Scottish fintech zumo posts 100x user growth

One year on from a 150% oversubscribed £1.66 million seed funding round closed in just a few short hours, Scottish fintech Zumo has reported that its customer base grew a hundred-fold over the course of the year, increasing from 500 in August 2020 to 50,000 in August 2021.

Founded with the mission statement smart money for everyone’, the Edinburgh-based crypto wallet and payments platform is one of a range of Scottish-born fintechs thriving amidst the vibrant Scottish fintech scene, with underpinning GBP payment services provided by fellow young company and FinTech Scotland member Modulr.

Backed by early investors including Murray Capital, Coldplay’s Guy Berryman and the Scottish Investment Bank, Zumo’s mobile app and B2B product offering aims to bring the benefits of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology to people and businesses everywhere, and it will continue to pursue ambition plans for growth over the course of 2022.

Other highlights from the past year included:

• Product: launch of a new virtual Visa debit card offering seamless cash-to-cryptocurrency payment functionality, alongside innovative smart price alert and smartfolio portfolio tracking features;

• People: a doubled workforce, with key strategic hires and appointments including Chief Operating Officer Dagmara Aldridge; Chief Technology Officer Tim Sabanov; and Non-Executive Director Andy Downes;

• Enterprise: the launch of ZumoKit, a B2B crypto-as-a-service solution that allows fintechs, banks and payment providers to connect to the blockchain, adopt digital and crypto currency solutions and profit from decentralisation; and

• Awards: recognition as a start-up to watch’ by Sifted, the FT-backed start-up monitoring platform, alongside further individual wins and nominations at the UK FinTech, Women in FinTech and EY Entrepreneur of the Year awards.

Nick Jones, Zumo CEO, commented:

“As we grow, it’s great to see the fintech ecosystem around us growing, too – not least through the efforts of organisations such as FinTech Scotland.

“With a global outlook, and breadth of product offering covering both mainstream consumer and business needs, we believe ourselves well placed to capitalise on unprecedented and growing consumer and institutional interest in digital assets and decentralised applications.

“We’re here to provide a new generation of smart money solutions for a new, decentralised economy – bringing financial wellness to people everywhere, not just the most tech savvy or financially literate.”

Swipii releases new feature for local businesses

Scottish start-up Swipii has released its latest feature, the Win-Back Offer enabling local business owners to utilise tech to retarget lost customers.

Swipii is a cashback app that rewards customers with cashback when they spend directly with local bars, cafes and restaurants simply by using their own bank card. Business owners can sign up to Swipii at no cost and use the technology to reach and retarget customers without the need for complicated integrations or marketing experts.

Louis Schena, Swipii co-founder and CEO explains; Local independent businesses form the backbone of our economy. The unfortunate truth is they are decades behind online businesses and big corporations when it comes to the technology they have and as a result are at a significant disadvantage. COVID has widened this disadvantage and our mission is to level the playing field as markets open up! We all have our part to play in shopping local with benefits ranging from investing in our communities to even reducing our carbon footprint!’

To date, businesses featured on the app have been leveraging Swipii’s cashBack offers to target customers at various times and days when they want to drum up footfall such as off-peak hours. Since launching the app in 2018, the Glasgow based app has helped local businesses increase customer engagement and spend, generating spend of £440k to date. Even during lockdown, Swipii cashback offers saw businesses increase customer spend by 16% on average.

Now, businesses can maximise their revenues even more by taking advantage of Swipii’s latest Win-Back Offer. The Win-Back Offer works by targeting customers who haven’t visited a business in a defined period of time, anywhere from 2 weeks to 6 months or longer. The technology crunches data in the background and identifies a cohort of users that fits this criteria and the Swipii app will send out a special cashback offer on behalf of the business getting customers back in store spending.

Bringing affordable tech to local businesses has never been more pertinent as:

• digital adoption surged during COVID with many companies seeing online customer interaction accelerate by 3 years ahead of expected forecasts*

• 75% of UK shoppers said they had been shopping more online compared to before the pandemic**

Backed by VCs such as LocalGlobe and Par Equity, Swipii is the easiest way for local businesses to increase revenue, loyalty and retention as shopping behaviours adapt post lockdowns.

Paymob Launch Tap-to-Phone in the US with ZmBIZI

Paymob is launching in the US through our partner ZmBIZI and their smartphone app. Alongside ZmBIZI, Paymob will be speedier and more accessible to small businesses.

Their US launch coincides with Visa launching its very first US Tap to Phone pilot in Washington D.C. as a method of supporting the region’s black-owned small businesses. This will see Visa providing ZmBIZIZ’s Z1 devices with Tap to Phone technology empowered by Paymob, on a six-city SMB revitalisation initiative, which also includes Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles and Miami.

“With the ZmBIZI Smartphone integrated with the Paymob SoftPOS we are now able to create the next generation of mobile merchants who are doing business on the go’.

This is how we empower communities across the globe to become truly self-sufficient . A one stop business solution that is also a verified partner for Visa Global Small Business Solutions” says Alpesh Patel, Co Founder of ZmBIZI

This has been a long-term project for Paymob, this such a significant and exciting milestone for the company. The Co Founder and CEO, Kosta Du notes;

“This is a huge leap for the paytech space, the move will allow more independent businesses across the country to accept payments without the upfront costs for external POS hardware, meaning small businesses and gig economy workers can accept card and digital payments quickly, on the go, anytime.”

The ZmBIZI app enables business owners and their employees to use the app to type the amount they wish to charge, the customer simply taps their contactless card or e-wallet on their smartphone and finally, it will send them an e-receipt to the customer in the matter of seconds. For Paymob this project with Visa is the necessary place to start as we launch our solution in the US, enabling those who will feel the benefit of Paymobs SoftPOS technology the most.

Terminal V goes cashless with Event Genius Pay

Terminal V, Scotland’s largest electronic music event brand, has joined an ever-growing list and decided to go cashless with Event Genius. 

All five of the brand’s UK events are going cashless with Event Genius – this includes four 5000 capacity summer events featuring the most popular names in techno, like Patrick Topping, Floorplan, Adam Beyer and Ben Klock.

Even after the festival taking place in summer, the flagship Terminal V Halloween festival will deploy egPay cashless technology over its two days run on the 30th-31st, with 40,000 fans attending.  

Prior to the events, ticket holders can create an online account to pre-purchase credits as a way of replacing cash across the festival sites so that when it comes to attending the festival, the credits are loaded onto an RFID enabled wristband that can be received in exchange for their ticket. With a quick tap, they can use this system to pay for food, drink and more. 

What happens when they run out of credits? Fans can top-up credits on-site whenever they run low, and can even reclaim any unspent credits once the event is finished.

Not only will this payment method reduce fan to staff contact points, making it safer, but it will speed up transactions by up to 80%.

Speaking about the partnership, Reshad Hossenally, Event Genius Founder and Festicket CSO commented: “egPay offers a win-win scenario for Terminal V’s fans and organisers.  Without having to worry about carrying money or wasting time waiting in line to be served, Terminal V attendees can enjoy more of the events while the Terminal V team can expect a reduction in cash handling, fan to staff contact points and potential virus transmission, as well as a significant boost to their revenues.”

“This will also be our first egPay roll out in Scotland, so we’re extra excited to meet the team, get onsite and help deliver some great events.”

Paysend Sets Sights on Global Expansion

Paysend, the international payments platform, has announced a $125m Series B funding round, which will help contribute to funding its global expansion plans.

“This $125m B Round investment will allow us to take our platform to the next stage, innovating and expanding geographically to target the $133tn opportunity in cross-border payment flows,” Ronnie Millar, CEO of Paysend said.

“Paysend’s vision is to develop the next generation integrated global payment ecosystem for consumers and SMEs. Our innovative technology is connecting 12bn cards worldwide to pay and send instantly anywhere, anyhow and any currency ”“ we call this Money for the Future.”

Led by One Peak, the funding round had additional input from Infravia Growth Capital, Hermes GPE Innovation Fund and existing Silicon Valley-based investor Plug and Play.

“There remain significant barriers to entry for consumers and SMEs to pay and send money globally; our platform aims to democratise the service by providing a one-stop-shop to pay and send money to families, suppliers, employees and partners in any currency anywhere in the world at a significantly reduced cost,” Millar went on.

It’s Paysend’s global network of banks, international and local payment systems that allows its customers to send money online from any location in any currency.

“We are excited by Paysend’s enormous growth potential in a massive market, benefiting from a rapid acceleration in the adoption of digital payments,” Humbert de Liedekerke, Managing Partner at One Peak, added.

“In particular, we are seeing strong opportunities as Paysend moves beyond consumers to serve business customers and expands its international footprint to address a growing need for fast, easy and low-cost cross border digital payments.”

In the past four years, the payments fintech has grown to more than 3.7 million consumers across 60 countries.

Crypto Wallet and Zumo Launches B2B Offering

Zumo, the crypto wallet and payments Fintech, has announced its Zumokit; crypto as a service platform.

This new B2B product targets Fintechs and other financial institutions that aim to compliantly offer cryptocurrencies to meet the demand of customers to access digital assets.

ZumoKit is a blockchain agnostic, thus enabling companies to connect to any blockchain by adopting any cryptocurrency or using their own stablecoin. This provides businesses to integrate a digital currency, allowing their customers to buy and sell digital currencies as an investment.

Commercial Director at Zumo, Eddie Robb, states that this gives businesses the tools necessary to build cryptocurrency solutions into their platforms, saving them thousands of hours of work.

“We’re working with a number of savings, remittance, and share trading apps to allow them to offer crypto to their customers. ZumoKit is a ready-to-roll solution for fintech companies and other financial institutions  that want to bring the benefits of crypto to their customers. It’s a plug and play product that makes it easy to get going with crypto in a safe, secure and compliant way.”

Robb added that such a solution can be beneficial to companies, as it allows them to provide customers with the ability to trade crytocurrencies whilst also shielding the wider business from the ups and downs of the markets.

Founded in Edinburgh in 2018 by Nick Jones and Paul Roach, Zumo is available for download on both iOS and Android app stores.