A Quick Story About One of Our Co-Founders 👇

Hey Payments Fanatic!

I talk a lot about "connecting the dots" in this newsletter, but the most important dots will always be the people.

That’s why I'm skipping the usual market breakdown to shine a bright light on our very own co-founder, Arthur Bedel.

Arthur shared a personal backstory on his LinkedIn earlier this week, and we wanted to share it with you. 

👉👉👉 Check out his post and drop him a comment.

You can actually meet the man behind the infographics in person. Arthur is heading to Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam this June!

FinTech brands that want to talk about visibility in the industry, don’t be shy, and send Arthur a DM to grab a coffee or a beer while he's there!

Back to our scheduled programming, here is what else is shaking up the industry today.👇 See you tomorrow!

Cheers,

Marcel

INSIGHTS

🇨🇩 Visa improved the launch performance of its Visa Pay App in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by using AppsFlyer’s attribution and measurement tools to better track campaign effectiveness. The initiative resulted in a 155% increase in app downloads, an 85% reduction in customer acquisition costs, and a 114% improvement in registration conversion rates during a 12-week marketing campaign.

➡️ 𝗖𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁 🆚 𝗗𝗲𝗯𝗶𝘁 🆚 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗱 

Breaking down the types of cards in payments👇

NEWS

🇦🇪 Wego introduces stablecoin payments through a partnership with Triple-A for flights and travel bookings. Through this integration, travelers can complete bookings using supported stablecoins, while Wego continues to receive settlement in traditional local currencies.

🌍 Mastercard Foundation Africa growth fund anchors Sabou Capital. By supporting companies with financial readiness, governance, and operational growth, the firm aims to help scalable local businesses create jobs, strengthen regional industries, and drive long-term economic inclusion in markets often overlooked by traditional investors.

🇸🇾 QNB Group and Mastercard in strategic collaboration to expand cards and digital payments across Syria. The collaboration aims to support the end-to-end infrastructure readiness for a comprehensive international card payment acceptance in Syria, including Point of Sale, e-Commerce, and SoftPOS.

🇦🇴 Mastercard and Banco Sol form a partnership to boost the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Angola. The introduction of innovative new financial products aims to provide accessible payment methods, promote financial literacy among businesses and consumers, and empower SMEs to achieve sustainable growth and long-term success.

🌏 Noah and PEXX unlock borderless USD and EUR accounts for 2 billion people in South and Southeast Asia. Through this partnership, both are providing a structural shift in who gets to participate in the global economy. By issuing digital representations of traditional bank accounts, users gain localized credentials without requiring a physical presence or residency permit in the target country.

🇸🇪  Worldline and Klarna partner to enable flexible, online, and in-store payments everywhere. Worldline will integrate Klarna more deeply into its technology stack and acquire transactions, making it much simpler for businesses to offer Klarna to their customers.

🇬🇧 Adyen and Starling Bank offer Tap to Pay for UK SMEs. The collaboration begins with a tap-to-pay feature that allows SMEs to accept contactless card and mobile wallet payments directly on smartphones, with future plans to add payment links for invoicing and streamline the full payment process within Starling’s banking ecosystem.

🇬🇧 Emerchantpay collaborates with Visa to offer instalment payments for UK merchants. The solution uses the existing credit line from the cardholder’s provider and enables real-time eligibility checks at checkout. Consumers can select an installment plan from the available offers and review the clearly presented terms and costs associated with the plans.

🇰🇷 Apple Pay drives a 30-fold surge in EMV payments at Hyundai Card. The growth has been driven by wider EMV-compatible infrastructure, rising consumer awareness, and increasing integration of contactless payments into public transportation and financial products.

🇧🇷 Visma acquires Brazilian tax automation and payments providers Dootax and Pag Útil. With Dootax and Pag Útil, Visma adds specialist tax automation that extends the reach of its Brazilian portfolio into the SMB and mid-market segments, where compliance demands are greatest, and the impact of the tax reform will be most acute.

🇬🇧 Paymentology appoints Fiona Tee as CFO. The new CFO will guide global strategy after the company secured a $175 million investment to accelerate its global expansion and continue innovating its modern issuer-processing infrastructure.

🇮🇪 The Dubai FinTech Qashio is setting up in Ireland to become a ‘modern HSBC. The company, which provides corporate spending management and virtual card solutions, aims to use Ireland as a launchpad for European expansion while establishing an innovation hub to drive its global product and technology strategy.

🇩🇰 Aryze closes €3m pre-series A as stablecoin issuers move to integrated infrastructure. The Danish company aims to simplify stablecoin and tokenized asset deployment by offering integrated infrastructure for issuance, custody, and fiat on- and off-ramps within a single system.

🇺🇸 NMI acquires Dwolla to strengthen pay by bank offering. The acquisition brings together NMI’s strengths in payment acceptance, channel distribution, onboarding, and merchant lifecycle management with Dwolla’s API-first capabilities in account-to-account infrastructure, real-time payments, open banking, and many-to-many funds flow. 

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