Fintech Fortnightly – April 5, 2023 –

Fintech is a vast, multi-sector, global industry, the growth of which affects not only the banking world, but society at large. Our deep dives, interviews and coverage looking at the evolution of payments, finance and banking are powered by constant updates, news and commentary on deals, funding rounds and partnerships. Every fourteenth day, The banker will showcase the interesting insights from the ‘fintech’ world that caught our eye.

This fortnight sees Railsr get a new management team, Bloomberg enters the AI ​​race, Scotland and the CBDC continue to flourish and banks enter into a series of partnerships, and one acquisition, with fintech companies.

All aboard! A new team takes over the rails…

Philippe Morel joins Railsr as CEO

Rescued former fintech darling Railsr announced the appointment of Philippe Morel as CEO, replacing founder Nigel Verdon. According to reports in Sifted, Railsr was sold at a 99.8% discount to its last valuation. Railsr was rescued by a consortium of investors led by D Squared Capital.

According to Sifted, new documents relating to the rescue reveal the deal was worth £413,904 – a 99.8% discount to the $250m valuation Railsr was awarded when it completed a divestment last October. The fire sale ended a months-long battle to find a buyer for the embedded finance provider, after takeover talks with Nigerian fintech Flutterwave collapsed last year.

Railsr also appointed Debbie Lotz as chief financial officer and Nick Charteris as chief operating officer. Morel will report directly to Rick Haythornthwaite, Chairman.

That’s ChatGPT’s world, we just live in it…

Bloomberg launches BloombergGPT, its 50 billion parameter language model, purpose-built from the ground up for finance

This large language model (LLM) has been specifically trained on a wide range of financial data to support a diverse set of natural language processing (NLP) tasks in the financial industry. It outperforms open models of similar size on financial NLP tasks by significant margins – without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks.

“For all the reasons that generative LLMs are attractive—shot learning, text generation, conversational systems, etc.—we see tremendous value in having developed the first LLM focused on the financial domain,” said Shawn Edwards, Bloomberg’s chief technology officer. “BloombergGPT will enable us to tackle many new types of applications, while delivering much higher performance out of the box than custom models for each application, at a faster time-to-market.”

Pour out a little dram for…

Fintech growth in Scotland

A year on from the publication of the FinTech Research and Innovation Roadmap, FinTech Scotland today announced that it is on track to meet its economic growth targets.

The number of Scottish SMEs increased by 13% year-on-year, driven by both new fintech start-ups and international firms setting up in Scotland. Scottish fintechs received more than £305 million in funding in 2022, half of which invested in fintechs aligned with the roadmap’s priorities.

The CBDC train shows no signs of stopping…

Central Bank of UAE (CBUAE) selects R3, G42 Cloud and Clifford Chance to help implement its CBDC strategy

CBUAE has launched its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) implementation strategy in partnership with R3, G42 Cloud and Clifford Chance. For Phase 1, R3 and G42 Cloud respectively have been selected as technology and infrastructure providers for the initiative, while Clifford Chance will provide critical legal oversight of the strategy. The strategy, which represents one of nine initiatives in the CBUAE’s Financial Infrastructure Transformation (FIT) programme, sets out a roadmap for using CBDC across a range of national and cross-border use cases in the region.

Jack Hardman, partner at Clifford Chance and head of fintech in the Middle East, comments: “As CBDC development moves from research to real-life construction, it is important that central banks are aware of the legal implications of any chosen design feature or strategy, in in addition to how this new technology interacts with existing regulations. Clifford Chance has an established track record as a leading financial services and technology advisor and we look forward to working with the CBUAE on their CBDC implementation strategy.”

We are not a supplier, we are a PARTNER, right…

Lloyds Bank and Enigio have launched a new long-term partnership

The partnership will support greater use of digital documentation in trade finance through the use of blockchain technology.

Through the partnership, Lloyds Bank and Enigio will look to expand the use of Enigio’s trace:original solution for digital original documents, including promissory notes, bills of exchange and bills of lading. It will also explore opportunities to display traces: original documents within wider trade finance products, such as documentary collections and credits.

Orange Bank and Mambu extend their partnership to France

The French telecom and digital banking leader chose Mambu’s cloud banking platform to drive European expansion.

The bank uses Mambu to manage its current account, loan and credit card products with a state-regulated savings account under development. The implementation in France signals the bank’s intention to operate a single banking platform to scale across Europe. Orange Bank, which was launched in 2017, offers banking solutions that have been developed for customers’ mobile use. Its digital-first ethos allows customers to complete all transactions autonomously from their mobile application, with ease and speed.

Askari Bank works with BPC to handle credit card and corporate fraud

Through this partnership, BPC will implement its next-generation SmartVista suite to enable a state-of-the-art credit card management system by migrating its existing solution and services. Also, an enterprise fraud management solution powered by AI and machine learning models will be introduced to detect and prevent fraudulent activities on Askari Bank’s digital channels in real-time to meet the bank’s security objectives and maintain an exceptional user experience.

…and then you are acquired

Zenus Bank makes a strategic acquisition of a leading payment provider

Zenus Bank, a US-based digital bank that enables accounts to be accessed internationally, has acquired Financial Urban Exchange LLC (FUEX Payments), a fintech specializing in real-time payments for the Caribbean and Latin American markets.

This acquisition is part of Zenus Bank’s ongoing strategy to innovate and expand its service offering in the fintech industry and demonstrates its focus on delivering cutting-edge financial solutions to its customers through an effective M&A strategy.

FUEX Payments has developed innovative API solutions that enable real-time payments through major global payment card brands for businesses, governments and financial institutions.