This Week in Fintech: TFT Bi-Weekly News Roundup 28/05

Welcome to The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup on Tuesday 28 May 2024, bringing you the latest updates from across the world.

Appointments

DailyPay, a worktech company, has appointed Stacy Greiner as interim CEO. Greiner currently serves as chief operating officer, where she successfully oversees the company’s four business lines, customer teams, marketing, and all business operations and payment operations. She takes over from Kevin Coop, who is named the new CEO of Definitive Healthcare, a healthcare commercial intelligence firm.

Paymentology, the global issuer-processor, appoints Tim Joslyn as its chief technology officer, succeeding interim CTO James Letley. In 2017, Joslyn co-founded and was the CTO for the merchant acquiring company Pollinate,  launching Natwest Tyl in 12 months before raising additional capital and expanding the business internationally to other banks around the world including National Australia Bank.

Zūm Rails, a company merging open banking and instant payments, has begun work on a large-scale banking as a service (BaaS) project. Leading this work is Miro Pavletic, the company’s newly appointed head of BaaS. Pavletic joins Zūm Rails following previous roles at payments company STACK!, TD Bank, CIBC Capital Markets and CSAM.

The Financial Technology Association (FTA), a trade association representing fintech companies, has welcomed Sarah Mamula as head of government affairs. In this role, she will lead FTA’s legislative advocacy efforts and develop strategies to advance the future of financial innovation. Sarah comes to FTA from the Bank Policy Institute, where she served as vice president for government affairs.

Paystand, a blockchain-enabled B2B payments company, appoints Allison Grieb as chief sales officer. Most recently, Grieb was senior vice president of global sales at Recurly, a subscription management software company. Prior to Recurly, she worked at planning software firm Anaplan.

Partnerships

GMS, a health insurance company in Canada, has joined forces with CoverGo, a global no-code insurance SaaS platform for health, life, and P&C, to digitise GMS’ entire health insurance ecosystem. GMS adopts CoverGo as its end-to-end modular core insurance platform. It will also leverageCoverGo’s patented no-code product builder and policy and claims management capabilities.

Pidgin, a secure real-time payments platform, has partnered with Corelation, a fintech offering core processing solutions. Pidgin is now a preferred partner with Corelation, and together, the partnership will enable more credit unions to offer real-time payments to their members with Pidgin’s payments ecosystem.

Archax, the FCA-regulated digital asset exchange, broker and custodian, has expanded its custody service by integrating Fireblocks, an enterprise platform for building blockchain applications and managing digital asset operations. It is also using the Fireblocks Network, an enterprise-grade digital asset transfer platform for rapid digital asset transactions and dynamic payment workflows.

Crowded, a digital financial management platform that makes bank accounts available to nonprofits, is partnering with TransPecos Banks. TransPecos Banks enables Crowded’s clients to deposit funds into TransPecos bank accounts and access debit cards issued by TransPecos.

Funding and investments

Finout, the finops-for-enterprise company, has secured a $26.3million Series B funding round led by Red Dot Capital with the participation of Maor Investments and existing investors – Team8, Pitango and Jibe Ventures. The funding brings the total raised by Finout to $45million.

Swiipr, a travel paytech startup that has developed a platform for airlines to distribute flight disruption payments, has raised £6million in funding. The round, led by Octopus Ventures, will help drive the company’s next phase of growth. More than 500 million global passengers are estimated to be affected by flight disruption each year.

NodeOps, a platform for blockchain node orchestration, has secured a $5million funding round led by L1D with participation also from Blockchain Founders Fund and Finality Capital. NodeOps plans to scale its operations rapidly, extending its infrastructure to encompass more protocols and build incentive mechanisms that empower developers.

Holo, the a direct mortgage platform in the Middle East, has completed an oversubscribed funding round. With Series A funding on the horizon, the company, having surpassed targets, decided to extend an opportunity to investors to further invest in the business through a pre-Series A round. The oversubscribed funding round was headed by DFDF and Oryx fund.