This Week in Fintech: TFT Bi-Weekly News Roundup 18/06

Welcome to The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup on Tuesday 18 June 2024 bringing you the latest updates from across the world.

Company updates

Atom bank, the UK app-based bank, has unveiled its strongest ever financial results, driven by a significant increase in lending while keeping costs low. Operating profit grew to £27millon, a 600 per cent increase on last year, with costs up four per cent. Atom raised £100million from existing investors last year, and the additional capital has been used to accelerate balance sheet growth and to further scale the business.

Stax LLC, a global strategy consulting firm specialising in commercial due diligence, value creation and exit planning for private equity firms, PE-backed companies, hedge funds, and investment banks, has opened a new office in Central London. This expansion follows the January hiring of Phil Dunne as managing director to lead the firm’s UK and EMEA practice and strategic growth efforts.

Digital Care, a Poland-based device protection and services company, has been renamed to bolttech Poland sp. z o.o and rebranded to bolttech. This follows the completion of bolttech’s acquisition of Digital Care in October 2023, when Digital Care became a part of the international insurtech group. All existing services and agreements will remain in place.

Signicat, a digital identity and identity fraud prevention solutions provider, has launched a new feature in its MobileID product: Face Authentication. MobileID is Signicat’s flagship product for secure user authentication via mobile apps. This new addition is designed to enhance security and prevent fraud in the financial and regulated services sectors.

Insights

UK Finance has released its card spending data for March 2024, covering the monthly value and volume of transactions across debit and credit cards. The data shows the number of contactless cards in issue in the UK topped 150 million (150,172,000) for the first time in March 2024. This means that contactless cards now make up 93 per cent of the cards in issue in the UK.

The 10 largest sectors in the FTSE 350 hold data worth £295billion within their organisations. That is equivalent to almost 20 per cent of their market capitalisation, according to research from Anmut, a strategic data asset management company. The widespread inability to value data means British firms have been mismanaging their data assets to the detriment of the UK economy, it says.

IDnow, an identity verification provider in Europe, has seen a significant spike in the number of gambling customers requesting identity verification. Between 14 and 16 June, IDnow saw a 750 per cent increase in the number of players being verified with a European gambling operator. This spike coincided with the lead up to the opening game of UEFA EURO 2024 on 14 June.

More parts of the UK economy grew in May than at any time in the last 15 months, according to the latest Lloyds Bank UK Sector Tracker. While the overall rate of output growth across the economy slowed marginally in May, 11 out of the 14 UK sectors monitored by the Tracker reported output growth – up from eight in April and the most since February 2023.

More insights

A study has found that up to 87.5 per cent of financial advice on TikTok could be ‘potentially misleading’.  The research from pension advisor Almond Financial has found that content creators producing advice-led content on TikTok rarely encourage viewers to do their own financial research and some give advice under the guise of selling online courses, e-books, or memberships to ‘exclusive’ investment advice.

With rent prices rising nine per cent over the last 12 months, three in ten (28 per cent) renters across the UK have been forced to turn to benefits due to rising costs, reveals research from responsible lender Creditspring. ONS figures show that average rents increased by 8.9 per cent over the last 12 months, with tenants paying over £100 more per month on average than last year.

M&As

Abacus Group, an IT managed services provider to financial services firms globally, has acquired Tribeca Technology Group (Tribeca), a UK-based IT MSP also serving the financial services industry, to further strengthen its existing market presence and capabilities across the UK market. The acquisition will see the two companies collaborate to pool their experience, diversify their portfolios and scale their offerings.

Partnerships

Digital ID verification company IDVerse (previously known as OCR Labs Global) has joined AWS Marketplace to offer a fully automated identity verification solution to AWS customers. IDVerse’s technology empowers AWS Marketplace buyers by leveraging AWS Lambda for scalable, cost-efficient, and event-driven execution, seamlessly integrating with other AWS services to provide robust security and reliability.

SteelEye, the integrated surveillance provider used by more than 150 financial firms worldwide, has formed a strategic partnership with Intelligent Voice, a specialist in financial services voice transcription and analytics technology. This strategic partnership looks to respond to financial firms needing to store and monitor all communications for compliance, but often ignoring voice transcription because regulations are unclear.

BlueFlame AI, the generative AI platform for alternative investment managers, has integrated with Encore Compliance, a compliance software solutions company. The integration incorporates Encore’s
generative AI call surveillance technology into BlueFlame’s AI platform, empowering alternative investment managers to transform deal management workflows and critical investment research compliance.

BNP Paribas Personal Finance UK has reaffirmed its commitment to supercharging innovation in the financial services sector by welcoming the latest cohort to its UK Fintech Incubator Programme to address insight and data-led challenges impacting the industry. Following a competitive application process for this year’s programme, several tech organisations have been inducted into the programme.

Two Scandinavian companies, Lunar and SAS, have entered a new partnership to launch Scandinavia’s first debit card. It enables customers to earn EuroBonus points on daily purchases from trips to the supermarket, morning coffee, and summer experiences – in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and abroad – without using credit.

More partnerships

GBST, a global provider of wealth management and advice solutions technology for the financial services industry, and Wipro Limited, a technology services and consulting company, have entered into a strategic partnership aimed at delivering end-to-end administration services for wealth, and pensions companies transitioning from legacy IT environments.

Appointments

TrueLayer, the European open banking payments network, has strengthened its leadership team by appointing Lisa Scott as its first chief strategy officer. In this new role, Scott will oversee the company’s expansion into new markets, drive consumer engagement and accelerate the adoption of its innovative open banking solutions. Scott joins TrueLayer from fintech Banked, where she was CEO for Europe.

CAB Payments, the holding company of Crown Agents Bank (CAB), a UK-regulated FX and payments service provider, specialising in global FX and cross-border payments for hard-to-reach markets, has announced Neeraj Kapur as the new group CEO taking over the role from Bhairav Trivedi. The pair have worked closely during the transition period which began in February.

Fintech Momnt appoints Chris Bracken as CEO. This follows recent significant capital investments from Saluda Grade Ventures, Rockefeller Asset Management and TruStage Ventures. In addition to Bracken being named CEO, current CEO and co-founder Barclay Keith is appointed special advisor to the board, where he will continue to provide insight and guidance.

Workato, the AI-driven enterprise orchestration platform, announces two new appointments to its leadership team. Chandar Pattabhiram joins as the company’s first chief go-to-market officer, while Bhagat Nainani  joins as the head of product and engineering. Workato enables enterprises to transform their business operations by orchestrating business processes end-to-end and operationalising AI across the organisation.

Funding and investments

CuspAI, a transformational AI company building a platform for next-generation materials to tackle global sustainability and clean energy challenges has secured $30million in seed funding from European and US venture funds. The round was led by Hoxton Ventures, with significant participation from Basis Set Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Global digital payments platform CleverCards announces €8million funding round, bringing total capital raised to date to €28million. Irish-headquartered CleverCards will use capital in accelerating expansion efforts, building on the rapid adoption of its configurable global payments platform. The round was led by an investment from Pluxee, a global player in employee benefits and engagement.

FINBOURNE Technology has raised £55million in Series B funding. This latest round was led by Highland Europe and AVP and follows a Series A funding round of £15million in 2021. The investment will fund the next phase in FINBOURNE’s commercial development, including expanding its sales, product and marketing capabilities in the US, UK, Ireland, Singapore and Australia.