The latest fintech developments reveal an industry moving beyond individual apps and deeper into the infrastructure underpinning payments, banking, fraud prevention and financial data.
MoneyHash and Azm Fintech are simplifying access to Saudi Arabia’s domestic payment ecosystem. Visa is acquiring BioCatch for $2.4 billion to strengthen its behavioural fraud intelligence, while MultiChoice-backed Moment has raised $22 million to expand its African payment infrastructure.
Maximum has emerged from stealth with one of fintech’s largest seed rounds to challenge legacy banking cores. NatWest has appointed Triona O’Keeffe to lead its data and AI strategy, and the launch of a commercial Truth Social data feed is demonstrating the value—and potential inequality—created by millisecond access to information.
Meanwhile, Peru shows what happens when digital wallets become more useful to consumers than conventional branches, without necessarily resolving the deeper problem of financial exclusion.
MoneyHash and Azm Fintech expand access to Saudi payment infrastructure
Payment orchestration provider MoneyHash has partnered with Azm Fintech to give businesses easier access to Saudi Arabia’s expanding digital-payment ecosystem.
The integration connects MoneyHash merchants directly with Edaat, Azm Fintech’s licensed billing and collections platform. According to TechAfrica News, businesses will be able to access SADAD KSA and local billing, collection and reconciliation capabilities through MoneyHash’s infrastructure.
The commercial value of the partnership lies in reducing integration complexity.
Businesses operating across multiple markets frequently need separate connections for payment gateways, domestic payment methods, recurring billing, fraud controls and reconciliation. Each connection introduces development work, maintenance requirements and another potential point of failure.
MoneyHash positions its orchestration layer as a single control point across those providers. Its integration with Edaat means merchants can access Saudi payment capabilities while retaining unified visibility over their wider payment operations.
Edaat supports billing, collections, settlement, distribution and reporting. Azm Fintech is authorised by the Saudi Central Bank to provide payment services, giving merchants access to locally regulated infrastructure rather than requiring them to assemble multiple disconnected solutions.
The partnership reflects three wider trends in Saudi fintech:
- Domestic payment methods are becoming essential for international and regional merchants.
- Regulatory alignment is being incorporated directly into payment infrastructure.
- Orchestration platforms are becoming the interface between businesses and increasingly complex payment ecosystems.
The arrangement also supports Saudi Vision 2030 by making it easier for businesses to digitalise financial operations and scale without multiplying operational complexity.
HIPTHER has previously examined similar infrastructure through PayTabs’ SwitchOn payment-orchestration platform, which likewise addresses the need for unified payments, local deployment and regulatory flexibility across MENA markets.
Visa agrees to acquire BioCatch for $2.4 billion
Visa has signed a definitive agreement to acquire behavioural-intelligence company BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash.
As FinTech Futures reports, the transaction will add BioCatch’s behavioural and device intelligence to Visa’s existing fraud, cybersecurity, risk and payment-security capabilities.
BioCatch analyses thousands of signals during a digital banking session. These can include keystrokes, touch gestures, mouse movements, device handling, network information and signs that a user may be acting under coercion.
The purpose is not simply to verify whether someone possesses the correct credentials. It is to assess whether their behaviour resembles that of the legitimate account holder.
That distinction has become increasingly important as criminals obtain genuine passwords, authentication codes and personal information through phishing, malware and social engineering. A transaction can appear properly authorised while still being fraudulent.
BioCatch’s technology is designed to identify risks including:
- Account takeover.
- Authorised payment scams.
- Money-mule activity.
- Fraudulent account applications.
- Remote-access manipulation.
- Automated or AI-assisted attacks.
The company protects approximately 760 million users across 1.8 billion devices and serves more than 350 financial institutions in 21 countries. Its systems reportedly analyse around 19 billion user sessions each month.
Visa says account takeovers and scams cost the global economy more than $1 trillion annually. The company has invested over $13 billion in technology and infrastructure during the past five years to protect its payment ecosystem and expand its value-added services.
For Visa, the acquisition represents a move further upstream. Instead of detecting fraud only when a payment reaches the network, behavioural intelligence can identify suspicious activity while a person is opening an account, logging in or preparing a transaction.
The deal remains subject to regulatory approval and other customary closing conditions. Visa expects it to close by the end of its second fiscal quarter of 2027.
Behavioural monitoring nevertheless introduces privacy and governance challenges. Financial institutions will need to ensure that data is collected proportionately, secured appropriately and tested for the risk of incorrectly flagging people with disabilities or unusual interaction patterns.
HIPTHER recently covered Visa’s wider expansion into embedded payments in its Fintech Pulse examining Visa, Airwallex, OPay and dLocal. The BioCatch acquisition demonstrates that Visa increasingly views fraud intelligence as a central part of its platform strategy rather than an auxiliary security service.
MultiChoice-backed Moment raises $22 million for African payments
African payments company Moment has raised $22 million in Series A funding to expand its infrastructure across the continent.
The round was led by AlphaCode Venture Partners, with participation from General Catalyst, MultiChoice and Canal+, which acquired MultiChoice in 2025. According to Condia, the investment brings Moment’s total funding to $55 million since its launch in 2023.
Moment was created by MultiChoice, Rapyd and General Catalyst to address the complexity of collecting payments across African markets. It was initially developed to support MultiChoice but has subsequently expanded beyond its founding customer.
The company now processes approximately 600,000 transactions per day and serves as many as 10 million people each month.
Its infrastructure supports recurring payments and locally preferred payment methods, helping businesses collect revenue in markets affected by fragmented systems, inconsistent connectivity and significant differences in consumer payment behaviour.
Moment says its platform has already reduced MultiChoice’s payment-processing costs. This offers an important test of its wider commercial proposition: infrastructure built to solve the needs of one large enterprise can become a reusable platform for other companies facing similar difficulties.
Africa cannot be treated as a single payments market. Companies expanding across the continent must navigate different currencies, regulators, banking systems, mobile-money networks and levels of card adoption.
The opportunity for Moment is to absorb some of that complexity so merchants do not need to rebuild their payment operations for every country.
Its association with MultiChoice and Canal+ may also provide a route into subscription businesses and digital services. Media companies need reliable recurring payments, effective retry systems and local payment methods to convert audiences into paying customers.
The funding round demonstrates continued investor appetite for companies building financial infrastructure around proven transaction volumes. Rather than relying entirely on future adoption, Moment can point to an existing enterprise use case and hundreds of thousands of daily payments.
Maximum raises $30 million to replace legacy banking cores
Maximum has emerged from stealth with a $30 million seed round to develop what it describes as an AI-native operating system for banks.
The financing was led by CRV, with participation from Pear VC, Restive, Plug and Play Ventures and Anthemis. FinTech Global reports that the company plans to replace fragmented core systems that continue to restrict product development across the banking sector.
Maximum was founded by Randy Fernando, who previously founded Vault and Power. Vault was acquired by Acorns in 2017, while Power was sold to Marqeta in 2023.
The company estimates that more than 70% of the nearly 5,000 banks operating in the US still rely on core technology developed during the previous century.
Legacy cores were not built for mobile banking, real-time payments, programmable money or autonomous AI agents. Banks have typically compensated by adding integration layers and specialist applications around the original system.
This approach extends the life of existing infrastructure but creates a growing web of dependencies. Customer information can become fragmented across systems, product launches require numerous integrations, and operational teams spend considerable time reconciling data between platforms.
Maximum proposes a real-time platform with AI integrated into its foundations. Banks will be able to develop specialised agents intended to automate workflows, monitor customer activity and support the creation of new products.
The proposition is ambitious because replacing a banking core is one of the most difficult technology projects a financial institution can undertake. Migration failures can affect balances, payments, regulatory reporting and customer access.
Maximum will therefore need to demonstrate more than technical capability. Its success will depend on implementation discipline, security, auditability, data migration and the ability to operate alongside legacy infrastructure during a gradual transition.
AI-native architecture also creates new risks. Banks must be able to explain agent decisions, restrict permissions and prevent autonomous systems from making unauthorised changes to accounts or operational processes.
The $30 million round shows investors believe incremental improvements may no longer be sufficient. The greater test will be whether Maximum can persuade regulated banks that replacing a core is less dangerous than continuing to depend on one that is decades old.
NatWest appoints Triona O’Keeffe to lead data and analytics
NatWest Group has appointed Triona O’Keeffe as its new Chief Data and Analytics Officer, effective January 2027.
O’Keeffe joins from the London Stock Exchange Group, where she has spent five years as Chief Information Officer for Data and Analytics. She previously served as CIO for Shared Application Services at Deutsche Bank.
According to FinTech Magazine, her mandate will include improving access to data and AI for the bank’s engineering teams while supporting NatWest’s broader technology transformation.
The appointment reflects how the CDAO role is changing. Data leaders are no longer responsible only for reporting, governance and business intelligence. They are increasingly expected to provide the foundations for generative and agentic AI across customer service, fraud prevention and internal operations.
One prominent area will be Cora, NatWest’s digital assistant. Launched in 2017 as a text-based chatbot, Cora now handles more than 12.9 million retail conversations annually and is moving towards agentic capabilities.
The potential next step is a system that does more than answer questions. An agentic assistant could help customers manage finances, resolve service requests and receive more personalised support.
That expansion increases the importance of reliable data, transparent decision-making and carefully defined permissions. A conversational system that can take action on behalf of customers requires stronger controls than one that merely retrieves information.
NatWest introduced an AI and Data Ethics accreditation for employees in June 2026. The programme combines online learning with practical guidance for recognising and managing ethical risks.
O’Keeffe’s challenge will be to turn data accessibility, engineering capacity and responsible-AI principles into one operating model. Financial institutions cannot scale AI effectively if their information remains fragmented or employees do not understand how automated decisions should be governed.
Truth API highlights the premium placed on millisecond information
Trump Media & Technology Group’s Truth API is drawing attention to the market value of high-speed information feeds.
The service reportedly offers trading firms millisecond-level access to posts published on Truth Social, with fees potentially reaching $100,000 per month. A Simply Wall St analysis examines what the launch could mean for companies supplying real-time data, analytical infrastructure and high-performance computing.
For trading firms, speed can determine whether a public statement becomes an opportunity or information that has already been reflected in market prices.
Social-media posts from politicians, regulators and corporate leaders can move currencies, equities and commodities. An API capable of delivering those statements to algorithms faster than conventional interfaces may therefore have considerable commercial value.
The development creates opportunities for businesses specialising in:
- Real-time market-data delivery.
- High-performance and edge computing.
- Alternative-data analysis.
- Algorithmic trading infrastructure.
- Low-latency APIs.
- AI systems that classify market-moving information.
It also raises questions about equal access. Although the underlying post may be public, an expensive high-speed feed creates different tiers of availability. Well-funded trading firms can act on information before ordinary investors have opened an application or refreshed a webpage.
Regulators may eventually need to consider how exclusive or premium access to politically significant communications fits within existing market-data and fair-disclosure frameworks.
The broader fintech lesson is that the economic value of information increasingly depends on delivery speed, structure and machine readability. A public statement becomes a financial product when it is packaged for immediate algorithmic consumption.
Peru’s digital wallets have outgrown traditional banking
Peru’s fintech transformation has been driven primarily by two digital wallets: Yape and Plin.
Yape was developed by Banco de Crédito del Perú, while Plin is supported by several competing banks. Both allow customers to send money using telephone numbers, make QR-code payments and complete everyday transactions without visiting a branch.
An analysis from The Fintech Times explains how these services have expanded beyond affluent consumers in Lima and become part of ordinary commerce across the country.
The decisive development was interoperability.
Initially, Yape and Plin operated largely as separate ecosystems. Users could transact efficiently within each network but faced friction when sending money between them. Peru’s central bank introduced an interoperability strategy requiring wallets and financial institutions to communicate.
By March 2025, interoperable wallet transfers had reached approximately 125 million transactions during the month. The share of mobile banking and wallets within payment methods rose from around 2% in 2014 to 34% by the end of 2024, while Peru recorded approximately 665 digital payments per adult in 2025.
Those figures demonstrate the power of simple, low-cost products combined with interoperable infrastructure.
They do not, however, mean financial exclusion has been solved.
A person may use a wallet every day while still lacking affordable credit, insurance or formal savings. A small merchant can accept QR payments without gaining access to working capital or entering the formal economy. Rural users may possess mobile phones while remaining distant from conventional financial services.
The next phase must convert payment activity into broader financial opportunity without encouraging harmful lending or exploiting customer data.
Open finance could help consumers use their transaction histories to access competing products and demonstrate creditworthiness. Peru has not yet implemented a comprehensive open-finance regime comparable with Brazil’s, although its interoperability reforms provide an important foundation.
Peru’s experience reinforces a point HIPTHER has previously made when examining fintech funding, emerging-market payments and meaningful financial inclusion: transaction numbers measure access to a payment tool, but not necessarily access to a complete and useful financial system.
The bigger picture: fintech is becoming the operating layer of finance
The seven developments show fintech moving from the edge of financial services into its underlying architecture.
MoneyHash and Azm Fintech are making domestic payment capabilities accessible through orchestration. Moment is building infrastructure around Africa’s fragmented payment markets, while Peru demonstrates how interoperability can turn competing wallets into national infrastructure.
Visa’s BioCatch acquisition pushes fraud detection earlier in the customer journey. Maximum wants to rebuild the banking core around AI, and NatWest is reorganising leadership around the data required to make that AI useful.
Truth API reveals a different dimension of the same transformation: information itself is becoming programmable infrastructure whose value depends on how quickly machines can receive and interpret it.
The companies most likely to shape fintech’s next phase will not simply offer another customer-facing application. They will determine how payments connect, how banks operate, how fraud is detected and how financial information moves.
