Global spending on financial market data and news grew modestly in 2024, with revenues rising 6.4% – far slower than the previous year – to $44.3 billion.

There is a growing appetite for the next evolutionary step in open banking – open finance – within the global FS sector, with nearly half of senior professionals considering it a “must have” in the context of data sharing.

Branch-based Metro bank is upping its digital game with the launch of a developer portal for third party firms to build services on top of its APIs.

Singapore’s DBS Bank is building hackathons into its talent development programme by pairing inhouse employees with startups from across the region to jointly tackle business and societal challenges.

In banking and payments, much is discussed about the end retail customer experience. We often read about B2C or even B2B2C payments, mostly because mobile devices have extended well beyond simple communication.

Ahead of our NextGen Nordics conference on 27 April 2022, we will be putting together a weekly briefing of all the top stories that are emerging out of the region and setting the blueprint for payments innovation across Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.

StashAway, a digital wealth management startup hailing from Singapore, is raising US$25 million in a Series D funding round led by Sequoia Capital India.

SAP is to set up a dedicated financial services unit in a joint venture with investment firm Dediq that will see the ERP vendor develop a new suite of products covering the full spectrum of commercial banking and insurance operations.

Trading and investing platform eToro is launching an AI-generated advertising campaign for the Paris Olympics.

Fintech influencer and VC Spiros Margaris is to create a basket of fintech stocks for clients of Swiss investment management firm Cat Financial Products.

Greenwood, the digital banking startup for Black and Latino people and business owners, has acquired fellow neobank Kinly, bringing the two largest fintechs focused on the Black community together as one company.

Nordea is extending its Open Banking initiative to Sweden, giving third party developers access to customer data via APIs.

FourTwoThree, a climate action platform backed by NatWest, NAB and SC Ventures, has gone live with a goal of helping SMEs to measure, understand, and take action to reduce their carbon emissions.

IDPartner, a startup providing online identity verification through a network of financial institutions, has raised $3.1 million in a seed funding round led by Abstract Ventures.