Leading UK wealth manager Evelyn Partners has invested further in its revamped retail investing platform Bestinvest with a number of strategic marketing and commercial appointments.

Following his successful project management of Bestinvest’s transformation, from a conventional do-it-yourself investing platform to a hybrid proposition with best-in-class digital features and free in-person investment coaching, Oliver Plant has been appointed Head of Bestinvest.

Evelyn Partners’ Chief Marketing Officer Simonetta Rigo said: ‘It’s been an incredible year which has seen the successful relaunch of Bestinvest under Oliver’s expert guidance. Since then, we’ve been delighted with the reception of our new proposition from not just Bestinvest clients but also sectoral commentators, platform analysts and comparison services.’

Following its live launch in May, the new hybrid Bestinvest has just won the Stock & Share ISA Innovation category in Finder.com’s 2022 Investing & Saving Awards. 

Rigo added: ‘We’re continuing to make waves as people discover Bestinvest’s unique range of features and services, including the free investment coaching. Oliver and his team are really driving the project forwards, with a big focus on the app.’

As well as continuing to develop the Bestinvest proposition, and helping Simonetta Rigo lead its marketing drive, Plant has been busy building up the Bestinvest commercial team.

The following new appointments have been made[1]:

·       Martin Pezet as Head of Bestinvest Marketing: Having spent the last six years driving tremendous growth at AJ Bell Youinvest, Martin brings a wealth of industry experience across marketing channels, driving new customer acquisition, and will increase the awareness and salience among our key audience base.

·       Louise Revell as Head of Bestinvest Proposition, who joins us from global management consulting firm Oliver Wyman. With her experience of helping both traditional financial services and fintech firms to address their most pressing issues, Louise will lead the growth and further differentiation of Bestinvest.

·       Will Pointing as Bestinvest Partnerships, Performance and Pricing Manager, having undertaken similar roles in the past at NewDay, WPP and MoneySuperMarket. With his experience of running innovative fintech partnerships using performance-driven analytics, he will maximise commercial opportunities with a range of new initiatives.

Oliver Plant said: ‘It’s very exciting to welcome Louise, Will and Martin on board to develop the Bestinvest proposition and raise its profile. We believe we are offering retail investors something new, which also happens to be great value, and these appointments demonstrate not just our determination to build on its initial successes but also the wider business’s belief in Bestinvest.’

Simonetta Rigo added: ‘As a leading wealth manager with a huge financial planning reach, Evelyn Partners was already unusual in also having an execution-only investing platform in Bestinvest. Now in its transformational hybrid form, Bestinvest not only offers something for more confident investors but also provides greater support for those needing a helping hand, so it bridges the gap between DIY investing and our advised investment services. 

‘It does this by offering all clients free person-to-person investment coaching as well as one-off affordable packages of regulated advice, all of which we are hearing from Bestinvest clients really helps to clarify their goals and hone their investment strategy. Bestinvest is an essential plank in Evelyn Partners’ purpose of putting the power of good advice into more hands, and these appointments reflect the seriousness of that purpose.’ 

London-based Plug-and-Play Finance specialist, Weavr, has today announced the launch of its latest whitepaper, entitled ‘Embedded finance: Bringing value into focus.’ The paper, which has been created in collaboration with leading industry experts, reveals a shared and focused vision for the future of embedded finance.

A hot topic amongst the fintech industry, embedded finance is top of the agenda for many. Yet, as Weavr’s whitepaper reveals, there has remained much to discover and understand about how a company can use embedded finance to unleash transformation and make the biggest impact.

The illuminating whitepaper, which is now available to read for free on its website, provides a comprehensive, digestible overview of how embedded finance is perceived today, where it stands to add the most benefits and what businesses require to make that happen. The whitepaper takes a detailed look at three sector-specific applications of the concept.

As Weavr’s whitepaper identifies, individuals are already benefitting from embedded finance technologies on a daily basis, yet the market is predicted to explode within the next five years. With boundless potential for businesses and end users to significantly benefit from the nascent technology. The success of this will be heavily reliant on education around the concept, a point of concurrence between the leading experts in the paper.

In publishing the embedded finance whitepaper, Weavr intends to inform those working in, and alongside the sector. The thought-provoking report makes the case that embedded finance has the potential to transform sectors for the better, and facilitate meaningful, long-term benefits across multiple sectors, however, in order to unleash these changes, education and implementation must be addressed. In fact, as the whitepaper highlights, Weavr is already providing the tools needed to realise the benefits with its Financial Plug-ins.

Speaking on the publication of the new whitepaper, Alex Mifsud, Co-Founder and CEO of Weavr commented: “Embedded finance has all the hallmarks of an unstoppable force that is revolutionising business, just like eCommerce did 20 years ago. We created this paper because we have a vision where most financial services are purchased and consumed through digital products and services that serve broader and more fundamental customer needs like health, education, work, family, and leisure. In these sectors, the focus would become more on the benefits of banking and less on the banking itself – with significant advantages to be had by both the businesses and end users.

The paper maps out how this vision might be realised, drawing on both our own expertise and that of respected industry leaders who have been generous with their advice on how the real-world benefits of embedded finance can be realised, as well as sharing industry-specific examples to show the concept working in practice.”

At its core, Weavr is on a mission to enable any business to integrate any financial service anywhere its customers need it. The company is doing this by offering its Plug-and-Play Finance solution, which offers simplicity, flexibility, and accessibility to all innovators. What’s more, by adopting Weavr’s solution, innovators don’t need to worry about the burden of upholding compliance, regulation, and data security - because Weavr does it for them behind the scenes. Each of Weavr’s Financial Plug-ins can be tailored to virtually unlimited use cases and are already gaining significant traction with innovative businesses.

In response to the need for faster, more efficient payment options, Australia’s New Payment Platform (NPP) has begun the rollout for its much-anticipated PayTo digital payments solution, augmenting real-time, account-to-account payments. As a primary participant for NPP Australia, leading independent payments solution provider Cuscal Limited is ready to enable PayTo’s back-office needs and requirements supported by the Concourse Financial Software Suite^® from leading payments software provider BHMI.

Cuscal enables NPP payment processing and settlement services for more than 60 banks and payment service providers – half of the market participants. BHMI's Concourse helps extend the back-office support for Cuscal's NPP settlement and dispute processing to PayTo, including enhanced reporting functions and dispute support for investigations and claims that pass through Cuscal’s API connection with the NPP system. PayTo functions must also align to ISO 20022 payments messaging standards like all NPP transactions, which Concourse will continue to support under the new service’s capabilities.

In addition to enhanced visibility and control over payment options, PayTo users will also be able to authorize third parties to initiate payments on their behalf at the NPP network level. Since 2018, NPP Australia has allowed money to move between different financial institutions’ NPP-connected accounts in seconds, but customers had to initiate payments themselves.

From this month, several Cuscal-sponsored payment service providers will begin offering PayTo to merchants and businesses, including Azupay, Ezypay, Monoova, Paypa Plane and Zai.

“We are excited at the speed and efficiency PayTo will offer to users, but when it comes to the real-time back-office processes like disputes, you not only have to be fast, you must also be certain,” said Nathan Churchward, Payments Domain Lead for Cuscal Limited. “BHMI’s Concourse helps us ensure both while providing the power and flexibility necessary to support the continuously evolving needs and broad use cases empowered by PayTo for the NPP platform.”

“We are pleased to continue our ongoing partnership with Cuscal helping to ensure its back-office support is ready to meet the demands for NPP Australia’s evolving capabilities like PayTo,” said Lynne Baldwin, President of BHMI. “Concourse offers our clients the configurability they need to keep pace with the shifting digital payments and transaction landscape. We look forward to PayTo’s rollout and helping Cuscal continue to deliver the best experiences for their NPP clients and users.”

CUBE Global (“CUBE”), a global leader in Automated Regulatory Intelligence (“ARI”), today announced a strategic growth investment from Bregal Milestone (“Milestone”), a leading technology growth capital firm with c. €1.2 billion of capital raised dedicated to investments in high-growth, market-defining technology companies. 

The investment marks the first institutional capital investment for CUBE. Serving a number of the world’s largest financial institutions, CUBE will leverage the investment to help deepen product capabilities for customers, fuel further international expansion, and accelerate overall growth both organically and through acquisition. 

As global regulations continue to rapidly evolve, compliance departments – particularly within larger financial institutions – are finding it difficult to clearly identify applicable requirements and their impact across multiple lines of business, jurisdictions, products, and services. Given large financial institutions are now spending between 10-15% of their operating costs on regulatory compliance each year and fines are in the billions, immediate action is needed. 

CUBE’s ARI RegPlatform transforms complex regulatory change management and compliance processes, enabling compliance teams to significantly cut existing costs and move highly skilled individuals up the value chain whilst also reducing risk. By capturing changing or emerging regulations and using AI to automatically enrich and map them to customers’ policies, procedures, and controls, CUBE’s solutions mean firms are alerted to regulations that matter to them instantly. Therefore, freeing up compliance departments to focus on preventing non-compliance and ensuring good governance practices.

Philippe Lautenberg, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Bregal Milestone, commented: “We are highly enthusiastic to partner with CUBE for this next phase of growth. As a founder-led, category-leading Regulatory Technology (“RegTech”) business, benefiting from powerful regulatory tailwinds and market momentum, we believe CUBE is an innovation leader, and one of Europe’s most exciting high-growth technology companies. We look forward to working with Ben and his ambitious team to further develop their business and drive growth.”

CUBE Founder & CEO, Ben Richmond, added: “Raising this level of investment in the current market from such a high-quality growth capital investor is a significant validation of both our market position and vision. Given the current macro environment, customers across financial services and beyond will want to partner with providers that have a strong track record and a clear vision with the ability to execute – now is the right time for us to bring in a strategic partner.” 

“We are building for the long term to ensure both our customers and their stakeholder’s success. Milestone is a strategic partner for CUBE that share our vision to be a category-defining RegTech leader. Our customers can be confident in CUBE being with them every step of the way in delivering on their regulatory compliance strategy.”

This strategic growth investment from Milestone will support CUBE’s next phase of expansion by leveraging both the growth firm’s extensive experience in scaling global technology companies and its in-house value creation team, Milestone Performance Partners. In addition, the firm expects to provide ongoing support for CUBE’s further geographical expansion and to extend CUBE’s technology edge for further organic growth.

CUBE’s advisors on the investment included; Investec Bank Plc, who led the advisory, Taylor Wessing LLP for legal and Buzzacott LLP for financial and tax. 

Milestone’s advisors on the investment included; ICAG Partners for commercial due diligence, Alvarez and Marsal’s (A&M) for both financial and tax due diligence, Endava Private Equity Group for technology due diligence, Deloitte’s Mid-market M&A Tax team for the transaction structuring, as well as Goodwin for the legal work. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

• 12.10.2022 -- 03:25 am

JPMorgan Chase and Visa are to establish connectivity between their global private blockchain networks, Liink and B2B Connect.

Under the collaboration Visa B2B Connect will utilise Confirm, a new tool from Liink to validate new accounts for cross-border payments and to approve accounts when new users onboard.

Confirm allows institutions to safely validate account information prior to sending a payment, ensuring fewer payment returns due to missing or incorrect information, and mitigating against fraudulent activity by pre-validating account information so participants know beforehand if the instructed beneficiary matches the owner of the account they are paying.

JPMorgan launched Confirm in pilot mode last year and has just signed Deutche Bank as a founding member for the product in Emea. The US bank is looking to recruit founding member banks across Apac, Latam and NAMR with the aim of growing its coverage to span across 35000 banks and more than two billion accounts.

The service is expected to be live in 10 countries by end-2022 and projected to increase its presence in over 30 countries in 2023.

Alex Littleton, global head of Confirm, says: "Confirm’s growth is heavily influenced by network effects. Therefore, naming Deustche Bank as a founding member, while also establishing interconnectivity to Visa B2B’s blockchain, will accelerate our adoption on a global scale.”

Founded in 2017, JPMorgan's Liink currently has 75+ global participants that are live on the network and has so far processed 60m+ messages.

Global information and insights company TransUnion recently hosted its UK Summit, bringing together leading names from banking, fintech and more, to discuss tackling the cost of living crisis, financial inclusion and next-generation lending.

TransUnion’s latest Consumer Pulse highlighted the impact the current economic picture is having on spending. Nearly six in 10 consumers say they’ve decreased discretionary spend over the last three months, with the same proportion (58%) intending to make further reductions in the three months ahead. Many (62%) plan to shift their spending toward utility bills and credit card payments instead.   

“With a sizeable portion of UK consumers reaching their expenditure limit, we as an industry need to be there for consumers to help them manage their finances and weather any financial uncertainty,” said TransUnion’s UK CEO Satrajit “Satty” Saha. “In these turbulent times, lenders need as comprehensive a picture as possible of a consumer’s financial standing to understand risk and to be able to provide appropriate finance. TransUnion offers differentiated and actionable insights into consumer behaviour that can support both businesses and consumers through this challenging economic climate – aligned to our mission of using Information for Good.”

As part of the panel debate on ‘Next Generation Lending’, TransUnion’s UK chief product officer Shail Deep and panellists covered new methods of reaching consumers, such as the ubiquitous buy now, pay later, which she described as “the hottest trend in lending”, or through heavy investment in digital experiences, something HSBC referred to as “core to meeting customer needs.”  

Talking about digital acceleration in the industry, Shail Deep commented: “Over the last few years, we’ve seen a rapid shift to digital and app-first offerings. These developments seek to reach consumers and capture market share through ease of access, informative user experiences, and of course, low-friction digital journeys. With these digital offerings gaining traction, consumer expectations have shifted away from traditional lending and payment products toward low-cost or free services with convenient digital experiences.”

Managing director of consumer interactive at TransUnion in the UK, Kelli Fielding, picked up the debate on customer experience, focusing on building brand loyalty and enabling trust with consumers as she hosted a panel discussion on financial inclusion.

Kelli Fielding explained: “We believe that credit inclusion is crucial to meeting consumer needs. In 2022, working with our partners, we’ve provided over 12 million consumers with access to their TransUnion credit information and enabled credit education. As consumers become more financially aware, they improve their credit profile and can access more credit products at better rates. As well as helping people to achieve life goals, such as buying a home or car, this also helps businesses and our economy to thrive.”

Four key steps for empowering credit inclusion:
 

1. Credit education – helping people to understand their credit information and how it’s used is essential in supporting wider financial inclusion and something Lloyds Banking Group spoke passionately about at TransUnion’s Summit. This follows the successful implementation of its ‘Your Credit Score’ service, which saw almost one million of the bank’s customers check their TransUnion credit score for the first time in April this year, and currently has over four million of the bank's customers registered for the service
 

2. Supporting consumers through the cost of living crisis – with TransUnion’s recent Consumer Pulse study showing that over a quarter (26%) of consumers may struggle to pay all their bills in the coming months, lenders need to be engaging with customers, pre-empting any financial difficulties and offering payment plans where appropriate.

TransUnion’s affordability solutions analyse historical trends and predict future consumer credit behaviour, helping lenders to understand their customers on a deeper level and make more accurate and better lending decisions
 

3. Giving consumers a clear value exchange – Open Banking is becomingly more widely adopted and can help provide further insights and granular detail of an individual’s spending but relies on consumer participation. TransUnion’s Kelli Fielding called out the need to make clearer to consumers the benefits of sharing data, such as swifter onboarding, greater security, and potentially access to better rates when it comes to finding finance

 4. Broader awareness – fintech Monevo spoke of the need for credit education to extend beyond finance providers during the panel discussion.  TransUnion shares this belief and recently launched a new free online teaching resource for UK schools: Credit Score Explained. It aims to give secondary school students the best start to their financial life, helping them learn about managing money and understanding from an early age the role that their credit report and score will play

To learn more about TransUnion’s TrueVision and how it can harness trended credit data to give a deeper view of consumer behaviour visit: https://www.transunion.co.uk/product/true-vision

Provenir, a global leader in AI-powered risk decisioning software, today announced that its AI-Powered Decisioning Platform has been named a gold winner in the “AI Platform” category in Juniper Research’s Future Digital Awards – Fintech & Payments.

The Fintech & Payments awards program honours the very best technologies across the fintech, payments, fraud and security, banking and blockchain sectors. Since 2008, the Juniper Research Future Digital Awards have been awarded to technology companies at the forefront of their respective fields: companies that deliver imaginative, innovative products or services that have the potential to disrupt their ecosystems and provide significant benefits to their target audience.

Provenir’s industry-leading AI-Powered Decisioning Platform empowers fintechs and financial services organizations to unlock the true value of data, combining universal data access with simplified AI and automated, real-time decisioning. With data and AI more accessible and usable than before, financial institutions can automate complex decisions that drive world-class customer experiences, addressing identity, credit and fraud for quicker onboarding and serving.

According to a recent study, AI-enabled risk decisioning is seen as key to ushering in improvements in many areas, including fraud prevention (78%), automating decisions across the credit lifecycle (58%), improving cost savings and efficiency (57%), more competitive pricing (51%) and improving the accuracy of credit risk profiles (47%). The study also revealed that 55% per cent of respondents who plan to invest in an automated credit risk decisioning system consider AI to be one of the most important features.

“Provenir is honoured to be named a gold winner for AI Platforms in Juniper Research’s Future Digital Awards and to be among a prestigious group of innovative technology award winners advancing the fintech and payments sector,” said Kathy Stares, Executive Vice President Americas at Provenir. “Provenir’s AI-Powered Decisioning Platform delivers a comprehensive real-time view of decisioning performance, easy access to third-party and historical data, as well as automated and auto-optimized AI, enabling organizations to deliver intelligent decisioning needed to grow their business.”

Today, Google Cloud and Coinbase announced a new, long-term strategic partnership to better serve the growing Web3 ecosystem and its developers.

The collaboration will involve Coinbase selecting Google Cloud as a strategic cloud provider to build an advanced exchange and data services. Coinbase will use Google Cloud's powerful compute platform to process blockchain data at scale, and enhance the global reach of its crypto services by leveraging Google's premium fibre-optic network. Coinbase will also build its global data platform on Google Cloud's secure infrastructure and leverage its leading data and analytics technologies to provide Coinbase customers with machine learning-driven crypto insights.

As part of the partnership, Google Cloud is positioned to enable select customers, starting with those in the Web3 ecosystem, to pay for its cloud services via select cryptocurrencies. Powered by Coinbase Commerce—which enables merchants globally to accept cryptocurrency payments in a decentralized way—the new payments experience will benefit Google Cloud's customers and partners by increasing the optionality of payments for Google Cloud services.

Through this partnership, Web3 developers can also access Google's BigQuery crypto public datasets, which will be powered by Coinbase Cloud Nodes, across leading blockchains. The integration will allow developers to instantly and reliably operate Web3-based systems without the need for expensive and complex infrastructure.

"We are excited Google Cloud has selected Coinbase to help bring Web3 to a new set of users and provide powerful solutions to developers," said Brian Armstrong, Co-founder and CEO of Coinbase. "With more than 100 million verified users and 14,500 institutional clients, Coinbase has spent more than a decade building industry-leading products on top of blockchain technology. We could not ask for a better partner to help execute our vision of building a trusted bridge into the Web3 ecosystem."

"We want to make building in Web3 faster and easier, and this partnership with Coinbase helps developers get one step closer to that goal," said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. "We're proud Coinbase has chosen Google Cloud as its strategic cloud partner, and we're ready to serve the thriving global Web3 customer and partner ecosystem. Our focus is making it frictionless for all customers to take advantage of our scalability, reliability, security, and data services, so they can focus on innovation in the Web3 space."

In addition, Google will use Coinbase Prime, for institutional crypto services, like secure custody and reporting.

MineralTree, a Global Payments (NYSE: GPN) company and accounts payable (AP) and payment automation solutions provider, today announced the ability for users of Sage Intacct’s ERP to process multi-currency invoices and make international payments through the MineralTree TotalAP platform. These capabilities enable finance teams using Intacct to realize additional efficiency, visibility, and cost savings benefits by leveraging a single, end-to-end workflow to process and pay both domestic and foreign currency invoices.

International AP by small and medium-sized businesses totals approximately $7 trillion annually, according to Medici Research. Yet, most businesses process their international invoices using a patchwork of manual processes, resulting in longer cycles, higher costs, lack of transparency, and reconciliation challenges.

MineralTree TotalAP supports the full invoice-to-pay cycle, from automated capture and approval of foreign-currency invoices to execution of international payments in 130 different currencies. As a result, finance teams save valuable time, avoid costly errors and hidden fees, and reduce foreign currency costs significantly compared to typical bank fees.

“Sage Intacct is one of the leading ERP systems in the mid-market, and it makes up a growing footprint within our customer base,” said Matt Friend, vice president of product and program management at MineralTree. “As those businesses look internationally to source more goods and services, we can help deliver the same efficiencies, cost savings and visibility they enjoy with their domestic AP workflows on our platform. It’s another way we can continue to simplify their finance operation and support their business growth.”

The new multi-currency AP capabilities for Sage Intacct users include:

●       Multi-Currency Invoice Management – Sage Intacct users can now automate the full invoice-to-pay process for multi-currency invoices, with no additional effort. This includes automatic capture and coding of English language invoices in all currencies, approval routing workflows, and posting to their Intacct ERP system where the invoice exchange rate is set.

●       International Payment Execution – Users can automate the execution of multi-currency payments within TotalAP. Unlike daily bank rates, MineralTree currency rates refresh continuously, giving users the flexibility to lock in favorable rates when payments are authorized, minimizing foreign currency risk. The payment amount is automatically withdrawn from the business bank account and users have full visibility into payment status within TotalAP. Suppliers receive remittance emails with payment details in their local currency.

In addition to Sage Intacct, MineralTree also supports international invoice-to-pay for users of Oracle NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, and Xero, along with many other ERP systems.