amnis is a fintech startup from Switzerland that offers an international payment platform for SMEs to transfer money abroad, collect payments, and exchange currencies, all within a single tool. amnis was founded back in 2014 to reshape international banking for SMEs.

In recent months amnis has achieved incredible milestones: in just 1 year it has expanded from 1 to 6 countries and opened 4 further offices in Vaduz, Vienna, Prague, and Milan and they have customers from over 25 different countries. The biggest milestone, however, was announced just a few days ago: they’ve successfully closed a financing round of 8.6 million.

Collaborations are crucial, especially in the rapidly growing fintech sector: for some new features, external knowledge and resources must be combined to achieve the best possible outcome.
The amnis goal is to build an innovative, digital ecosystem to be able to benefit from the best technologies and knowledge, from video identification for customer onboardings to accounting system integrations.

The international team of more than 30 people is a unique combination of interdisciplinary experience and product knowledge, and all are highly motivated to build the SME banking solution.
In Italy, the team has 2 people and they will hire another 3-4 people in the next 12 months. They are currently expanding in all areas and locations to double the team by the end of this year.

WATCH THE VIDEO INTERVIEW

Would you like to keep up to date with our community? Sign up for our MONTHLY NEWSLETTER

Soldo has recently joined the ranks of the Payments start-ups and scale-ups belonging to the Fintech District community. To better understand its business, we interviewed Founder and CEO Carlo Gualandri.

What does Soldo do and who is it aimed at?

Soldo is the leading European Spend Automation Platform, for businesses of all sizes. Beyond employee expenses and T&E, Soldo streamlines spend management for purchases, advertising, software subscriptions, e-commerce purchases, and all other company costs. From decision to allocate funds to departments and projects to the execution of outbound payments with cards or bank transfers, from the automated classification and reconciliation of transactions to the integration with accounting platforms Soldo delivers a unified and connected vision of spend across the entire organisation. Today, thousands of organizations across Europe, including small, medium and large businesses, use Soldo to manage spend the brighter way.

How has it grown in recent months?

Soldo has attracted a total of $260 million from international institutional investors including $180 million in the latest C round that will be used to increase turnover tenfold to 200 million euros in the four years after the pandemic. Soldo is expanding in Europe, where Soldo already has offices in Italy, United Kingdom, Ireland and France, and is continuously developing its platform to address and automate all the different types of company spend.

Have you done or would you like to do any open innovation projects? What kind and with whom?

At Soldo innovating in both software and financial services is part of our DNA. We support companies open innovation with a range of initiatives that allow the integration of the Soldo platform into the custom business logic of our clients allowing them to fully control our architecture according to their needs and we are constantly experimenting also with financial institutions on how they could make our proposition part of their product offering for selected segments of the market.

How is your team structured?

Soldo is a real European company, our team comprises people from over 27 nationalities, and there is no single headquarter as both London, Rome and Dublin each is the base of a number of divisions that in turn then interact with the teams present in each country we serve that contribute with the specialised knowledge and understanding of each market. We have currently over 350 employees and we are constantly growing.

subscribe to OUR NEWSLETTER to learn more about our community

More and more often, values related to environmental sustainability appear in the business plan and mission of innovative global start-ups. This is a transversal emergency that must affect all sectors, and fintech cannot shy away from it. On the contrary, it can set an example for other industries by showing how technology can lend a big hand in tackling the climate crisis.

The potential of fintech is enormous, as demonstrated by companies such as Greenly. In this interview, Giulia Girardi takes an in-depth look at the mission and projects of this excellent company.

What greenly does and who it is aimed at?

Greenly is a company specialized in carbon tracking through payments. Our mission is to democratise access to carbon analytics to all businesses and individuals, and we do this through 3 solutions:
• Our app for individuals to track their emissions
• Our carbon accounting software for SMEs – through which we served more than 200 companies
• Our API for banks and fintechs to integrate emissions information within their banking apps – serving at the moment 13M users

How is your team structured?

It was founded in 2019 by Techstars alumni and Alexis Normand (CEO), Matthieu Vegreville, (CTO) and Arnaud Delubac, (CMO) – who decided to bring their expertise gained within health-tech company Withings on the quantified self to the fight against climate change.

How has your business grown in recent months?

To date – Greenly has raised a seed round of €500k and recently announced a bridge round of €2.5M and is currently on route to raise €10M to scale and internationalize their operations outside of France.

Have you done or would you like to do any open innovation projects? What kind and with whom?

Greenly is open to connect with companies operating with payments or within the sustainability industry to make carbon analytics a new, easily accessible standard.

If you want to keep up to date with our events and the growth of our community, subscribe to our newsletter now.

We never forget our international vocation and today we go very far geographically but very close in terms of interests and objectives with an interview dedicated to fintech opportunities in Australia with Matteo Musso, Associate Director, KPMG Sydney.

Let’s start by exploring the fintech landscape of this country

The number of fintech companies in Australia has increased from around 100 in 2015 to more than
700 in 2020. In this context, there are some sectors in particular that stand out, in which fintechs in
Australia have succeeded in positioning themselves as world leaders, due to their capacity to
innovate and offer value-added technological solutions to their clients. Within those sectors that
stand out, there is the payments sector, particularly Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL), the small business
lending sector, digital banks (also known as neo-banks), as well as the blockchain and cryptocurrency
sectors. With respect to investment, in 2020 Australia attracted 2 billion dollars of investment in the
fintech sector. This means investment in the fintech sector increased by more than 250% compared
to the previous year. In Italy in the same period, there was 150 million euros of investment. These
factors indicate that the Australian fintech sector boasts not only a large variety of players with
cutting edge technological solutions, but is also a sector with strong growth and the capacity to
attract global investment.

What opportunities does Australia offer in the payments industry?

The payments sector is the sector that boasts the greatest number of companies in the Australian
fintech sector. The strong growth we have seen in this sector is primarily due to the fact that in
Australia, most payments are electronic and Australians are used to using advanced payment
options that are also offered by the major banks. This has resulted in the creation of fertile territory
for the proliferation of payment companies within the local ecosystem. There are some data we can
analyse to further understand this phenomenon. For example, it’s possible to observe in Australia
that cash is used in only 27% of cases, and this percentage drops further to only 5% of cases if we
look at the part of the population that ranges from 19-39 years of age. In Italy, cash is used in more
than 80% of cases. For these reasons, we are convinced that Australia has the potential to become a
world leader in the payments sector. Some examples of Australian companies in this sector are Tyro
Payments, Zip and Afterpay. Recently we have also seen the acquisition of an Australian player by
the US global payments giant Square, which acquired the Australian company Afterpay for more
than 39 million dollars, which is not only the largest acquisition in Australian corporate history, but is
also one of the largest deals in the fintech sector.

What opportunities are there in the SME lending sector?

In Australia the small and medium enterprises (SME) sector is represented by more than two million
businesses employing around 5 million Australians. With respect to the sector regarding loans for
small businesses, we can see that one in four businesses are refused credit by the major Australian
banks. This is due to the fact that small businesses are often considered as less profitable and high
risk. This has created a ‘funding gap’ of around 90 billion dollars, which represents the amount of
credit that small businesses are unable to access via the main Australian lenders. This creates fertile territory for fintechs focused on the sector of small business (SME) lending, in that this funding gap is
considered to be a significant opportunity for investment and innovation in a market that at the
moment isn’t covered by the principal players in the sector in Australia. For this reason, in recent
years we have seen a proliferation of fintechs in the small business (SME) lending sector, offering a
value proposition with a strong technological component, with the objective of allowing small
businesses to have rapid access to credit. Some examples of SME lending players in Australia include
Moula, Judo Bank and Prospa. In our view, this is one of the sectors in which we will see significant
growth and innovation.

In collaboration with the Australian Trade and Investment Commission (Austrade) – for more information about opportunities to grow and expand in Australia, please visit: https://www.globalaustralia.gov.au/industries/financial-services-and-fintech

Keep up to date with news from FD Community and the Italian fintech world

Hipay is a global payment provider. Thanks to its solutions, e-commerce and retailers can give their users the possibility to pay using their preferred payment method and local currency. There are two solutions linked to the main platform Hipay Enterprise: the Business Intelligence and the HiPay Sentinel. The first allows marketing teams to do an in-depth analysis of payment data. The second one is the anti-fraud tool, native of the Hipay Enterprise payment platform and very useful for managing risky transactions.

“With Hipay – explains Senior Head of Italy Paola Trecarichi – those who are part of the world of e-commerce, and want to open up to the international market instead of making integrations and contracts with many payment providers, can use our payment gateway that allows offering local solutions with one single integration and one single contract.

HiPay closed 2018 with +30% of managed transactions. “We have had more than 1,200 new merchants and 116 Key accounts. Our currents merchants have also grown by 19% in terms of volume compared to the previous year,” says Trecarichi, pointing out that the world of e-commerce is moving towards innovation and digital payment methods both of which are growing in Italy and Europe.

HiPay is a French company, its headquarters is in Paris and has 220 employees. The technical part is in Nantes. There are also many commercial offices in Europe, especially in Portugal, Belgium and Italy where there is a team of 7 people. HiPay is a European platform but the solutions are worldwide because they help European merchants to sell on the international market thanks to the payment methods it has integrated. China is also included since HiPay has recently integrated the payment methods of that country such as China UnionPay, WeChat and Alipay.

In the summer, HiPay joined the Fintech District, because it considers it “a gateway to the Italian market (and) one of the opportunities Italy offers”. It sees in the community “the possibility of exchanging knowledge and skills. “We think we can give our contribution and also learn from the companies that are part of this ecosystem. In Italy the fintech world is in its early stages and HiPay is part of this beginning”.

The next important event in which HiPay will take part in is Salone dei Pagamenti. “We also attended it last year, together with Fintech District – recalls Trecarichi – and we will show our technological innovations, hope to meet other people in the sector and understand what will be the future trends and what market demands”.

If you wish to stay updated about news, events and initiatives of the FINTECH DISTRICT, subscribe to our newsletter HERE

Their pay off is “make it easy” but is it easy for an Italian startup to make its way into the fintech sector? Looking at the speed with which SplittyPay is growing, it would seem so, but behind this success, and the smart pay off, there is a lot to tell. We have Alberto Porzio, founder of this startup which entered the Fintech District community last autumn, do so directly.

Since joining the Fintech District community, how have you grown?

We joined the community 1 year ago and a lot has changed since then. We started with a business idea that evolved over time, bringing some changes aimed at responding to the needs of users and merchants. In the meantime, we completed 2 rounds of financing for a total of 360k€ as well as acquiring a competitor platform with the aim of completing our offer.

How has your strategy changed and why?

Our strategy has not substantially changed, the SplittyPay payment platform is still the core business of the company and we are convinced that in the long run, we will find great satisfaction with this product. However, the B2B negotiations are complex and long so we have had some delay with respect to the roadmap. This does not scare us. We have already signed agreements with important merchants and many integrations already planned between now and the end of the year. We have decided to anticipate the implementation of the Splitted platform, also taking advantage of an opportunity that has allowed this step, to start generating revenues in the short term, pending the integration of SplittyPay.

Any Milestones reached worth remembering?

Undoubtedly the Fintech award of the e-commerce observatory of the Politecnico di Milano, the first real transactions with the first merchants who have adopted SplittyPay for the first phase of testing and the first revenues of the Splitted platform!

What’s Splitted?

Splitted is an innovative, secure and practical digital collection service that allows you to manage expenses between groups of people by creating shared collections. Each collection can be customized through a rich set of options and can be public or private. Each user can enter a fee, free or predefined, using their preferred payment system. The payment of fees is also open to users not registered to the platform. Splitted is also a social-payment platform. Thanks to the social wall integrated into each collection it is possible to create a strong interaction between users, add comments with photos or videos and categorize them through hashtags.

What do you expect from this new service? How does it complement or enhance your previous offer?

Splitted is a natural evolution of the SplittyPay platform. Our goal is to offer 360° solutions in the field of online group payments. While with SplittyPay we have a predominantly B2B market, with Splitted we also wanted to open up the possibility of overseeing the B2C market with an innovative, easy-to-use platform, that can bring benefits in terms of the brand to SplittyPay.

The decision to launch the new product right now was dictated by the fact that there was the opportunity to acquire the technology and user base belonging to a direct competitor who had been operating for several years, allowing us consequently not to have to start from scratch and start, instead, from day 1 to generate revenues. Without this possibility we would probably not have decided to launch Splitted in the short term. You need to know how to seize opportunities and make the right decision quickly and time will tell us if this choice is right.

How useful has it been for you to join the Fintech District in recent months?

Fintech District is establishing itself as the nerve centre of Milanese and Italian innovation. Working for several months at its headquarters we have been able to benefit from many services, participate in events and get in touch with top experts in the Fintech sector. It has helped us improve our product, understand compliance standards and study new trends in order to plan the growth and evolution over the next few years. We have also been able to create synergies with some other companies within the building.

Watch the video about SplittyPay here.

If you wish to stay updated about news, events and initiatives of the Fintech District, subscribe to our newsletter HERE

Mirware is a company that deals with business intelligence applied to the world of interbank transactions. It extracts value-added information related to the characteristics of the bank’s customers to support commercial development and operational efficiency.

Since 2016 it has activated a benchmark service in the world of international payments and trade finance which 7 of the main Italian banking groups have joined

“The purpose of this activity – explains Corrado Roccazzella, Product Manager at Mirware – was to provide, at very low cost and with a very low technological impact, the tools which allowed banks to get used to read and interpret relevant phenomena to set up more effective, and gain greater awareness of, market dynamics through continuous comparison within significant peer groups”.

After gaining solid experience in the Italian market, Mirware began to explore the markets of France, Spain, and Russia in 2018. In 2019 it planned further activities to attack the main European markets.

Its solutions have no limit as far as commercial scalability is concerned as they are based on an approach that involves working on international standard messaging.

At the end of 2018 the company decided to enter the Fintech District: “we are convinced that this can give us the opportunity to access a community of very good counterparts who have developed vertical skills – explains Roccazzella – Thanks to the sharing of ideas and projects we can create new business opportunities attracting national and international counterparts interested in the potential of the fintechs”

If you wish to stay updated about news, events and initiatives of the Fintech District, subscribe to our newsletter HERE

K Linx is an innovative platform for payment reconciliation. It deals with those processes that are normally carried out by the back office in manual mode and which concern the acknowledgement for each payment of the person paying and what he is paying in order to record the payment.

The platform automatically performs these operations. The greatest added value emerges in the sector of unstructured payments. These are payments that do not rely on specific references such as pre-printed bulletins, a MAV or an SDD but rather on free text descriptive reasons. Wire transfers represent the typical form of unstructured payment, but K Linx also automatically manages handwritten deposit slips.

The company is currently working to direct the IT components, that make up the platform, towards the development of neural networks. “It serves to emulate as much as possible the reasoning of a person in the analysis of payments especially those that are unstructured – explains founder Mario Farris – and to reduce as much as possible doubtful cases, meaning those in which the intervention of an operator is required”.

The K Linx team aims at creating a platform able to operate in total autonomy, in which human intervention is required only for monitoring correct operations but only from an IT operation point of view.

This company has an intrinsic vocation towards internationalization: in dealing with payments it knows the standards starting off from the European SEPA standard and the international SWIFT standard.

“We are very interested in presenting our platform in other countries of Europe and overseas,” says Farris, explaining that he has chosen to join the Fintech District community “to become part of an ecosystem where contamination takes place every day, both at the level of ideas, and at the level of technologies and strategies. It is a type of cooperation whose outcome can only be positive ”

Last November K Linx was among the startups that participated in the Salone dei Pagamenti, “a great experience” according to Farris who promises: “we will also return next year with important news, especially regarding developments in the neural networks

If you wish to stay updated about news, events and initiatives of the Fintech District, subscribe to our newsletter HERE

Splitty Pay is an alternative payment system that aims to simplify purchases between groups and at the same time to improve the performance of e-commerce platforms.

This startup entered the market not so long ago with the first two platforms and is making agreements with other very important platforms. By the end of 2018, as explained by Alberto Porzio, founder of Splitty Pay, “we aim to be present on many e-commerce sites”.

Immediately after entering the market in Italy, the company aims to enter the UK market which is 5 times bigger than the Italian one. Its team has already participated in a six-week acceleration program in London, TechItalia London, “which allowed us – says Porzio – to start looking at the UK world”.

Last summer Splitty Pay became part of the Fintech District community and not only for the location! “We consider it the ideal place to grow quickly and get in touch with other fintech companies – explains Porzio – while from the Fintech District we expect support at all stages of our growth, both in finding possible partners and in participating in events during which we can explain what our vision is”.

If you wish to stay uptodated about news, events and initiatives of the Fintech District, subscribe to our newsletter HERE

Europass is a digital marketing and mobile payment solutions company for Chinese tourists traveling in Italy. “We create official accounts on the main application used by the Chinese, WeChat. At the same time, for luxury brands of tourist attractions, hotels and restaurants, we deal with marketing profiles on the Alipay platform (Alibaba group)” explains Paola Pacchiana, business developer at Europass.

As far as the payment sector is concerned, Europass also offers the two main mobile payment solutions, namely WeChat Pay and Alipay, in one single integrated solution. The goal of this company is to allow a Chinese tourist, traveling in Europe, to find the same digital ecosystem he is used to when in his country.

Pacchiana points out that, in China, the digital ecosystem and mobile payment systems are much more evolved: “the situation there is very different from the European one. In China the two main mobile payment solutions have already replaced not only cash but also credit cards “.

Europass was born in France in 2016 but the Italian branch has been open a few months together with other branches located in other main European countries. There is also a branch in the United States and this company also works a lot in the United Arab Emirates, especially in Dubai. “Our pace of expansion is very high and – Pacchiana comments – we hope to continue the development in other European countries”.

In the coming months, after the WTM in London and the Salone dei Pagamenti, Pacchiana plans to take part in many workshops organized by various Italian regions, as buyers, to meet the different tourist attractions. In recent months, Europass has also joined the Fintech District community with two main objectives. “The first is to interact, collaborate and create partnerships with other startups – explains Pacchiana – the second is to exchange ideas and advice with other members on how to make our business evolve“.

If you wish to stay uptodated about news, events and initiatives of the Fintech District, subscribe to our newsletter HERE