Chinese e-commerce giant Tencent is heading up a $35 million financing round for UK-based startup TrueLayer, further adding to its growing portfolio of fintech investments.

Finextra is at Davos this year, covering global insights into the impact fintech has on wider issues such as responding to Covid-19, restoring economic growth and advancing a new social contract.

Giles Andrews, the co-founder of Zopa – the world’s first online peer-to-peer lending business – is bringing some fintech chops to C. Hoare, the UK’s oldest private bank.

Google and PayPal have agreed a multi-year collaboration to advance agentic shopping and frictionless commerce payments.

Equals Money, a payments provider for company expenses, has launched a Banking-as-a-Service product to helping businesses offer their own digital payment and card services.

Swedbank has acquired Stabelo, a tech-led mortgage business with a focus on younger, more digitally-aware customers.

Fresh from a £37 million funding round, London-based digital wallet Curve is hiring 50+ customer experience recruits to provide human-centric tailored services to its six million user base.

“We expect to play a very meaningful role in making sure projects get delivered,” said John Flint, chief executive, UK Infrastructure Bank, regarding the role the bank will have in the HS2 replacement plans in the North of England.

BBVA is to share a EUR60,000 pot with developers who can augment bank API data from card transactions in Mexico with external resources to create innovative new financial applications.

The digital assets arm of Boerse Stuttgart has hired Solaris tech chief Dennis Winter as CTO.

Deutsche Bank and Mastercard are working together to bring open banking payments to merchants and consumers across Europe.

The CEO of a cryptocurrency firm was kidnaped and held for a C$1 million ransom in Toronto, according to local press reports.

TransferWise is expanding its debit card programme into dozens of new markets after inking a worldwide deal with Visa that will see the money transfer firm connect to the card giant’s global processing network via the cloud.

Sweden’s central bank says the country’s retail payment infrastructure needs to be modernised to accommodate more instant payments and third party access to payment and settlement rails.

Banks in Singapore will progressively implement Singpass Face Verification (SFV) over the next three months to strengthen the digital token (DT) setup process for retail banking customers.