This Week in Fintech: TFT Bi-Weekly News Roundup 30/04

Welcome to The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup on Tuesday 30 April 2024, bringing you the latest updates from across the world.

Job movers

Bitsight, a cyber risk management company, appoints Lou Serlenga as its new chief revenue officer and Rob Dinning as chief legal officer. In addition to senior leadership roles at Tenable and Nile, Serlenga’s experience includes more than a decade at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. While Dinning has previously worked at Freshfields, Shearman & Sterling, Ernst & Young, Barclays Bank, RiskMetrics Group and ISS.

MarketAxess Holdings, an operator of an electronic trading platform for fixed-income securities, has named Dan Burke as global head of emerging markets. He will lead business and product management expansion of the company’s EM trading business across geographies and products. Burke most recently served as MD at Standard Chartered in Singapore and London.

iPipeline, a provider of digital solutions for the life insurance and wealth management industries, has welcomed Adam Boone as chief financial officer. He is tasked with leading and driving iPipeline’s investment strategies and business development opportunities. Boone previously worked at data solutions provider Sight Machine as well as software platform LeafLink.

Local payments platform PPRO hires Bronwyn Boyle as chief information security officer. She will spearhead PPRO’s security strategy and oversee information, cyber and technology security across all product offerings and processes. Most recently, Bronwyn served as CISO at fintech Mambu and led security transformation and AI enablement initiatives for TSB Bank.

Sidekick, a wealth management platform for modern investors, appoints Alessandra Farnum as its alternatives product lead. Farnum will play a key role in launching new products and services within Sidekick’s alternative asset class offering. She previously worked at London-based fintech VC fund Mouro Capital as well as Samsung Ventures.

Additional appointments

Xceptor, the intelligent automation platform for financial markets, has appointed Keith Man as general manager for Asia Pacific, based in Singapore. The appointment underscores Xceptor’s continued investment and penetration into the APAC region. He will expand Xceptor’s sales, business development and operations, while also advancing growth into new markets and segments. He was most recently head of APAC at Duco.

Vatic AI has named Dilip Krishnan as its new president and CEO. Dilip is responsible for Vatic AI’s global growth expansion into new geographies, M&A as well as the development of new AI products predicting credit worthiness of anonymous audiences online. Vatic AI’s Qscore product leverages AI to predict the credit qualifications of anonymous audiences.

Digital risk company Cytora adds James Platt as the newest member of its advisory board. Formerly group COO and chief digital officer of Aon, Platt has also recently co-founded Trimstone Partners, a boutique consultancy focused on enabling strategic change across financial services.

The British Business Bank has unveiled Kristen McLeod CBE as its new chief strategy officer, effective from September 2024. McLeod joins from HM Treasury, where she has served as advisor to the Chancellor of the Exchequer on growth, investment and business since October 2022. Prior to this, she also served as the director of the Office for Life Sciences.

Banking Circle Group has welcomed Johan Bergqvist as the new group CFO. He work closely with the co-founders, Anders la Cour and Laust Bertelsen, and the rest of the management team, to drive the next phase of sustained, rapid and profitable growth. Bergqvist has previously worked at Spotify and Bolt.

Company updates

Axle Asia, an insurance broker in Indonesia, rebrands as bolttech following the completion of bolttech’s acquisition of the majority shareholding in Axle Asia in late 2022. The rebrand and rename have no impact on bolttech Indonesia’s service or offerings to its partners and customers. All existing services and agreements will remain in place.

Embedded insurer Wakam receives approval as a licensed and regulated insurer by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) to support the launch of its new, UK subsidiary Wakam UK Limited. This initiative is part of a wider strategy aimed at enhancing technical fundamentals and scaling processes, positioning Wakam for future growth and success.

Paystand, a blockchain-enabled B2B payments company, has acquired Teampay, a spend management software. The transaction creates a ;B2B payments powerhouse’ whose continued goal is to shakeup payments by expanding the ‘largest, fastest, and most cost-efficient B2B payments network’.

Funding and investments

Danish-founded Ageras has raised €82million for new acquisitions in an oversubscribed private placement round. The round saw participation from i.a., Folketrygdfondet, Lazard as well as Investcorp. Ageras, which provides accounting software to over 300,000 active European small businesses, has completed its sixth and largest investment round to date.

Gideon Valkin has launched Andrena Ventures: a $12million solo GP fund backed by tech founders and VC leaders. The fund has reached its first close with a final close planned for later in the year. He has also revealed the fund’s first investment into Nustom, a new AI-powered software-building startup from Monzo co-founding CTO Jonas Templestein.  

Partnerships

dLocal, a cross-border payment platform, has forged a partnership with Open English, an online English-learning platform. The partnership adds alternative payment methods such as bank transfer and Visa Debit, cash, installments, Boleto and Pix. These expanded methods are offered to English learners in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador as well as Vietnam.

FastSpring, a merchant of record for global SaaS and software companies, and EBANX, a payments company, have teamed up to enhance users’ payment experience within FastSpring’s product suite in Latin America through local payment method Pix.

WealthKernel, a digital investment infrastructure provider, has unveiled a partnership with GetGround, an all-in-one property platform for buy-to-let investors. GetGround can now offer its property investors the option to open an Investment Pot and earn a return on their limited company cash thanks to WealthKernel’s API-led technology.

Meanwhile, Neonomics, an open banking company and Qvik, a developer of digital consumer products, have signed a strategic partnership to jointly promote and deploy open banking services to customers across the Nordics and UK. The pair say the “appetite for more efficient payments and data services has never been stronger”.

Brite Payments has partnered with e-commerce platform Shopware to bring the benefits of its open banking-based instant payments to businesses across Europe. Shopware merchants can now activate Pay by Bank (aka account-to-account or A2A payments), which enables their customers to pay instantly, directly from their bank account.

More collaborations

Tokeny, a a tokenisation technology company for capital markets assets, and Globacap, an automation of private markets operational workflow company, have partnered. By partnering with Tokeny, Globacap joins the DINO Network initiative, an interoperable distribution network for digital securities leveraging the ERC-3643 token standard, which will in turn expand the reach of its marketplace. 

There’s also a partnership for Phos, the software point-of-sale orchestration for businesses company, and Silverflow, a cloud platform for global card processing, to help businesses leverage a solution for accepting contactless payments directly to mobile devices. The partnership combines Phos’ SoftPoS technology with Silverflow’s modern payment processing platform, to offer a ready-to-deploy solution for banks, acquirers, payment service providers and independent sales organisations.

Viva.com, a European acquirer powering merchant payments acceptance on any device in 24 markets, enters a strategic partnership with Satispay, a mobile payment circuit in Italy independent from credit and debit cards, to eliminate the barriers between the physical and online shopping experience for merchants and consumers.

Manchester City announces a multi-year partnership with Quidd, a digital collectible platform. Quidd will provide new experiences for fans to be able to swap and collect digital cards, as well as opportunity to unlock real-world rewards including official Manchester City merchandise, hospitality tickets and exclusive experiences.