Virgin Money has launched a free, full money management package to support small business customers with their day-to-day financial operations and ensure they have a complete view of their past, current and future financial position.

In partnership with market-leading fintech company, Strands, Virgin Money will be the first UK bank and Mastercard issuer to offer Money Management, aimed at empowering small business owners with under £1m annual turnover to take control of their finances in the most efficient way possible.

Powered by Artificial Intelligence, the new digital platform, Money Management provides an innovative and personalised banking experience allowing Virgin Money’s Business Current Account customers to make more informed financial decisions through clearer insights and analysis of their financial position via a range of features including:

• Forecasting through Financial Calendar
  • Provides a snapshot overview of cash in and out each day to allow customers to plan ahead and for the long-term.
• Invoice creation & management
  • Creates sales invoices and tracks to see whether they are unpaid, paid, or overdue to help customers manage payments more effectively. 
• Budgeting
  • Creates visual budgeting graphs which automatically update with each transaction made to help customers stay on track with their business plan at a glance. 
• Transaction Categorisation
  • Understands and tracks business spending by filtering transactions by time period, client provider or category. The data can then be automatically presented in graph form enabling easier analysis and reporting.
• Cashflow Projection
• Automatically generated cashflow forecasts so customers can stay on top of cash coming in and out of the business. 

The free tool is accessed through the Bank’s online desktop business platform and is underpinned by 24-hour chat support with a dedicated web team, to help customers manage their accounts.

Sue Douthwaite, Small and Medium Business Director at Virgin Money, said: “As a nation packed with almost six million SMEs, representing 99% of all businesses, it is so important that they have all the tools to help them succeed, particularly in today’s climate where pressure is coming from all sides.  The easier it is for SME owners to juggle day-to-day operations and cashflow, the more time they have to plan their future growth.

“The Money Management package is a ‘one-stop shop’ service that gives busy business owners a holistic view and a better understanding of their finances, while providing them with a simple, user-friendly experience, all in one place to help them make smarter business decisions aided by the confidence that comes from foresight and planning.

“We are committed to working with our customers to support their long-term development and growth, and Money Management is an excellent addition to the features and capabilities our customers have access to, completely free of charge.

“These last few months has been extremely difficult and many of our smaller customers have taken on lending for the first time to ensure their business survives the pandemic. This tool will give them an instant overview of their finances to allow them to manage and plan accordingly, which will allow them to operate more efficiently.”

Erik Brieva, CEO at Strands, said: “We’re delighted to partner with Virgin Money, one of the most innovative and customer-centric banks in the UK, with a strong emphasis on digital excellence. By leveraging the power of AI, Virgin Money is equipping SME owners with a truly comprehensive and personalised banking solution, as well as positioning itself as a trusted financial advisor to its customers.”

Money Management will complement the Group’s innovative proposition designed for SMEs and also for larger corporates. It will include the ‘Working Capital Health’ to track financial wellness, combining dynamic views across the company’s working capital cycle, with a set of solutions to manage liquidity, all backed up by proactive relationship management and a unique ecosystem of capability partners.

Ohpen, the first fintech platform to bring a bank to the cloud, today announces the appointment of Douwe-Klaas Bijl as its new CFO. Joining the Executive Board, Douwe will be responsible for Ohpen’s continued expansion from a financial, risk, legal and compliance perspective.
 
This latest appointment forms part of Ohpen’s wider growth strategy and vision. Last month, Ohpen acquired Davinci (https://latest.ohpen.com/ohpen-acquires-davinci/), Europe’s STP number one loan and mortgage software company, to challenge leading core banking software providers. As a result, Ohpen now holds assets under administration in the region of $100 billion. Douwe brings his 15+ years of international experience across finance, strategy and operational implementation in the financial services sector to continue the seamless and successful integration of Davinci.
 
Douwe spent over 10 years with McKinsey, some of which was working at McKinsey Australia and United Kingdom, both advising clients on corporate finance and strategy and supporting them through large scale transformation programmes. He was part of the team that set-up and scaled LeasePlan’s European used-car marketplace, responsible for finance, analytics and business intelligence.   Most recently, Douwe served as the CFO for Digital Insurance Group, focusing on fundraising and growth.
 
“Ohpen is at an incredibly exciting stage of growth and Douwe’s experience will be crucial to our continued expansion and momentum. He has a strong perspective on the benefits of integration and a careful eye for both commercial and efficiency opportunities. He will be a key asset as we continue working on our mission of setting financial institutions free from legacy software,” said Matthijs Aler, CEO of Ohpen. 
 
On his appointment, Douwe said: “I feel privileged to join Ohpen at the brink of its next wave of growth and innovation. It is uniquely placed to challenge legacy technology providers in the financial services sector and its client proposition as the only cloud-native core banking engine to offer a full suite of products is not just compelling, but proven. I am thrilled to be playing a role changing the face of finance by joining the team.”

TrueLayer, the leading technology company building financial infrastructure that’s open to any business, anywhere in the world, today announced leading investment platform Trading 212 has implemented its platform to deliver an improved investment experience.

Trading 212 is a London-based fintech with a mission of democratising the financial markets by offering commission-free investing for everyone through smart and easy to use apps. After spectacular growth in 2020 Trading 212 now serves more than 700,000 customers and manages over £1 billion in client assets.

Determined to continue evolving its market-leading platform, the firm has integrated TrueLayer’s Open Banking platform to deliver a seamless experience for users.

That begins with the data API delivering the rapid identification and verification of a user’s primary bank and connecting it to the Trading 212 app. From inside the app, the payments API means users can then quickly and securely fund their investment account, using Payments Initiation.

Francesco Simoneschi, CEO and co-Founder of TrueLayer, commented: “Retail investing is booming and Trading 212 has been at the forefront, lowering the barriers to entry and making the UK market more accessible. A new generation of investors are used to seamless digital experiences in every aspect of their lives, and now expect that in their financial services providers. By integrating our open banking platform, Trading 212 has enhanced its offering to meet those expectations by offering its customers a dramatically improved account set up and funding experience, enabling them to invest with confidence.”

Nick Saunders, CEO of Trading 212, commented: “The ability to fund accounts instantly and securely is critical for our users. TrueLayer enabled us to offer such experience even for bank deposits. Our users no longer need to do manual wire transfers and wait a day or more before funds arrive in their Trading 212 account.”

Personio, the provider of an all-in-one HR software solution for SMEs, has appointed Ross Seychell as Chief People Officer. Starting in November 2020, the former Transferwise CPO will be tasked with driving Personio’s people strategy and employee experience to support organisational and business growth across Europe. Seychell will play a pivotal role in executing Personio’s company and product strategy from an HR perspective, to support Personio in becoming the leading European HR platform for SMEs.

While primarily based in London, in one of Personio’s four European offices, Seychell will spend half of his time at the Munich headquarters where the majority of the company’s HR team is located.

Seychell brings more than twenty years of experience in developing and implementing people strategies that add value to fast growing global businesses. Before joining Personio, he spent over two years as CPO at Transferwise, where he supported company growth and long-term business strategy while overseeing the fintech’s growth from 800 to 2,400 employees. Transferwise’s valuation more than tripled to over $5bn during Seychell’s time in the business.

Hanno Renner, co-founder and CEO of Personio, said: “HR is the backbone of any business, but in an HR-focused company like ours, the Chief People Officer is especially important. Personio is currently growing by over 30 new colleagues each month, which makes the people function even more important to support this growth from an organisational perspective. That’s why I’m very happy that Ross is joining the Personio team on our journey to becoming Europe’s leading HR platform for SMEs. Not only is he a great fit for our culture and core values, he’s also extremely experienced in quickly scaling international teams in thriving businesses. At Personio he'll be integral in defining our business and product strategy in a way that maximises customer value and thereby continues to drive our rapid growth.”

Ross Seychell: “Being an HR professional, I know first hand how challenging it is for HR teams to create value in parallel with the demands of day to day operational workload. Having the right technology allows these teams to focus more of their time with employees and delivering people strategies. Personio is the only tool I know of that is so clearly dedicated to the needs of its customers – namely small and medium-sized enterprises – so when Hanno asked me to join the team, it was a very easy decision to make. I’m really excited to be part of this extremely talented team of people in a company that’s dedicated to driving excellence in people operations and strategy.”

The third high-profile executive to join Personio’s leadership team in just eight months, Seychell’s appointment follows the arrival of Geraldine MacCarthy from Dropbox as CRO and Birgit Haderer from Zalando as CFO earlier this year. Besides these new joiners, the company’s executive team also includes two original founders, Hanno Renner (CEO) and Roman Schumacher (Chief Product Officer), as well as Jonas Rieke (COO) who helped build the company from the beginning, as well as Sebastian Enderlein (VP Engineering) who joined Personio last year after twelve years in Silicon Valley at Uber and Salesforce.

Open Finance data, intelligence and payments platform Moneyhub, has transformed the ease and speed at which landlords can now file their HMRC Self-Assessment: UK property (SA105) form. Moneyhub’s Data & Intelligence API makes this new feature accessible to fintech innovators seeking to enhance their proposition for landlords.

Moneyhub’s API enables landlords to easily categorise transactions on the platform that relate to their property or other projects, meaning filling out income and expenditure details can be done seamlessly, quickly, and accurately. Innovators using Moneyhub’s API can make their customers lives easier, saving them time and money which can result in more engaged and loyal customers. 

For landlords in particular, many of whom will have multiple properties within their portfolios, this feature will not only save time but also significantly reduce the chance of errors being made within tax returns. According to HMRC, 11.7m individuals were required to fill in a Self-Assessment tax return for the financial year 2018/19. However, filling a Self-Assessment Tax Return can not only be a lengthy process but if not done accurately can lead to an investigation from HMRC. 

This new feature launched by Moneyhub is already being used by one of the UK’s biggest building societies. 

Dan Scholey, COO at Moneyhub comments: “Moneyhub isn’t just about aggregating and enhancing financial data, we help our clients to go to market faster with innovative features they don’t have to develop themselves. With this latest API, innovators have the power to truly revolutionise their clients’ experience when it comes to completing tax returns. 

Open Banking and Open Finance have the power to simplify financial management across the board and we are constantly innovating to do just that.” 

Other recent features available via Moneyhub’s API include ‘Projects’ which allows users to track and monitor all transactional activity and assets related to specific projects. Moneyhub has also launched ‘Transaction Attachment’, enabling users to easily upload, store and access attachments linked to transactions, such as photos, receipts, and warranties. 

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organisation, has helped Legal & General (L&G), one of the UK’s leading financial services companies and a major global investor, successfully complete the transfer of its insurance-based savings, pensions, life and with-profits policies to ReAssure (now part of the Phoenix Group).

In December 2017, L&G announced the sale of its Mature Savings division to ReAssure in a £650 million deal. As L&G’s strategic partner, TCS provided end-to-end IT solutions support for the complex transfer program, involving 1.1 million policies representing assets worth over £30 billion. TCS leveraged its deep contextual and domain knowledge to deliver GDPR compliant solutions covering over 130 applications.

TCS built and implemented a solution to securely extract, transfer and subsequently delete large volumes of in-scope data from a complex and integrated IT estate without impacting the existing business. Additional solutions were designed to allow inflight business transactions to seamlessly transfer from L&G to ReAssure in case of a successful transfer or remain operational within L&G in case of a failed transfer event, with minimal manual intervention.

With careful and detailed planning, TCS could successfully extract and securely transfer over 8.9 billion rows of data, within the very short transfer window of 16 hours, achieving peak extraction and packaging rates of over 500 million records per hour. Post-transfer issue incidence is reportedly the lowest experienced to date, for a migration of this size.

The critical implementation phase of the program was carried out during the COVID-19 pandemic with zero disruption, leveraging TCS’ Secure Borderless Workspaces™, a transformative operating model that allows organizations to fully and seamlessly transition to virtual workspaces.

“TCS has been part of this strategic journey since 2017 and worked closely with the L&G team to take timely actions to ensure regulatory compliance, optimise outcomes whilst ensuring no material detriment to the business and our customers,” said Feargal Supple, Project Sponsor, L&G.

“Our domain knowledge of the UK insurance industry, past experience in large-scale policy migrations and deep contextual knowledge of L&G’s business helped us navigate through the complex challenges involved, and successfully transfer such a large book of business to ReAssure,” said Vinay Singhvi, BFSI Business Unit Head – UK, TCS. “This latest success further deepens our long-standing partnership with L&G in their transformation journey to build a robust, resilient and futuristic business.”

Adyen (AMS:ADYEN), the payments platform of choice for many of the world’s leading companies, has today announced the rollout of Giving - a product feature that enables Adyen’s merchants to accept charitable donations during the online and in-store checkout process, and allows them to strengthen their bond with their shoppers by providing a platform for their preferred charitable causes. By doing so, Giving converts shoppers’ good intentions into additional revenue streams for charitable causes. 

Adyen partnered with a host of leading brands to launch Giving, including Gap Inc., Delivery Hero and Crocs. In line with the company’s philosophy of leveraging its technology to make a positive impact, Adyen will absorb the full cost of the donation.*

“Our founder, Don Fisher, firmly believed that ‘we do more than sell clothes’ has always been at the heart of what we do,” said Ben Wittman, Senior Director at Gap EU. “Adyen has made it simple and accessible for our shoppers to give back to their communities in our stores”.

“Meal donation is a core part of our Corporate Social Responsibility ambition at Delivery Hero. Adyen has been a great partner in building out the donation strategy for our ShareTheMeal project,” says Jeffrey Oatham, Director of CSR & Sustainability at Delivery Hero.

“Adyen’s innovative donation technology provides our shoppers with a seamless and transparent way to support our partners, like Feeding America, with one click,” notes Feliz Papich, Senior Director Ecommerce Product Manager at Crocs. “It excites me that through teaming up with Adyen, donating to charitable causes is now so frictionless.”

“The combined strengths of our merchants’ forward-thinking attitudes and our technology create a multiplier effect that enables fundraising for charitable causes at tremendous scale,” comments Pieter van der Does, co-founder and CEO of Adyen. “Giving increases the pool of funds available to charities by playing into newly evolved donation behavior at a time when charities are increasingly unable to rely on traditional means of giving. I’m proud that we’re using our technology to enable our merchants to cater to these evolving needs - especially during a global pandemic, when it’s more important than ever for charities to have the funds they need.”

With a single tap on a point-of-sale terminal or the click of a button at an online checkout, shoppers can donate to the merchants’ charity of choice. Giving transactions seamlessly integrate into existing checkout processes across all payment channels, and shoppers’ donations are reported and settled to the charity of choice directly without impacting the merchants’ existing reconciliation flow. For more information on Giving, go here.

*Adyen Giving eligibility criteria apply

Gresham Technologies Plc (Gresham), the leading global fintech that specialises in providing real-time solutions for data integrity and control, banking integration and payments and cash management, has appointed Jenny Knott and Dr. Ruth Wandhöfer as Non-Executive Directors.

The appointments bring a wealth of banking and financial technology experience to the Board and follow the recent news of a Clareti Annualised Recurring Revenue (ARR) increase of 18% to £10.7m and a significant new Tier 1 bank win during H1 2020.

Named one of the top 100 influencers by Financial Technologist in 2018, Knott is the co-founder of FinTech Strategic Advisors, where she has worked extensively with fintech start-ups to support their scale and success. Her investment banking roles as CEO, COO and Finance Director give her first-hand experience of working on many of the challenges that Gresham address for their customers.

Dr. Ruth Wandhöfer is a Global Fintech 50 Influencer with deep expertise in the Fintech and RegTech sectors. Her extensive career includes spearheading regulatory and market strategy for Treasury and Trade Solutions at Citi, advising the European Banking Federation on Securities Services and Payments and serving as a NED of the London Stock Exchange. Wandhöfer’s footing at the nexus of finance, technology, and regulation puts her in the ideal position to cement Gresham’s role in the new digital and fintech ecosystem.

Peter Simmonds, Chairman at Gresham, commented: “We are delighted to have Jenny and Ruth join the Board. They bring deep experience in global banking and financial technology to the Company at an exciting time as we look to accelerate the Clareti business and further monetise the wealth of IP that the Company has developed and acquired in recent years.”

On her recent appointment, Jenny Knott comments: “This is an exciting time to join Gresham’s board. In an increasingly digital landscape, it is essential that financial firms not only have full confidence in the quality and accuracy of their data but are able to manage and use it effectively across the business. Gresham are well-placed to lead the innovation that this requires and solve the data challenges businesses face, today and tomorrow.”

Ruth Wandhöfer adds: “I am delighted to be joining Gresham’s board, a business that plays a fundamental role in supporting financial institutions and corporates when it comes to data, compliance and overall efficiency. I look forward to working with a great team and helping shape the next chapter of growth.” 

Among the founding ideas for Ripple is to expand global financial inclusion for everyone—not just those in wealthy nations. The existing financial system is antiquated, broken and poorly designed to serve the needs of those in emerging markets, which are too often overlooked by financial service providers. As the pandemic spurs an increasing shift toward digital payments, the number of those without access to affordable financial services is only growing. There is much at stake.

Through Ripple Impact, Ripple partners with innovative NGOs, universities and industry partners to bring the 1.7B unbanked adults into a modernized, global financial system that leverages the promise of financial technology. 

Today, Ripple is proud to announce a $10 million USD contribution to Mercy Corps to expand financial inclusion and increase economic empowerment globally. 

Among NGOs, Mercy Corps is a proven leader in creating economic opportunities for vulnerable populations through the application of new and innovative technology. Last year alone, Mercy Corps’ programs helped nearly 28 million people and its impact investing arm, Mercy Corps Ventures, invests in and partners with innovative social entrepreneurs to scale solutions to the world’s most persistent challenges, including financial exclusion.

In partnership with Ripple and Rippleworks — a nonprofit co-founded by Chris Larsen that supports social ventures across multiple sectors—Mercy Corps Ventures will support solutions that leverage digital financial technologies—such as distributed ledgers, digital assets and cryptocurrencies—to bring large numbers of people in emerging markets into the global economy over a three-year initiative. Already, Ripple has been working with Mercy Corps Ventures to define pilots and invest in early-stage fintech startups in the Global South and Latin America. Ripple’s contribution will also be used to support the education of Mercy Corps’ field staff working to address the financial challenges faced in these regions and apply digital financial solutions. In doing so, Mercy Corps aims to reach 10 million people in the next decade. 

“The existing financial system is fragmented, antiquated, and exclusionary–leaving 1.7B people unbanked and disproportionately excluding women. Emerging fintech, crypto and blockchain technologies have the potential to radically transform it, but there are substantial risks for the world’s most vulnerable people if their needs are not taken into consideration as these new technologies are designed and deployed,” said Scott Onder, Senior Managing Director at Mercy Corps Ventures. “We are going to leverage our global resources and reach to ensure community voices are heard and vulnerable populations are not left behind in the fintech revolution. “ 

Ripple and Rippleworks’ contribution will also support the launch of FinX, a joint initiative by Mercy Corps Ventures and Mercy Corps to reimagine the existing financial system and build a coalition committed to ensuring this new system is inclusive for the un- and underbanked populations.

Today’s partnership is an important step in Ripple’s long-term commitment to achieving global financial inclusion. Ripple is proud to collaborate with innovators like Mercy Corps and merge our expertise building financial products with the market insights and expertise of an effective global development organization and its network of mission-driven entrepreneurs. 

To learn more about how Ripple is accelerating financial inclusion, visit Ripple Impact.