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.”

Mobey Forum, the global industry association empowering banks to shape the future of digital financial services, has launched a Digital Wallet Expert Group to help financial institutions explore emerging wallet use-cases and assess their strategic options for commercial participation as the ecosystem evolves beyond payment-oriented use cases.

The Digital Wallet Expert Group brings together expert practitioners from Mobey Forum member organisations to analyse how banks can establish optimal strategic positions in the diversifying market for digital wallet applications. By assessing consumer trends, market and technological developments, and key points of influence and control within the ecosystem, the Expert Group will help banks expand their role in the digital economy to offer trust-based services that move beyond payments.  

The launch of the new group marks the latest initiative by Mobey Forum to equip financial institutions with the requisite knowledge of how best to leverage digital technologies as they evolve their portfolio of products and services.

In 2012 and 2013, Mobey Forum’s Mobile Wallet Working Group published a series of milestone whitepapers identifying competitive ‘control points’ in the mobile wallet ecosystem, dominance over which would commercially entrench specific stakeholder groups, including banks, in the creation and delivery of the technology and its supporting infrastructure to end users. A decade on, the digital wallet is not only pervasive but is again evolving to serve a variety of new use cases, including as a vehicle for digital identity. 

“As more consumers rely on digital wallets to store everything from plane tickets to identity credentials, it’s clear that banks have an important role to play in the growth and evolution of the ecosystem,” comments Elina Mattila, Executive Director, Mobey Forum. “Our Expert Group aims to help banks build on their strong positions of trust to establish prominent roles in the development of the infrastructure that supports digital assets, identification and trust services, open banking, and embedded finance.”

The work of the Digital Wallet Expert Group will also build on a recent report from Mobey Forum’s Digital Identity Expert Group which evaluated how financial institutions can stake out their role in the burgeoning digital identity ecosystem.

Kristian Sorensen from Norfico, Marina Repo from Nordea, and Cedric Sieber from PostFinance will chair the new group. Marina Repo comments: “Market developments have brought digital wallets back to the very centre of all financial players’ strategies. The new Expert Group will help all banks, together with those stakeholders engaged with them, to determine the best course forward, with the collaborative goal of ensuring that new digital wallet offerings evolve to deliver maximum value for the customers they collectively serve.”

Mobey Forum welcomes engagement from banks and related stakeholders interested in advancing the evolution of the digital wallet ecosystem through commercially neutral collaboration.

UK-based FinTech Stubben Edge Group (the Company) and National Friendly (the trading name of Mutual, National Deposit Friendly Society Ltd) have announced a new partnership to harness the Company’s technology and distribution expertise to National Friendly’s people-focused bespoke insurance products.

This is the first time the Mutual has worked with a FinTech to distribute its products to affinity groups. The Company’s technology solution provides seamless distribution via a single platform to multiple affinity groups and white-labelled clients, such as those recently announced as affinity partners, the British Pest Control Association, Association of Specialist Fire Protection, and the Institute of the Motor Industry, with new partners due to be onboarded in the next few weeks.

The first product to go live on the platform is Over 50s Guaranteed Life Assurance. This product pays a guaranteed lump sum upon the death of the policyholder, provided they have held the policy for the qualifying period. Acceptance is guaranteed without any medical questions, subject to a two-year qualifying period. If the policy holder dies within that qualifying period (not following an accident), the premiums they have paid to date will be repaid.

However, if the customer answers two questions when taking out the policy, they can be eligible for a lower premium, an increased sum assured and a shorter qualifying period of only six months – the shortest qualification period available in the market today. Built into the policy is the addition of access to National Friendly’s virtual GP service “Friendly GP”, which enables the policyholder to access a GP 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, via telephone, video consultations, and an expedited referral system should further treatment options be investigated.

Oliver Jones, Sales & Distribution Director at National Friendly: “In an ever-changing world it is important that we as a mutual society remain agile and adapt and utilise new technologies to bring protection to customers in a way that’s informative, convenient and time effective. By partnering with Stubben Edge we are able to do just that. Creating a tailored online customer journey bespoke to the affinity group, the collaboration will help empower customers to make their own informed decision as to what insurance products meet their needs with the added confidence that it is endorsed by their trusted professional association.”

Karen Barretto, Deputy CEO of Stubben Edge, said: “The Insurance Industry, Mutual Societies and Trade/ Professional Associations share a long and distinguished history of spreading risk and sharing costs for the benefit of all, in addition to the ability to leverage membership data to provide better quality and better-informed insurance products for the membership base. We’re delighted to announce this partnership which, by harnessing our tech to provide simple to use, online buying journeys and access to our wider distribution network, brings further benefit to the membership base.”

European fintech, Citizen, has today announced it has chosen embedded finance infrastructure provider, OpenPayd, as its real-time payments provider. The partnership will give the end-users of Citizen’s clients a simplified payments experience via OpenPayd’s BaaS platform, which offers plug-and-play banking and payments infrastructure through a single API.

Founded by former Worldpay CTO, James Neville, Citizen harnesses Open Banking to provide simple and secure instant cardless payments for merchants. Citizen is transforming merchant acquiring and processing, bypassing traditional methods with no cards, no codes and no apps - offering cost-effective payments that settle instantly. To deliver an even better experience to its clients, Citizen needed an embedded finance infrastructure provider that could facilitate instant payouts and offer a greater global reach than other providers in the market.

Partnering with OpenPayd enables Citizen to issue virtual International Bank Account Numbers (vIBANs) for every client and enable simpler payouts via OpenPayd’s API. Unlike a traditional business account, OpenPayd’s infrastructure allows Citizen to issue clients with a corporate account and vIBANs that provide real-time data notifications as soon as money reaches their account, delivering better cash flow management and reconciliation. The partnership is already live and is available to Citizen’s multi-industry customer base.

“Through the collaboration of technical expertise, Citizen’s partnership with OpenPayd has opened up new product opportunities for us in even more locations across Europe,”  said James Neville, CEO and co-founder of Citizen. “By offering a more expansive range of solutions to our customers, such as bank account creation and eWallet functionality, Citizen is more than a simple payment method - we are truly a payments ecosystem.”

“Working with Citizen is another example of how versatile our BaaS infrastructure is,” said Iana Dimitrova, CEO of OpenPayd. “Our broad and evolving technology suite can cater for any industry, any payment rail, anywhere. We’re looking forward to a long and successful relationship with Citizen, as they scale their offering and deliver a better payments experience to their clients.”