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.

Financial wellbeing platform Blackbullion has today announced a £2.5m investment round to accelerate financial wellbeing for students. The new funding round will scale the platform’s growth, driving Blackbullion’s mission to simplify the complex world of finance for young people, while connecting them with scholarships and additional funds while they study.

The oversubscribed round was led by Calyx Venture Fund with existing investors including Lord Stanley Fink and MPA Education, also participating; Blackbullion is the first investment for MPA’s second fund.

Blackbullion’s platform is deployed by over 50 universities, colleges, and higher education organisations across the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. Over 1.2 million students have access to the platform and 92% report increased financial confidence as a result. To date, Blackbullion’s university partners have awarded £10 million of funds to almost 15,000 students through their proprietary Funds Management System.

Vivi Friedgut, founder and CEO of Blackbullion, said, “We founded Blackbullion to make financial wellbeing accessible to all young people, through great financial education and better, more inclusive access to funds. The current cost-of-living crisis makes this more urgent than ever, as we continue to create solutions truly focusing on students’ specific financial needs. We’re beyond excited to make this happen, with this new breed of operator-led investors, as we head into our next phase of growth.”

The investment will be used to scale product development, funds-specific features as well as an ambitious hiring plan. It will also support the integration of The Scholarship Hub further into the Blackbullion platform, following its acquisition this spring.

Melody Lang, Founding Partner at MPA Education, comments, “Today’s economic climate means financial education and wellness are more urgent than ever; we couldn’t be prouder to launch MPA Education’s second fund with Blackbullion, to scale the platform at a global level. Congrats to Vivi for achieving this in what has been the toughest raise environment for years.”

Chris Donegan at The Calyx Venture Fund adds, “This was an opportunity for us to invest in a fintech company truly committed to taking on a major global challenge, driving financial inclusion, through financial education. Blackbullion has a strong business model, great leadership and real business fundamentals which is why this is such a great proposition for us. We’re looking forward to working with Vivi and her team to help make this mission happen faster.”

Fluro, the UK consumer lender previously known as Lending Works, today announced a landmark £200 million financing partnership with BNP Paribas.

Established in 2014, over the last two years, Fluro has evolved to become an institutionally funded lender and this facility from BNP Paribas will allow Fluro to significantly expand its balance sheet. With 75 employees based at its London headquarters, Fluro is one of the UK’s most innovative embedded lenders, providing unsecured personal loans to prime and near-prime UK consumers through partners such as price comparison sites. Fluro pioneered “Real Rates, Real Eligibility”, providing customers with instant decisions and transparency on rates, as opposed to the incumbent representative APR approach that led to poor customer experience.

Fluro’s business is underpinned by best-in-class risk management, built on eight years of lending experience, combined with a sophisticated technology stack, which together provide seamless integration with partners and frictionless user experience.

Jonathan Kramer, Chief Operating Officer, Fluro, said: “This funding will enable us to provide even more customers with our fair rates and transparent service. We would like to thank the team at BNP Paribas for their support. This is an exciting time at Fluro. Building on our eight years of experience, we are taking the next leap forward to creating the UK’s premier consumer lending proposition. In these uncertain economic times, Fluro has both the experience and funding to prudently grow lending to UK consumers.”

Simon Jones, Head of Securitised Products, BNP Paribas, added: “We are very excited to be partnering with Fluro in supporting their plans for further expansion into the UK consumer lending market. This securitisation is designed to support them on their growth trajectory and underscores the strength of their platform.”

Nuvei Corporation, tomorrow’s payment platform, announces today the launch of Nuvei Simply Connect, a ready-to-use, fully customizable payments interface designed to help businesses accelerate their growth. 

Until today, merchants without large in-house development were left with low-performing products that did not give them the ability to customize, localize and adapt to the needs of their business.

Nuvei Simply Connect is a Software Developer Kit (SDK) solution that is simple to implement and customize and comes with the leading features and capabilities from Nuvei’s enterprise-grade core product, making it the most complete and easy to deploy SDK solution in the market to date.

Thanks to Nuvei’s modular approach, the solution allows merchants to connect seamlessly to any part of an existing payment stack a business may have. It includes features Nuvei usually provides to its top merchants, such as the largest offering of payment methods available on the market, leading fraud and risk management, PCI and 3DS compliance, authorization rate boosters and best-in-class analytics and reporting.

Everything with Simply Connect has been designed to enable merchants and platforms of any size to customize and improve the customer experience, the transaction page to completely blend with the rest of a site’s layout and make loading time issues a thing of the past. The simple ‘very low code’ tools allow a business to modify fonts and colours, choose optimal payment methods, currencies and languages to display.

“Accepting payments should not be complicated. At Nuvei, we are committed to helping businesses of all sizes around the world deliver unique consumer experiences and accelerate their growth. That’s why we are delighted to be launching Simply Connect which makes enterprise-grade payments technology available to all,” said Nuvei Chair and CEO Philip Fayer.

Airwallex, a leading global fintech platform, today announced that it recently closed its Series E extension (“Series E2”) with the same US$5.5 billion valuation, and secured more funds from existing investors Square Peg, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia Capital China, Lone Pine Capital, Hermitage Capital, 1835i Ventures and Tencent. HostPlus, an Australian industry superannuation fund, as well as a leading North American pension fund also participated in this round. With an additional US$100 million, Airwallex’s total funding increased to more than US$900 million to propel the company’s global growth trajectory.

“The valuation underscores investors’ confidence in Airwallex’s core business value and fundamentals, and we are fortunate to have the continued support of our existing investors, and the confidence of new investors, as we pursue our vision to become the global economic infrastructure for modern businesses,” said Jack Zhang, Co-founder and CEO at Airwallex. “The market environment remains challenging in the foreseeable future, and while we remain well capitalised, this additional runway allows us to continue our growth plans, product expansion, and hire some of the best talents in the world. By strengthening the breadth of our global reach and product offering, we can better empower our customers to unlock new market opportunities.”

The Melbourne-founded company accelerated its international expansion in 2021, successfully extending its reach across Europe, North America and Asia Pacific, serving three of the largest e-commerce markets in the world: China, the United States and the United Kingdom. Today, tens of thousands of modern businesses leverage Airwallex’s global payments and banking platform to process payments and move money efficiently anywhere around the world.

“We are building one of the world’s most powerful global payment and banking infrastructure,” Jack adds. “By providing a faster, safe, transparent and more efficient way to operate globally, we are enabling businesses to maximise revenues and accelerate growth.” 

Airwallex has continued to see its business grow and reach new heights, with its customer base more than doubling and revenue increasing by 184% YOY. Multiple new products and services are also being planned in its 2022-23 roadmap including improvements to its expense management platform and a credit solution, as the company continues to invest in product innovation on top of market expansion and talent acquisition.

Financial institutions are spending millions of dollars every year inefficiently onboarding and maintaining clients, according to new research from Fenergo, the leading provider of Know Your Customer (KYC) and Client Lifecycle Management (CLM) software solutions for financial institutions.

A global study of over 1,000 C-level executives across corporate and institutional banks found that on average, over half are spending between $1,500 and $3,000 to complete just one client KYC review. Large financial institutions onboarding thousands of new clients per year are spending up to $30 million per annum on KYC.

The findings also showed that over half of financial institutions are spending between 61- and 150-days on KYC reviews for clients, much of which is spent gathering and inputting data across multiple systems. This is a waste of operations and compliance resources that could otherwise be focused on higher-risk cases. Overall, more than 80% of respondents have between 1,000 and 2,500 employees working on KYC tasks. The majority of firms (90%) stated that labour-intensive KYC effort impacts their ability to make better risk decisions.

Between 31%-60% of KYC review tasks are still being completed manually by over half of financial institutions. However, the data shows that financial institutions are now focusing investment on automation with 62% prioritising spend on technology. The research also uncovered continued friction between compliance and operations with an approach to risk management, rate of regulatory change and communication and collaboration in the top three areas of concern for respondents.

“With so much focus on digital transformation towards revenue-generating parts of the bank, KYC has been left somewhat as a technological afterthought – still relying on manual and legacy systems,” said Stella Clarke, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer, Fenergo. “But KYC compliance has long been a critical part of the client lifecycle and has important implications on how fast a bank can generate revenue. With the economic climate putting an even greater emphasis on cost control, more financial institutions are looking for ways to streamline the client lifecycle process in order to drive much-needed efficiencies.”

The report KYC in 2022 – A Final Frontier for Digital Transformation in Banking by Fenergo, provides an in-depth analysis into the time and cost implications of regional and global banks spending valuable time trying to complete KYC tasks, and comprises three chapters. The opening chapter uncovers the real opportunity cost of being a fully compliant bank, with chapters two and three delving into the centralisation of tech and operations vs compliance respectively. The full study is available here alongside the full methodology here.

Today, at Stellar’s 4th annual Meridian conference, Wirex, a leading payments platform, announced the launch of USD Coin (USDC) on the Stellar blockchain within the Wirex app. In addition to expanding access to Stellar-based digital assets, this announcement is an important milestone in an ongoing collaboration between Wirex and the development of the Stellar Development Foundation (SDF), the non-profit organisation that supports the growth and development of the Stellar network.

With stablecoin adoption growing rapidly, proving the utility of fiat-backed assets in the digital economy, they are emerging as a reliable payment option for everyday use. Over the past year, Wirex has rapidly increased the number of tokens and stablecoins available to buy, hold, exchange, and sell in-app. This has given their 5 million customers more flexibility and choice for faster transactions, lower fees and easier access to the benefits of DeFi.

Support of USDC on Stellar will be available immediately in the Wirex app, which lets users save or instantly spend USDC in real-life using the companies’ crypto-enabled debit card. For every purchase made in-store or online, users can also earn up to 8% in WXT rewards. As a fully reserve-backed stablecoin issued by Circle, a regulated US fintech, USDC is always redeemable 1:1 for U.S. dollars. Circle’s reserves are held in U.S. financial institutions and audited monthly by a trusted, independent firm, Grant Thornton LLP.

Wirex’s collaboration with SDF dates back to 2019, rooted in the companies’ shared goal of democratising access to the digital economy. Their collaboration has enabled Wirex users to access Stellar-based USDC and Lumens in 39 countries, including the US, UK, and across Europe.

The announcement of USDC on Stellar was made today at Stellar’s Meridian Conference in Rome by Chief Growth Officer, Kiel Dowlin. He comments: “As a strong advocate for the digital economy, I believe that stablecoins will play a significant role due to the payment utility. Expanding multi-chain support for stablecoins such as USDC will offer further convenience for users seeking low-cost transactions to support micro-payment use cases globally.”

Ada Vaughan, SDF Growth Strategist, said “We saw an opportunity to leverage Wirex’s user-friendly app and debit card along with the Stellar network’s speed and near zero transaction cost, effectively making digital assets more useful than ever. Through this collaboration, we’re excited to put access to USDC on Stellar into the hands of millions of consumers across 39 countries.”

Working together to advance adoption and understanding of the financial landscape, over the past two years, the two organisations jointly commission and released unique research reports gathering primary data to help understand user’s crypto habits and adoption. Recognising consumer needs, awareness and pain points, it’s been highly regarded amongst industry analysts and policymakers globally as a benchmark for the state of adoption of cryptocurrency.

Third Financial, the investment platform trusted by more than 70 wealth managers and IFAs, has developed a market-leading 2-way integration with intelliflo office (io), as part of Third’s efforts to help advisers simplify and scale their businesses.

This development marks the deepest level of integration with io available from any adviser platform.  All clients and plans opened and maintained in io are electronically updated to the platform in real-time, eliminating dual keying.

Third Financial’s platform allows advice firms to gain significant operational efficiencies by consolidating their multiple platform relationships into a home for all their clients and under their own branding.

intelliflo works with 2,500 financial advice firms across the UK, helping them with a personal finance portal, electronic signatures, management information reporting, lead management, and fact finds.

The leading IFA Foster Denovo partnered with the Third Financial platform in 2019.

Amir Hakim, Proposition Director at Third Financial, said: “Our well-established integration with intelliflo is part of our ongoing effort to modernise advice businesses.  Naturally, we want to attract new firms to our platform, but the wider mission is to help advisers simplify and scale in a sector that is prosperous and efficient for both clients and advisers.  The adviser segment lags behind other financial services.  Advisers are well-aware they need to follow suit, with too many advice practices still running their business across multiple platforms.  To date they have lacked an obvious single alternative to turn to but we are now providing that alternative.”

Helen Lovett, Chief Operating Officer at Foster Denovo said “We worked with Third Financial to design and build the intelliflo office (io) interface.  The 2-way interface has removed data rekeying between the systems and enabled us to onboard clients and process advice administration far more efficiently.”

Third Financial, meanwhile, is now one of the largest independent regulated technology firms offering investment platform and software services to wealth managers, financial advisers and family offices.

Ian Partington, Group Chief Executive Officer at Third Financial, said: “The advice sector is facing manifold challenges including fee pressure, rising costs, and further layers of regulation. This comes atop a cost-of-living crisis that is increasing drawdowns and impacting client sentiment.  As margins are compressed, the best course of action is to reduce the long-term administrative burden, leaving more time for IFAs to engage with clients and grow their business. As the market and client demand changes, it is much easier to adapt if you have a simplified operating model.”

Worldline, a global leader in payments services, has joined forces with NPCI International Payments Ltd. (NIPL), the international arm of National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) – the driver of digital payments in India - in a move to expand the acceptance of Indian payment means across Europe.

As part of the partnership, Worldline will bring more convenience for Indian customers in the European markets by allowing merchants’ point-of-sale (POS) systems to accept payments from UPI,  an instant real-time payment system, as well as RuPay, NPCI’s proprietary card payment network solution. This will result in a multitude of customer-related merchant benefits due to an increase in footfall and spending from Indian tourists.

Currently, customers from India pay through international card networks. However, the hugely popular United Payments Interface allows multiple bank accounts to be accessed through one single mobile application. This, in turn, will enhance customer experience whilst opening up new business prospects for merchants.

Facilitated via Worldline QR, the company’s universal product for the acceptance of all QR-based payments, the first target markets for NIPL are set to include BENELUX and Switzerland with further plans for expansion, as Worldline QR is rolled out in more European countries.

India is one of the most important tourist markets for Europe with an estimated 10 million Indians travelling to the region each year prior to the pandemic, according to Schengen Visa. Now, as the impacts of COVID-19 begin to subside, that number is expected to significantly increase.

Marc-Henri Desportes, Deputy CEO of Worldline, said of the initiative: “Our analyses of international customers’ payment behaviour have indicated a push away from international card schemes in recent times, and a preference for any mobile payment method they are acquainted. Our partnership with NPCI International seeks to mitigate the risk of excluding or limiting Indian customers from safely using electronic payments in the EU.”

In 2021, NPCI’s UPI recorded 38.74 Billion transactions, worth USD 954.58 Billion, making it the best-performing real-time payment eco-system in the world. Similarly, 714 million RuPay cards have been issued till date, clocking over 1.3 billion transactions.

Mr. Ritesh Shukla, CEO, NIPL said “In Worldline, we found a partner that provides us with good coverage of the European markets as well as an advanced and universally applicable solution. The roll-out of acceptance of UPI-powered Apps and RuPay Cards across Europe is important to us, as we expect increased mobility of Indians in the continent in the coming years. We believe this partnership will empower Indian consumers to continue using their preferred payment modes as they travel across Europe.”

Bank of America today announced the launch of an expanded CashPro Payment API through which clients can access more than 350 payment types and bundle payments. The development comes as Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) continue to transform business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) transactions given the ability of APIs to provide real-time data, reduce costs and improve operational efficiencies.

“A significant feature of APIs is their ability to support 24/7 processing. We’re seeing that play out with our Payment API where 20% of the volume is being processed during the weekend. The enhanced API will give clients even more options to process payments in multiple jurisdictions and countries at any time of the day,” said Tom Durkin, global product head for CashPro Platform in Global Transaction Services (GTS) at Bank of America. “The development is part of our multi-year digital strategy to make business easier and more secure.”

The breadth of capabilities of the enhanced CashPro Payment API spans:

• More than 350 payment types in 38 markets globally
• 7 real-time payments schemes and services such as Zelle in the U.S. and Pix in Brazil
• Domestic and cross-border wires
• Domestic ACH
• Local payment instruments such as Brazil Boletos
• Ability to execute payments in bundles, helping clients avoid or reduce backlogs in payment queues

“Through our single payment API, clients can disburse payments to hundreds of countries and get real-time data and information, helping to increase their business efficiency and competitive edge,” said Stephanie Wolf, head of Global Financial Institutions, Governments, Business Banking Sales, and Risk in GTS at Bank of America. Citing an example of insurance claims, Wolf said, “Our API can be a bridge between an insurer’s system and the policyholder, disbursing funds digitally, and instantly providing access to funds following a claim, without the need to use checks.”

Bank of America’s suite of CashPro APIs includes more than a hundred APIs supporting payments and treasury operations. Clients can connect to them through the CashPro API Developer sandbox, which is designed to accelerate onboarding. Clients can also access the APIs through one of the more than 28 Treasury Management System (TMS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms that are integrated into Bank of America’s platform.