Fintech, Finance, Technology, Banking Highlights – 19 September 2018
MortgageGym closes £3.8m funding round
MortgageGym, the FCA-regulated mortgage robo-adviser, has announced the successful completion of a funding round of £3.8m from investors, including LSL Property Services plc (LSL), which is the parent company of the UK’s second largest mortgage network.
Leading fintech pioneer GoCompare Group plc (GoCompare) has also increased its shareholding as part of this investment round. Following the LSL investment MortgageGym is valued at £12m despite only having fully launched its proposition earlier this year and the funding will enable ongoing investment in the company’s development of mortgage robo-advice and artificial intelligence services. The investment round included the obtaining of FCA approval.
The funding round follows a seed funding round of £2.5m, which was completed in 2017, and almost a year of integration with GoCompare’s services.
Money Transfer Fintech WorldRemit Integrates with WhatsApp
Digital money transfer company WorldRemit has added WhatsApp notifications to its service.
Through its integration with the WhatsApp Business solution, customers who use WhatsApp to chat with family and friends can now also receive instant notifications on the status of their transactions.
Given the challenges of SMS delivery in many markets, customers can often miss out on real-time information about their transfers. WhatsApp’s high reliability and sustainability will provide WorldRemit customers with even more choice in their communications preferences.
WorldRemit is the first fintech company in the U.K. to integrate with the WhatsApp Business solution. Pioneering a mobile-first approach to the $600bn a year remittance industry, this integration supports WorldRemit’s goal of serving 10 million customers connected to emerging markets by 2020.
Alice Newton-Rex, Chief Product Officer at WorldRemit, comments: “WorldRemit is delighted to add the WhatsApp Business solution to its platform to further improve its service by enabling our customers to receive instant updates on transactions.”
LendInvest raises $39.5 million in Series C fundraising
LendInvest, an online platform for property finance and investing, has through the summer completed a Series C debt and equity funding round for approximately $39.5 million (£30.5 million) which was positioned by the company as pre-IPO funding.
Atomico have increased their investment in LendInvest in the debt and equity fundraising, along with new investors which include a fund associated with the technology investment bank, GP Bullhound; and Tiger Management, founded by legendary US hedge fund investor, Julian Robertson.
The funding follows a Series B funding round of $22 million (£17 million) in March 2016, which enabled the business to accelerate its investment in technology and enter the Buy-to-Let (BTL) market. Through all of its fundraising efforts, from its Online Investment Platform through to institutional funding, LendInvest has now raised well over £1 billion.
LendInvest uses technology to bring investors and borrowers together providing property finance that is fast, online and works for all. Today, LendInvest lends in the specialist mortgage market with products across bridging finance, development finance and Buy-To-Let. The business has lent over £1.5 billion ($1.94bn), financing over 5,000 properties across the UK.
UnderwriteMe leverages Yellowfin technology to transform the life insurance industry
Yellowfin BI, the analytics company that provides better answers faster, announced that UnderwriteMe, the largest supplier of automated underwriting systems in the UK and Ireland, has deployed Yellowfin technology to give insurers a new way to consume and serve up rich data services.
UnderwriteMe understood the challenges that insurers and intermediaries faced. They worked with key decision makers and potential customers to design an integrated suite of software that allows underwriters to rapidly create brand new rules, or amend rules to suit their own philosophy, interact fully with live cases, and create customised reports and dashboards with drill down capability for more detailed analyses.
As part of this suite, Yellowfin was selected as the front-end analytics and data visualisation tool. Yellowfin is a white-labelled, fully embedded solution which means that customers can apply its ‘plug-and-play’ capabilities and completely brand the reporting interface in line with their corporate palette. Furthermore, customers can create and schedule their own reports and maintain full auditability.
