On Monday 24 August 2020 digital bank Zopa is launching it’s Fixed Term Savings account, offering UK savers the ability to earn rates of up to 1.3% over one to five years.   

Savers can set up an account in as little as four minutes, and monitor their balance and interest in the Zopa app once their money is deposited. With accounts being fully managed online, customers can watch their money grow 24/7. There is a minimum deposit of £1,000 on the account and a competitive range of rates are available from 1 – 5 years. Customers’ money is protected by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) up to £85,000. 

After gaining its full bank licence and launching its digital bank in June, this is the first offering from Zopa’s new suite of products that will provide much needed consumer choice. During a heightened time of uncertainty and record low savings rates, Zopa has launched a product that will offer consumers an attractive rate and certainty of return.  

Jaidev Janardana, Zopa’s CEO said: “Today people quite rightly want to know that their savings will deliver a return that helps them make the most of their money. Launching our fixed term savings product delivers the much needed choice and reassurance of rate that consumers are looking for.  

“As a new digital bank, Zopa is using its innovative, agile approach to ensure we bring more choice and competition to people’s financial lives when they need it most. By leveraging our significant technological and financial services expertise we are able to offer good value, straightforward products and intuitive tools to help people manage their money.”

Ondot Systems, a digital card services platform for credit and debit issuers, announced the addition of key staff to its European team as part of the company’s international expansion plans. 

The European sales team is led by Sunil Gossain, a business development executive with two decades of knowledge and experience from leadership roles within solution providers, financial services and consulting agencies.

Also recruited to the EMEA team is George Kelsey, a technology executive with four decades of experience and knowledge in established global financial services, fintech startups and technology innovation. George works across Ondot clients and technology providers in EMEA to drive the next generation of digital financial services.

“Financial services and payments are always in a state of flux, but this is especially true in the current context,” said Sunil. “Ondot’s platform allows card issuers to create digital experiences for the whole card lifecycle, driving self-service and increasing the profitability of the portfolio. These same experiences allow the card to be configured to individual preferences and offer control and deep insight on spend to the cardholder, much needed in a post Covid context when household budgets are likely to be squeezed."

The moves by Apple with their credit card, and Google with the disclosure of their highly anticipated debit card, are creating premium digital experiences that are shifting consumer preferences very rapidly. In this new paradigm, banks are having to fight hard to ensure transactions and customers are retained.

The Ondot platform utilizes existing payment infrastructure to create premium digital experiences that drive user engagement and card spend, helping banks compete with the new tech entrants.  Key features include:

• Digital onboarding and instant issuance;
• Helping customers understand their expenditures through enriched merchant data;
• Managing and controlling their payment instrument through digital self-service.

All of this capability can be delivered via APIs, SDK or HTML5 or a new Card App. The platform is available across Europe to create services that compete with big technology companies.

Paymentology, providers of the innovative cloud-based processing platform, has announced the launch of its new global credit card processing solution, under the branding of Credit Works.

Credit.Works fills a growing gap in the industry’s credit card processing space which has lagged behind with a lack of innovation. Paymentology’s market-leading approach enables Credit.Works to supersede the capabilities of existing platform solutions.

Credit.Works brings together the provision of highly flexible interest rate controls, inbuilt loyalty capability and the ability to give integrating banks full visibility on customer data at the point of spend.

CEO of Paymentology, Shane O’Hara, commented on the launch: “The Paymentology platform has established itself as the processing platform of choice for those banks looking for a rapid drive in their digitisation journey. Our Credit.Works platform now focuses on credit card providers with novel, innovative technologies. It enables banks to address global markets with a genuinely market-leading suite of benefits.”

In addition to incorporating full credit management across limits, interest rates, and transaction and card fees, the platform also runs reward programmes with real-time customer data capture at point of spend.

‘Increasingly an issue of concern for banks is their fraud management,” adds Shane O’Hara. “Our Credit.Works product takes in our advanced fraud prevention technology recognised to be 30% more efficient than competitors’ solutions, giving banks not only the opportunity to integrate the full-service credit card platform, but to do so too with the benefit of highest quality fraud controls.”

Paymentology has taken the initiative to bring credit card processing to the digital age and Credit.Works leverages technology to provide even more opportunities to the world’s leading banks.

Paysend, the global Fintech corporation based in UK, announces a technology collaboration with Alipay to provide Paysend's users with cross-border money transfer that brings more convenient and inclusive services to consumers globally.

Paysend said the agreement is a significant step forward towards creating a more inclusive and accessible global money transfer market. Alipay, China's largest mobile payments business operated by Ant Group, currently serves about 1.3 billion users around the world together with its local e-wallet partners.

Paysend is licensed and regulated by FCA in UK and already services over 2 million customers in over 45 countries. Under the partnership, Paysend will facilitate overseas users to send money across borders through licensed banks in China, with the funds reaching bank accounts linked to the Alipay app.

Ronnie Millar, CEO of Paysend, said of the partnership: “Paysend’s vision is using the most advanced technology to make payments faster and easier for millions of customers around the world. Working with Alipay, we aim to bring a new dimension of convenience and simplicity to the movement of money.”

“We look forward to working closely with Paysend as we continue to explore new ways to apply our technology in order to benefit more people globally,” said Ma Zhiguo, Alipay’s head of the global remittances business. “We are committed to working with partners such as Paysend, using innovative technologies to help global consumers gain access to inclusive financial services.”

Paysend expects the collaboration to especially benefit migrant workers around the world, particularly in Asia, where it has a foothold in the money transfer market through local partners.

Global payments platform Adyen recently released its H1 2020 earnings statement.

Key highlights include:

• €129.1 billion in payments processed, an increase of 23% year on year
• €279 million net revenue, an increase 27% year on year
• €140.9 million Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, an increase of 12% year on year.

The company cites diversification across vertical sectors, merchant base and geographies for one of the key reasons for its continued growth through the global pandemic. It also found that online retail and digital goods volumes accelerated while travel and in-store volumes slowed down following lockdown restrictions.

More information can be found in the shareholder letter, found here: https://www.adyen.com/investor-relations/h1-2020#section0.

Fast growth fintech, TradeCore, announces two new partners to its TradeCore platform. ComplyAdvantage, a global technology company transforming financial crime detection, and TrueLayer, a leading technology company building financial infrastructure that’s open to any business, anywhere in the world, to continue its mission to bring greater innovation to UK financial services, join key ecosystem partners to help reduce the time it takes to launch new and exciting fintech propositions.

TradeCore, which launched its new fintech platform last month is on a mission to drive faster innovation within the fintech industry, reducing costs and helping founders, CTOs and product directors to focus on what makes their new fintech stand out.

The partnership will see TradeCore integrate its ecosystem with ComplyAdvantage and TrueLayer, further supporting TradeCore’s creation of a ‘one-stop-shop’ for fintechs. A platform that guides fintechs through the complexity of the sector, including compliance or costly processes and regulatory or licensing hurdles - and reduces overall time-to-market. The new partnerships will strengthen TradeCore platform's ability to serve anti-money laundering (AML) compliance and open banking solutions. 

ComplyAdvantage’s AML infrastructure, enables customers to speed up customer onboarding cycle time, review live financial crime insight and automate manual labor-intensive processes - all of which is available to TradeCore customers. They will then remain compliant through Know your customer (KYC), and are able to optimise all digital opening strategies through harnessing ComplyAdvantage’s API.

“Partnering with companies that are reducing customer friction while meeting their compliance obligations is a key part of our mission at ComplyAdvantage,” says Founder and CEO, Charles Delingpole of ComplyAdvantage. “Not only do customers have a better onboarding experience, but by taking advantage of automation and best in class data, businesses are better able to identify who they want to work with and can apply a risk-based approach with greater accuracy than ever before.”

TrueLayer has developed market-leading APIs that support firms to build best-in-class digital services and enable developers across any industry to reinvent financial services. Through TrueLayer’s Payments API, TradeCore customers can enjoy the benefits of open banking, delivering a seamless and secure payments experience - transferring money, making deposits and managing accounts - at a much faster pace.

Francesco Simoneschi, CEO and co-Founder of TrueLayer, says: “With this collaboration, using our Payments API, TradeCore can ease a lot of pain points by improving the security, speed and availability of transactions. Ultimately this means TradeCore’s clients can quickly build products and services that offer a highly secure fully integrated payments experience. This has the benefit of reducing operational costs and risk as well as providing an enhanced user experience.”

Stefan Pajkovic, founder and CEO at TradeCore comments: “We want to help fintechs avoid what we call the fintech spiral of death. Whereby fintechs fail to launch due to the complex challenges in compliance, set-up and resources needed to get to market. With support from our partnerships with the likes of ComplyAdvantage and TrueLayer, the TradeCore platform is able to offer credible payment solutions to our customers. Allowing our fintechs to innovate and launch products and services quickly and securely to the market.”

Today, Clear Books and Metro Bank are launching a new partnership, offering easy accounting software with free bank feeds and exclusive discounts to Metro Bank small business customers. The integration provides Metro Bank’s customers with access to Clear Books’ easy to understand financial management tools via online and mobile banking.

Metro Bank customers can use the Metro Bank app to register for a free Clear Books accounting trial.

They have 30 days of free access to manage their Metro Bank transactions in Clear Books, raise professional invoices and view financial reports.

At the end of the trial period, users can subscribe for the level of access that suits them, securing a 25% discount for life.

This will be available for mobile banking customers using iOS immediately, with Android functionality to follow in the coming weeks.

Offering deeper integration and cheaper pricing, the new partnership makes Clear Books a great choice for Metro Bank small business customers who are looking to take control of their accounting.

Clear Books CEO, Ruth Fouracre said: “We love working with banks and fintechs to integrate accounting software and online banking platforms. The links make it easier for small businesses to manage their finances. We worked alongside Metro Bank to carefully design a customer experience that provided small businesses with access to Clear Books accounting tools through Metro Bank’s online banking platforms. This partnership provides users of both Clear Books and Metro Bank with great tools, a more aligned experience between the two products, and amazing discounts.”

David Thomasson, Chief Commercial Officer at Metro Bank, adds: “We’re thrilled to partner with Clear Books to provide our business customers with essential money management tools, easily accessible from our mobile app. These will empower SMEs to free up time in a way that wasn’t possible before, to spend running and growing their businesses.”

Temenos (SIX: TEMN), the banking software company, announced that leading industry analyst firm Gartner, Inc., has again named Temenos as a Leader for its ability to execute and its completeness of vision in Gartner’s August 2020 Magic Quadrant for Global Retail Core Banking report.

Max Chuard, Chief Executive Officer, Temenos, said: "We are proud to be named by Gartner as a Leader in global core banking for the 11th time. We believe Temenos SaaS is powering the digital banking revolution, accelerating the digital transformation and transition to the cloud for traditional banks and fueling a new breed of mobile-first neobanks all around the world. Today, we have over 800 core banking customers, and the largest installed base in cloud according to the report. We take a new bank live every day and we are implementing remotely to support our customers during these challenging times. We continue to invest heavily in R&D, more than any competitor in this space, and have made strategic investments to enhance our cloud-native platform with the latest technology, including AI, microservices, and richest banking functionality. We believe our position in the Magic Quadrant is validation of these investments, our strategic vision and global customer success.”

According to Gartner Analysts, Vittorio D’Orazio and Don Free, authors of the report: “The demand for core banking packages is expected to grow in 2020 as banks deliver on digitalization strategies while facing the consequences from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Temenos Transact core banking software offers the winning combination of advanced cloud-native, AI and API-first technology and the richest banking functionality to help banks transform faster.

Today, Temenos Transact is delivered as Temenos SaaS and can also be deployed natively on all main commercial cloud platforms or a private cloud, allowing banks to take the full benefit of lower operating costs and elastic scalability of these services, as well as benefiting from in-built operational resilience. Temenos’ technology  microservices architecture helps banks replace their legacy systems at their own pace and  deliver additional services and capabilities on top of multiple systems. Temenos Transact is also now pre-integrated with Temenos Infinity, the breakthrough digital front office product, to deliver an end-to-end digital transformation.

AI has emerged as a top priority for banks and with the July 2019 acquisition of Logical Glue, Temenos is the first to bring transparency and explainability of AI automated decision making to the banking industry.

*Gartner, Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Global Retail Core Banking,” Vittorio D’Orazio and Don Free, August 2020

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Pi1, the modular bank-in-box platform, and financial technology provider, announces a new service in partnership with Marqeta and TagNitecrest to issue Visa debit cards.
 
Pi1 is an initiative from Project Imagine, which looks to bring true innovation to financial services, and sits alongside Project Imagine’s financial wellness and investment app Dozens.
 
Pi1 has noticed a gap for card issuing services, and so its new service offering was formed. Pi1’s card issuing services will be of particular interest to those fintechs and payment businesses looking for a long-term, responsible and responsive partner.
 
Pi1, through Project Imagine, has its own primary Visa membership and is itself an issuer of Visa cards for customers of its consumer brand Dozens.
 
The new alliance, together with its existing relationship with Clearbank, will allow Project Imagine to extend Pi1’s cutting-edge tech and data platform services to include BIN sponsorship for card issuance alongside agency banking services, with immediate effect. 
 
In addition, existing connectivity to Google Maps via Snowdrop means Pi1 clients can allow their customers to see card transactions on a map from day one, enabling a reduced need for customer support calls, and improved fraud detection, as well as benefit from other ancillary services, like IFTTT, that are already live on the platform. 
 
Aritra Chakravarty, Founder & CEO of Project Imagine said: “This is an exciting time for Project Imagine – as with these strategic partnerships, our digital banking platform Pi1 can provide clients with a full range of solutions including issuing, processing, and agency banking; enabling clients to enter the market in as little as 90 days”.
 
Ian Johnson, Managing Director Europe at Marqeta said: “The Marqeta team is delighted to be Dozens’ chosen payment processor and is enthusiastic about the promise to work with new Pi1 clients in the future. We believe Marqeta’s cutting- edge processor abilities complement the technology offering of Pi1”.   
 
Bill Gibson, Business Development Director at TagNitecrest said: “We’ve had a strong partnership with Project Imagine to date, and the TagNitecrest team are extremely excited to continue this journey with the new Pi1 service offering. We will continue to deliver leading card printing techniques and to play our part in helping Project Imagine to drive innovation and to facilitate change across the industry”.

EBANX announced the launch in the United States of its international logistics solution LEVE, to help online stores in the country to send parcels to Brazil. Created in the EBANX's group and headquartered in Brazil, the startup specializes in ecommerce, and handles the reception and handling, labeling, and shipment all the way to Brazil – a process with a current final delivery time of 20 to 25 calendar days.  

"At EBANX, we were already easing the connection between our US-based merchants and their Brazilian consumers through payment solutions that grow their total addressable market. With LEVE, we are now easing the entire international selling process for our merchants," said Gabriela Rodrigues, project manager of LEVE. "Our solution speeds up the delivery time from the US to Brazil, which ultimately helps to improve the consumer experience within US online stores," she added.

At its warehouse in the US, LEVE receives the parcels of its merchants, and labels them following Brazilian standards of tracking codes and delivery information. This way, packages leave the US already displaying the label that will be required when they arrive in Brazil, and the national tracking number that can be used in the website of the Brazilian postal service. Because this is handled before entering the country, these parcels are not subject to Brazilian fees like the postal dispatch, charged to cover precisely this handling and relabeling into Brazilian standards.

LEVE is also in charge of shipping the parcel. Once it arrives in Brazil, it goes through the traditional Brazilian customs processes – that will evaluate if it needs to be taxed, a process that takes around one business day for parcels coming with LEVE. If this is the case, LEVE informs the consumer about it, so they can pay the tax and release the parcel. This helps lowering the rates of parcel abandonment followed by chargeback requests.

Besides easing the entire process for the merchant, LEVE also offers more visibility of the parcels to them, by providing a full tracking, from the moment of the departure in the country of origin. In Brazil, if by any chance the postal service cannot deliver a parcel within the standard delivery attempts, LEVE communicates the merchant, so they can decide what to do.  

Expertise from handling logistics China-Brazil

LEVE also operates logistics between merchants in China and consumers in Brazil. In just six months, since the solution launched in China, in February, the startup brought over 175,000 packages to Brazil, normally within approximately 17 calendar days. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world, this delivery time increased, and it is now stabilized within 20 to 25 calendar days, which is faster than other standard services that are currently taking about 45 calendar days to deliver. 

"We aim to offer a complete ecommerce solution for merchants and consumers. Delivering payments, marketing consultancy, customer service, and now logistics in a very consistent strategy, helping merchants navigate the specificities of the Brazilian market, and connecting Brazilian consumers to the best brands in the world," completed Rodrigues. 

For more information, please visit https://www.leveexpress.com/.