Fintech funding round-up: 29 November 2016
We’ve summed up the latest funding efforts and results in the fintech space – so you don’t have to! Featuring Billon Group, Stripe, figo and Finimize.
We’ve summed up the latest funding efforts and results in the fintech space – so you don’t have to! Featuring Billon Group, Stripe, figo and Finimize.
Who do you trust with your money? Well, if the latest talk in personal finance is anything to go by, we’ll soon be placing our trust in an altogether less warm-blooded beast. Move over mankind: the robots are coming. But not so fast!
Avaloq is rumoured to be talking to private equity (PE) firms. Suitors reportedly include New York-based KKR.
Standard Chartered is set to cut about a tenth of its global corporate and institutional banking headcount. The job cuts will start in Hong Kong and Singapore and will eventually affect all major business hubs of Standard Chartered.
Holiday buying declined slightly over the Thanksgiving weekend, but more consumers were shopping, according to the National Retail Federation. The trade group estimates that some 154 million U.S. consumers shopped over the holiday weekend, up 1.9 percent from 151 million last year, but the average shopper spent about $289.19 this year, down about 3.6 percent from $299.60 in 2015.
San Francisco-based online and mobile payments technology provider Stripe was valued at $5 billion during its previous funding round in July 2015—meaning its valuation nearly doubled in less than a year and a half.
The European Banking Authority in January is set to release its online transaction rules in response to the revised Payment Services Directive, or PSD2, which calls for “strong customer authentication” for online payments. Visa also opposes the measure.
It’s the most wonderful time of the year for fraudsters, who are expected to ramp up global online fraud attempts by 12 percent over the upcoming holiday season compared with last year, according to new data from ACI Worldwide.
The ATM is one of the most recognised and trusted pieces of technology on the high-street, but as it too has come under pressure from the wave of digitalisation sweeping almost every aspect of our everyday lives. The humble ATM is no longer a single physical touch point…
US Bancorp, Macquarie and JP Morgan are understood to be in the “leave” camp as they have opted out of the upcoming fundraising effort of the R3 blockchain consortium.
Catch up on Banking Technology’s top five fintech stories of the week – all in one place!
Let’s put the fun in funding by keeping it mercifully brief. Money seekers are PayKey, Euklid and Flender.
No longer are the mid-tier banks doomed to be extinct! The arrival of open application programming interfaces (APIs) will enable them not just to survive but to prosper, states Chris Truce, director of platform development at Saxo Bank.
Paysafe Group reportedly is pulling the plug on its Neteller and Skrill prepaid Mastercard cards in 100 countries on Friday. The move, which affects a product popular with online gamblers, apparently does not apply to North America or the 34 countries that are part of the Single European Payments Area.
The FDIC’s final rule establishing recordkeeping requirements for large financial institutions offers some relief for banks that hold prepaid accounts insured under pass-through coverage, but there’s still a lot of heavy lifting to be done for covered institutions.
Visa has modified and clarified debit network routing rules, following recent FAQ guidance issued from the Federal Reserve and to address a Federal Trade Commission inquiry.
The holiday season is upon us and many shoppers plan to give gift cards this season, according to a consumer trends survey by the National Retail Federation. What’s more, spending on gift cards this year is expected to outpace spending in 2015.
Nasir Zubairi has been named CEO of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (LHoFT), a new public-private initiative aimed at advancing Luxembourg’s fintech and financial services industry.
San Francisco-based personal finance company NerdWallet has named Tapan Bhat as its first chief product officer.
Online payment service provider PayU has appointed Matthias Setzer as its global chief commercial officer.
The Prepaid International Forum (PIF) has announced that Mastercard and Neopay have become benefactors of the 10-year-old prepaid financial services trade association.
Stockholm-based payments provider Trustly has hired Ulrica Falkenberg as head of people operations, where she will be tasked with supporting the company’s growth and doubling the staff from 130 to 250 in the next year.
It’s infographics time! A great compilation of fintech companies, showing how we’ve gone from graph paper to personal data algorithms – and everything in between.
Morgan Stanley and National Australia Bank (NAB) are understood not to be renewing their membership with the R3 blockchain consortium.
The CFPB has filed a motion for a rehearing before the entire appellate court after a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals sent shockwaves in October when it determined the structure of the bureau is unconstitutional because it’s led by a single director who can only be removed by the president for just cause.
A European plan for new online transaction authentications has come under fire from Visa, which says the proposal will make online checkout needlessly complicated for consumers.
Small business might want to accept payments via mobile wallets, but most of those merchants worry about the cost of upgrading their systems to do so, according to new survey from Samsung Electronics America.
Alibaba’s Alipay has taken the crown of the world’s most popular online payment method, accounting for 44 percent of global e-commerce spending and projected to grow to 60 percent by 2020, according to a new report from U.K.-based payments processor Worldpay.
Fundinfo says its new cloud-based fund selection system, Digital Advisor, considers “investor’s emotional preferences” in addition to analysing active and passive funds.
Dinosaur Merchant Bank, a UK-based investment management, brokerage and advisory firm, has deployed Ancoa’s surveillance platform to monitor its equity trading activity for instances of market abuse and to meet their obligations under Market Abuse Regulation (MAR).
Santander has decided to leave the R3 blockchain consortium, which it joined last December. Meanwhile, R3 has slashed its fundraising target to $150 million from the original $200 million.
Israel-based Bank Leumi’s credit card subsidiary, Leumi Card, will launch a “first-of-its-kind” integration of a mobile security product based on behavioural biometrics. Using Israeli start-up SecuredTouch’s solution embedded in the Leumi Card app, it will eliminate the need for passwords. SecuredTouch’s technology allows user identification based on a “unique” personal usage profile within the mobile […]
A little more than a year after the bank announced plans for its Chase Pay mobile wallet—and just in time for Black Friday—customers of the U.S.’s largest bank by assets finally can use the Chase Pay app in stores, online and for in-app payments. The industry will have to wait and see if this is the watershed moment for mobile wallet adoption, some payments experts have predicted.
Wirecard has begun issuing in the Netherlands the pay2d Visa card, a virtual prepaid card for online payments. Wirecard, which worked on the card with fintech firm 3V Benelux B.V., said this marks its first virtual prepaid card rolled out in that country.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 17 ruled in favor of allowing an antitrust class-action lawsuit against Mastercard, Visa and their bank partners proceed after a lower court ruled that the consumer plaintiffs had no standing, according to a Reuters report.
Consumers in southern Nevada now are able to purchase transit passes using the recently launched rideRTC app for Apple and Android smartphones.
Banks are not competing with banks anymore, but against the ubiquitous, all pervading unified digital experience, which is driving the adoption of digital across the corporate banking value chain. Fintechs are a great example of how innovations in digital can deliver speed to market, a superior customer experience and better pricing.
Dutch mobile-only challenger bank Bunq is using Veridium’s hand recognition software for its new app. The app will now use VeridiumID and its software, 4 Fingers TouchlessID. With their collaboration, Veridium and Bunq say this is a “world first” for “safe” mobile banking. Todd Shollenbarger, COO of Veridium, calls Bunq’s banking platform a “market disruptor”. […]
Catch up on Banking Technology’s top five fintech stories of the week – all in one place! FNZ to build new BPO centre EXCLUSIVE. For Société Générale’s private banking business Mizuho Bank gears up for new core banking system go-live Keen to modernise after large-scale system failures in 2011. Big three explore blockchain for consumer […]
Republican legislators and business associations, emboldened by Donald Trump’s successful presidential bid, have set their sights on the CFPB, an agency that’s been in Republicans’ crosshairs since the day it was created as part of the Dodd-Frank Act. Meanwhile, retailers are calling on Congress to steer clear of introducing legislation that would repeal financial services reforms they say are critical to U.S. businesses and consumers.