This week in Fintech: TFT Bi-Weekly News Roundup 19/07
Fintech Times Bi-Weekly News Roundup on Tuesday sees a new engineering director for Financing circle as well as financing success for FairPlay AI.
Financing and investment news
FairPlay AI has raised $ 10 million in Series A financing to reduce lending bias. FairPlay uses AI justice techniques to reduce algorithmic bias for people of color, women, and other historically disadvantaged groups. FairPlay’s customers include fintechs, such as Figure technologies, happy money and Octane.
Zesty.ai, which provides AI-driven real estate analysis for Farmers and Berkshire Hathaway, has secured a $ 33 million Series B round. The round was led by Centana Growth Partners. The influx of financing will drive Zesty.ai’s expansion.
Roman capital, fintech growth revenue platform, has expanded its seed round led by Ulu Ventures with additional participation also from MatterScale, Edovate Capital, Tenzing Capital and KCRise. The additional funding will accelerate the development of the platform.
Meanwhile, Coffee Insurance, an insurtech for the truck and transportation sector, has closed a $ 11million Series A. That brings the company’s total funding to date to $ 15.5million. The additional increase will be used to improve current product offerings and further hiring.
The job is moving
Yapilythe open banking platform, appoints Caroline Abercrombie as Chief People Officer, as the team and reach in Europe continue to grow rapidly. She will lead Yapily’s efforts to acquire top talent, as well as continue to build diversity and inclusion into the material.
Financing Circle, the UK small business lending platform, unveils Bruno Tavares as VP of engineering. He joins as the platform continues to develop its multi-product, multi-channel offering; roll out revolutionary new products and opportunities.
Contractsa supplier of integrated compliance and risk management solutions to the financial industry, name Matthew Peace as CFO. Peace will oversee the company’s growing accounting and financial planning team.
Volt, the open payment gateway, has recruited Stuart Barclay. He joins Volt after more than three years with the Swedish open banking unicorn Trustly. Barclay was also a former senior policy adviser to the UK Cabinet’s Open Innovation Team.
Meanwhile, payment processing company VizyPay has added 60 new employees in the last four months. Seventy-five percent are in customer-facing positions and 23 percent in technology roles. Vizypay also added 30 remote account administrators in eight states, including Wisconsin, North Dakota and South Dakota.
Pronto block appoints Kelley Millet as the company’s CFO and board member. Millet’s fintech experience will “accelerate Prontoblock’s traction as a bridge to DeFi that serves banks and other financial institutions across the tokenization of interest rates, commodities and collateral.”
Finally, FinTech Wales has appointed Gemma Hallett as its head of competence. The teacher and former international rugby player will help develop and retain fintech skills in Wales. She is also the founder of miFuturean edtech solution.
Business updates
Creative agency Every Friday has been appointed by new “bank bill” Ashman before launch. Ashman plans to transform the banking experience for small and medium-sized real estate companies. Earlier this month, Ashman received his British banking license, and became the first new player to receive the license this year.
Ondo Insurtech is to deliver LeakBot detection apparatus and repairs to Admiral Platinum customers. As part of the agreement, LeakBot will be delivered to 20,000 customers over the next six months. LeakBot measures air and pipe pressure and can detect any problems before it becomes a major problem.
Global fintech TS Imagine The Montreal business is expanding as demand increases. TS Imagine opened its development center in Montreal in 2019 and is expanding to a new facility in July to serve customers worldwide. It describes Montreal as a ‘thriving global fintech hub ‘.
The twinsa cryptocurrency exchange, has received a registration of Virtual Asset Service Provider (VASP) from Central Bank of Ireland. The company is now approved to offer its crypto services to individuals and institutions in the Irish market.
Zimpler, a fintech company born in Sweden, has gone live in Norway. After Sweden, Finland, Germany, Estonia, the Netherlands, Latvia and Lithuania, Norway will be the eighth market to offer Zimpler’s account-to-account payment solutions.
Fintech lender Creditspring says it is saving £ 17million in UK borrowing costs by offering an interest-free alternative to high-cost credit options. Creditspring’s subscription model is a fixed-price, low-risk credit solution that gives customers access to two advances per year.
HSBC Kinetic, the small business banking app, has lent over £ 2 million in the first three months since its publication. HSBC Kinetic also automatically includes categorized expense statements, account insights and customer service in the app.
Partnership
Ping identity has entered into a partnership with an open banking platform Better to enable customers in the US and Canada to connect their financial accounts to fintech apps. From user onboarding to digital loan applications and money transfers, Flinks’ open banking API technology enables financial businesses to access bank-based financial data.
Kneip has entered into a strategic partnership with ISS FWW to make European ESG Templates (EET) available on the German market via ISS FWW. The partnership will help provide transparent, up-to-date and accurate ESG data to investors.
And finally… SABIC, a chemical company, has launched a pilot project with a technology company Finboot, recycling company Plastic energy, and packaging company Intraplasia to investigate the possibilities of blockchain technology to support end-to-end digital traceability of circular raw material in customer products. Finboot’s MARCO software solution acts as a middleware layer. It will also track TACOIL produced by Plastic Energy from the recycling process, the delivery of this oil to SABIC for conversion to TRUCIRCLE circular polymers, and finally the delivery of the polymers to Intraplás for conversion to its packaging solutions.
