The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | October 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.

Database-as-a-Service

Airwallex, a global payments and financial platform for modern businesses, has partnered with Alpaca, a developer-first API brokerage platform, to support Alpaca’s global payments and foreign exchange (FX) needs.

Through the partnership with Airwallex, Alpaca and its broker partners can leverage Airwallex’s global network of local collection and payment rails to support funding and settling transactions in a wide range of currencies, starting with Australian dollars (AUD), Canadian dollars (CAD), Euros (EUR), and many others, all while effectively managing the FX risk.

Philipp Reichardt, Head of Enterprise Sales, Americas at Airwallex, said “Alpaca is unlocking access to the U.S. stock market at a global scale. We’re excited to support Alpaca and its customers in achieving seamless and efficient investment across currencies, continents, and timezones.”

Nutanix, a cloud software provider, has announced that Bahrain Islamic Bank (BisB), the provider of Islamic digital banking services in Bahrain, has standardised Nutanix technology solutions to accelerate its digital transformation.

The Bank ran Nutanix in a test environment for a whole year to understand the technology’s impressive capabilities and get firsthand experience of its incredible performance and reliability before deciding to invest in a full suite of solutions, including Nutanix Database-as-a-Service (NDB), Nutanix Files, Nutanix Data Protection and Nutanix AHV.

Growth Opportunities for businesses

Hitachi Payment Services, India’s payments and commerce solutions provider has announced the launch of its innovation program, HPX.

This initiative is a step in line with the company’s commitment to revolutionize the payment industry by collaborating with FinTech startups for long-term investment. Through the HPX initiative, Hitachi Payment Services will collaborate with disruptors in the FinTech and payments segment, and thereby provide payment experiences through innovation for businesses and consumers.

This ambitious program will bring together a diverse range of entrepreneurs who have been working on technology-led solutions to shape the future of payments. The HPX initiative offers a comprehensive range of benefits for participants, including access to capital, expedited commercialization of innovative payment solutions, invaluable access to key industry partnerships, and the unique opportunity to extend their influence beyond India’s borders.

LoanTap, an India-based FinTech firm in the lending industry has launched co-lending for the AfterPay segment to expand its support to a wider range of retailers.

In a strategic move, LoanTap has partnered with financial institutions such as Muthoot Finance and Mirae Asset as co-lending partners. This step forward allows the firm to broaden its support to a wider array of retailers, thereby fostering growth opportunities for businesses of all sizes.

By extending credit to this segment, both FinTech and its co-lending partners share the risk involved, ultimately empowering them to allocate funds to a broader spectrum of retailers.

What is the buzz

Braid, a San Francisco-based consumer payments start-up founded in 2018, has shut down as of September 2023.

The start-up had built a multi-user financial account where consumers could pool their money, send and request money from people and groups, set up controls and permissions for access, and utilise a debit card to spend pooled funds. Over the course of five years, Braid managed to raise nearly $10 million in funding from investors and claims to have passed $10 million in monthly payment volumes processed by Q4 2022.

In a blog post, Braid co-founder Amanda Peyton outlines the company’s story from inception to its eventual closure, and attributes the demise of the start-up to a number of different causes, including the turbulent macroeconomic conditions seen at the beginning of 2023.

The “final nail in the coffin”, Peyton describes, is when “a critical third-party informed us that they’d changed their mind on a key technical decision”, right when it had signed a term sheet for a new round of funding. “This change was going to break all our software,” Peyton writes. “We had two decisions: rebuild over from zero or shut it all down. It didn’t feel right to take additional capital knowing that we’d have to rebuild, again, so we called off the round.”

After winding down all operations, Peyton ran an auction for Braid’s intellectual property (IP), but ended up being the only bidder for it.