Cake + Visa: Slicing Through Vietnam’s Payment Clouds
Future of Fintech - Edition #142 (12th-18th Nov)
Last week’s fintech trends brewed up a powerful mix of innovation and ambition. Seamless payments are heating up, simplifying transactions and setting new benchmarks. Meanwhile, the race to become the next big superapp is on, with companies reimagining their offerings and crushing their fintech goals. Take your first sip of the boldest fintech brew »»»
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What’s on the fintech menu today?
📖 Today’s Must Read: Embedded Finance Q3 2024: Driving Seamless Financial Integration Across Industries
🌟 Fintech Fiesta: The Week's Hot 10!
🌐 ‘Byte’ Buzz: Fintech highlights, sorted by segment!
🔗 Link Up: Your gateway to resourceful links!
Fin-teresting Stories in Fintech 📰
Embedded Finance Q3 2024: Seamless Financial Integration Across Industries
Q3 2024 highlighted a pivotal shift in the financial services ecosystem, where embedded solutions rapidly transformed customer experiences across payments, lending, insurance, and card services. This quarter's trends reveal a collective drive toward seamless integration, personalization, and scalability, reshaping how businesses and consumers interact with financial services.
Partnership Ecosystems Flourish: The quarter witnessed an explosion of strategic alliances between fintechs, non-financial brands, and traditional financial institutions, bridging gaps in cross-border transactions, in-store payments, and digital commerce. Partnerships like Thunes and Alipay+ and Amazon with PayPal demonstrate the global push for payment accessibility and efficiency.
Rise of Flexible Finance: BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) and SMB-focused lending solutions are gaining traction, with Klarna, Liberis, and more introducing innovative financing models. These embedded offerings empower businesses and consumers to manage cash flows and access credit with ease.
Co-Branded and Virtual Cards Dominate: From Amazon-Barclays in e-commerce to Singapore Airlines-SBI Card in travel, personalised card solutions are redefining loyalty while virtual cards, such as Brex's B2B platform, lead in security, automation, and convenience.
Insurance Goes Embedded: Companies like Priceline and Dream Unlimited are leveraging embedded insurance to provide frictionless and contextually relevant coverage, improving customer trust and satisfaction.
Embedded finance is maturing into a core strategy across industries. Businesses are moving beyond standalone services to holistic ecosystems that drive customer loyalty, streamline operations, and unlock new revenue streams.
Ready to unlock the full scope of these trends and their implications? Dive deeper with our exclusive State of Embedded Finance Q3 2024 report—access it now! 👇
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Brewed to perfection: Edition #142 is your fresh pour of fintech updates!
The Week's Hot 10!♨️🔟
Visa Steals the Spotlight in Fintech Town
⤷ Visa joined forces with Affirm and Liv to bring its 'flexible credential' technology to the US and UAE via a card that can toggle between debit and BNPL payment options.
⤷ Cake by VPBank launched a cloud-based Card Management System with Visa in Vietnam, modernising payment processing.
UK Fintech Takes Center Stage
⤷ Equifax UK launched an affordability solution for lenders that combines credit bureau data with real-time transaction data accessed via Open Banking and statistical estimates.
⤷ Griffin received approval from Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) and Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) allowing Griffin to exit mobilisation and launch as a fully operational bank. The launch is backed by a $24M funding round.
AI Meets Fintech: The Hottest Trend
⤷ Zand Bank partnered with Alibaba Cloud and Ant Digital Technologies to accelerate the applications of generative AI, blockchain and payment technology among corporate, institutional and wealth clients in the UAE.
⤷ Grasshopper teams up with EnFi to leverage EnFi’s AI platform to streamline its credit analysis and risk monitoring processes, allowing its team to concentrate on delivering innovative banking solutions for clients.
Breaking Down Barriers to Financial Services
⤷ SEB Embedded, the BaaS platform of Tier 1 Swedish bank SEB, selected Thought Machine’s cloud-native core banking platform, Vault Core, to power its new BaaS offering.
⤷ Tether launched Hadron by Tether, a platform designed to simplify the tokenisation of everything from stocks to bonds, stablecoins, loyalty points, and more.
Crushing Goals, Fintech Style
⤷ Bolt partnered with Salesforce to launch "Bolt for Salesforce" on AppExchange, streamlining insurance quoting for brokers and agents to enhance client experiences.
⤷ Coinbase acquired Utopia Labs in a bid to to help accelerate its onchain payments roadmap within Coinbase Wallet.
Now, for the ‘byte’-sized fintech buzz –
The Embedded Finance realm saw established players weaving in financial services to elevate the customer journey, from smoother payments to effortless returns.
Mastercard collaborated with Qover to offer automated reimbursements for return shipping to credit card users in Belgium and Luxembourg. With Qover’s platform, Mastercard now provides a return shipping cost protection service that refunds shipping fees when retailers don’t provide free returns.
Adyen partnered with Zalando in order to provide European clients and users with secure and optimised payment methods. As a partner, Adyen will help Zalando ensure that its customers can effortlessly pay using their preferred payment methods, providing a seamless payment experience on the shopping platform.
The Open Finance arena is buzzing with partnerships, as players join forces and leverage APIs to unlock new possibilities for data sharing and innovation.
Aryza expanded its partnership with GoCardless to integrate its loan and lease management software, ‘Aryza Lend,’ in 2025, with the intention of integrating it more broadly across other product lines.
CRIF and FlowPay partnered to develop advanced open banking solutions with FlowPay's agility and innovation in the payments sector, to the benefit of both businesses and consumers.
The Digital Finance scene is heating up as players broaden their in-app services, all in the quest for the ultimate super app.
Starling Bank launched Easy Saver, offering 4% AER variable interest, penalty-free withdrawals, and up to £1M savings linked to its current account. The new account is open to eligible Starling personal current account holders and will be rolled out at the end of November.
Nubank launched a Cryptocurrency Swap Tool in its app, allowing currencies to be exchanged directly, facilitating transactions between assets. The new feature, integrated with Nubank Cripto, simplifies currency transactions through direct exchange.
The Fintech Infrastructure sector is seeing a surge in demand for secure and scalable solutions, as institutions double down on digital transformation.
US-based Gate City Bank partnered with Alkami Technology to deploy its full suite of cloud-based digital banking solutions as it looks to enhance the online banking experience for customers.
The London Stock Exchange Group selected IDVerse’s identity verification tools and infrastructure to scale global coverage and fight digital deception in customer onboarding.
The DeFi space witnessed players launching practical solutions that connect decentralised finance to everyday needs.
Cryptocurrency infrastructure firm MoonPay introduced a new payment solution for self-custodial spending, allowing users to hold and spend fiat balances. The new solution empowers users to spend balances through MoonPay’s direct integration with non-custodial or self-custodial wallets.
Fireblocks signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with NongHyup Bank to launch a prototype for tax refunds. Fireblocks and NongHyup Bank will use the Fireblocks Tokenisation Engine in a pilot project to refund value-added tax (VAT) and goods and services tax (GST) on purchases at retail outlets.
And that's a wrap 👋
We hope you enjoyed this edition of the Weekly Fintech Brew!
As a reward for making it this far, enjoy a curated list of awesome fintech resources to keep your curiosity cup full to the brim. Cheers to continuous learning!
🔗 Link Up! –
Uncovering the Value of Payment Flexibility, Optionality, and Choice Report - FreedomPay
The Future Of Spend Management Report - Forrester X Brex
Remittance Reimagined - How fintechs are changing the game Blog - Paymentology
Industry deep dive: Exploring player behaviour trends in eGaming Blog - Volt
How Affirm is Scaling Distribution with Embedded BNPL Blog - WhiteSight
The State of Open Finance (Q3 2024) Report - WhiteSight
Hungry for more fintech insights? Check out some of our other work at WhiteSight.
If you're someone who likes to read think pieces, you will likely love our monthly blog, Fintersections, where our team members analyse the convergence of fintech with the world.
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