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This Thursday’s The Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup brings you the latest appointments, partnerships and funding rounds.
Job moves
Indian fintech BharatPe has named Smriti Handa as its new chief human resources officer. Handa will focus on strengthening the organisational culture and HR practices in the company with the objective of building BharatPe as an employer of choice. Prior to joining BharatPe, she was HR head, Reckitt Hygiene- SoA before taking over as global talent acquisition director.
Amazon Payment Services, a payment service provider operating across the MENA region, has named Mona Alsemayen as the country head, strategy and growth for Amazon Payment Services in Saudi Arabia.
Merchant commerce platform Pine Labs has appointed Varun Varma as the head of strategy and corporate development, while Jagriti Bhattacharya joins as general counsel. Prior to joining Pine Labs, Varun was leading corporate strategy for PayPal across its international markets. Bhattacharya was previously with the London Stock Exchange Group/Thomson Reuters as chief counsel, South Asia.
Blockchain gaming firm Cross the Ages has appointed Ting Peng as chief operating officer. Peng will drive business and product development for the startup, which plans to be fully operational in the metaverse by June 2023. Peng has served as chief marketing officer at Cross the Ages since 2021.
More appointments
Meanwhile, Elavon, a wholly-owned subsidiary of U.S. Bank, appoints Pari Sawant as chief product officer. Most recently, Sawant led the document cloud business for Adobe.com. His role is to strengthen Elavaon’s global product team.
Paycast, the marketplace payment engine and second venture of UK based fintech group SPG, haa hired Claire Van der Zant as managing director. Her previous role was Paycast’s customer director. She will continue to support Paycast’s sales, partnerships, marketing and customer success teams, while also working closely with product and engineering teams.
Wayflyer, the revenue-based financing and growth platform for e-commerce merchants, has made a series of hires across its offices in Europe and the US. Ciara Smyth joins as chief talent officer, while Roisin Faizullah-Khan joins as VP of talent acquisition. Will Mahon-Heap joins as chief business officer and Deirdre MacCarthy as chief legal officer. Meanwhile, Emer Mc Carthy joins as head of brand and Dan O’Brien is promoted to chief revenue officer.
SH Payments names Irmantas Kamienas as the company’s new CEO. He joins following a 12-year tenure at financial group SEB. Kamienas is tasked with growing the company’s client portfolio. Key areas for growth include the company’s specialist expertise in payments, treasury, and asset management experience.
Finally, authID.ai appoints Joe Trelin to its board. He is the company’s fifth independent director and eighth director overall. Trelin brings with him invaluable experience in systems, platform and application development and will help authID.ai management scale its portfolio of biometric identity security solutions into new markets and use cases.
Funding and investments
Crypto exchange CoinDCX has closed an oversubscribed funding round of $135million led by Pantera and Steadview Capital. CoinDCX is the first digital asset company in India to complete a Series D. Last year, CoinDCX became India’s first crypto unicorn after raising $90million from its Series C.
Themis, a collaborative governance, risk and compliance platform, has secured $9million in seed investment to solve compliance and risk challenges stemming from cross-sector and cross-border partnerships. The round was led by TTV Capital with participation from Felicis and existing investors Walkabout Ventures.
FOODICS, a cloud-based technology firm serving restaurants in the Middle East, has raised $170million. Investors include Prosus and Sanabil Investments. The series ‘C’ funding will support regional and international expansion, including its merger and acquisition strategy to increase market penetration.
Meanwhile, SafetyWing announces $35million Series B funding to scale-up health insurance for remote teams. New investment secured to scale its remote health product, as SafetyWing continues to build global social safety net.
Abhi, a Pakistani financial wellness platform, has completed a $17million Series A capital raise. The fund raise was led by Speedinvest and supported by Global Ventures, VentureSouq, VEF, Sturgeon Capital, Rallycap and FJ Labs. Also participating were Fatima Gobi, Sarmayacar and i2i Ventures.
F10, an innovation ecosystem for fintech and insurtech, with hubs in Switzerland, Singapore, and Spain, has secured a funding round in the mid single-digit million range. It also revealed a management buy-in by the F10 executive leadership , to support expansion into new markets and strategic capabilities. The funding round was led by Five T Fintech.
Partnerships
Moneyhub is partnering with financial technology platform Wyzr. Powered by Moneyhub’s open banking technology and Wyzr’s artificial intelligence algorithms, the Wyzr platform will kick off its pilot later this month making it easy for consumers to analyse past and current spending and save for the future. With data gathered via Moneyhub APIs and sorted through its categorisation engine, Wyzr users can label transactions, giving them 360-degree vision of their finances.
DSK Bank, Bulgaria’s largest financial institution, has announced its partnership with Backbase, the engagement banking platform provider. The bank will adopt the Backbase’s solutions in order to enable frictionless self-service and digital onboarding capabilities for the bank’s retail customers.
Meanwhile, credit card startup Yonder has teamed up open banking platform Yapily to provide consumers access to credit without needing a UK credit score. Yapily data enables Yonder to fetch individual bank account information and analyse factors such as income and expenses to create a more holistic credit profile.
Finally, Haas F1 Team has unviled a worldwide partnership with TransferMate, a B2B payments firm. As an official ‘Team Partner’, TransferMate will provide cross-border payments services, while the TransferMate logo will be featured on the Haas F1 Team’s VF-22 car.
| https://thefintechtimes.com/this-week-in-fintech-tft-bi-weekly-news-roundup-21-04/ |