The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | March 16th

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.

Moving beyond conventional internet banking

BankDhofar has launched Neo Corporate Internet Banking (Neo CIB), a next-generation digital banking platform that significantly expands the range of services available to corporate, SME, institutional, and government customers. The new platform represents a major milestone in the bank’s digital transformation journey, offering a unified, intelligent, and highly automated banking experience designed to meet the evolving needs of modern businesses.

Neo CIB has been developed to move beyond conventional internet banking by bringing together payments, collections, salary processing, reporting, and system integrations within a single digital environment. By eliminating fragmented workflows and manual processes, the platform enables businesses to manage their financial operations with greater speed, transparency, and control. At the core of Neo CIB is a modern, customisable dashboard that provides real-time visibility of account balances, consolidated positions across multiple accounts and entities, pending approvals, and transaction statuses. Customers can initiate and track domestic, regional, and international payments from a single interface, with live status updates and full audit trails that support both operational efficiency and regulatory compliance.

The platform offers an expanded suite of services covering fund transfers within BankDhofar, payments within Oman through ACH and RTGS, international transfers with SWIFT GPI tracking, GCC payments, and specialised corridors such as transfers to India. Neo CIB also introduces robust bulk payment capabilities, allowing record-level debits, approvals, acknowledgements, and reconciliation, significantly reducing manual effort and processing time.

OpenLegacy has launched a new platform aimed at helping enterprises modernise legacy systems without operational disruption, reflecting growing industry demand for incremental approaches to mainframe transformation.

The company introduced OpenLegacy Hub, a platform built on and integrated with Amazon Web Services (AWS), designed to enable organisations to modernise mainframe and legacy applications gradually while maintaining continuous system availability. The solution allows legacy and cloud environments to run in parallel, reducing the operational risks typically associated with large-scale migration projects.

For many enterprises, particularly in sectors such as banking, insurance, and telecommunications, mainframes continue to run mission critical workloads. However, maintaining these systems can be costly and complex, while full-scale migrations have historically been high-risk and resource-intensive. As organisations increasingly pursue AI and cloud-native strategies, modernising legacy infrastructure has become a key strategic priority.

Credit Takes the Travel Route

India-based travel FinTech startup Scapia is in early-stage discussions to raise between $50-$60 million in fresh funding, with venture capital firm General Catalyst expected to lead the round.

The fundraising talks remain preliminary and the round has not yet been finalised. Several other investors are reportedly evaluating participation alongside General Catalyst, though the final structure and valuation could evolve as negotiations progress. The potential funding is expected to support the expansion of Scapia’s travel marketplace, scale its credit card offering, and strengthen partnerships with banks and travel service providers. The company has focused on building a consumer platform that combines payments, credit, and travel booking into a single digital experience.

Scapia has reported strong growth since launching its services, with revenue increasing around 70% year-on-year to approximately $4.36 million, while narrowing its losses over the same period. The growth reflects rising consumer adoption of credit-led digital platforms tied to lifestyle spending categories such as travel.

The company operates in an increasingly competitive segment that includes FinTech platforms such as Uni Cards, Niyo, and Jupiter, all of which are targeting digitally native consumers with credit cards and app-based financial services.

GlobalPay has introduced a Smart Switch Forex Card aimed at simplifying international payments for travellers by enabling users to switch between multiple currencies on a single prepaid card.

The card, allows travellers to begin with a single currency and later switch to a multi-currency wallet supporting up to 30 currencies through the GlobalPay mobile application or online platform. The company said the product is designed to remove the need for multiple forex cards when travelling across several destinations.

According to GlobalPay, the card can be loaded in US dollars and used for transactions in local currencies, with the option to switch to a broader multi-currency wallet covering more than 30 currencies across over 180 countries. Supported currencies include widely used ones such as the euro, Canadian dollar, and pound sterling, as well as select regional currencies including the Japanese yen and Indonesian rupiah.

What is the Buzz

Airwallex has raised $330 million in its Series G funding round, lifting its valuation to $8 billion—a 30% jump in just six months. The round was led by Addition, with participation from T. Rowe Price, Activant, Lingotto, Robinhood Ventures, and TIAA Ventures. The company recently crossed $1 billion in annualised revenue and is aggressively expanding its global footprint.

In the US, it has established a second headquarters in San Francisco and plans to deploy $1 billion between 2026 and 2029 to scale operations, doubling its American workforce to 400 within a year. Globally, Airwallex employs over 2,000 people and aims to grow headcount by 50% by the end of 2026. The company already serves more than 200,000 businesses worldwide and has achieved 109% year-on-year growth in the UK, where it is doubling the size of its London office. It has also expanded its regulated presence to 12 new markets, including France, Israel, Canada, Korea, Japan, and Brazil. CEO Jack Zhang emphasised that legacy providers no longer meet modern business needs, positioning Airwallex as a single platform for global banking, payments, billing, treasury, and spend management powered by proprietary infrastructure.