In line with its commitment to providing the latest in digital payments, Al Baraka Bank announced its partnership with Mastercard, a global leader in digital payments technology, to introduce an array of premium consumer, commercial, and SME products, in Egypt. This strategic move is set to effectively cater to the needs of individuals in the realm of digital payments and streamline corporate expense management, ushering in a new era of digitization and efficiency in the payment ecosystem.

Abdel Aziz Samir, Deputy CEO, Consumer Banking at Al Baraka Bank, expressed his delight with the partnership, stating, "This partnership reflects our commitment at Al Baraka Bank to providing a comprehensive suite of cutting-edge solutions and diverse services, offering a seamless digital experience for our customers. Through this collaboration, we aim to expand the range of financial services provided, attract diverse customer segments, and meet all their needs through services and products tailored specifically for them. This collaboration contributes to advancing digital transformation and financial inclusion efforts, promoting electronic payment systems, and positively impacting the economy as a whole."

“Our partnership with Al Baraka Bank is a key milestone in our journey to deliver on the shared vision of building a sustainable and resilient digital economy that is inclusive for all. This collaboration will enable Al Baraka Bank to empower individuals and businesses with world-class innovative offerings and payment solutions to embrace the benefits of digital transactions by making transactions safe, seamless, convenient, and rewarding,” said Khalid Elgibali, Division President, MENA, Mastercard.

This collaboration is poised to redefine the way individuals and businesses handle their finances, marking a significant step towards a more digitized and efficient payment ecosystem in Egypt. The collaboration between the two industry leaders signifies a significant milestone in the financial sector’s journey toward digital transformation, redefining the banking experience and setting new standards for customer convenience, payment security, and financial innovation.

This collaboration emphasizes the joint commitment of Al Baraka Bank and Mastercard to providing premium consumer products and driving the transition away from traditional payment methods, aiming to better serve customer needs and reach new, untapped market segments.

GCEX (GCEX Group), a regulated digital brokerage that enables brokers, funds, and professional traders to access deep liquidity has partnered with Crossover Markets Group, Inc.,  a digital asset technology firm focused on meeting the unique liquidity requirements of institutions. Through this partnership, GCEX clients will have access to Crossover’s execution-only crypto electronic communication network (ECN) to execute spot cryptocurrency transactions.

GCEX will provide brokerage services for spot cryptocurrency transactions and access to deep liquidity through its professional 24/7 service. The offering is tailored to institutions looking to partner with a regulated brokerage through either GCEX’s crypto-native platform – XplorSpot – or via API, enabling further adoption of digital assets across institutions and professional traders.

Lars Holst, Founder & CEO, GCEX commented, “With the increasing demand for digital assets, we are delighted to be partnering with Crossover, providing even greater opportunities for our institutional clients to access deep liquidity in digital assets. We are excited about the synergies and opportunities that this partnership will bring.”

Commenting on this partnership, Anthony Mazzarese, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer, Crossover added, “We are excited to welcome GCEX to the CROSSx ECN as our newest venue participant. Crossover’s focus on speed, throughput and operational efficiency will help GCEX achieve tighter spreads and a lower cost to trade across their client base of institutional and professional investors, and this partnership will further enhance spot crypto liquidity.”

GCEX Group enables institutional and professional clients to access deep liquidity in FX and CFDs on digital assets, as well as digital assets spot trading and conversion, and offers a broad range of Forex brokerage and crypto-native technology solutions – XplorDigital. XplorDigital includes the firm’s plug-and-play solutions, ‘Crypto in a Box’ and ‘Broker in a Box’ and comprises of technology-agnostic platforms covering regulation, regulated custody solutions, staking solutions, safety of funds, tier 1 and deep liquidity, connectivity to the biggest price makers, advanced risk management, and innovative technology partnerships.

Headquartered in London, with multiple offices across the globe, GCEX is regulated by the UK’s FCA, registered with the Danish FSA as a VASP and currency exchange, and has been granted a Virtual Asset Service Provider license by the Dubai Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority. True Global Ventures are investors in GCEX.

Crypto Finance AG, part of Deutsche Börse Group, has reached another milestone in its history. The prudentially FINMA-supervised provider of institutional-grade investment solutions, custody, and trading for digital assets has now also secured four licenses from the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority, BaFin. The licenses for its subsidiary, Crypto Finance (Deutschland) GmbH, include regulated digital asset trading, settlement, and custody services in Germany. The new licenses further strengthen the company’s role in the regulated European digital asset value chain. This achievement also highlights Crypto Finance’s commitment to providing seamless institutional-grade services within the regulatory framework and solidifies its position in advancing the digital asset ecosystem.

Stijn Vander Straeten, the CEO of Crypto Finance Group, states: “We are excited that Crypto Finance (Deutschland) GmbH is now licensed by BaFin, the highest benchmark in regulatory oversight, as a crypto custody provider in Germany. It distinguishes our offering as one of the few to meet these exceptionally high standards. This demonstrates our commitment to transparency and security but also positions us as a trusted entity in the market, contributing to the development of a reliable ecosystem for crypto assets”.

Eric Viohl, Managing Director Crypto Finance (Deutschland) GmbH, comments: “Crypto Finance offers a comprehensive approach as a one-stop-shop solution for digital assets. Our commitment to covering the entire value chain sets us apart and we are now proud to be able to achieve significant milestones in Germany, where we offer highly regulated services. Our offering goes beyond trading to include settlement, custody, and post-trade services, creating a seamless experience for institutional investors seeking access to the dynamic world of digital assets”.

Moneyhub has been named as a supplier of Crown Commercial Service’s (CCS) Open Banking Dynamic Purchasing System (DPS) framework for its Open Banking and Payment services. 

Crown Commercial Service supports the public sector to achieve maximum commercial value when procuring common goods and services. In 2021/22, CCS helped the public sector to achieve commercial benefits equal to £2.8 billion - supporting world-class public services that offer the best value for taxpayers.

Moneyhub is the leading data and payments platform built on Open Banking and Open Finance principles. Its solutions already help businesses in various sectors increase efficiency and offer consumers efficient, secure alternatives to card and cash payments. 

Through its work with clients such as Nationwide, Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Life, Legal & General, amongst hundreds of others, Moneyhub has proven the benefits of Open Banking and account-to-account payment solutions. Government organizations' ability to purchase Moneyhub services through the DPS will help more public sector services increase efficiency and experience the benefits that Open Banking delivers. 

Vaughan Jenkins, Managing Director of Partnerships at Moneyhub, comments: “At Moneyhub we're on a mission to enhance the lifetime financial wellness of people, their communities, and their businesses, and the public sector has a significant opportunity to benefit from and lead the way in the mass adoption of Open Banking solutions. The continued adoption of Open Banking technology will result in better outcomes for taxpayers and the country.”

Cascading AI, a cutting-edge fintech startup founded by alumni of Stanford University and Y Combinator, is thrilled to announce the successful completion of its $3.9 million pre-seed funding round to unlock $1 trillion in value of advanced AI for the global banking industry 

Casca, the flagship product of Cascading AI, is revolutionizing the lending landscape as the first AI-native Loan Origination System.

"The real game changer is our AI Loan Assistant, Sarah," says Lukas Haffer, CEO of Cascading AI. "Imagine a small business owner applying for a loan on a Friday evening and waiting 72 hours for a response from a loan officer. With Casca, they receive an email response within minutes from Sarah - who leads them through the entire application process. Sarah is infinitely patient and infinitely kind; every loan applicant receives the care and attention they deserve."

Casca is already showing results by achieving nearly 3x higher conversion rates and reducing manual effort in the back office by 90% compared to traditional methods.

"We've just seen tremendous success with Casca, even in the first months," said Ryan Hildebrand, Chief Innovation Officer at Bankwell Bank, Casca's first customer. "Casca helps bring leads that are five or six times the quality of what was coming in through organic marketing."

The pre-seed funding round was led by Peterson Ventures, a renowned investor in the vertical SaaS sector known for identifying disruptive startups. Additional participation came from Y Combinator, The Sarah Smith Fund, and Clocktower Technology Ventures, who share Cascading AI's vision for the future of banking.

The fresh capital infusion will enable Cascading AI to:

1. Expand its team of world-class AI and machine learning engineers
2. Accelerate the development of the Casca product
3. Enhance its human-in-the-loop, responsible AI capabilities
4. Onboard a select group of new banks

"Our mission for the last four months was to build a system that actually brings AI into reality, is useful and fully compliant for one bank and solves problems for them," Haffer said. Now the company is focused on scaling up the Bankwell installation and onboarding two more banks.

Data Zoo, a leading global identity provider, has appointed former  London Stock Exchange Group executive Charlie Minutella as its new Chief Executive Officer. 

Minutella brings nearly two decades of experience leading risk, identity, and compliance teams,  notably spearheading the Refinitiv risk division at the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).  

The appointment follows three years of impressive growth for the award-winning “know your customer” solution, which has successfully expanded its customer base across various geographies,  complexities, and use cases. 

Minutella will lead Data Zoo’s global operations from its New York office, guiding the company to further capitalize on its strengths and broaden its identity and fraud prevention solutions to address increasingly complex customer needs. 

Data Zoo founder Tony Fitzgibbon has served as Chief Executive Officer since the company's inception over a decade ago. Fitzgibbon will transition to the role of Chairman and Chief Strategy  Officer, where he will continue to play a significant role in shaping the company’s innovations,  products, and partnerships.  

During his tenure, the bootstrapped company grew to over 80 employees worldwide, launched operations in the US, and successfully entered the heavily regulated European market – going head to head with established global identity providers to become the trusted provider for major customers, including an Australian “Big Four” bank, a global social media brand, and three of the top global payment providers. 

Reflecting on the leadership transition, Tony Fitzgibbon, founder and CEO of Data Zoo, said, “As a founder, selecting someone to take the helm is no small task. However, Charlie’s expertise and  alignment with our core values and vision made him an obvious choice.” 

“I am immensely proud of the heights Data Zoo has reached and am thrilled to continue working alongside our exceptional team, customers, and partners under Charlie’s leadership as we embark on the next phase of our global expansion journey,” Fitzgibbon added.  

Charlie Minutella expressed his enthusiasm for his new role, “I am truly excited to join Data Zoo as  CEO. My career has taught me that the key to success lies in a company’s passion and purpose,  qualities that Data Zoo embodies in its unique blend of agility, innovation, and unwavering  commitment to compliance.” 

“I am eager to capitalise on these strengths, tackling complex challenges and filling the gaps the  industry has struggled to address. We have an exciting opportunity to leverage our distinct  capabilities to solve more issues for our customers, further solidifying our position as a leader in the  industry,” Minutella said.  

Today, investment platform Lightyear announces the full launch of its web application with new stock screeners, a highly requested feature by investors on the platform. The screeners - a directory of instruments with metrics and data - are completely available to the public.

Lightyear customers can now access a fully functional web app from signing up, to investing and managing their portfolios - meaning new users no longer need to download the mobile app to get started. The web app holds all the same key features as mobile, including ways to deposit cash and the newly launched order types (limit and stop orders). Over half of Lightyear’s customers (57%) have said that access to their account and data on a bigger screen comes into play when choosing which broker to invest their money with. 

The company launched its web app in beta last year, allowing users to view and buy stocks. Since its launch, Lightyear has been adding multiple features, iterating the web platform experience based on a feedback survey from 500 customers. This includes some of the web users’ most requested features: watchlists, tools for investment analysis such as analyst ratings, financials, earnings data, and news and investors activities and statement downloads to get an overview of transactions on accounts.

Stock screeners launch alongside the full web platform today; a full directory of stocks and funds with metrics and data to enable all investors - whether a Lightyear customers or not - to make informed investment decisions. Screeners are divided into stocks and funds, allowing users to filter the entire Lightyear instrument universe based on specific criteria - from country and sector to P/E ratio, share price, daily performance, and more. Users can also find out more about selected stocks or funds, see analyst ratings, and use the available instrument analysing tools.

The directory of instruments is also completely available to the public, giving non-Lightyear users access to explore Lightyears’ instrument universe in full, using the same tools that are available to customers of the platform. These launches further the investment platforms’ mission to make investing more accessible in Europe while fostering education and financial literacy simultaneously. 

Although this is the newest version of Lightyears’ web application, Jani Kiilunen, Product Lead at Lightyear, emphasises it is just the foundation of future iterations of the web platform: “Lightyear on Web has quickly become one of the most advanced and intuitive web platforms for investing - while other neo-brokers have kept their customers waiting for years or keep very simple versions of their web apps behind paywalls. Many of our customers are advanced investors that prefer investing on the big screen, which is why this has been a high priority project for us. We want to create tools that allow users to make better investment decisions - whether you’re a Lightyear customer or not. We’re only just scratching the surface of what we’re planning for Lightyears’ web application.” 

Private equity investor, LDC, has invested in the rapidly expanding insurtech business Uinsure, to support its ambitious growth strategy.

Founded in 2007, Uinsure is a cloud-based technology platform that connects financial intermediaries and lenders with a panel of the UK’s leading insurers, enabling its customers to arrange cover through a frictionless platform that has removed the complexities from insurance.

Uinsure has achieved 27% compound annual revenue growth over the last 10 years and LDC’s investment and strategic support will increase its market share further, while developing new markets, as well as growing its network of partnerships with intermediaries, major building societies, and banks.

Uinsure has invested heavily in its technology capability in recent years, including in new API integrations, improvements to its customer experience and in the development of its new pricing engine, enabling it to offer disruptive and award-winning digital-first insurance solutions.

The Manchester-based business has doubled the size of its team dedicated to technology over the last two years, while it has won twelve prestigious industry awards during that time for its UinsureCX product, which tracks an individual’s mortgage progress and triggers communications at the most relevant moments of the mortgage cycle.

LDC is backing the existing management team led by founder and CEO Simon Taylor, who is also the former founder and CEO of Bankhall. Martin Schultheiss will continue as Group Managing Director, James Fawcett as Chief Financial Officer, and Dan Wright as Non-Executive Chair. As part of the transaction, Peter Thompson, industry expert and former CEO of BGL Insurance has joined Uinsure as a Non-Executive Director.

The investment was led by LDC North West Partner Aziz Ul-Haq and Partner and Head of North West Dale Alderson, alongside Investment Director Grant Goodwin and Investment Manager Camilla Greenwood. Dale and Aziz will join the board.

Simon Taylor, CEO of Uinsure, said: “Right from the very first meeting, LDC has been aligned with our vision to remove the complexity of insurance for our partners and their customers. When we started looking for an investor to support us through our next phase of growth, finding the right partner who shares our culture was extremely important to us. The team at LDC will be working closely to strategically support us with our long term goals, as we explore new markets and grow our network of partnerships.”

Aziz Ul-Haq, Partner at LDC in the North West, added: “Uinsure’s recent large-scale investment in its technology means it is perfectly placed to serve its target market by offering a digital-first solution with a competitive edge. It has a highly experienced and incredibly ambitious management team whose offering has disrupted the industry and revolutionised the market. We’re looking forward to working with them to help it grow further.”

LDC has a successful track record in the technology sector. Since 2012, we have invested over £650m into more than 35 fast-growing technology businesses, backing management teams to achieve their ambitions.

Uinsure was advised by GP Bullhound (corporate finance), Eversheds Sutherland (legal), and Deloitte (debt advisory), with bank facilities provided by HSBC and Santander.

LDC was advised by DLA Piper (legal), KPMG (financial due diligence and tax), and LEK (commercial due diligence).

Duco, the leading SaaS provider of AI-powered data automation, today announced it has acquired Metamaze, a fast-growing company in the unstructured data ingestion and Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) space. Metamaze uses AI and no-code techniques to accurately replace manual data extraction and classification from documents and emails for customers across multiple industries, with a strong focus on banking and insurance.

Most business data is not organised, sitting in various document formats like pdfs, emails, images… and is difficult to manage, with operations and finance teams often resorting to manual entry, for example to process insurance claims, structured loans, or orders and bills of lading. These processes have resisted automation for decades, creating cumbersome and low-value task work. By combining the power of the Metamaze and Duco platforms, customers can now easily ingest any type of data from any type of document and automate processes around it.

“Duco has taken a very extensive look at firms in this space and we are extremely pleased that, in Metamaze, we found a company that shares our vision of how software should be delivered - in the cloud, with AI doing the heavy lifting, and focused on a powerful business end-user experience, based on a no-code framework. By combining Metamaze with our proven enterprise-grade security and scale, we are rapidly delivering innovation safely to some of the world’s most demanding businesses,” said Christian Nentwich, Founder of Duco.

“Combining Duco’s and Metamaze’s capabilities and expertise fundamentally changes how firms deploy AI in their operations. Our customers will now be able to bring together all unstructured and structured data in a single platform and manage it through its full lifecycle. They can avoid point solutions and automate the biggest time wastes, such as manual data entry, manual data validation and reconciliation. This is highly transformative for areas like post-trade operations in financial services, which remains under-automated to this day. It is a massive step forward towards Duco’s vision of reducing the time spent on data related work in operations and finance teams by 90%,” adds Michael Chin, who recently joined Duco as the new CEO.

“We started Metamaze to tackle the huge and growing ‘unstructured data problem’. Most IDP platforms are limited by preset models, common document types, and fixed sets of fields. We’ve built Metamaze as an AI-powered self-learning intelligence platform that reads and interprets any document to extract information and data by itself. Embedding our tech into a complementary data automation suite, while scaling globally is our primary goal. We are very excited to join forces with Duco, who share our automation vision, and to grow Metamaze as a core part of Duco’s strategy,” said Niels Van Weereld, CEO and board member at Metamaze

Cohesity, a leader in AI-powered data security and management, and Veritas, a leader in secure multicloud data resilience, today are announcing their definitive agreement under which Cohesity intends to combine with Veritas’ data protection business, which will be carved out of Veritas, to create a new leader in data security and management. Customers will benefit from the accelerated innovations unlocked by the joint company’s scaled R&D investment, its unwavering support for customer success, and one of the industry’s most extensive partner ecosystems. 

Sanjay Poonen will lead the combined organisation as CEO and President. Greg Hughes, CEO of Veritas, will serve as a Board member and strategic advisor to Sanjay Poonen after the close of the transaction.

Protecting the world’s data and gaining insights from that data are top imperatives for IT practitioners all the way to board members. Given the rampant threat of ransomware, every organisation needs a cyber resilience strategy. Furthermore, technology and business executives now have a unique opportunity to leverage the power of generative AI for data-driven insights to unleash new levels of efficiency, innovation, and growth.  

The combined innovations of Cohesity and Veritas will address these challenges directly, offering organisations a comprehensive, multicloud data protection portfolio with a powerful, simple user experience, and a high-performance, centrally-managed hyperconverged platform. This highly complementary combination will create a new leader in data security and management with numerous product offerings to help customers address their needs for data security and data insights. The combined company will bring together 100s of exabytes of data protected, a global go-to-market footprint, high penetration in the enterprise with 96 of the Fortune 100 and 80% of the Global 500, and a strong partner ecosystem across all segments of cloud service providers, security players, VARs, system integrators, and hardware OEMs. 

The combined company will continue to invest in and advance the roadmap and strategy of all Cohesity products and services, as well as Veritas NetBackup, NetBackup appliances, and Alta data protection offerings, while working towards the delivery of an integrated solution combining the best technology across the two companies.

“We are deeply committed to our mission to protect the world’s data. This deal will combine Cohesity's speed and innovation with Veritas’ global presence and installed base. We will lead the next era of AI-powered data security and management by bringing together the best of both product portfolios - Cohesity’s scale-out architecture ideally suited for modern workloads and strong Generative AI and security capabilities and Veritas' broad workload support and significant global footprint, particularly in the Global 500 and large public sector agencies,” said Sanjay Poonen, President and CEO of Cohesity. “This combination will be a win-win for our collective 10,000 customers and 3,000 partners, and I can’t wait to work with the Veritas team to bring our vision to life.”

Greg Hughes, CEO of Veritas, stated, “Veritas and Cohesity share a common vision of empowering businesses to protect their critical data assets in the face of evolving cyber threats and complex hybrid cloud environments. Bringing Veritas’ differentiated cloud-native architecture to Cohesity’s strong innovation engine will ideally position us to offer our customers transformative solutions against cyber attacks while delivering the flexibility and scalability required to thrive in the multicloud era.” 

“Both companies have high Net Promoter Scores and share a steadfast, long-term commitment to customers. Existing products will continue to be supported for many years while leveraging joint best-of-breed technologies to provide the most innovative roadmap for a future that delights customers,” Poonen continued. “We are deeply committed to both Cohesity and Veritas customers, partners, and employees as we accelerate customer-driven innovation as one company.”

“I believe customers could benefit from the combination of Cohesity’s simple and secure, high-performance platform and AI-enabled data insights together with Veritas' global footprint and cloud-native capabilities,” said Patrick Moorhead, Founder, CEO, and Chief Analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. “The combined company will benefit from scaled R&D efforts and industry-leading capabilities to help make customers more secure and offer them advanced capabilities in data management and insights.” 

Together, the companies will target a total addressable market (TAM) of over $30 billion. This figure includes the data replication and protection software market, estimated to be $12.2 billion in 2024 by IDC. The expanded go-to-market breadth, geographic footprint, and R&D resources will allow the combined company to accelerate new customer adoption and help drive the deployment of innovative solutions within the fast-growing data security and management segment. 

The combination will provide compelling benefits for customers, with increased resources to invest in technology innovation while simultaneously adding scale to support customers worldwide. On a pro forma basis for the fiscal year ending July 2023, the combined entity had revenues of over $1.6 billion, annual recurring revenue (ARR) of $1.3 billion, and a 27 percent adjusted cash EBITDA margin. Further, the combination will augment long-term growth with incremental product and geographic expansion opportunities, ensuring customers can access best-in-class tools and services to safeguard their data.