June 2024: Top five fintech partnership stories of the month
The global fintech industry delivered a range of compelling partnerships throughout the month of June. Here we’ve selected five of the most notable collaborations, featuring Citi, Bank of England, Bunq, and more.
Dutch neobank Bunq enters partnerships with Mastercard and Nvidia
Bunq has entered into two partnerships with Mastercard and US-based computer hardware manufacturer Nvidia this month to enhance its user experience through open banking and to combat fraudsters with the help of accelerated computing and AI.
The Amsterdam-based neobank will leverage Mastercard’s Open Banking platform to enable customers to add accounts from any bank to the Bunq app.
Likewise, Bunq has tapped Nvidia’s generative AI (GenAI) technology to help improve its fraud and money laundering detection capabilities.
The selection includes Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs), which will power its AI-driven transaction monitoring system, as well as its NeMo Retriever offering, to boost further the response accuracy of its personal AI assistant Finn.
Turkey’s Papara taps DriveWealth for fractional investing solution
Turkish banking challenger Papara partnered with DriveWealth, a US-based financial tech firm providing Brokerage-as-a-Service, this month to launch a new US stock investment product.
Papara is set to leverage DriveWealth’s fractional investing solution to enable its 20 million users to invest in US stocks on the Nasdaq and NYSE in real-time.
The new offering, which is planned to launch in October and will be accessible directly through Papara’s app, will also allow users to buy and sell fractional shares in US equities and ETFs with a minimum investment of just $1.
Citi extends USD Clearing service to Middle East in partnership with Emirates NBD
US bank Citi tapped Dubai-based banking group Emirates NBD this month to launch its USD Clearing service in the Middle East.
As part of the partnership, Emirates NBD will extend the service, along with its commercial payment and treasury payment execution capabilities, to its corporate and retail clients through its branch networks in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
This deployment is intended to enable the group’s clients to make cross-border USD payments with non-stop availability and overcome the current barriers to payment flow processes posed by the UAE’s varying cut-off times for transaction execution.
Following the initial debut, the pair have disclosed plans to extend the service to all of Emirates NBD’s branches in the Middle East and across the globe, “including partnerships with Emirates NBD’s third-party institutions”.
BIS and Bank of England team up to evaluate synchronised settlement in FX transactions
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Bank of England partnered this month to launch Project Meridian FX, an investigation examining synchronised settlement in foreign exchange (FX) transactions.
The project will assess the “usability” of a synchronisation operator (SO) across various asset types and technologies, as well as additional integrateable features that “could help reduce the liquidity needs of participants”.
The partnership’s remit builds on the findings of Project Meridian, which introduced the concept of the SO through transaction testing.
Scheduled to commence towards the end of 2024, the project will see Meridian FX’s SO connect with three solutions under the Eurosystem’s broader exploratory work on wholesale settlement.
These include the DL3S DLT Interoperability Solution by the Banque de France, the Trigger Solution by Deutsche Bundesbank and the TIPS Hash-Link by Banca d’Italia.
Nium tapped by Air France and KLM for payments solution
US-based cross-border B2B payments platform Nium unveiled its collaboration with Air France and Dutch airline KLM this month to facilitate “closed loop” electronic payments between the companies and selected travel agents.
The two airlines are set to utilise the Nium Airline Payments (NAP) solution, which looks to offer an alternative to travel agent card transactions and simplify reconciliations, expedite settlements and lower costs.
The solution will first be deployed to Air France and KLM’s travel agent system across Europe, starting in Italy, with further markets to follow.