Pollen Street buys Finastra’s Universal Banking core unit
Pollen Street Capital is buying Finastra's Universal Banking core unit and its Essence platform — a PE bet that modernising 150+ incumbent banks beats rip-and-replace.
Desk
Payments, KYC, trading technology and the vendors that sell it to brokers.
254 stories since 2021 · page 10 of 13
June 2026
Pollen Street Capital is buying Finastra's Universal Banking core unit and its Essence platform — a PE bet that modernising 150+ incumbent banks beats rip-and-replace.
Mercury raised a $200m Series D at a $5.2bn valuation and won conditional OCC approval for its own US bank charter, breaking the sponsor-bank model.
Chime booked its first GAAP profit ($53m) in Q1 2026 while Revolut and Monzo defer their IPOs — proof the fintech listing window now opens for earnings first.
Saris raises a $28.8m Series A led by 8VC to scale agentic AI workflow automation for banks and credit unions across lending, compliance and operations.
Temenos has agreed to buy Swiss wealth-orchestration platform additiv in a 50/50 cash-and-equity deal, pushing embedded finance from payments into wealth.
Klarna has rolled out a Visa Flexible Credential debit card in the US, signalling its push to be valued as a neobank rather than a BNPL lender.
Figure is acquiring lender Kiavi for $717m, with Sixth Street warehousing the loans — a balance-sheet-light template for scaling tokenised lending.
KOHO becomes Canada's newest unicorn with a C$130m Series E backed by Mubadala and Tobi Lutke — capital aimed squarely at a Schedule 1 bank licence.
Swift's cross-border payments scheme hits its June go-live with 25+ banks across 11 corridors — landing as stablecoins are reframed as settlement rails.
Wise FY26 cross-border volume rose 25% to £181.7bn and customers hit 18.9m, even as its take rate fell to 51bps — the volume flywheel that defies neobank fee logic.
Forage raised a $40m Series B led by Mouro Capital to scale its SNAP/EBT payments rail — the government-benefits infrastructure mainstream fintech ignores.
Ramp's $750m Series F at a $44bn valuation re-rates the corporate-spend leader on an AI-spend thesis even as the broader fintech index stays weak.
Flutterwave is integrating Stripe-backed Tempo as a stablecoin settlement layer for African cross-border payments — a tell about where stablecoins actually work.
Perk, formerly TravelPerk, has secured a $300m private credit facility — not equity — to fund the US launch of its AI-native spend management platform.
Adyen wins the GOV.UK Pay contract, displacing Stripe across 1,000 public sector services and adding pay-by-bank to government payments.
Bertelsmann's Riverty has won a Luxembourg banking licence from the CSSF and ECB, turning its BNPL and credit unit into a deposit-funded EU bank from July 2026.
Slash raised $100m at a $1.4bn valuation to stay independent just as Capital One closed its $5.15bn Brex buy — the corporate-spend category is splitting in two.
Airwallex has launched a billing product, taking on Stripe's decade-old turf — the clearest sign yet of 2026's payments-platform land-grab.
May 2026
Outmarket AI's $17m Series A lands as AI insurtechs capture two-thirds of sector funding, signalling capital is flowing to broker automation, not risk.
Revolut is weighing an H2-2026 secondary share sale above $100bn while delaying its IPO to 2028 — the clearest case of fintech's stay-private valuation staircase.