The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | January 29th

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.

Instant refunds for failed UPI transactions

FinTech ModernFi has raised an additional $18.7 million in funding to bring its tech-forward platform to community and regional banks.

The funding round was led by Canapi Ventures, the round also had participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Remarkable Ventures, and leading banks Huntington National Bank, First Horizon, and Regions. This round adds to a $4.5 million round led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing the company’s total raised to over $23 million to date.

“Community and regional banks form the foundation of the American economy, providing an outsized amount of credit and banking services to critical industries and areas that might otherwise be overlooked,” said Paolo Bertolotti, CEO and Cofounder of ModernFi. “Faced with fundamental shifts in the behavior of deposits, institutions benefit from modern tools to manage and grow their funding. ModernFi has been privileged to help institutions of all sizes protect their deposit base, and the team looks forward to continuing its support of the sector.”

Razorpay, India’s Omnichannel Payments and Banking Platform for Businesses has announced the launch of Instant Refunds on UPI transactions by Razorpay POS.

This solution will allow merchants to provide a more seamless in-store payment experience to their customers by providing instant refunds for failed UPI transactions within 2 minutes, resulting in faster checkouts.

When transactions are delayed and funds are debited from the consumer’s account but not received by the merchant, customers hesitate to retry the payment or opt for an alternative method, often abandoning the purchase. This not only hampers the consumer experience, causing confusion and frustration but also raises operational costs for merchants, impacting their overall business.

Data-led challenges

Impactsure Technologies, an AI and Machine Learning document analytics SaaS company for banks, financial institutions, and enterprises, has announced the availability of its SURE (Secure Unified Responsive Engine) platform based on SureMatch and SureXtract solutions in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.

The system enables secure data extraction, processing, and analytics. This helps users make accurate decisions and achieve better business outcomes, compliance, increased transaction volumes, and improved customer experiences. The system can also handle various use cases, such as trade documentation, invoices, accounts payable processing, customer onboarding, shipping and logistics documentation, compliance reporting, human resource documentation, supply chain documentation, manufacturing operations, contract management, ESG, and many more.

SureExtract, SureMatch, SureAutomate, and SureFlow have intuitive interfaces that can be easily integrated with ERP systems and existing workflows. These solutions streamline and automate complex document-based tasks that are usually labour-intensive and error-prone, resulting in a reduction of 80% in manual efforts and the processing times of complex document-based workflows to just a few minutes.

BNP Paribas Personal Finance has joined forces with SuperTech, in collaboration with STEAMhouse as the delivery partner, to unveil the Innovation Lab – aimed at addressing data-led challenges in the financial services sector.

BNP Paribas Personal Finance and SuperTech have renewed their partnership for a second year to establish an incubator programme dedicated to discovering digital solutions from a range of sectors to apply to challenges within the financial services industry.

Open for applications, this year’s challenge focuses on harnessing external data and insights to enhance engagement with financial services customers, fostering mutual value and trust for the customer, the financial services provider (BNP Paribas Personal Finance), and any third-party data providers involved.

The Innovation Lab is actively seeking SME businesses with a digital tech solution to this challenge, irrespective of their current market. Successful applicants stand to gain a multitude of benefits, including the opportunity to collaborate with BNP Paribas Personal Finance in cultivating a culture of open innovation and co-creation.

What is the buzz

Visa, a world leader in digital payments, announced that its Africa FinTech Accelerator program is now accepting applications for its second cohort. The announcement was made at FinTech Day where several members of the fintech community in Morocco came together to discuss the opportunities to improve the digital payments and financial inclusion landscape in the country.  Seed to Series A startups operating in Africa and that fall under specific categories are encouraged to apply on the Visa website, with applications open until February 29th  2023.

Visa also announced they are hosting the program’s first demo day on February 13th in Nairobi. During the event, the first-cohort startups will pitch their innovations to key ecosystem players, funding partners, angel investors, and venture capitalists.

The first cohort featured startups operating in more than 18 African countries – including three from Morocco, one from Egypt and one from Tunisia, with participants shortlisted from over 1,000 applicants across diverse subsectors including merchant payment solutions, lending infrastructure, Banking-as-a-Service, and B2B marketplaces. Around 48% had a woman founder or a woman in their leadership team.