Anduin, a trailblazing FinTech company revolutionising transactions in the private markets, takes centre stage.

In a game-changing move, Anduin recently secured an impressive $15m in series B funding. The round witnessed participation from investors who firmly believe in the vision Anduin represents, demonstrating a continued commitment to innovation and technological development in the private markets sector.

At its core, Anduin aims to transform investor onboarding, a process traditionally seen as a necessary evil for both GPs (General Partners) and LPs (Limited Partners). The company has been diligently closing the infrastructure gap between GPs and LPs, providing superior investor experiences and enabling GPs to onboard a significant number of investors. By focusing on digital solutions, Anduin makes the onboarding process smoother and more efficient, helping to eliminate the tedious task of sifting through spreadsheets, emails, and paperwork.

With the fresh capital of $15m in their pocket, Anduin plans to supercharge its impact by expanding the scope and scale of its critical infrastructure. The funding will be instrumental in further supporting strategic leaders globally in their investor onboarding needs and beyond.

Over the years, Anduin has quietly risen to become an integral part of the investor relations operations for many top private market professionals. In 2022 alone, a staggering 4% of all global capital raised was facilitated by Anduin, marking a significant footprint in the industry. The company has helped hundreds of future-forward GPs onboard over 27,000 investors and raise more than $55bn in capital, proving the effectiveness and influence of its model.

In a statement, an Anduin spokesperson expressed their gratitude, “We remain grateful to every investor who believed in our vision, every GP, LP, fund administrator, and law firm that gave us feedback, and every Anduin colleague that strove for excellence. Thank you for pushing us to build better private markets for everyone.”

Anduin’s Series B funding follows its impressive journey in closing the infrastructure gap in the private markets and revolutionising transactions, setting a high bar for the future of the FinTech industry.

International, non-profit organization nexo standards – established to create a unified global card payments acceptance ecosystem – has welcomed GIM-UEMOA into the association to implement ISO 20022 specifications that help reduce time to market of West African payment solutions and improve the customer experience.

GIM-UEMOA brings together 145 members including banks, financial and postal institutions, microfinance structures, electronic money institutions and promotes electronic payment systems and means of payment to the banking and financial sectors, administrations and the population of the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU).

The organization’s ambition is to work with nexo and adopt ISO 20022-based specifications so it can meet the specific needs of the WAEMU zone.

“Our members are critical in helping to shape the future of payments. With their support, we can break new ground worldwide and ensure that global, unified standards are available to all. We are eager to help GIM-UEMOA meet its ISO goals and learn from its regional expertise as nexo continues its efforts to simplify payments acceptance everywhere,” comments Jean-Philippe Joliveau, Chairman of the Board of Directors, nexo standards.

Speaking about joining nexo standards, Minayegnan Coulibaly, CEO of GIM-UEMOA, adds: “This is a significant partnership for the future of payments across West Africa as we continue to provide a connected, modernized, interoperable and secure platform offering.

“Electronic payment inter-banking in the WAEMU area is no longer an option but a necessity. With more of the West African population using mobile money over cards, we want to collaborate closely with nexo to contribute to the specifications and enable mobile money to be recognized as a standardized use case both in the region and globally too.

“Additionally, with nexo standards, it means we can further support our members in cross-border transactions – and ISO 20022 migration will be integral in achieving this.”

nexo standards currently has a 101-strong membership spanning Europe, America and the Middle East. It has powered over a billion transactions, supporting the simplified implementation of payment acceptance solutions through standardization.

Aryza, a leading provider of financial software solutions, is proud to announce the launch of Aryza Dunning in the UK and Ireland. The platform helps businesses to optimise receivables management and generate more liquidity by actively tracking open invoices, minimising manual collection effort, and maximising recovery rates with automated, customisable processes and workflows. 

The current economic landscape highlights the importance of maintaining control over debtor-related processes, as companies and customers can face financial difficulties at any moment. Aryza Dunning empowers businesses to navigate these challenges effectively. 

The simple, user-friendly interface provides maximum transparency, offering a seamless user experience across various devices, including cell phones and tablets. The software supports multiple languages and currencies, accommodating businesses in diverse international settings. 

Utilising Software as a Service (SaaS) cloud technology, Aryza Dunning ensures fast scalability and flexibility allowing for easy addition of new users, administrators, and business locations. The software runs in a highly secure cloud environment, protecting data against cyber-attacks and local IT infrastructure defects. Its state-of-the-art security architecture meets the highest standards.  

Aryza Dunning provides specialised functionality through robust features and tools tailored to the unique requirements of credit management. It offers direct insight into the development of the claims portfolio, planned actions, and open balances at both the overview and customer level. 

The software supports all major communication channels and enables targeted monitoring of arrears, payment behaviour, and response rates of debtors thereby improving days sales outstanding (DSO) and cash flow. Aryza Dunning seamlessly integrates with a business's existing ERP system (through API interfaces or data import) and with many payment service providers, maximising effectiveness in receivables management and streamlining credit processes for efficient credit management. Automated reminders and sequential workflows minimise manual effort, accelerating the credit management cycle, while customisable templates for emails or letters enable personalised communication. 

Through its enhanced risk assessment capabilities, it allows businesses to accurately evaluate customer creditworthiness, manage risk, and make informed decisions. 

The software includes a robust reporting system and analytics capabilities, empowering businesses to monitor key performance indicators to facilitate better decision-making, identify trends, and improve overall credit management strategies. 

"We are excited to introduce Aryza Dunning to the UK and Ireland markets," said Rob Doherty, Head of Legal & Insolvency Division, Aryza Group. "This innovative software solution empowers businesses to optimise their receivables management, enhance efficiency, and improve cash flow. Aryza Dunning's user-friendly interface, multilingual capabilities, and comprehensive functionalities will drive significant improvements in credit management processes for many businesses." 

By leveraging Aryza Dunning, businesses can expect leaner processes, faster invoice payments, reduced accounts receivable, lower costs, and improved DSO and cash flow. The software's continuous improvements, driven by valuable customer feedback, ensure that credit management evolves alongside changing business needs. 

Webⁿ, an incubation hub for fintech and Web3 innovators, backed by Alan Howard, today announces an investment from Laser Digital, Nomura’s digital asset subsidiary. As part of its investment, Laser Digital’s CEO, Dr. Jez Mohideen, joins the board of Webⁿ as a non-executive director. Webⁿ incubates businesses that bring digital assets and Web3 products and services to financial institutions. Founded in late 2021, Webⁿ has built a team with a deep understanding and extensive experience of capital markets, financial services, start-ups and technology.

Himanshu Panwar, CEO, Webⁿ Group UK, commented:

“Webⁿ’s ambition aligns with Laser Digital’s commitment to addressing the challenges currently faced by institutional investors who are engaging with digital assets. With this investment, we look forward to co-building businesses with Laser Digital that meet a real market need for institutions and combine high standards of risk management and compliance with institutional-grade technology products.”

Webⁿ has an established ecosystem of partners and has incubated several businesses. Its current public portfolio, with more upcoming, includes:

• Geometry, a team that builds companies and protocols which leverage deep mathematics, cryptography and engineering to advance the use of Web3
• Trufin, a DeFi protocol built to provide access to on-chain asset management
• Twinstake, an institutional-grade, non-custodial staking provider designed and built in collaboration with leaders in the digital asset space

Olivier Dang, Head of Ventures, Laser Digital added:

"We are very excited to invest in Webⁿ and work with the team there, which has a track record of building innovative and scalable businesses. We look forward to driving responsible innovation in the ecosystem by jointly developing institutional grade products and services across the digital asset value chain."

 

“We’ve seen incredible levels of growth in the past year, with thousands of businesses looking to our revenue-based funding solution to help their businesses thrive during this challenging period of economic uncertainty and high interest rates,” said Andrew Raphaely, 365 Business Finance Managing Director. “Our flexible repayments solution, which matches our customers’ cashflow, market-leading customer service and fully-automated collections technology have enabled us to become a leading provider of unsecured finance to the retail, hospitality and online sectors.

“We’re delighted to build on our long-standing relationship with Pollen Street. Our increased credit facility will enable us to more than double our levels of funding to UK SMEs over the next 12 months.” 

Michael Katramados, Partner, Pollen Street, said, “We are delighted to build on our strong relationship with 365 which started in 2018, increasing our facility to support them as they grow. Through this facility our financing will continue to support SMEs across the UK, aligning with our commitment to generating a positive impact through the work that we do.”

Nutanix, Inc., a leader in hybrid multicloud computing, has today announced the financial services industry findings of its fifth annual Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) survey, which measures enterprise progress with cloud adoption. 

The research reveals that mixed deployments among financial companies are at 64%, which is slightly ahead of the global average, and data security considerations drive many of the financial sector’s infrastructure investment and application mobility decisions. This remarkable adoption rate in financial services reflects the highly competitive industry's commitment to significantly enhance the customer experience, leveraging hybrid multicloud deployments to fuel digitalisation, advanced data capabilities, and modernise applications. 

“Increased infrastructure diversity and a heightened emphasis on data storage, management, security, and cloud-native services are driving all IT professionals to seek hybrid operations that transcend private and public infrastructure. As evidenced by recent regulatory measures such as the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), operational resilience and concentration risk are additional driving factors to hybrid model adoption,” said Ian Haynes, EMEA Field CTO, Nutanix. “For cloud deployment models, the financial services industry has emerged as a frontrunner, surpassing many other sectors in embracing the hybrid multicloud approach.” 

Key findings from this year’s report include:

• Hybrid multicloud adoption has accelerated and is expected to rise in financial services. The financial services industry has made significant progress in adopting cloud technology over the past year, with 64% of those surveyed using multiple IT environments – whether a mix of private and public clouds, multiple public clouds, or on-premises and hosted private infrastructure.
• Cybersecurity is the biggest IT infrastructure driver. The financial sector and global respondents prioritised cybersecurity above all else. This is not surprising, given the increasing sophistication of cyberattacks and the critical role that IT plays in financial services organisations. 
• Mixed environments create new challenges and demand for a single place to manage all workloads and data. Most ECI respondents agree that having a single platform to manage their diverse private and public infrastructures would be ideal. Among those from financial firms, 96% agreed. However, only 42% reported actually having that visibility. The visibility findings indicate a gap in capabilities, highlighting the need for integrated tools to improve hybrid IT operations. Without visibility, IT teams are unable to manage, secure, synchronise, or analyse what they cannot see.
• The overriding driver of application movement among ECI financial services firms in the past year was to improve data access speeds. All respondents in the financial sector (100%) indicated that they had moved applications between IT infrastructures in the past 12 months. Nearly half (49%) cited a desire to accelerate data access as a reason for the move. This driver was followed by aspirations to improve their companies' security posture or better meet regulatory requirements and to gain the ability to integrate with cloud-native services, such as AI and machine learning.
• Cost factors remain a wild card. ECI respondents tend to be fickle in their attitudes toward IT cost, which seems to be inching downward on IT priority lists – falling to last on global respondents’ infrastructure criteria lists and tying for fourth in importance among financial companies. At the same time, most respondents rank controlling costs high on their list of challenges. For example, 87% of financial services respondents described cloud cost control as a challenge with managing their current IT infrastructures, and about a third said it was a significant one.

For the fifth consecutive year, Vanson Bourne conducted research on behalf of Nutanix, surveying 1,450 IT decision-makers around the world in December 2022 and January 2023. This report is supplemental to the global 5th Annual Enterprise Cloud Index master report and focuses specifically on cloud deployments within the financial services industry. It sheds light on the cloud plans, priorities, challenges, and experiences of IT professionals operating in this sector, offering valuable insights for comparison with global responses and other industries. Gain a deeper understanding of the cloud deployment journey of financial services organisations and uncover key trends and benchmarks in this ever-evolving landscape. 

To learn more about the report and findings, please download the full fifth Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Index, here.

TP24, a fintech provider of flexible revolving business credit, has raised  £345m in debt funding from UK parties Barclays Bank Plc (“Barclays”) and M&G Investments. The amount of £240m will be used for lending to SMEs in the UK and the Netherlands. Barclays is providing up to £200m in warehouse financing, while M&G is providing up to £40m in mezzanine funding.

TP24 provides SMEs with flexible revolving business credit based on their outstanding invoices, without taking over the debtor base. In addition to the amount of £200m for the UK and the Netherlands, an amount of up to £105 million has also been made available by Barclays for lending by TP24 in Australia.

Gordon Beck, European Head of Corporate & Sustainable Securitisation at Barclays, said: “Barclays is pleased to support TP24 on its mission to provide innovative lending solutions to SMEs across the UK, the Netherlands and Australia. Progressive SME lending is critical to the health and success of many businesses, and TP24’s solutions are tailored, affordable, and convenient. Barclays is proud to be partnering with TP24 as it leads this innovation on a global stage.”

Alexis Dussault, ABS Portfolio Manager of M&G, said: “We are pleased to close this funding round with TP24. The product they offer to SMEs in the Netherlands and the UK will help them access affordable, flexible and fast financing to grow and support their business in a challenging environment. M&G is proud to contribute to the financing of the local and wider economy and to fund innovation with TP24’s outstanding team.”

Niels Turfboer, Managing Director of TP24 in the UK and the Netherlands, commented: "We are pleased and proud to announce these agreements today. The support from established parties like Barclays and M&G confirms the strength of our innovative product and the talent of our team and gives us the opportunity to grow further."

Positive impact for UK SMEs

TP24 was launched in Switzerland in 2018 and in recent years opened branches in Australia (2019), the UK (2021) and the Netherlands (2022). 

"With the committed capital from Barclays and M&G, we can really make a difference for UK SMEs." says Niels Turfboer. “Small and medium sized businesses across Britain are facing unprecedented challenges that are impacting cash flow - from the cost-of-living crisis and soaring energy bills to high interest rates. TP24 has created a valuable service that can help overcome these pressures by providing the capital that companies need to manage their operation costs and to scale up successfully. With over 5 million SMEs in the UK, these businesses are the backbone of the economy, and in the coming years, we will do everything we can to help as many SME entrepreneurs as possible realise their ambitions, and thus give the UK economy an extra boost."

Unique proposition

UK SMEs looking for financing for further growth can turn to TP24 for flexible revolving loans from £250,000 to £5,000,000. The prerequisite is that they are based in the UK, have been operational for at least three years, and have a debtor base of more than £350,000. Unlike factoring, TP24 does not take over outstanding invoices.

TP24's flexible revolving credit is a unique proposition for medium-sized SME entrepreneurs looking for working capital, filling the gap between the offer from banks and existing alternative financiers. Using innovative technology, customers are helped quickly and efficiently at an attractive rate, while remaining in control of their debtors.

Nexpay, a leading Lithuanian Electronic Money Institution (EMI) providing business banking solutions for digital companies, has announced its enhanced service offering by adding SWIFT payments in 23 currencies. This strategic move caters to the evolving needs of digital businesses worldwide and advances Nexpay's ambition to bring innovative and secure financial solutions to the forefront.

Nexpay's latest service expansion aligns with the global industry's shift towards cross-border payments transformation, allowing customers to leverage SWIFT's secure, efficient, and universal payment infrastructure.  Initially focusing on EUR transactions via the SEPA payment system, Nexpay has now enhanced its offerings to include multi-currency payment orders through the SWIFT network. This development opens up a world of possibilities for Nexpay clients, who can now seamlessly process payments in a wide range of currencies, including USD, GBP, JPY, AUD, CAD, and many more. The automatic conversion feature ensures hassle-free transactions, as funds are effortlessly converted into their respective EUR accounts.

"Digital businesses need transactional banking, where the focus is merely on enabling them to receive and make payments safely, cost-effectively, and simply. In the face of the evolving landscape of cross-border payments, our move to include SWIFT payments reinforces our commitment to a banking model prioritising simplicity, safety, and cost-effectiveness, enabling digital businesses to flourish without unnecessary frills and risks," said Uldis Tēraudkalns, CEO of Nexpay.

Nexpay's commitment to security and compliance remains paramount in its service expansion. As an authorised EMI with a license from the Bank of Lithuania, Nexpay ensures stringent adherence to regulations and consistent reporting to the supervisory authority. With a focus on continuous improvement of client experience and product features, Nexpay has processed over €7 billion in transactions across 42 countries to date.

Encompass Corporation, the provider of the leading dynamic Know Your Customer (KYC) process automation platform, has unveiled a new whitepaper providing critical expertise that will help banks accelerate digital transformation, and move towards a perpetual KYC (pKYC) operating model.  

pKYC, which uses automation to detect risk more accurately and quickly while improving operational efficiency and customer experience, is a strategic driver for organisations striving to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving financial landscape.  

Gaining executive-level backing is a pivotal step on the journey to pKYC, and the whitepaper, titled ‘earning executive sponsorship for pKYC transformation’, delves into the challenges and issues to consider. It also sets out best practice guidance for bringing key stakeholders on board – an important ingredient for banks looking to transform processes with technology today. 

Building on Encompass’ revolutionary pKYC maturity model unveiled earlier in the year, further insights are also delivered on how banks can get the most out of digital transformation, regardless of whether pKYC is the end goal. This includes how to frame the benefits of utilising the best in technology solutions – from risk reduction to slashing costs – and how to ensure the right stakeholder is aligned to a project to see results. 

The paper, authored by Howard Wimpory, KYC Transformation Director at Encompass, and Global Head of Industry and Regulatory Affairs, Dr Henry Balani, outlines the value of digital KYC profiles, which use KYC process automation to gather, merge and analyse data and documents in real-time to inform KYC decisions. This brings positive impacts in areas such as risk mitigation, accuracy and scalability.  

Howard Wimpory, KYC Transformation Director at Encompass Corporation, commented: “In a competitive market, now, more than ever, banks require the tools to maximise operational efficiency in order to stay ahead. The manual processes that were once straightforward and linear are no longer sufficient, with the implementation of technology-led processes, such as pKYC, an imperative to long-term success. 

“Leveraging automation, and specifically relying on digital customer profiles, which monitor in real-time to improve risk mitigation, reduce costs and support business scalability, is a crucial element of a game-changing endeavour. 

“While the journey to pKYC is not an overnight one, it must be realised that there are significant incremental gains available. Supported by real, experience-led insights and expertise, banks can confidently embark on a meaningful digital transformation project – towards pKYC or otherwise - that will reap rewards now and in the future.” 

Dr Henry Balani, Global Head of Industry and Regulatory Affairs at Encompass Corporation, commented: “As an increasingly stringent regulatory landscape develops in response to the prevailing threat of financial crime, it is vital that banks prioritise compliance and bolster their own processes by utilsing technology-led solutions, such as dynamic KYC process automation. 

“Manual KYC not only requires a large amount of time and resource, but it is cumbersome and slow when it comes to keeping pace with changes in regulations, increasing risk for institutions. Aside from this, there is also the regulators to consider, with it being widely expected that banks look to the technology available to them and how they can bring solutions into operations.    

“It is for these reasons that the time is now for banks looking to accelerate their transformation initiatives and effectively tackle the pertinent global issue of financial crime.” 

This whitepaper supports Encompass’ goal of elevating the pKYC conversation within the industry by sharing the experiences and opinions of its pKYC Advisory Board, chaired by Dr Henry Balani and comprising representatives from leading global banks and a select group of trusted data, technology and consulting partners.