Today, PayU, the leading online payment service provider operating in over 50 emerging markets, announces that it is expanding into Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Costa Rica.  

Central America is an emerging e-commerce market, expected to deliver high growth over the next five years thanks to rapidly increasing financial inclusion and internet access. International purchases are particularly popular, accounting for almost two-thirds of e-commerce in Panama and El Salvador in 2021. This growth, in combination with a young, digitally-savvy demographic and a combined population of over 180m people, make Central America a key strategic market for consumer e-commerce. 

PayU will offer card processing for US dollars and local currencies including Lempira, Colon and Quetzal, as well as full PCI compliance. Strong security and anti-fraud capabilities will be integrated, including authentication protocol 3DS Secure 2.0, and advanced machine learning tools deployed to manage transaction risk. 

Access to these markets will deliver significant revenue-generation opportunities to global and regional merchants already using PayU’s payment solutions and attract new merchants looking to take advantage of Central America’s growing e-commerce landscape.  

PayU is already active across Latin America and parts of Central America, including Panama, so this expansion bolsters an already strong regional offering.  

Mario Shiliashki, Global CEO of PayU’s Global Payments Organization, comments: “At PayU, our mission is to build a world without financial borders where everyone can prosper. Our expansion into Central America is another important step on that journey and it reflects our commitment to providing the smoothest online payment experience for consumers in high-growth markets and merchants globally. Especially in these economically challenging times worldwide, we’re proud to be making fully compliant payment processing across Latin and Central America even easier, while driving growth for international merchants through access to new markets and consumer segments.” 

The 7^th Edition Connected Banking Summit - East Africa will be held on 7th of March in Nairobi, Kenya

The Connected Banking Series focuses on building future-oriented banking models by accelerating the pace of digital transformation and delivering a delightful customer experience in line with policy and regulations while ensuring the highest standards of privacy and security.

The Summit will host leaders and experts from across the region representing Banks, Insurance Companies, FinTechs and TechFins, Digital and NeoBanks, Non-Banking Financial Organizations, Cooperatives, Investments Funds, Asset Management Companies to discuss and deliberate on how integrated solutions are shaping the future of banking.

The International Center for Strategic alliances (ICSA) are the Organisers of the Leading Banking Summit Connected Banking Summit 2022- (Formerly Africa’s Digital Banking Summit) is all set to go live with the 7th Edition Connected Banking Summit East Africa which is themed as “Accelerating Digital Inclusion Through Sustainable Transformation”.

The Summit goes live on 7th of March 2023 in Nairobi, Kenya with 250+ Delegates in attendance.

Summit Focus on:

• Digital Ecosystem and Latest Innovations 

• Future of FIs in the Digital Era 

• Customer Experience and Digital Transformation 

• DeFi, Lending and Financial Inclusion 

• Strengthening Operational Resilience 

• Security – An all-pervasive model 

• Future of Money: Cash v/s digital currencies 

• Digital Identity and Financial Security 

• Synergies Between traditional FIs and Telecoms 

• Role of AI, ML and Robotics in Financial Services 

The past Editions have inputs from:

• Makabelo Malumane, Managing Director, Head of Transaction Banking, Kenya and East Africa, Standard Chartered Bank.

• Mukwandi Chibesakunda, Chief Executive Officer, Zambia National Commercial Bank (Zanaco) PLC.

• Karanja Gichiri, Vice President Banking Capital Markets and Advisory, Citi Bank.

• Shaun Edmeston, Director of Customer experience, Absa Group Mauritius.

• Obinna Ukwuani, Chief Digital Officer, Bank of Kigali.

The Connected Banking Series is an ideal platform for networking with industry players; senior managers, decision-makers, and practitioners operating in the industry and making the most of banking technologies.

SteelEye, the compliance technology and data analytics firm, has appointed Christopher Pennington as Chief Revenue Officer. This new role will strengthen SteelEye’s customer engagement and commercial functions as the firm continues to scale globally.

Christopher is a seasoned and esteemed commercial leader with over 30 years of experience in Big Tech, having held senior roles at Microsoft and Google. He joins SteelEye with a proven track record of driving high-growth sales organisations.

Having worked at some of the industry’s most iconic brands, including Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and Google, Christopher has an exceptional acumen for building successful teams and transforming business outcomes. He will be responsible for all SteelEye commercial revenue streams, focusing on delivering high-value and impactful propositions to clients.

Christopher brings a global perspective to business and leadership, having established and run successful teams across America, Europe, and Asia. He will report to SteelEye’s CEO, Matt Smith, and will join the company’s executive management team.

In September, SteelEye announced a $21 million Series B fundraise to support accelerated growth and an expansion into North America. This year alone, SteelEye has increased its headcount by 35% as it scales in line with its growth opportunities, which Christopher will now lead.

Matt Smith, CEO of SteelEye, commented:

“The SteelEye executive management team encompasses an abundance of specialist RegTech and financial services expertise, crucial to our success to date. We believe firmly in the value of diverse perspectives, including professional backgrounds. Christopher’s experience and achievements with several Big Tech firms will be invaluable as we now seek to drive revenue growth. I am delighted to have secured someone of his calibre. Christopher’s appointment will bolster our executive team and enhance our revenue generation as we transition from start-up to scale-up. I have no doubt he is the right person to drive our commercial business forward.”

Christopher added:

“I am incredibly excited to be joining SteelEye at this critical point, as the firm expands in the US and eyes growth opportunities in APAC and beyond. Under the leadership of Matt Smith and the management team, SteelEye has established an enviably strong position in the industry, as evidenced by its success to date. I look forward to leading and driving SteelEye’s next phase of growth.”

Paga, the payments and financial services ecosystem for Africa, has launched its ‘Making Life Possible’ brand campaign. The campaign tells the story of the Paga Orange ship, which has empowered people to simplify their lives and businesses for over a decade.

Paga is one of Africa’s most pioneering fintech companies. Since its inception, the company has been building an ecosystem to enable the African consumer to send, pay, and bank digitally.

With over 20 million unique users in Nigeria alone and set to reach 40-50 million (Nigerian) users in the next five years, Paga’s mission has been to simplify payments and financial services for businesses and individuals. The company’s infrastructure has become Nigeria’s principal platform, and since 2012, Paga has processed over N6.1 trillion in payments on its platform - with the latest N2 trillion taking just eight months, demonstrating the company’s exponential growth and soaring engagement levels.

Paga’s mission is vital. 57% of Africans still do not have a bank account. In larger economies such as Nigeria, the figure is 60%. Cash is still king in Africa, used in 90% of all transactions. Paga’s goal is to make it simple for 1 billion people to access and use their money. While the company’s well-established agent network has been a vital channel for accomplishing that goal, it has always been about ‘Making Life Possible’ and making payments simple for everyone. This campaign showcases the ecosystem Paga has built to make that a reality.

By making payments and financial services easy to process, Paga is helping businesses and consumers to take control of their daily lives. Day-to-day, this means a technology platform that works consistently, with a 99% uptime and a first-class user experience, making life easy – anytime, anywhere.

Paga is ‘Making Life Possible’ for everybody, whatever they do:

• For consumers via the Paga App: to send, pay, and bank.

• For merchants via the Doroki app: to collect payments and grow their businesses.

• For agents: to start earning money by assisting consumers.

• For Fintech developers: to collaborate, build and share via the Paga platform.

• For third-party partners: to build, launch, and grow with Paga’s robust payment APIs.

• Fore entrepreneurs: to earn, manage their businesses and build communities

Paga welcomes every voyager to the Paga Orange ship!

Tayo Oviosu, Paga’s founder and Chief Executive Officer, said:

“We’re thrilled to launch our ‘Making Life Possible’ campaign. The campaign is about the impact of what we’re about - making life possible and easier for everybody. Paga simplifies your life as you try to accomplish various things each day. Whether it’s sitting down to watch a football match and realizing your internet subscription needs to be renewed, listening to your favourite songs on Spotify, paying for your meal at a restaurant, or getting a loan to make a purchase. By using Paga, you make all these activities seamless. There is something for everybody with Paga, and it's never too late to join the Orange ship!”

The future looks amazing. As a pioneer, Paga has built a core payments infrastructure that everyone can get value from. After a decade of remarkable progress, the next step is doing more for the right people – consumers, businesses, and SMEs. Paga welcomes everybody to join them or stay with them on this journey.

DKK Partners, a leading fintech company, which specialises in emerging markets (EM) and foreign exchange (FX) liquidity, has opened a Ghana operation. The office, which will serve as a hub for the booming African market, will be led by entrepreneur Sam Nti, who joins as director, and will include an additional four full-time staff.

The expansion comes following a record year of trading for DKK, with the company’s revenues rising to £63m – up from £3m the previous year. The new operation will be based in The Atlantic Tower building at Airport City, in Ghana’s capital, Accra. The location was chosen by DKK to support prominent banks in the key financial districts of the country.

The new operation has already completed KYC (know your customer) verification for over 50 per cent of its customer base which includes market-leading companies and banks. The Ghana operation expects to begin formally trading in the first quarter of 2023 and will continue to onboard key importers with a high demand for FX, following the Bank of Ghana withdrawal of FX support in certain industries.

DKK, founded by capital markets specialist Khalid Talukder, previously of UBS, Citi & Deutsche Bank, and Dominic Duru of RBS and Citi, enables businesses to manage currency risk in frontier markets.

Key services include offering virtual IBAN accounts, allowing customers to unlock access to new territories and currencies, as well as EM liquidity, giving direct access to real-time pricing and execution across the frontier, emerging and G10 market currencies.

Sam Nti, director, DKK Partners said, “I’m excited to be joining such an ambitious and forward-looking company which combines FX expertise with actual on-the-ground presence.”

“The Ghanaian market deals immensely in the importation and has most of the country’s goods priced in foreign currency and not the local currency. This makes the demand for foreign currency high, following the Bank of Ghana withdrawing their Foreign Exchange support to banks and other financial institutions to fund the importation of some goods like rice, vegetable oil and the like. This increases the room of opportunities for DKK to strive and reflects a promising and profitable future for DKK in Ghana.”

Dominic Duru, Co-founder of DKK Partners comments said, “We’re thrilled to welcome Sam to the team to lead our Ghana operation. He brings with him extensive business experience, local market knowledge and skills to further expand our business at a time when FX services are in high demand.”

Temenos today announced that a leading US financial institution is extending its relationship with Temenos to include its international private banking business. The Temenos wealth management platform will support the bank’s strategic transition to a cloud-based core banking system and help drive growth in Europe and the Asia-Pacific (APAC) as it looks to transform its operations and drive efficiencies at scale while offering first-class services and products to its clients.

Max Chuard, Chief Executive Officer, Temenos, said: “We are excited to be partnering with one of the world’s leading financial institutions and supporting them with their digital transformation journey. By delivering a state-of-the-art wealth management platform in the cloud, Temenos will support the bank’s expansion into new markets. Temenos has been at the forefront of innovation, leading in the wealth management space and this leading bank joins the raft of top tier customers that are using Temenos for their wealth management business.” 

SEON is advising online businesses to batten down the hatches, as online crooks prepare to make one final fraudulent push before the holidays. Leveraging its own data and customer insights, the company believes more fraud attempts will be made during the week of 12th December than in any other week in 2022.

According to SEON:

• The percentage of average declined transactions was higher during the week of 12th December than any other week in 2021 due to elevated fraud risk.
• There was a 255% increase in bot usage on fraud attempts during this period in 2021, which should be expected again in 2022.
• Unlike Black Friday weekend, where eCommerce merchants are mainly targeted, fraudsters are more likely to attack iGaming providers in the run-up to Christmas as they prioritize cash over products.

In the final run-up to the holidays, fraud prevention company, SEON is warning all online businesses to brace for one last surge in fraud attempts. That’s because last year, during the week of 12th December, the company’s system declined more than 100,000 transactions per day for merchants in the eCommerce, iGaming, and online loan sectors. Now, SEON is expecting even bigger numbers in 2022, as fraudsters look to take advantage ahead of the big day.

However, unlike Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which see particularly big increases in fraud attempts targeted at eCommerce merchants, the run-up to Christmas is dominated by online crooks attempting to defraud iGaming providers. Clearly, fraudsters don’t have much faith in their local post service to deliver their stolen goods in time for Christmas and would rather use their nefarious methods to generate cash and bonuses instead.

This change in target seems to also influence the methods that fraudsters use during this period. Whereas during Black Friday weekend, when online crooks look to utilize fake accounts, the week of 12th December sees SEON’s system flagging a big rise in suspicious web browser profiles. In practice, this means user accounts with suspiciously old browser versions or ones that demonstrate behaviours associated with online bots.

Speaking on the trends, Tamas Kadar, CEO and Co-Founder of SEON commented: “The run-up to the holidays is busy for everyone, including online fraudsters. Any business expecting a holiday from this threat will be disappointed by our research, which clearly highlights the week of 12th December as being the busiest single week for online fraud attempts of the year. Thankfully, solutions like ours can help in the fight back against this challenge.”

Recently, SEON, which has just launched a ‘forever free’ version of its online fraud prevention solution, warned online businesses about the fraud risks associated with Cyber Monday. The company’s prediction has been supported by recent reports from TransUnion and BigCommerce, which have highlighted that a significant increase in online fraud attempts did occur during this period.

TrueLayer, Europe’s leading open banking platform, today announced its collaboration with innovative European crypto payment platform Swaps.app. Estonia-based Swaps.app is a crypto and fiat payment gateway providing a platform for businesses to offer cryptocurrency purchases and payments on their websites.

Swaps.app was founded in 2019 with a vision to make integrating cryptocurrency payments easier for companies of all sizes. While it focuses on providing B2B crypto services, Swaps.app also makes the crypto buying experience easier for individuals through its multifunctional widget and mobile app, available both on App Store and Google Play.

To complement its digital-first experience, Swaps.app is partnering with TrueLayer, using its open banking infrastructure to deliver secure, lower-cost instant bank payments in the UK. With TrueLayer Payments embedded in the Swaps.app platform, customers benefit from an improved experience when funding their investments. 

Payments powered by TrueLayer remove the need to enter any card or bank account details. Instead, customers simply select the Instant Bank Payment option, authenticate their identity and confirm the payment, removing the risk of human error. As a result, Swaps.app bypasses card networks and their interchange fees, and safeguards itself as all customer payments are authenticated directly with the bank.

Georgios Kalmpazidis, CEO and Founder of Swaps.app, said: “The central principle behind Swaps.app is to make the onramp to cryptocurrencies as straightforward as possible. We’re delighted to be working with a market leader in TrueLayer to support our business across the UK and Europe with a user experience that is more intuitive and faster.”

As well as improving the customer experience through smoother deposits, open banking payments with TrueLayer provide Swaps.app with numerous operational benefits. This includes lower processing fees compared to other deposit methods and real-time payment confirmation and settlement, providing Swaps.app with the assurance that every transaction has been authorised and received into the customers’ accounts.

Nick Tucker, Head of Financial Services at TrueLayer, added: “Speed is the name of the game when it comes to crypto investments. Slow settlements can cause customers to lose trust in platforms and miss out on opportunities. Our partnership will help Swaps.app deliver the fast, frictionless, safe and secure experiences that only open banking payments can provide.”

Leading UK food and catering supplier JJ Foodservice has partnered with Solaris and Ecospend to implement an open banking payment solution to enable its 100,000 customers to pay for orders direct from their business bank accounts instead of through card transactions.

The solution enhances JJ Foodservice’s customer journey, making payments and refunds instant while also giving the wholesaler a huge potential for cost savings by removing the cost of high business card transaction charges, which can be as much as 3%. Currently, 44% of customers are already choosing to pay by this option.

JJ Foods is one of Britain’s fastest-growing food wholesalers, reporting sales of £270m for the year ended March 31st, a 22.5% increase of the previous year. The Enfield headquartered firm has 11 depots around the UK and employees more than 750 people.

Mick Dudley, Chief Technology Officer at JJ Foodservice said: “By partnering with Solaris and Ecospend we are making our customer journey that bit smoother, by offering a payment method that can take payments and provide refunds in real-time.

“This will help to give customers a more real-time view of their costs with us, while also offering of another payment method. It also decreases our reliability on card transactions, which typically incur high transaction fees. Such cost savings play a key role in helping us to continue to grow the business and after one month we have already seen 44% customers opt to place orders via the open banking solution.”

The closed-loop direct account-to-account ‘pay by bank’ solution will be offered to customers at the online checkout, which will signal the start of the open banking journey via Ecospend with payments crediting a JJ Foods account held with Solaris. Refunds and returned payments can also be initiated to debit the same account.

Andy Lyons, Managing Director of regulated Sales Europe at Solaris said: “JJ Foodservice is a true innovator in the sector and this solution offers customers a new way to pay, while enabling JJ Foodservice to make substantial savings on typically high business card charges.

“The successful roll-out of the solution is testament to our strong partnership with Ecospend and our capability to bring innovative payment solutions to a range of industry sectors.”

James Hickman, COO at Ecospend added: “This is a fantastic example of how partnerships can provide businesses with sector leading payment solutions, helping organisations that process a high volume of transactions to stand out in their market.”