Global Screening Services (GSS), a London-based regulatory compliance platform that helps financial institutions meet their global sanctions obligations, has raised $47 million in a round of funding.
The raise comes amid a spike in economic sanctions, with the U.S. issuing trade-restrictions and asset-blocking against states including Russia, China, Iran and more.
The company actually raised a similar amount of funding last year from big-name backers including Japan’s Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), one of the world’s largest banks.
Banks often find themselves at the forefront of sanctions enforcement, given their role in controlling the flow of money around the globe.
GSS sells a sanctions-screening platform to help banks and other financial institutions comply with regulations.
The complaint accuses Apple of moulding its privacy and security practices in ways that benefits the company financially.
One quote particularly jumps out where the DOJ calls Apple’s privacy and security justification an “elastic shield”:“Apple deploys privacy and security justifications as an elastic shield that can stretch or contract to serve Apple’s financial and business interests,” it says.
“Apple wraps itself in a cloak of privacy, security, and consumer preferences to justify its anticompetitive conduct.
It also said that at the moment developers can’t offer a separate app store for children.
Essentially, the DOJ argues that Apple’s privacy and security practices are pretextual in nature and the company chooses “alternative courses” to protect its monopoly.
Teachers’ Venture Growth, the late-stage venture and growth investment arm of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, is investing $80 million in Perfios, an Indian fintech that provides real-time credit underwriting solutions to banks and other financial institutions.
The new investment values Perfios at a valuation of over $1 billion.
Bengaluru-based Perfios provides real-time data aggregation and analysis tools to financial institutions, enabling them to streamline their customer journeys and make more informed decisions.
Perfios said it delivers 8.2 billion data points to banks and other financial institutions every year to facilitate faster decisioning, and processes 1.7 billion transactions a year with an AUM of $36 billion.
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, one of Canada’s largest pension funds, has ramped up its interest in India in recent years.
Founded by former Silicon Valley engineers, UK-based Griffin Bank bills itself as an API-driven ‘Banking as a Service’ platform.
But Griffin isn’t likely to offer banking accounts directly to consumers, but to other businesses needing to offer embedded financial solutions such as savings accounts, safeguarding accounts and accounts for holding client money.
Last year in North America, Treasury Prime secured a $40 million Series C, Synctera $15 million and Omnio raised $9.8 million.
So they’re leveraging an existing financial relationship to bundle additional financial services in an embedded way.
All of that needs to sit in specially marked bank accounts.” Griffin’s aim, he says is to pick up as much of that business as possible.
Why does every startup want to help you get paid?
Then I wrote about Remofirst, a startup out to take on the likes of Deel and Rippling, too, securing $25 million in Series A funding.
Also, Tage wrote about how UAE-based RemotePass announced it had raised $5.5 million in Series A funding led by Istanbul-based 212 VC.
Paris-based business banking startup Qonto is using an undisclosed portion of its cash reserve to acquire Regate, an accounting and financial automation platform.
Argyle raises $30M to expand automated income, employment verificationSynctera raises $18.6M in Series A-1 funding (TC covered Synctera’s Series A here.)
The Harness offering also has two other components, serving as a marketplace for discovery of advisors and services and consumer financial insight tools.
In order to fill that need, Harness partnered with experienced tax advisors who in most cases already had a significant roster of clients.
So when those advisors partnered with Harness, many of those clients became clients of Harness as well.
Put simply, the new platform “powers the collaboration between tax advisors and their clients,” the company said.
About 75% of Harness’ clients come through advisors that join the platform.
London-based fintech company Monzo raised a late stage funding round of $430 million (£340 million), confirming a report from the Financial Times from a few weeks ago.
Founded in 2015, Monzo provides UK current accounts, debit cards and several financial products with a digital-first approach.
That’s why Monzo is sort of defying the odds with this new funding round, with Google playing a big part in this investment.
Monzo reached a post-money $4.5 billion valuation in 2022.
Now, Monzo has nine million retail customers in the U.K.
Credit bureaus relying on outdated third-party data are only getting a small piece of the puzzle, Georgina Merhom says.
User-permissioned data sources, that consumers provide with their permission, come from a variety of places.
In addition, user-permissioned data sources replace the self-reporting process, brokers trust between the institution and consumer and identifies opportunities that the bank would have otherwise overlooked, Merhom said.
Building a better credit bureau or finding new ways to verify data from people without a lot of credit is not a new concept.
“It costs banks $29 billion a year to process applications, and that’s not even including the money they pay credit bureaus,” Merhom said.
In 2022, Walmart acquired earned wage access provider Even to offer early pay access to its employees.
Other big U.S. companies, including Amazon, McDonald’s and Uber, also offer employees early wage access programs.
Like other earned wage access providers, Wagely charges a nominal flat membership fee to employees withdrawing their salaries early.
“This is something that no other competitor is even close to because other earned wage access companies are focusing on different things,” he said.
One of the areas where global earned wage access providers have shifted their focus nowadays is lending — in some cases, to lend money to employers.
Ever since Hong Kong legalized cryptocurrency trading last June, blockchain projects from the West have been paying more attention to the Asian financial hub.
Aptos, the a16z-backed blockchain network developed by a group of former Meta employees, is one of them.
Started by some of the original creators of Meta’s abandoned crypto payment project Diem, Aptos is set to host a DeFi event in Hong Kong this April.
When asked when users in Hong Kong will get access to Aptos-based DeFi services, the founder said he cannot speculate on regulation.
“I do think Hong Kong regulators are moving things in the right direction and forward and providing clarity for entrepreneurs to build.
