The British Business Bank has welcomed Edward O’Hara as its new Chief Risk Officer.

Edward joins the Bank from The Commonwealth Trade Bank Plc, where he served as Chief Risk Officer from early 2017. He has had an extensive career in Risk and strategic leadership positions in a wide variety of international banking and finance institutions, including in the UK, USA, Poland and Bulgaria.

Token, the turnkey open banking platform, has completed a $16.5m strategic investment from a pool of investors, including Opera Tech Ventures, the venture arm of BNP Paribas - one of the world’s largest banks and two other visionary banks headquartered in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.  

Swoop, a FinTech solution that supports SMEs to access funding, has been awarded £5 million (€5.6 million) by the UK’s Banking Competition Remedies (BCR) – an independent body working on behalf of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). BCR aims to ensure RBS is continually promoting competition within banking, and fair access for SMEs to the banking services market, with funds becoming available when an alternative body can better deliver this goal.

London-based insurtech firm Zego has raised $42million in one of the largest funding rounds for a European insurtech start-up. 

QuarterOne, the sales forecasting software start-up for SMEs, raises first major investment from Seedcamp, the influential European seed fund

Inzura.ai the UK based global InsurTech has raised a further £1m in a pre-A funding round. This follows a seed investment round in early 2018 and rapid growth in the UK and South East Asian markets.

Inzura works with brokers and insurers to deliver enhanced digital versions of their insurance products through smartphone apps, leveraging telematics, integrated dashcams and artificial intelligence (AI). With some customers already achieving over 30% improvements in loss ratio, Inzura's digital products are customer focussed, cost significantly less to operate, reduce fraud, and enable greater pricing accuracy.

Maven Capital Partners has invested a further £750,000, in disruptive car insurance platform, Honcho Markets Ltd. The funding has been provided by Maven VCTs (£322,500), North East Development Capital Fund, supported by the European Regional Development Fund (£322,500) and the Finance Durham Fund, established by Durham County Council (£105,000). The follow-on investment will support the business as it enters its next phase of development to launch the product nationally, add new insurance product lines and make significant enhancements to its platform. The investment will also support the creation of 10 jobs over the next 12 months, bringing the total staff numbers to 15.

Kernel Capital and Par Equity have led a £1.2M investment in Datactics Limited, a Belfast-based provider of RegTech solutions for the banking and financial services sector.  This is the second round of funding secured by the company from The Bank of Ireland Kernel Capital Growth Fund (NI).  Datactics provides data quality and matching software to the financial services industry and government departments to help financial firms measure, clean and match data ahead of a regulatory reporting, business intelligence or analytics process. 

Augusta & Co, a specialist financial advisory and investment firm for the renewable energy industry, has today announced the appointment of Axel Narváez Kirkpatrick to the position of Managing Director, Head of Spain.

New research from Intertrust shows an overwhelming majority (94%) of UK-based financial services industry decision-makers believe that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the most potential to revolutionise the sector over the next five years, considerably ahead of blockchain (53%) and the Internet of Things (24%). 

Silverfleet Capital, the leading Pan-European private equity firm, has agreed to acquire Microgen Financial Systems Limited, a leading provider of Trust & Fund Administration (T&FA) software to the Trust and Corporate Services industry. The transaction is subject to the approval of the shareholders of the seller, Aptitude Software Group plc.

autologyx has announced that it has raised an additional £1 million to rapidly expand its foothold in legal, RPO and insurance sectors. The digital operations platform, which automates real-world, complex business processes, has seen significant growth over the past year, both in terms of recurring revenues – which have doubled, and demand for its market-leading platform.