Thursday, 9th of June, 2022

Hi,

Why is research so important when addressing potential customers?

Of course, you can schedule a call and inquire about your potential business partner's pain points, but are you not doubling the workload?

Before arranging the call or even attempting to contact the organization, conduct extensive research on your prospects and their goods.

Then, after the conversation is scheduled, be prepared to give a solution to their problems and be willing to hear some sometimes tough comments.

Only in this way are both parties learning from each other, and even if it does not result in a formal contract at the end of the day, you can share the video with your team and then analyze what may be better.

Cold pitching is still in use, and everyone is making use of it.

But at the very least, we can all endeavor to add value.

Cheers,

Radek

Finance & Tech?

• Paysafe, a leading specialised payments platform, has partnered with APEXX Global, the multi-award-winning global payments orchestration platform, to offer Paysafe’s payment processing services to APEXX Global’s merchant base. Through the new collaboration, APEXX Global will support its merchants to scale globally by increasing their international payment acceptance with Paysafe, enabling them to process card transactions seamlessly across multiple countries and currencies. Using Paysafe’s acquiring payment processing services, merchants can accept payments in over 40 currencies and support a large range of local payment methods, underpinned by the regulatory compliance required to process cross-border payments effectively and expand into new regions. Peter Keenan, CEO and Co-Founder at APEXX, said: “The ecommerce landscape has been transformed in the last couple of years alone and continues to evolve at pace. Paysafe and APEXX are at the forefront of the developments in the payments industry and are extremely well positioned to help merchants continue their growth during these competitive and uncertain times. We are looking forward to working together and expanding this powerful collaboration.” Read more.?
• Supporting Italian SMEs in their international business projects of growth, development and competitiveness, taking advantage of the great opportunities offered by digital export: this is the purpose of the agreement signed by Banca Sella and Business Vision, a company specializing in digital commerce development and an Alibaba's Global Service Partner that will allow Italian SMEs to land on the B2B marketplace and thus expand their presence in foreign markets. "The agreement with Business Vision represents a tangible response to SMEs' growth needs in digitization and export: two essential levers to support companies and the entire national economic fabric - said Andrea Massitti, Head of Corporate and Small business at Banca Sella. Read more.?
• MonetaGo is ditching blockchain for a shift to the cloud after almost a decade of using distributed ledger technology for its trade finance fraud prevention product. The company says that scalability, adoption, lack of in-house expertise, varying international regulatory comfort levels, and technological maturity were the primary deciding factors in the company’s switch to a cloud-based model. "The move to the cloud streamlines the process, while enabling the preservation of data privacy and providing all the same assurances to financial institutions," says the company. Read more.
• Starling Bank CEO Anne Boden has threatened legal action against former anti-fraud minister Lord Agnew over his allegations that the bank used the Government's Covid loan scheme as a "God-sent opportunity" to swell its balance sheets without conducting adequate checks on the ability of loanees to repay the debt. In his statement at aconference last week, Agnew singled out Starling Bank as one of the worst offenders when it came to validating the turnover of businesses or submitting suspicious activity reports. “With minimal data, I cannot analyse the full extent of the misdemeanours, but I’d like to call out one of these banks that I believe has acted against the government’s and taxpayer’s interests: this is Starling Bank,” he said. Read more.?
• Cryptio has raised $10 million in Series A funding for its enterprise crypto back-office platform. Point Nine led the round, with participation from BlueYard, Alven, Coinshares, Avantgarde Finance, Protocol Labs and Draper Associates. Antoine Scalia, CEO, Cryptio, says: "The biggest challenge with crypto accounting on the institutional level is having auditable and reliable transaction history data. Block explorers and third-party data providers often fail to capture complex crypto activity like DeFi, Staking, Mining, and NFTs. These discrepancies can’t be tolerated at the institutional level.? Read more.?
• All-in-one card and financial app Curve has tapped TrueLayer to deliver automated variable recurring payments for customers. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has mandated the UK’s nine largest banks to provide variable recurring payments (VRPs) that support the automatic transfer of money between two accounts belonging to the same person, referred to as ‘sweeping’. Under the collaboration with TrueLayer, Curve customers will be able to make purchases via instant bank transfer using the Curve all-in-one card. They will also have the flexibility to set up a recurring payment mandate for future purchases. For customers of its credit product, Curve Flex, recurring payments will automatically sweep funds from their linked current account for scheduled repayments. Read more.?
• Digital bank Zopa is the latest to jump on the buy now, pay later bandwagon, promising "responsible and sustainable BNPL lending to the UK market". Setting its sights on the UK’s ￡6 billion BNPL market, Zopa is targeting bigger outlays in the ￡250-￡30,000 region for its new offering. Tim Waterman, chief commercial officer at Zopa, says: "We combine the seamless customer journeys and best-in-class digital UX offered by traditional BNPL players alongside the ability to underwrite longer, larger loans in a way that fully meets regulatory requirements.” Read more.?
• Stripe has signed up Wise as the first user of a new biometric delegated authentication feature for strong customer authentication (SCA) transactions. The new SCA rules mean that online transactions in Europe over a set amount are subject to two-factor authentication checks. While there is evidence that the new regime is already cutting fraud, Visa estimates that SCA-compliant transactions have suffered an 11% drop in conversion rates due to purchasers needing to shuffle between different apps at checkout. Matt Henderson, Emea business lead, Stripe, says: "Our delegated authentication feature is a powerful lever to increase the payment conversion of merchants on Stripe, which means more money into their topline without asking them to lift a finger. Across all SCA-covered transaction. Read more.?

Number to Remember

34

• Even as global venture funding fell for the second consecutive month in 2022, 34 companies joined The Crunchbase Unicorn Board in May, raising a median of $118 million in their latest funding. This cohort of new unicorn companies added $57 billion in value to the board, according to a Crunchbase News analysis. Read more.?

Reader’s Corner?

• The current state of NFT art is best described as “visual dogshit,” the artist and provocateur Brad Troemel argued in a recent Instagram slideshow. Nobody actually cares what these images look like, Troemel said, so long as they can be produced quickly in large quantities, while also avoiding risky artistic gestures that might alienate crypto bros. “The defining production method across all NFTs is that they’re auto-generated as a batch of hundreds or thousands of images to be sold at a time,” Troemel wrote, a strategy that he believes was created to “give a lot of people as little as possible.” Read more.?
• Amazon is tapping into augmented reality in an attempt to appeal to sneakerheads shopping its site. The retailer this morning announced a new feature called Virtual Try-On for Shoes that will allow customers to visualize how a pair of new shoes will look on themselves from multiple angles using their mobile phone’s camera. The company says the feature will help brands to better showcase their products while also informing customers’ purchasing decisions. The launch follows the rollout of other virtual try-on technology for athletic shirts this past April, as part of an update to its “Made for You” custom clothing service. In that case, however, the technology was rendering the shirt on an avatar that represents the customer’s body, based on their actual measurements, and doesn’t use AR. Read more.?