Cheap airlines and luxury watches are part of the mix with APEXX Global, Bud, Trade Ledger and TrueLayer bagging fintech deals.
Payment orchestration platform APEXX Global is flying in fintech via a deal with Ryanair.
Bud has been chosen by Aviva to provide the tech behind its new open banking dashboard.
Trade Ledger has won a three-year contract with Virgin Money to help its business lending services.
Open banking platform TrueLayer has announced its collaboration with Watches of Mayfair, a luxury London-based watch and jewellery boutique.
At the APEXX
London-based APEXX Global says it has partnered with Ryanair to “transform the low-cost carrier’s legacy payments infrastructure”.
John Norton, Group Treasurer at Ryanair, states: “APEXX’s approach prioritises merchants, lowers costs and boosts conversion rates, which means that we are well positioned to capitalise on the rebound in international travel across Europe.”
According to APEXX, it combines acquirers, gateways, shopping carts and alternative payments methods into a single API connection. Its service manages the authorisation and processing of transactions.
APEXX has been active. Earlier this month, Paysafe teamed up with APEXX to offers its payment processing services to APEXX’s merchant base. In January, APEXX made its entrance into the US market.
APEXX has over 120 integrated partners, and various enterprise clients including ASOS, eShopWorld, XE.com, Swoon and AirSeychelles.
Bud’s Buddy
Bud has found a nice friend and says Aviva originally reached out earlier in the year to discuss the prospect of providing an open banking-enabled dashboard to its workplace pension clients. After a “rigorous selection process”, Bud has now got the deal.
The solution uses Bud’s ‘Connect’ gateway to help Aviva corporate pension members access transaction data through open banking. In addition, it uses Bud’s ‘Intelligence’ product to help turn the data into insights that customers can use to manage their finances.
Bud reckons the deal is a “significant sign of confidence in the open banking ecosystem to see a non-bank institution with the scale of Aviva stepping in like this”.
It’s a good month for London-based Bud. It was bolstered by a brigade of benign buddies with an $80 million (£64 million) Series B funding round, led by Bellis Phantom Holdco.
Trade Ledger Built to LaaS-t
Trade Ledger will provide Virgin Money with a digital decisioning platform that will reduce business loan application from five days to “as little as 20 minutes”.
Graeme Sands, Head of Business Lending and Products at Virgin Money, says Trade Ledger enables the firm to “aggregate application, accounting and business credit data, allowing us to deliver significant improvements in the speed of application processing”.
London-based Trade Ledger offers a Lending as a Service (LaaS) option. Its business lending platform analyses data and automates a range of processes. It can access accounting data from a variety of software packages and business credit insight from Experian.
In other news, and back in November 2021, Virgin Money turned to Microsoft to launch a cloud-based platform for its six million customers.
TrueLayer Lands on Mayfair
According to TrueLayer, it will enable Watches of Mayfair’s customers to pay via instant account-to-account payments.
Powered by the fintech unicorn’s open banking platform, Watches of Mayfair’s customers can now pay without having to input card details or share sensitive data. Instead, they use their online banking service to make a direct payment, using biometric authentication to confirm their identity.
Anton Zvarych, Founder of Watches of Mayfair, notes: “Discovering open banking payments has been transformational for us, combining enhanced security and greater comfort for our customers at a much lower cost to the business. This is a game changer in how luxury retail businesses approach payments.”
TrueLayer is often in the news… for positive things.
Its most recent deal was with financial app Curve. Other successes include CMC Markets, Thunes, digital bank Zopa, The Credit Thing, Monoova in Australia, Lemonade Finance, MogoPlus, Douugh, ETX Capital in London and investment platform Tillit.
