Geoffrey Barraclough

Kindred Studios set to return to North Paddington with a permanent home at 300 Harrow Road | Westminster City Council

It's great to be welcoming @kindredstudios.bsky.social back to North Paddington to operate 7,500 sq ft of new affordable managed workspace at 300 Harrow Road. We're opening 30 - 36 affordable studios in the summer + co-working spaces for 100 local businesses. www.westminster.gov.uk/news/kindred...

Well-financed Volt reports strong growth with good unit economics Volt, a well-financed open banking payments vendor with global ambitions, reported a strong increase in revenue for 2023. Although the business, like many of its competitors, is still a long way fr…

Some positive Open Banking news. Volt almost tripled revenues in 2023 while while maintaining premium pricing for its transaction processing. Having raised $60m, Volt likely has enough money in the bank to outlast its competitors. businessofpayments.com/2025/02/21/w...

Business of Payments - February 2025 How Paytech makes money

February's Business of Payments is out! Featuring the latest corporate news, fundraising from start-ups, European growth figures from Visa and Mastercard, product innovation in autonomous stores, SoftPOS and crypto and much more. open.substack.com/pub/business...

Dziś mija 10. rocznica rynkowego debiutu Blika Blik, rówieśnik cashless.pl, ma już 10 lat.

Happy 10th birthday to Blik, the Polish mobile payment standard that has taken the country by storm. It's now in Slovakia and Romania too. www-cashless-pl.translate.goog/16554-blik-1...

Computop Brings CloudPOS to Over 500 freenet Shops Following the replacement of card terminals across the freenet retail network in Germany, Computop’s A77 Android-based mobile devices will provide a payment alternative with immediate effect. As part ...

It's good to see Computop winning omni-channel deals as a change from @adyen.bsky.social. The German PSP will be supplying 500 PAX A77s to @freenet stores in Germany. Nexi is acquiring the card transactions. computop.com/uk/about-us/...

@worldpay.bsky.social's deal to buy Ravelin, the London-HQ'd fraud specialist, makes sense. There really isn't much money in fraud screening as you can see from Ravelin's slow growing revenue line. Merchants increasingly expect the service free of charge with their payment processing bundle.

Self-checkouts: 37% of shoppers admit to stealing Supermarkets self-checkout machines have 'created a new breed of shoplifter'

Blimey. 37% of Brits admit to scanning items at the self-checkout but not paying. www.thegrocer.co.uk/news/self-ch...

Norway’s Receipts raises €1.7M to make paper receipts obsolete Oslo's Receipts, a B2B fintech serving financial services, has raised nearly €1.7M in a new investment round to accelerate its expansion.

Flux redux? Norwegian start-up Receipts raises €1.7m to send digital receipts direct from the retailer to your banking app. siliconcanals.com/norways-rece....

Impressive stuff. @planet_pay (not to be confused with @PlanetPayment) completes 11,000 unit SoftPOS roll out with DPD in Poland. Couriers can take cash-on-delivery from their @ZebraTechnology devices. www.dpd.com/pl/pl/2025/0...

Payone: Bafin greift heftig durch Bei einer Prüfung stellte die Finanzaufsicht Mängel bei der Geldwäschebekämpfung und IT-Prozessen von Payone fest. Jetzt muss das Institut mehr Eigenmittel vorhalten – und bekommt einen Sonderbeauftra...

More problems at PAYONE, Worldline's troubled joint venture with the German savings banks. BAFIN (the local regulator) has found more shortcomings in the PSP's AML processes and has sent a special representative to supervise improvements. paymentandbanking.com/payone-bafin...

myPOS Finalizes Its First Acquisition to Enhance Presence in France | myPOS Newsroom Learn the latest news about myPOS and find useful tips for your business. See more on the myPOS blog!

Good move from myPOS to buy Toporder, a leading French ISV that specialises in software for speciality food retail. Advent bought myPOS last year seems serious about creating a pan-European player to rival SumUp. www.mypos.com/en-gb/newsro...

Flatpay, the fast growing Danish POS-focused PF which works with Shift4, has raised a further €58m to support market expansion, taking total fundraising to a very chunky €120m. Investors claim Flatpay is “the fastest growing Danish startup ever.” dontt.dk/flatpay-rejs...

Payment services to power your performance | Checkout.com Boost your acceptance rate, cut processing costs, fight fraud, and create extraordinary customer experiences with Checkout.com's payment solutions.

Checkout.com has shared highlights for 2024. Revenue grew 40% and the business is now profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis. Crypto now represents less than 5% of the business. The focus is very much on digital retail and fintech.
www.checkout.com/blog/2024-an...

The @discover global network is going backwards. Volume from customers of its 25+ partners was down 30% in Q4. AribaPay was blamed (again) for the decline. Meanwhile, Discover reports that old fashioned Diners Club volume was up 9%, boosted by good performance in Israel.

The Naughty List Grows: 13% Committed First-Party Fraud During the Holiday Shopping Season - Digital Transactions Some consumers better hope Santa Claus doesn’t read the latest fraud report from Socure, a fraud-pre

Wow. 13% of US consumers admit to first-party fraud during the holiday season such as pretending parcels weren't delivered. www.digitaltransactions.net/the-naughty-...

Unicaja and Fiserv partner to expand payments in Spain Unicaja and Fiserv have announced a strategic partnership aimed at developing advanced payment and ecommerce solutions.

@unicajacb.bsky.social, the sixth largest bank in Spain with over 900 branches, has chosen Fiserv as its merchant payment partner. This is a good win for Fiserv and gives it a bank partner in Spain for the first time. thepaypers.com/payments-gen...

Klearly snatches €6 million for in-person payments and to support SMBs across Europe | EU-Startups Klearly, an Amsterdam-based fintech startup focused on in-person payment solutions, has raised €6 million in a seed funding round to fund its expansion

Amsterdam-based Klearly, a SoftPOS vendor focused on hospitality ISVs, raises €6m to expand to new European markets. The business claims 4,000 merchants trading today. www.eu-startups.com/2025/01/klea...

Rubean, the Munich-based SoftPOS vendor, almost doubled sales in 2024 to €1.9m with EBITDA losses running at c.€2.9m. Rubean claims >50K SoftPOS live today in Germany and Spain and new customer wins include Deichmann. www.research-tree.com/companies/ge...

AI payment platform transforms AI transactions as Nevermined raises $4M for "PayPal for AI" — TFN Nevermined raises $4M to revolutionise AI-to-AI transactions with a dynamic AI payment platform dubbed the 'PayPal for AI.' Discover how it enables seamless and flexible commerce for the AI economy.

This is really exciting. Berlin-based Nevermined raises $4m to develop payment products for AI agents to pay other AI agents. The future of business is going for lunch while our bots sort out the details. techfundingnews.com/nevermind-ai...

MoonPay acquires Helio in $175M deal to expand crypto payment services MoonPay acquires Helio for $175 million, integrating Solana blockchain tech to revolutionize crypto payments for merchants and marketplaces.

London-based Helio Fintech, whose plug-in allows merchants to accept crypto and get paid in $ (real or stable), sold itself to MoonPay for $175m. That's punch price. Helio claims $1.5bn processing volume from 6,000 merchants and charges 2% per transaction. cointelegraph.com/news/moonpay...

The J.P. Morgan vs Viva.com litigation continues but has moved from London to Athens. Both parties accuse the other of bad faith but it's the lawyers that will likely win this one. www.reuters.com/business/fin...

The Great Crypto Crash Trump will usher in a speculative frenzy.

There's a crash coming. The only question is when. Caveat emptor. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

Rewolucja PayEye w pierwszym hotelu: płacenie okiem i twarzą oraz weryfikacja wieku Luksusowy hotel nad Jeziorem Rożnowskim stawia na innowacje i wygodę gości, oferując multifunkcjonalne terminale do płatności, check-inu i weryfikacji wieku. Pomaga mu w tym rozwiązanie firmy PayEye.

This is novel. Payeye, a Polish start-up, has combined iris scanning automatic payments with age verification. First customer is a five star hotel but bars/nightclubs would certainly be interested too. www.telepolis.pl/fintech/cash...

Nomupay raises $37M at a $200M valuation to build payment rails in underserved markets across Asia | TechCrunch Wirecard, a German fintech that raised hundreds of millions of dollars only to collapse in 2020 in a sea of scandal and insolvency, still makes headlines

Hat tip to Dublin-based Nomupay, formed out of the ashes of Wirecard, raising a further $37m at $200m valuation. Nomupay has now received $90m total investment and says it will be profitable this year on ARR of $20m from 1,600 merchants. techcrunch.com/2025/01/07/n...

Klarna's CEO says AI is capable of doing his job — and it makes him feel 'gloomy' Sebastian Siemiatkowski said he's "not necessarily super excited" about AI being able to do his job as CEO of Klarna.

Klarna's CEO says a robot could do his job. "I am not necessarily super excited about this," he explained. www.businessinsider.com/klarna-ceo-s...

Swiss startup looks to help media 'tiun' in to younger audiences with new funding | EU-Startups tiun, a Zurich-based fintech helping media providers to attract, engage and convert younger audiences, is today announcing a €2.5 million pre-seed funding

Hat tip to Zurich based Tiun.io raising €2.5m for its pre-pay micropayment solution for online publishers. 50 titles are already on board. Very clever idea that meets a genuine market need. www.eu-startups.com/2024/12/swis...

Payment services to power your performance | Checkout.com Boost your acceptance rate, cut processing costs, fight fraud, and create extraordinary customer experiences with Checkout.com's payment solutions.

Update from Checkout.com following yesterday's over-excited posts reflecting 2023 financial results from one UK entity. Checkout says global revenue grew 40% in 2024 with headcount rising to 1,900. The business seems in decent shape to me. www.checkout.com/newsroom/cla...

Business of Payments - January 2025 How Paytech makes money

Start 2025 with January's Business of Payments including new fundraises, corporate activity (European acquisitions by Shift4 & Nuvei) + product news from SoftPOS, open banking (featuring financial results from Trustly & Yapily) and much more.
businessofpayments.substack.com/p/business-o...

Experience: I paid £55,000 for a beer When I asked for the receipt, the bartender printed it out and put her hand over her mouth

Fat fingers at the till and an Australian bank's generous fraud controls.... www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

City regulators to start oversight of tech firms that provide ‘critical’ services to UK New powers come amid concerns that cyber-attacks and outages could put the country’s financial stability at risk

It's dead right to call out the cloud providers as possible points of catastrophic failure but much harder to see how the UK government could regulate them in practice. Especially as one of the key risks is political (Trump 2.0 say "turn off the UK") www.theguardian.com/business/202...