A brief look back at week 51 at some of the news that’s not always picked up.
Australian fintech secures funding from wealth manager
In the run-up to Christmas, news was fairly thin on the ground, but we did hear that in Sydney, SendGold, Asia-Pacific's peer-to-peer Digital Gold Money platform, has secured investment from a number of Melbourne-based family offices led by EL&C Baillieu, one of Australia's leading wealth management firms.
The investment is part of a pre-Series A round which also included a crowd-sourced funding offer open on platform Birchal. The CSF was already quickly overfunded, attracting over 200 investors from Australia, the US, the UK and Asia. SendGold intends to undertake a Series A funding round in 2020.
"In my opinion, fiat currencies are faith documents; cryptocurrencies are faith data signals," stated Andrew Hellier, EL&C Baillieu. "However with simple commodity exchange in the palm of your hand, based on 100% physical gold, SendGold may just be onto something.
“If the engine of FinTech disruption is technology, the fuel of FinTech disruption is the growing customer awareness of unjustifiable intermediary costs. Good ideas always find an audience."
Quinte Financial Technologies rebrands
We also learnt that in New York, Quinte Financial Technologies – previously operating as Quatrro Processing Services (QPS) and a provider of financial crime management solutions – has been rebranded Quinte.
"The company's name change to Quinte from QPS," said Chairman Venu Gopal, "reflects our differentiated response to a fundamental shift in how financial services companies, merchants and payment processors are currently addressing increased demands related to fraud protection, regulatory compliance and customer experience. Those institutions have learned that technology alone is not a panacea, and that it must be combined with domain knowledge and experienced human capital to deliver effective solutions. This combined, comprehensive capability serves as the basis for Quinte's value proposition."
FinTech South 2020 announces speaker lineup
The Technology Association of Georgia (TAG) has announced the first round of featured speakers for the FinTech South 2020 conference on April 20-21st at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
More than 45 fintech leaders have joined the initial lineup of keynote and breakout session speakers, including:
Dan Macklin, CEO, US, Salary Finance
Dave Birch, Global Ambassador, Consult Hyperion
Kathryn Petralia, Co-Founder, Drum Technologies; Co-Founder & President, Kabbage Inc.
Luvleen Sidhu, Co-Founder, President & Chief Strategy Officer, BankMobile
M. Troy Woods, Chief Executive Officer, US, TSYS, a Global Payments Company
Michael Praeger, Chief Executive Officer, Co-Founder & Board Member, AvidXchange
Peter Hazelhurst, Head of Uber Money, Uber
FinTech South 2020 is a global exchange of insights, innovations and trends fuelling tomorrow's financial tech industry.