Paysafe, a leading specialised payments platform, has today announced an expanded strategic partnership with Mastercard. The new agreement is designed to support Paysafe’s growth and card acceptance in the European Economic Area (EEA) with a particular focus on Paysafe’s card issuing solutions, including its Skrill Prepaid Mastercard® and NETELLER Net+ Prepaid Mastercard®.

Paysafe has been a Principal Member of the card scheme since 2013. As part of the new agreement, Mastercard will support Paysafe’s product development and innovation, including digital enablement for its services. The focus of the new partnership will include enabling digital payment methods such as Apple Pay and Google Pay.

Lorenzo Pellegrino, CEO of Skrill, NETELLER and Income Access at Paysafe – responsible for the company’s card issuing division – commented: “At Paysafe we have a relentless focus on creating a leading customer experience for both our consumer and merchant customers, and that includes our ability to innovate and scale in order to meet demand. We value the role that Mastercard plays in supporting us to do this.” 

Scott Abrahams, Senior Vice President, Business Development and Fintech at Mastercard in the UK said: “We are delighted to be entering this next phase of our relationship with Paysafe, supporting their ambitions to leverage prepaid and e-commerce acceptance across Europe as they grow.”

In Europe alone, Mastercard is the partner of choice for more than 60 digital banks and fintechs, which has doubled in the last two years, and is testament to our strategy of working with fintech partners from their inception. Mastercard Start Path is an award-winning programme that enables later-stage tech start-ups to rapidly scale through unparalleled access to Mastercard’s technology, solutions expertise and global partnerships.

Wirecard, the global innovation leader for digital financial technology, and Klarna, a leading global payments and shopping provider, announced today the launch of a new enhanced joint payment solution. All three Klarna shopping methods, Pay Now, Pay Later and Klarna Financing, can now be embedded into merchants’ checkout via a single integration through the Wirecard digital financial commerce platform to boost average order value, conversions and hence fuel growth for merchants.

As the single point of contact for merchants, Wirecard ensures that Klarna is integrated easily into the merchants’ checkout page as a payment option and also processes all subsequent payments made via Klarna. Merchants that take advantage of the all-in-one-integration will be able to offer consumers the full range of Klarna payment methods in nine markets (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Netherland and the United Kingdom) today, and even more regions in 2020 including the US and Australia. In addition, Wirecard and Klarna cover the merchant and consumer risk respectively, meaning that the payments are guaranteed.

Through the cooperation, Wirecard and Klarna will be complementing each other’s services, while growing Klarna’s potential merchant base and global consumer brand. Shoppers will continue to enjoy a smooth, hassle-free checkout experience when paying via Klarna.

“We are proud to team up with Wirecard to combine the best of our offerings into a single solution,” said Luke Griffiths, Commercial Vice President at Klarna. “Our joint partnership will enhance both the merchant and end-customer experiences, while expanding our footprint to more geographies. We are looking forward to launching this attractive solution on a global scale.”

“Shoppers seek, above all, a frictionless shopping journey,” added Kilian Thalhammer, Executive Vice President Product Management at Wirecard. “Together with Klarna, we will give shoppers exactly that: a hassle-free shopping experience, on their terms. Merchants will also benefit from a more streamlined and efficient integration – meaning that merchants and shoppers are that much closer to their ideal checkout experience. We are happy to join forces with Klarna.”

AI insurance pricing solution Akur8 has raised €8m in its Series A round from BlackFin Capital Partners and MTech Capital, bringing Akur8’s total funding to €10 million following initial investment and incubation from Kamet Ventures in 2018. Akur8 solves the insurance industry’s issue of ever-increasing pressure to find a sophisticated way to offer quick, easy and appropriate prices for today’s retail and commercial insurance customers. 

Akur8 allows insurers to build risk models more than 10 times faster than the traditional manual process, reducing the pricing time to market to hours rather than weeks. It is currently deployed by multiple insurance companies throughout Europe and The Americas and was named to the prestigious InsurTech Impact 25 list for 2020 compiled by Oxbow Partners. 

Pricing sophistication has become a key differentiator as insurance companies face increasing pressure on pricing and time-to-market, driven by new competition (direct players with real-time reactivity), price comparison websites, and low interest rates that undermine profitability. Yet pricing processes remain lengthy, manual and inefficient. While AI has the potential to improve this process, standard machine learning approaches are by design ‘blackbox’ solutions, meaning the decisions taken by algorithms are extremely hard to reverse engineer. Akur8 has created a solution to this challenge by developing a unique AI algorithm to automate the insurance pricing process while providing complete transparency, thereby ensuring compliance with local insurance regulatory requirements.

Akur8 is headquartered in Paris with a team of 25 people including a large research & design team, data scientists, developers and actuaries. The latest funding will be used to accelerate its international expansion throughout Europe and the US.  

Samuel Falmagne, Co-Founder and CEO of Akur8, said: “When we embarked on building Akur8, we were passionate about offering a truly novel solution for the insurance industry. We are proud to have developed a product that gives carriers the ability to meet customers’ expectations for real time pricing while improving the accuracy of their risk assessment, thus significantly reducing their loss ratio. We are looking forward to continuing our growth journey and are excited to have the support of BlackFin and MTech, two leading investors in our space.”

Julien Creuzé, Managing Director at BlackFin Capital Partners, said: “Akur8 has developed a highly differentiated AI-based solution for risk modelling and pricing, with tremendous value potential for the insurers who embrace it. It is a must-have product for insurers looking to stay relevant in an increasingly competitive and complex environment. We firmly believe in the team and are proud to be their partners in this round.”

Kevin McLoughlin, Partner and Co-founder of MTech Capital, said: “Our investment thesis is centred around backing visionary founders with the ambition to transform insurance through the use of technology. We are proud to be backing Akur8 as a unique player solving a critical issue for the entire industry.”

Starling Bank founder and chief executive Anne Boden said the business will to make its first monthly profit in “in January or February” of next year.

This year is perhaps the most crucial in the well-regarded bank’s short history. Boden has to manage expansion into Germany, France and the Netherlands, maintain the bank’s quality, and produce a profit.

“Digital banks have experienced high growth,” says Boden. “We are all putting on numbers. This has never happened before in the history of banking. But now we are moving into a period where these banks have to show they can make profits.”

The digital bank has opened 1.25 million customer accounts and holds more than £1.25bn in deposits since it was launched in 2014. The digital bank has forged a reputation for bringing quality products to market across business banking, travel money or overdraft facilities that have won it several bank of the year awards.

All of this has made Boden arguably the most famous woman in British fintech.

However, the Starling competes against UK rivals who have more customers such as Revolut which claims 10 million accounts and Monzo, which notched up four million accounts earlier this month.

Starling makes its cash from a mixture of charging fees on the cards it issues, its marketplace where it charges other financial service firms to sell products on its platform, as well as using its deposits to lend.

“The thing to remember is that our cost base is so small the cash we raise here is meaningful,” adds Boden.

The elephant in the room for all neo-banks is Big Tech firms such as Amazon or PayPal. These firms have deep pockets, large customer bases, and unlike high street banks, are platform companies themselves and so are comfortable with the business model.

The number of fintech deals by global tech giants – including Alibaba Group, Alphabet, Apple, Baidu, IBM, Microsoft and Tencent – increased for the fifth straight year, with $3.5bn invested across 46 deals in 2019, according to last month’s KPMG Pulse of Fintech bi-annual report.

 “I think Big Tech will want to distribute banking services, says Boden. “I don’t think they will want to get involved in the financial plumbing of moving money around. Or obtaining a license, that will mean more regulation, and they already face calls for more regulation as it is.”

Finastra has crowned Team ‘WonderTech’ the grand prize winner of its largest ever global fintech hackathon on its open development platform, FusionFabric.cloud. The Manila-based team was selected for the top honor for its ‘Agree Farm App’ from among five category winners at Finastra Universe New York. The app, which aims to connect rural farmers in the Philippines with access to bank loans, was chosen by an audience of senior professionals representing financial institutions. The team’s app was built using open APIs on FusionFabric.cloud, Finastra’s open development platform.

Team ‘WonderTech’ consisted of four young professionals and university students in Manila: Michael Puzon, Vaniza Dagangon, John Robert Tubale and Clyde Palattao. Using Finastra’s payment APIs, in combination with third-party industry APIs, the team built the working prototype in just a few weeks, proving the speed and simplicity of FusionFabric.cloud.

More than 1,000 individuals, including data scientists, developers, and engineers, from across 38 countries participated in the ‘Hack to the Future’ hackathon. Inventing over 240 innovative new apps, the hackathon teams harnessed new technologies, with more than 40% of the hackathon submissions using Machine Learning.

Shuki Licht, Chief Innovation Officer at Finastra, said, “Congratulations to Team ‘WonderTech’ for developing an app that helps provide vital financial services to those who have traditionally been unbanked or underbanked. Fintech is one of the hottest growth and innovation areas, with some serious investment from banks, private equity, VC and government. ‘Team WonderTech’ and all of the category winners have demonstrated an incredible ability to understand the needs of the market and have shown that the future of finance is truly open.”

The five category winners will have the opportunity to continue refinement of their apps, for promotion in Finastra’s FusionStore. The complete list of category-winning apps includes:

Future of Capital Markets: Stratl

Future of Corporate Banking: Accenture, with IN-CRE-D (Intelligent Credit Decisioning using AI) app 

Future of Payment & Banking for a Better Future: WonderTech, with Agree Farm App

Future of Retail Banking: ING, with Financial Assistant on FB Messenger app

Best App by an Established Fintech: Manager.one

The Centrale Bank van Curaçao en Sint Maarten (CBCS) has contracted equensWorldline SE, a subsidiary of Worldline [Euronext: WLN], the European leader in the payments and transactional services industry, to introduce an Instant Payments (IP) CSM on top of their current clearing & settlement system. This means that all interbank payments in Curaçao, Sint Maarten and Bonaire will soon be processed within ten seconds - 24 hours a day, 365 days per year. The Instant Payment transactions will be handled in Antillean Guilders and US Dollars. This makes the CBCS one of the first institutions to use a direct dual currency system and to process dollars instantly. The IP CSM will be fully compliant with international standards and ISO20022. The contract with equensWorldline will initially be for a period of five years.

Phase 1 and 2

Phase 1, in which the basic infrastructure will be built, is just the beginning of the implementation of Instant Payments on the islands. The CBCS wants to further develop Instant Payments and has already designed phase 2 together with equensWordline.

Phase 2 is aimed at expanding online and in-store Instant Payments with P2P (person-to-person), P2B (person-to-business) and P2G (person-to-government) payments.

Leila Matroos, Executive Director at the CBCS: “The developments surrounding Instant Payments are in line with our goal to modernize the infrastructure and stimulate economic development in Curaçao and St. Maarten. With the introduction of Instant Payments, we are preparing ourselves for future developments in the world of payments. We chose equensWorldline because of their experience and proven track record as the largest Instant Payments processor in the Eurozone.”

The new normal

The Central Bank of Aruba went live last month with a comparable Instant Payments project. The Centrale Bank van Curaçao en Sint Maarten will follow on short notice.

Michael Steinbach, CEO equensWorldline, said: “The developments surrounding Instant Payments in the Caribbean show that this payment method is on the way to becoming the new normal. We are fully geared to support the CBCS in their major development towards 24/7/365 payments, as our currency agnostic solution supports all possible use cases for Instant Payments, ranging from P2P, P2B, in store, online and corporate use cases. With 1.2 million IP transactions per day we are the largest Instant Payments processor in the Eurozone and we are proud that equensWorldline is now working on global expansion.”

Ascent, an AI-driven solution that helps customers automate regulatory compliance, today announced that it has won the 2020 FinTech Breakthrough Award for Best RegTech Startup.

FinTech Breakthrough is an independent organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global FinTech market through its annual FinTech Breakthrough Awards program. This year’s awards, now in their fourth year, drew over 3,700 nominations. 

Brian Clark, Ascent Founder & CEO, commented, “We’re honored to be included among the many top companies across the fintech industry to be selected for this year’s FinTech Breakthrough Awards. This win, and the other industry recognition that we continue to receive, is a direct reflection of our commitment to the needs of our customers and helping them achieve certainty in their compliance obligations.”

Using its proprietary RegulationAI™, Ascent processes and analyses regulatory text, doing automatically what takes individual Risk and Compliance officers hundreds of hours to accomplish manually. By delivering actual regulatory knowledge – the regulatory obligations and ongoing rule changes that apply specifically to their business – Ascent helps customers reduce their risk while saving significant time and money. 

In a recent project with global financial institution Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Ascent used natural language processing (NLP) and AI technologies to interpret and convert over 200,000 words of regulation into a set of digital, easy-to-consume tasks customized for the bank. As a result, CommBank saved hundreds of hours of manual processing across the business.

Ascent has been rapidly gaining momentum since its founding in 2015. Since its inception, Ascent has grown 100% YOY, secured $26.7M in funding, and expanded to 50 full-time employees. Ascent has customers all over the world from Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks and other financial institutions. Ascent is continually expanding its regulatory coverage in order to better serve its customers worldwide.

In response to new regulations on ‘Open Banking’, Edinburgh-based iDelta has launched an app to help bricks-and-mortar banks combat the rapid rise of online challengers such as Revolut and Monzo.

Open Banking, which is the UK’s implementation of the European Directive PSD2, requires the UK’s 300 banks and 45 building societies to release customer data to authorised third parties on the say-so of customers. As a result, customers can access their bank accounts using third party products, making it easier to view and manage their finances across multiple accounts in one place.

iDelta works with leading retail banks to provide data driven insights on all aspects of business and infrastructure performance. The iDelta Open Banking app gives banks increased visibility of how well their customers’ needs are being met, by enabling them to efficiently monitor and analyse the interactions their customers are having with other providers.

Stuart Robertson, director at iDelta, said: “Open Banking is intended to increase competition in the marketplace, and in a competitive environment you get innovation. While challenger banks and other financial third parties are revolutionising the marketplace, there is still huge opportunity here for the incumbent banks to drive forward innovation, using insights gleaned from existing customer data to develop customer-focused products”.

According to consumer group Which? the UK is currently losing an average of 55 bank branches a month. In recent weeks, Virgin Bank announced it would be closing 52 of its outlets and HSBC confirmed it would be getting rid of 27 branches in the UK. Meanwhile, Revolut, the leading banking and money transfer app globally, recently raised $500 million in a funding round that valued the company at $5.5 billion.

Robertson, who designed iDelta’s Open Banking Insights app, said: “Our app gives the market a low-cost, highly efficient and extensible way of providing a business with a central view of their customer banking channel. Banks that choose to fully use the data they are generating, with the app we have built, will position themselves at the forefront of this new channel of business.”

Designed to deal with the fact that every bank will have different technology stacks, the app was coded with an abstraction layer over the data – which enables its dashboards and reports to work with each bank’s systems with minimal customisation.

Robertson said: “While the UK is pioneering Open Banking, we are seeing a shift change in banking worldwide, with USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia and others adopting their own approaches to its implementation, so we see lots of potential for the app globally.”

Standard Chartered Bank has joined TradeLens, a blockchain-enabled digital container logistics platform, jointly developed by A.P. Moller – Maersk (MAERSKb.CO) and IBM (NYSE: IBM), making Standard Chartered Bank the first financial institution to enter a formal agreement for use of the platform.

TradeLens was launched to help modernise the world’s supply chain ecosystems with a special focus on containerised freight and logistics. Many of the processes for transporting and trading goods are costly, in part, due to manual and paper-based systems. Replacing these peer-to-peer and often unreliable information exchanges, the platform enables participants to digitally connect, share information and collaborate across the shipping supply chain ecosystem.

In joining TradeLens, Standard Chartered Bank will be able to instantly validate the authenticity of shipments using TradeLens’ extensive record of real-time data and document exchange amongst the network of entities involved in a shipment.

“As a critical link in the global supply chain ecosystem, Standard Chartered Bank plays a crucial role in supporting global trade transactions. Supply chains are continuing to become more international, drawing on many parties from around the world. Digital ecosystems have the potential to promote the sustainability agenda of many participants in international trade,” said Michael Spiegel, Global Head of Trade, Standard Chartered Bank.

“The trade ecosystem has complex processes, slow turnaround times, high paper-based manual documentation and limited connectivity between the various parties involved and it remains a major pain point in the centuries-old trade finance industry. The partnership with TradeLens equips Standard Chartered Bank with reliable real time information to validate and protect the integrity of transactions and thus deliver fast and safe service to our clients,” said Aarthi Fernandez, COO Trade, Singapore & South East Asia and Global Head of Trade Operations, Standard Chartered Bank.

Today, TradeLens captures millions of supply chain events and tens of thousands documents per week, having processed information on over 15 million containers worldwide since its launch. TradeLens ecosystem consists of more than 150 members, including 100+ ports and terminals, 20+ ocean carriers and intermodal providers, and 10+ government authorities. The solution has been commercially available since December 2018 and its standards-based open APIs are openly available to the entire community. For more information, please visit here.

“The initiative with Standard Chartered Bank exemplifies how the global trade ecosystem can work together to advance trade digitisation efforts on both the physical and financial side. Working with all of the ecosystem partners, our goal is to accelerate the standardisation and automation of global trade,” said Todd Scott, VP of Global Trade Solutions, IBM.