Edinburgh based fintech crowdfunding for new app

Financial education Scottish fintech MoneyMatiX is launching a fundraising campaign to raise £12,000.

This campaign will support the launch of its KUZAKASH APP using the RBS Back Her Business scheme which pledges to match fund up to 50% of their crowdfunding target. MoneyMatiX was launch by two highly motivated and driven mums passionate about making money management accessible to all.

Financial habits are becoming ever more complex with young people turning to adults for financial guidance but finding them ill-equipped at money management. This led MoneyMatix to develop KUZAKASH, a family finance management APP promoting meaningful financial interactions between children, parents & teachers.

Kuzakash uses visualisation tools to make financial goal setting fun and achievable. Both adults and children can set, track and contribute towards their goals which are used as the educational touch-points to illustrate healthy money habits.

This raise will be used to carry out beta testing of the KUZAKASH APP and a consumer education campaign.

“Financial management skills are one of the most important factors that determine our lifestyle choices. Money is a continuous touchpoint throughout our lives and technology can help make this touchpoint meaningful by enabling people to create healthy interactions with money.”

Tynah Matembe, CEO of MoneyMatiX

“There is an African proverb that says it takes a village to raise a child, but I want to add to it that it takes a family and community to foster good financial habits. In this day and age of influencers, young people should not only be influenced by fashion or talent, but they should also be influenced by skills that will last for a lifetime like financial education. We are building a generation of financially savvy youngsters who will not only impact their communities but the economy at large. We can’t do this on our own! We need your help to build financially capable communities.”

Helene Rodger Co-Founder and COO of MoneyMatiX

To get the matched funding from RBS they need to get at least 100 unique backers for their APP. The campaign will run for 30 days and you can get involved to back KuzaKash here.

New fintech set to transform consumer investment experience

Scottish fintech company Visible Capital announced today it had secured £500,000 seed funding from TechStart Ventures and a group of eight private investors. 

They also announced the appointment of Preston Rabl (WPP founder) on their board.

The 3 founders, Richard Braidwood, Ross Laurie and Christian Burgin will launch Visible Capital in early 2020. The solution will use Open Banking to assist clients of intermediaries provide their advisors with controlled access to their financial data in order to receive quicker, more informed advice on financial matters. 

“Financial advisers and wealth managers still take information from their clients in paper form ”“ which means the advice they give and the strategies they suggest can only be as good as the immediate information they receive. Visible Capital’s technology allows the intermediary agreed and controlled access to real data about spending needs, wants, savings and borrowing, giving an instantly accurate picture of their clients’ ongoing finances ”“ making the onboarding process quicker and easier, and a lot more precise.”

Richard Braidwood, Co-Founder of Visible Capital

Earlier this year Visible Capital received approval from the Financial Conduct Authority.

Eika Makes Major Investment in EedenBull

Norwegian banking group Eika announced a large investment into Scotland based fintech EedenBull. Eika’s member banks will have access to EedenBull’s existing and future solutions and thereby increased competitiveness in the payments market..

EedenBull was founded in 2018 by a team of payments experts from around the world and expanded into Scotland with. the opening of their new office on September 2019. EedenBull already has a large number of customers in Europe and is now launching its new and innovative payments and spend management programme through more than 65 banks in the Nordic region for more than 9,000 businesses. The company is said to onboard a new customer every 4 minutes.

EedenBull’s solution gives companies simplicity and control for managing employees’ purchases made on their behalf. The solution includes payment cards, a web-based and mobile app management module.

“To us, it is important to create partnerships with players who possess specialist expertise in their areas, as the collaboration with EedenBull is an example of. This investment is strategically important to the Eika Group and our member banks for us to strengthen and secure our ability to compete effectively in the complex world of payments going forward.”

CEO Terje Gromholt of Eika Kredittbank

“The investment made by Eika and the partnership that follows is a testament to our ability to provide significant value to banks and their customers through combining our expertise and experience with payments with access to and utilization of new technologies. We are excited about the opportunity we have to not only embrace change in the way consumers and businesses think about payments, but continue to take a leading role in setting the agenda and driving change”

EedenBull CEO Nicki Bisgaard

Soar and Acquired enter partnership

Another great example of partnership between fintech firms has been announced today. This is partnership with a purpose as the main objective is to enable ethical finance companies to compete more effectively with mainstream providers.

Scottish fintech Soar and London Payments Technology Platform Acquired.com collaborating to help credit unions and other ethical organisations provide better and transparent services.

Award winning fintech, Soar, has developed a cutting edge banking technology platform which is already being used by 10 credit unions around the UK. With the partnership with Acquired they will be able to provide more services including automated reconciliation and for the first time – complete transparency over the entire payment life cycle.

“This is an important partnership for us and a statement about how we intend to improve business processes for our ethical clients. It will also allow their customers to view, manage and pay for a variety of services through one mobile and desktop application.

Our clients will not be playing catch up with mainstream players as they are now enjoying the latest cutting edge tech, which is a match for any organisation in the financial services sector.”

Soar’s founder and CEO, Andrew Duncan

“Acquired.com was born in the highly regulated Consumer Finance sector and has always been committed to helping businesses serve their customer better. We believe that credit unions play a key role in offering fair and transparent banking and credit products to communities all around the country, which we are delighted to play a part in. 

Using our award-winning payment technology, Soar’s clients will be able to gain a much better insight into their customers using our rich payment data.”

Rob Clark, Managing Director of Acquired.com

In the last quarter Soar has been awarded over half a million pounds of research and development grants and this new partnership is seen as a further boost as the company looks to expand throughout the UK and into overseas markets.

Scottish Young Edge winners HubSolv ranked 33rd in UK’s top tech list

Technology directors gathered from across the UK last week on November 7^th for the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards ceremony in London; one of the UK’s foremost technology awards programmes. The directors from Glasgow-based firm HubSolv Limited, Fraser Hamilton and Lewis Black, were among the guests, following Deloitte’s recognition of HubSolv as one of the top 50 fastest-growing technology companies in the UK.

HubSolv was one of the three Scottish firms to have made it to the influential list and ranked 33rd in the prestigious Technology Fast 50. The rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over the last four years, and HubSolv has experienced 1,058% growth.

The team at HubSolv have come a long way since its foundation only five years ago, when they designed their specialised software for the niche industry of personal insolvency. In 2015, the firm won a Scottish Young EDGE award ”“ a grant prize that recognises the most promising firms and businesses with directors under the age of 30. The following years saw the Glasgow team further developing tech solutions and extending their product portfolio, growing their client base and tripling their workforce.

“We’re thrilled to have ranked 33rd in the UK Technology Fast 50. Since we embarked on this journey back in 2014, we have strived to innovate and evolve our product offer, which aims to digitise processes for the industry. Deloitte’s ranking is a recognition of our achievements and denotes HubSolv’s accelerated growth as we concurrently progress with our software solutions.”

Fraser Hamilton, co-founder at Hubsolv

The Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards came back in its twenty-second year. This year, the competition saw fintech businesses comprising 30% of the winners and fintech companies dominating the top three places. Revolut ranked first on the list; while Credit providers OakNorth and Dividebuy achieved second and third place. 

“As part of the growing fintech community, it’s been very encouraging for us at HubSolv to see the pace of growth across the sector and a strong performance from fintech businesses, who have managed to thrive in spite of the recent waves of economic uncertainty in the country. These are exciting times for our team; we have promising plans in the pipeline and a talented, high-skilled team in place to support our growth and innovative development. We’re looking forward to seeing what 2020 holds for HubSolv.”

Fraser Hamilton, co-founder at Hubsolv

Digital Asset and Blockchain Technology Partners launch Sextant for DAML

Digital Asset and Blockchain Technology Partners announced the availability of Sextant for DAML with early adopters Quantum Materials Corp

Counterfeit goods are a $1.8 trillion criminal industry with vast economic and human consequences. Using the latest in nanotechnology, smart contracts and blockchain, Quantum Material Corp (QMC) partnered with Digital Asset and BTP to deliver a platform that will allow manufacturers and buyers to determine absolute product identity.

QMC has released Quantum Dots, nanoscale particles so tiny you could line ten thousand of them across the diameter of a human hair. By varying properties such as wavelength QMC are able to produce billions of unique optical signatures. Impossible to copy, these can be incorporated in the production of almost anything, from aircraft components to luxury handbags.

These unique optical signatures are only useful, however, when paired with the technology that enables them to be read and identified securely. This is where Digital Asset and BTP have stepped in. 

To verify an optical signature, an immutable and cryptographically secure digital twin is required – the perfect use case for blockchain. Combining their expertise in getting blockchain projects into production and generating real business value, Digital Asset and BTP partnered with QMC to provide a platform that will enable customers to verify the authenticity of their optical light signatures as simply as using a hand-held scanner or smartphone application.

By combining DAML, the leading smart contract language created and open sourced by Digital Asset, and Sextant for DAML, BTP’s blockchain management platform especially designed to deploy DAML onto distributed ledgers and databases, QMC has been able to get to market fastest and produce real value.

For more detail, check out the latest DAML blog

Agrud Unveil Expansion In Global Market Analysis Capabilities

Agrud is part of the Scottish fintech community and are the people behind Stella, a powerful global market analysis engine.

Operating between Edinburgh, Kolkata and Singapore, Agrud is pleased to announce an expansion in the way it helps financial institutions and the mass affluent stay well informed in an increasingly complex market environment.

Combining a lifetimes’ investment experience, an innovative approach to data modelling along with purpose-built natural language generation (NLG) technology, Agrud’s UI’s already cater to the needs of over 10,000 investment professionals globally. 

Traditional means of market analysis are falling short in their ability to take full account of the vast quantity and variety of data available today. Whilst price data, industry reports and statistical analysis are still fundamental tools in the investors arsenal, Agrud’s development of its Indicators’ system represents a landmark depth and breadth of automated written-word insights.

Over one-millions real time data points are able to be drawn upon for fact-creation’ about market activity, from technicals and fundamentals to insights on behaviors on all major social media platforms. Around 20,000 indicators can be used in the creation of insights around any particular entity. 

The transformation of this vast quantity of facts’ into useful narratives is where our NLG system comes in. Insights are crafted into easily-readable sentences, and ordered so as to prioritize what matters most to the user.

The real-time acquisition, aggregation, interpretation and delivery of valuable information is the mission.

“Information empowers, and by making premium quality global market analysis more openly available you provide opportunities for growth. Too many are excluded by the crazy price tags of the traditional providers.”

Co-founder and CEO Sayanta Basu

Partnership announced between LendingCrowd and ICAS

Scottish fintech LendingCrowd have signed a strategic partnership with the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS). The partnership effectively makes LendingCrowd ICAS’s preferred partner in its Business Loans category.

With this partnership ICAS will provide LendingCrowd with a new channel to tell their network of member accountants about alternatives to traditional bank lending and their benefits. In exchange, LendingCrowd will give a special discount on client fees to ICAS members.

The partnership will last for an initial period of three years, until 2022.

Commenting, LendingCrowd founder and CEO Stuart Lunn said: “We are delighted to announce this strategic partnership with ICAS, which brings real opportunities for us all. It is a fantastic platform for us to showcase the benefits of alternatives to traditional bank lending, and for ICAS members to then utilise these benefits. It marks another important step forward in LendingCrowd’s growth story, five years after we launched. We look forward to working closely with ICAS and making this partnership a real success story.”

Commenting, ICAS Chief Executive, Bruce Cartwright CA, said: “We are pleased to have entered into a strategic partnership with LendingCrowd and secured a new, exclusive benefit for our members. Through our partnership, ICAS members’ clients can now claim 25% off LendingCrowd business loan fees. We look forward to working with LendingCrowd over the coming years.”