Dwolla, the programmable payments platform, today announces the latest feature in its robust Partner Ecosystem, the Partner Portal. As a one-stop-shop for Dwolla’s extensive group of Integration Partners, the Partner Portal enables current and prospective partners to manage their applications within a single, dedicated portal.

Dwolla’s Partner Ecosystem is designed to offer customers complementary solutions that can drive mutual growth. It was formed to provide Partners with access to services that can help them scale effectively. Prior to the Partner Portal, there was no dedicated location to manage their applications. Now, Integration Partners have the ability to create a Partner Login and Partner Profile and then be able to create a Sandbox Partner Application to integrate with their own application. While the Partner Portal will first be implemented with Dwolla’s Integration Partners, the portal is structurally fit to support all of Dwolla’s Partners moving forward.

“By building out our established Partner Ecosystem, Dwolla provides the most comprehensive financial technology for today’s innovative companies,” said Dwolla CEO, Brady Harris. “Because our partners are such a significant asset to our vision, we wanted to ensure our Ecosystem provided the best experience. The Partner Portal makes it easier for them to control their accounts and succeed as a Dwolla Partner.”

Since its inception, the Partner Program has added huge players in the payment industry like Nacha, Plaid and Sift. As Dwolla looks to expand its network of leading solutions, IdentityMind joins Dwolla’s robust Partner Ecosystem. A leading provider of tools that assist with anti-money laundering and fraud prevention, IdentityMind will assist Dwolla’s clients with identity verification, compliance requirements and fraud prevention.

"As the payments world becomes more crowded and complex, merchants must leverage the partnerships between the leading technology providers in order to build the best possible solutions for their business," said Alain Gendre, Head of Strategic Partnerships at Sift. “Dwolla’s robust Partner Ecosystem offers merchants best-in-class integrations including Sift's Digital Trust & Safety Suite, which allows them to fight fraud and grow revenue."

For more information on equipping customers with best-in-class FinTech services through Dwolla’s Partner Ecosystem, visit https://www.dwolla.com/partnerships/.

Colt Technology Services has today announced the launch of multi-cloud access on its award-winning SD WAN platform.

Colt’s SD WAN multi-cloud offering sees enterprises now being able to benefit from a single connection to multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), including cloud-to-cloud connections, over SD WAN which ensures enhanced security, agility and latency compared with connecting via the public internet. 

Colt’s SD WAN proposition provides intelligence through application recognition and traffic steering features to increase the availability and performance of access to multi-cloud services.

This new offering is underpinned by the Colt IQ Network, which is comprised of 29,000 on net buildings and over 900 data centres, serving more than 25,000 customers globally. Colt’s fully-owned and operated dense fibre network allows enterprises to benefit from an end-to-end, seamless connection to the cloud. Colt’s public and private peering with CSPs globally, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft’s Azure Cloud means that whichever combination of cloud platforms an enterprise choses, application traffic will be optimised to take the most direct path

This next decade is set to be transformational for cloud computing, with new research from Colt finding that 96 per cent of senior IT decision makers are now confident in moving critical business capabilities to the cloud. The study also found that 86 per cent of businesses are taking a multi-cloud approach, highlighting that the majority of enterprises are now relying on many cloud environments to power the next wave of their digital transformations. 

Colt’s Vice President Product Portfolio, Peter Coppens said, “As more and more enterprises are shifting their business-critical workloads to the cloud, and using multiple cloud environments to do so, working with a connectivity partner that can provide high-performance, rapidly scalable and highly secure cloud connectivity to one or many cloud environments has never been more important.

“By using Colt’s SD WAN multi-cloud offering, enterprises can now benefit from better performance, security, scalability and efficiency by accessing all their cloud services through a streamlined infrastructure. This ensures that businesses can focus on the next phase of their growth, knowing that their operations are supported by a best-in-class network and enabled by best-in-class CSPs,” he added. 

“Enterprises are increasingly embracing hybrid and multi-cloud approaches, allowing them to deploy applications faster and run mission-critical applications on the infrastructure best suited to their business needs, as we’ve seen with the success of Google Cloud’s Anthos,” said Kevin O’Kane, Managing Director, Partnerships at Google Cloud. “We’re pleased that Colt will expand its capabilities to enable businesses greater connectivity across multiple cloud environments.”

Colt’s SD WAN offering has long been seen as market-leading with most recently the service being recognised by the Network Transformation Awards, with Colt named as an early adopter and an innovator of SDN and NFV technologies.

“Colt is a leader in delivering quality of experience, exceptional performance, and business resiliency to customers throughout Europe, Asia, and North America,” said Michael Wood, CMO, Versa Networks. “We are excited to partner with Colt and their innovative multi-cloud connectivity offer which leverages Versa Secure SD WAN to enable a best in class experience for businesses around the globe.”

Colt’s multi-cloud proposition via SD WAN is available across Europe from today. 

Today Koine, the post-trade custody and settlement platform for institutions, and Panxora, the crypto treasury management service, are working together to provide mutual clients with services dedicated to reducing risks associated with holding cryptocurrencies for the growing numbers of institutions investing in the digital asset class.

Aimed at supporting Koine’s institutional client base, Panxora’s models hedge against cryptocurrency volatility while allowing clients to retain total control over their digital asset portfolio as they are held in their own Koine custodial account.

Panxora’s service operates like a classic segregated managed account and works with the world’s most liquid cryptocurrency exchanges in conjunction with Koine’s post-trade settlement solution, designed to minimise credit and counterparty exposure.

Panxora’s AI models adapt to the behaviour of the cryptocurrency markets. They are designed to take advantage of upward trends while acting quickly to the limit the losses experienced when the markets decline sharply in value.

Licensed by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority as an Electronic Money Institution for the issuance of electronic money, Koine is specifically designed for institutional investors to mitigate counterparty, insolvency and credit risks of trading on exchanges. 

Koine’s unique security model, which deploys Digital Airlocks™, replaces the cold storage and hot wallet model that can compromise the security of private keys as a result of still needing employee access to account information. By combining this new digital asset security model, Koine provides a post-trade solution of settlement and segregated custody services for digital assets, plus settlement for digital assets versus fiat money, that is suitable for traditional capital markets.      

Hugh Hughes, CEO and Chairman at Koine, says: “From Koine’s inception, our main focus was the protection of digital assets, which is why we’re working with independent services like Panxora to support institutions in managing their funds in the most secure way possible. We will continue to work with various third-parties, including tax reporting, margin and lending, to ensure all our clients’ needs are accounted for.”

Koine provides secure, segregated custody services for digital assets, plus the settlement of digital assets versus fiat money, that is suitable for traditional capital markets. As more institutional investors participate in digital currency trading, an additional layer of governance is required to protect portfolios as they enter unfamiliar markets. This partnership ensures losses are minimised, while assets are held securely.

Gavin Smith, CEO at Panxora, adds: “As the cryptocurrency markets mature, governance will become a key differentiator for companies operating in this space. Working with Koine allows Panxora to offer our clients an integrated solution that actively manages their market risk in a very volatile asset class while protecting their assets from counterparty risk that would usually be a key concern in this sector.”

Equity investment in the UK’s tech businesses increased by 27% in 2019 to £4.0bn, the highest amount since the series began in 2011, reveals the British Business Bank’s annual Small Business Equity Tracker report, published today. The UK’s thriving tech sector remains highly attractive to equity investors, accounting for 47% of total equity investment in UK SMEs through 691 deals in 2019.

Within tech, the sectors receiving the largest share of deals were software (425 deals worth £2bn) and life sciences (78 deals worth £540m). The verticals attracting the greatest amount of equity investment in 2019 were Software as a Service (471 deals worth £2.5bn), FinTech (193 deals worth £1.8bn) and AI (173 deals worth £880m).[1] Software as a Service companies in particular were highly attractive to equity investors, with investment value increasing by 69% in 2019 compared to 2018, a much larger increase than that seen in the overall market.

The Small Business Equity Tracker report, which analyses Beauhurst data on equity investments throughout the UK in 2019, provides an important benchmark of the market immediately prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. It shows the value of total equity investment in the UK’s smaller businesses rising 24% to £8.5bn in 2019 - the highest amount recorded - and a record number of deals, rising 4% to 1,832 with deal sizes up by 21%.

52% of deals by number took place outside of London, with South West, Scotland and Northern Ireland showing a strong increase by deal number in 2019, rising by 34%, 26% and 24% respectively. Several regions also saw investment levels by value increase strongly in 2019, including Northern Ireland (191%), Scotland (51%), North West (50%), London (37%), West Midlands (36%), and the South East (27%).

The growth stage engine

Equity investments into growth stage companies rose by 39% to £5.3bn. The average growth stage deal size, where the UK has lagged behind the US, also grew by 27% driven by a small number of very large deals. Such financing is important as it is often used to help international expansion and to enter new markets, demonstrating both the increasing strength and maturity of private UK SME equity markets and the broader potential of later-stage private companies. 

Keith Morgan, CEO, British Business Bank, said: “The UK’s small business equity finance market saw a record year in 2019 with investment amounts soaring to £8.5bn. This was a clear sign of investor confidence in UK smaller businesses located across the country and their potential for growth as well as the strong fundamentals of the UK economy as a place to start and grow a business.”

“The British Business Bank’s equity programmes are estimated to have supported around 11% of all equity deals in UK SMEs in 2019. As the economic impact of Covid-19 continues to affect businesses across the country, the work of the Bank has never been more important. Ensuring a wide range of innovative and ambitious smaller businesses continue to have access to equity investment to support their growth plans will be essential to the UK retaining its world-leading position in science, innovation and technology.”

Emerging signs of market changes before Covid-19

Despite a record year for fundraising overall, signals of a softening in private UK small business equity markets were apparent prior to the impact of Covid-19.

The amount of investment into seed stage companies declined by 1% in 2019. While the scale of this decline is small, it is set against seed stage investment increasing every year since 2011. This decline, combined with the number of companies raising follow-on funding in 2019 being higher than the number of companies raising finance for the first time, has the potential to impact on the future UK equity pipeline.

Investors also appeared to be exercising more caution in 2019, particularly towards some growth stage companies where average pre-money valuations fell compared to 2018. There was an increase in the proportion of equity ‘down rounds’ in 2019, with down rounds forming 12% of all deals in 2019, compared to 9% in 2018.

Unsurprisingly the Covid-19 outbreak is expected to have an impact on smaller businesses’ ability to raise equity finance.  The Bank’s analysis of Beauhurst data showed that 43% of all UK equity backed companies are at least moderately affected by changes in delivery and demand for their products and services.

Alice Hu Wagner, Managing Director, Strategy Economics and Business Development, British Business Bank said: “The British Business Bank’s Small Business Equity Tracker report illustrates a strong interest in growth stage investment in the equity market in 2019, with a particular focus on tech businesses. Ensuring our high-potential later stage companies have the capital they need to compete on the global stage will be crucial to powering the economic recovery.”

The British Business Bank Effect

British Business Bank programmes are estimated to have supported 11% of UK equity deals between 2017 and 2019, compared to 9% between 2016 and 2018 as reported in last year’s report. The increase in market coverage is due to British Patient Capital fund activity, which has grown considerably over the same period.

Seed and venture stage deals supported by the Bank are generally smaller than the wider market, while growth stage deals tend to be larger, showing the Bank’s programmes are tackling market gaps at both ends of the UK SME equity spectrum.

The commercialisation and growth of the UK’s science-based companies, crucial for building the future economy, is well supported by the Bank’s equity programmes - 50% of our deals between 2017 and 2019 went to technology/IP-based businesses.

Addressing regional imbalances remains core to all British Business Bank activity, with two funds in particular specifically targeting underserved regions. The Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund and Midlands Engine Investment Fund (MEIF) contributed to 16% and 19% of deals in their respective areas.

[1] NB - companies can appear in one or more verticals.

The “next normal” may cultivate new consumer attitudes that are applied to money management and shopping. From digital banking solutions to omnichannel retail experiences, the FinTech industry is looking hard at how consumers are adapting to this new way of life. By viewing the trends and implementing new services and strategies, financial technology can be ready for whatever comes next.

Quant Insight (Qi), the macro data analytics firm that applies innovative quantitative techniques to financial markets, today announced the firm has launched their desktop application on OpenFin, the operating system of finance. 

Qi provides quantitative macro analytics across multiple asset classes to a wide array of investors from discretionary to systematic, from equity long/short to absolute return. Qi brings a single, comprehensive and robust solution to its clients with actionable signals.

The collaboration enables the seamless deployment of Qi’s quantitative macro analytics on OpenFin’s OS, giving end-users a simple, comprehensive macro solution to aid their strategy, via an integrated API and an enhanced user experience dashboard. This will allow users to identify investment opportunities and manage risk, whether they are bottom-up or top-down in approach.

In building its data analytics app on OpenFin, Qi provides its clients with cutting edge analytics that reduces the need to develop and invest in quant personnel and the associated technology overheads.

With interoperability being a key component for all applications built on OpenFin, Qi can easily reveal the macro drivers and sensitivities of assets, indices and portfolios to other applications through OpenFin’s message bus. This will empower investors and funds to understand the key influences driving their asset prices, so their teams can more effectively manage their risk and performance.

Mahmood Noorani, Founder and CEO of Quant Insight, said: “Making Qi available through the OpenFin ecosystem will allow us to efficiently deliver continuous quant macro data to users without large overheads. Our customers including wealth managers, hedge funds, pension funds will benefit from the enhanced user experience and ease of access to complement their daily decision making and workflow processes”

Adam Toms, CEO OpenFin Europe, added: “We are excited to welcome Quant Insight to our ever increasing universe of customers, making their macro analysis available to the OpenFin ecosystem. Understanding what is driving asset prices is crucial for all fund managers evaluating investment decisions; the OpenFin community can now benefit from easy access to Qi’s macro analytics across multiple asset classes.”

Connect Ventures, the London-based venture capital firm focused on seed-stage technology investments, today announces a new $80M (£65M) fund to support product-led founders across Europe. This third fund was raised from a combination of existing and new LPs including Top Tier Capital Partners, Isomer Capital, British Patient Capital, De Agostini, Big Society Capital, Draper Esprit and Korelya Capital.

Connect Ventures is a thesis-led investment firm and will continue to invest in purpose-led founders obsessed with solving hard problems at scale by creating products and companies that people love. The fund has a pan-European remit and will deploy capital across all B2B and consumer software categories including SaaS, fintech, digital health and future of work. Connect will continue to lead seed rounds and support founders on the seed-to-Series-A journey with capital, network and expertise. 

Sitar Teli, co-founder and Partner at Connect Ventures said: “We have a strong belief at Connect that product-led, software entrepreneurs are the ones who will transform the way we live and work on a massive scale. We’ve intentionally created a low volume, high conviction, high support investment firm to back these founders. That’s why we’ll be targeting the same curated number of seed investments with this fund, using the larger fund size to provide the right capital and support on our journey together.

“We’re interested in building long term relationships with founders who have the obsession and focus required to build product-led companies, and the ambition to build category leaders,” she added.

Connect Ventures was the first VC investor in Citymapper, helping the London-based startup revolutionise urban mobility across numerous cities, as well as an early seed investor in Typeform, the company transforming online data collection with conversational forms. Connect’s current portfolio also includes Curve, the all-in-one digital banking app which recently raised a $55M Series-B, and TrueLayer, the open-banking API provider which raised a $35M round led by Tencent.

Connect has already started deploying the fund with recent investments in Parentalist, the subscription-based childcare and babysitting platform, Emma, the app helping users take control of their finances, and Oyster, the distributed talent enablement platform.

Connect Ventures provides ongoing post-investment support to ensure founders have the capital, knowledge and network to aggressively scale and transition from minimum-viable-product to product-market-fit. This means that every new portfolio company has a Connect partner on their board. The Connect Founder Network is a core component of ongoing support and aims to help founders learn faster than the speed of their own experience. 

Eric Fitzgerald, Managing Director at Top Tier added: “Connect has an outstanding track-record when it comes to identifying and backing Europe’s most exciting seed-stage companies. Connect’s thesis-driven product-led approach has allowed them to deploy capital highly effectively, investing in a small, select portfolio of innovative software companies that are shaking up a broad range of sectors. With the closing of this latest fund, as a new LP, we’re looking forward to partnering with Connect and seeing how their portfolio grows and develops.”

Catherine Lewis La Torre, CEO, British Patient Capital said: “Our mission is to enable long-term investment in innovative companies across the UK, led by ambitious entrepreneurs who want to build successful world-class businesses. Connect’s focused support to some of the UK’s most high-potential early stage companies with knowledge, networks and significant capital, has been instrumental in accelerating their scale-up journey from seed to Series A and beyond. As the UK’s largest domestic venture LP, we are able to make significant commitments to individual funds, ensuring managers with compelling strategies, like Connect, can back their companies through multiple rounds.”

To learn more, visit: https://www.connectventures.co/. 

In cooperation with Hamburg-based Varengold Bank, Berlin fintech Kapilendo is now offering small and medium-sized enterprises the first fully digital application process for instant loans (GER: Schnellkredite) offered by KfW, a German state-owned development bank based in Frankfurt. German companies with more than ten employees can apply via www.kapilen.do/kfw-schnellkredit. The loans will be 100% guaranteed by the German Federal Government. Innovative API services by SCHUFA, the largest German credit bureau, ensure that the eligibility verification process and associated compliance checks can be conducted digitally.

By connecting a digital platform to this aid program, Kapilendo and Varengold Bank have created an urgently needed unbureaucratic process from application to payout.

Christopher Grätz, Co-Founder and CEO of Kapilendo AG, said: “We have processed an initial batch of applications, the first of which have already been approved by KfW. Together with Varengold Bank, and with excellent support from KfW, we have managed to provide the German “Mittelstand” with a straightforward and digital access to the KfW instant loan programme. This is good news particularly for those companies which have difficulties accessing this programme because they lack a long-standing credit relationship with their principal bank. The KfW instant loan scheme is an aid program which many small and medium-sized enterprises in Germany have been waiting for. The Federal Government and the KfW have taken exactly the right step. In the current situation it was imperative to create a straightforward and digital access to these instant loans, which we have managed to achieve in cooperation with Varengold Bank.”

To which, Frank Otten, Member of Varengold Bank’s Board of Managing Directors, adds: “Providing companies with quick and easy access to capital is most definitely part of Varengold Bank’s mission. We are thus really pleased to work with Kapilendo in these challenging times by siding with small and medium-sized enterprises, who are facing huge challenges through no fault of their own, and offering them instant, unbureaucratic support.”

Smartway2, a next-generation technology company specialising in workplace scheduling solutions, announced the expansion of its COVID-Safe Workplace capabilities to include the automation of approvals and certification processes for those who want to come back to the office, as well as employee surveys to gauge how people feel about their return to work.

These new capabilities reflect the rising demand for technology that can adapt to fast-changing needs as the pandemic continues. These needs are twofold:

- The ability to roll out new health and safety procedures on the fly, and 
- The ability to forecast demand for resources - from desks and meeting rooms, to parking and other facilities

Many organisations are facing uncertainty about which risk is greater: could too many people flood back to work, jeapordising physical distancing measures; or will remote working continue, prompting the need to downsize real estate amidst a challenging economic climate.

Smartway2 enables organisations to take a data-driven approach to optimising space utilisation. By using advanced workspace analytics and data visualisation to help companies understand precisely how meeting rooms, desks and other resources are being utilised, they can boost employee experience, collaboration and productivity, while right-sizing real estate. These capabilities have become increasingly important during the Coronavirus pandemic, as the role of the workplace undergoes a fundamental shift.

Part of this shift demands that organisations control and monitor access to facilities more closely than ever before, given that a free-for-all workplace in which people use any desk or meeting room they desire, without regard to social distancing and sanitation procedures, would clearly endanger health.

The way to achieve this is by ensuring employees book what they need, when they need it.

When someone books a desk in Smartway2, they can be prompted to disclose why they want to be in the office - such as not having a suitable workstation at home, loneliness or a business reason. This information helps managers gauge levels of necessity and manage risk, while generating valuable data to predict demand and provide additional support to employees.

Likewise, people can be prompted to self-certify that they are free from symptoms such as a fever and have not been in contact with anyone displaying symptoms, to avoid putting others at risk.

Another important aspect of managing a safe return to work – or indeed managing any change - is providing employees with the opportunity to give feedback throughout the transitionary period. In Smartway2, organisations can pose survey questions to people when they book resources, in order to measure sentiment, address concerns around perceptions of workplace safety, or predict demand by asking how many days per week they would like to come into the office.

“Our ethos is all about Extreme Flexibility,” says John T. Anderson, CEO of Smartway2. “This key design principle is something we’ve obsessed over since day one. It manifests in our uniquely flexible ‘rules engine’, that allows the system to be rapidly configured to support almost any workflow. We had no idea it would be so well suited to helping organisations safety return to work amidst a global pandemic. That is a scenario I fully admit we did not plan for, but we are grateful for the opportunity to make a difference during these challenging times.”

Organisations are already using Smartway2 to automate social distancing, contact tracing and sanitation procedures. When someone books a desk, the system automatically takes desks out of service within a specified radius. Once the desk is vacated, a countdown timer in the system will prevent anyone else booking it until it has been sanitised, to prevent touch contamination; and sign-off and release procedures for desks and rooms are fully automated. Usage data gathered in the system then informs contact tracing reports that identify the risk levels of employees in the event that someone falls ill.

Founded in 2014, Smartway2 has expanded aggressively opening corporate headquarters in the U.S. and growing its footprint in APAC and Europe, as well as increasing its reseller base worldwide. 

Since 2018, Smartway2’s headcount has tripled, with new leadership and key hires that bring extensive industry experience to marketing, sales and engineering.

For more information visit: http://www.smartway2.com/.