Stripe Alumni Raise €30M to Build the Next Layer of Trust in Payments

Hey Payments Fanatic!

Stripe alumni are back in the Payments ecosystem...

Duna just raised a €30M Series A led by CapitalG, with backing from former Stripe and Adyen executives.

Founded by ex-Stripe operators in Germany and the Netherlands, Duna is focused on business identity verification for FinTechs and payment platforms, helping companies onboard business customers faster and with less friction.

The investor list says a lot. Former Stripe CTO David Singleton, ex-COO Claire Hughes Johnson, and Adyen leaders all joined as angels. These are people who’ve scaled global payment infrastructure and know exactly where onboarding breaks at scale.

Duna’s longer-term goal is to let businesses reuse verified identity data across platforms, reducing repeated checks when opening accounts, accessing payment services, or integrating with new PSPs.

A very Payments-native problem, now getting serious capital behind it.

Another signal of how Payments are being pulled closer to the shopping moment

Mastercard and Shopee are teaming up to bake incentives directly into checkout, not as an afterthought.

Under the agreement, card programs will plug rewards straight into the Shopee experience. Think VIP access, instant benefits, and loyalty baked into the payment itself. Faster checkout, clearer value, less friction.

The first launch is the VPBank S Rewards Mastercard, targeting digital-native shoppers. Free Shopee VIP for a year, up to 12% back in Shopee Xu, plus a welcome bonus. Payments, loyalty, and commerce collapsing into a single flow.

Scroll down to see what else is moving in Payments today 👇 I'll be back next week with more updates.

Cheers,

Marcel

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NEWS

🇻🇳 Mastercard and Shopee Vietnam announce strategic collaboration, with the launch of the VPBank S Rewards Mastercard Card. The cooperation aims to promote cashless payments, contributing to the development of the digital economy and improving the online shopping experience. Additionally, UWallet and Mastercard strengthen their collaboration to advance digital financial inclusion in Jordan. By combining Mastercard’s global technology with UWallet’s local market expertise, the initiative seeks to drive lasting impact across both consumer and business markets.

🇺🇸 Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach says the company is shifting from pilot to real-world execution with Ripple, expanding blockchain-based settlement capabilities. Well, this signals Mastercard’s rising confidence in blockchain as a real payment infrastructure.

🌍 BrightCHAMPS and Triple-A partner to enable stablecoin payments for global learners. As part of this collaboration, BrightCHAMPS will now accept all major stablecoins such as USDT and USDC as fee payment options across all 30+ countries, including the US, Canada, the UK, the UAE, and Southeast Asia.

🇬🇧 Noah and Sumsub partner to deliver the fastest, most scalable compliance and verification engine for modern money. Through the partnership, any client using Noah’s high-speed rails and accounts can now onboard users in seconds, with greater accuracy, fraud protection, and success rates, thanks to Sumsub’s automated verification.

🇬🇧 Ecommpay announces strategic partnership with Payrails to revolutionise global payments for enterprises. The collaboration aims to directly impact top-line growth and bottom-line costs. By leveraging the combined strengths of both platforms, enterprises can aim to expect improved acceptance and conversion rates, reduced costs, and accelerated speed to market for their services.

🇩🇪 Stripe alumni raise €30M Series A for Duna, backed by Stripe and Adyen execs. Backed by prominent angel investors from Stripe and rivals like Adyen, the company aims to build a reusable digital passport system that allows businesses to share verified identity information across multiple platforms.

🇺🇸 Corpay announces agreement to sell non-core vehicle payments asset, PayByPhone, a mobile parking payments business, to Lightyear Capital. The transaction is not expected to have a material impact on Corpay’s 2026 Cash EPS outlook. Continue reading

🇬🇧 Apexx Global raises $10m for payments orchestration platform. By intelligently routing transactions across the global payments ecosystem, Apexx says it materially increases acceptance rates, reduces processing costs, and improves unit economics.

🇧🇷 Tencent Cloud and Treeal partnership brings next-gen PalmAI service to Brazil. Designed to outperform traditional biometric methods, including fingerprint and facial recognition, the new system offers a secure, contactless, and highly accurate alternative for payment processing and access control.

🇫🇷 Lyf Pay is shutting down. The FinTech Lyf, which offers an electronic wallet, QR code payments in stores or at tables, and peer-to-peer money pools, has never been able to generate sufficient volume against heavyweights like Apple Pay or Lydia. Read more

🇧🇷 Clara renews $150 million debt facility with Goldman Sachs to scale payments products in Mexico, bringing total debt capacity to over $250 million. The funding from Goldman Sachs will enable Clara to scale its payment solutions, including corporate credit cards, bill pay, and cross-border transactions, as well as Clara TravelPay.

🌍 Volt launches Volt Accounts, a flagship cash management suite for merchants and partners in the UK and the EU. Volt Accounts monitors transactions in EUR and GBP from initiation to receipt, providing status updates at crucial stages of the payment value chain. When payments are completed, merchants can dispatch goods or deliver services faster and with greater certainty.

🌍 Binance Pay brings crypto payments to 650,000 SA merchants through a strategic partnership with Scan To Pay. Through Scan to Pay’s integration with Moneybadger, Binance Pay users can now pay with over 100 cryptocurrencies at participating merchants, ranging from fashion retailers to essential bill payments, using the familiar QR-code payment experience.

🇰🇷 South Korea and Indonesia to launch cross-border QR code-based payment system in April. Travelers moving between South Korea and Indonesia will be able to make payments without exchanging currencies using a QR code-based payment system starting in April, Seoul's central bank said. 

🇪🇸 The Bank of Spain has a simple warning for anyone who pays by phone. Financial authorities warn that users often rely on weak locks, unchanged spending limits, and disabled security features such as two-factor authentication, leaving phones vulnerable if lost or stolen.

🇺🇸 Visa introduces Visa & Main, a new platform to accelerate small business growth across the U.S. The new program aims to tackle the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs across three pillars: Business Capital, Business Connect, and Business Essentials.

🌍 Phone-to-phone euro transfers from Spain to Poland, BLIK tests interoperability with additional European payment systems. This means the ability to make seamless, instant phone-number-based transfers between users of different mobile payment systems in Europe, without the need to install additional applications.

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