This week in Fintech: TFT Bi-Weekly News Roundup 08/11

Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup delivers the latest fintech updates from around the world on Thursday, November 8, 2022.

The job is moving

Balance, a B2B cash register for B2B payments, has hired a fintech manager Kim Loftis as its VP for customer growth. Loftis joins Balance following its $56 million Series B fundraising to help merchants and marketplaces scale e-commerce payments with instant funding and a B2B checkout.F

Fintech The baton has appointed Alistair Griffiths as director of EMEA sales. Griffiths will be based in London with a focus on acquiring new businesses across all Baton solutions in the region. He previously served as senior sales manager for post-trade solutions at FIS Global.

European provider of payment solutions MANGOPAY has appointed a new CTO Ronen Benchetrit. He joins the team Bumbleand prior to this, was CTO of a UK challenger bank and pioneering peer-to-peer lender Zopa. He also has three decades of experience working and leading agile product engineering and cloud teams globally in scale-up companies.

The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) have named Nashira Spencer as Chief Security Officer. Spencer served the past six years as CISO and most recently CTO at Anywhere property (previously Realology. Spencer will ensure a comprehensive and holistic approach to risk management and resilience across the organisation.

Funding Updates

Partitiona blockchain-powered technology provider, has completed a Series A funding round led by Standard Chartered with additional participation from DBS, JP Morgan and Theme sec. Standard Chartered will also join the Partior network, one of its integrated euro settlement banks, and accelerate the deployment of blockchain across the bank’s global financial network.

London based ethical lender Lawn has raised £40m in seed funding with new investors including Active partners, plus Velocity Juice, Sivo and the founders from Monzo, Starling Bank and Oodle Car Finance. The seed round also includes existing pre-seed investors Ascension, Tomahawk VC, DD Venture Capital and Hatch which has doubled its original commitments in the wake of post-launch growth and above expected loan results.

Pypl, the MEA-focused platform for financial services and Hub71 the company, has closed its Series B raise target of $20 million. Pyypl is considering opening a second tranche for further investment due to interest from investors. The funding will enable the company to further expand its reach across the entire MEA region.

Evo has secured a further £750,000 in seed funding, backed by GroVentive, to continue its growth strategy in the UK’s £30 billion rental sector. By digitizing property repairs, maintenance and compliance services, Evo saves landlords significant costs, takes the hassle out of property management and improves the tenant experience.

Capital of Quona has closed its last fund Fund III at $332 million. This is the third fund from Quona Capital since inception, bringing the company’s total committed capital to over $745 million. Quona Capital is a venture capital firm focused on fintech that can expand access for underserved customers and small businesses in emerging markets, including India and Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.

Partnership

DivideBuy has entered into a partnership with the CRM platform Salesforce to offer instant onboarding for DivideBuy’s merchants and partners. The partnership promises to “break records” in terms of onboarding times for merchants, and accelerate the uptake of POS financing among customers in multiple verticals.

Help AGthe cyber security arm of e& business has merged with ExtraHop, a cloud-based network intelligence firm, to provide clients in the UAE and KSA with enhanced cyber security solutions. To mark their collaboration, Help AG and ExtraHop signed an agreement at the 2022 edition of the Gulf Information Technology Exhibition (GITEX), the Middle East technology and networking event held annually in Dubai.

Talos has joined with Amber Group to unlock greater access to liquidity on the Talos platform through the integration of Amber’s digital asset platform, WhaleFin. The partnership comes as Talos continues to expand its operations and strengthen its presence in the Asia Pacific.

BlueSnapthe payment orchestration platform, has expanded its collaboration with the e-commerce agency object source to support online sellers across Europe. Paytech firm has teamed up with London-based consultancy to improve integration with shopping cart plugin Magento/Adobe Commerceadds new payment methods GooglePay and ApplePay, iDeal and So quickly.

Fexco and Cash flows announce partnership to deliver a complete end-to-end dynamic currency solution for ATM providers across Europe. This partnership sees Cashflows offer new and existing ATM customers the Fexco Treasury DCC solution from launch, potentially connecting to more than 20,000 ATMs across Europe.