EMEA Daily: Sweden, Norway and Israel Central Banks Test Cross-Border CBDC Payments

Today in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), central banks in Sweden, Norway and Israel have teamed up to test central bank digital currency (CBDC) interoperability, and Satispay becomes the latest Italian unicorn.

Sweden, Norway and Israel Central Banks Test Cross-Border CBDC Payments

The central banks of Sweden and Israel announced today that they will start exploring how central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) can be used for international retail and remittance payments in collaboration with the central bank of Norway and the Bank for International Settlements.

The initiative, dubbed Project Icebreaker, will see the involved parties develop a “hub” to which participating central banks will connect their domestic proof-of-concept CBDC systems. The press releases stated that the project’s objective is to test specific key functions and the technological feasibility of interlinking different national CBDC systems.

The project will run through the end of the year, with a final report expected in the first quarter of 2023.

Separately, the three central banks involved in Project Icebreaker have each been exploring the possibility of issuing digital equivalents of their existing fiat currencies. However, because these CBDCs have so far been developed in relative isolation, how the digital shekel (Israel), the e-krona (Sweden), and the e-kroner (Norway) would interoperate has yet to be properly investigated.

ECB Advisor Defends Amazon’s Role in Digital Euro Project

Jürgen Schaaf, an advisor to the European Central Bank (ECB) defended the decision to make Amazon one of the five companies to test a digital euro at a panel discussion on CBDCs and stablecoins today.

“The prototyping experiments for the front end are driven by technological considerations,” he said at the event hosted by the Association for Financial Markets in Europe. “The companies that have been chosen for that five were the most appropriate in terms of the needs that we have for technological tests and experiments,” he added.

Schaaf said that the digital euro could help ensure Europe’s autonomy in the payments market, and pointed to the risks if sanctions imposed from abroad hamstrung the European Union economy by limiting transactions. However, he said he didn’t want to see a “political” exclusion of U.S. firms.

“Our wish to strengthen our monetary autonomy with a digital euro does not mean that Europe would shut down all its gates for retailers from abroad,” he emphasized.

Grover Agrees to $260M Debt Financing Facility With M&G

Berlin-based Grover, which operates a consumer technology subscription platform, has agreed to a new 270-million-euro (about $260 million) debt financing facility with international asset manager M&G.

Grover runs a subscription model that allows people to rent consumer electronics, including computers, smartphones, games consoles and eScooters.

The company will use the capital to expand its product inventory to serve demand from customers in existing markets, such as Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Austria, as well as to expand its service into new European markets, according to a statement released today.

PingPong, Uncapped Partner on Capital Advance for European Merchants

Aiming to help eCommerce merchants that have established their businesses and are now looking to expand, PingPong Payments and Uncapped have partnered to enable PingPong customers in Europe to get a capital advance from Uncapped.

The new partnership agreement for lending services brings together the customers of PingPong’s end-to-end payment solutions for cross-border businesses with Uncapped’s revenue-based finance that can help fund their online businesses.

In a press release announcing the partnership, the firms said that PingPong customers with proof of at least six months of trading and at least 10,000 euros (about $9,700) in monthly revenues will be eligible for an advance of between 10,000 euros (about $9,700) and 10 million euros (about $9.7 million) from lending partner Uncapped.

Partner Hub, Answer Pay Team on eInvoicing, Request-to-Pay Services

Payments-as-a-service platform Answer Pay and online invoicing service and technology provider Partner Hub have joined forces to make it easier for banks to offer their customers request-to-pay and eInvoicing services.

The partnership pairs Answer Pay’s request-to-pay service, available in the United Kingdom and the Single European Payments Area (SEPA), with Partner Hub’s ability to reformat invoice data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for invoice presentation and automatically generate payment requests, Answer Pay said in a blog post today.

Payments Startup Is Italy’s Newest Unicorn Following €320M Series D

Payments company Satispay raised 320 million euros ($306 million) in a Series D funding round that boosted its valuation to 1 billion euros, making it the latest FinTech unicorn among Italy’s few. The round was led by Addition, with participation from previous backers Greyhound Capital, Lightrock, Block, Tencent and Gestione Fondi.

The news was announced in a LinkedIn post from the company’s CEO and Co-founder, Alberto Dalmasso.

Headquartered in Cuneo, Italy, and co-founded by Dalmasso, CTO Dario Brignone and CFO Samuele Pinta, the Satispay payments app is used as a digital wallet by an estimated 3 million people in Italy and by 200,000 merchants.

With the latest funding, Satispay has raised more than 450 million euros of capital since launching nine years ago.

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