Research from the CBI and Finastra, canvassing the opinions of UK small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), suggests that there’s a gap between the ambition of firms to trade internationally and the reality of doing so. While just 44% of businesses surveyed currently engage in international trade, only 23% said they were not interested in doing so. One third of respondents believe there’s potential value, but do not trade internationally due to perceived barriers and a lack of support.

Common barriers cited by respondents include: the impact of Brexit (23%); being too small to trade internationally (16%); and limited knowledge about international markets (15%). 

To better understand current business attitudes to international trade and accessing finance, the CBI and Finastra worked with YouGov to survey over 200 financial decision makers at UK-based SMEs to gain more insight into the challenges businesses are facing, attitudes to finance and ambitions for international growth. The findings are included in the CBI’s International Trade Toolkit, being launched this week, which is designed to help UK SMEs across all sectors increase their international trade ambitions.

“Our International Trade Toolkit, developed with Finastra, is designed to provide advice and guidance for SMEs, as well as helping to facilitate connections with fintech players and financial institutions that can help support such growth,” explained Rain Newton Smith, CBI Chief Economist. “Our Seize the Moment strategy estimates that a new generation of SME exporters could raise around £20 billion in additional UK export revenues by 2030, and the UK’s fintech sector can play a key role as a driver of productivity gains and enabler of broader economic transformation.” 

Additional takeaways from the survey include:

·       Ambitions for growth: those businesses that currently engage in international trade see opportunities for further growth, with 27% expecting to increase their imports or exports compared to only 4% of those who do not currently trade.

·       Sources of finance: financial institutions that businesses have an existing relationship with are the most common provider of finance (51%), although many businesses use their credit card (43%) and overdraft (28%) which are traditionally more expensive. Nearly 2 in 5 businesses have never applied for financing, suggesting more needs to be done to help them understand how finance can help them with their growth ambitions and find the option best suited to their needs.

·       Potential for embedded finance: With 3 in 10 respondents expressing interest in using embedded finance solutions, helping businesses understand the value embedded finance can deliver will be key to future growth. For example, ecosystems created by tech and fintech companies can support the matching of supply and demand of loans, using third-party data to provide personalized loan offers for SMEs.

“Finastra is delighted to partner with the CBI in creating the International Trade Toolkit and in helping UK businesses unlock the benefits of international trade,” said Jonathan McPhail, Lead Client Partner, Banking as a Service, Finastra. “Harnessing the power of fintech solutions can help firms overcome some of the barriers to international trade and give them a competitive edge – reaping efficiency gains through process improvements in payments, finance, cash management, compliance and operations, as well as improving business development opportunities through enhanced customer propositions. The toolkit shines a spotlight on just some of these use cases as the landscape continues to evolve.”

Finastra and the CBI have invited UK SMEs to join them at an event to mark the launch of the International Trade Toolkit, Winning with Fintech: International trade and accessing finance, taking place in London today, 18 January 2023.

Temenos today launched the next generation of its AI-driven, Corporate Lending solution to enable banks to consolidate global commercial loan portfolios and unify servicing all on the Temenos banking platform.

The solution simplifies complex loan processing and lifecycle management across lending lines and geographies, addressing the needs of large tier-one as well as regional banks, many of which are struggling to seize the growth opportunity in corporate lending due to disparate systems and a lack of integration.

Pat O'Sullivan, IT Director, Customer Platforms, Allied Irish Bank, commented: "With Temenos, Allied Irish Bank is working to streamline business credit onto a single platform to deliver a modern, flexible solution that will provide business credit capabilities to all AIB's customers. With Temenos, we are consolidating disparate systems, and removing complex, manual processes, which in turn reduces cost, and it enables us to rapidly respond to our customer demands and enhance our service. This is one of the most fundamentally important and strategic programs underway at AIB and is at the centre of our ambition to transform the bank."

Today, most banks are using decades-old, different systems for different types of corporate and SME lending, for example, multiple systems for bilateral loans, for asset finance, and syndicated lending which results in complex workflows and increased servicing costs.

With Temenos next-generation Corporate Lending solution banks can efficiently service a wide range of loan types – from high-volume bilateral loans to the most complex corporate credits - with best-practice automation and workflow for the entire loan servicing lifecycle available in the Corporate Model Bank. The lending process centres around transactions and activities, involving many parties such as borrowers, and bank personnel from many departments. The liaisons must be routed, approved, tracked and audited within Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Temenos Explainable AI will be used to identify opportunities for task and process automation as well as areas for load balancing high-value resources to key transactions.

Banks also benefit from a single golden source of data across the commercial loan portfolio, and global customer entities, for better insight and reporting and to deliver a superior customer experience.

Temenos Corporate Lending is available on Temenos Banking Cloud as SaaS or for deployment on-premise or any public or private cloud.

David O’Connell, Strategic Advisor, Aite-Novarica Group, said: “Temenos’ expanding presence in the loan servicing market provides additional options for banks looking to achieve increased ROI via excellence in loan servicing. According to Aite-Novarica’s research, only 32% of commercial lenders service their borrowers with excellence.  The lost opportunity here is significant: financial institutions that service commercial loans with excellence get a great return on the required investment because excellent loan servicing makes borrowers more likely to renew and less price sensitive. Temenos’ launch of their next-generation Corporate Lending solution provides additional options for banks looking to achieve increased ROI via excellence in loan servicing, something which we have seen too infrequently in the past but hope to see more of in the years ahead.”  

Prema Varadhan, Chief Product and Technology Officer, Temenos, commented: “Standardizing processes across lending lines and automating the loan servicing lifecycle is critical to reducing costs and increasing margins. With the next-generation, AI-powered Corporate Lending solution, we build on the corporate lending specialization we have added in recent years and bring the value of Temenos' open platform approach to make it easy to integrate, configure, upgrade and maintain. Temenos clients can further benefit from powerful loan origination capabilities to unlock the full lending value chain.

“Temenos is uniquely positioned to unify operations across commercial lending asset classes to help banks reduce costs and win new business. With clients such as Allied Irish Bank in Ireland, Commerce Bank in the USA, and Al Rajhi in Saudi Arabia, corporate banking is a key focus for Temenos, and we continue to invest heavily to strengthen our offerings in this area.”

Corporate Loan Origination continues to heat up with an annual IT spend of $1.4bn growing at c.19% per year over the next four years according to Aite-Novarica Group[1]. Temenos continued expansion in the loan origination space offers banks the ability to capitalize on this growth with a compelling out- of- the box lending proposition. With capabilities integrated into Temenos Infinity, the digital banking platform, banks can benefit from the systematization and standardization of loan initiation and granting. The corporate origination solution is also available as a standalone. This powerful end-to-end corporate lending solution, significantly enhances Temenos corporate banking offering and open up more opportunities with larger banks in servicing and origination.

Temenos investment and innovation in corporate banking is recognized by Forrester, being named a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Digital Banking Processing Platforms for Corporate Banking, Q3 2022. According to the report, “Temenos sets the pace in AI-powered banking capabilities and application architecture” with a strategy that “shows no weak spots”.

Encompass Corporation, the provider of the leading Know Your Customer (KYC) automation platform, has published a landmark whitepaper analysing trends in financial crime compliance across 2022 and providing an understanding of what they mean for banks in 2023.

'Trends in Financial Crime Compliance’, authored by Dr. Henry Balani, Global Head of Industry and Regulatory Affairs at Encompass, revealed that, in 2022, regulatory pressure concentrated on areas such as Ultimate Beneficial Ownership (UBO). This was in response to the Pandora and Paradise papers, with a key focus on London as a mecca for money laundering. 2022 also saw an increase in notable fines against firms for non-compliance, especially crypto exchanges, brokers, asset managers and securities firms, and in the UK and Asia.

It analysed the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the volatile and complex systems of sanctions this has created. Global economies have been inconsistent in their responses, particularly in relation to restrictions placed on specific individuals, companies and industries.

The whitepaper concluded that these significant external issues are being exacerbated by internal factors, such as outdated technologies exposing firms to greater risk of non-compliance, and prominent data siloes meaning firms are failing to effectively identify suspicious customers. Internal inefficiencies are also impacting the speed at which regulated firms are reacting to change.

As a result, the KYC approach must move from being traditionally manual to one which takes advantage of the power of automation. This comes, Dr Balani writes, as instances of global financial crime – and the sophistication of perpetrators - increase, alongside the burden of regulatory compliance.

Looking at what can be expected throughout 2023, the whitepaper states that sanctions regimes and money laundering scandals are triggering a strong response from regulatory bodies, and they will continue to clamp down on financial crime, with KYC as a core mitigating component.

Dr. Henry Balani, Global Head of Industry and Regulatory Affairs at Encompass, commented:

“It is likely that we will continue to see investigative and enforcement activity in all jurisdictions focus on the quality of systems and controls, as well as the true application of a risk-based approach to managing financial crime compliance.

“The ability for firms to demonstrate they have a robust KYC framework, with efficient and effective controls - and a well-defined and comprehensive approach to customer risk assessment - is critical to standing up to regulatory scrutiny.”

iDenfy, a global all-in-one identity verification and fraud prevention tech startup, announced the launching of a brand new partnership program. It will enable iDenfy’s partners to earn commissions while building an enhanced growth strategy based on two program options, Referral and Technology/Solution. 

With the new partner program, iDenfy aims to help businesses and individuals create a smoother sales cycle by leveraging several types of partner programs. According to Domantas Ciulde, the CEO of iDenfy, each new partner supports the growth of the tech startup, with the potential to scale for both parties. 

iDenfy’s new partnership offers were designed to cultivate long-term collaborations without the hassle. While traditional partnerships typically involve lengthy planning and demand funding, the startup doesn’t require investments. Whether it’s a SaaS business, an influencer, or any other B2B company, iDenfy officials claim that the partner programs can be customized to each individual and their needs. 

Depending on target markets, iDenfy offers its partners attractive options, promising to help create additional sales and earn commissions. According to the startup, it’s one of the fastest ways to assist others in meeting Know Your Customer (KYC) obligations. Asked about other benefits, iDenfy explains that its programs will enable entities to expand globally and, at the same time, create new revenue streams. 

iDenfy’s Referral Agreement program will work best for tech company leaders, consulting firms, or independent advisors specializing in the fields of fraud prevention and compliance. This option is based on promoting iDenfy’s identity verification and anti-fraud tools that’ll help ensure compliance across various sectors and establish better client relationships. 

In the meantime, the Technology/Solutions program will be perfect for blockchain infrastructure providers, e-gaming networks, NFT launchpads, e-signature service providers, and white-label platforms, authorizing businesses to implement iDenfy’s solutions into their workflows. The main idea behind this program circles around building value and gaining a competitive advantage through technological advancements. 

Before making its partnership program official, iDenfy’s team developed a thorough strategy that helps smoothly onboard new partners and provides every tool they need for quick integration. Currently, iDenfy offers industry-leading guide kits and documentation, as well as technical support assistance for both partnership programs. 

In 2022, iDenfy hit a benchmark of having +500 partners who selected its IDV service and anti-fraud solutions for more robust security. The tech startup plans to expand further, inviting businesses and individuals to test the new partner program by completing a simple application form. 

“Every partnership is a unique opportunity to create a custom journey for those interested in our white-label KYC and AML tools. With the new partner program, we’re excited to expand our operations, at the same time, add value to existing customers by upgrading our anti-fraud tooling kit.” — commented Domantas Ciulde, the CEO of iDenfy. 

Today, finance software startup Quartr and investment platform Lightyear announce a partnership to bring Quartr’s convenient access to earnings calls audios, reports and slide decks to the Lightyear platform.

Quartr has collected company information from roughly 7,000 listed companies and have, since this autumn, started redistributing this data to other platforms through an API. The next company to integrate with Quartr is the UK-based investment platform Lightyear. The partnership will bring all of Quarter’s earnings call features to Lightyear’s investors in 20 countries.

Quartr and Lightyear share the mission of bringing easily accessible stock market information to investors everywhere. Quartr brings together information such as earnings calls, slide decks and reports that have historically been difficult to access and scattered on individual companies’ sites.

The information will be presented to investors from right within the Lightyear app, allowing users to access the data audibly and visually. This additional data offering, together with Lightyear’s transparent fees and extensive product suite give customers a strong foundation to make informed investment decisions.

Lightyear was founded by ex-Wise duo Martin Sokk and Mihkel Aamer to give everyone in Europe seamless, low-cost access to global markets. Traditionally, if European investors want access to international markets they get hit with transaction and custody fees, but most notably, hidden foreign exchange fees. Lightyear aims to bridge these gaps and lower the fees for international markets for customers.

Quartr CEO and Co-founder Sami Osman comments: “Lightyear’s implementation of our API solution is a natural step on our mission of bringing the financial community closer together, creating yet another important distribution channel. We are convinced that our API will create a lot of value for both investors and online brokers worldwide, and not least for public companies as this enables them to get their equity stories told to a much wider audience”.”

Lightyear CTO and Co-founder Mihkel Aamer comments: “Easy access to stock market data is crucial for new and experienced investors alike — to build out their investment strategies and successfully carry them out over the years. Historically earnings calls and the discussions within them have not been easily accessible for retail investors; yet keeping up with companies’ quarterly results is a key part of staying up to date with your portfolio performance. We’re excited to partner with Quartr and bring earnings calls, reports and slide decks into the Lightyear app, for our customers all across Europe.”

In a move designed to optimize user experiences and filter out fraud attempts, online fraud prevention experts, SEON has partnered with challenger bank, tbi bank, to leverage its Machine Learning based fraud detection platform. 

As we kick off 2023, fraud remains a pervasive trend among online banks. Thankfully, a growing number of companies in the sector are becoming more aware of the problem and are increasingly looking to build effective protocols that mitigate the issue before it affects customers. Working in this vein is tbi bank, one of Southeast Europe’s fastest-growing challenger banks, which recently partnered with online fraud prevention experts, SEON. 

As part of the new partnership, tbi bank will incorporate SEON’s powerful online fraud prevention system into its customer onboarding journey. The move has been designed to enable better and safer financing experiences for the bank’s customers and is centred around a broader desire to enhance user experiences across the company’s vast network of business and retail customers. 

Alongside optimizing user experiences, the tools provided by SEON will help tbi bank to filter out fraud attempts in real-time. The company’s revolutionary system harnesses the immense power of Machine Learning to assess and act on the risk of online fraud in an incredibly responsive manner. With SEON’s assistance, tbi bank will soon be able to reduce the costs and resources it’s previously lost to fraud. 

Whereas some online fraud prevention platforms require users to trade off customer experience with security, SEON’s solution leverages powerful AI systems to provide a ‘best of both worlds’ situation that’s perfectly suited to the demands of modern banking customers. Moving forward, tbi bank will be able to offer an enhanced customer onboarding journey to its users, without sacrificing important security checks.

What’s more, thanks to its API-first approach, SEON’s system was onboarded by tbi bank in only a matter of hours. This efficiency was a major benefit for the challenger bank, who were able to integrate the company’s complete and transparent solution into their existing fraud prevention infrastructure seamlessly. In doing so, tbi bank was able to eliminate the time and cost demands usually required to undertake such an upgrade.  

Speaking on the new partnership, Jimmy Fong, Chief Commercial Officer at SEON commented: “SEON is the perfect tool for challenger banks like tbi bank, providing these organizations with a powerful tool in the fight against fraud. Our automated system offers clear results to clients at the point of sign-up in a transparent and reliable manner, thus helping to verify potential new users with zero friction.”

Costin Mincovici, Chief Credit Officer at tbi bank commented: “Our team has the ultimate goal of serving customers’ real needs, so we added a fraud solution to quickly filter out high-risk users, without increasing friction for our valuable customers. The additional data provided by SEON adds valuable information to our database, allowing us to improve and update our risk models with Machine Learning methodologies.”

The new partnership marks the beginning of a bigger collaboration between SEON and tbi bank, which will see the fraud prevention experts join the financial institution’s larger ecosystem of customer and business protection tools. The company’s capabilities in this exciting space are now well-established and prior to partnering with tbi bank, SEON has already worked with sector leaders, including Revolut, FairMoney, Carbon and Nubank.

Jack Henry™ announced today that it is expanding its credit card offering with the Agent Credit Card Program provided by TIB, N.A. (The Independent BankersBank). Texas-based TIB has more than $3 billion in assets and is the nation’s largest bankers’ bank, based on both total assets and number of clients, currently supporting approximately 1,400 community banks.

Banks and credit unions can utilize Jack Henry for full-service credit processing or perform most of their card functions in-house and connect to the card networks through Jack Henry. With TIB’s Agent Credit Card Program, financial institutions now also will be able to issue credit cards without many of the common barriers that have historically deterred them from offering these types of products, including financial, fraud, and operational risks. In addition, they will benefit from higher approval and card usage rates due to the program’s relationship-based underwriting process. As their card programs evolve, financial institutions also can choose to purchase and transition their agent portfolio to an in-house, self-managed environment.

Michael G. O’Rourke, president and CEO at TIB, said, “TIB is excited to provide Jack Henry with what we believe to be the best Agent Credit Card Program in the country. We are confident this partnership will further our reach into serving more financial institutions and the communities they serve while expanding Jack Henry’s product offering. We consider it a partnership of best-in-class providers and a win for community banking.”

Tede Forman, president of Payment Solutions at Jack Henry, said, “Credit card programs are a primary source of recurring revenue for banks and credit unions and a high-demand financial service that enhances our clients’ competitive positioning and supports their loyalty and retention goals. There has never been a more critical time for financial institutions to launch a highly competitive credit card program or to modernize their existing programs. Jack Henry is a service-driven, expertise-rich, high-touch provider of modern solutions that can help our clients meet the evolving needs of their accountholders.”

Jack Henry also provides debit processing and programs and ATM services. The company recently launched its Credit Card Portfolio Advisory Services to provide financial institutions with fully customized consulting services and expert guidance on launching new or reinventing existing credit card programs.

Surprisingly, the number of UK tech M&A deals in 2022 was the second highest on record, according to research from tech-focused investment bank ICON Corporate Finance.

Despite the global pandemic, war in Ukraine, falling equities, the highest inflation in 40 years, supply chain gridlock and a jump in interest rates, 972 deals were announced.

While the number of deals was down -9% compared with 2021, impressively it was up 9% compared with 2019 (pre-COVID). Smaller and mid-cap deals proved particularly resilient.

In its newly published UK Tech M&A Snapshot 2022, ICON reveals:

• Foreign and PE-backed acquirers were key in 2022, responsible for 43% and 31% of all acquisitions respectively 

• The busiest acquirer in 2022 was Access Group, followed by Babble and Clearcourse, as private equity-funded businesses continue their buy-and-build spending spree

• In 2022, total deal valuations weakened as investors were more risk-averse. Nevertheless, seven of the top 10 deals were valued at greater than 5 x the revenues

• The number of UK unicorn companies continued to increase in 2022 with the addition of 10 new UK tech businesses such as Payfit, Multiverse, Spectrum and Beamery. Their focus is dominated by Fintech and Artificial Intelligence.

• The wave of de-listings continued in 2022 with the loss of 15 companies, including majors such as Micro Focus, Aveva and Ideagen. The IPO market is essentially closed - with an appetite close to a 10-year low.

Report author and Head of M&A at ICON, Brian Parker, said: “The world has had no shortage of twists and turns in the past few years with Brexit, COVID and an alarming jump in inflation.

“So, it may be unexpected for many to learn in our report that 2022 was the second-best year ever for the number of UK Tech M&A deals.

“With strong ongoing demand for digital transformation and AI, a weak currency and plenty of PE cash, we remain positive about UK Tech M&A. ICON starts the year with a busy M&A pipeline and several deals in due diligence. But no doubt the year of the Rabbit will be full of surprises!”

Instant Financial, the pioneer of fee-free, responsible earned wage access (EWA) solutions, today unveiled its new website, brand positioning and card design to reflect the company’s revolutionary leadership in on-demand pay. Since its founding in 2015, Instant has built the most comprehensive, fee–free earned wage access platform to date.

“Today reflects a pivotal moment in the on-demand pay space, as we affirm our claim as the leaders of the earned wage access industry.” said Ryan Ashton, Vice President of Marketing at Instant Financial. “With this unveiling of Instant’s new brand positioning, and our new website, we are launching the Payday Revolution.”

Pioneering the Payday Revolution

While some vendors claim otherwise, the fees attached to various earned wage access programs can be more predatory than a payday loan or even the highest-interest credit card. In fact, a $2.99 fee on $50 for 5 days can accumulate to an annual percentage rate (APR) of 436%.

Instant was founded with the ethos that employees shouldn’t have to pay to get paid, and has since grown into the industry’s most responsible fee-free platform that bridges the gap between work day and payday.

As Instant embarks on the next stage of the Payday Revolution, the company’s redesigned website and new URL, paydayrevolution.com, represents its mission to engage, empower, and foster financial wellness for all. The brand updates reflect the shifting consumer demand for on-demand pay and the resources to prepare employers for economic uncertainty.

Additional highlights of Instant’s updated brand presence include:

• A retention savings calculator including estimated turnover reduction and annual savings that organizations could realize using Instant

• An updated color palette and illustrative style, to reflect warmth and delight for its users.

• A newly designed Instant Card, made more accessible, approachable and aligned with employee access to fee-free on-demand pay.

“After pioneering the earned wage access industry, we are proud to continue leading the charge by launching the Payday Revolution,” said Tal Clark, CEO of Instant Financial. “Instant’s rebrand is marking the start of a new era of on-demand pay for millions of Americans, protecting hard-working employees, and enabling them to achieve financial freedom and security.” 

Currencycloud, the experts in simplifying business in a multi-currency world, has partnered with UK-based venture capital platform Vauban, to enable the platform to be more accessible and permit global investors to launch and run their special purpose vehicles (SPVs) both easily and instantly.
 
For the platform to reach its true potential, speed was a necessity.  By integrating Currencycloud’s APIs into its platform, Vauban is now able to deliver SPVs and funds in hours rather than weeks or months.  Now, an SPV will be able  to set up bank accounts for each vehicle instantly and run payment processing related to capital calls. As a global company, with global investors and jurisdictions, Vauban benefits from Currencycloud’s competitive FX rates and wallet, which allows the platform to operate in multiple currencies in addition to reducing their FX risks.

Arik Oslerne, COO of Vauban says: “Currencycloud is a robust solution able to handle our banking needs and enable us to be truly global. As we continue to expand into new jurisdictions, enabling more people to get into venture capital and expand equity ownership, Currencycloud is right there with us to deliver on that promise and offer a seamless experience for our customers across the globe.”

Nick Cheetham, Chief Revenue Officer at Currencycloud, commented: “Vauban is on a mission to democratise private investment, a vision that only further amplifies our ethos of ‘backing your bold’. As a result, the partnership between Vauban and Currencycloud has levelled the playing field for investors. Now VCs of any size, anywhere, have the opportunity to invest via Vauban’s platform in startups whenever they want.”