Global Payments is to acquire smaller rival EVO Payments for nearly $4 billion in an all-cash deal that will extend its reach in the B2B sector. 

Headquartered in Atlanta, EVO currently offers merchant acquiring and payments processing services to more than 550,000 merchants in over 50 markets and 150 currencies.

Global Payments is paying a significant premium for the acquisition, which will expand its geographic footprint and also add accounts receivable automation software capabilities that complement its existing B2B and accounts payable offerings.

“The acquisition of EVO is highly complementary to our technology-enabled strategy and provides meaningful opportunities to increase scale in our business globally,” says Cameron Bready, president and chief operating officer, Global Payments. “Together with EVO, we are positioned to deliver an unparalleled suite of distinctive software and payment solutions to our combined 4.5 million merchant locations and more than 1,500 financial institutions worldwide.”

Savana, a financial software player that helps banks and fintechs go digital, has raised $45 million in a Series A funding round led by growth-stage investor Georgian.

Fintech giant Fiserv, which has a reseller agreement with Savana, joined the round.

Savana's API-first and cloud-native digital delivery platform promises to "orchestrate" a bank's technology ecosystem to eliminate silos and automate servicing for bank teams and customer-originated requests.

The firm says its technology can work seamlessly with both traditional core banking systems as well as new Gen3 platforms to unlock digital delivery.

Michael Sanchez, CEO, Savana, says: "This funding round will help support the growth of our digital delivery platform to enable any bank, whether new or going through transformation of existing technology infrastructure, to speed time to market of new products and services, support continuous digital innovation and drive significant operational efficiency."

Elfin Market, the UK-based peer-to-peer lender, is pleased to announce the launch of the new “Elfin Card”, the world’s first peer-to-peer payment card.

“After a successfully closed beta stage, we can’t wait to get the cards in customers’ hands. I believe the addition of the Elfin Card to our popular borrower product will help make Elfin Market the go-to platform for flexible credit in the UK.” - Mansour Bouaziz - Co-founder & CEO

“Though technically not a credit card, the Elfin Card was designed to offer UK individuals the same borrowing flexibility as a credit card, without the sky-high rates and numerous additional fees.” Lakshithe Wagalath - Co-founder & COO

TrueLayer, Europe’s leading open banking platform, today announces its partnership with WealthOS, the innovative SaaS platform that accelerates digital adoption and innovation for wealth managers.

Anton Padmasiri, Co-founder/CEO, at WealthOS explained: “Customer experience is the battleground upon which many wealth management firms are fighting to gain users. To capture the significant generational transfer of wealth and expansion of the industry over the coming years, wealth managers need to be able to compete with seamless financial experiences that consumers have elsewhere in their lives. We are thrilled to be able to bring secure, seamless account funding to wealth management products through our partnership with TrueLayer.”

Nick Tucker, Head of Financial Services at TrueLayer, commented: “Fast and secure account funding is an essential element of a great wealth management service. Customers are used to these experiences in their everyday lives, so why should the management of their money and long-term investing be any different? That’s why we’re excited by the possibilities that partnering with WealthOS will deliver by embedding our instant, secure payments into their platform and supporting wealth managers to deliver a truly digital experience.”

World-leading cryptocurrency platform OKX has today introduced its new-and-improved P2P (peer-to-peer) Trading platform. The service not only allows users to trade seamlessly between one another but makes safe, reliable P2P trading available to a far broader range of users.

P2P Trading on OKX empowers users to become their own marketplace by issuing “advertisements” in order to trade with one another and better control the price they buy and sell at. This includes users in unbanked markets who may lack access to conventional banking infrastructure. OKX’s P2P Trading platform not only offers more than 900 payment methods from across 40 different currencies but is offered to users free of fees.

Lennix Lai, Director of Financial Markets, OKX, said: “P2P Trading on OKX empowers users to trade on their own terms. But more importantly, it makes secure person-to-person trading accessible to far more people, including those around the world who lack access to traditional banking services. This is one of the ways in which OKX is empowering users the world over to liberate themselves from traditional financial systems and strive to attain financial independence.”

The OKX platform plays a facilitation and risk management role in P2P trades. After a deal is struck between users, OKX holds the funds in escrow until the buyer’s payment is confirmed. This allows the exchange to manage the risks faced by users and ensure safe and stable trading between them.

OKX’s overhaul of its P2P Trading platform includes a new-and-improved homepage UI, and an easy-to-use navigation bar that makes it easy to switch seamlessly between the marketplace, orders and ads. The revamp also provides streamlined access to P2P guides, FAQs and tutorials to help users learn how to get the best out of the platform.

SC Ventures today announced the launch of Appro, a fintech startup that digitises, streamlines and simplifies the retail banking user journey. Backed by SC  Ventures, Standard Chartered’s innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm, the bank agnostic platform aims to reduce the time taken to complete the application processes for retail banking products – such as credit cards and personal loans – from several hours to just three minutes. 

Appro brings to market a solution that significantly simplifies the application and onboarding process for customers, requiring them to complete just a single application per product. After capturing the required background information and preferences from each customer via their application, these data points are then shared securely1 with all participating banks, allowing them to qualify customers and in turn, recommend their most relevant products for each customer. The platform then collates the best product offerings for each customer and ranks them using a unique algorithm based on the customer’s indicated preferences, enabling an easier as well as more informed and intelligent decision-making process. 

At the same time, the participating banks receive the pre-processed applications for each qualified customer, which already include the outcomes of all necessary bank on-boarding activities, such as Know Your Customer, customer due diligence, creditworthiness assessments and fraud checks. 

The idea for Appro was founded by three employees – Iftekhar Salim, Tarek Osman and  Antofelix Rajan – who were previously retail bankers at Standard Chartered and understood the pain points customers often experienced during the lengthy and cumbersome onboarding process for retail banking products in the UAE. The fintech was then incubated at SC Ventures,  with early-stage investment on three occasions.  

“Our goal is to bridge the gap between customers looking to find the best deals in town and banks’ concerted efforts to be positioned as a superior service provider,” said Iftekhar Salim,  CEO of Appro. “When we developed our first solution to this end as part of an internal retail banking challenge facilitated by SC Ventures in 2019, we managed to reduce turnaround time for mortgage pre-approval letter issuance from six days to a mere 45 minutes. We saw our mortgage booking volume jump significantly and this really validated the market appetite we had only surmised up to this point. It drove us to see what else we could build to better serve both  customers’ and banks’ needs in the retail banking space.” 

Alex Manson, Head of SC Ventures, added: “At SC Ventures, we are focused on finding solutions to problems we identify in the market and will serve customers in the ways they want and need to be served. Appro’s platform is a fantastic example of such a solution that has  emerged from a customer-focused approach to remove a great deal of friction from the  onboarding experience.” 

Growth Intelligence has secured £1.5m of funding from Shard Credit Partners through its UK  technology-focused venture debt fund. This marks the third investment made by Shard Credit  Partners’ new fund and the first since its successful first close which was announced in June 2022.  

Growth Intelligence helps B2B marketers, who have struggled to accurately and completely define their audiences, run more efficient and creative digital-first campaigns. With the world’s richest data on SMEs, Growth Intelligence allows marketers at blue-chip, global clients including American Express and Vodafone, to run ABM at scale for the first time. 

The Company has won numerous awards and has received backing from Innovate UK, the UK’s innovation agency. Growth Intelligence has been experiencing rapid growth over recent years and generated a 100% year-on-year revenue increase for 2021-2022. The funds raised will be used to support sales team expansion, product development and expansion into new markets planned for the coming year.  

The investment is in line with Shard Credit Partners’ strategy to target borrowers with annual recurring revenues of at least £2.0 million, operating in the B2B SaaS and fintech sectors and benefiting from long-term customer contracts. Its focus is to provide flexible venture loan capital in support of sales growth, through increased expenditure on marketing initiatives. Previous investments include  PassFort, which generated a total gross IRR of 249.2% in just six months (1.8x multiple on invested capital) and Rezatec.  

Venture debt is becoming increasingly popular with high-growth technology companies globally in recent years. The asset class is highly developed in the United States, having positively tracked the strong growth in the venture equity market during the last two decades. The venture lending market is in its infancy in the UK and remains an area that is materially underserved, which has created an opportunity for innovative private credit managers to raise dedicated technology venture debt funds.  

Market demand for venture debt in the UK is being driven on the back of very strong growth in the technology venture capital sector over the past decade, which now comprises approximately 13,000 post-series A technology companies. This represents a significant addressable market opportunity for specialist UK technology venture debt funds, such as the one launched by Shard Credit Partners Limited. 

William Chappel, Head of Venture Debt for Shard Credit Partners Limited, said, “We are very excited to provide financing support to Growth Intelligence. We've been looking to work with this business for some time now and we’re delighted to complete this investment. Growth Intelligence has an enormously exciting offering, and we can't wait to work closely with Tom, James and the wider team as the business continues to grow. This is a great addition to the Shard Credit Partners UK Tech-focused  Venture Debt fund.” 

Tom Gatten, CEO of Growth Intelligence commented, “Growth Intelligence’s goal is to cement its position as the only platform offering account-based marketing at scale -- across the U.S. and the U.K.  The opportunity for businesses to acquire new customers digitally is growing post-covid, yet most marketing leaders struggle to confidently define their ICP and total addressable market, which leads to high digital ad spending, slow growth, and low conversions. We’re here to solve this problem and transform B2B marketing by enabling large enterprises and mid-sized companies to build, scale and launch account-based marketing programs at scale. This latest round of funding will help support  Growth Intelligence to invest in our own commercial team and become a global account-based marketing champion and are pleased to have received this venture debt from Shard Credit Partners.” 

Alastair Brown, Chief Executive of Shard Credit Partners, commented, “Our investment in Growth  Intelligence marks the third investment from our new venture debt strategy. The investment team,  led by Will Chappel, has a strong pipeline of opportunities and we expect the pace of deployment to  continue through the summer months, supporting positive fundraising momentum as we approach  subsequent fund closes through the remainder of 2022.” 

Shard Credit Partners Limited is currently in advanced discussions with the several UK and international institutional investors with regard to participating in subsequent fund close throughout summer  2022. The target fund size at the final close is £75 million, with a hard cap at £100 million, by June 2023. 

Shard Credit Partners Limited has a strong focus on ESG across all its private credit investments and has historically been a strong supporter of female entrepreneurs and firms with meaningful female leadership, ownership, and senior management. No less than 80% of its investee companies have female board representation and 60% have mixed-sex equity ownership, a direct result of Shard Credit  Partners Limited’s implementation of ESG covenants and ESG margin ratchets in its loan agreements and investment documentation as standard. 

Legal advice to Shard Credit Partners was provided by Orrick LLP, led by Partner Scott Morrison and supported by Hridi Chowdhury.  

BVNK, the crypto-powered business banking and payments platform, today announces that it has appointed Jonathan Cumberlidge as its FX (foreign exchange) Sales Director. Cumberlidge joins the company as it seeks to disrupt legacy FX payments and OTC (over-the-counter) trading infrastructure and processes with a faster, more transparent, and more cost-effective alternative based on crypto. 

Cumberlidge brings to bear more than 15 years of experience in the FX industry, having most recently worked at Finalto where he held the position of Sales Director. During his career, Cumberlidge has also held senior sales positions at companies including Saxo Bank, GAIN Capital and GFT

At BVNK, Cumberlidge will work with brokers and funds to design digital asset banking and payment solutions that help service demand from active traders for digital assets and payment methods. BVNK's solutions will help broker-dealers extend their global reach, deploy treasury intelligently, and increase trading volumes across assets.

Cumberlidge said: “Traders want increased access to crypto liquidity, for both spot and derivative products, custody solutions, platforms, banking and payments. With their loyal, active trader customer bases, brokers are ideally positioned to satisfy these demands and diversify into crypto as an emerging asset class.” 

Jesse Hemson-Struthers, BVNK’s CEO, commented:  "BVNK recently secured a $40 million funding round based on our vision for transforming financial services through blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. Our latest hire shows that we are turning these plans into a reality. With Cumberlidge, we are gaining an FX insider with the connections and expertise needed to help us turn the industry on its head with an agile payment and OTC infrastructure that's fit for the digital age."

Cumberlidge adds: "I share BVNK's view that the traditional banking and payment infrastructure is not fit for purpose in the evolving digital asset space. BVNK's team of finance and crypto experts combined with the strength of its financial backers makes it best placed to deliver the radical improvements to digital banking and payments infrastructure that the industry requires."  

BVNK sits at the intersection between traditional finance and digital assets. The core services BVNK provides within this exchange are banking, cross-border crypto payments, crypto payment processing, and OTC trading. BVNK's products are seamlessly integrated within one solution to make the process of managing, reporting, and paying effortless. The product suite is designed to be calibrated to the needs of BVNK's partners and broad enough to switch on new services as partners' digital asset journeys evolve.”

Radware®, a leading provider of cyber security and application delivery solutions, announced it signed a reseller agreement with DataBank, a leading provider of enterprise-class colocation, connectivity, and managed services. Based on the agreement, DataBank will offer Radware’s Cloud DDoS Protection and Application Security solutions to customers interested in enhancing the cyber defence levels around their data centre assets.

DataBank’s edge infrastructure platform consists of more than 65 data centres located within 50 miles of half the U.S. population. It also includes modular data centres that can be placed anywhere for geo-specific requirements and 20 major interconnect hubs to give workloads unrestricted reach.

“IT infrastructures are becoming more software-defined, user-managed, and edge-focused. They demand a data centre experience that ensures data and applications are always secure, always compliant, and always on the right platforms in the right places,” said DataBank’s chief information security officer, Mark Houpt.

“Radware delivers scalable, top-grade security solutions that will further expand our menu of managed security services and offer our customers added levels of protection.”

Radware’s Cloud DDoS Protection uses behavioural-based detection, automatic signature creation, and sophisticated SSL attack mitigation to protect organizations against today’s most dynamic and damaging DDoS threats. For application security, Radware delivers a cloud-based web application firewall (WAF), bot manager, API security, and application-layer DDoS protection services. The security is based on automated, machine-learning-based algorithms that learn legitimate user behaviour and then separate malicious and legitimate traffic to deliver a higher level of application security with lower false positives.

“We are looking forward to partnering with DataBank to help organizations build modern, agile, IT environments,” said Bob Simpson, vice president of North American sales at Radware. “Our state-of-the-art, frictionless security solutions are designed to protect their customers against sophisticated DDoS and application-layer attacks while maintaining network uptime and access to critical infrastructure and applications.”

Radware’s solutions have earned industry recognition. Radware was included in Gartner’s 2021 Critical Capabilities for Cloud Web Application and API Protection report, ranking second among 11 vendors for API security and high-security use cases.

Forrester ranked Radware a global leader in its report, “The Forrester WaveTM: DDoS Mitigation Solutions, Q1 2021.” Quadrant Knowledge Solutions named Radware a leader in its 2022 SPARK Matrix: Bot Management report.

Monument Bank, UK’s first neo bank focused on the needs of the ~4.8 million ‘mass affluent’, has partnered with Persistent Systems, a Global Digital Engineering provider to build a bespoke, cloud-native digital banking platform for lending and deposit services to support Monument’s ongoing operations. Monument’s target clients are usually pressed for time and often feel underserved and undervalued by other banking providers. Monument’s mission is to help its clients prosper and optimise their time by offering smart, efficient and flexible solutions.

Persistent was engaged in the designing and planning of Monument’s technology systems and subsequently helped construct the Bank’s bespoke systems architecture using a flexible building block approach. This approach enables new components to be added and swapped over time to take advantage of the latest innovations, allowing Monument to choose and integrate multiple SaaS-based core component technologies.

Monument is dedicated to providing exceptional, high-value customer service, enabled by a host of innovative, industry verticals, and cloud technology solutions. Persistent has been instrumental in advancing the Bank’s strategic goals by helping to build the Bank’s architecture that combines services with an adaptable, cloud-based platform, including components to provide core banking, CRM, payment services, AML/KYC, general ledger and regulatory reporting. 

Monument is focused on the ‘mass affluent’ client market, which includes business professionals, entrepreneurs, and property investors. Having received its full banking license in November, Monument quickly launched its property investment lending and an initial range of savings products using advanced in-app capabilities for client interactions. It will continue to enhance its range of products and services to serve the evolving needs of its mass affluent clients.

John Saunders, Chief Commercial Officer, Monument Bank:
“Monument’s ambition has always been to create a significant financial institution for the mass affluent market in the UK, recognising the future opportunities to better serve the needs of the mass affluent in other jurisdictions.” 

Steve Britain, Chief Operating Officer, Monument Bank:
“Becoming a bank was a huge challenge but we were delighted to achieve this during a pandemic. It requires a significant investment of both time and money to accomplish and it didn’t make sense for us to take on the journey alone. We wanted a solutions partner to help us bring Monument to life and it was evident from our discussions with the Persistent team that they not only had a very strong understanding of the banking ecosystem but were willing to build a strong partnership with us from the get-go. As a result, we have built an integrated ecosystem and platform that not only supports Monument but also has the potential to power other banks in the future and with a partner like Persistent, we can rapidly enable that.”

Jaideep Dhok, SVP & General Manager, Banking, Financial Services & Insurance, Persistent:
“Customers today want a simple and seamless experience. Modern, improved and automated process plays a crucial role in meeting these expectations. Neo banks such as Monument can provide a tailored, specialised offering, giving their customers the flexibility and services they need. However, the architecture required to deliver simple and seamless experiences is complex, which calls for a trusted partner to help engineer and integrate the technology that makes it possible. Our ‘digital mosaic’ approach enables technology solutions that simplify processes and offer flexibility to the customers. Thus, allowing Monument to accelerate its development and focus on building a substantial mass affluent business.”