Sage, the leader in accounting, financial, HR and payroll technology for small and mid-sized businesses, today announces increased investment in Sage Intacct.  Through a series of significant product updates and enhancements, more customers will be able to experience increased productivity and smoother business processes. 

Delivering against Sage’s ambition to become the trusted network for SMBs, the scale of Sage Intacct enables customers to automate processes, boost productivity and free up time to focus on running their businesses.

“Over the past year we have continued to deliver on our commitment to evolve our products and services, making improvements to workflow and connecting processes for our customers across business functions,” said Dan Miller, EVP Sage Intacct. “We are constantly striving to meet our new and existing customers’ needs through innovative solutions that help them make their businesses more efficient and focus on what matters most – reaching their full growth potential.”

Sage Intacct Product Enhancements shared at Sage Transform include:

Further internationalisation of Sage Intacct – Leveraging Sage’s global presence and compliance expertise, Sage Intacct is expanding its core financial offering into continental Europe, starting with France by the end of the year – the first non-English speaking country for Sage Intacct. 

This will enable multi-national customers, operating in France, to expand their operations with Sage Intacct faster and easier. It will also offer France-based companies the power of Sage Intacct’s modern cloud capabilities to simplify and automate their multi-entity financial operations giving them data and insights to better run their business. 

Sage Intacct core financials will be available in France by the end of the year.

Sage Intacct Manufacturing US – Following the Sage Intacct Manufacturing release in France and the UK earlier in 2022, Sage Intacct Manufacturing will be available for customers in the US from 2023. The cloud-native solution extends Sage Intacct to deliver industry capabilities for businesses specialising in discrete manufacturing and distribution, enabling them to streamline end-to-end operations and increase productivity.

Early adopters available in the US from Mid-October. General availability in the US is planned for the middle of 2023.

Sage has also shared the news on the continued partnership with Microsoft - providing customers with the option of hosting Sage Intacct on Azure as well as the capabilities through the Sage Intacct App for Microsoft Teams to submit and approve certain processes directly through the Application. 

This announcement was shared today at the annual Sage Transform event, designed for the Sage Intacct community of customers and partners, taking place in Orlando, Florida, from October 10-14 2022.   

TripActions, the all-in-one travel, corporate card, and expense management company, today announced its Series G financing at a post-money valuation of $9.2 billion. The raise, a combination of $154 million in equity from new and existing financial investors as well as a $150 million structured capital transaction led by Coatue, marks the third financing round for the company in three years. Since early 2020, TripActions has recorded a 2x-plus valuation increase, validating the company’s choice to double down on travel and payment innovation during the peak of the pandemic.

“TripActions is building the best travel and expense management solution in the world. The recent funding round shows not only the strength of its business model but also the value to companies looking to increase savings and enable responsible spending,” says TripActions CEO and co-founder, Ariel Cohen. “TripActions is proof that empowering users through relentless innovation and automation is the future of travel.”

In concert with the company’s growth, savings tools like dynamic travel policy, real-time reporting with benchmark data, traveller incentive programs, and Liquid’s built-in spend controls have worked to ensure that customers can continue to run at their best without letting costs run rampant. Automated features, like expense reporting, itemization, and reconciliation, ensure that employees are free to focus on their work — not paperwork.

“From the start, TripActions revolutionized business travel by automating, personalizing, and professionalizing the experience,” says Ben Horowitz, cofounder and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Despite a pandemic that brought business travel to a standstill, the company doubled down on innovation and now those bets are paying off in a big way.”

Joining the TripActions Board of Directors is Sandesh Patnam; Dan Rose, Chairman at Coatue Ventures, will additionally join the Board as an Observer.

“TripActions is a complete travel and expense platform,” says Patnam. “As the market shifts, companies will look to platforms that provide real value by increasing productivity and decreasing costs. TripActions’ growth over the past two years has proven the strength of its user-first, online approach and it is now well-positioned to capture this market. I am excited to join them on this journey.”

The funding will be used to accelerate the TripActions Group’s rapid global expansion, which in the past year includes the acquisitions of travel management companies Reed & Mackay, Comtravo, and Resia, as well as the launch of TripActions Liquid in Europe and office openings in Portugal, Germany, France, and the UK. As of the end of July 2022, TripActions currently has more than 2,500 employees across nearly 60 global offices.

“All road warriors have experienced the pain of booking flights, making last-minute changes, and submitting expenses,” says Rose. “TripActions is bringing modern software to make all of this more seamless. And at a time when companies are more focused than ever on controlling expenses, TripActions saves enterprise companies money by aligning employees’ incentives with the business. Coatue looks forward to supporting TripActions as it continues to scale this platform.”

First Central Insurance and Technology Group, a fast-growing private motor insurer and innovator in data, announced that it has embarked on Clausematch's compliance management platform to streamline its drafting, review and approval processes.  

“We have been impressed by the Clausematch team throughout our interactions with them. They have been extremely helpful, engaging and thorough in understanding our business so they can best support us in our goals. The system itself is flexible and has been easily configurable to our needs, and through the implementation, we have learned how to ensure it is future-proofed for the continued growth in scale and complexity of our business.” – Ben Lowing, Risk & Compliance Director commented.

“Our goal was to offer a solution for First Central that eliminated the burden of manually managing its compliance obligations. With a single platform, it is now possible in a few clicks to run the end-to-end lifecycle of policies so that they can easily be drafted, reviewed, approved, and finalised. Clausematch makes all of that instantly available in an easy-to-use repository for colleagues to access and attest to.” – Freddie Frith, Clausematch Head of Sales remarked. 

• 12.10.2022 -- 12:32 pm

Modulr has announced its membership in the Digital Pound Foundation community.

Since its inception in 2016, Modulr has grown to become the leading provider of embedded payments to businesses across the UK and Europe. Authorised by the UK’s FCA, the Central Bank of Ireland and de Nederlandsche Bank as an Electronic Money Institution, Modulr enables 200+ clients to automate, control and embed payments and is now processing an annualised transaction value of more than £100bn.

In addition, Modulr will be joining the Digital Pound Foundation’s Payments and Use Cases Working Groups, taking a leading role in both groups in driving the foundation’s agenda and thought leadership in these two key areas of our work.

Ritesh Tendulkar, Chief Innovation Officer at Modulr, commented: “At Modulr, it’s our purpose to enable growth and innovation by making money flow more efficiently through business and the economy. That’s why we’ve become a member of the Digital Pound Foundation to collaborate with other forward-thinking businesses to build the digital economy of the future.”

William Lorenz, Payment Strategy Director at Modulr, will now join the Digital Pound Foundation’s steering committee, further strengthening our ability to deliver on our mission to advocate for and demonstrate the societal impact and benefits to the UK that arise from a variety of new forms of digital money.

Claire Conby, Operations and Governance Lead at Digital Pound Foundation added: “We are delighted to welcome Modulr to the Digital Pound Foundation community and look forward to working with William and Ritesh as we continue with our analysis of the attributes and considerations for a well-designed digital pound. We will soon be increasing our focus on use case exploration, an area which we know is of particular interest to Modulr, so the addition of Modulr as a member at this juncture is extremely timely.”

FlapKap, the first tech-enabled revenue-based financing platform in the MENA region, revolutionising e-commerce growth, today announced the close of its $3.6M seed round.

The round included participation from Bolt by QED, Nclude, Outliers, and A15. This latest capital injection comes six months after the company’s pre-seed raise and coincides with the company recording significant milestones of a MoM growth of ~200% in amount of funding disbursed and number of serviced clients.

With the new funding, FlapKap plans to increase its capacity in helping more e-commerce businesses in the MENA region scale and maximise their growth potential, as well as consolidate its position as the region’s foremost and leading revenue-based financing player. The company aims to solidify its presence in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt by offering e-commerce businesses the ability to scale their inventory and digital ads now, while flexibly paying later.

Cofounded by Ahmad Coucha and Khaled Nassef, with founding team Sherif Bichara and Adel Hodroj, FlapKap enables e-commerce businesses to scale and grow by targeting businesses that have traditionally had limited access to bank or venture capital financing. FlapKap offers insights and analytics to e-commerce businesses to help them accelerate growth and swift access to working capital financing for deployment on inventory and digital marketing spend. The company prides itself on fast and data-driven decision-making, which allows it to make merchants an offer less than 48 hours after they sign up. Fees are paid back as a percentage of revenues, meaning that if revenues slow down, so do repayments, and merchants do not have to worry about late fees or penalties

Targeting e-commerce businesses which have been operational for at least 6 months, FlapKap’s new capital and low entry threshold means it is able to welcome a lot more online stores to its already expansive roster. FlapKap has so far worked with some of the region's most-promising e-commerce firms, some of which include Dresscode, Palma, Tam’s Shoemaker, and Raw African, amongst others, helping in some cases generate >85% increase in revenue and over 70% increase in net profits within a few months. FlapKap has also recently integrated its AI-based insights and financial data analytics with Shopify, Woocommerce, Facebook and Google, and expects to strike more partnerships with players in the ecosystem.

Speaking on the round, Ahmad Coucha, FlapKap CEO and Cofounder said, ‘As we develop our platform and expand our capacity to enable even more e-commerce platforms to attain their full growth potential, we're excited to be joined by prominent global investors with deep knowledge and extensive expertise in the revenue-based financing space, having previously invested in some of our international peers. Our rapid growth within a short period of time demonstrates the massive unmet demand in our region and, being founders ourselves, we take huge pride in being able to offer this founder-friendly financing to founders and entrepreneurs all across the region’.

Investor QED has invested in some of FlapKap’s most successful international peers such as Wayflyer and Fairplay, which have raised more than $900m in financing combined.

Gbenga Ajayi, Partner at QED commented, “Having invested and worked with similar companies to FlapKap across other regions such as Europe and Latin America, we are confident this team can attain similar success''.

Basil Moftah, Partner at Nclude added, “We value companies and entrepreneurs that create innovative solutions that push the envelope and are proud to support FlapKap's previously unavailable financial services to SMEs in the MENA regions''

Mohammed Almeshekah, Partner at Outliers commented, “Coucha and Khaled have combined their first-hand experience and insights at Kijami & N26 and hit the ground running with strong initial performance. We are thrilled to be part of their journey from the beginning''

Karim Beshara, Partner at A15 commented, “Having embarked on this journey with Ahmad from the very start, we are proud FlapKap's success so far. We are pleased with the team's momentum and are excited about the growth opportunities going forward''

The growing post-pandemic trend in online shopping presents a great opportunity for FlapKap to expand its specialised solution to solve the growth-destructive challenges of emerging online stores in the region. Recent research suggests that the e-commerce markets in Saudi Arabia, UAE and Egypt alone account for a combined $21.4 billion and is projected to grow by more than 50% to $33.3 billion in 2025. Also, as global shopping festivals such as Singles Day and Black Friday, popularly referred to as ‘White Friday’ in the MENA region, continue to rise in popularity and spend [MENA shoppers spent ~$6 billion on Black Friday in 2021], it is increasingly becoming imperative for online stores to prep themselves to take full advantage of the growing phenomenon.

Payable, a payments operations platform for businesses, has raised $6.1 million in a funding round led by CRV and Earlybird.

Founded by Checkout.com vets Daniel Yubi and Razvan Musca, Payable has built a platform that lets firms connect their banks and automate payments from initiation to reconciliation with a single API and dashboard.

Writes Yubi in a blog: "For a healthy economy, money needs to move efficiently between companies. Yet still in 2022 human intervention is required to download bank statements, reconcile payments, and initiate bank transfers. That's insane!"

He adds: "Our goal is for Payable to be the software that enables companies to bring their own corporate bank accounts, wallet provider or financial data source, so they can have one tool for initiating, tracking and reconciling payments."

11th Global Islamic Microfinance Forum (GIMF) will convene in Dubai – U.A.E on November 21 -22, 2022 under the theme of “Financial Inclusion, Outreach Strategies & Innovations” to explore and discuss innovative financial inclusion strategies that can create clear pathways to poverty alleviation. This Apex event is jointly organized by AlHuda CIBE FZ LLE, Islamic Microfinance Network, Pakistan Microfinance Network and Wings Media “The Alliance to Promote Islamic Finance and Microfinance globally”. Alliance members are an established name in the microfinance & financial inclusion sector with a vision to increase the outreach of financial services, especially with the unserved and marginalized segment. 

More than 30 countries will be participating in this prestigious event and around 25 international speakers will be addressing in the event. Majority of the speakers will be from industry leaders and experts. This event helps industry practitioners to join the common platform and strengthen the networking for industry development in true and innovative ways.

Mr. Muhammad Zubair, the Managing Director of AlHuda CIBE said that the 11th GIMF will explore how new and effective strategies (according to Shariah-compliant procedures) be formulated to alleviate poverty and for economic sustainability. He further said that now the time has come that International Organization like UN, ADB, IFC, USAID, GIZ, DIFD, and IFAD etc. play their role to alleviate poverty from the world by including Islamic Microfinance strategies to reduce poverty. The purpose of this forum is to gather the stakeholders under one platform, to find out the remedy to these problems to give strong support to the rapidly increasing Islamic Microfinance industry. A gathering of 120+ Participants are expected from almost 30 different countries to participate in the forum, wherein a large variety of topics will be covered including; Islamic Microfinance, Financial Inclusion, Evidence of Impact, Rural development, use of IT in Microfinance, Micro Takaful, Rural credit, Small business problems and solutions, and General Economic Development under Shariah rulings.

The Forum will be followed by two days Post Event Workshop on ‘’Practical Aspects of Islamic Micro, Agriculture & Rural Finance and Exposure Visit” from November 23 -24, 2022. To learn more please visit: http://www.alhudacibe.com/gimf2022/ .

The cybersecurity sector is leading the way for M&A and fundraising activity in 2022, says tech-focused investment bank ICON Corporate Finance, with deal activity for Q1-Q3 up 60% compared to 2020 for M&A and +22% for fundraising.

Revealed in ICON’s latest Cybersecurity report, the sector is proving recession-proof and remains a vital growth area, defying current troubling macroeconomic headwinds. Enterprises recognise that they must continue investing in cyber defences regardless to protect against an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape, and as a result of significant geopolitical and economic uncertainty. This in turn continues to drive M&A and fundraising deal activity. ICON’s report investigates the fundamentals behind why this is the case.

Key insights:

• The first three quarters of 2022 recorded 353 cybersecurity M&A deals, with a total value of $125 billion. As a result, the sector is on track to surpass pre-Covid levels
• Vendor platform consolidation, largely backed by Private Equity, is a major driver behind the sustained deal activity
• Fundraising activity remained in line with long-term trends: $15.4bn of VC money was invested in the sector globally across 572 deals Q1-Q3 
• After an 18-month-long bull run, public cybersecurity stocks have reset at lower levels but continue trading at a significant premium compared to the broader tech market. Growth is the main valuation driver: The top quartile is trading at 8.6x revenues, with growth at +34.4% 21-22E (3.6x revenues, and +6.1% growth, respectively, for the bottom quartile)
• Recent downgrades in valuations have led to a large number of take-private transactions - most recently, Vista Equity offered to acquire KnowBe4 at a valuation of $4.22 bn, which represents a valuation premium of nearly 39% to KnowBe4’s prior closing price on Sep 16 
• ICON predicts that consolidation will continue at pace as trade and Private Equity acquirers are ready to capitalise on the extraordinary market opportunity 

Protecting mission-critical data, applications and infrastructure remains a board-level investment priority for public and private organisations. The report highlights that from 2020 to 2022, average data breach costs surged 13% to $4.35m. Financial institutions became a particular target, with malware attacks doubling in H1 2022 and ransomware attacks increasing by 243% against financial targets.

Report author Florian Depner, Director of ICON Corporate Finance, explains: “In our report, we ask the key question: Is the cybersecurity sector and related deal activity recession-proof?

“The answer, in short, is a strong yes. Enterprises recognise that they must continue hardening their security defences to keep above water in the arms race between good and bad. Cybersecurity is mission-critical and companies have no choice but to keep investing given the uplift in malicious activity, and state-backed attacks. Consequently, capital will continue to flow into the sector, which in turn spurs M&A and fundraising activity.”

Florian Depner added: “We believe that cybersecurity deal activity, both in the US and Europe, will be fuelled by Private Equity, providing a more attractive exit alternative to existing shareholders than the IPO route, as demonstrated by KKR’s acquisition of diversified enterprise security specialist Barracuda for $3.9bn in April 2022.

“We also anticipate that Private Equity will continue injecting much-needed growth fuel into later-stage scale-up companies; a trend demonstrated by the BlackRock-backed $250m investment in Swiss-based storage management and personal backup services provider Acronis. These factors, combined with Private Equity backing buy-and-build strategies and vendor platform consolidation, and the fact that the three-year cyber security index for public sector stocks rose 61.5%, while NASDAQ rose just 35.5%, make cybersecurity players undeniably desirable. That’s creating a buoyant market for cybersecurity deals and investment.”