Every fortnight, The Banker showcases the most interesting insights from the world of fintech. Liz Lumley reports.
Fintech is a wide-ranging, multi-sector, global industry, whose growth influences 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 fuelled by constant updates, news and commentary on deals, funding rounds and partnerships. Every fortnight, The Banker will showcase the interesting insights from the world of ‘fintech’ that caught our eye.
This fortnight, Railsr gets a new management team, Bloomberg enters the AI race, Scotland and CBDCs continue to flourish and banks forge a number 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 chief executive officer, 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 related to the rescue reveal that the deal was worth £413,904 – a 99.8% discount on the $250m valuation Railsr was assigned when it completed a downround in October last year. The fire sale put an end to a months-long struggle 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. Mr Morel will report directly to Rick Haythornthwaite, chair of the board.
It’s ChatGPT’s world, we just live in it…
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 within the financial industry. It outperforms similarly sized open models on financial NLP tasks by significant margins – without sacrificing performance on general LLM benchmarks.
“For all the reasons generative LLMs are attractive – few-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 it delivers much higher performance out-of-the-box than custom models for each application, at a faster time-to-market.”
Pour out a wee dram for…
A year on from publishing the FinTech Research and Innovation Roadmap, FinTech Scotland announced today that it is on track to hit its targets for economic growth.
The number of Scottish small and medium-sized enterprises 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 £305m in funding in 2022, half of which invested in fintechs aligned to the roadmap’s priorities.
The CBDC train shows no sign of stopping…
CBUAE selects R3, G42 Cloud and Clifford Chance to assist in implementing its CBDC strategy
Central Bank of UAE (CBUAE) has launched its Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) Implementation Strategy in collaboration with R3, G42 Cloud and Clifford Chance. For phase 1, R3 and G42 Cloud have, respectively, been selected as the technology and infrastructure providers of the initiative, while Clifford Chance will provide critical legal oversight for the strategy. The strategy, which represents one of nine initiatives in the CBUAE’s Financial Infrastructure Transformation programme, sets out a roadmap for applying CBDC across a range of domestic 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 building, it is vital that central banks are aware of the legal implications of any chosen design feature or strategy, in addition to how this emerging technology interacts with existing regulations. Clifford Chance has an established track record as a leading advisor in the fields of financial services and technology, and we look forward to working with the CBUAE on its CBDC implementation strategy.”
We’re not a provider, we’re a PARTNER, awright...
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 widen the application 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 feature trace:original documents within wider trade finance products, such as documentary collections and credits.
Orange Bank and Mambu expand partnership to France
The French telecoms and digital banking leader chose Mambu’s cloud banking platform to fuel European expansion.
Orange Bank leverages Mambu to manage its current account, loan, and credit card products with a government-regulated savings account under development. The implementation in France signals the bank’s intention to operate a single banking platform to scale Europe-wide. Launched in 2017, the bank offers banking solutions designed natively around customers’ mobile uses. Its digital-first ethos allows customers to autonomously perform all transactions from their mobile application, with ease and speed.
Askari Bank partners with BPC for credit card and enterprise fraud management system
Through this partnership, BPC will implement its next-generation SmartVista suite to enable a state-of-the-art credit card management system by migrating the 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 fulfil the bank’s security targets and maintain an exceptional user experience.
…and then you get acquired
Zenus Bank makes strategic acquisition of leading payments provider
Zenus Bank, a US-based digital bank that enables accounts to be made available internationally, has acquired Financial Urban Exchange (FUEX Payments), a fintech specialising 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 merger and acquisition strategy.
FUEX Payments has developed innovative application programming interface solutions that enable real-time payments through major global payment card brands for businesses, governments and financial institutions.
