Paynetics UK, a fintech, trusted payment service provider and part of the Paynetics Group, has today announced that it has acquired some of the assets of Wirecard UK & Ireland. The deal will see Paynetics work with corporate customers, who have previously relied on Wirecard for card issuing and payment services, to adopt Paynetics for the continuation of their existing card programmes.

Paynetics is a regulated e-money institution, licensed across the EU and a Principal Member of Mastercard, Visa, SWIFT, and SEPA. It offers next-generation payment technology solutions with an all-encompassing technology stack under one roof, including issuing, acquiring, state of the art payment services, IBANs, money transfers, eWallets, mobile payments and software POS.

As part of the acquisition, Paynetics will provide its new customers with a fast, secure and seamless transition, together with a strategic product roadmap for the future development of these programmes, which until now faced the prospect of termination.

As part of the deal, Paynetics will power a range of programmes including employee benefits, sales incentive, corporate expenses and social welfare for these organisations. The company has begun engaging with and novating its new customers in order to manage their transition in a way that is specific to the individual requirements of that business.

In addition to this news, Paynetics has appointed Mike Peplow as CEO of its UK business. Formerly Chief Operating Officer at Omnio Group and President of BancTec EMEA, Mike brings over 20 years’ experience within the banking and payments industries, and has a strong track record of growing and developing international businesses.

Mike Peplow, CEO, Paynetics UK, commented: “Through this acquisition, we’ve not only proven our technological competence and the industry’s confidence in our proposition, but also that our products and services are fit for purpose for large, corporate organisations. We’re operating within the most sophisticated financial services market in the world, and we’re proud to bring something different to the table. We’re a young, innovative company who can keep up with the high standards that our industry demands, but we also care deeply about our customers and will work with each of them on an individual basis to ensure that they are getting the best solution for their business.”

Valeri Valtchev, Co-Founder of Paynetics, added: “This is a flagship deal for Paynetics, and a crucial milestone for us in terms of our expansion in the UK and European markets. But it’s also a game changer for our new customers, who are now in a safe pair of hands and have the certainty of a clear roadmap ahead for their businesses. We are one of a few companies in Europe which, as a regulated fintech, has the capabilities, expertise and technology to fulfil the needs of these clients, and the only one who could do so as quickly and efficiently as we are able to.”

Laura McCracken, EVP, Wirecard Global Sales and Chairman, Wirecard UK & Ireland Ltd., added: “When faced with the difficult decision of sun-setting Wirecard’s corporate payout card business, Paynetics showed up as the white knight. Their speed and agility enabled us to preserve numerous programs for our corporate clients and ensure minimal disruption to thousands of end users. More importantly, we were impressed by the capabilities, creativity, and vision that Paynetics brought to the table for this business. Long may it prosper.”

Neil McKenna, VP, Global Strategic Partnerships & Business Development, Wirecard, said: “We are delighted to have signed an agreement to sell our corporate payout card portfolio, originally acquired from Citi over three years ago, to Paynetics. We have been very pleased by the positive reaction from our corporate clients in the face of this unique situation. Paynetics will no doubt bring fresh life to this valuable portfolio and we are confident this deal will result in a win-win-win for all involved.”

To help businesses take prompt action on payments received in the current challenging times, PayPoint has launched Event Streamer. The unique new solution, which strengthens the MultiPay digital payments portfolio, delivers real-time notifications to businesses of all transactions improving productivity and customer experience.

Traditionally, tracking cash payments alongside digital payments has proven difficult to reconcile, however, the Event Streamer payment solution makes this process much easier. By streaming payment transactions to an organisation’s CRM system, Event Streamer delivers real-time payment visibility and a single view of customer payments across all digital and cash channels.

Crucially, notifications will be received for arrears paid, preventing collections teams wasting time on chasing payments already made.  It can also expediate the reactivation of a suspended service due to outstanding arrears, to ensure the customer experience is a positive one.

Danny Vant, Client Services Director of PayPoint, comments: “In the current financial environment, the need for businesses to monitor and react to transactions has never been greater.  As a result, a significant number of our clients requested access to real-time transaction insights to complement the end-of-day reporting they already receive, as well as improve efficiencies in the back office once payments were made.  This extended beyond digital transactions to over the counter cash payments made via the PayPoint retail network.

“In response, we built a unique solution designed specifically to keep businesses up to date in real- time of payments made, due and overdue. Importantly, clients can benefit from Event Streamer without any onerous requirements for full API integration.

“This latest solution confirms PayPoint’s commitment to responding quickly and developing innovative solutions that help businesses support their customers, collecting with care and responsibility, through these financially difficult times.”

• 09.10.2020 -- 12:46 pm

Aya Karlieva of Financial IT chats with Ivo Gueorguiev, the Co-Founder and Chairman of Paynetics, a regulated fintech company that focuses on payments solutions. He talks about the goals, trends and obstacles facing the future of digital payments.

Deutsche Bank today announced that they will launch an enhanced securities settlement service that proactively identifies in-flight security transactions at risk of settlement delay, to debut in early 2021. The enhanced service, powered by the Elastic Stack and Elastic’s machine learning and anomaly detection features, will enable the bank's clients to avoid hefty financial penalties under the upcoming implementation of the new Central Securities Depositories Regulation (CSDR) in 2021.

In 2020, Deutsche Bank launched its current real-time settlement service in Euronext, Germany and the UK. The platform provides its operations staff with a real-time view of the issues that can delay a transaction settlement, a stark contrast to traditional platforms which only provide a retrospective view of what has caused settlement delays.

Using dashboards powered by Elasticsearch and Kafka, Deutsche Bank’s teams actively monitor transactions and are provided actionable tasks when a transaction is flagged at risk of delay. The operations teams can also offer other internal teams and external clients high-performance application programming interfaces (APIs) to run their own settlement queries, using Elastic’s search and analytics engine.

Early Warning System Flags Settlement Delays

Deutsche Bank now plans to enhance its settlement service with Elastic's machine learning (ML) technologies, enabling the platform to move from real-time to forward-looking. The ML-enhanced service will proactively detect the in-flight transactions that require actions and alert the bank’s teams before the transactions encounter issues.

“Our aim is to deliver a real shift in how markets view exception processing and to bring pre-trade performance to our post-trade operations. We can now detect transactions in real-time that previously would not be flagged as at risk, and divert our attention from the transactions that ostensibly appear to be at risk, but upon historical analysis have always matched in time to settle,” said Christopher Daniels, director, Data Products, Securities Services at Deutsche Bank.

The analytics model underpinning the enhanced service is powered by Elastic’s anomaly detection feature, which considers seasonality, market variation and other changing dynamics to provide the bank’s operational teams with dashboards and action queues that are driven by a large set of factors that would be too broad and complex for a human to process.

“We have developed several dashboards covering liquidity, settlement performance, and risk and control, but the most recent innovations have been in running machine-learning algorithms in production to provide outlier detection. We’re using the platform to identify the most influential features that are more likely to cause a late or failed settlement, and to focus our data quality reviews on activity that does not synchronise with what we would typically expect from a particular cluster. It's a very exciting time in our data roadmap,” said Daniels.

“Deutsche Bank’s partnership with Elastic showcases the innovation that is achieved when deep domain expertise is paired with the Elastic Stack,” said Dan Broom, area vice president, Northern Europe, Middle East and Africa at Elastic. “Our machine learning and anomaly detection technologies are helping to fuel Deutsche Bank’s innovation and delivering a real game-change in settlement processing.”

OneStream Software, a leader in corporate performance management (CPM) solutions for mid-sized to very large enterprises, today announced it has been named a Leader in Gartner’s 2020 Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) Solutions.  OneStream was also recognized as a Leader in the 2019 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close Solutions.

As finance leaders look to implement cloud planning solutions that support agile financial planning, budgeting, modeling and performance reporting, Gartner evaluated 12 cloud FP&A solution providers based on their ability to execute and completeness of vision and placed OneStream in the Leaders Quadrant.

“In a year that has forced the office of finance to undergo rapid and vast changes to its responsibilities and rapidly respond to economic disruption, we are seeing increased demand for our unified, and extensible platform for planning, reporting and analytics,” said Tom Shea, CEO of OneStream Software.  “We believe OneStream's positioning as a Leader in this year's Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud FP&A Solutions reflects the power of our platform, our commitment to 100% customer success, and our unique ability to deliver new solutions to address the increasing demands on the Office of Finance even in very complex and dynamic organizations.”

The news comes in the middle of a year in which OneStream has seen increasing demand and rapid growth. In addition to a 75 percent increase in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), the company announced in July it had achieved a 40 percent year-over-year growth in customer acquisitions and a 67 percent increase in its global workforce.

“Many organizations continue to struggle on with spreadsheets — or cling to on-premises FP&A solutions. However, almost all migrations and new FP&A deployments have shifted to the cloud,” wrote John van Decker, Greg Leiter, Robert Anderson of Gartner. “Cloud FP&A solutions offer faster time to value and are easier to design, implement, use and maintain... They also enable broader adoption by offering extensive self-service analytics. These analytics help finance users address modern demands and requirements, such as for rolling forecasts and driver-based planning.”

To access a complimentary copy of the full report, click here:  https://info.onestreamsoftware.com/gartner-magic-quadrant-for-cloud-fpa-2020.

Sources: Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Planning and Analysis Solutions, Robert Anderson, John Van Decker and Greg Leiter, 06 October 2020. Magic Quadrant for Cloud Financial Close, Robert Anderson, John Van Decker, Greg Leiter, 21 October 2019.

• 09.10.2020 -- 11:41 am

SmartStream announces SmartStream Air version 2, the latest artificial intelligence (AI) technology to transform data quality and reconciliation processes that would usually be measured in weeks and months, to just seconds. In addition, with cloud-based technology accessed via a new user interface, it manages large volumes of data, in any format, to achieve even higher match rates.

Meniga (www.meniga.com), a global leader in AI-powered digital banking solutions, announces that it has expanded its business to the US, with a dedicated team appointed to drive sales operations by targeting the nation’s biggest banks and financial institutions.

The new US team - operating remotely before opening planned premises in New York in 2021 - will be headed up by North America Heads of Sales, Wim Van Lerberghe and Paul Renken, and has been established in response to increasing demand in the sector for digital solutions; a demand that has accelerated due to the pandemic and the need to help customers live better financial lives.

Meniga’s suite of products will ensure that America’s traditional banks can future-proof and improve their offering to customers, against a growing number of challengers and technology giants such as Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook, which are currently grabbing significant shares of the market.

Wim Van Lerberghe has more than two decades’ experience in international B2B financial services sales, with the past few years spent in the technology sector, particularly focussing on scaling fintechs in the US as co-founder of consultancy firm Advintro. Paul Renken, also a co-founder of Advintro, brings expertise in sales, strategy and business development from numerous top-level roles within the technology, financial services and investment banking sectors in the US.

With Wim and Paul establishing Meniga’s US footprint, the new office is currently running as a remote operation before the team grows out from physical premises based in New York in 2021.

By opening its doors to the US, Meniga is now consolidating its global market presence, with over 165 banking partners across more than 30 countries, and offices in London (its HQ), Reykjavik, Stockholm, Warsaw, Barcelona and Singapore.

In Europe, Meniga has established itself as the market leader for banking incumbents looking to remain competitive in the era of challenger banks, having developed digital tools for some of the world’s largest financial institutions, such as UniCredit and Santander. Since entering the Southeast Asian market in 2019, it has successfully launched some of the most popular banking apps in the region, for the likes of Singaporean multinational banking group, UOB. To date, Meniga has enhanced the digital banking experience of over 90 million end-users from all corners of the world.

Paul Renken, North America Head of Sales, comments: “In this era of rapid digitalization, Meniga has established itself as the market leader for upholding, and increasing, the competitiveness of banks in the European market. Since expanding into the Southeast Asian market just last year, we’ve also been instrumental in getting some of the area’s most popular banking apps to market. By opening up to the US, we’re going to be leading the charge here too.

“We see banks as the bastions of the customer, designed to protect and manage assets, particularly during such a financially unstable climate. However, in order to remain competitive this means they also need to move, and digitalize, with the times. With Meniga’s technology and expertise, banks all across The States will be able to achieve this; creating a customer experience that is intuitive and seamless as well as secure and reliable.”

Georg Ludviksson, CEO and co-founder of Meniga, said: “In the current economic climate, it is crucial that Americans are getting the support they need from their banks, and help with the management of their personal finances. But if the bank fails to respond with anything but an efficient and enjoyable user experience, those customers will go elsewhere.

“Meniga created the digital standard for banks in Europe, with our banking partners now proudly leading the way when it comes to personalized services and customer engagement. We know that the unrivalled expertise and local market insight brought by Wim and Paul will allow us to fully export our technology to the US, granting American banking partners access to cutting-edge digital products and apps that their customers will love to use every day.”

Following the partnership, Lydia will use Tink as its main open banking technology provider, for enhancing the app’s connectivity and adding new services. As a first step of the partnership, Tink’s account aggregation and payment initiation services are being integrated into the Lydia app. This will improve the way users connect their accounts across multiple banks, manage payment beneficiaries and initiate bank transfers without leaving the app. 

Launched in 2013, the Lydia app allows users to receive, send and manage all of their money simply and conveniently. Lydia has a 25% market share among French millennials and more than 5,000 new users sign up to the app every day. The French mobile payment app processes €250 million of transactions per month. 

Cyril Chiche, co-founder and CEO of Lydia, said: “We are proud to partner with a global open banking leader like Tink, that can support us in our international growth. By teaming up with Tink, we aim to give Lydia’s users the best possible user experience and allow them to easily manage their financial daily lives within our app. We look forward to working with Tink to create an improved and seamless experience for our users.” 

Daniel Kjellén, co-founder and CEO of Tink, added: “We are excited to team up with one of Europe’s leading payment fintechs and become their open banking technology provider. By working together, we will make our open banking technology available to Lydia’s 4 million users. We look forward to supporting Lydia in their expansion in France and across borders.” 

Since launching in Sweden in 2012, Tink has been dedicated to enabling banks, fintechs and start-ups to develop data-driven financial services. Through one API, Tink allows customers to access aggregated financial data, initiate payments, enrich transactions and build personal finance management tools. Today, Tink has more than 270 employees globally and is Europe’s leading open banking platform — enabling customers to connect to more than 2,500 banks that reach over 250 million bank customers across Europe.

Primer — the UK-founded fintech company that helps merchants seamlessly consolidate their payments stack and easily support future payment methods — launches with its unified payments API and checkout. Providing an open payment infrastructure to merchants through a single integration, Primer manages the front-end checkout process and backend consolidation of payments services — supercharging payments with data-driven insights and a clean, flexible experience for end consumers.

Unifying payment service providers (PSPs), proprietary payment methods, fraud providers, and other third-party services (including loyalty and reward schemes), Primer enables merchants to take advantage of any payment service — both current and future. This means Primer can work with any merchant; in turn, merchants can connect the likes of Stripe, Klarna, Amazon Pay, GoCardless, and WeChat, without writing a single line of code. Primer's "Workflows" capability enables merchants to build sophisticated payment flows and routing, unify their fraud mitigation efforts and gain greater visibility of transactional information through connections to business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools.

Primer was founded in January 2020 by Paul Anthony and Gabriel Le Roux, who met at Braintree, a division of PayPal, where they worked with the world’s biggest merchants to optimise their payments strategies, expand to new markets and offer new commerce experiences to their consumers. After recognising the complexity, and vast technical burden merchants faced in scaling their payments ecosystems, maintaining their current payments stack and adapting to wider changes in the payments landscape, both sought to solve this problem for merchants — Primer was born.

Built to unify merchants entire payments stack through an agnostic integration (an industry-first), Primer announced a £3.8 million seed fundraise just four months later in May 2020, led by Balderton and joined by TransferWise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus. Seedcamp, Kima Ventures, and Speedinvest also participated in the round. Now, just one year after its founders left PayPal, Primer — headquartered in London with 18 employees across seven countries — has launched, driven by insights gleaned from conducting in-depth technical workshops with almost 80 merchants globally.

Commenting on this news, Primer co-founder and Head of Product and Engineering Paul Anthony, said: “Merchants don't want to be constrained by payments any longer. They want to offer customers the experience they expect, wherever they are, and without compromising on UX and optionality at checkout. The payments landscape is evolving at a rapid pace, and merchants need to leverage best-in-class technologies at every step in the checkout process. Primer is designed to put merchants on the leading-edge of payments, and to keep them there.”

Gabriel Le Roux, co-founder and Head of Business Development and Strategy at Primer, added: “Managing multiple PSPs and proprietary payment methods is no mean feat, yet larger merchants — particularly those operating in more than one geographical region — are often stuck supporting endless payment methods, resulting in poor user experience, lack of transparency, complex pricing and substantial technical overhead. Merchants need all the help they can get when it comes to scaling payments globally, which is where Primer comes in."

For more information, visit: https://primer.io/.

HPS, the leading multinational provider of payment solutions, today announced that Capitec Bank, South Africa’s second largest retail bank, will use PowerCARD to consolidate and modernise its Back Office payment activities for both their Card Issuing & Merchant Acquiring businesses.

Capitec Bank will replace their legacy payment systems with PowerCARD, HPS’ payment platform in order to launch new and innovative products to the market more quickly and more efficiently than is possible today.

In consolidating its payments activities on PowerCARD, Capitec joins a number of other leading banks in South Africa who have also adopted PowerCARD as the new “Gold Standard” in electronic payments across the continent.

“With PowerCARD, we plan to launch new and innovative, as well as of-the-shelf standard products, ready to go to market. We can now imagine the products and services we want to better serve our customers and simplify banking,” said Wim de Bruyn, CIO at Capitec Bank. “We can also rely on PowerCARD capabilities to consolidate and optimize all our Payment Businesses in one single platform both now and in the future with initiatives such as Tokenization, eCommerce, 3D-Secure, and even a Mobile Wallet for the under-banked in South Africa.”

“We are delighted to partner with Capitec Bank to empower them with a future-proof, modern and scalable payment platform,” comments Philippe Vigand, Managing Director at HPS. “With PowerCARD, they’ll have the perfect companion to take their Issuing and Acquiring businesses to the next level for their Capitec and Mercantile Bank activities. In addition to their Back-Office activities, they will have the opportunity to further consolidate all Front-End activities of the bank. They will also be able to optimize processes for both IT and Business, as well as consolidating all their data into one single system.”

Find out more about PowerCARD-Issuer here and PowerCARD-Acquirer here.