueLayer to help enable that progress for merchants in the UK and Europe.”

Nomura's digital assets subsidiary, Laser Digital, today announces the launch of their Ethereum Adoption Fund. The Fund, which invests in long-only spot positions in Ethereum, also deploys a yield enhancement strategy by staking the Ethereum held by the fund.

It is the second in a series of digital adoption investment solutions that Laser Digital Asset Management began launching in September, starting with the Laser Digital Bitcoin Adoption Fund.

The ‘Laser Digital Ethereum Adoption Fund SP’ is a segregated portfolio of Laser Digital Funds SPC (a segregated portfolio company incorporated with limited liability under the laws of the Cayman Islands under registration number MC-401019). Komainu, which is regulated by the UK Financial Conduct Authority and the Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority in Dubai, will provide secure, regulated custody for the fund’s assets.

Laser Digital Asset Management is led by Sebastian Guglietta, who was previously Nomura’s Chief Scientist Officer, prior to which he was a Portfolio Manager and Senior Scientist at Brevan Howard. Sebastien has over 25 years of experience in the domain of systematic investment strategies, derivatives and macro trading. Fiona King, Head of Distribution, joined Laser from Nickel Digital Asset Management, where she was Managing Director and Global Head of Institutional Business and prior to this she was at Bank of America Merrill Lynch responsible for their UCITS alternative platform.

On launching the fund, Sebastien Guglietta, Head of Laser Digital Asset Management commented: “Technology is a key driver of economic growth and transforms a large part of the economy from being analogue to digital. Ethereum is one of the enablers of this long-lasting transformational change. Hence, being exposed to Ethereum in the long run is considered a solution to capture this structural technology trend and the pace at which the Web 3.0 economy expands its network effect.”

Fiona King, Head of Distribution, Laser Digital Asset Management added: “We’re excited to now be able to offer institutional investors a regulated product to allow investment and even staking in Ethereum. Our product simplifies digital asset investment strategies, driving institutional engagement securely.”

Laser Digital was launched by Nomura and was co-founded by Steven Ashley, who previously led Nomura's wholesale division and Jez Mohideen, who was Nomura’s Chief Digital Officer and Co-Head of Global Markets EMEA. Headquartered in Switzerland, Laser Digital combines the rigor, best practices, and capabilities from global investment banking with the experience of a crypto-native team.

Liminal Custody Solutions, a leading provider of digital asset custody, has taken a momentous stride in its mission to fortify the security and accessibility of India's digital asset ecosystem. As a trusted custodian of digital assets, Liminal was appointed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to manage seized digital assets in a non-custodial manner securely, which they impounded during their investigations.

Following this announcement, Liminal also played a pivotal role in a high-profile operation led by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Law enforcement agencies like the CBI require secure and compliant wallet solutions for the safe storage of these assets, and Liminal stepped in to fill this crucial role. This milestone firmly establishes Liminal as a vital ally for law enforcement agencies in India. As a part of this operation Liminal Custody Solutions assembled a specialized team that collaborated closely with CBI officers on the ground. The creation of specialized multi-sig and MPC wallets were executed with precision to ensure assets' security with strict adherence to standard operating procedures (SOP).

CBI's officers expressed their appreciation for Liminal's collaboration and support during this operation.

Manan Vora, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Operations at Liminal, stated, “At Liminal Custody, we consider our partnership with the CBI as a testament to our unwavering dedication to building a safe and regulated digital asset ecosystem in India. As experts in the field, we feel it's our responsibility to assist law enforcement agencies with rigorous security protocols. We look forward to making a substantial contribution to India's digital asset security and accessibility.”

Liminal continues to expand its role in safeguarding digital assets and remains dedicated to upholding the highest standards of digital asset security.

Nexi has entered into an agreement with IN Groupe, a specialist in identity and secure digital services, who will take over the ownership of the eID business. 

The strategic ambition of Nexi is to further strengthen the position as the leading PayTech in Europe and in the context of the portfolio rationalisation and simplification process announced at the Capital Markets Day in September 2022, the divestment is in line with the strategic direction presented.

IN Groupe is a global leader and specialist in identity and trust solutions, providing comprehensive solutions that address a broad variety of digital identity challenges and enabling both corporates and consumers/citizens to benefit from the digital transformation in a simple and secure manner.

“Nexi has, via its ownership of Nets, managed to develop an industry-leading identity and trust solutions in Denmark which has contributed to making Nordic societies the most digitised in the world. As a provider of a trusted digital infrastructures, we understand how critical it is to deliver stable, resilient, and secure services. Combining Nexi’s eID capabilities with our own will enhance our ability to support our customers throughout Europe as they have to embrace new regulations rapidly coming into play such as eIDASv2 and NIS2.” says Didier Trutt, CEO and Chairman, from IN Groupe.

“We want to expand digital payments in Europe and broaden our presence as provider of digital payment solutions. As this requires that we focus our investments within the payments space we have reviewed the possibilities to divest our eID business. Our main objective was to find a future owner that will maintain and develop our eID solutions to the same high standards we have applied. In IN Groupe, we could not have found a better home for our eID business, and our customers and citizens can expect a provider of critical digital infrastructure who – better than us – can continue to develop the solutions to the benefit of its clients,” says Torsten Hagen Jørgensen, Global Head of Issuing Solutions in Nexi.

Leading transition to digital identity

The completion of the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and the authorisation of the Danish government on the suitability and capabilities of IN Groupe as their continued eID solution provider.

Today Nets/Nexi provides an array of trust services in Nordics and key parts of the eID infrastructure in Denmark, MitID and NemLog-in, which serves as a personal entrance key to both the public sector and most parts of the private sector, e.g. banks.

IN Groupe’s strategic ambition is to become an industry-leading player in identity and secure digital services, and a preferred partner of governments and businesses in Europe. The acquisition of the eID Business from Nexi will enable the group to augment its geographical footprint and to serve its customers with a portfolio of differentiated ID and trust services based on cutting-edge technologies.

In the wake of the recent ACH outage, the creator of the ACH alternative—the Paystand B2B Network—is recognized on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™. The fintech payments company, founded in 2013, today announced it ranked number 210 with 671% growth from 2019 to 2022. Paystand's customers use its technology to incentivize their payers to change payment behavior, boosting the customer's bottom line. 

The Deloitte annual listing is a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech companies in North America.

"We are extremely pleased to be recognized in the Deloitte Fast 500 list. Last year we processed a full one percent of all U.S. direct account-to-account business payments, and our [Paystand B2B] network now has more than 600,000 payers," said Jeremy Almond, Paystand CEO. 

Paystand utilizes a combination of proprietary products, user interfaces and economic incentive models to increase SMB profitability.

"With high inflation, high-interest rates and supply chain delays, SMBs must bring in cash faster – without taking a chunk from their bottom line," Almond continued. "Our technology incentivizes CFOs to leave the current risky, expensive payment rails behind and shift to no-cost financial approaches that speed time-to-cash." 

"With the added power of blockchain, we empower businesses to escape financial gravity, thrive without unnecessary fees, and emerge as pioneers of a digitally transformed financial era," he commented.

Over the past year, during a period of increased banking strain, Paystand delivered new products to help finance teams better manage, control and access their cash at all times. These products include: Smart Treasury Management for AR, Paystand Spend and Dynamic Discounting for AR teams. 

In addition, Paystand recently introduced its integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for one-click accounts receivable automation. The Microsoft integration is Paystand's third native integration, expanding its proven record and its reach to SMB finance departments. Paystand was first integrated with Oracle's NetSuite, then followed by integrating with Sage Intacct. 

"Each year I look forward to reviewing the progress and innovations of our Technology Fast 500 winners as these companies truly demonstrate how important new ideas are to progressing our society and the world, especially during difficult times," said Paul Silverglate, vice chair, Deloitte LLP and U.S. technology sector leader. "While software and services and life sciences continue to dominate the top 10, I'm encouraged to see other categories making their mark. Congratulations to all the winners who show us how creativity, hard work and perseverance can lead to success."

• Access to Zero Bias AI™-tested identity verification ensures inclusivity and safeguarding against discrimination related to race, age, and gender through generative AI technology.

• Swift and seamless customer integration and onboarding with automated digital identity verification systems.

• Efficiency boost and reduced operational expenses with a notable decrease in manual review requirements for identity verification, leading to 99% accuracy.

Libby Robinson, Head of Partnerships at IDVerse, added, “We are immensely proud to join the Mastercard Engage Program. Partners in the program will benefit from IDVerse's robust global document coverage and compliance certifications that ensure the highest standards in our offerings. Our fully-automated identity verification solution, powered by Zero Bias AI™-tested technology, embodies the future of secure digital onboarding. Through this collaboration, IDVerse is committed to empowering Mastercard customers to seamlessly automate digital identity verification (IDV) and navigate the complex balance between security and user experience.”  

Glia, the customer interaction leader unifying Digital Customer Service (DCS), phone and automated self-service on a single platform, today announced it has ranked 225th on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™, a ranking of the fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech companies in North America, now in its 29th year. Glia grew 629% during this period.

Glia’s strong growth is powered by its seamless, Customer Interaction Platform that unifies traditional phone, SMS, chat, voice and video—supported by on-screen collaboration. The result is dynamic ChannelLess™ interactions that maintain the digital connection and enhance operational efficiencies.

"Customer experience is the ultimate business multiplier with the ability to fuel growth through seamless customer interactions. Empowering 450+ financial institutions to optimize their customer experience by offering the right interaction at the right time is what has powered Glia’s own growth. We are honored to be acknowledged as part of the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 for a fourth consecutive year,” said Dan Michaeli, CEO and Co-Founder of Glia.

Glia previously ranked 219 as a Technology Fast 500™ award winner for 2022 and came in at 237 for 2021.