GoCardless raises £22.5m in funding round
London start-up GoCardless has raised £22.5m in a funding round backed by existing investors Accel, Balderton Capital and Passion Capital.
The start-up provides technology that helps firms integrate payments online. It has processed more than $4bn of payments across 30,000 businesses.
“As more and more businesses become international, they face endless frustrations in managing payments across multiple territories.
“What we have engineered is a way to simply plug recurring payments into their existing systems, across the world, so they can focus on the challenges that really matter,” says Hiroki Takeuchi, CEO and founder of GoCardless.
UK supermarket to start accepting fingerprint payments
UK supermarket Costcutters has become the first in the world to allow customers to pay for their groceries using their fingerprints.
Stahler, the firm behind the technology, has said it was in “serious talks” with other major UK supermarkets to adopt the technology and finger vein scanners at multiple pay points. Customers at the Costcutter store at Brunel University can now pay using their unique fingerprint to identify themselves.
The technology works by using infrared to scan people’s finger veins and then links this biometric map back to their bank cards. Customers’ bank details are stored with global payment provider WorldPay, the same way information is stored when shopping online.
According to The Telegraph, finger print payments are already widely adopted at cash points in Poland, Japan and Turkey.
Yolt adds new features to banking app
Yolt, the money management app owned by ING, has released a series of exciting new updates today, following its launch to the app stores in June.
Bringing the UK market one step closer to Open Banking, Yolt lets users view their accounts and credit cards in one place. This allows Yolt users to unthink money as they are able to see exactly where they spend their money, set budgets and plan for upcoming expenditures.
Yolt has also launched a new partnership with money transfer comparison platform, Moneytis. This exciting addition to the Yolt platform means users will be offered the option to compare ways to transfer money worldwide and look for these deals directly in the Yolt app.
Google unveils new pay-by-sound app
Google has released a new payment app that uses sound to transfer money.
The new system, called Tez, is a mobile wallet that allows users to link their bank accounts and use it to pay for items in stores and online.
The technology enables digital money transfers using ultrasonic Audio QR codes between two devices. Tez, which means ‘fast’ in Hindi, requires users to possess an iOS or Android device equipped with a microphone and speakers, link their bank account to the app and start making payments.
Read last week’s news round up here.
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