The Weekly Wrap: all you need to know by Friday COB | Jan 30th

By Puja Sharma

The Weekly Wrap is published every Friday and recaps the week’s main stories and deals, as well as upcoming events and announcements for Prime subscribers only.

The Big Story

Dubai-based digital lender Wio Bank has partnered with global FinTech firm Pine Labs to modernise its merchant acquiring infrastructure, as digital payments adoption accelerates across the UAE.

Under the agreement, Wio Bank will deploy Credit+, Pine Labs’ modular, API-first acquiring platform, to power its core acquiring operations. The move is aimed at building a next-generation infrastructure without legacy technology dependencies, enabling faster merchant onboarding, real-time settlement capabilities, and multi-channel payment acceptance at scale.

The platform is built on a cloud-native, microservices-based architecture and is designed to support high transaction throughput, intelligent rule-based workflows, and data-driven decision-making. It also manages the full merchant lifecycle, from onboarding to ongoing servicing, through configurable APIs.

For Wio Bank, which positions itself as a digital-first financial platform for businesses, the partnership aligns with its strategy to embed scalable, flexible infrastructure that can evolve alongside merchant needs. The deployment is expected to enhance operational resilience, improve acceptance rates, and support rapid feature rollouts in a competitive payments environment.

The partnership comes as the UAE advances its cashless economy agenda, with regulators and financial institutions investing heavily in digital infrastructure. For banks, modernising merchant acquiring systems has become a strategic priority, as legacy platforms often limit scalability, data integration, and speed-to-market.

Pine Labs, which works with banks and enterprises globally, has been expanding its footprint in the Middle East and Africa region. The collaboration with Wio Bank underscores a broader industry trend in which digital-native banks are opting for modular, cloud-based acquiring stacks to support growth, improve cost efficiency, and respond more quickly to changing merchant and regulatory requirements.

Deals of the week

• Juspay lands $50m to scale bank-grade payments infrastructure
• TeamSystem acquires AIG Classic to rollout E-Invoicing in Spain
• Plumery, Lokalise partner to scale hyper-local digital banking
• Remara selects 10x Banking to scale alternative lending
• Vennre raises $9.6m to expand private market access in MENA
• Allvue, BC partner to advance AI automation in private credit
• Revolut launches fully licensed digital bank in Mexico
• Lithic taps Stearns Bank to strengthen card issuing infrastructure
• Archax partners with OpenPayd to boost institutional fiat settlement
• Lithic taps Stearns Bank to strengthen card issuing infrastructure

Be on the lookout for

In January 2026, the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority (DFSA) imposed an administrative fine of DKK 313 million (around $50 million) on Saxo Bank for alleged breaches of Denmark’s Money Laundering Act. The penalty stems from a regulatory inspection conducted in May 2023, which scrutinised the bank’s AML processes, internal controls, and compliance systems.

The DFSA concluded that Saxo Bank had failed to adequately collect information about the purpose and intended nature of certain customer relationships, particularly involving white-label clients (WLCs). These clients use Saxo’s trading platform to serve their own end customers, making monitoring more complex. The regulator also highlighted deficiencies in the bank’s ongoing monitoring obligations during the period from January 2021 to May 2023.

Despite these shortcomings, the inspection did not uncover any actual cases of money laundering. Saxo Bank cooperated with the investigation and has since addressed 12 enforcement orders issued by the DFSA.