Leading fintech bank breaking both traditional model and challenger approaches to drive next wave of integrated UK banking

FinecoBank, one of Europe’s leading fintech banks has set a new record for revenue growth in H1 2021 – exceeding last year’s record-breaking growth. 

In the first half of the year, Fineco opened more current accounts in UK than in the whole 2020, while improving the penetration of active clients on brokerage, representing more than 70% on new current accounts. 

• Overall Fineco recorded robust net profit of € 184.6 million in the 6 months of the year (+2% y/y).
• Revenues at € 403.5 million (+3% y/y) led by Investing area (+22.7% y/y) thanks to the increase of AuM (at € 51.4 billion) and in Investing net margins.
• FinecoBank has a strong and safe capital position: CET1 (Tier 1 Capital) Ratio is 18.59%.
• Further European expansion with plans to launch in Germany by H1 2022. 

FinecoBank entered the UK market three years ago with a unique offering combining brokerage, banking and investment services. In the first half of the year, revenues from UK business were almost equal to the ones recorded in the whole 2020. 

Paolo Di Grazia, vice general manager of FinecoBank commented: “An extraordinary operating context in 2020 has led record growth, with today’s results confirming a strong UK proposition beyond the pandemic. The acceleration of our customer acquisition dynamics and in the quality of our client base has been confirmed in the last few months. We continue to grow at speed in the UK with the launch of Fineco ISA this year, and now over 20 asset managers available through our investing platform. We are also excited to announce that plans are underway to launch in Germany – a one stop digital solution across banking, investing, and brokerage will be the default model of the future in European banking.”

Fineco continues to drive its UK customer offering and has further expanded its investing platform with the introduction of more than 20 asset managers and the launch of the Fineco ISA in April. Fineco plans continue to build on these successes and intends to roll-out additional features and services during the coming months. The bank will focus on further improving the user experience by building up easy-to-use journeys and maps to help clients choose the best investment solution based on their goals

Innovative Payment Solutions, Inc.(“Innovative” or the “Company”), a California-based fintech company focused on building a 21st century universal digital payment platform, IPSIPay, today announces that it has retained CORE IR, a leading investor relations, public relations and strategic advisory firm, to assist the Company with investor relations, public relations and shareholder communications services. 

CORE IR will focus on expanding market awareness for Innovative Payment Solutions, Inc., conveying the company's business model and growth strategies to the institutional and retail investment communities. CORE IR, a boutique Investor and Public Relations and strategic advisory firm, specializes in leveraging the most effective investment, growth and exposure strategies for small to mid-sized publicly traded and privately-held companies through an integrated approach to relationship development and corporate communications. 

“We believe CORE IR’s integrated approach to communications will help Innovative Payment Solutions to expand our breadth of both institutional and retail investors while clearly communicating our story to the public at large,” said Innovative’s CEO William Corbett. “We have a unique story that we feel will continue to be well received as we execute our business plan.” 

“CORE IR is a great fit for Innovative Payment Solutions, and we are very pleased to have the opportunity to work with management in executing our integrated approach to help the company expand their outreach and exposure strategies. We look forward to raising market awareness and engagement with the investment communities and to assisting the company in achieving its goals,” added Scott Gordon, president of CORE IR. 

ITRS Group, a leading provider of real-time monitoring and analytics software, has acquired 100% of Opsview Limited, a modern, scalable monitoring platform, which provides unified insight into dynamic IT operations on-premises, in the Cloud or hybrid. Opsview will remain and operate as a separate brand and entity.  

The purchase of Opsview aligns well with ITRS’ strategy to build, buy and partner to deliver smart, automated and predictive end-to-end monitoring solutions for increasingly complex IT estates across industries. This development follows the successful strategic acquisitions of Sumerian, OP5 and Uptrends. 

Guy Warren, CEO of ITRS commented: “Opsview is trusted by hundreds of businesses, government organisations and service providers globally. This acquisition will enhance our technological innovation, increase our portfolio capability, and provide continued expansion across our global support services.” 

Mike Walton, CEO and founder of Opsview said: “Partnering with ITRS represents an exciting opportunity to accelerate improvements to our products and services, while simultaneously strengthening our ability to deliver best in class service and support to our customers who now have access to the rest of the ITRS product suite.” 

• Despite a shift away from cash, only 47% of consumers trust digital payment providers
• Payment cards will dominate the banking scene until at least 2025
• Consumers need a payment solution to protect them from card-present fraud – which amounted to almost £400 million, in the UK alone, in 2019.

Despite a recent study suggesting over half the world’s population will use mobile wallets by 2025, payment cards are set dominate the payment industry for the next decade as consumers lack trust in digital payments.

The past year has seen consumers and retailers move away from cash, but shoppers haven’t rushed to embrace mobile wallets as a replacement. According to McKinsey, more consumers reported a deteriorating perception of the security of digital payments over the past year (15%) than an improving one (11%). Similarly, while 64% of consumers say they trust banks, only 47% say the same for digital payments providers. This supports findings by PCM that payment cards will dominate the banking scene “until at least 2025”.

Contactless cards represented 73% of all card transactions last year, and more than 4.74 billion payment cards were shipped in 2019. Yet, despite 81% of those cards including chip and PIN security, unauthorised financial fraud losses from UK payment cards totalled £395.9 million in 2019^[1], and card-present fraud is still on the rise.

“The decline of cash payments over the last year has led many consumers to turn not to digital wallets, but to contactless payment cards for security, trust and convenience they can rely on. As a result, contactless cards will dominate the banking industry for years to come. It’s clear that banks and payment providers must acknowledge that ongoing consumer demand and explore fingerprint biometric authentication to deliver the next generation of payments to consumers and payment providers alike,” comments Phil Sealy, Research Director at ABI Research.

Consumer attachment to payment cards is already leading to a growth in the biometric payment card market, which UBS forecasts will generate more than USD five billion in global revenue and account for 15% of the market by 2026.

“We’ve recently seen momentous change in the payments industry: the fall of cash, the growth of digital wallets and the development of digital currencies. But one thing has remained constant— consumer demand for payment cards. Fingerprint biometric payment cards provide consumers with the convenience of a card and that much-needed security at the touch of a finger,” said Vince Graziani, CEO, IDEX Biometrics.

That demand for biometric payment cards has led to considerable momentum in the biometric payment technology industry in the past four years. Now, such a fingerprint biometric payment card is soon set to hit consumer wallets with the IDEX biometric sensor embedded in IDEMIA’s next generation biometric payment card representing a turning point for the payments industry and for consumers.

“Consumers will soon have fingerprint biometric payment cards in their wallets which is a significant milestone for the payments industry. With fingerprint biometric payment cards available to consumers, banks will gain a competitive edge by delivering the future of payments to their customers, in a format they know and trust,” continues Graziani.  

Odoo, one of the biggest CRM and ERP systems, teamed up with Salt Edge, leader in developing open banking solutions, to get instant access to banking data and enable businesses to reconcile invoices and payments as quickly as possible.

The modern accounting and BFM software market is growing exponentially, and to remain competitive, companies should embrace innovative technologies and widen their service propositions. Open banking becomes a divining-rod merging tech-savvy with resource-saving solutions to streamline critical business processes.

Odoo is a Belgium-based all-in-one business management and accounting software that covers all forward-thinking company needs: accounting, billing, ERP, CRM, e-commerce, inventory, point of sale, project management, manufacturing, and much more. Using Salt Edge Account Information, the company levels up the bank synchronisation in their accounting platform. Now Odoo enables its users to retrieve bank transactions from across European banks effortlessly. It helps businesses to have a true picture of their company financials in real-time, thus saving time and gaining efficiency in all subsequent operational processes.

We needed to cover a large number of banks in a maximum of countries, quickly. Salt Edge turned out to be our best choice as open banking partners; They have a qualitative and well-documented API, transparent communication, and a much-appreciated ability to simplify complex legal issues. Our goal is to integrate all business flows and keep them simple for our users. Salt Edge’s open banking solution helps us achieve it.

Benjamin Stiénon, Product Owner at Odoo

Teaming up with Salt Edge, Odoo will better serve its growing customer base of over 5 million users and 50,000+ companies and offer borderless service by getting access to more than 2,500 financial institutions in Europe.

Open banking revolution is spreading across the financial services market, and accounting and business management are already reaping a rich harvest from it. Live bank feeds powered by open banking transform many accounting processes from physical to digital, boosting efficiency and reducing operational costs. Salt Edge’s main goal is to build stable and secure infrastructure making integration with our solutions smooth and flawless. We are excited to join hands with Odoo, a user-friendly all-in-one business tool to automate the management of crucial business operations via open banking technology, thus helping more companies to grow their success.

Vasile Valcov, VP at Salt Edge

Ex-Mambu Julien Douve appointed as Head of Alliances and Partnerships to manage partnership programme

Modularbank, the next-generation core banking platform, has today announced the appointment of Julien Douve as Head of Alliances and Partnerships. Following its €4million round of late Seed Funding in December last year, the appointment is part of Modularbank’s wider expansion strategy to further strengthen its customer base in the UK, Nordics and Continental Europe and increase commercial breadth in new markets such as Latin America.

Modularbank aims to build out a global alliance network made up of four key types of partner: technology vendors, system integrators, resellers and business advisories and consultants. Working with such partners will be critical for the company in reaching and supporting an increasingly wide range of customers and use cases. By drawing on the expertise and know-how of these integrators and consultant partners, Modularbank will be able to help customers bring their own offerings to market rapidly, with a broader range of  best-of-breed solutions.

By hiring a dedicated Head of Alliances and Partnerships, Modularbank will be able to focus on sourcing the right partners that it can trust to work autonomously to help create a global ecosystem. The program will build on the recent agreements made with partners over the last 12 months. These include agreements with Nets, one of the top payment processors in Europe, HAWK:AI, a money-laundering detection and investigation platform and Trifork, a next-generation IT services provider.  The company will also continue to work directly with customers both in existing and other new markets, therefore operating a hybrid direct/indirect sales strategy.

Julien has worked in business development roles at a range of large technology and fintech companies including SAP, Oracle and Mambu, Rivo Uibo, Chief Business officer at Modularbank said: “We are delighted to have Julien on board and managing our indirect sales strategy. The banking and financial services sector is evolving rapidly. Julien has a clear understanding of the shifts taking place in the sector and the needs of both banks and non-banks as they seek to optimise these changing market needs. I am confident he will be a huge asset to the company and ensure we recruit the right partners who are aligned with our philosophy and able to replicate the same dedication to the specific needs of each customer.” 

Julien Douve commented on his appointment: “I’m delighted to join the Modularbank team. Its next-generation core banking platform is at the forefront of banking technology, appealing to a wide range of players in the financial services sector and I am very pleased to be driving the company’s indirect sales strategy”.  He continued: “As experts in their fields, partnering with integrators, resellers and fintech consultants will enable Modularbank to reach both larger financial institutions and more niche customers. We are looking to build an ecosystem of partners who can work independently and who we can entrust to help us empower the next generation of financial services.”

 SideDrawer and 8Twelve Mortgage announce a uniquely innovative API integration between SideDrawer’s document collaboration platform and 8Twelve’s fintech mortgage brokerage. Through this integration, SideDrawer’s professional users have the opportunity to refer their clients to 8Twelve’s mortgage brokers, apply for and ultimately provide the required mortgage documents, all from within SideDrawer’s secure platform. This eliminates the back and forth of countless emails with sensitive documents which are typical for traditional mortgage application processes, and demonstrates the capability of SideDrawer’s API-first, document collaboration platform.

8Twelve is a leading national mortgage brokerage with consistently high 5-star consumer reviews. With their unique service model and technology platform, they are able to provide fast turnarounds and exceptional service levels to applicants.

“8Twelve’s platform will leverage SideDrawer’s Information Request API, which combines a dynamic form and guided file request into one simplified function. We designed this API as we looked to solve one of our professional users’ biggest pain points – the process of collecting data and documents from clients. This is a significant administrative burden, which consumes a tremendous amount of time, prevents scaling capability, reduces efficiency, delays revenue collection and is a very poor client experience. We converted all of that into a seamless workflow which is being used by professionals and their clients, and now 8Twelve to power their mortgage process,” said J. Gaston Siri, Co-Founder & CEO of SideDrawer.

“When we saw how SideDrawer reimagined document management to be collaboration focused, vs storage based, we saw it as an opportunity to provide a differentiated client experience, something that aligned with today’s digital-first customer. We designed a more streamlined application and collection process for our referring customers from SideDrawer, making it easier for them to generate client referrals to us. We are very impressed with the efficiency of the API design leading to reduced administrative requirements for our mortgage brokers, creating a seamless and phenomenal user experience for the end client,” said Gary Fooks, 8Twelve’s CEO.

The integration will allow SideDrawer’s professional users to refer their client to 8Twelve’s highly qualified mortgage brokers. Through the connected platforms, the user experience will be far more streamlined, maintain a high degree of security, reduce risk of exposure and maintain data privacy at all times. With the added benefit of having the financial advisor initiate the referral but still receive passive notifications due to the nature of SideDrawer’s activity tracking, the advisor can immediately adjust and reflect the mortgage transaction into the client’s financial and estate plans. This is an exceptional level of advisor engagement only available through SideDrawer’s platform.

“Since SideDrawer is already being used by professionals and clients to collaborate on sensitive financial and tax documents, this integration was a logical extension of our platform’s capability. We believe there are a significant number of similar opportunities to improve upon the document collaboration experience, and we expect to announce additional partners that will leverage SideDrawer’s APIs to enhance their offering, or save precious development resources,” said Ali Qureshi, Co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer of SideDrawer.

$9.3 billion asset community bank using nCino's cloud-based, single platform to enable automated workflow across the institution

nCino, Inc., a pioneer in cloud banking and digital transformation solutions for the global financial services industry, today announced that S&T Bank is now live on the nCino Bank Operating System®. With a footprint spanning Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York, the community bank selected and adopted nCino to streamline processes, advance their digital strategy and better serve their business clients. Through nCino, S&T has been able to eliminate numerous disparate systems and manual processes in favor of a single, end-to-end platform through nCino’s Commercial and Small Business Lending Solutions. S&T is now also live on nCino’s Treasury Management Sales and Onboarding Solution, which will provide an even clearer 360-degree client view and reporting capabilities.

“For more than 100 years, S&T Bank has been committed to providing the right tools to create a frictionless experience for our clients,” said Brian Dobis, Director of Commercial Banking at S&T. “We want to build relationships rooted in excellent performance and long-standing trust. Our partnership with nCino has allowed us to do just that, by delivering an industry leading solution that will provide our employees, commercial and small business clients the seamless experience they need.”

By choosing to leverage nCino, S&T Bank is able to digitize, automate and streamline inefficient and complex processes and workflow, much of which was previously done manually. S&T is also able to digitally serve their clients across multiple products and channels, providing enhanced communication, delivering an improved client experience and expediting the speed to funding process for their commercial, treasury and small business clients. This unified digital relationship between S&T and its clients will empower the financial institution to be more efficient and effective, while also collecting more data driven, real-time insights into their business performance, which will allow the bank to better measure and manage their operations, as well as increase opportunities to grow wallet share.

“Many financial institutions around the globe are still working with siloed legacy systems, spreadsheets and manual, outdated processes that cannot support the modern needs of the client,” said Paul Clarkson, EVP of U.S. Financial Institutions at nCino. “The nCino platform allows for a scalable and sustainable technological foundation that can not only meet the growing expectations from consumers, but also ex

TruNarrative platform commemorates the anniversary of its launch and prepares for further success with rebrand. 3th August 2021 – Leeds: Leeds based RegTech firm, TruNarrative are celebrating the third anniversary of its platform which has transformed the way businesses; onboard their customers, ensure compliance with regulation and prevent financial crime. Marking the occasion, TruNarrative unveils a new look, to ensure its brand reflects their innovative, forward-thinking technology and prepares the company for future growth. TruNarrative was founded in 2017 through a partnership between Yorkshire Fintech Entrepreneur, John Lord and Larry Smith, a high-net-worth serial technology entrepreneur from California.

The founding team included, John, Ryan Morrison, Mike Harriss and Dave Eastaugh – industry experts with over 100 years of combined experience in the data and technology space, had all previously worked together at GB group plc, where John was the group managing director. Their mission was to create a unifying platform for workflow, orchestration & decisioning for the prevention of financial crime, available to businesses of all sizes through Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Data-as-a-Service (DaaS) technology. TruNarrative now boasts sales exceeding eight figures and has many high-profile customers including some of the world’s largest challenger banks, gambling organisations and leading payment services businesses. TruNarrative’s customers benefit from the latest AI-driven Onboarding, Risk Rating and Transaction Monitoring technology for Fraud Prevention, and Anti-Money Laundering (AML). Delivered through their cloud-based SaaS, TruNarrative’s Risk & Financial Crime platform has close partnerships with over 100 pre-integrated third-party data sources covering 150+ countries.

In February of this year, TruNarrative also launched a simplified version of their technology, serving high street professional services, and have customers across accountants, lawyers, estate agents and procurement managers. The Technology firm currently employees over 60+ people in their Leeds office, and is set to expand significantly within the next twelve months. Unveiled in July, the rebrand sees TruNarrative make significant aesthetic changes across their product logo, website and marketing collateral.

“4 years ago my team and I had an idea, that financial crime, customer onboarding and compliance could be orchestrated in a single SaaS solution.That idea has now grown into one of the UK’s leading RegTech firms, employing 60+ in our office above Leeds Kirkgate Market.” John Lord, Chief Executive Officer & Co-founder at TruNarrative “Great to celebrate 4 years of the business and 3 years of our live solution, with a brand new aesthetic. Our platform has undergone many changes in the last 3 years, and continues to evolve to meet customer and market demands. Now is the right time to refresh our brand, as we begin the next chapter of TruNarrative.” Ryan Morrison, Chief Operating Officer at TruNarrative “We set out to use technology to protect businesses and consumers from the threat of fraud and anti-money laundering. The TruNarrative platform is a trusted part of many organisations compliance and financial crime prevention strategies. Making sure that criminals are unable to defraud consumers or launder money from illegal activity into the financial system.” Mike Harriss, Chief Revenue Officer at TruNarrative

“As an investor in high growth SaaS platforms, it has been a pleasure to work with John and the TruNarrative team, helping them become the leader in a new space with ‘a single unifying platform’ to prevent financial crime. We are privileged to be based in Leeds, not only because it’s becoming the fastest growing Fintech hub in Europe, but because the talent pool from the local community, universities and colleges is almost unsurpassed in any European conurbation.” Larry Smith, Co-founder of TruNarrative

Adjust customers can now benefit from integrations with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, enabling mutual customers to streamline marketing decisions

Adjust, a mobile marketing analytics platform,  today announced it has launched an app marketing collaboration on Salesforce AppExchange, empowering mutual customers to gain a more complete view of the user journey and to make more informed marketing decisions. The first integration to launch will be with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (Marketing Cloud).

The data integration with Marketing Cloud will enable customers to create a user journey from an email directly to in-app with Adjust’s deep linking technology. This connection will give customers marketing measurement insights to increase installs, revenue, and lifetime value (LTV).

Built on the Salesforce Platform, Adjust’s app marketing solutions are currently available on AppExchange at https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3A00000G9gzdUAB

The unique benefits for marketers include:

●        Measuring and analyzing where their app users are coming from, and how they interact with their app once it’s installed.

●        Enabling customers to add mobile and Connected TV (CTV) data points to their user journey — all in one place — and tackle the challenges of subscription attribution with Subscription Tracking.

●        Making analytics actionable by automating campaign workflows.

●        Protecting marketing budgets against mobile performance ad fraud.

“Collaborating with Marketing Cloud means that we can develop solutions that can better power the growth of companies around the world,” said Lokesh Bidhan, senior director of partnerships at Adjust. “Our core focus is to bring actionable insights into the full user journey and this collaboration helps fulfill this for more businesses around the world.”

The initial integration for email campaign and attribution management will help brands optimize their campaigns and increase in-app engagement. It also paves the way for further integrations between Adjust and Marketing Cloud, increasing the strategic value of each.

“Adjust is a welcome addition to AppExchange, as they accelerate digital transformation for customers by providing granular measurement and analytics,” said Woodson Martin, GM of Salesforce AppExchange. “AppExchange is constantly evolving to enable our partners to build cutting-edge solutions to drive customer success.”