2018 AFR Young Rich List: Emily Skye backs Millennial bank start-up
Fitness star and Young Rich Lister Emily Skye may have built a small fortune but that doesn’t mean she’s good with money. “I’ve never really known what’s going on with money, I mean I love to spend it but I’m not able to track it and really be responsible for it,” Ms Skye said. Ms Skye rockets up the 2018 Financial Review Young Rich List with an estimated worth of $36 million, reflecting growth in her online fitness business that attracted an undisclosed investment from Quadrant Private Equity this year. As she continues to build the fitness business, including releasing the first app for her FIT program this year, Ms […]
Melbourne Fintech to disrupt the way young Australians travel
Melbourne Fintech Pelikin is on the cusp of disrupting the Australian travel money market with its mobile-only multi-currency account and prepaid Visa card. The young team is on a mission to make “travel brighter” for young Australians by providing them with valuable travel and money services that have been built with their best interests first. At its core, the Pelikin app and card will allow users to hold up to five different currencies at once and spend in over 200 countries across the world in an easy, affordable way. Last month, Pelikin released its prepaid card and with a unique vertical and neon yellow design, it’s a far cry from […]
Verrency adds two more partners – Basiq and Pulse iD – to enable financial data aggregation and geolocation services to be easily accessed by banks
Australian global payments innovator Verrency has certified two new strategic partners, Basiq and Pulse iD, to enhance the commercial offerings it enables for issuers and banks. Announcing the partnership today at Money 20/20 in Las Vegas, the deal enables Basiq and Pulse iD to easily distribute their financial data aggregation and geolocation services to global financial institutions via Verrency’s integration platform. Verrency Founder and CEO, David Link, said Basiq and Pulse iD are fantastic additions to Verrency’s growing fintech services marketplace, V+, in making it increasingly easier for banks and issuers to innovate at scale by significantly reducing their own cost of integration with FinTechs. In accessing Basiq via the […]
ASX-listed Peppermint Innovation registers more than 5,000 Bizmoto agents in the Philippines
Peppermint Innovation Limited announces that to date more than 5,000 agents have signed up to its Bizmoto network in the Philippines. Having launched the Bizmoto agent network in late May followed by a preliminary digital marketing drive which started on August 23, the Philippines operations team had registered 5,000 Bizmoto agents as of the end of last week. The agents are now being on-boarded and trained in how to deliver the various Bizmoto services, including mobile banking, mobile eLoad, bill/product payment and money transfers. They also receive training on how to charge and recharge their electronic wallets, which they use to facilitate Bizmoto services. At present, Filipinos can use their […]
Huge Sibos event shows surging clout of banking and fintech
More than 7000 global bankers have flooded into the International Convention Centre in Sydney on Monday for an unprecedented opportunity to download the latest cutting-edge thinking about global finance over the next four days. And by the looks of hundreds of booths representing the world’s biggest banks in the vast exhibition hall – which are more like fully blown bank branches – it’s clear some serious business is being done here this week too. The world of global transaction banking used to be relatively boring, uninspiring even; after all, this is the plumbing of the financial system. But the sheer scale and topics on the agenda of this year’s Sibos […]
ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott says technology will kill the banking oligopoly
Rapid technological disruption will break apart the Australian banking oligopoly and overturn the universal banking model that has underpinned big bank profits for decades, the chief executive of ANZ Banking Group told thousands of global bankers on Monday. In order to thrive in an uncertain future, banks will need to partner more with start-ups and global tech giants and potentially sell financial products manufactured by outsiders, Shayne Elliott said. The ANZ boss said dealing with the fallout of the Hayne royal commission simultaneously with unprecedented technological change was “challenging”, although he remained optimistic that ANZ could cope with both. The four-day Sibos event in Sydney this week is being attended […]
Westpac launches ‘designer’ wearable payments accessories
The bank has made payment-enabled keychains, silicon tags, and some pins available, but there’s still no sign of Apple Pay. Westpac has announced the availability of “Centsitive Objects” on Wednesday, touted by the bank as a range of “designer” wearable payment-enabled accessories. Instead of just plugging into devices manufactured by others, Westpac launched its own range of wearable, hands-free, and battery-free payment accessories in October. The new range designed by Sydney-based entrepreneur Hayden Cox builds on the bank’s PayWear wearable payments play. According to Cox, his designs are ideally shaped for customers that want a payments device with a “little more flavour”. “Our customers are increasingly on-the-go with more than […]
Neobank Revolut to launch in Australia, 20,000 on waiting list
“I never want Revolut to be referring to itself as a bank,” says its head of marketing, Chad West. “We are an alternative to a bank. We are completely different.” Revolut, headquartered in London, was only founded three years ago; it now has over 3 million customers in Europe, a number that has doubled over the past nine months. The neobank is attracting 7000 new customers each day, and expects this will be 10,000 by the end of this year. In April it secured $US250 million in fresh venture capital funding for global expansion, at a valuation of $US1.7 billion. It’s the fastest-growing unicorn tech company in Europe. And according […]
