Today, Coda Payments (“Coda”), the leading provider of cross-border payments and distribution solutions to digital content publishers, announced that it has partnered with award-winning RegTech provider Know Your Customer to simplify and accelerate its corporate onboarding processes across the Asia-Pacific region.

By integrating Know Your Customer’s corporate onboarding solution with its front-end and back-end operations, Coda is streamlining its due diligence operations on business prospects and clients, leveraging automation to achieve greater efficiency and an improved customer experience. Coda uses Know Your Customer’s single API to connect to company registries across 127 countries globally in real-time, retrieve the necessary official documents automatically, extract vital corporate information, unravel complex company charts, and identify ultimate beneficial owners (UBOs) through documentary evidence as required by regulations. 

Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Singapore, Coda is one of the leading providers of secure, cross-border monetisation solutions for digital products and services. The company helps digital content publishers unlock new revenue for their games, apps, and services in more than 60 territories worldwide. In 2022, Coda was named the 45th fastest-growing company in the Asia-Pacific region by the Financial Times, and has been named a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum.

Know Your Customer is an award-winning regulatory technology (RegTech) company specialised in highly configurable corporate onboarding and Know Your Business (KYB) solutions for a variety of regulated sectors. Its live registry connections now cover all 50 states in the United States. In November 2022, Know Your Customer won the Silver ASEAN Award at the Singapore Fintech Festival Global Fintech Awards by the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS).

Keira Kwek, Global Compliance Lead at Coda, commented:

“Our new onboarding process, powered by Know Your Customer, is instrumental in enabling the fast and secure expansion of our customer base across multiple Asia-Pacific markets and globally. From the start, the Know Your Customer team demonstrated how their solution was able to provide both the real-time registry connections required by the compliance team, as well as the API capabilities sought by our engineering team to facilitate fast integration with our internal systems.”

Claus Christensen, CEO & Co-Founder of Know Your Customer, added:

“We are delighted to be working with Coda to enable their vision for seamless, straight-through corporate onboarding across the Asia-Pacific region. It is inspiring to see their commitment to both better customer experience and no-compromise compliance, a dual objective which can only be achieved through RegTech innovation. We look forward to supporting them on this journey and enabling their continued and ambitious commercial growth.”

BankiFi, a leading provider of embedded banking solutions, has released a new whitepaper in partnership with RedCompass Labs, a world leader in good and bad payments technology. Titled “SME Banking Channels: converting a money pit into a business opportunity,” the report explains the challenges banks face when offering digital solutions and how banks can most effectively and lucratively deliver cutting-edge technology.

The whitepaper found that, although most SMBs initially look to their financial institutions for payments and accounting services, most banks are unable or unwilling to provide solutions that are on par with third-party services. It further notes that a rise in open banking by about 30% shows that small businesses are increasingly turning towards third-party service providers.

It also reveals that, between technology costs and staffing costs, banks regularly struggle with the cost of ownership for their in-house digital channels. The report concludes by noting that banks are able to eliminate these costs by partnering with external service providers to offer top-of-the-line technology at the best price for the bank.

The whitepaper takes full inventory of the small business market in the United States, stating that small businesses make up 90% of all businesses in the country and employ roughly half of all Americans. The study also notes that small businesses in the U.S. spend about $225 billion annually on payments and accounting services.

“We’re seeing a real crisis for both banks and small businesses,” said Keith Riddle, CEO of BankiFi Americas. “There is plenty of demand for payments and accounting services among small businesses, but banks are disincentivized to offer those solutions given the current state of the market. Through external partners like BankiFi, banks can have the best of both worlds, offering the best technology with minimal cost to the bank itself.”

Kjeld Herreman, Head of Strategy Advisory at RedCompass Labs explained that “In our discussions with financial institutions, it became apparent that it was quite challenging for them to quantify the costs and the benefits associated with their SME banking channels. We’ve developed a model for banks to better understand these drivers in order to refine their channel strategies for this important client segment.”

Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC), the leading global financial centre in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia (MEASA) region, has chosen anti-financial crime compliance specialist Napier to upgrade the screening services they employ with Napier Client Screening.

With the next-generation solution, the DIFC Authority will benefit from continuous large-scale client screening and re-screening capabilities to ensure it fulfils regulatory compliance requirements. The partnership will help DIFC safeguard its global reputation and vigilant adherence to international anti-money laundering and combating the financing of terrorism (CFT) standards.

As the Middle East’s largest financial ecosystem with more than 4,000 active registered companies, DIFC is also home to an independent and internationally recognised financial regulator. DIFC is home to 17 of the world’s top 20 banks, 25 of the world’s top 30 global systemically important banks, five of the top 10 insurance companies, five of the top 10 asset managers and many leading global law and consulting firms.

Jacques Visser, Chief Legal Officer at DIFC, said: “Dubai bridges the East and West, and DIFC facilitates significant trading and investment for the region. We are committed to maintaining our status as a great place to do business and, as such, we endeavour to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to adopting the very latest technology to set the standards for financial compliance. We are delighted to be incorporating Napier’s Client Screening solution into our regulatory framework.”

The Napier Client Screening system will help DIFC to automatically screen and re-screen clients at relevant intervals against sanctions, blacklists, PEP lists, and other watchlists.

Greg Watson, CEO at Napier, commented: “DIFC is a central pillar of the financial and regulatory landscape in the Middle East. We’re proud to be supplying them with our advanced, robust screening capabilities and playing our part to help keep the district and the businesses based there safeguarded from financial crime risks.”

Dima Godfrey, Regional Sales Director at Napier, said: “As one of the many organisations that have selected the DIFC district for a UAE base, we look forward to building on the great relationship Napier has with the Centre.”

In addition to DIFC, Napier provides anti-financial crime solutions to many organisations across the MEASA region, including central banks, monetary agencies and crypto exchanges. It opened its Dubai office at the Centre in 2021.

Today, leading payment orchestration provider BR-DGE announces that it has partnered with payments firm Total Processing to drive better payment experiences for merchants and customers.

Through a single point of integration, BR-DGE’s merchants can access a world of payment providers, fraud capabilities and alternative payment methods. Merchants will now be able to complement these tools with Total Processing’s cutting-edge solutions, offering them access to its network of global acquirers, full-featured dashboard and dynamic risk-based fraud tools. This offers merchants the ability to grow internationally and respond to ever-evolving customer needs.

Total Processing’s platform provides merchants with a wide range of capabilities, such as transaction management, recurring payments and alternative payment method integrations. Its recurring payment solutions help merchants retain customers and boost revenue through smart features, such as pay by links, account updater and flexible scheduling.

By tapping into Total Processing’s advanced gateway, merchants will now be able to provide a more flexible, secure and streamlined payments process for consumers, enabling them to compete more effectively in the global marketplace.

The partnership between the award-winning businesses comes at a time when both BR-DGE and Total Processing are experiencing periods of significant growth. With synergies in their ambitions, both firms seek to leverage the collaboration to drive further merchant growth.

Tom Voaden, Head of Partnerships at BR-DGE, said: “We’re excited to be working with Total Processing to offer merchants the very latest technology to deliver the best payment experiences. Total Processing’s expertise in connectivity and security aligns closely with our position as an independent payment orchestration platform as a partner for growth for merchants.

Due to the flexibility that the BR-DGE platform provides, we expect merchants to be able to swiftly adopt Total Processing’s solutions and implement them to help improve customer experiences, ultimately leading to increased loyalty and growth.”

Matthew Bloxham, Partnership Manager at Total Processing, said: At Total Processing, our culture is built around being the most customer-focused payments company. Creating strong partnerships so that we can truly offer our merchants the best solution for their business is fundamental to achieving this.

We’re really excited about working alongside BR-DGE who share the same values, and together, will strive towards helping our merchants reach their goals through a seamless and revenue-boosting payment solution.”

Pagos, a payments intelligence startup founded by Braintree and PayPal vets, has raised $34 million in a Series A round led by Arbor Ventures.

Point 72 Ventures, Infinity Ventures and Underscore VC joined the round, the proceeds of which will be used to expand the Pagos engineering team and further develop the platform’s enterprise product suite.

The Pagos platform is used by online brands such as Adobe, Eventbrite, GoFundMe, and Warner Bros Discover to turn disparate, hard-to-access digital payments data into clear, actionable business insights.

The firm's tools can be used on top of businesses’ existing payments processing infrastructure. For example, Peacock provides a dashboard enabling businesses to see, analyse, and act on payments data across vendors, channels, and markets.

Klas Bäck, CEO, Pagos, says: "Our platform helps companies understand and act on the data that already exists within their payments environment, allowing them to better support changing consumer behaviour and demands, reduce their operating costs, increase their revenue, and mitigate unnecessary customer friction—all without having to change their current payments infrastructure."

Growth across a myriad of sectors continues to be adversely affected by a broader downturn in the global economy but the field of embedded finance continues to go from strength-to-strength, as highlighted by Plug-and-Play Finance company, Weavr.  

In early 2022, London-headquartered technology-provider, Weavr, announced the close of a $40 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global. At the time, the raise showcased the growing interest of venture-capital businesses in embedded-finance technologies. Now, just over a year on, Weavr has underlined why the buzz around embedded finance continues to be so strong by announcing a year of impressive business and customer-growth numbers.

Despite considerable uncertainty in the broader economy, Weavr’s platform has gone from strength to strength in the past 12 months. The total number of users on the company’s platform has more than tripled, with close to 1,500 corporates now signed up to the service. Indeed, monthly on-boarding of corporate customers is now three times greater than a year earlier. In turn, the company has also experienced a corresponding surge in transactions through its platform, experiencing growth of over 340% in just one year.

Weavr supplies cutting-edge solutions in the form of its easy-to-deploy, cost-effective Financial Plug-ins, which aim to disrupt the current Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) model that is increasingly coming under scrutiny by regulators. Its first plug-ins addressing Supplier Finance, Employee Finance and Worker Finance provide B2B SaaS companies in sectors such as accounting, employee benefits, and freelancer marketplaces with all they need to deploy financial services, while shouldering the significant burden of compliance, regulation, and data security.  

The company’s impressive performance in 2022 underlines the growing demand for embedded-finance solutions, particularly among B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies that wish to incorporate financial services into non-financial environments. These SaaS businesses increasingly see embedded finance as a way of increasing revenues from their existing customers and ultimately retaining more of them in these challenging times.  Weavr’s success proves that the appeal extends across businesses of all sizes, with the company onboarding notable clients like Wectory, AllGravy, and Corplife in this period. 

Speaking on the company’s performance in the past year, Alex Mifsud, co-founder and CEO of Weavr commented: “As the past year has shown, the economic picture can change very quickly, sometimes shifting from month to month. During such times, businesses need inventive ways to generate greater resilience in their operations, and embedded finance offers one of the most effective and exciting ways to do so. 

“That’s why we’ve seen such strong performance for Weavr in the past year and also why we’ve signed so many exciting partnerships with leading, innovative businesses. By focusing on the needs of our customers, we’ve been able to engender double-digit monthly growth on our customer base in 2022 and have used this momentum to really shape the concept of Plug-and-Play Finance within the wider market.”

Weavr’s success in the past year has not gone unnoticed. In the last 12 months the company has received the award of ‘Leading Emerging Payments Association’ at the Pay360 Awards and was named a ‘Platinum Winner’ at the Fintech and Payment Awards. In addition, the company has been featured in numerous industry lists, and named in the ‘Startups 100 2023 Index.

Clausematch, a technology company developing solutions for regulatory compliance, is pleased to announce it has signed an agreement with The Connector, a technology commercial firm with an unconventional approach to assisting companies looking to scale-up their client base, as well as financial services companies looking for a trustworthy third-party solution.

According to a recent survey of IT and security professionals, organizations worldwide are using about 110 SaaS applications in their business. However, most companies do not have core competency in buying such software, and often, purchase SaaS products that are overpriced, difficult to use, or fail to solve the root problem. 

The Connector, led by RegTech influencer Koen Vanderhoydonk, has a proven track record of strong relationships and an extensive international network in the financial services industry. Vanderhoydonk also has significant reach in the Benelux Union, which will prove advantageous to Clausematch. With Clausematch and The Connector working together, companies looking for a reputable third-party solution to help manage their compliance obligations will benefit from a win-win combination of technological expertise and top-tier solutions and practices.

“We’re thrilled to be working with The Connector as they have tons of shared knowledge and experience in FinTech, Banking and Investment Management, and a deep network across the BENELUX and beyond to introduce Clausematch where they see a solutions gap. With the team’s prior knowledge of Clausematch and their championing of the platform, this was a partnership waiting to happen,” said Claudia Coutinho-De Somma, EMEA Account Executive at Clausematch.

The Connector employs three criteria when choosing third-party solutions, like Clausematch, to bring to its connections: a proven solution, proven benefits to customers, and proven steadiness and promise of a future in the industry. According to Koen Vanderhoydonk, CEO of The Connector, Clausematch exemplifies all three criteria.

“Currently, the RegTech market is fragmented, with different maturity levels attempting to serve multiple regulatory needs across multiple jurisdictions. The partnership between companies like Clausematch and The Connector helps bring the maturity of the RegTech industry to the next level. It also further grows the awareness and adoption of RegTech solutions in the financial services industry, especially by companies looking to scale up operations,” said Vanderhoydonk.

Clausematch has a proven track record as a RegTech global leader. It was selected as a part of several incubators and programmes, including FinTech Innovation Lab London and New Work, Lloyd’s Lab, LawTechUK Sandbox Pilot, and the Barclays Accelerator Program, to name a few. Being involved in these programs allowed the Clausematch team to share its solution with industry experts, hearing their feedback and understanding how best to adapt the platform to targeted companies’ needs. The partnership with The Connector ties into Clausematch’s mission to bring a SaaS compliance product to highly-regulated companies.

Speaking about this, Vineet Agrawal, Co-founder, Jiraaf, said, “Investments are key to financial wealth creation, and in the modern era, alternative investment options have emerged as great opportunities for those seeking predictable & high returns. While equity markets have seen enormous participation from the public, fixed income remains underpenetrated. Our mission at Jiraaf is to make fixed-income opportunities mainstream by innovating and making them more accessible. We are thankful to our partners like Caratlane, Homecredit, Everest Fleet and Rupeek among others for sharing our journey. We have created a strong team across functions including technology, investments, and credit risk to present a wide range of curated investment opportunities.”

“In today's market environment, retail investors have a growing appetite for alternative fixed-income products, and we believe there is a gap in the market for products vetted by professionals. Jiraaf has effectively democratised the debt market and has provided access to a wide array of products for wealth creation beyond the traditional asset classes. This milestone achievement aligns with what Saurav and Vineet were set to achieve. We are proud to be part of this journey of Jiraaf in revolutionizing wealth creation.” -  Barath Shankar Subramanian, Partner at Accel

Adding further, Saurav Ghosh, Co-founder, Jiraaf said, “We are extremely happy to have crossed the INR 1000 crore investment mark. The trust of our users remains our biggest asset. It gives us great confidence that 93% of our customers are return investors. Our endeavour in the next 12 months is to grow our user base and increase our monthly run rate of investments from 100 cr to 300 cr. Bringing new opportunities and building a robust digital platform will be our key focus areas in the next 1-2 quarters. We are grateful to our investors Accel partners, Aspire family office, Mankekar family office and others who have supported us through our journey.

Freedom Finance, one of the UK’s leading digital lending marketplaces, is renewing its partnership with independent, award-winning think tank the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) until 2025. 

The extended relationship will see Freedom Finance support, among other issues, the CSJ’s work investigating the relationship between access to credit, illegal lending and debt advice. Freedom  Finance’s Chairperson, Brian Brodie, already sits on the Advisory Board for the think tank’s Debt Unit.  

Last year, the CSJ and Freedom Finance partnered to publish the first detailed investigation into the scourge of illegal money lending in a decade. The Swimming with Sharks* report revealed that as many as 1.08 million people in England could be indebted to a ‘loan shark’, and it highlighted the devastating impacts of ‘hidden debt’ as well as those who feel locked out of the mainstream credit market. 

This eye-opening report has been followed by several investigations around the shadowy fringes of the consumer credit market, poverty credit premiums and research into instituting financial education into the national curriculum. 

Founded in 2004 by former Conservative Party Leader, Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the CSJ focuses on the root causes of poverty with the aim of promoting the interests and opportunities of those from the poorest and most disadvantaged backgrounds in Britain. Their work covers areas such as debt,  education provision, housing welfare, and employment.  

Brian Brodie, Chairperson of Freedom Finance, commented: “We are delighted to be renewing our  partnership with the Centre for Social Justice and will endeavour to continue increasing the visibility of  those who fall victim to the inaccessibility of credit.”  

Emma Steeley, CEO of Freedom Finance, added: “We value the CSJ’s work and look forward to  collaborating with them further to discover ways to better use technology and data to help the financial  services industry ease the pressure on household budgets in a safe and affordable way.” 

Matthew Greenwood, Head of Debt at The CSJ, said: “As Britain continues to endure high inflation,  we know it is those at the very bottom who are at the sharpest end of the cost of living crisis. We are excited to drive forward our mission to expand financial inclusion and provide a pathway out of problem debt. Support from organisations like Freedom Finance is essential to allow us to keep  working with industry and charities to support the UK’s poorest and most disadvantaged households.”