UMB Financial Teams Up With Fraedom And Yandex.Checkout Launches Charity Option

Welcome to The Axis, your late look at payments news from around the world. Coverage includes UMB Financial Corporation’s tie-up with U.K.-based Fraedom. In addition, Russia’s Yandex.Checkout is allowing customers to make donations by rounding up their purchases and TransferGo is rolling out money transfers powered by the blockchain between Europe and India.

Fraedom, based in the U.K., is teaming up with UMB Financial Corporation to allow UMB to create a suite of card services such as expense and card management, as well as a mobile app. At the beginning of the partnership, the two firms will move the existing UMB’s commercial card customers from two legacy systems onto Fraedom’s platform. In all, UMB’s executive vice president and director of product management, Uma Wilson, said, “Our new suite of commercial card services will enable them to achieve enhanced operational efficiencies and help ease customers’ day-to-day needs.”

TransferGo, which is also based in the U.K., has started to allow money transfers enabled by the blockchain between Europe and India, BlockTribune reported. The company said the transfers would be made using technology from Ripple. Daumantas Dvilinskas, founder and CEO of TransferGo, was quoted as saying that the technology allows the company to “establish real-time communication between [TransferGo] and [its] banking partners in India, allowing TransferGo customers to send money to family and friends or make international payments immediately.”

In other news, Russia’s Yandex.Checkout is rolling out a way for customers to round up purchases and donate the difference to charity, according to reports. The company said that the first Yandex.Checkout’s partner to offer the service is Yves Rocher. The news comes as an analysts from Yandex.Checkout found that the number of Russians making donations to charities online — and through crowdfunding websites  — jumped 40 percent in the first half of the year compared to 2017.