The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | Mar 17th

By Puja Sharma

The Monday Roundup sets the scene for the week’s biggest news stories, industry deals, and upcoming events. For Prime subscribers only.

Blending classic payments with crypto

RedotPay, a Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency payment platform, has raised $40 million in a Series A funding round, led by Lightspeed, a venture capital firm from California.

The round also received backing from HongShan Capital Group (HSG), Galaxy Ventures, DST Global Partners, Accel, Vertex Ventures, and several other investors.

RedotPay aims to integrate traditional payment technologies with cryptocurrencies, providing users the ability to spend digital assets in a way that feels familiar to conventional payment methods. The newly raised funds will be used to expand the company’s licensing in various regions, accelerate product development, strengthen regulatory compliance, and enhance the user experience on its payment platform.

Swiss financial services provider additiv has announced a strategic partnership with PT Trimegah Asset Management (Trimegah AM), one of Indonesia’s largest asset management firms.

This collaboration seeks to make professional investment advice more accessible by allowing banks, financial advisors, and digital platforms in Indonesia to integrate digital model portfolio solutions into their services.

With digital model portfolios, retail and mass affluent investors will gain access to professionally managed, diversified investment strategies tailored to their financial goals—something previously only available to high-net-worth individuals. The collaboration will enhance additiv’s Financial Services Platform with Trimegah AM’s expertise in managing investment portfolios, enabling financial institutions to seamlessly distribute and scale investment products in a cost-effective and compliant manner. This partnership follows additiv’s recent expansion into Indonesia, marked by the opening of its new Jakarta office.

Seizing new markets

MoonPay, a cryptocurrency payments company, has acquired Iron, a German API-first stablecoin infrastructure platform, for an undisclosed sum. This strategic acquisition enhances MoonPay’s enterprise services, enabling businesses to manage multi-currency treasuries, facilitate instant cross-border payments, and generate new revenue through yield-bearing assets.

Iron’s suite of stablecoin payment APIs allows companies to integrate stablecoins into their payment systems, offering virtual accounts with stablecoin functionality. This integration aims to eliminate slow bank transfers, streamline multi-currency treasury management, and expedite cross-border fund movements.

This acquisition marks MoonPay’s second in 2025, following the purchase of London-based crypto start-up Helio for a reported $175 million in January. Founded in 2022, Helio simplifies crypto payments for merchants and creators by providing tools to accept cryptocurrencies like SOL, ETH, and BTC. The company has quickly become a leading crypto checkout app with 6,000+ merchants and millions of users.

Israeli FinTech-as-a-Service platform Rapyd has acquired PayU’s Global Payment Organisation (GPO) in Latin America and Africa for approximately $610 million. The deal, initially signed in August 2023, concluded after receiving approval from seven regulatory authorities worldwide.

PayU GPO is the payments and FinTech business of Prosus, a Dutch consumer internet group and global tech investor based in the Netherlands. The company offers payment solutions to both enterprise and SMB segments and operates in over 30 countries worldwide.

The sale of GPO in Latin America and Africa enables PayU to focus on the rapidly growing Indian payments and credit market, where it serves more than 450,000 merchants and over 2 million credit customers.

In a statement, Prosus said the move supports its ongoing strategy to concentrate on markets with the highest growth potential. PayU will continue to innovate within India’s dynamic FinTech sector, leveraging the country’s rapidly evolving digital payments landscape.

What is the Buzz

Visa has launched a new initiative to combat financial fraud, called the Visa Scam Disruption (VSD) program. This department, part of Visa’s Payment Ecosystem Risk and Control (PERC), has already saved potential victims $350 million from scams in the past year. In total, PERC helped prevent $40 billion in attempted fraud across the Visa network during the same period.

The creation of VSD highlights Visa’s ongoing dedication to improving security and reducing fraud through substantial technological investments, totaling over $12 billion in the past five years.

VSD aims to enhance Visa’s ability to identify and disrupt scam operations using a combination of advanced generative AI tools and proprietary network-level data. One major success involved breaking up a large scam network that used phishing links from a dating site to enroll victims in fraudulent recurring billing schemes. This effort alone prevented over $37 million in potential fraud losses and led to the shutdown of nearly 12,000 fraudulent merchants.