Fintech, Finance, Technology, Banking Highlights – 27 October 2017
Current raises $5m
Financial technology company Current today announced today it has raised $5 million in a Series A funding round led by QED Investors, with additional investment from Cota Capital.
In conjunction with the investment, QED’s Founding Partner Frank Rotman will join Current’s Board of Directors. Current is building a mobile, digital-first payments platform free of traditional banking constraints. The company has focused its efforts on families, and in particular, teens – mobile and digital natives with no preconceptions about traditional banking and payment methods.
“More and more consumers and retailers are eschewing cash for digital payments, yet the market seems to want teenagers to start-off with a traditional checking account,” said Current Founder and CEO Stuart Sopp. “We are introducing teenagers into the financial system with digital payments and a set of mobile tools that leave behind the outdated structures of traditional banking and better prepare them for the future.”
Adjoint joins open source blockchain movement
Adjoint, developer of smart contracts and distributed ledger technology for the financial industry, announced today the release of their open source platform Uplink.
Adjoint will use this platform to propel development of domain-specific applications in the financial sector across banking, capital markets, insurance, asset management, and commodities trading.
In doing this open source release, Adjoint is responding to client demand in the financial services industry. This demand is for platforms which the clients can use themselves to create, verify and execute financial smart contracts in a secure, private and scalable way. In addition to financial clients, Uplink will also provide a focal point for a community of partners in smart contracts development, financial services consulting and industry bodies.
DBS opens multi-currency accounts for corporate clients
DBS Bank today announced the launch of the DBS Corporate Multi-Currency Account (Corporate MCA) to help businesses transact and manage up to 13 currencies in separate e-wallets all maintained in one single account.
The Corporate MCA enables businesses to send and receive cross-border payments in different currencies and manage their foreign exchange costs more efficiently as incoming currencies are stored in respective e-wallets until exchange rates are in the business’ favour.
In addition, the Corporate MCA does away with the need to maintain a minimum balance in different currency accounts. Instead, all a business has to do, is to maintain a minimum balance of SGD 10,000 in the account.
According to an International Enterprise Internationalisation Survey conducted in 2016, overseas revenue for companies based in Singapore grew by 4.2 per cent year-on-year, of which 53 per cent of total revenue for Singapore-based SMEs came from overseas.
Kinecta Federal Credit Union invests $3m in Constellation Digital Partners
Constellation Digital Partners, LLC has secured a new partnership and Class A $3 million investment from Kinecta Federal Credit Union, based in Manhattan Beach, Calif.
Constellation CEO Kristopher Kovacs closed the investment last week with Kinecta CEO Keith Sultemeier. Kinecta’s $4.13 billion in assets and 286,000 members makes this the largest credit union investor to date in the financial technology software platform and marketplace.
Constellation is the result of a three-year research and development process, which resulted in the filing of a patent in 2015. Kovacs was awarded a patent for his unique technology May 2, 2017. Kovacs realized there was a fundamental problem in modern digital financial services. Despite a recent boom of potential financial technology partners, credit unions have not been able to access them because of the legacy structure of credit union relationships with current digital banking providers.
AI firm Squirro lands in Singapore
Squirro, the AI-driven context intelligence and data insights solution provider, is opening its first office in Asia, looking to use the new Singapore office as a base from which to target other countries in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.
Squirro’s AI-driven context intelligence and data insights solutions are used by Financial Services (FS) firms all over the world, including organisations such as Wells Fargo, Investec and SwissRE. The Singapore office will be Squirro’s fifth opening, with offices in three European locations and its US HQ in New York.
This latest international expansion is the first since Squirro finalised a $10M Series B funding round in July 2017, with investors including Orange Growth Capital and Salesforce Ventures.
