LoopingOne, the pioneering fintech startup, is thrilled to announce that it has secured an impressive €2 million during a recent seed funding round. With the investment the company will accelerate the development of its groundbreaking agnostic KYC/B and multi-party payments product for marketplaces and online platforms. 

As the online volume for marketplaces is projected to reach an astonishing $9Tn per annum in the next few years, LoopingOne is expected to capture a significant share of this rapidly growing sector. The company's platform is specifically designed to provide streamlined onboarding (KYC and KYB) and payment solutions for B2B, B2C and C2C marketplaces. 

LoopingOne has attracted significant attention within the fintech industry. Investors that contributed in the seed round include former C-level employees at Adyen, Worldline, and GlobalCollect employees as well as founders of established global marketplaces. Ebury, which invested in the previous seed round, was also part of this round, demonstrating its belief in the immense potential and value that LoopingOne brings to the market. 

Co-founder and CEO Bob Voermans expressed his excitement, stating, "LoopingOne helps Marketplaces be independent from payment partners in their day-to-day operation by allowing them to choose various KYC/B and payment partners that suit their individual needs at any given time." 

A testament to LoopingOne's commitment to innovation and excellence is its recent nomination for the CIO Magazine Innovations Award in the Most Innovative Start-up/Scale-up/Challenger category. The award recognizes and promotes innovative projects among suppliers and customers in the field of technology. “Our teams are really excited to be re-imagining a platform from the ground up, based on Azure, API-first and AI architectures with a beautiful user-experience,” says CTO Chris Martlew.

Financial IT, a leading fintech publication, is excited to announce the launch of its highly anticipated Fintech Pathfinder. This comprehensive report showcases the most promising fintech startups that are revolutionizing the financial services landscape. Alongside the report, Financial IT will also be unveiling a cutting-edge platform that provides detailed information on each startup listed.

Fintech Pathfinder aims to identify and showcase the most innovative fintech startups globally. To ensure the highest quality and relevance, a rigorous selection process was employed using key criteria to evaluate each company. The following selection criteria were applied:

• No company is older than 10 years old: Financial IT recognizes the importance of highlighting the latest and most innovative players in the industry. By focusing on younger startups, the report captures the dynamic nature of fintech innovation.
• Privately held by VC/angel investors: The report emphasizes startups that are privately funded, showcasing their potential for growth and independence.
• Quantifiable funding rounds from publicly available information: Financial IT leverages publicly available information to provide comprehensive insights into the financial backing of each startup.

Fintech Pathfinder will serve as an invaluable resource for investors, financial institutions, and industry professionals seeking to identify and engage with the most promising fintech startups. The report will provide detailed profiles of each selected startup, including key information such as their products and services, funding rounds and investors.

In addition to Fintech Pathfinder report, Financial IT is also launching fintech startup listings platform. This platform will provide in-depth information on each startup, enabling users to explore their offerings, track their progress, and connect with potential partners or investors. It will serve as a one-stop destination for anyone interested in staying at the forefront of fintech innovation.

"We are thrilled to launch Fintech Pathfinder ranking," said Andrew Hutchings, Editor in Chief at Financial IT. "The fintech industry is constantly evolving, and it is essential to recognize and support the emerging players that are driving innovation and disruption. Fintech Pathfinder and our new platform will serve as a catalyst for collaboration and growth within the industry."

Fintech Pathfinder is available for download on Financial IT website.

Global AML specialist Napier has announced the appointment of its chief data scientist, Dr Janet Bastiman, to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA)’s newly created Synthetic Data Expert Group, a sub-group of the Innovation Advisory Group (IAG). The IAG, created in March 2023, aims to deepen Innovation’s engagement with industry and to inform the FCA’s forward-looking work programme, including alternate approaches to future TechSprints. 

The new group has been formed to examine the role synthetic data has to play in protecting consumers and encouraging beneficial innovation in financial services through the use of its enhanced capabilities. The group assembles diverse and experienced professionals representing technology and data vendors, regulated firms, consultancies, and public sector organisations. It aims to identify relevant use cases and clarify key issues in the theory and practice of synthetic data in the UK financial market, and create an established framework for collaboration across industry, regulators, academia, and the wider civil society on issues related to synthetic data. 

The appointment comes hot on the heels of Bastiman’s appointment to chair of the Royal Statistical Society’s Data Science and AI Section.  

“It’s a great honour to be appointed by the FCA to the Synthetic Data Expert Group and I’m looking forward to bringing my extensive experience and expertise in data and ethics to help formulate best practices for the UK financial sector” she says. “It’s another amazing tool with huge potential in the armoury of financial crime fighters. Closer working relationships with regulators and law enforcement agencies can only strengthen our response to global money laundering.” 

Bastiman has spent more than 20 years in the industry, pushing the boundaries of data science in telecommunications, marketing, and the financial services sector, where she has helped both start-ups and established businesses implement and improve their AI offering. She regularly speaks at conferences on topics in AI including explainability, testing, efficiency, and ethics.   

Meanwhile, a unique life insurer that operates solely in cryptocurrency, has announced that it has raised around $19m across two seed funding rounds.

This financing puts Meanwhile in an advantageous position, making it the first and only life insurer to operate exclusively in cryptocurrency.

The funding rounds have seen significant participation from high-profile investors. The first round was co-led by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Lachy Groom, the former head of Stripe issuing. The second round saw Gradient Ventures, a Google venture, taking the lead. This substantial financial backing has allowed Meanwhile to secure licensing and regulation from the Bermuda Monetary Authority, a leading global insurance regulator. With this financial boost, Meanwhile is set to enhance its team, launch its Bitcoin-denominated whole life insurance product, and move the company forward.

Meanwhile, breaking new ground in the insurance industry, offers life insurance services wholly denominated in Bitcoin. Their ambition is to reach more than a billion people globally by combining Bitcoin with artificial intelligence and creating an innovative full-stack life insurance company. Their services are designed to resonate particularly with long-term Bitcoin holders.

Meanwhile CEO Zac Townsend, who has spent over a decade at the intersection of tech, finance, and public policy, said, “As one of the few innovations in money in the last century, Bitcoin is on track to become a global store of value and functional currency. To start, it makes perfect sense for long-term holders of BTC to invest in life insurance denominated in that asset and to enable a percentage of their BTC holdings to become active.”

The key aim for Meanwhile is to offer a frictionless life insurance product using artificial intelligence, operating completely in digital assets, thereby modernising one of the world’s oldest financial products. The team, led by Max Gasner, CTO and co-founder, leverages AI to reduce manual labour, promote transparency, and bring efficiency to the insurance system.

Anna Patterson, Managing Partner at Gradient Ventures, commented, “Meanwhile is sitting at the confluence of the AI and digital assets transformation. We’re excited to support Zac and Max on their mission.” Likewise, Jon Soberg, Managing Partner of MS&AD Ventures, expressed his enthusiasm about the unique financial products that Meanwhile will bring to the market.

Payrails has raised $14.4 million in a seed extension round led by EQT Ventures to scale its financial operations platform.

Orkhan Abdullayev, CEO, Payrails, says: "As payment processing gets more complex once companies scale, the need to keep advancing the payment stack and leverage multiple processors to improve performance becomes the industry standard.

"Leading companies understand the strategic importance of optimising payments and are searching for flexible solutions that can adapt to their needs."

Keeta, a new global payments platform offering instant and secure cross-border monetary transactions, today announced its official launch with $17 million in funding from investors, including Eric Schmidt.

Powered by a highly scalable proprietary ledger technology, capable of processing more than 50 million transactions per second, and a network of interconnected real-time payment rails, Keeta’s platform dramatically reduces the time and fees typically associated with international money transfers. Whereas current cross-border payments can cost upwards of five per cent of the amount transferred and take nearly a week to process, Keeta empowers customers to send these payments instantly at a fraction of the price.

“We want to make international payments as easy as Venmo,” said Ty Schenk, CEO and Founder of Keeta. “I’m really proud of the technology our team has built. Keeta connects places like São Paolo and New York with more convenient, safe, and secure payments while adhering to the highest regulatory standards.”

“Keeta’s technology is orders of magnitude more scalable and efficient than existing solutions,” said Eric Schmidt, investor and former CEO of Google. “I’m thrilled to support Ty and his team in their mission to modernize global payments.”

By accessing the Keeta Platform via easy-to-use APIs or custom integrations, fintech companies and financial institutions can improve customer experiences by reducing the costs and delays associated with funding customer accounts and delivering payments. In addition to its business tools, Keeta is launching a consumer-facing mobile app, allowing instant transfers between friends and family worldwide.

BlueSnap, a global payment orchestration platform whose embedded payments solution is used by many leading SaaS platforms, today announced the results of its 2023 Embedded Payments Survey.

For this report, BlueSnap collaborated with Gartner Peer Insights to survey 300 B2B executives globally to understand the benefits and challenges of embedded payments for software platforms.  A key takeaway from the findings: software leaders found numerous benefits beyond additional revenue from embedded payments.

Embedded payments have seen a sharp increase in adoption recently with the overall rise in embedded finance innovations across the fintech industry. Software platforms looking to improve customer experience, control the payment process and generate new revenue are embedding payments into their software platforms and seeing results.  

The data shows that software platforms are experiencing numerous benefits from embedding payments into their software in addition to new revenue.  Forty-eight per cent of respondents said embedded payments gave them an advantage over their competition, with 35% of software leaders seeing an increase in client tenure, 34% an increase in new client acquisition and 28% an increase in company valuation.

But software leaders are not choosing to implement embedded payment solutions on their own. Survey data shows that 89% of software leaders chose to work with a payments partner to implement payments rather than become a registered payment facilitator or payment service provider (PSP).  Key barriers reported by software leaders to embedding payments into their platform on their own includes the technical resources needed (58%), time to become a PSP (53%) and staffing for associated roles such as compliance and underwriting/risk (50%).  Of those software leaders who chose to go it alone, 83% of respondents said it took a year or more to become a registered payment facilitator or payment service provider (PSP).

“Our recent data show there are clear, profitable benefits for those software companies taking advantage of embedded payments,” says Ralph Dangelmaier, CEO of BlueSnap.  “An experienced payments partner can provide guidance and support on everything from onboarding and risk to reporting and customer support.  This can help ensure your embedded payments solution is quick to market and provides an ROI.”

To review the full report, please visit https://bit.ly/3N9jTDs