The Weekly Wrap: all you need to know by Friday COB | Dec 19th

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

The NSIA Group, a major player in banking and insurance across the African continent, has entered into a strategic agreement with SBS for its banking subsidiaries to deploy the SBP Core Amplitude solution.

SBP Core Amplitude is a new-generation, robust, and highly scalable banking solution that will enable NSIA to:

• Strengthen regulatory compliance, particularly in the WAEMU and CEMAC regions
• Accelerate the digitalisation of key processes and enhance customer experience
• Harmonise information systems to optimise operations, improve service quality, and reduce costs

“This initiative fully aligns with the NSIA Group’s ambition to offer high-quality, innovative banking solutions tailored to the needs of as many people as possible across the African continent, while providing harmonised services to our customers and partners throughout our network in the five countries where we operate,” said Léonce Yacé, CEO of NSIA’s Banking Division. Thanks to its open architecture, APIs, and advanced integration capabilities, SBP Core Amplitude facilitates interoperability with FinTechs and external partners, supporting the bank’s continuous modernisation.

According to IBS Intelligence in July this year, SBS was selected by National Savings and Investments (NS&I) to deliver a next-generation, cloud-native core banking platform, replacing its legacy system with SBP Digital Core as part of a large-scale digital transformation impacting over 24 million UK savers.

Deals of the week

• RedotPay raises $107m in Series B to scale stablecoin payments globally
• Olea raises $30m to expand AI-driven trade finance globally
• MoEngage raises $180m to scale AI customer engagement
• Sporta raises £123k via Crowdcube to build AI-native sports bank
• Xceptor adds AI tools to speed up platform upgrades
• First Abu Dhabi Bank selects Presight to boost AI-driven growth and intelligence
• ViaBill brings pay-later installments to Apple pay in Denmark
• Ajman Bank taps Oracle to modernise trade finance

Be on the lookout for

Blackstone Inc. is in early-stage talks with Revolut Ltd. to explore a possible partnership in wealth management. The discussions centre on offering Blackstone’s investment funds through Revolut’s app as the FinTech pushes deeper into private banking. If the deal goes ahead, Revolut’s roughly 70 million users could gain direct access to Blackstone-managed products, helping the platform move beyond payments and trading. For Blackstone, the tie-up would provide a gateway to a younger, digitally native audience. While talks are still informal and far from certain, they underscore the accelerating overlap between established asset managers and digital finance platforms.