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• Digital identity company Ping Identity has agreed to acquire UK-based biometric authentication firm Keyless. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
• Ping Identity will integrate Keyless’ Zero-Knowledge Biometrics technology into its platform to enable business to enhance their fraud prevention and user verification processes.
• Ping Identity has been a Finovate alum since its appearance at FinovateEurope 2012. Keyless won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2025.

Digital identity company Ping Identity has agreed to acquire UK-based biometric authentication specialist—and FinovateEurope 2025 Best of Show winner—Keyless. Terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed, and the transaction remains subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals.

“In an era where trust is continuously tested, organizations must deliver digital experiences that are more secure, private, and effortless,” Ping Identity CEO and Founder Andre Durand said. “By joining forces with Keyless, we aim to make privacy-preserving authentication as simple as a glance—building greater confidence into every digital interaction.”

With its Zero-Knowledge Biometrics technology, Keyless separates itself from traditional biometric authentication solutions in a number of ways. Requiring a only single glance at the camera, Keyless’ technology verifies the user’s face and device against enrollment data, leveraging cryptographic techniques that prevent biometric data from being stored in a retrievable form. This prevents the data from being reconstructed and potentially linked back to the original image—whether on the device or in the cloud. Additionally, Keyless does not require a dedicated device, which makes the technology easier to deploy across a range of different environments and user groups.

The technology helps defend users against fraud techniques such as account takeover, providing instant biometric authentication and deepfake detection for frontline and mobile workers with sub-300ms performance benchmarks. Keyless also supports employees with passwordless multi-factor authentication and seamless single sign-on (SSO) for easier, stronger access. The technology is also designed to enhance readiness for a variety of international regulatory compliance standards for privacy including GDPR, CCPA, and PSD3.

“Trust lies at the heart of every digital relationship,” Keyless CEO and Co-Founder Andrea Carmignani said. “This acquisition will help to embed trust throughout the identity journey—from verification to authentication to authorization—and reflects our shared commitment to a more secure, seamless, and private world.”

Per the acquisition, Ping Identity will integrate Keyless’ privacy-preserving biometric authentication into its platform to enable businesses to enhance their fraud prevention and user verification processes without adding friction to the user experience. The acquisition also helps Ping Identity manifest its One Platform vision of providing verified trust across all identities, including customer identity and access management (CIAM) workforce, and B2B use cases. This vision also means delivering secure, passwordless access for frontline, shared terminal, and manufacturing environments.

Headquartered in Denver, Colorado and founded in 2003, Ping Identity first demonstrated its technology at FinovateEurope 2012. Today, the identity verification innovator boasts 99.99% uptime and more than three billion identities under management. The company’s acquisition announcement comes in the wake of a survey it conducted that indicated that while AI use is climbing rapidly, its impact on customer trust has been increasingly problematic. “AI and the rise of agents is compounding the attack on trust, making threats more persuasive and harder to detect, which raises the stakes for identity verification and protection,” Ping Identity VP of Consumer Segment Strategy Darryl Jones said.

Winning Best of Show in its FinovateEurope 2025, Keyless was founded in 2019 and is based in London. The company’s privacy-preserving biometric authentication technology has helped banks, fintechs, crypto platforms, and more reduce account takeover incidents, secure high-risk transactions, and boost operational efficiency. Keyless’ Zero-Knowledge Biometrics solution provides multi-factor authentication with a single glance at the camera, delivering results in 300 milliseconds without storing valuable biometric information.

Last month, Keyless announced that it had been named a “Luminary” in Acuity Market Intelligence’s Biometric Digital Identity Privacy and Compliance Prism Report. In September, Keyless was featured in Gartner’s Emerging Tech Impact Radar: Disinformation Security for its innovations in biometric continuous identity assurance.

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This week’s edition of Finovate Global features recent fintech news from Canada.

Wealthsimple secures $750 million at valuation of $10 billion

Canadian fintech Wealthsimple has raised CAD $750 million at a post-money valuation of CAD $10 billion. The funding round includes both a CAD $550 million primary offering and a secondary offering of up to CAD $200 million. Dragoneer Investment Group and GIC led the round, which also featured participation from new investor Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) as well as existing investors Power Corporation of Canada, IGM Financial Inc. ICONIQ, Greylock, and Meritech.

“This raise reflects deep confidence from new and returning investors in our mission and our role as a defining Canadian company,” Wealthsimple Co-Founder and CEO Michael Katchen said. “We were intentional in choosing partners committed to the long-term future of Wealthsimple. These are well-respected, global leaders with a proven track record (of) scaling category leaders, and who believe in our vision for the future of financial services.”

Founded in 2014 and headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Wealthsimple offers a suite of low-cost financial solutions to help Canadians build wealth. The company’s platform features self-directed investing, managed portfolios, digital asset investing, tax filing, advisor services, and more in a single, integrated experience. Wealthsimple serves three million Canadians and has $100 billion in assets under administration.

“Few companies have achieved what Wealthsimple has in the last few years,” Dragoneer Investment Group Partner Christian Jensen said. “The Wealthsimple team has built an expansive financial platform that millions of Canadians trust. They’re not just participating in Canada’s financial services industry; they’re redefining it.”

Earlier this year, Wealthsimple unveiled a waitlist for its first credit card, which topped 300,000 Canadians in the first six months. The company’s fundraising news follows a profitable 2024 and current profitability in 2025, as well. The capital infusion will help Wealthsimple accelerate its product roadmap in investing, spending, and credit, as well as support the company’s efforts to expand its platform.

Fintech investment slows in H1 ahead of potential rebound in H2

Speaking of investment and Canadian fintech, KPMG’s Canada Fintech Investment Report is a great way to get up to speed on the investment trends that are supporting fintech innovation in Canada. The report was published in August, and focuses on investment trends from the first half of 2025.

While the report indicates that Canadian fintech investment fell significantly compared to international trends, the report authors suggest that the first half of 2025 represented a normalization in the wake of record high levels of investment in 2024. Areas of investor interest include AI, especially agentic AI, and digital assets, which represent a continuation of trends from 2024. A more positive regulatory tone toward cryptocurrencies—especially stablecoins—in the US has been credited for this rebound in interest in digital assets. The report also noted some interest in quantum computing among insurers.

“Last year was exceptionally strong for fintech investment, thanks to two major take-private deals,” Dubie Cunningham, a Partner in KPMG in Canada’s Banking and Capital Markets Practice, explained. “Since then, investment activity has dropped to more stable levels. In fact, when you consider the economic shifts such as tariffs affecting global trade, investment in the first half was quite robust compared to historical levels. There’s still a lot of dry powder ready to be deployed by investors, but they are demonstrating more selective behavior than in previous years. They’re looking for quality companies and we’re seeing longer tails for maturing mid-to-large stage private equity deals.”

Read the full report.

Coming to Canada: Atlanta’s Rainforest and Lebanon’s Whish Money

This week reminds us of how attractive Canada is to a growing number of fintechs around the world. Rainforest, a embedded payments company based in Atlanta, Georgia, announced recently that it is looking to expand to Canada. The company, founded in 2022, secured $29 million in funding in September, taking its total capital raised to $57.5 million. The idea of expanding to Canada, as Rainforest Founder and CEO Joshua Silver explained to Global Atlanta, represents more than a regional expansion for the company itself. The move would also help Rainforest’s platform client expand their offerings in a new market.

Rainforest specializes in payments partnerships with software providers that target businesses in underserved industry sectors. These software providers themselves are an underserved segment of the industry—processing $50 million to $2 billion in annual payments. Rainforest offers an embedded payments solution that enables software platforms to provide a robust payments experience for their end merchants without having to register as a payment facilitator with card networks.

Hailing from even farther away than the Peach State where Rainforest resides is Whish Money. Headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon, and regulated by the country’s central bank, Whish Money announced this week that it had secured financial services licenses in Canada. The regulatory approvals are the first for the company outside of the MENA region, and is part of a global expansion that includes entering markets in the US, the UK, the EU, and Australia.

“Securing our Canadian license is a monumental step that validates our compliant, customer-focused model and sets the foundation for our international expansion,” Whish Money board chairman Toufic Koussa said. “This move is about more than just entering a new market; it’s about strategically connecting high-diaspora communities with reliable financial infrastructure, beginning with North America. We are committed to building a regulated, transparent global ecosystem that truly serves our users.”

Whish Money offers a range of digital financial services including payroll, fund transfers, and billpay. Founded in 2019, the company’s e-wallet, money remittance, and e-distribution platform has a user base of more than 1.5 million. The company’s global expansion is being supported by partnerships with companies such as Visa, Mastercard, Ria, and Terrapay.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Central and Southern Asia

• Pakistan-based fintech startup ZAR raised $13 million for its technology that enables consumer to convert cash into stablecoins.
• Indian fintech infrastructure company Falcon announced a partnership with technology consulting firm Tech Mahindra.
• Alipay+ and HUMO, Uzebekistan’s national payment system, teamed up to facilitate cross-border payments.

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Blockchain infrastructure and cryptocurrency provider Binance unveiled QR code payments in Argentina
• Kueski and dLocal team up to bring Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) services to merchants in Mexico.
• Nubank and OpenAI partnered to launch ChatGPR Go in Brazil to give individuals greater access to ChatGPT’s advanced capabilties at a lower cost.

Asia-Pacific

• Remittance provider Viamericas partnered with Dong Phuong Money Transfer to expand access to remittance services throughout Vietnam.
• Japanese fintech JPYC launched the country’s first yen-denominated stablecoin.
• Malaysian fintech Instapay earned a spot on CB Insights’ Global Fintech 100.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• South African fintech SME Snapshot launched updated version of its business management dashboard.
• Nigeria’s Flutterwave partnered with Polygon to launch a stablecoin payment network across 34 African countries.
• Kenya’s Choice Bank teamed up with Safaricom to power cross-border money transfers.

Central and Eastern Europe

• Coinbase and Tink teamed up to bring Pay by Bank crypto payments to customers in Germany.
• Lithuanian regtech IDenfy partnered with Australian remittance service provider J Forex Money Transfer.
• Finlayer and Salt Edge annnounced a partnership to bring open banking to small and medium-sized businesses in Romania.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Saudi Arabian Buy Now Pay Later firm Tabby boosted its valuation to more than $4.5 billion in the wake of a secondary share sale.
• Israel-based Viola Credit closed its third credit fund at $2 billion, topping its original target of $1.5 billion.
• Lebanon-based fintech Whish Money secured financial services licenses in Canada.

Photo by Harrison Haines

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Digital businesses in the modern era span geography, product types, and regulatory regimes, making the process of verifying identities and assessing risk difficult. Today, we’re highlighting a conversation that digs into how platforms can assess risk at scale by embedding identity and risk intelligence into a single workflow.

At FinovateFall earlier this year, I spoke with Kate Young, Marketing Manager at Middesk, a company specializing in identity verification and onboarding automation. During our conversation, Kate discussed identity and onboarding challenges, how platforms distinguish legitimate enterprises from fraudulent ones, and the importance of embedding risk intelligence and KYB tools into the onboarding and lending processes. The interview touches on real-world use cases, ROI metrics, and what it takes to move from spreadsheets to APIs.

“There’s still this… trust gap between all of the businesses and the changes that they make both legitimately and illegitimately and the understanding of those financial institutions of those businesses. So there’s a wide gap between that business identity data and financial institutions being able to trust it…. We can actually bring that [gap] much closer and financial institutions can get much closer to trusting those businesses and saying yes to them more confidently and honestly growing their portfolio with those businesses once they truly trust who they are.”

Founded in 2018, Middesk’s identity and business verification platform provides APIs for verifying B2B customers, reducing fraud risk, and automating underwriting. With features such as entity resolution, beneficial-owner monitoring, and embedded data flows, Middesk enables platforms to streamline onboarding, reduce fraud, and scale reliably by offering up-to-date, verified data about their business users and clients.

Photo by Lisa from Pexels

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• Walmart’s OnePay digital banking platform is partnering with DriveWealth to launch OnePay Invest, giving users access to stock and ETF trading within their existing app.
• Since acquiring fintechs Even and ONE, Walmart has built OnePay into a full-service app offering savings, credit-building, BNPL, and now investing.
• Integrating DriveWealth’s brokerage-as-a-service APIs, OnePay lowers the barrier to entry for first-time investors and strengthens Walmart’s bid to become a one-stop financial hub for everyday consumers.

Digital trading and brokerage company DriveWealth scored a partnership this week with Walmart’s digital banking platform OnePay, which will leverage DriveWealth’s brokerage-as-a-service offering to launch OnePay Invest.

Walmart launched OnePay in January 2021 through a partnership with Ribbit Capital. In January 2022, Walmart expanded OnePay’s capabilities by acquiring two fintech platforms, Even and ONE, which helped Walmart create a more comprehensive financial services app. Since then, Walmart has been actively building up OnePay to compete with top fintech startups by adding features such as a high-yield savings account, credit-building tools, and BNPL capabilities.

DriveWealth will give OnePay users a new way to invest in stocks and ETFs. OnePay Invest will offer users access to trading tools within the same mobile app they already use to save, spend, and borrow.

“OnePay puts everyday money decisions in one place. By embedding DriveWealth’s investing technology directly into that experience, we are giving millions of Americans simple, reliable access to invest where they already save and spend,” said DriveWealth CEO Naureen Hassan. “This partnership moves our shared mission forward: make investing available to anyone, anywhere.”

Many OnePay customers may be new to investing, and embedding DriveWealth’s tools directly into the OnePay app lowers the barrier to entry. By enabling users to explore stock and ETF investing within the same platform they already use to manage savings, spending, and borrowing, OnePay creates a simple on-ramp to wealth building.

The move also helps OnePay differentiate itself from competitors such as Chime and Dave, which both cater to similar underbanked populations but have yet to integrate investing capabilities. In combining everyday money management with access to the markets, OnePay is positioning itself as an all-in-one financial hub for the mass-market consumer.

Today’s partnership isn’t Walmart’s first attempt this month to bolster the capabilities of OnePay. On October 3, the company announced plans to offer crypto trading and custody in its mobile app, allowing users to buy, hold, and trade Bitcoin and Ether. 

DriveWealth was founded in 2012 to allow third parties to enable access to US equities, fixed income, and other asset classes through scalable, compliant solutions via its suite of APIs. Earlier this year, the New York-based company teamed up with Moment Technology to make fixed-income investing more accessible to a broader range of investors.

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• Capital markets software developer Devexperts launched its latest AI-powered data analysis solution, Acomotrade, this week.
• The new offering is designed to help online trading platforms better engage new users, most of whom rarely become the kind of active traders these platforms rely on.
• Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, and founded in 2002, Devexperts demonstrated its technology at our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016.

For all the excitement experienced when markets are soaring toward new highs, life for brokerage companies can actually be more complicated. While trading volumes are climbing, the fact of the matter is that many of the new traders and investors who decide to start participating in the market often don’t end up sticking around very long at all. The average new user lifetime on a trading platform is less than six months—to say nothing of those traders who abandon the platform shortly after registering, never even placing their first trade. New traders rarely become the kind of active traders that online trading platforms crave, which complicates the acquisition cost equation and makes it hard for platforms to recoup their investment in new users.

The new offering from capital markets software developer Devexperts, Acomotrade, is designed to help online trading platforms better manage these challenges. An AI-powered data analysis solution, Acomotrade leverages insights into user behavior to help brokers improve the return on acquisition via better engagement and lower early user churn.

Acomotrade features personal instrument recommendations, analyzing trader activity and behavioral patterns to suggest tools like watchlists that match the individual trader’s habits and preferences. The solution also includes disengagement detection, leveraging large-scale behavioral data to detect signs of user disengagement. At this point, brokers can intervene with personalized communications or incentives before the user leaves the platform entirely.

Acomotrade also relies on user representation to group traders together based on characteristics such as risk appetite, trading style, and engagement duration. This helps brokers personalize their engagement with different user groups. All of these features are designed to help platforms better understand, communicate with, and support their newest users when they are most vulnerable to becoming disenchanted with the online trading experience.

“Acomotrade gives brokers a practical way to strengthen user engagement and retention, directly improving profitability without additional acquisition spend,” Devexperts Data Science Team Lead Ivan Kunyankin said. “It will initially be offered as an opt-in feature within the DXtrade platform and we look forward to seeing our clients benefit from the advanced insights and functionalities Acomotrade has to offer, as well as working with our clients to develop these further over time.”

Dublin, Ireland-based Devexperts participated in our developers conference, FinDEVr Silicon Valley 2016. The company specializes in providing trading platforms and brokerage automation, complex software development products, and market data products. The company also provides consulting services for financial institutions, particularly in the areas of real-time transaction monitoring, trading automation, and risk management. Devexperts’ DXtrade platform is a multi-asset, broker-agnostic trading platform for brokers and prop firms that offer trading in stocks, derivatives, FX, CFDs, spread bets, and blockchain-based currencies. More than 20 million users rely on Devexperts’ technology every day. Nikolaj Mosejev is CEO.

Photo by Sophie Popplewell on Unsplash

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This week we’re sharing six interviews from the Finovate Podcast featuring the companies that won Best of Show at FinovateFall last month.

From the latest innovations in the fight against fraud to leveraging AI to make it easier for small businesses to secure the financing they need to grow, FinovateFall 2025’s Best of Show winners help us see exactly where fintech is making the most impact for companies and communities.

In his most recent podcast interview, Greg Palmer talks with LemonadeLXP CEO John Findlay.

Findlay explains how the company evolved into a comprehensive all-in-one learning and knowledge platform for financial institutions. Findlay and Palmer discuss the shortcomings of traditional learning management systems that focus on compliance training rather than skill development that leads to business growth and more effective customer service.

EP 277: John Findlay, LemonadeLXP

Finovate Podcast host Greg Palmer catches up with Shivangi Khanna (CEO) and Sophie Jewsbury (COO) of Krida.

The three talk about how Krida leverages AI and workflow automation to transform the commercial lending process. Khanna and Jewsbury discuss the universal pain point of document collection and processing and explain how Krida’s technology automates the feedback loops between borrowers and loan officers to shorten the time between lead generation and a completed loan application.

EP 276: Shivangi Khanna and Sophie Jewsbury, Krida

Greg Palmer interviews Mart Vos, CEO of Eko Investments.

Palmer and Vos discuss how Eko makes it possible for early-stage investors to get started building their wealth through the credit union or bank they already know and trust. Vos explains how enabling financial institutions—especially smaller ones—to offer investment services can help them compete with third-party investing apps, many of which are embarking upon offering banking services of their own.

EP 275: Mart Vos, Eko Investments

Mitch Rutledge, CEO of Vertice AI, joins Greg Palmer on the Finovate Podcast.

In this conversation, Palmer and Rutledge talk about how Vertice AI enables smaller financial institutions to “punch above their weight” with AI-powered solutions that help them transform institutional data into actionable insights. Vertice AI helps community FIs deliver personalized customer engagement and measurable growth outcomes.

EP 274: Mitch Rutledge, Vertice AI

Greg Palmer chats with Tim Li, Co-founder and CEO of LendAPI.

Li explains how LendAPI serves as a “super orchestration platform” that enables users to build their own financial products via an intuitive browser interface. The platform includes a product studio in which FIs can build personal loans, mortgages, and other products with integrated rule studios, models studios, pricing engines, and third-party plugins.

EP 273: Tim Li, LendAPI

Finovate Podcast host Greg Palmer interviews Casap Co-founder and CEO Shanthi Shanmugam.

Palmer and Shanmugam talk about the challenges of first-party fraud and how this form of fraud—in which customers falsely claim they did not make purchases they actually did make—has become the leading fraud attack vector around the world, even more than account takeovers and scams. Shanmugam explains how Casap leverages AI agents that function like expert investigators to determine when disputes are legitimate.

EP 272: Shanthi Shanmugam, Casap

Photo by Will Francis on Unsplash

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• Morgan Stanley has agreed to acquire private company trading platform EquityZen. Terms of the transaction were not immediately available.
• The acquisition will help Morgan Stanley offer a full suite of solutions for its private company and wealth management clients, including cap table solutions, tender and liquidity programs, direct and co-investment opportunities, and secondary trading.
• EquityZen made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2016. The company is headquartered in New York.

One of the biggest challenges in the world of private company investing is dealing with the liquidity gap that can arise between private companies and their stakeholders when stakeholders seek access to cash before companies are ready to officially exit via public offering or acquisition. As more and more companies stay private longer, an opportunity has developed for innovators that can not only democratize access to private market investments, but can also serve the interests of employees seeking liquidity, companies requiring control over secondary transactions, and investors wanting access to high-growth private startups.

Tackling this challenge is EquityZen, a New York-based fintech founded in 2013 that made its Finovate debut at FinovateSpring 2016 in San Francisco. This week, we learned Morgan Stanley has announced its acquisition of the company, which offers a proprietary platform that facilitates secondary transactions in private firms, and works directly with shareholders and issuers to provide a seamless experience for buyers, sellers, and companies alike.

“This announcement comes at a critical time in the development of the private markets ecosystem,” Jed Finn, Head of Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, said. “The combination of EquityZen with Morgan Stanley will uniquely address client needs as companies stay private much longer, such as delivering liquidity solutions for their employees and early investors in a seamless yet controlled process of their own design. With EquityZen, we combine our cap table management solutions with a private shares marketplace to deliver end-to-end solutions to our private market company clients.”

EquityZen enables accredited investors to explore investment offerings on its platform, review offering documents, and conduct research before reserving investments in live offerings, or indicating their interest in upcoming offerings. Investors can execute documents and provide payment information in order to complete the investment via ACH or wire, and actively manage their investments and receive personalized updates on their companies in their portfolio. Investors receive investment proceeds in the form of cash or shares if the company exits successfully or simply if the investor requires liquidity.

The acquisition follows news of Morgan Stanley’s expanded partnership with private capital software platform Carta. Morgan Stanley noted that its acquisition of EquityZen will enhance its private markets ecosystem, and enable the firm to offer a range of services to private companies and their shareholders including cap table solutions, tender and liquidity programs, direct and co-investment opportunities, and secondary trading. Morgan Stanley will benefit from EquityZen’s issuer-aligned model, which will help it enhance its relationship with private companies and offer its wealth management customers greater access to private shares.

“Our entire mission has been to bring ‘private markets to the public’ and by integrating into Morgan Stanley, we will reach more investors and shareholders than ever before,” EquityZen CEO Atish Davda said. “When our category-leading technology and welcoming marketplace are matched with Morgan Stanley’s comprehensive suite of products, services, and offerings focused on the private markets, we can create a value proposition together for issuers, shareholders, and investors that is unrivaled in our space.”

EquityZen has 800,000 registered users. To date, the company has processed more than 49,000 transactions across 450+ private companies.

Photo by Pixabay

Views: 702

• Barclays’ US consumer banking subsidiary, Barclays Bank Delaware, is acquiring Best Egg for $800 million.
• Barclays aims to use the purchase to diversify its US consumer business and strengthen its presence in unsecured lending.
• The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026.

Barclays‘ US consumer banking subsidiary, Barclays Bank Delaware, unveiled plans this week to expand its US footprint, acquiring personal loan origination company Best Egg. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026 for $800 million.

Best Egg offers a direct-to-consumer personal loan origination platform that specializes in lending to prime borrowers. Since it was founded in 2013, the Delaware-based company has facilitated over $40 billion in personal loans to more than two million customers. By the end of this year, Best Egg will have facilitated more than $7 billion in personal loan originations.

Best Egg currently services approximately $11 billion in personal loans which are funded through structures such as securitization programs and forward flow arrangements provided by a range of alternative asset managers. The company generates fee-based income from its loan origination and servicing activities.

Best Egg CEO Paul Ricci said the acquisition marks a major milestone in the company’s mission to help consumers achieve financial confidence through modern lending products. “At Best Egg, we are driven by a mission to empower people with financial confidence and flexibility through our suite of lending products and financial health tools,” said Ricci. “Joining forces with Barclays marks a pivotal moment in our journey—one that amplifies our ability to reach even more people through innovative lending solutions that truly make a difference. This transaction is a testament to the strength of the incredible business we’ve built over the past 12 years, our talented team, and the trust we’ve earned from our customers. Together with Barclays, we’re excited to accelerate our growth and continue shaping the future of consumer finance in ways that are both meaningful and impactful.”

Barclays’ US Consumer Bank will leverage Best Egg’s digital and risk capabilities to enhance its credit card business that provides unsecured personal lending to customers by partnering with co-brand card partner programs. Buying Best Egg provides the bank an on-ramp into a well-established lending platform with proven underwriting and distribution capabilities. It also signals Barclays’ intent to diversify beyond credit cards and move into unsecured lending.

Barclays Group Chief Executive C.S. Venkatakrishnan described the acquisition as a key growth opportunity within the bank’s long-term US strategy. “The deep and sophisticated US consumer finance market offers rich prospects for growth at Barclays,” said Venkatakrishnan. “The transaction will strengthen our US Consumer Bank and offers an exciting opportunity to significantly bolster our capabilities in personal lending.”

Once the acquisition is complete, Barclays plans to leverage this same model while retaining a small portion of Best Egg’s new lending flow on its balance sheet.

Denny Nealon, CEO of Barclays US Consumer Bank, said the move supports the company’s broader goal of diversification and scale in US retail banking. “This acquisition represents a significant step forward in our strategy to grow and diversify our US consumer banking business,” said Nealon. “As a leader in the personal loans market, Best Egg gives us the ability to reach more US consumers through a proven platform that has been successful for over a decade. We look forward to welcoming Best Egg’s customers as well as its talented and experienced management team and colleagues upon closing in 2026.”

Photo by YUSUF ARSLAN

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The initial agenda for FinovateEurope 2026—February 10 and February 11 at the Intercontinental O2 in London—has just been released. And while there are still plenty of elements to be added to the two-day event, we are already seeing the contours of a conference that will help attendees better understand the opportunities in emerging technologies like quantum computing, learn the latest strategies for fighting fraud and financial crime, and find the most effective use cases for both AI and digital assets like stablecoins.

There’s plenty to share in the weeks to come. For now, here are six of the early highlights from Days One and Two.

Day One: All About AI

Boom, bubble, or something else entirely, the AI revolution in technology continues to be one of the defining characteristics of innovation in our times. To this end, the first day of FinovateEurope 2026 will feature a number of sessions dedicated to the AI phenomenon and how banks and other financial institutions are putting this new technology to use to offer new products and services faster and better serve their corporate and retail customers.

On the afternoon of Day One, FinovateEurope will host an Executive Briefing titled The AI Competitive Imperative & Ten Solutions You Need to Know About Today. This session will discuss how firms can successfully integrate AI into core financial services operations. The briefing will cover strategies to deploy AI safely and compliantly, ensure that AI initiatives are aligned with the company’s business and change management strategy, and successfully scale their AI projects from pilot to production.

Later that afternoon, FinovateEurope will feature a Keynote Address: Agentic AI—A New Frontier in Banking, How Can FIs Harness it to Reimagine Enterprise Processes. Agentic AI is one of the most exciting developments in AI, with applications from cybersecurity to e-commerce. What needs to happen to ensure that Agentic AI delivers real value for both customers and banks? And what about the issues of trust and identity? How should banks operate in a brave new world in which bots are customers? Our keynote address on Agentic AI will cover all this and more.

FinovateEurope 2026 wraps up Day One with a Power Panel: AI, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, Beyond the Hype—How Financial Institutions Can Use AI to Make Money or Save Money. This panel will showcase a variety of viewpoints on where we are in terms of AI, fintech, and financial services. Where are the greatest opportunities: product innovation or customer journeys? What are the best use cases for financial institutions and do we have the right KPIs to measure success? And what does it mean for financial institutions to “lean into” the opportunities in AI—where do the potential rewards most clearly outweigh the potential risks?

Day Two: Cyber Security, Quantum Computing, and Stablecoins

If Day One is dedicated to all things AI, Day Two offers a tour of many of the other enabling technologies and top challenges in fintech and financial services.

Wednesday morning, FinovateEurope will feature a Power Panel: Financial Crime & Cyber Security—How Banks & Fintechs Can Work Together to Meet the Challenges of the Digital Era. This session will look at some of the new tools and technologies that are available to help combat financial crime. The conversation will cover the role of digital identity and biometric authentication—as well as AI and machine learning—in the current fight against the fraudsters. The panel will also examine ways that fintechs and banks can partner to better defend customers from both contemporary and evolving threats.

AI is not the only advanced technology that fintechs and banks are exploring. Quantum computing, with processing power that dwarfs that of supercomputers, could have a major impact on industries from technology to communications to defense. FinovateEurope’s Quick Fire Keynote: How Quantum Computing Could Transform Banking—What Are the Use Cases for Banks? will provide insightful commentary on what bankers—and their technology partners—need to know about the promise and risks of quantum computing.

There are many areas where the UK and Europe are ahead of the US—sustainability, open banking and open finance, for example. But has the new clarity in stablecoins in the US courtesy of the Genius Act given the States an edge vis-à-vis the UK and Europe when it comes to these digital assets? FinovateEurope’s Fireside Chat: Stablecoins and Tokenized Deposits in the Real World—Hype vs Reality will look at the current regulatory status of digital assets like stablecoins in the EU and discuss what to look for in the next phase of cryptocurrency adoption in the region.

There’s plenty more conversation coming—from discussions about bank modernization and the power of platform banking partnerships to the growth of open banking, open data, and open finance. Be sure to check out our FinovateEurope 2026 hub—as well as our coverage here on the Finovate blog—for the latest updates.

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• Modern Treasury announced its first acquisition, purchasing stablecoin and fiat payments company Beam to expand its real-time money movement capabilities.
• The deal unifies fiat and stablecoin rails under Modern Treasury’s single API and will support RTP, FedNow, ACH, wires, Push-to-Card, and stablecoin payments while streamlining compliance through built-in KYC, KYB, and AML.
• By combining Beam’s stablecoin technology with Modern Treasury’s scale, the company is positioning itself as a bridge between traditional and blockchain payments.

Payment operations platform Modern Treasury marked its first acquisition today. The San Francisco-based company announced this week it has purchased payments company Beam for an undisclosed amount.

Modern Treasury plans to use Beam, which offers both stablecoin and fiat payments capabilities for customers like Sling Money, to broaden its own money movement platform to include both traditional and stablecoin settlement rails.

Beam was founded in 2022 and has since processed more than $350 million in payments across the globe that have enabled small and medium-sized businesses to manage their cross-border operations. The company has raised $7 million and is backed by investors including Archetype, Castle Island Ventures, Arca, A*, and Soma.

“Instant payments and stablecoins are the future of money movement,” said Modern Treasury Co-founder and CEO Matt Marcus. “Beam has proven traction delivering real-time payments for stablecoin-native payment flows. Modern Treasury has processed hundreds of billions of dollars on our platform. Together, we’re creating the best infrastructure to move money instantly—without the delays and limitations of banks or card-first payment providers.”

Modern Treasury will support real-time payments via stablecoins, Push-to-Card, and traditional rails like RTP, FedNow, ACH, and wires. The company simplifies the application with its single API that handles compliance elements such as KYC, KYB, and AML, which allows it to replace six months of onboarding and compliance work with just a few API calls.

“Beam was founded on the belief that stablecoins can play a major role in the future of payments, but to make that real, you need scale, regulatory strength, and trusted infrastructure,” said Beam Founder and CEO Dan Mottice. “By joining forces, we’re accelerating that vision. Beam’s stablecoin and fiat orchestration capabilities will be woven directly into Modern Treasury’s platform to unlock instant pay-ins and payouts, FX efficiency, and next-generation liquidity management, all within a trusted enterprise-grade system.”

Mottice, who previously led Visa’s crypto settlement products and Visa Direct Payouts, is joining Modern Treasury as Head of Beam as part of today’s deal.

Modern Treasury’s acquisition of Beam is a great example of how stablecoins are not only becoming mainstream, but they are also becoming a key way for organizations to differentiate themselves in the enterprise payments space.

As stablecoins gain regulatory clarity and businesses demand faster, always-on settlement, Modern Treasury is positioning itself as the connective tissue between fiat and blockchain rails. Because it brings both traditional and stablecoin payments under one API and compliance framework, Modern Treasury sets itself apart in the crowded global money movement space.

Photo by Maximilian Orlowsky

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This week’s edition of Finovate Global examines recent fintech news from Mexico.

Earlier this month, ResearchAndMarkets.com published its Mexico Embedded Finance Databook Report for 2025. The 230-page report noted that the embedded finance market in Mexico is expected to reach more than $18 billion this year and top $22 billion by the end of 2030. Among the key takeaways from the report is the increasing traction of embedded credit products such as Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), and the growth of embedded payments in mobility, food delivery, and social commerce driven by growing smartphone use and government support for digital, real-time payments options. Embedded finance solutions such as lending are enabling non-fintech businesses in Mexico to leverage APIs and BaaS to expand their offerings, the report notes. This is helping bring more financial services to underserved communities in the country. It is also creating greater competition for companies in both the lending and payments spaces.

Mexican Fintech Plata Double Valuation on Latest $250 Million Fundraise

Mexican digital financial platform Plata has secured $250 million in new equity funding. The round, which includes both a primary equity raise and a secondary equity transaction, was led by Kora and featured participation from Moore Strategic Ventures, Audio Ventures, Spice Expeditions, Hedosophia, as well as several US and European family offices. The funding builds on an earlier investment by Televisa-Univision and boosts Plata’s valuation to $3.1 billion.

“The growth we have achieved in such a short time demonstrates a clear strategy and a shared conviction: build a strong institution from its foundations,” Plata CEO and Co-Founder Neri Tollardo said. “This transaction reflects investors’ confidence, the strength of our technological model, and the talent we have assembled. We set out to create a digital bank built on innovation, operational excellence, compliance, and efficiency—and today, we are seeing the results of that effort.”

Plata received its banking license in December 2024 and is waiting for authorization to begin banking operations. The company boasts its own technological and operational infrastructure, including a core banking system that enables a fully digital, branchless model with automated risk management and 24/7 personalized customer service. Over the past 30 months, Plata has topped the two million mark in terms of active credit customers, making it one of the fastest-growing digital financial platforms in Latin America. The company’s Plata Card gives users two months to pay without interest and up to 15% of cash back in real money.

“We believe Plata represents the new standard for digital banking in emerging markets,” Kora Co-Founder Nitin Saigal said. “In a very short time, the company has demonstrated impressive execution, combining technological innovation with a clear vision for financial inclusion. We are excited to continue strengthening our partnership and to support Plata in this new phase of growth.”

Revolut obtains Mexican banking license; SumUp goes live

This week we learned that two Finovate alums—Revolut and SumUp—are actively exploring opportunities in Mexico. Revolut announced this week that it has received final regulatory approval to initiate banking operations in Mexico. The authorization came from the National Banking and Securities Commission (CNBV), with approval of the Bank of Mexico. Now a Multiple Banking Institution in Mexico, Revolut is the first independent digital bank to directly apply for and complete the full licensing and approval process in the country.

“We are exceptionally proud of our team and the bank we have built here in Mexico,” Revolut Bank S.A., Institución de Banca Múltiple CEO Juan Miguel Guerra said. “We are very grateful to the authorities for this vote of confidence and their commitment to fostering competition in the industry, and we are confident that our offering will benefit millions of people across the country.”

Revolut is a digital banking and financial services platform that offers a wide range of solutions, including multi-currency accounts with real-time exchange rates; stock, cryptocurrency, commodity, and ETF investing and trading; as well as business accounts, corporate cards, and expense management tools. Founded in 2015, Revolut serves as a financial services “super app” for more than 65 million customers around the world.

Meanwhile, payments platform SumUp announced its official launch in Mexico this week. The company has introduced its SumUp Go card reader to the Mexican market, enabling merchants to accept payments anytime, anywhere, with no monthly fixed costs. The card reader is compatible with all major credit and debit cards and features both exceptional battery life and unlimited 4G cellular connectivity due to its built-in SIM.

“Expanding into Mexico marks a pivotal step in SumUp’s strategic growth across Latin America,” SumUp North America CEO Andrew Helms said. “We see remarkable potential in the region and recognize a strong demand for accessible, user-friendly payment solutions that streamline business operations. At SumUp, our mission is to simplify business for our merchants and we’re delighted to bring this commitment to Mexico.”

Founded in 2012, SumUp counts more than four million merchants in 37 markets as users of its payment processing solutions and business management tools. These include mobile card readers and point-of-sale (POS) systems, as well as solutions for sales tracking and inventory management, customer loyalty programs, and financial reporting and analytics.

Revolut has been a Finovate alum since its debut at FinovateEurope 2015. SumUp won Best of Show in its Finovate debut at FinovateEurope 2013. Both companies are headquartered in London.

Here is our look at fintech innovation around the world.

Middle East and Northern Africa

• Oman’s BankDhofar launched its new braille debit card.
• The Cooperative Bank of Oromia, a regional bank based in Ethiopia, partnered with digital transformation company JMR Infotech to go live with Oracle Financial Services Crime and Compliance Studio.
• Saudi National Bank subsidiary Samba Bank unveiled its new fraud detection system powered by BPC’s SmartVista Fraud Management.

Central and Southern Asia

• Mongolian fintech AND Global raised $21.4 million in Series B funding in a round led by the International Finance Corporation and AEON Financial Service.
• Karandaaz Pakistan and Walee Financial Services forged a strategic partnership to launch Pakistan’s first Shariah-compliant, digital asset financing solution for female entrepreneurs.
• Did India ban discussion of cryptocurrencies at the world’s largest fintech conference in Mumbai?

Latin America and the Caribbean

• Mexican digital financial platform Plata doubled its valuation to $3.1 billion upon securing a $250 million Series B funding round.
• Uruguay-based cross-border payments platform dLocal teamed up with Alchemy Pay to streamline crypto-to-fiat payments throughout Latin America.
• Payments platform SumUp announced its launch in Mexico this week.

Asia-Pacific

• Three of Japan’s largest banks—MUFG Bank, Sumitomo Mitsuio Banking Corp, and Mizuho Bank—announced plans to collaborate on the launch of a unified stablemcoin.
• Tracxn’s recently released Southeast Asia FinTech Report noted that fintech startups in the region raised $839 million in the first nine months of 2025, a decline from previous years.
• Fintech innovation in Pyongyang? A look at the growth in popularity of e-payments in North Korea.

Sub-Saharan Africa

• African all-in-one financial platform Moniepoint secured more than $200 million in Series C funding.
• Sanlam teamed up with TymeBank to build a co-branded fintech super app for consumers in South Africa.
• Capitec Bank partnered with accounting software company Stub to provide South African small and micro-sized businesses with direct access to their transactional data.

Central and Eastern Europe

• German fintech Aifinyo AG announced that it was converting its balance sheet to bitcoin, becoming the first German firm to adopt a full bitcoin treasury model.
• SoftPOS solutions company MineSec inked a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU with Turkish digital payments company Paymore.
• Latvian fintech Eleving Group raised €275 million ($319.5 million) via a public bond issue.

Photo by Pyro Jenka on Unsplash

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