FinTech news in London category

Elsewhere, it seems that the U.S. also remains a more desirable option for tech companies considering going public, with SoftBank-owned U.K. chip giant ARM reportedly favoring an IPO in the U.S, though the U.K. government is trying to engineer a dual-listing that includes the U.K. It is worth stressing that Atlassian has only ever really been a U.K.-domiciled company on paper, though — its global headquarters has always been in its native Australia, and it has never had an office in the U.K., though employees are allowed to base themselves from the U.K. as part of Atlassian’s remote work policy.

The company just closed a $6.6 million seed round and plans to launch its first web3 gaming world, Project Nightshade, in the fall, Mark Warrick, founder and CEO of the company, exclusively told journalist.

And when you consider all of the elements that go into buying and selling goods and services, there are a lot of areas left for SumUp to tackle — big data analytics, more tools to build, manage and optimize, online sales experiences for its customers, more technology to use to improve how items are sold in physical commerce experiences and so on — all areas that SumUp can approach either through building its own technology, or indeed through more M&A. The solution for a company like SumUp — with the bread and butter of its business, point of sale payments, fundamentally a part of that in-person commerce experience — has been to diversify and double down on a wider array of services for its small business retailers customers. Nevertheless, turning that statistic around, POS payments still represents the bulk of the company’s revenues, so 60% growth is not just a testament to SumUp being able to grow that business in the last two years, but also the fact that in-person and point-of-sale payments remained active areas for transactions. To that end, it has used significant chunks of the debt it’s raised to date for acquisitions and to build out more services beyond POS payments, in areas like business banking (the basic version of which it throws in as a freebie), online payments and business services around both.

The latest to enter the BNPL field attacking the B2B/SME market is Playter a London-based BNPL platform aimed at SMEs. It’s now closed a $55 million funding round from Adit Ventures and Fasanara Capital, with Fin Capital and Act Venture Capital and 1818 Ventures also participating.

African payments company Interswitch has secured a $110 million joint investment from LeapFrog Investments and Tana Africa Capital to scale its digital payment services across the continent, the two private investment firms said in a statement Wednesday. Alongside existing investors, LeapFrog and Tana plan to work with management to continue to drive Interswitch’s pan-African strategy.

Egyptian fintech Paymob, which enables merchants to accept digital payments online and in-store, announced today it has raised $50 million in Series B funding. The Tap-on-phone product leverages contactless payments technology so that these merchants can turn their NFC-enabled smartphones — personal or commercial — into a POS by downloading a Paymob-powered app.

Merritt Hummer, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said she doesn’t view Fidel API as a competitor to expense management players, but rather an enabler of them. Fidel API says it has tripled its growth metrics and quadrupled its card base year-over-year since launching in 2018, according to CEO and co-founder Dev Subrata.

First, it will help it expand the company expand its geographic footprint: Azimo currently has payment licenses in the U.K., the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong, and it operates a payment network in more than 160 countries, while Papaya Global (not to be confused with the other fintech called Papaya) operated services in 150 countries just prior to this deal, Eynat Guez, Papaya Global CEO and co-founder.

Consumers are able to pay without entering financial data, no need to create an account, no financial details are shared, authorization is biometric and the merchant receives the funds in real time.

Given that it’s not a big leap between financial services and fintech — indeed, in cities like London which have strong industries in tech and financial services, the two have long competed heavily to recruit technical talent — it’s surprising that we haven’t seen more banks trying to built personalization in house rather than look to a third-party provider like Personetics.