Finastra today announced that XPAY, an embedded finance provider offering branded Mastercard^® card programs with loyalty components, has selected Finastra, a global provider of financial software applications and marketplaces, to support its ambitious growth plans. Finastra’s Fusion Essence will come pre-integrated with its payments gateways and Open Banking Compliance from Salt Edge, a global Open Banking pioneer. The combined offering and access to FusionFabric.cloud, powered by Microsoft Azure, enables XPAY to deliver differentiated end-user experiences and rapidly introduce new services as it grows.

“Our business evolves quickly,” said Michael Schott, CEO at XPAY Financial Services UAB. “As we regularly launch new features and card programs, we needed a partner who can match our speed of innovation. With Finastra’s SaaS solution, we can streamline our operations and quickly expand thanks to its comprehensive banking and payments functionality, open APIs and microservices architecture. Crucially, its financial services ecosystem enables us to implement new capabilities, such as Salt Edge’s Open Banking Compliance, seamlessly, at speed and when we need them.”

Fusion Essence is a next-generation digital banking solution which combines sophisticated functionality and advanced technology to increase enterprise agility, reduce costs and improve operational efficiency. Its open architecture and integration with FusionFabric.cloud enables financial institutions to incrementally add value-added services. Finastra’s Fusion Total Messaging solution offers secure SEPA payments that are screened against sanction lists and scrutinized by artificial intelligence, powered by NetGuardians, to provide real-time fraud detection. Salt Edge’s Open Banking Compliance provides full coverage of regulated markets with cross-bank and pan-European API standards, including The Berlin Group in the EU.

“XPAY is a fast-growing fintech that also shares our passion for open and embedded finance,” said Siobhan Byron, EVP Universal Banking at Finastra. “Our digital banking solution is designed with powerful built-in analytics and supports hyper-personalized customer journeys, enabling the company to increase customer loyalty for brands through its leading Cards as a Service solutions. Backed by the power of collaboration and our open platform, we are excited to support XPAY as it continues to reach more customers.”

“Integrating our solution with Fusion Essence provides XPAY with a fast and seamless way to comply with Open Banking on top of its digital banking functionality,” said Alina Beleuta, Chief Growth Officer at Salt Edge. “Our comprehensive suite of APIs provides services such as payment initiation, third party access validation, and strong customer authentication (SCA) compliance, for enhanced payment services and added security to protect XPAY and its customers.”

Temenos today announced that it has expanded its Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) capabilities on Temenos Banking Cloud to meet the technology needs of organizations offering BaaS from licensed banks to specialist BaaS providers servicing brands or fintechs. With Temenos Banking Cloud incumbent and non-incumbent banks as well as BaaS providers can establish and scale their BaaS programs fast with minimal effort thus opening up new revenue streams.

Temenos offers API-driven banking capabilities ranging from origination to fulfillment of financial products across retail, SME, corporate banking and wealth. With Temenos’ new Open Products capabilities, licensed banks and BaaS providers can create and service highly-configurable financial products, enabling brands and fintechs to differentiate their embedded finance offerings.  

In the BaaS ecosystem, brands and fintechs – from retailers to ride-sharing apps – are embedding financial services in their offerings to give a seamless customer experience, build customer loyalty and increase revenues. Temenos’ Open Products addresses this requirement by decoupling product design and servicing from underlying processing systems. This allows new products to be designed on top of standardized banking services, and then published independently ‘as-code’, making them extensible and upgradeable through Temenos’ extensibility framework.

For example, if a brand wants to offer credit services at the point of sale, they could consume Temenos lending service from the BaaS provider, and then leverage Open Products to design differentiated features, such as pay later offerings, variable rates, or early payment incentives. 

To license-holder banks, Temenos Banking Cloud offers always-on customer services such as payments, orders and credit scoring. Temenos’ extensibility framework enables banks to explore banking services and configure or extend their functionality. Temenos provides a high-performance, API-based, cloud-native platform for banks to offer financial services to serve e-commerce brands and fintechs at scale.

Demonstrating the scale of Temenos’ platform, a global payments provider launched its Buy-Now-Pay-Later service on the Temenos Banking Cloud, reaching 25 million BNPL consumers which equates to 150 million loans, this was the fastest and most successful product launch in the company’s history.

In a recent benchmark with 100 million customers and 200 million deposit accounts with 100,000 transactions per second, the Temenos platform reached up to 61 transactions per second per core on AWS Cloud, a world-class performance on scalability and efficiency proving its ability to help banks massively scale and cater for the high volumes of transactions in the BaaS world as multiple brands are hosted on a single platform underscoring our green architecture.

Furthermore, Temenos caters for the technology needs of BaaS providers complementing their payments and cards services with banking technology. With Temenos platform, BaaS providers can offer an end-to-end BaaS infrastructure including regulatory support to help brands provide embedded finance.

To BaaS providers, Temenos also offers APIs to connect to multiple brands or fintechs and help them deliver digital journeys to their customers and to service multiple products per brand from a highly scalable single platform.  Temenos banking platform can also power 'as a service' offerings by BaaS providers such as personal loans and business credits. The complexities of running multiple brands with different customer bases that share common infrastructure and books of records for regulated banks is easily handled by Temenos’ proven multi-bank architecture.

Mbanq, the leading BaaS provider, is leveraging the Temenos platform to offer BaaS services to its clients. Temenos recently announced that it has invested in Mbanq to capture the BaaS opportunity in the US.  

Vlad Lounegov, Chief Executive Officer, Mbanq said: “Temenos banking platform combined with Mbanq’s complementary technologies such as a multi-currency, multi-asset patented digital wallet, brings to market a differentiated BaaS proposition for fintechs and brands as well as compliant banking and payments capabilities to the regulated partner banks.” 

Philip Barnett, President Americas, Temenos, said: “Our partnership with Mbanq extends our addressable market by opening up a new channel to offer BaaS services directly to consumer brands, an incremental market to our business. Together, we bring to market a unique combination of capabilities in embedded finance underpinned by broad and massively scalable functionality, combined with value-add services, such as regulatory and compliance. To sponsor banks, we can offer a parallel core to run their BaaS business separately and securely by integrating to their existing core banking system and with brands.”

Salv, the regtech startup founded by former Wise and Skype employees, closes a €4m seed round extension led by ffVC, with German G+D Ventures and existing investors also participating. The funds will allow Salv to further develop its modular regtech technology and support geographical expansion to new territories, including Poland.

Salv’s collaborative crime-fighting technology

Salv’s offering entails all the necessary AML functionality for financial services companies, such as automatically identifying and prioritising suspicious activity and processing vast amounts of data in real-time. The company’s toolset also includes its proprietary collaborative crime-fighting platform - Salv Bridge, which uses the collective power of its network to minimise non-compliance and financial crime.

The world’s first fully GDPR-compliant platform, Salv Bridge, enables collaborative investigations between financial institutions by opening a direct line of communication - allowing them to exchange and enrich data on potential threats. This helps network members solve fraud cases in minutes, not days. By utilising this collective intelligence from financial institutions within the Bridge network, Salv’s tools can adapt to evolving threats.

Taavi Tamkivi, CEO and co-founder of Salv, commented on the new market entry: “The digitalisation of the financial industry has resulted in an avalanche of financial crime, and the numbers are only projected to grow. our collaborative-crime fighting platform, Salv Bridge, is proven to be effective against money laundering, sanctions and fraud. The funds allow us to add further functionality to our modular AML toolset and expand to new markets, helping more companies greatly improve their crime-fighting measures and thereby protect their end-customers.”  

Why collaboration is needed to effectively fight financial crime:

Taking advantage of the explosive growth of the financial technology industry, financial crime -  especially fraud - has recently seen a meteoric rise. The low-risk, high-profit nature and the low probability of prosecution due to the complexity of cross-border investigations make fraud an attractive activity for international organised crime groups, who benefit from differences in national legislation.

Criminals are successful because they have large, efficient international networks for sharing information, whilst financial institutions lack the means to securely and effectively exchange information on suspicious activity. Operating in silos, they try to solve problems individually, often losing precious time, which is crucial for a successful fraud recall.

Andres Kitter, Deputy CEO of LHV UK, said: “LHV Bank took part in the Bridge pilot and saw excellent results in a short timeframe - authorised push payment fraud cases dropped significantly across the network. In the UK, where we process payment volumes worth hundreds of millions every day, Salv's solutions allow us real-time communication with other institutions within the network and provide us with tools to apply effective countermeasures to constantly changing patterns of financial crime.” 

Mateusz Zawistowski, Managing Director of ffVC, commented on their investment: "We invested in a working solution that has already proven effective against financial crime. For us, an important element was that 21 financial institutions in Europe have already joined the collaborative crime-fighting network and collectively solved almost 7000 investigations, helping to prevent €6-7m from reaching criminals. We see a huge potential for geographical expansion and more financial institutions joining the network to improve their compliance and crime-fighting capabilities.

Investor voting fintech Tumelo is calling on investment funds to disclose to investors whether they permit them to vote the shares in their portfolios.

Responding to a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) consultation on sustainable fund marketing and anti-greenwashing measures (CP22/20), Tumelo is highlighting the importance of transparency over pooled funds’ policies on asset owner voting. Asset owners are the retail or institutional investors in a fund.

Until recently, voting on key issues at shareholder meetings was done exclusively by fund managers, as the registered owners of the shares.

However, voting technology is empowering shareholders to have a voice on the issues they care about. It allows fund managers to either take account of investors’ wishes (known as ‘expression of wish’ voting), or even to allow investors a direct vote on board resolutions in the underlying companies held in the fund (pass-through voting).

Greenwashing concerns

The FCA is concerned firms are making exaggerated or misleading sustainability-related claims about their investment products, eroding trust in the market and potentially leading to consumer harm.

It is proposing to introduce measures aimed at clamping down on greenwashing, including launching three sustainable investment labels – sustainable focus; sustainable improvers; sustainable impact – to reflect the natures of funds in the space.

Tumelo is recommending that funds in each category should be required to disclose to investors what their policy is on allowing investor voting on shares. This should form part of pre-sale disclosure documents and fund managers’ annual reporting, it added.

Georgia Stewart, CEO and co-founder or Tumelo, said: “Fund managers play at least two roles in society: they are capital allocators, and they are stewards of companies. Companies have amassed a huge amount of power over our political, social and environmental systems. As registered shareholders of these companies, fund managers play a lead role in influencing how they use that power, to achieve better long-term outcomes for their clients.

“Capital allocation – deciding which companies to invest in and which to side-line – has, for years, received all the focus from fund managers, clients and regulators alike, including the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation. It’s time that regulators like the FCA gave due focus to the second and arguably most important role that fund managers play – that of stewards.

“In my opinion, this FCA consultation is about demanding transparency over questions that investors don’t know to ask or can’t ask, and that includes voting. Some fund managers are making use of new technologies to improve the services they offer to clients – effectively handing asset owners the choice to vote on how companies in their funds are managed. So, for example, an investor could fairly assume that the voting rights associated with their “sustainable investment” fund would be used in such a way as to promote positive environmental and societal outcomes in how companies invest and operate.

“However, many fund managers still do not offer this flexibility and most clients don’t know it's on offer in other parts of the market. Because investors aren’t aware, they don’t ask; because investors don’t ask, fund managers assume there is no demand. This is a perfect case for greater transparency.”

The FCA’s consultation CP22/20: Sustainability Disclosure Requirements (SDR) and investment labels closed on 25 January, with final rules and guidance set to be published at the end of the first half of 2023.

Integral, a leading currency technology provider to the financial markets, announced today that brokerage firm Swiss Finance Corporation (“SFC”) has selected its cloud-based SaaS technology to modernize their offering and bring eFX trading to their customers.

SFC benefits from access to Integral’s sophisticated end-to-end workflow and eFX trading technology, which was rolled out in a matter of weeks – allowing the firm to focus on growing their business and optimizing their yield. The SaaS solution includes liquidity aggregation, price generation, distribution, risk management and analytics, and enables clients to run their trading businesses more effectively – at a fixed subscription cost.

Harpal Sandhu, CEO, Integral, commented: “We built our SaaS technology for our customers and it’s an absolute pleasure to work with SFC. It’s the perfect example of why we do what we do: to help our customers be the best version of themselves with the help of our technology and allowing them to focus on what matters most to them, looking after their customers and growing their business.”

Paul Hayward, Leadership Team, SFC added: “Swiss Finance is committed to providing its clients with best-in-class products and choosing Integral as our trading platform technology partner is further evidence of this. As a multi-asset financial services provider operating 24 hours a day, our customers demand the highest standards of pricing, liquidity and reliability. Integral has an excellent reputation and we are confident that this partnership will complement our ambitious growth plans in the years ahead.”

Block Scholes has got off to a fantastic start in 2023, securing regulatory approval from the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK for specific regulated activity – which means we are likely the only regulated digital assets trade recommendation provider at this time.

Our new regulated status enables us to offer, trade recommendations and innovative financial products to professional market participants – a significant competitive advantage over unregulated service providers.

This important milestone follows on from the successes of late 2022, when we welcomed D2X, a crypto derivatives exchange soon to be regulated in the EU, to our growing list of clients and announced our partnership with Bitbns, India's leading cryptocurrency exchange.

Our CEO Eamonn Gashier says: “Block Scholes may be a young company, but we are covering ground fast, as demonstrated by our new status as an FCA-registered company. For too long, there has been a scarcity of trusted information in the cryptocurrency sector but we are here to change that, and this authorisation marks an important step. Our FCA registration covers our activities in relation to regulated instruments but in this rapidly changing regulatory environment, we wanted to be leaders in this regard by beginning the regulatory registration process. This is a real differentiator among our peers, and an essential pillar in our vision to be a trusted source for crypto investors, offering a comprehensive range of services from one platform. I am very much looking forward to growing the company further in 2023 and beyond as we cement ourselves as the go-to resource for institutional crypto investors and help to build trust within the market.”

Looking ahead, Block Scholes remains confident in the attractiveness and growth potential of crypto markets. Investors in this space have been underserved historically, but we are addressing this by combining proprietary data, sophisticated quantitative models, interactive analytics, enterprise services, financial products and independent research on one comprehensive and intuitive platform.

Recognise Bank, the digital SME lender and savings provider, today announces that its parent company, the City of London Group plc, has delisted its shares after yesterday’s successful AGM vote backing the plan.

The delisting simplifies Recognise Bank’s corporate structure and follows the bank conditionally raising £25 million to support lending and to fund the continued development of new products and technology for SMEs.

Jean Murphy, CEO of Recognise Bank, said: “We are pleased to announce the delisting of our parent company, which simplifies the bank’s structure, making it more streamlined and efficient. This will support the delivery of our strategy to create new services and products for all our customers.”

Nicola Clark and Simon Monks from Azets, a specialist local accountants and business advisory group providing audit, payroll, corporate finance, tax and banking and finance services, are supporting the group with its corporate simplification strategy to achieve a platform from which it can deliver its future growth ambitions.

Starling Bank is starting the new year with a trio of significant achievements. The digital bank tops the Current Account Switch Service (CASS) leaderboard, is named Britain’s best current account by Finder.com, and makes the top ten in its debut entry to the UK Customer Service Index.

Starling’s place in the top three most-switched-to banks is confirmed today in the latest CASS quarterly dashboard. Starling gained 9,070 net switches for the period from 1 July 2022 to 30 September 2022, behind Santander (29,105) and HSBC (13,119) and is the only bank on the podium not to offer financial switching incentives. Starling is the most-switched-to-bank not to offer incentives throughout 2022 to date, with full annual data to be confirmed in April 2023, and was the most switched-to-bank overall in 2021.

Starling has also been named Britain’s best current account in the Finder Customer Satisfaction Awards 2023. 94% of Starling customers would recommend the bank to others and the bank received a satisfaction score of 5/5, according to analysis of 24,000 customer responses across 15 financial categories. 

The digital bank also debuted on the UK Customer Service Index at sixth place, joining household names including John Lewis, M&S and Tesco Mobile among the UK’s top ten performing brands for customer service. The bi-annual report is published by the UK Institute of Customer Service and is based on 45,000 survey responses. 

Helen Bierton, Chief Banking Officer at Starling Bank said: “We’ve started the new year with recognition of our founding mission: to change banking for good. We will continue to fight for that mission by building a market leading product, offering human, 24/7 customer service, and creating a bank that’s worth switching to - with no cash incentives.”

Paul Ford, Head of Customer Service at Starling Bank said: “What customers really like, and notice, about Starling is that we offer 24/7 customer service with a human touch, as well as a stand-out digital experience.”

Starling’s award wins follow a record year for the bank, which won Britain’s Best Current Account for the fifth year running and was named Britain’s Best Children’s Financial Provider by Smart Money People. Starling was also named Banking Brand of the Year by Which? for the second year running and won City AM’s Bank of the Year.

2022 also saw Starling report its first full year of profitability for FY2021, launch its Software as a Service subsidiary business, Engine, and announce its plans to hire 1,000 employees in its new Manchester office.

ECOMMPAY, a leading international payment service provider and direct bank card acquirer with its own fintech system, has hired Moshe Winegarten as its Chief Revenue Officer. The appointment comes as the fintech leader prepares to tackle the main challenges for merchants this year through continued innovation in payment technologies and solutions and integration with strategic, third-party vendors. 

Moshe’s appointment comes at a critical time as the company invests in its workforce and builds upon its services. To alleviate the issues faced by e-commerce & retail, travel & hospitality, and fintech, ECOMMPAY is enhancing its Open Banking offering and exploring the latest payment options from BNPL to crypto. In addition, the company aims to improve its existing technologies for tackling fraud, increase conversion rates and streamline overall UX.

According to research from ECOMMPAY, payment flows are a major pain point for end-users, with almost half of the consumers unsatisfied with their experience. In the retail space, 20% of consumers are unsatisfied with online checkout processes, and this figure rises to 40% in the hospitality and travel industries. 

As part of his remit, Moshe will be responsible for developing ECOMMPAY’s expert go-to-market sales, revenue, partnerships and marketing teams and optimising the account management function. As the company doubles its efforts on growth this year, Moshe will oversee the trajectory of innovation by working with the development team to add new features to its various technologies. 

With over 16 years of experience in the fintech space, predominantly in product, strategy and consulting, Moshe has held a variety of significant positions throughout his career. In the early days of fintech, he played an instrumental role in developing the UK’s first instant-issue prepaid MasterCard. During his tenure at Barclaycard, he was responsible for all their branded consumer cards in the UK and successfully developed their first new consumer proposition in five years. Having led payments innovation and strategy within Accenture’s UK payment practice, Moshe joined Visa as EU Director of Commercialisation for Visa Direct, where he played a vital role in driving the growth of one of the company’s flagship products. More recently, as Senior Vice President of Sales at Checkout.com, he scaled their sales team, secured some of their largest clients and helped them become one of the largest unicorns in Europe today.

Moshe Winegarten, Chief Revenue Officer of ECOMMPAY, commented: “Having known ECOMMPAY for a number of years before joining, I was always impressed by their agility and speed of innovation. ECOMMPAY is in a very special category of its own as a fully modular payment service provider able to offer orchestration, gateway, processing and acquiring services combined with their own in-house solution for billing, Open Banking and crypto acceptance and a whole raft of other functionality and alternative payment methods.

“In a tough economic climate, payment challenges for merchants can make or break a business. Many companies across the retail, fintech and travel industries are turning to specialist solution providers, especially in local markets. ECOMMPAY is in a great position to solve our partners' problems, increasing conversion rates and boosting their revenue, and I’m excited to develop the strategies and team that bring our expertise to the marketplace.”

DailyPay, a leading financial technology company, today announced it has secured $260 million of capital to fuel growth domestically, expand internationally and further invest in product innovation. The funding is divided between revolving credit facility capacity provided by Barclays and Angelo Gordon, and new term loan funding from SVB Capital and a fund managed by Neuberger Berman.

DailyPay first announced a $300 million revolving credit facility from Barclays in March 2022. The additional revolving credit facility capacity ($100 million provided by Barclays and $60 million from Angelo Gordon) provides DailyPay with more capital to service its ever-growing roster of clients. The $100 million in term loan funding will be invested to fuel DailyPay's continued product innovation and to accelerate growth.

The fundraise announcement comes five months after Kevin Coop joined DailyPay as Chief Executive Officer. In his first five months as CEO, DailyPay has significantly grown its roster of clients and has seen meaningful revenue growth.

"On-demand pay has proven to be a transformational financial wellness benefit for employers and their employees, and DailyPay is the proven market-leader. Now, our opportunity lies in capturing more of the market, which is overwhelmingly vast green space," said Kevin Coop, Chief Executive Officer of DailyPay. "Our track record of trust and investment from the world's leading financial institutions validates our business model and path forward. This latest funding further propels us to a position of strength."

Latham & Watkins LLP advised DailyPay on the financing transactions.

DailyPay partners with leading employers across various industries, including Fortune 500 companies such as Hilton, Target, Kroger and Dollar Tree. The company's modern, insight-driven pay strategies help companies activate their workforce and build stronger relationships with their employees, who feel more engaged, work harder, and stay longer.