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Mastercard Wants to Acquire a Swedish Firm that Simplifies the Management and Cancellation of Subscription Agreements

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On Tuesday, Mastercard said that it had reached a deal to buy Minna Technologies, a software company that helps customers better manage their subscriptions.

The action was taken in response to Mastercard’s and Visa’s aggressive efforts to diversify their businesses beyond credit and debit cards and into technology services including pay-by-bank payments, cybersecurity, and fraud prevention.

Mastercard refuses to share the transaction’s financial information, which is presently being examined by regulators.

The payments giant claimed that the agreement will enable it to provide customers with a method to access all of their subscriptions in a single view, whether inside your banking app or a central “hub,” in conjunction with other projects it is committed to surrounding subscriptions.

Based in Gothenburg, Sweden, Minna Technologies creates technology that enables users to manage subscriptions within banking apps and websites, irrespective of the payment method they originally used.

According to the company, it collaborates with some of the biggest financial institutions in existence today. It already counts rival Visa and Mastercard as important partners.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Mastercard stated, “These teams and technologies will add to the broader set of tools that help manage the merchant-consumer relationship and minimize any disruption in their experience.”

Modern consumers frequently have a tonne of subscriptions from various providers, including Netflix, Amazon, and Disney Plus, to keep track of. Having numerous subscriptions can make it challenging to cancel them because users may forget which ones they have paid for when.

According to Mastercard, this may have a detrimental effect on retailers since customers who find it difficult to cancel their subscriptions often contact their banks to ask that payments be stopped.

Data from Juniper Research indicates that there are currently 6.8 billion subscriptions worldwide; by 2028, that figure is predicted to increase to 9.3 billion.

Establishment businesses in the financial services industry, like Mastercard, have been expanding their product line quickly to stay competitive with up-and-coming fintech companies that provide consumers with easier-to-use, digitally native methods of managing their money.

A U.S. fintech company called Finicity was purchased by Mastercard in 2020. It allows other banks or other third parties to access a customer’s banking data and process payments on their behalf.

In other words, as a customer, you would simply need to use your fingerprint to confirm your identity when you pay, instead of having to manually enter your card details as it was previously stated that the company would tokenize all cards issued on its network in Europe by 2030.

Meanwhile, Visa is making an effort to compete with fintech rivals. The business introduced Visa A2A, a new service that makes it simpler for customers to set up and manage direct debits—payments that are deducted from your bank account instead of using a credit or debit card—last month.On Tuesday, Mastercard said that it had reached a deal to buy Minna Technologies, a software company that helps customers better manage their subscriptions.

The action was taken in response to Mastercard’s and Visa’s aggressive efforts to diversify their businesses beyond credit and debit cards and into technology services including pay-by-bank payments, cybersecurity, and fraud prevention.

Mastercard refuses to share the transaction’s financial information, which is presently being examined by regulators.

The payments giant claimed that the agreement will enable it to provide customers with a method to access all of their subscriptions in a single view, whether inside your banking app or a central “hub,” in conjunction with other projects it is committed to surrounding subscriptions.

Based in Gothenburg, Sweden, Minna Technologies creates technology that enables users to manage subscriptions within banking apps and websites, irrespective of the payment method they originally used.

According to the company, it collaborates with some of the biggest financial institutions in existence today. It already counts rival Visa and Mastercard as important partners.

In a blog post on Tuesday, Mastercard stated, “These teams and technologies will add to the broader set of tools that help manage the merchant-consumer relationship and minimize any disruption in their experience.”

Modern consumers frequently have a tonne of subscriptions from various providers, including Netflix, Amazon, and Disney Plus, to keep track of. Having numerous subscriptions can make it challenging to cancel them because users may forget which ones they have paid for when.

Mastercard pointed out that this could be detrimental to retailers because customers who find it difficult to cancel their subscriptions wind up contacting their banks to ask that payments be stopped.

Data from Juniper Research indicates that there are currently 6.8 billion subscriptions worldwide; by 2028, that figure is predicted to increase to 9.3 billion.

Establishment businesses in the financial services industry, like Mastercard, have been expanding their product line quickly to stay competitive with up-and-coming fintech companies that provide consumers with easier-to-use, digitally native methods of managing their money.

A U.S. fintech company called Finicity was purchased by Mastercard in 2020. It allows other banks or other third parties to access a customer’s banking data and process payments on their behalf.

In other words, as a customer, you would simply need to use your fingerprint to confirm your identity when you pay, instead of having to manually enter your card details as it was previously stated that the company would tokenize all cards issued on its network in Europe by 2030.

Meanwhile, Visa is making an effort to compete with fintech rivals. The business introduced Visa A2A, a new service that makes it simpler for customers to set up and manage direct debits—payments that are deducted from your bank account instead of using a credit or debit card—last month.

Business

Zopper, an Insurtech Company, Raises $25 Million in a Round Sponsored by Elevation Capital and Dharana Capital

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Zopper, an insurtech firm, announced in a note today that it has raised $25 million in a new round of funding led by Elevation Capital and Dharana Capital.

Dharana Capital has supported companies like NoBroker and Urban Company, while Elevation Capital is an active investor in the Indian fintech ecosystem.

The financing also included Blume Ventures, an existing investor. Other investors in Zopper include Creaegis, Bessemer Venture Partners, and ICICI Venture. To date, the business has raised a total of $96 million in equity investment.

The business from Noida will utilize the money to improve its insurance distribution network and expand its digital technology infrastructure. Additionally, the funds will improve Zopper’s device and appliance protection businesses’ post-sales and maintenance capabilities and speed up the expansion of the company’s current bancassurance products. The method used to sell insurance products through banking channels is known as the bancassurance model.

Banks and other businesses can use Zopper’s technology stack to package and market insurance products to their clients.

The company claimed in a statement that it presently has over 2,500 ecosystem actors and 40 insurance providers as partners.

At the moment, Zopper offers customized insurance solutions for consumers in India by integrating them into the ecosystem’s current digital channels.

“We are here to transform and automate the insurance distribution model in India, effectively, strategically and keeping customers in mind. We are mission-focused as a team. If we get this right, it will be transformational for the ecosystem and the country,” stated Mayank Gupta, Zopper’s chief operating officer.

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Amazon Invests an additional $4 Billion in the AI Firm Anthropic

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As the e-commerce behemoth competes with Big Tech rivals to profit from generative artificial intelligence technology, Amazon.com (AMZN.O.) opened a new tab and invested an additional $4 billion in OpenAI opponent Anthropic.

Amazon’s stake in the company famed for its GenAI chatbot Claude has doubled, but it is still a minority investor, the business announced on Friday. Like Amazon’s prior $4 billion investment, it is made in installments, starting at $1.3 billion and taking the form of convertible notes.

According to sources who asked not to be named in order to discuss private topics, Anthropic is also in discussions with other investors in order to raise more money with Amazon’s support.

Amazon, which has steadily become Anthropic’s main cloud partner, is in intense competition with Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL.O) and Microsoft (MSFT.O) to provide AI-powered tools for its cloud clients. As a major distributor of its most recent models, AWS is generating a substantial amount of revenue for Anthropic.

“The investment in Anthropic is essential for Amazon to stay in a leadership position in AI,” Gil Luria, an analyst at D.A. Davidson, stated.

The increased investment by the e-commerce giant in Anthropic highlights the billions of dollars that have been invested in AI startups in the past year as investors seek to profit from the technology’s surge in popularity following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022.

Last month, Microsoft-backed OpenAI collected $6.6 billion from investors, potentially valuing the company at $157 billion and solidifying its place among the world’s most valuable private enterprises.

Anthropic intends to use Amazon’s Trainium and Inferentia chips to train and implement its core models. Securing expensive AI chips is a big concern for startups since the rigorous process of training AI models demands powerful processors.

“It (partnership) also allows Amazon to promote its AI services such as leveraging its AI chips for training and inferencing, which Anthropic is using,” Luria stated.

Amazon is one of the many so-called hyperscaler clients of Nvidia (NVDA.O), which opens a new tab and presently controls the market for AI chips.

However, through its Annapurna Labs branch, which Anthropic stated it was “working closely with” to help create CPUs, Amazon has been striving to develop its own chips. Additionally, Amazon has been working on developing its own AI model, code-named “Olympus,” which it has not yet made public.

Anthropic, which was co-founded by brothers Dario and Daniela Amodei, former executives at OpenAI, said last year that it had obtained a $500 million investment from Alphabet, which pledged to contribute an additional $1.5 billion over time.

The startup’s operations also make advantage of Alphabet’s Google Cloud capabilities.

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Wiz will pay $450 million to acquire Cloud Remediation Startup Dazz

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Wiz revealed on Thursday that it will buy channel-focused company Dazz in an agreement to add cloud remediation capabilities to the vendor’s cloud and AI security platform.

With features like application security posture management and continuous threat and exposure management, Dazz provides a remediation-focused cloud security platform.

Jared Phipps, a seasoned cybersecurity industry executive who most recently worked for SentinelOne, was hired by Dazz in February as its CRO as the business sought to expand its collaboration with channel partners. Presidio, situated in New York, has been one of the key partners.

Dazz said in July that it has raised a $50 million round of funding, increasing its total funding since its 2021 launch to $110 million.

Dazz provides a “industry-leading remediation engine,” according to a post published on Thursday by Wiz Co-Founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport, which will allow Wiz to “empower security teams to correlate data from multiple sources and manage application risks in one unified platform.”

This is Wiz’s third purchase overall and its second acquisition of 2024 after the company’s April acquisition of cloud detection and response provider Gem Security.

Wiz, a four-year-old startup, reported in May that it had raised $1 billion in new capital at a $12 billion valuation, citing its continued strong development in the cloud and AI security areas. Annual recurring revenue (ARR) for the business reportedly increased from $350 million earlier this year to above $500 million.

After making a number of management additions aimed at facilitating quicker partner-driven growth, Rappaport stated in February that Wiz would prioritize its channel operations moving ahead.

I“In cybersecurity partners are super, super important in the success of a company. So we’ve always [seen that] this has huge potential for us to tap into. I think there is so much more we can do,” he stated at the time.

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