In today’s top Europe, Middle East and Africa news, Meta is facing an order to suspend data transfers to the United States by the European Union, while Russia’s Ministry of Finance has released a cryptocurrency draft law.
Plus, B2B commerce startup Marketforce raised $40 million in a Series A funding, the U.K.’s financial watchdog is examining crypto platform Bitpanda’s plan to purchase Trustology, and nearly six dozen CEOs are calling for increased regulation of the FinTech sector in the United Kingdom.
Regulator Could Order Meta to Stop EU-US Data Transfers
Meta Platforms Inc. is facing an order to suspend data transfers to the United States by the European Union (EU) agency responsible for protecting personal information.
The Dublin-based Data Protection Commission’s (DPC) ruling could cause Facebook’s parent company to retaliate by removing its websites from Europe.
Russian Finance Ministry Proposes Crypto Rules
One month after Russian President Vladimir Putin urged regulators to reach a compromise on regulating cryptocurrency, the Ministry of Finance has submitted a draft law, the government announced.
Under the proposed regulation, digital currencies are only available as an investment vehicle and cannot be used as payment, according to the release. Still, the guidelines are expected to be a step forward for the booming but unregulated industry.
African B2B Commerce Platform MarketForce Raises $40M in Series A
Business-to-business (B2B) commerce startup Marketforce raised $40 million in a Series A funding round to help the company grow its staff and the platform for retail distribution of consumer goods and digital financial services in Africa.
The capital will be used to offer buy now, pay later (BNPL) to help merchants access fast-moving-consumer goods (FMCGs) on credit, as well as expand further into existing markets.
FCA Warns Bitpanda Over Trustology Deal
The U.K.’s financial watchdog said it has its eyes on crypto platform Bitpanda’s plan to purchase the British company Trustology and can quash the deal if it uncovers concerns.
The Financial Conduct Authority, which gave Bitpanda a license under its anti-money laundering rules last year, said it can rescind the company’s registration if it seems warranted.
London Stock Exchange Group Closes $325M Deal for TORA
The London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) closed a $325 million all-cash acquisition deal for TORA, a single platform for execution, order and portfolio management system (EMS, OMS and PMS).
TORA will become part of LSEG’s Data & Analytics unit’s Trading & Banking Solutions business. LSEG and TORA said they will create an innovative financial infrastructure that works across the investment lifecycle as an open ecosystem.
HSBC Under Fire for Bankers’ Alleged Misuse of WhatsApp
London banking giant HSBC is being investigated by the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for bankers’ alleged use of non-HSBC approved messaging platforms for business communications, according to its annual report published alongside earnings Tuesday (Feb. 22).
The probe by CFTC is likely part of a broader investigation by U.S. regulators, HSBC CEO Noel Quinn told Bloomberg.
Open Letter From FinTech CEOs Calls for More Regs
Nearly six dozen CEOs are calling for increased regulation of the FinTech sector in the United Kingdom, Altfi reported.
In a letter, executives of the country’s major FinTech firms have called on regulators and the U.K. government to accelerate reforms aimed at better financial regulation.
Investment Platform Primary Bid Lands $190M in Series C
British investment platform PrimaryBid is seeking expansion in Europe and the U.S. following the close of a $190 million Series C funding round.
The company said the funding follows growth last year with a number of public companies, initial public offering candidates and the U.K.’s capital markets ecosystem adopting PrimaryBid’s platform.
London FinTech Startup Weavr Nets $40M Funding Round
Embedded finance startup Weavr raised $40 million in a Series A funding round led by Tiger Global, with participation from Mubadala Capital, Latitude Fund, QED Investors, Anthemis and Seedcamp.
The London startup is aiming to disrupt the banking-as-a-service (BaaS) model by extending financial services to any online business. The BaaS model comes with a high price tag due to compliance, technical aspects and implementation, the company said.
UK Departs, Slightly, From EU Competition Rules With New Exemptions
After leaving the European Union last year, the U.K. was no longer bound by EU rules, except in a few cases where the U.K. retained some EU rules for some time. But the U.K. government said it is determined to use its renewed powers to rule on competition law matters, and one of the first actions is to issue a new “block exemption” to competition law.
Under EU law, certain agreements between producers, distributions and retailers are exempted from competition law because it is deemed that the benefits of these agreements clearly outweigh their anticompetitive effects. The U.K. retained these EU rules, but they expire in May, and government will take this opportunity to redesign them.
Klarna Launches Rewards, Pay Now in UK
Klarna is introducing its rewards program and Pay Now option to customers in the U.K. as part of an upcoming expansion plan to nine new markets: Australia, Ireland, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Canada and New Zealand.
The initiative gives Klarna users points each time they opt for Pay Now, the immediate payment option, or make a payment on time using Pay Later or Pay in 3, according to a press release.
Intense Competition From Big Techs Keeps Nordic Payment Firms On Their Toes
Like many businesses operating mobile wallets, Norway-based mobile payments firm Vipps has seen bumper usage since the onset of the pandemic.
The company said its clients have seen their businesses expand as they’ve found new ways to sell their products and services. In addition, Vipps said that with the resurgence of QR codes in the hospitality sector and the expansion of digital payments, the the payments industry in the Nordic region has witnessed rapid growth in the last few years.
Ecobank Says Africa’s Payment, FinTech Future is Bright
In Africa’s changing payments ecosystem, innovation is the norm. In two decades, major transformations have taken place across the continent, from the rise of telco-led mobile money, to the growth of automation across the industry, said the head of consumer payments at Ecobank.
Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are booming in emerging markets such as Nigeria. And a surge in venture capital investment in Africa is also enabling startups to capture payment opportunities and improve user experience and reduce friction.
Parliament Blasts Regulators Over Failure to Oversee Financial Services
Members of Parliament took aim at the United Kingdom’s financial regulatory bodies Monday (Feb. 21), alleging they have failed to combat fraud and accused them of being too cozy with financial institutions, Investment Week reported.
At a hearing before the Treasury Committee, staff from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Bank of England got a scolding. Angela Eagle, a Labor member of Parliament, said that while the FCA has said it plans to improve its fight against financial crime and fraud, it’s been a failure.
Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) promises to improve operational efficiencies and the customer experience offered by enterprises.
The advanced technology is finding applications in loan underwriting and fraud detection, and now it’s moving across borders.
TerraPay Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Ram Sundaram told PYMNTS as part of the “What’s Next in Payments” series focused on exploring AI’s use in banking and by FinTechs that automated decision making and streamlined processes will continue to transform global money movement, especially as faster payments gain ground in cross-border transactions. That’s the inexorable trend, but as Sundaram put it, there’s still room, and a necessity, to have some human interaction in the mix.
In terms of global fund flows, TerraPay’s single connection ties more than 3.7 billion mobile wallets together across 200 sending and 144 receiving countries, touching 7.5 billion bank accounts. As one might imagine, coordinating and enabling the transactions is complex.
“Obviously, in the best-case scenario, everything goes smoothly, but when things are not going smoothly, that’s when the customer queries come in,” Sundaram said.
It’s no easy task to find out straight away where a transaction is, as analysts and representatives at the company have to look at logs and query partner systems.
“A lot of that work is done manually,” said Sundaram, who added that the agents “know the corridors and the markets that they are working in, but it still takes some time.”
TerraPay is using AI models with machine learning to bolster customer support and automate tasks as financial institutions (TerraPay’s client base) send payments in real time, and those payments are processed into local markets’ beneficiary banks.
“We still don’t trust [AI models] to let them respond to the customer straight away, but we can do the analysis, and then that gets reviewed by an agent who decides if [information] is accurate or not and then sends it off,” Sundaram said.
The same principles are guiding AI models and company practices to improve technical and security operations, analyzing and categorizing anomalous transactions and automating integrations with partner firms.
“Compliance is an issue where there is a lot of review needed of the alerts, and we are using [AI models] to speed up those processes,” Sundaram said.
Asked by PYMNTS about how agentic AI can be harnessed, he said: “In financial services, you can’t take chances on technology like this, which has the freedom to go wrong. You have to be careful about making sure that it’s 100% reliable before we can let things run entirely by automation.”
Agentic AI also remains pricey. For example, OpenAI is charging $20,000 a month for its specialized agents. However, Sundaram said the industry will become commoditized quickly, which will lower prices, and some open-source offerings are capable.
“There’s a fire hose of news about breakthroughs and new ideas and new ways of doing things that are coming out on a daily basis,” he said.
Data underpins it all, and Sundaram told PYMNTS that no matter what the application, the information fed into the models must be clean. Most organizations have a range of data sitting in different intra-company silos, and those silos need to come down.
In addition, the data must be structured so that it is accessible and can be synthesized by the models. Many firms may have more than 1,000 software-as-a-service (SaaS) resources to which they are subscribed but are not accurately tracked or monitored.
“Every database is separated, each one sitting somewhere else,” he said.
The days of stitching together those separate SaaS offerings to run an enterprise are ending, he said, and we’re headed to a future when data is collected in one place.
AI models and agentic AI “are extensions of what we’ve always valued at TerraPay, which means building the most efficient infrastructure possible in order to make sure that transactions are processed safely, quickly and affordably,” Sundaram told PYMNTS. “We see AI and [AI models] as powerful tools that help us scale all this very quickly while making sure we build more and more efficiency into the system.”
