Fintech, Finance, Technology, Banking Highlights – 25 September 2018
Marketing Tech Company Bread Secures $60 Million Through Latest Equity Financing Round Led By Kinnevik
Bread, the marketing technology company that builds customizable financing solutions for brands and retailers, announced it has completed a $60 million round of equity financing.
The round is led by Kinnevik and includes additional investment from Bread’s existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, RRE Ventures, Colle Capital Partners, and Cue Ball. The capital will be used to extend Bread’s omnichannel capabilities and expand into new verticals and strategic opportunities.
New technologies are changing the landscape for retail, and digital-first brands are now expanding to offer omnichannel experiences. Bread, born in the era of online, is using the proceeds of this funding to continue investing in solutions that put the retailer’s brand first, including offering more cross-channel marketing strategies that help the retailer realize better conversions and improve customer lifetime value (LTV).
Effectively reimagining the offline private-label credit card industry through technology, Bread’s fully white-labeled experience and flexible financing solutions allow retailers to offer customizable pay-over-time solutions that help retailers reach more shoppers and improve conversions without harming brand equity or lowering the value of their products. Bread’s deep funnel integration, marketing data, and insights enable retailers to better understand their customers, meet them where they are and elevate their sales potential by as much as 61 percent in average order value (AOV), translating to an average increase of 15 percent in top-line sales.
PayPal Completes Acquisition of iZettle
PayPal, announced that it has completed its acquisition of iZettle for approximately $2.2 billion USD.
This transaction builds on PayPal’s strong set of products and services for small businesses and is intended to help accelerate growth and deliver a seamless commerce experience for merchants.
“We’re thrilled to welcome the iZettle team to the PayPal family and are excited to expand the ways we serve our small business customers,” said Bill Ready, chief operating officer, PayPal. “iZettle brings a suite of products and services that allows merchants to meet their customers where they are – online, in store or via mobile. This is another step in our journey toward democratizing commerce tools to help businesses of all sizes thrive.”
With the close of the deal, Jacob de Geer, co-founder and CEO of iZettle, now joins PayPal and will continue to lead iZettle, reporting to Ready. Magnus Nilsson, co-founder and Executive Chairman of iZettle, also joins PayPal.
“Today is a very big day – for me and for everyone at iZettle,” de Geer said. “We share PayPal’s strong belief in the power of small businesses. Together, we will be stronger and move even faster to help small businesses succeed in a world of giants.”
Dion Global Solutions launches Modular Wealth Intelligence Platform
Dion Global Solutions, a supplier of modular solutions to the Wealth Management industry and a trusted technology partner to banking and financial institutions across the globe, announced the official full launch of its Wealth Intelligence (WIN) platform at their Annual Wealth Management Conference in London yesterday.
The Wealth Intelligence (WIN) platform, designed with the user in mind, offers integrated, front-to-back office capabilities meeting the needs of Investment Managers whilst providing a wide range of regulatory compliance tools. The platform empowers Wealth Managers to efficiently manage investments for large numbers of complex portfolios and provide high quality service to their clients. The key benefits include decision-making support for the front office, along with increased productivity via enhanced process automation and straight through processing.
The platform, with its open API ecosystem and data agnostic approach, provides seamless user experience, enriched analytics capabilities, and full transparency between the firm and the end investor. It is deployable in Dion’s Amazon Web Services cloud, a cloud service of the firms choice or on-premises.
The platform incorporates various new modules and many of its existing award-winning wealth management solutions. One of its key modules, the Investment Manager portal was awarded the ‘Best Investment Manager Application’ at the Goodacre Systems in the City Awards 2018.
Kean Williams, Managing Director, Wealth & Post Trade Solutions, Dion Global Solutions, said, “We are excited to officially announce the complete launch of our Wealth Intelligence (WIN) platform, a truly unique, cost-effective, fully-featured wealth management solution for wealth managers and financial institutions of all sizes and levels of complexity. With its modular, open API ecosystem and data agnostic approach the platform seamlessly integrates with a firms’ infrastructure and third-party vendors, providing an enriched user experience to Investment Managers, Intermediaries and end investors”.
