Hunter previously led JPMorgan Chase’s Global Clearing business and brings extensive cash management and payments services experience to SWIFT

SWIFT today announced the appointment of John Hunter as Chief Executive of the Americas and U.K. Region. Hunter was most recently Managing Director at JPMorgan Chase, leading its Global Clearing business, and brings extensive experience in cash management, payment services and innovation fields.

Hunter’s focus at SWIFT will be on strategic customer relationships across these major markets, with a focus on enabling the industry to transform and create new services based on SWIFT’s underlying infrastructure that will enable instant and frictionless international transactions and rich data services across more than 4 billion accounts in 200 countries around the world.

Hunter, who begins in the role this week, is a respected industry thought leader on transaction services and has deep experience in the technology sector having also previously worked in financial services positions at Accenture, Adobe and Hewlett-Packard.

SWIFT Chief Business Development Officer, Rosemary Stone, commented: “At SWIFT, we are fundamentally transforming cross-border payments and securities processing aligned with our vision for instant and frictionless transactions globally.  John’s valuable and extensive experience will reinforce our industry focus and support our customers in the Americas and the U.K. as they leverage SWIFT’s expanding capabilities to create innovative new services for the consumers and businesses they serve.”

John Hunter, Chief Executive of the Americas and UK Region for SWIFT, said: “I am very proud to be joining SWIFT at a time when it is evolving its platform to deliver widespread benefits to the industry and unlock new opportunities for customers. SWIFT has long served as a trusted global partner to the industry, and I am delighted to support the next stage of the journey as financial institutions embrace its bold and exciting vision.”

Widespread Demand for Petabyte Scale, Multi-cloud AI and ML Applications Drives Momentum for Aerospike Real-time Data Platform in EMEA

Aerospike Inc. has announced that Q2 2021 was the best quarter in the company’s history. Quarterly bookings increased 100% in Q2 2021 over Q2 2020 as more organisations around the globe selected or expanded their use of the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform. In the EMEA region ARR growth was up 300% from Q2 2018.

The Aerospike Real-time Data Platform lets organisations act in real time across billions of transactions while dramatically reducing server footprint. Applications built on Aerospike reap big rewards for enterprises, delivering a three-year return on investment (ROI) between 446% and 574%, per a Forrester Consulting Projected Total Impact™ study.

“Legacy NoSQL databases have failed to scale to meet the new speed, scale and cost dynamics of the market. Digital transformation demands modern, multi-cloud applications with predictable, sub-millisecond performance beyond petabyte scale,” said John Dillon, CEO, Aerospike. “Our customers continue to lead and transform their respective industries by leveraging the Aerospike Real-time Data Platform as a competitive advantage for mission-critical digital applications and customer experiences.”

Airtel, Experian, PayPal, Snap, The Trade Desk, Verizon Media and Wayfair rely on Aerospike as their data foundation for real-time applications that instantly fight fraud, dramatically increase shopping cart size, protect companies from cyberattacks, and scale payment networks. 

Geoff Clark, General Manager EMEA, Aerospike commented: “Following tremendous growth over the past two years, the EMEA region continues to expand in 2021 and that was particularly evident in Q2. Furthermore, our expanding customer base and increased revenues from new subscriptions has seen us double our headcount”.

Recent Company Highlights

• Increased Adoption of the Aerospike Cloud Managed Service. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) for Aerospike’s Cloud Managed Services grew 150% in 1H2021 over 2H2020. 
• Industry’s First Petabyte Scale Database Benchmark. Done in collaboration with Amazon and Intel, the benchmark illustrates Aerospike’s sub-millisecond performance at petabyte scale on a remarkably small 20-node cluster—hundreds of nodes less than other databases for a savings of up to $10 million per application.
• Expanded Accelerate Partner Program. To meet the demand for data-driven digital transformation across multiple industries, Aerospike unveiled significant investments in technical, marketing and sales resources specifically designed to speed partner ramp to revenue. 
• Accelerating International Growth. In 2020, Aerospike announced that it had doubled revenues, customers and employees in the APAC region. 
• Expanded Senior Leadership Team. Stephanie Grethen, the former Chief Customer Officer of SAP, joined as Aerospike’s new Chief Customer Officer. And Erich Ringewald, the Chief Enterprise Architect of PayPal and former SVP, Enterprise Architecture, Web and Mobile Engineering at American Express, has joined the company’s board of directors. 

During the Eastern Economic Forum Sber and Russian Fishery Company (RFC) signed a letter of intent to finance the construction of four large freezing fish trawlers in the amount of USD 400 million. The document was signed by First Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board of SberBank Alexander Vedyakhin and Chairman of the Board of directors of Russian Fishery Company Gleb Frank.

Under this agreement Sber will act as a lender and financial partner of the enterprise. Fishing vessels are planned to be built in Saint Petersburg. All-in-all eleven supertrawlers — the largest and most technologically advanced Russian fishing vessels — will be built for RFC. The first vessel has already undergone field tests. Six more vessels are at various stages of completion at Admiralty Shipyards (three vessels have been set afloat, factories are being assembled). The new agreement will give impetus to the construction of four more vessels. After being set afloat all trawlers will head to Primorye region to add to RFC’s fishing fleet.

“Russian Fishery Company is Sber’s long-term partner, and this is not our first agreement. We are happy to invest in a company that intensively develops fishing fleet in the Far East and is one of the large employers in the region. Apart from the new supertrawlers’ power and fishery efficiency, it is worth noting that they comply with the sustainability principles Sber is committed to.”

Alexander Vedyakhin

First Deputy Chairman of the Executive Board of SberBank

“Today is a milestone for us: we have financed four out of eleven vessels where Sberbank is a partner of construction. Thus we are closing the financial package for the whole programme of our new building. The new vessels are called supertrawlers for a reason. They are super efficient: not only are they able to catch 60 thousand tons of fish per year but they efficiently process it. Unlike the existing vessels, the new ones are able to make products for the final markets – fillet and surimi. They are super sustainable: fresh water use is reduced to zero, a supertrawler’s carbon footprint is the lowest among fishing fleet vessels. Within 4-5 years we should receive the remaining vessels of the line.”

Gleb Frank

Chairman of the Board of directors of Russian Fishery Company

 UTA, a leading provider of fuel and service cards in Europe and an Edenred company, has partnered with The ai Corporation (ai), an expert for fraud prevention and payment solutions. This new partnership is founded on developing additional protection for UTA customers from the evolving global threat of fuel card fraud. The ai Corporation’s services will complement UTA's established range of security measures and the activities of UTA's internal fraud prevention team.

The aiFraud Managed Service which is powered by ai’s new automated machine learning, combines the latest advanced technology solutions, along with best-in-class fraud analytics expertise, aimed at preventing the latest global fraud trends. Currently this ser-vice provides direct support to over 200,000 fuel retail sites across Europe, North America, East Asia, South Africa and manages more than 500 million fuel card transactions a year.

Carsten Bettermann, CEO of UTA, says: “We want to offer our customers the best possible security for their cards and transactions. In view of the steadily increasing risk of fuel card fraud and the technically sophisticated and innovative fraud methods, we are therefore continuously adapting our systems and processes for the prevention and detection of fraud. The cooperation with ai and the introduction of algorithm-based and artificial intelligence-driven automated fraud detection brings UTA’s security standards to a new level.”

Dr. Mark Goldspink, CEO of ai, says: “We are excited to partner with UTA to add our expertise to their existing fraud practices across the fuel card portfolio. Our aiFraud Managed Service will give UTA access to the latest technologies including ai’s automated machine learning (AutoPilotML) and our team of fuel card experts. We are delighted about this new partnership and look forward to a fruitful business relationship.”

UNION TANK Eckstein GmbH & Co. KG (UTA) is a leading provider of fuel and service cards in Europe. Commercial customers can use the UTA card system to refuel – independent of brand and without cash – at more than 68,000 acceptance points in 40 European countries. The UTA card can also be used for toll invoicing, repair work, and break-down and towing services. Furthermore, VAT and fuel tax refunds can be claimed through a UTA service provider partner. UTA was voted "Best fuel card service provider for SMEs 2021" in a survey conducted by German Wirtschafts-woche magazine and the Cologne-based market research institute ServiceValue. UTA was founded in 1963 by Heinrich Eckstein and is today owned by Edenred SE.

• Owens joins Liberis to build a suite of embedded finance products to serve Liberis’ partners with frictionless finance for their small businesses

• Further expanding the API driven Credit as a Service platform and advance Liberis’ machine learning capabilities and use of AI

• Top UK CIO 100 2019 and 2020, UK Top 50 Most Influential Women in Tech 2020 and 2021, Women in IT Awards nominee and winner

• Plans to rapidly double the engineering team to support international growth and onboarding new partners

Global embedded business finance platform Liberis has today announced it has added Georgina Owens to the London based team to serve as CTO and drive the company’s technology and engineering strategy forward. 

“We are thrilled to bring Georgina on board to navigate our engineering team through the company’s rapid expansion and onboarding of new partnerships,” said Rob Straathof, CEO Liberis. “An advocate of building engaged and autonomous teams, we are confident Georgina can guide Liberis through the continued development and delivery of our award winning offering. The past year we have invested heavily in scaling our platform, to build a world leading embedded finance offering for our partners around the world, and have further expanded internationally to serve SMEs in seven markets.”

Owens has held senior technology leadership and transformation roles since 1987. She joins Liberis most recently from a role as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Doqit Technologies. Previously she held executive technology and advisory positions at DAZN, Vodafone, WPP, Kantar, Cognizant, Centrica, British Gas and Citibank.

“I’m excited to work with this dynamic team on Liberis’ industry leading embedded business finance products. Revenue based finance is the future for small business funding and I look forward to continuing to develop Liberis’ product with new features and functionality as we support more and more businesses around the world through partnerships.”

OKEx continues its commitment to the advancement of the crypto industry and decentralized finance with the launch of DeFi Hub

OKEx (www.okex.com), a leading global cryptocurrency spot and derivatives exchange, today announced the launch of a decentralized digital asset ecosystem, DeFi Hub. The platform currently features two core products: NFT Marketplace and DeFi Dashboard.

The NFT Marketplace is an end-to-end NFT platform built to empower creators and inspire collectors. Via the platform, anyone can buy, sell and trade NFTs directly, with zero fees paid out to OKEx. What makes NFT Marketplace even more unique is that anyone can use the platform to mint their own NFTs of any kind, using the OEC or Ethereum blockchains.

Newly minted NFTs will be available for sale on NFT Marketplace and creators are given the flexibility to set their own royalty fees. Signalling OKEx's commitment to protecting the interests of creators, royalty fees for creators are then paid out to them in every subsequent transaction on NFT Marketplace's secondary market. The NFT Marketplace also lets users import NFTs that have been generated on other supported platforms.

DeFi Hub also offers a way to view and manage decentralized assets across major blockchain networks and DeFi protocols. The DeFi Dashboard displays both a full portfolio view, as well as a separate view for digital collectibles. 

"The NFT market is growing rapidly in popularity, creating a need for a comprehensive system for managing NFTs," said OKEx Director Lennix Lai in a statement. He continued: 

"With DeFi Hub, we’ve created an NFT Marketplace that will accelerate NFT adoption by making it easier than ever for anyone to create, exchange, and sell NFTs. We’re also thrilled to launch DeFi Dashboard to bring much-needed improvements to users’ visualizations of their cryptocurrency portfolios."

iwoca - one of Europe’s largest small business lenders - has today launched its industry-first cash advance product on Funding Xchange for small business online sellers.

iwoca will be the first lender in the UK - using Open Banking - to offer fully automated revenue-based repayments to e-commerce businesses with a business bank account on the marketplace.

From today, small business owners operating on platforms such as eBay can access flexible revenue-based repayment loans of between £1,000-£50,0001 when trying to source a loan product on FundingXchange’s online marketplace.

How it works 

With one fixed fee and no interest on the loan, business owners repay what they’ve borrowed based on revenues. Using Open Banking technology, iwoca will calculate the monthly repayments based on the business’ revenues and take a pre-agreed portion of that revenue to repay the loan.

Building on iwoca’s heritage of bringing flexibility to SME lending, the new Cash Advance product will, for the first time, enable SMEs to choose a loan repayment profile that mirrors their trading ups and downs - allowing for maximum flexibility during interruptions in operation or seasonal dips. As the loan is powered by Open Banking, it will have mass market potential. 

Improving access to finance is vital to supporting SMEs to bounce back from the COVID-19 crisis. Through this partnership, iwoca will bring flexible cash advances to SMEs to alleviate cash flow issues and enable rapid access to finance.  

Christoph Rieche, CEO and co-founder  at iwoca said: “Our vision is to provide finance to SMEs when, where and how they need it. We are transforming small business lending through product innovation powered by technology, combined with creative distribution partnerships.

“With our new cash advance product and Funding Xchange partnership, we continue our proud track record of industry firsts. Just under ten years ago we were the first UK company to integrate with eBay and Amazon to provide instant credit decisions for e-commerce sellers. We were also the first business lender to offer a lending API - which has now been used by over 20 major fintech partners, and the first SME lender to connect to the UK’s nine largest banks with Open Banking.”

Katrin Herrling, CEO and co-Founder of Funding Xchange added: “iwoca and FundingXchange are leaders in the use of intelligent technology to make SME funding more accessible, more affordable and more sustainable. By transforming the credit-assessment and cost-to-serve, we deliver targeted, self-serve propositions to underserved segments. Given the challenges that the crisis has created for small businesses, this partnership is delivering critical access to finance to help businesses rebuild and flourish.”

iwoca distributed nearly £400 million to small businesses through the Government's Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme (CBILS) and last year launched iwocaPay – an online buy now pay later invoice checkout to help small businesses get paid. The lender is reaching 1.8 million businesses across the UK and Germany through its embedded lending technology, which allows businesses to access loans through a range of platforms such as accountancy software apps and digital neo-banks. iwoca has also partnered with Mental Health UK on research to identify the needs of small business owners, and will soon launch a tailored mental health support package.

• Specialist insurance firm Inigo Ltd is the best funded start-up of 2020-21, with $800,000,000 raised since launching in 2020
• Also within the top 10 is Genesis Digital Assets, a bitcoin mining operator
• Seven London-based businesses dominate the top 10

Specialist insurance firm Inigo Limited is the best-funded start-up of 2020-21, a new study reveals.

Conducted by cloud accounting company Ember, the research analysed Crunchbase data to discover companies founded on and after 1^st January 2020 and identify those with the highest total funding since their inception.

Topping the list with funding of £800m raised since their founding in 2020, Inigo Limited offers specialist insurances in several regions including property, energy and terrorism and political violence.

In second and labelled as “the first fully digital and algorithmically-driven Lloyd’s syndicate” is London-based insurance firm Ki Insurance. Originally announced in March 2020, the organisation offers subscription-based, algorithmic underwriting for a variety of risks. Since its inception, the company has gained $500m in total funding.

The third highest-funded start-up of 2020-21 is the industrial-scale bitcoin mining operator Genesis Digital Assets – also based in London. Launched in May of this year and with funding of $125,000,000 since inception, the firm recently released its Q2 reports, highlighting what it referred to as the “emerging role” of Ethereum and Decentralized finance (DeFi) in the industry.

London-based companies dominate the top 10 list of the best funded start-ups – seven of the ten firms included are registered to operate within the country’s capital.

The list also reveals considerable variety in the types of businesses that are generating high levels funding. There are five companies focusing on finance and insurance, alongside those operating in industries as diverse as food delivery and nanotechnology.

Commenting on the findings, a spokesperson for Ember stated: “It is thrilling to see that, even in spite of the recent pandemic, start-ups within various sectors are receiving substantial funding in order to conduct their business. The top ten businesses have generated more than $1.8 billion in funding, so it’s clear that the British start-up scene is in rude health.”

The news follows research by Ember which revealed that retail is the UK’s best industry in which to start a business. It came out on top of the overall industry rankings thanks to one of the highest survival rates, and a healthy ratio of companies being started compared to businesses failing

The study was conducted by Ember, the cloud accounting company which automates accounting and tax to help make business admin simpler and more cost effective for freelancers, contractors, start-ups and small businesses.

Marlin Equity Partners acquires a majority stake in Rydoo and becomes the major shareholder of the T&E management company. 

Rydoo, a leading international SaaS software solution for managing business travel and expense reports, today announced an investment from its new major shareholder Marlin Equity Partners (‘Marlin’). The global investment firm with over $7.6 billion of capital commitments under management acquired the majority shareholding. 

The investment represents a very strong endorsement for Rydoo from a global investment firm with a proven track record of successful collaboration with similar companies in the software and technology space. With Marlin’s support, Rydoo will accelerate its global expansion with the ultimate objective to become a leading global player in the Travel and Expense (“T&E”) industry.

Details of acquisition 

Rydoo, operating since 2018, offers end users and finance managers an end-to-end solution to efficiently manage the travel and expense journey of employees within one single tool. The company’s two modules, Travel and Expense, cover the entire value chain of T&E management through one application. Rydoo aids companies around the world in digitizing and simplifying their travel and expense management processes and reinventing the way many companies currently operate today.

More than 10,000 customers, public and private organizations, in more than 150 countries already trust in Rydoo, including renowned brands, such as Burger King, Deloitte, Singapore Airlines, Veolia and many more. Rydoo’s customer base consists of over one million professional end-users worldwide that benefit daily from a seamless workflow and an improved employee experience. 

“At Rydoo we aim to offer the most user-friendly Travel & Expense solutions to the corporate world and create a more efficient workflow combined with a better quality of life for employees,” said Sebastien Marchon, CEO of Rydoo. “We are very pleased to have found a new shareholder and partner in Marlin that supports our strategic goals and recognizes our value. With Marlin’s experience and expertise in scaling and growing businesses, we are well-equipped to strengthen our presence in the T&E market and expand our business even further. This is a new chapter in Rydoo’s history, and we look forward to the journey.”

“We admire Rydoo’s strategic and innovative product offering, which solves traditionally poor user experience in the B2B Travel & Expense market and delivers significant benefits to its customers,” said Jeremy Nakache, a principal at Marlin. “We believe in the capability and vision of Rydoo’s management team, who is driving fantastic momentum and resilience in the business, despite extreme economic conditions. Further, we share Rydoo’s collaborative and high energy approach, which we believe will ensure our partnership is both financially and operationally successful.”

SIA's technology infrastructure will process the transactions

of credit and prepaid cards issued by the Austrian bank

BAWAG P.S.K., one of the largest banks in Austria with 2.3 million customers, has selected SIA, a leading European hi-tech company in payment services and infrastructures, controlled by CDP Equity, as the technology partner for the management and processing of the credit and prepaid cards portfolio issued by BAWAG P.S.K., easybank and PayLife.

SIA is extending its partnership with BAWAG which can focus on its core business whilst benefiting from IT synergies with the easy integration, standardization and interoperability guaranteed by SIA’s technology infrastructure. SIA will continue to offer various advanced services for the bank’s card products evolution enabling BAWAG P.S.K. to extend its footprint in the digital ecosystem.

“As a longtime partner of BAWAG, we are particularly proud of the extension of our successful collaboration for the management and processing of its payment cards portfolio, representing a considerable portion of the Austrian market. It confirms SIA’s role in Europe as the preferred technology partner supporting banking and financial communities in the constantly growing challenges of the digital payments business, thanks to our significant expertise and commitment to the development of innovative solutions in the sector,” stated Cristina Astore, Northwest Europe and DACH Region Sales Director of SIA.