BlueSnap, the All-in-One Payment Platform for global B2B and B2C businesses, has partnered with leading education software providers to improve digital payments in education. 

The global payments leader has teamed up with Faria Education Group, a leader in international education systems and services, as well as other edtech leaders including Teaching Strategies, Snowman Software, Proclass, and Finalsite.  

The string of new client acquisitions comes amid unprecedented growth in the market. In 2020 alone, the UK’s edtech sector grew by 72% as a result of mandatory school closures and national lockdowns. 

BlueSnap’s white-label solution enables edtech companies to integrate digital payments into their platforms to increase efficiency, reduce risk and enhance the overall user journey.

Jeff Coppolo, SVP, Global Sales of BlueSnap: “As with most industries, the global pandemic has upended the education market. Schools, education centers, and other academic organisations have all turned to technology solutions to solve their new challenges. And payments, be it tuition, donations, after-school programmes, or otherwise, are a crucial yet overlooked part of the equation. They have historically been managed separately rather than in one place.” 

He adds, “At BlueSnap, we understand the impact that digital payments can have on the entire education ecosystem, having navigated the nuances of the sector for years. In collaboration with our education partners, we’ve created a payment experience that’s easy, fast, and virtually frictionless for all parties involved.”

Based on years of expertise in the market, the company’s Modern Education Payments Solutions enable edtech providers to offer their customers a better, more integrated user experience. 

This makes it fast and easy for parents to manage school-related payments, something which has become increasingly important during the pandemic. 

For schools, BlueSnap reduces the cost of payments processing and provides a plethora of payment options as well as best-in-class services. This allows learning institutions to focus more time on teaching and other administrative work. 

In the increasingly sophisticated education software market, payments are quickly becoming an integral part of the ecosystem. BlueSnap’s solutions are powering the education industry’s embrace of the rapid digital transformation that is redefining the relationship between education and technology.

The UK education technology market is valued at over £3.5 billion in 2020 and growing. As a result, administrative processes, like integrated payments, are quickly becoming a point of difference for software vendors, enhancing the overall experience for schools and parents. 

BlueSnap’s market-tested solutions, including white-label solutions, a customised onboarding application and simplified compliance, have attracted notable edtech partner integrations like Teaching Strategies, Faria Education Group, Snowman Software, Finalsite, and more. 

David Higginson, International Sales Director for Faria Education Group said: “We are excited to have partnered with BlueSnap. BlueSnap has great expertise and knowledge within the education sector. As such, they are able to cater to our company’s specific payment solution needs. As we come out of lockdown, there will be an even greater need for the organisation and management of extra-curricular activities. Our partnership with BlueSnap allows us to facilitate this more efficiently and conveniently for our customers.

To learn more about BlueSnap’s leading education solutions, visit www.bluesnap.com/payments-for-education. 

Identity verification platform Sumsub secured an administrative services provider (ASP) license from CySEC, a key European regulator with stringent demands. This additional qualification will help Sumsub consult over 1000 businesses that struggle to meet AML requirements.

Sumsub’s KYC/AML solution received CySEC’s Administrative Services Provider (ASP) license certificate. With this new license, Sumsub will help more companies achieve higher compliance standards through a variety of technical solutions including anti-fraud, KYC, and enhanced due diligence—all backed up by professional legal advice. 

CySEC’s ASP license allows service providers, like Sumsub, to supply customers with much more than just innovative compliance infrastructure. This includes legal and compliance support in corporate structuring, auditing, business consultancy, and anti-money laundering procedures. 

With the ASP license, Sumsub will expand its range of services to include a full internal audit service, comprehensive compliance support services, special investigations, preparation and documentation of internal procedures, customer due diligence outsourcing, monthly and/or quarterly compliance reports, and compliance support for KYC and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) procedures.

In recent years, CySEC has become known for its stringent yet innovative approach to regulating the financial industry in the EU. This makes CySEC’s ASP license an especially important addition to our portfolio, empowering us to set higher standards of compliance in the EU and beyond.

“CySEC is known as one of the most stringent AML regulators across Europe. Being recognized as an ASP will further our mission to set the highest possible standard of compliance for our clientele, irrespective of their jurisdiction.”—Jacob Sever, Founder of Sumsub.

Billhop (www.billhop.com), the Swedish payment platform that allows businesses to pay invoices by card regardless of whether the receiver accepts cards, has today announced a new partnership with International Card Services (ICS), the largest credit card provider in the Netherlands, to help Dutch businesses improve their cash flow and close liquidity gaps.

As part of the agreement, ICS commercial cardholders will have access to Billhop’s service at a preferential rate and will thereby be able to pay suppliers using any card, regardless of whether the supplier accepts card payments. Through Billhop, businesses can pay their suppliers instantaneously without needing to on-board the end beneficiary, while taking advantage of the interest-free payment period offered by card issuers. This allows businesses to extend their payment terms, significantly strengthen their liquidity cushion and ensure a more efficient distribution of their cash flow.

Billhop currently serves over 50,000 SMEs, sole traders and large corporations across Europe, having already expanded to key markets including the United Kingdom, Sweden, Italy and the Netherlands. In the midst of the pandemic, as government aid is gradually being discontinued, and as SMEs are experiencing shrinking liquidity margins, Billhop has seen a dramatic increase in the demand for its service.

Over the past year, a rising number of businesses have been using Billhop in order to benefit from the increased working capital flexibility their credit cards offer, and to find an alternative way to finance their growth and dilute the volatility in their cash resources. In particular, the total transactions processed via Billhop, across all of its customer segments, exceeded €270M in 2020. 

Tashi Gauffin, Chief Commercial Officer of Billhop, said: “We are really excited to partner with the largest credit card issuer of the Netherlands. ICS has a first-class organisation and product portfolio and we look forward to servicing ICS’s customers with our working capital management tools.”

Glenn MacDonald, Chief Commercial Officer at ICS, said: “Businesses are increasingly turning to cards as their payment method of choice, namely for the convenience and simplicity cards offer. However, low card acceptance within the B2B space has for long been the biggest obstacle to increasing the adoption of commercial credit cards. We’re very happy to now be able to help our cardholders by opening up our credit cards for all types of supplier invoices, as well as providing them with a very practical cashflow management tool.”

Impact 12 to support social ventures created within 12 of the UK’s leading universities

Twelve leading universities have joined forces to create an impact investment fund, Impact 12 (www.impact12.com), to support mission-led university ventures.

The ten-year, multi-million-pound fund will support social ventures created within the twelve participating universities across the UK. The fund will support ventures motivated by beneficial social or environmental impact, rather than solely by profit.

Impact 12 has been developed by Social Investment Scotland (SIS), an impact investor and responsible finance provider based in Edinburgh, in partnership with the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, Northampton, Coventry and eight universities comprising the MICRA Project (Aston, Birmingham, Cranfield, Keele, Leicester, Loughborough, Nottingham and Warwick). Oxford University Innovation leads the consortium.

Impact 12’s aim is to bring positive change, to people and places, by accelerating the development and success of impact-led social ventures spun out of universities. It will support social ventures with innovative finance tailored to their needs, including equity investment and debt. The fund will also provide access to timely and expert mission-aligned finance and impact support.

Impact 12 will be managed by SIS Ventures, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SIS, which provides the tools and investment required to help early-stage mission-driven businesses grow and deliver social impact at scale. SIS Ventures will shortly be recruiting a dedicated Impact 12 Senior Investment Manager whose initial focus will be fundraising.

The fund will launch later this year with an initial fundraising target of £8 million. The capital raised will be deployed to support up to fifteen social ventures from across the partner universities, with both seed and follow-on funding over the next ten years.

Impact 12 will tap into the growing interest in impact investing and the rise of social enterprise strategies within universities. It will fundraise among alumni networks as well as the wider impact investor community. Figures from the annual CASE-Ross Support for Education Survey showed that new philanthropic funds secured by UK and Irish higher education institutions reached £1.3 billion in 2019-20 - the third year running that new funds secured from philanthropic sources have remained higher than £1 billion since the report’s inception in 2000.

With mission-driven companies increasingly out-performing more traditional business models, funding from Impact 12 will help meet a clear need for early-stage finance among university social ventures, which often lack the financial support of traditional university spinouts or start-ups.

Professor Louise Richardson, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford said: “I am delighted to see the growing emphasis on social ventures. Over the past three years, 11 companies targeting six of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals have emerged from the four Divisions of the University. Combining applied research with sustainable economics they address some of the critical issues of the day. Impact 12 will align Oxford’s research and innovation expertise with the community experience of our partner institutions and advance the progress of social ventures far beyond Oxfordshire’s borders.”

Professor Stephen J Toope, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge said: “Cambridge is proud to join forces with sister universities to launch Impact 12, a powerful partnership for social ventures to expand their networks and scale up their work. The social ventures supported by our 12 universities will be at the forefront of creating change and finding solutions to support the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.”

Professor Nick Petford, Vice-Chancellor, University of Northampton commented: “The University of Northampton is delighted to be part of the Impact 12 partnership, supporting impact driven start-ups, spin-outs and community enterprises through innovative impact investment products. Our mission at the University is focused on ‘Transforming Lives and Inspiring Change’, a mantra that will be further bolstered by our work together on Impact 12. We see this new fund as an innovative initiative that will demonstrate the impact that higher education institutions can deliver in partnership with impact driven organisations like SIS Ventures.”

Alastair Davis, CEO, SIS said: “At a time when global economies are still suffering the impacts of the pandemic, Impact 12 provides a new and exciting vehicle for helping to support and fund some of the very best mission-driven businesses spinning out of universities’ research labs and accelerators. For SIS Ventures, this fund also marks a new opportunity to realise our ambition of entering new markets where we feel able to support impact creation. Through our collaboration with these twelve universities, we believe we can create considerable impact by supporting mission-aligned businesses which have the potential to be the cornerstone of our economy in years to come.”

For more information on Impact12 visit www.impact12.com

It is a common belief that financial access should lead to financial prosperity. According to the World Bank, financial inclusion is defined as all people and businesses having access to useful and affordable financial products and services that meet their needs. Sakhile Mabena, CEO, Ofin, a venture-backed fintech startup specialising in Behavioural Data Analytics, Financial Process Automation, Behaviour-based Financing and SME Behaviour Nudges, says that to successfully address financial inclusion in Africa it is important to address the financial behaviours and leverage technology to better enable users to become more bankable.

Mabena, previously a World Economic Forum Global Shaper, has together with his team, developed an app that focuses on changing financial behaviour, which will ultimately and more effectively address financial inclusion: “OFIN is a first of its kind mobile app aimed at South African distribution operators, trucks and drivers. The app looks to automate financial health based on behavioural changes.”

Two years in the making, Mabena says that the app uses an online marketing technique called gamification, which encourages engagement with a product or service. By gamifying financial spend, he says they hope to encourage usage and a better understanding of the plight of the financial excluded: “While Ofin is ultimately a financial-inclusion app, its aim is to not only assist logistics business to run more profitably, but more importantly its intention is to uplift and educate drivers to better manage the truck, and ultimately create a business where there was once just a single truck.”

In simple terms, Mabena says that Ofin is the difference between just driving the truck versus owning it and ultimately building a fleet: “The Ofin app focuses on three aspects for the driver: to save on expenses, to make the participant lendable and to automate and improve on cost cutting such as fuel and tyres.”

Ofin is collaborating with oil company and tyre manufacturers to offer incentives, fuel rebates and loyalty programmes. It is also building a peer-to-peer network between the registered users and encouraging enough interaction to eventually develop a fruitful ecosystem for all involved.

“We also work with large enterprises who want to reduce risk, lower costs and increase demand flexibility with or for transport operators who form part of their supply chain. Currently, we have trials running with two leading breweries to fine-tune the mechanics of the app.”

This clever use of technology is rapidly becoming a key driver of financial inclusion. Based on the rapid expansion of mobile phone usage among people of all income levels, fintech’s such as Ofin are able to reach and deliver services to the underbanked more efficiently and cost-effectively than ever before.

BSO, a global pioneering infrastructure and connectivity provider, has announced newly-upgraded direct connectivity routes between Frankfurt and Istanbul, Frankfurt and Moscow and Frankfurt and Hong Kong. The new routes help to solidify BSO as a leading low-latency provider and will allow customers trading on the Borse Frankfurt-Borse Istanbul, Borse Frankfurt-MOEX, Borse Frankfurt-HKEX to trade significantly faster than they could with other providers.

Commenting on the upgraded route Tony Jones, Head of Low Latency Services, said: “As demand for trading increased between Frankfurt, MOEX, Borse Istanbul and HKEX, low latency has never been more important for traders. The upgrade of these Frankfurt routes will ensure that hungry market makers continue to have unrivalled access to some of the most popular exchanges in the world”.

Michael Ourabah, CEO of BSO also comments: “This is a significant moment for BSO as we strengthen our position in EMEA’s vibrant economies. Our presence in these exchanges reinforces our continued commitment to providing the trading community with continuous and stable access to some of the most profitable and attractive markets as they look to stay one step ahead of the competition”.

The new routes are now live and are providing low-latency connectivity to banks, specifically heads of trading and market infrastructure chiefs as well as derivatives brokers and electronic market makers.

Finastra has established a new partnership with Uni Systems Information Technology S.M.SA (Uni Systems), an Information and Communications Technology (ICT) systems integration company that specializes in Information Technology landscape transformation in Europe. Uni Systems will be bringing Finastra treasury, risk and payments software – Fusion Treasury, Fusion Risk and Fusion Global PAYplus respectively – to local markets with on-the-ground implementation and support services.

Constantine Serros, Banking and Financial Services Business Unit Director at Uni Systems, said, “We are excited to announce this new business partnership with Finastra. As a global leader in the fintech space, Finastra brings deep expertise coupled with leading solutions in the domains of treasury, payments and risk, which we aim to leverage further with our local footprint, knowledge and technology integration capabilities. We are certain that this partnership will help European financial institutions on their journey to digital transformation – a vision which both Finastra and Uni Systems share.”

The partnership will enable customers to benefit from local expertise and high-level professional services alongside Finastra’s trusted technology solutions. It covers selected customers in multiple geographies in Europe, including Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, North Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia.

Michael Henssler, General Manager, Treasury and Capital Markets and Risk at Finastra said, “Uni Systems is an exciting new member of our Fusion Orbit partner program. We are looking forward to reaching wider markets across Europe with this collaboration. Uni Systems’ specialized consultants are now trained and certified in delivering our solutions, both in the cloud and on-premise, and we are confident they will also deliver quality professional services to our customers.”

 Gresham Technologies plc (Gresham), a global fintech that specialises in providing real-time solutions for data integrity and control, banking integration, payments and cash management, today announced the closing of its acquisition of Electra Information Systems, Inc. (Electra). 

First announced in May 2021, the $38.6 million acquisition reinforces Gresham’s market leadership position in reconciliation solutions for financial markets and strengthens the fintech’s rapidly expanding operations in North America.

This strategic investment follows Gresham’s successful acquisition of Inforalgo Information Technologies in July 2020 to enhance the firm’s regulatory reporting and connectivity capabilities. The deal will enable Gresham’s customers to benefit from a rich portfolio of cloud services, covering STP connectivity, data aggregation and control, matching and reconciliation, exception management, regulatory reporting, banking connectivity and payments. 

Electra is a leading provider of post-trade automation solutions, with a focus on improving efficiency and mitigating risk for buy-side participants. The company has built a strong reputation for customer service, a deep understanding of the needs of the buy-side community, and a market leading presence in North America.

The combined business will be supporting 270 customers in 20 countries around the world and positions Gresham as the leading independent provider of data aggregation, control and reconciliation solutions to financial markets.

The deal reinforces Gresham’s strategy to deliver functionally rich solutions that can meet the exacting requirements of specific industry segments, asset classes and use cases, all on one enterprise-grade platform. Customers will benefit from the combination of Electra’s highly respected buy-side solutions and the power of Gresham’s Clareti platform. 

This latest move reflects Gresham’s ongoing commitment to the U.S. market and takes the fintech one step closer to achieving its strategic vision of bringing digital integrity and confidence to financial markets around the world. 

John Landry, CEO at Electra, will support Gresham’s leadership team as an advisor to ensure a smooth transition. All other permanent Electra employees will join Gresham.

Commenting on the completed transaction, Landry said, “We’re delighted to be joining forces with Gresham. Since our plans were first announced last month, the reaction from our clients and our people has been overwhelmingly positive, and we’re excited to become part of a leading and trusted technology partner for banks, investment managers and other financial services firms across the world.” 

Ian Manocha, CEO at Gresham added, “On behalf of everyone at Gresham, I’d like to welcome the entire Electra team into the business. We are committed to supporting Electra customers and products with the same levels of excellence that have been hallmarks of their business since its inception.” 

Manocha continues, “Bringing together two market leaders with a shared vision, highly complementary offerings, and significant combined firepower in research and development will enable us to accelerate our innovation agenda and our ambitious global growth plans.” 

Apex Group Ltd, a global financial services provider, announces today the acquisition of Senasen Group Ltd. (“Senasen”),  a unique digital marketing platform provider designed to connect LPs and GPs and support the capital-raising process.

Founded by Blair McPherson and created by Ben Slater (CTO), both of whom will join Apex as part of the deal, Senasen’s proprietary SaaS platform will benefit clients through delivering a self-service offering they can leverage to publish multi-media content, research, interact with investors and build their profile. The platform will enhance connections between Investors, Asset Managers including family offices and HNWIs, and both public and private companies by supporting the instant communication of engaging content and information with just a few clicks.

Early registered adopters of the platform include over 100 investors, 12 asset managers and 110 companies. Users will be able to create profiles to post content (videos, podcasts, research and marketing documents) to their desired audience, via a private room or general newsfeed, to engage in public or private marketing to complement capital raising activity.

The Group will offer a scalable solution, with outsourced marketing options to support its clients, including the production of high-quality video and podcasts interviews to be shared as digital content along with virtual investor presentations to support the capital raising process.

This acquisition continues Apex Group’s growth momentum and is the third deal announced by the Group in as many months, with recently announced international transactions including geographic expansion via the acquisitions of fund administrators BRL Trust Investimentos and MAF in Brazil, Tzur in Israel.

Rosie Guest, Chief Marketing Officer at Apex Group comments: “We see frictionless digital solutions as the future for the financial services space. The Senasen platform is like a LinkedIn for the investment management space. Our global client base ranges from well-established institutional managers looking to deploy capital efficiently, to start-up funds seeking to attract new investment; no matter what stage they are at, the Senasen platform can be of benefit providing secure two-way communication. For those looking for additional support, we plan to offer outsourced platform management solutions in addition to a range of content creation and marketing support services to further enhance our single-source offering. “

Blair McPherson, Founder of Senasen Group adds: “Since founding Senasen in 2018, Ben and I have worked together to build an innovative and user friendly platform which increases visibility for allocators and managers, bringing the traditional Investor Relations model into the modern world. We are delighted to be joining the Apex Group and further enhancing what is already a really powerful offering and reinforcing the Group’s ability to deliver a unique single-source solution to clients throughout their lifecycle. The reach and relationships of the Apex Group, partnered with our SaaS platform will offer a solution that drives efficient, meaningful and productive engagements, enabling money to reach the right home at the right time. “