A new, hot alliance in the Banking as a Service space! The partnership was formed by Bankable, a BaaS solutions architect, Aion Bank, a Belgium-licensed digital bank, and Vodeno, a cloud-native platform for retail & SME banking backed by the same private equity firm as Aion–Warburg Pincus LLC. The deal aims to create the leading and most feature-rich one-stop-shop for Banking as a Service solutions in Europe, targeting both EU-based and non-EU banks that want to launch a multi-country offering in the region. In the words of Wojciech Sobieraj, CEO of Aion Bank:

Bankable and Aion share the same mission: to give pan-European access to premium local banks and to offer embedded financial services across Europe to FinTechs, established businesses and brands. Together with Vodeno, we offer both a formidable infrastructure powered by the best technology that gives access to banking-related services that are modular and easy to integrate, and the deepest product breadth in the Bank as a Service European market, covering accounts, cards and credit.

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The biggest “media for equity” fund in the UK, Channel 4 Ventures, has closed a deal with Clim8 Invest, a green FinTech startup that offers investment products for retail customers, allowing them to tackle the problem of climate change and make conscious investment decisions. The firm will receive airtime worth £2m in exchange for equity, with a chance to reach a wider audience with their TV advert. The Clim8 app launched in March this year and has thousands of users signed up to use products such as ISA and General Investment Account. “Sustainable investment represents one of the most powerful ways in which we can all make a positive impact on climate change,” commented Duncan Grierson, Clim8 Invest founder and CEO.

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Augmentum FinTech continues to build the portfolio of financial services companies after raising £27.5m in share placement in October. The venture capital firm announced two investments in the sector of workplace savings which, according to Augmentum CEO Tim Levene, is “ripe for disintermediation”. The first startup that joins Augmentum’s portfolio is Epsor, a French retirement savings platform that has just closed a Series B round, and the second is Cushon, a UK-based workplace pension and ISA provider that has raised £26m in the Series A round closed this week. Augmentum CEO added that the VC believes that “both companies can be highly disruptive and are well-positioned in their respective markets to win market share”. Congrats to both startups and the investor!

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Provide a single API that grants access to the world’s entire payment infrastructure–that’s the ambitious goal of Nium, a Singapore-based money transfer operator. The acquisition of Ixaris, a travel payments startup that offers a virtual card is a move that brings Nium one step closer to achieving this goal by replacing traditional, monolithic payment platforms, according to CEO Prajit Nanu. What is more, the company plans the IPO in the US within the next two years, and Nanu believes that the extended geographical reach will strengthen Nium’s position on the market.

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