Scottish fintech Soar secures major funding boost
Scottish fintech Soar, together with Nivo (a Barclays spin out), has secured £200,000 from the Affordable Credit Challenge. This challenge was created to help with the development of innovative solutions to make credit more accessible and affordable, particularly for those who are financially vulnerable.
This is a very important problem to tackle as a recent piece of research shows that 82% of people think more needs to be done to create alternatives to high-cost lenders and 75% believe not-for-profit, community lenders need more support to succeed.
This boost will allow the fintech to work on a mobile app and its automated loan application processes available 24/7.
“We’re excited to have won this prestigious challenge. It’s testament to the hard work of our team and the close collaboration with our partners at Capital and Nivo. Our aim is also to ensure the technology developed for Capital can be rolled out across the UK to positively affect the lives of millions of people.”
Soar’s founder and CEO, Andrew Duncan
The scheme is run by Nesta Challenges in partnership with HM Treasury and three finalists from across the UK were each awarded £200,000.
“The UK’s world-leading fintech sector has a huge role to play in helping the most vulnerable access alternatives to high cost credit. That’s why we set up the Affordable Credit Challenge, bringing together fintechs and community lenders to develop new, pioneering solutions to this challenge. The three winners have done amazing work and I look forward to seeing how they help more people to access affordable credit products.”
John Glen, Economic Secretary to the Treasury
“There is a huge need for affordable credit, and we know that technology can help credit unions and others to both reach people who need it and provide the kind of service that mainstream financial institutions offer. The panel was really impressed by all the finalists – and we’re looking forward to seeing the results of these exciting partnerships.”
Joanna Elson, CEO of Money Advice Trust and Chair of the Affordable Credit Challenge judging panel
COVID-19 – An update from FinTech Scotland
- Ongoing update by the Scottish Government on business support available. For question call 0300 303 0660
- ScotlandIS coronavirus hub with a number of resources to help tech businesses responding to COVID-19
- Deloitte are also providing useful information and webinars on their hub
- For legal assistance, Pinsent Masons are publishing content daily and are also running webinars
In the next few weeks we’ll be organising virtual drop-in sessions for the Scottish fintech firms.
Money Dashboard recognised once more at the British Banking Awards
Scottish fintech Money Dashboard, was named Best Personal Finance App at the 2020 British Banking Awards. Money Dashboard also won this award in 2017 and 2018. The British Bank Award is a celebration of new innovative services which benefit UK consumers.
The company now has over 500,000 registered users who use the platform on a regular basis to manage their finances.
The solution allow people to see all their accounts in one place and now connects with products such as Revolut, Monzo, Starling and Wealthify – all of whom also took home awards on the night.
“We’re delighted to have been recognised by our customers as the UK’s best personal finance app for a third time. This is such an exciting time for independent fintechs like Money Dashboard. Millions of customers are now embracing new fintech products and are therefore benefiting from cheaper, faster and better services. We play a crucial role in bringing all those services together on a personalised dashboard for our customers.”
Steve Tigar, Money Dashboard CEO
Money Dashboard is preparing for a major product launch in the coming months and people can register their interest now.
Modulr, new principal issuing member of Visa
Scottish fintech Modulr just announced it has become a principal issuing member of Visa. As such they have access to the industry-leading global payments network and have the opportunity to enhance their proposition with new features (optimised pricing, faster and easier ways to launch Visa products).
Modulr removes the need for an intermediary bank. They can issue Visa products directly, which, in terms, allow for greater control over delivery, payment infrastructure and scheme compliance issues.
Modulr will use the partnership to accelerate its impressive growth in Europe. The fintech will launch card capabilities in both the consumer and business spaces soon, as well as additional issuing currencies.
“Gaining direct access to key financial infrastructure, such as the Visa network, means that we gain more control and are able to deliver faster, simpler and increasingly friction-free full payment capability to our clients. By opening up access to non-banks such as ourselves, it also helps to provide a more level playing field for competition in the sector.
We look forward to extending the functionality of Modulr’s core platform with a leading card scheme, enabling us not only to build a more reliable service, but to pioneer payments innovations even faster.”
Myles Stephenson, CEO of Modulr
“We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Modulr, an exciting payments platform that enables digital businesses to offer innovative, user friendly, payment solutions. We look forward to working with Modulr as it looks to expand its portfolio and grow across key sectors in Europe such as travel. We look forward to seeing how our partnership will enable even more businesses across the UK and Europe to benefit from Visa products, driven by powerful payment solutions built by Modulr.”
Jill Docherty, Head of Business Development, UK & Ireland at Visa
In 2019, Modulr became one of only a few non-banks to gain direct access to Bacs and Faster Payments and recently won Best Initiative from an SME at the Card & Payments Awards 2020.
Scottish fintech iDelta launches Open Banking Insights app
Edinburgh-based fintech iDelta announced the launch of its Open Banking Insight app to traditional banks combat the rapid rise of online challengers.
Last year, the implementation of Open Banking required the UK’s 300 banks and 45 building societies to release customer bank transaction data to authorised third parties with customer approval. Customers can therefore access their bank accounts using new solutions that make it easier to see several accounts in one place.
Scottish fintech iDelta developed a new app that provides retail banks with data driven insights on all aspects of business and infrastructure performance.
The iDelta Open Banking app allows incumbents to gain visibility on whether or not they are satisfying their customers needs. Indeed, with iDelta they can analyse and understand the interactions their customers are having with other providers.
“Open Banking is intended to increase competition in the marketplace, and in a competitive environment you get innovation. While challenger banks and other financial third parties are revolutionising the marketplace, there is still huge opportunity here for the incumbent banks to drive forward innovation, using insights gleaned from existing customer data to develop customer-focused products”.
“Our app gives the market a low-cost, highly efficient and extensible way of providing a business with a central view of their customer banking channel. Banks that choose to fully use the data they are generating, with the app we have built, will position themselves at the forefront of this new channel of business.”
Stuart Robertson, director at iDelta
The app uses an abstraction layer to deal with the fact that every bank will have different technology stacks. This allows its dashboards and reports to work with each bank’s systems with minimal customisation.
Further International Exposure for Scotland’s Fintech Sector
Scotland’s reputation as a global fintech base has been enhanced after hosting a visiting delegation of sector leaders from Japan.
The Scottish Government’s Trade and Investment Minister Ivan McKee formerly welcomed the fintech representatives, who visited Scotland for a two-day programme organised by Scottish Development International (SDI).
The visit was part of the Department for International Trade’s inaugural JP-UK Tech Rocketship Awards for entrepreneurs in Japan.
Engagements for the delegation, which consisted of five fintech companies based in Japan, included a visit to the Bayes Centre, the University of Edinburgh’s innovation hub for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, a tour of IT company Fujitsu’s office in Edinburgh and an overview of the Scottish fintech sector by FinTech Scotland during a tour of RBS’s Gogarburn HQ.
Speaking after the visit, Mr McKee said: “Scotland is globally recognised as an attractive and welcoming place for companies operating within financial services.
“This SDI programme allowed us to show our visitors from Japan the collaborative approach Scotland operates within the fintech sector, where our public institutions, academia and the private sector work together to support innovation and encourage business growth.
“This visit will further increase Scotland’s profile in the Far East and is another step towards our goal of being ranked among the world’s top five fintech cluster nations.”
The visit was the latest boost for Scotland’s international fintech profile. At the end of January, the Scottish fintech sector became the first in the UK, and only the third in Europe, to receive formal accreditation as a cluster of excellence.
The European Secretariat for Cluster Analysis, which benchmarks economic clusters across Europe, looked at 36 indicators before making the award.
The Scottish cluster was founded as an independent industry organisation by the financial services sector, universities, the Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise, and is overseen by FinTech Scotland.
Stephen Ingledew, CEO of FinTech Scotland, said: “The visit to Scotland by the fintech entrepreneurs from Japan was another example of the global collaboration with fintech centres around the world.
“Working with the SDI team, the fintech trade visit from Japan provided the opportunity to share why Scotland has been recognised as a fintech cluster centre of excellence, one of only three in Europe.”
Mr Ingledew added that FinTech Scotland had recently signed a collaboration agreement with both the Fintech Association of Japan and Fintech Tokyo, which will strengthen connections to develop innovation opportunities.
Takeshi Kito, Vice Chairman of the Fintech Association of Japan and CEO of Crowd Realty said: “I am very excited on agreeing the partnership and signing the MoU with Fintech Scotland.
“We look forward to working with the Fintech ecosystem of Scotland based in the second largest financial centre in the UK, which holds a number of large asset management firms.”
As part of its second anniversary celebrations last month, FinTech Scotland announced that the number of fintech SMEs based in the country had grown by more than 60% over the past year.
It is estimated that there are now 119 fintech SMEs operating in Scotland, coming from as far afield as Australia, the United States and Europe.
Visiting Japanese companies were:
Keychain http://keychain.io
Moneytree https://moneytree.jp
Credify 　 https://credify.one
Soramitsu https://soramitsu.co.jp/
Crowd realty　https://www.crowd-realty.com/en/
Money Dashboard and Wealthify to team up
Money Dashboard, the Scottish fintech that helps people manage their finances has just announced an integration with robo-investor Wealthify. This integration will let users view their investment accounts alongside the other current, credit and savings accounts they hold.
The Money Dashboard app lets people aggregate their various accounts and understand their spending habits to help them save and budget. Wealthify are the first investment integration rolled out by the app.
Wealthify provides an an online investment service. People can easily start investing with as little as £1. The investments are made via investment products such as ISAs, General Investment Accounts, and Junior ISAs and soon-to-be-launched Self Invested Personal Pensions.
This announcement follows Money Dashboard’s recent collaborations with leading challenger banks including Monzo, Starling Bank and Revolut.
“Our mission is to help people from all walks of life master their money, so we’re delighted to be rolling out integrations with innovative FinTechs such as Wealthify and making it simple for users to track their investments as well as their day-to-day spending and saving. Having complete visibility over one’s finances in real-time makes it much easier for people to understand their overall financial situation and to progress to where they want to be. This integration is one of a number of exciting new connections we’ll be making with providers across the financial landscape in the coming months”.
Steve Tigar, Money Dashboard CEO
“At Wealthify, we aim to make investing as simple, accessible and transparent as possible. Our integration with Money Dashboard is a fantastic fit for both brands, allowing our customers even greater visibility and control of their money. We are thrilled to be the first digital wealth management platform to partner with Money Dashboard ”“ our values are closely aligned and we have great respect for what they are doing.”
Richard Theo, Wealthify CEO
AutoRek signs Nationwide as a new client
AutoRek, the Scottish fintech and leading software solutions provider for financial controls, data management and regulatory reporting, have just announced that Nationwide Building Society had joined their list of clients.
The initial contract of 3 years (with option of another 2 years extension) will see Autorek provide Nationwide with their cloud-based financial controls and data management platform.
Nationwide selected Autorek for their ability to deal with a number of reconciliation and attestation challenges. The project will be implemented in a multi-phase approach and will include Mortgages, ATMs, Payments, Cards & Substantiation.
“I am really pleased to welcome an organisation of Nationwide’s calibre to our list of clients. We are looking forward to building a good working relationship with the team and providing them with our experience in helping leading financial services firms better understand their transactional data. This is a landmark deal for AutoRek and the result of an extraordinary team effort on both sides”
Gordon McHarg, AutoRek’s Managing Director
“After a thorough tender process, we were impressed with the quality of the AutoRek tool, it’s speed, adaptability and robustness. We noted that with its cloud functionality that we could face into future with confidence on scale and volume.”
Ian Williams, Director of Financial Control & Operations at Nationwide Building Society
Blockchain Technology Partners brings smart contracts to Amazon Quantum Ledger
Scottish Fintech Blockchain Technology Partners(BTP) has made available its integration of DAML.
Amazon QLDB is now supported by Sextant for DAML in the same way Hyperledger Sawtooth and Amazon Aurora are. The solution simplifies the deployment and management of DAML enabled ledgers.
“There are plenty of scenarios where there is a trusted centralised operator or a natural authority but there is still a requirement to ensure data is not tampered with. DAML on Amazon QLDB addresses these use cases combining the expressive power of DAML with the resilience of AWS.”
Kevin O’Donnell, Co-founder and CTO of BTP
DAML is an open source platform-agnostic smart contract language designed for use in multi-party processes. DAML abstracts away the underlying complexities of blockchains, distributed ledgers, or traditional databases, allowing developers to focus on the business logic of the applications while giving clients deployment flexibility as well as application portability.
“Businesses need to stay nimble to compete and thrive while also maintaining high standards of security and auditability. BTP’s Sextant for DAML with QLDB makes it seamless to run distributed applications without the operational overhead or compromising security,”
Shaul Kfir, co-founder and CTO of Digital Asset.
The integration of DAML on Amazon QLDB is commercially supported by BTP’s management platform, Sextant for DAML, which was launched on the AWS Marketplace at AWS re:Invent in December 2019.
FinTech Alliance partners with FinTech Scotland to boost global engagement and investment funding opportunities for innovative FinTech firms.
London/Edinburgh, 8.00am, Tuesday 25 February 2020 ”“ FinTech Alliance partners with FinTech Scotland to boost global engagement and investment funding opportunities for innovative FinTech firms.
- Through the partnership, FinTech Scotland’s community and cluster activities will be promoted across the FinTech Alliance platform, which aims to bring access to market, talent and capital to the firms across the UK FinTech space.
- The collaboration is part of FinTech Alliance’s mission to bring together the strengths of the global FinTech ecosystem in one destination, fostering collaboration and supporting the growth of the firms and sector as a whole.
- The partnership will build on Scotland’s recent recognition as a FinTech cluster centre of excellence, reflecting the progress made by FinTech Scotland since its formation in early 2018.
- Since its launch in mid-2019, a number of high-profile companies have signed up to the FinTech Alliance platform including Revolut, Level39, OakNorth and Virgin Money, as well as leading Scottish FinTech firms including Direct ID and Modulr.
FinTech Alliance, an innovative digital platform uniting both the UK and the global financial technology sectors, announces a partnership with FinTech Scotland, the independent body established to develop the FinTech community and cluster in Scotland.
The partnership is part of the FinTech Alliance mission to bring together the strengths of the UK’s FinTech ecosystem on one all-encompassing platform, and to support the continued growth of the sector.
The Scottish FinTech community is innovative, collaborative and inclusive, with Scotland home to a growing number of FinTech firms spanning the full spectrum of financial technologies from payments and blockchain to open banking and RegTech.
Scotland was also home to the UK’s first MSc in FinTech, which is offered by Glasgow’s University of Strathclyde as well as the first FinTech Consumer Panel.
Recently, Scotland was recognised as a FinTech cluster centre of excellence by the European Cluster accreditation body which benchmarks the impact of innovation and collaboration across all sectors of the economy.
The partnership will involve collaborating on a number of initiatives, including global development and engagement with investors.
FinTech Alliance will also support FinTech Scotland throughout next year’s Scottish FinTech Festival in September, developing a programme of events, roundtables and discussions.
FinTech Scotland’s content and activity will appear on its FinTech Alliance microsite and will be promoted by FinTech Alliance across social media platforms and newsletters.
FinTech Alliance will aim to keep the Scottish community at the centre of the conversation each month by creating original content, sharing Scottish FinTech news and regularly profiling Scottish FinTechs on the FinTech Alliance platform.
Each and every company in the FinTech Scotland community will be able to avail of unique offers from FinTech Alliance as part of the agreement. The FinTech Alliance platform enables companies within the community to share news and insight, connect with investors and talent, and keep up to date with policy and regulation.
New features and initiatives are being added to FinTech Alliance’s platform on a regular basis, including a Diversity Hub and Mentoring Hub which seek to build a more inclusive FinTech space and offer support to those wishing to build a career in the sector.
FinTech Alliance launched on 10 June 2019 in partnership with the Department for International Trade (DIT). Over 1,000 individuals and companies already have signed up to the Alliance, including Revolut, Thought Machine, OakNorth and CYBG. As users continue to register from all over the UK and internationally, the collaboration between FinTechs gets stronger. The partnership with FinTech Scotland is the latest example of this.
Stephen Ingledew, CEO, FinTech Scotland, added: “This partnership is a further example of driving FinTech innovation through collaborative relationships. We’re impressed by the progress made the Phil and the team in a short space of time and with our shared values of inclusion and diversity combined with a global mindset we aim to accelerate initiatives to support FinTech enterprises.”
Phil Vidler, CEO, FinTech Alliance, said: “It is both exciting and important to have FinTech Scotland on board. Under Stephen’s stewardship, FinTech Scotland has achieved brilliant things as a strategic enabler to some prominent FinTechs in the UK, and has become the true backbone of Scottish FinTech. This partnership cements FinTech Alliance’s commitment to, and support for, all firms across the UK. It also underlines the real spirit of collaboration we are seeing in the FinTech sector ”“ one that will help all involved grow and prosper.”
FinTech Alliance is open to both individuals and companies. While individuals can register for free, businesses are asked to pay a monthly subscription or annual fee for a presence on the platform. The profits made by the organisation will be used to drive further initiatives and support pre-existing organisations in the UK FinTech community.
To sign up and for further information, please go to www.FinTech-alliance.com.