News
The latest news from Solidi
News, Updates
Solidi partners with Tink as first settlement account customer for Open Banking
London, 13 July 2022: Europe’s leading open banking platform, Tink, has announced a significant upgrade to its payment stack with the launch of settlement accounts, a new feature that aggregates PIS settlement. Starting in the UK with a wider European roll-out to follow in the coming months, this launch enables real-time payment confirmation, instant refunds and payouts, integrated reporting, and more.
This means that in addition to being able to benefit from Tink’s Payment Initiation Service (PIS) technology – which already delivers secure, cost-effective and frictionless instant bank payments – merchants can now also benefit from a full-stack payments offering that enables fully automated refunds, payouts, and reconciliation.
For merchants, settlement times can be slow, taking up to four days in some cases. Fraud rates are an ongoing concern, high fees and operational costs are associated with many payment methods, alongside friction at the checkout. Tink’s new payments stack addresses these pain points directly. Merchants can now accept low-cost bank payments with integrated, real-time settlement and reporting – meaning you can send and receive money online faster while simplifying payment operations. Tink’s platform can accelerate merchants’ time-to-market since there’s no need for merchants to build and operate their own settlement or reconciliation systems, and manual processes for issuing refunds and payouts can be fully automated.
The first customer to use Tink’s settlement accounts feature in the UK is instant purchase crypto exchange, Solidi. Solidi already lets users start investing in crypto in less than two minutes, and by partnering with Tink, Solidi can take advantage of the core benefits of open banking payments – low transaction fees and reduced operational overheads – while continuing to offer instant account top-ups. Solidi can also cut out the manual work of reconciliation and troubleshooting user errors, since payment details are pre-populated.
Tom Pope, Head of Payments and Platforms at Tink said: “The arrival of settlement accounts in the UK means that our partners can now enjoy the full time- and cost-saving benefits of real-time bank payments more easily. We already enabled instant, seamless pay-ins that reduce friction for the end-user, and now we’re removing friction for merchants with the ability to receive a real-time payment confirmation and automate manual processes like issuing refunds and payouts or reconciling payments. This has the potential to be a game changer for merchants by unlocking the full value of open banking payments for key use cases like ecommerce and crypto. We are proud to partner with Solidi as our first settlement account customer in the UK.”
Jamie McNaught, CEO and co-founder of Solidi added: “Providing Solidi customers with a completely seamless experience when investing in crypto is key. Tink's open banking payments technology is the obvious choice for our customers – it takes our already instant onboarding experience and adds easy, frictionless payments – enabling anyone to invest in their first crypto in less than two minutes. For Solidi, Tink’s new settlement features reduce integration and operational costs, as well as the time to market. Unlike other open banking platforms, Tink enables us to perform payment initiation and settlement using a single API – rather than multiple API's from different providers."
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About Tink:
Tink is Europe’s leading open banking platform that enables banks, fintechs and startups to develop data-driven financial services. Through one API, Tink allows customers to access aggregated financial data, initiate payments, enrich transactions, verify account ownership and build personal finance management tools. Tink connects to more than 3,400 banks that reach over 250 million bank customers across Europe. Founded in 2012 in Stockholm, Tink became a wholly owned subsidiary of Visa in 2022. Tink’s 500 employees serve more than 300 banks and fintechs in 18 European markets, out of offices in 13 countries. We power the new world of finance. For more information, visit tink.com.
About Solidi:
Founded in 2015, Solidi is one of the longest-established cryptocurrency exchange in the UK and is among the first to gain full Cryptoasset registration with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). It is headquartered in London with its development centre based in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Our clients range from a variety of retail and SMEs to multinational crypto businesses, asset recovery firms and government departments. For more information, visit solidi.co .
News, Updates
Amina Ojeifo joins the Solidi team as Head of Marketing
We're delighted to welcome Amina Ojeifo as our Head of Marketing starting February 2022. She has taken on strategic leadership role to further accelerate growth in the distribution efforts of our marketing content in the UK and Europe. Amina's role will include the planning of prospect outreach, engagement campaigns and thorough execution to achieve Solidi's expansion objectives on market positioning, brand building, and lead generation.
Amina brings to the team years of experience in marketing communication and business development in the financial services industry. In her previous roles in the wealth management, family office and investments industry, she was responsible for executing the marketing strategy, events management, creating marketing content, PR collaborations and relationship building with external organisations to identify opportunities for speaking and sponsorships of industry events.
Aside from her marketing career, Amina ran a non-profit charity organisation that supports the wellbeing of the less privileged and was also the chair for the UK and European Women's ERG (Employee Resource Group) at her previous firm, which was set up to cultivate an inclusive, equitable and supportive culture that ensure women thrive in the firm.
"I am delighted to welcome Amina to Solidi, finally filling one of our longest standing vacancies with someone truly fit for the role. Amina brings to the orgainisation a wealth of relevant experience in the financial sector that will enable Solidi to clearly communicate the benefits of our crypto investment products to the rapidly growing alternative finance space."
Jamie McNaught, CEO & Founder of Solidi comments
Amina will be working closely with our compliance and engineering team as we continue to expand Soldi's product offerings while maintaining our strict regulatory compliance, in line with our full CryptoAssets registration with the FCA.
News, Partnerships
Solidi and Asset Reality to cooperate in asset seizure and recovery
Solidi, a leading UK based crypto asset exchange and custody provider, is pleased to announce a new strategic partnership with Asset Reality, the world’s first end-to-end solution for recovering, managing and realising seized crypto assets. The partnership will combine the talents of both firms to offer an innovative solution in storing seized digital assets to support asset recovery in civil and criminal cases.
By working together Solidi and Asset Reality aim to build a cost effective and straightforward solution to the challenge faced by law enforcement. The combined effort paves a way for law enforcement to secure digital assets from criminals and where possible, return those assets to the victims of crime at the conclusion of the case. This can be very challenging given the nature of crypto currency, differing legal and regulatory regimes and the common lack of knowledge or expertise in many investigation teams.
Solidi is an FCA registered custodian of digital assets and a crypto exchange. Our platform combines multiple layers of security with a tried and tested cold storage vault to ensure stored digital assets are protected. Our cold storage solution recently celebrated its 7th year of flawless operation during which it has successfully secured hundreds of millions of crypto assets. At Solidi we work closely with regulators to implement best practice in safeguarding and trading digital assets. We see Asset Reality as a key partner in the asset recovery space. We are pleased to be working with them in such an important area that will be of significant benefit to the future of digital assets and to victims of complex financial crime.
Solidi CEO Jamie McNaught commented:
“Through exchanges such as Solidi, the Crypto asset space has become increasingly easy to enter during the last 5 years. However, by lowering the barrier to entry we have witnessed an explosion in crypto being used in scams and money laundering. Blockchain analysis and an increasingly technically astute police force has resulted in a surge in asset recoveries, necessitating a secure storage solution to protect seized assets during the legal process.“
“Our partnership with Asset Reality provides a single ‘one-stop-shop’ for the management, storage and eventual liquidation of seized assets, lowering costs & complexity to achieve a better result for the victims of crime.”
Paul Munson (Solidi, Head of Compliance & MLRO) added:
"We are excited to be partnering with Asset Reality to support the seizure and forfeiture of criminal virtual assets for the greater good of society. Solidi is a company built with a focus on being customer driven and delivering a safe and secure platform to invest in cryptocurrency."
Aidan Larkin (Chief Executive Officer at Asset Reality) commented:
“Asset Reality are delighted to be expanding our network of FCA registered digital custodians by working with Solidi. One of the biggest challenges in crypto asset recovery is finding compliant and trusted solutions for the extensive breadth of different types of digital assets that public and private sector organisations are now seizing and need insured custody solutions. Our role is to identify these strategic partners to enable an end to end solution in crypto asset recovery and we’re proud to adding Solidi to our stable of insured custodians for our clients around the world.” Read More
News, NewHires
Paul Munson named New Head of Compliance at Solidi
We are delighted to announce that Solidi has appointed Paul Munson as our new Head of Compliance and Money Laundering Reporting Officer.
Paul brings to Solidi a wealth of experience in investigation, intelligence, compliance audit and regulatory affairs, gained during his 20 year career in organisations including Circle Financial, E-Money Association, Financial Conduct Authority, Serious Fraud Office and HM Revenue & Customs.
"Paul brings to the organisation a rare mix of highly detailed knowledge of the appropriate regulations while at the same time a practical approach to integrating compliance right into the heart of the business and product development process. I know I speak for the whole team in saying that we are delighted to have Paul on board and look forward to continuing to build the best, regulatory complaint, crypto products."
Jamie McNaught, CEO & Founder of Solidi
Paul will be working with our engineering teams to continue to expand Soldi's product offerings while maintaining our strict regulatory compliance, inline with our full CryptoAssets registration with the FCA.
Paul joined the Solidi team in September 2021. Read More
News, Regulation
Solidi gains full FCA CryptoAssets registration
Today, we are delighted to announce that Solidi is now fully registered as a CryptoAssets business with the UK Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). Solidi is the only UK exchange with instant onboarding that has been registered by the FCA.
Only 3 retail exchanges have become fully registered, along with 6 other firms out of a total of 100 firms who applied. Read More