News: Ant's $1.2bn Raise, Teya Doubles Down on SMEs and Revolut Lands licence in Australia

**Laura Watkins** (0:05)
This is Fintech Insider News. This week, Ant International raises $1.2 billion in a Series A round, Teya expands its business account with bill payments and cashback cards, and Revolut secures an Australian banking license. We'll be tackling all of this and more on today's news show, so don't go anywhere.

**Simone Joyce** (0:28)
Introducing Meta Glasses.

**Laura Watkins** (0:31)
You have questions, they've got answers.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:34)
Hey Meta, what's the capital of Peru?

**Laura Watkins** (0:36)
Lima. How do you say, where's the restroom in Spanish?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:41)
Dónde está el baño?

**Simone Joyce** (0:42)
Hey Meta, is a hot dog a sandwich?

**Laura Watkins** (0:46)
Technically, no.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:47)
Spiritually, yes.

**Laura Watkins** (0:48)
Hey Meta, what should I do with my life?

**Simone Joyce** (0:51)
That's one of life's biggest questions. What do you think?

**SPEAKER_3** (0:55)
Ask anything with the new Meta glasses.

**Laura Watkins** (1:08)
Hello and welcome to episode 1,084 of Fintech Insider News, brought to you by 11FS, the sixth time consultancy of the year that works with financial providers big and small to build the next generation of financial services. I'm Laura Watkins, Director of Media and Marketing at 11FS and to help me unpack the biggest and most interesting stories from Fintech and financial services from the past week. I'm joined by a brilliant panel of guests. First up, we have a welcome to the podcast for Alessandra Giner, Chief Product Officer at Teya.
Hello Alessandra, welcome to the show. Could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and Teya please?

**Alessandra Giner** (1:45)
Yes, of course. So thank you so much for having me Laura, excited to be here today.
So I have been working in the Fintech space for more than 10 years, always in the small business, payments, banking side of things. Originally in Brazil, where I started in a business that were like 20 people, that business grew to an IPO, 16,000 people and quite a success story there. And then I decided to move to Europe and join Teya, where we're also focused on small businesses and everything that comes to money. So Teya is basically an European fintech, focused on helping on payments, banking, credit and software products for all local businesses.

**Laura Watkins** (2:31)
Brilliant. Thank you. And obviously, as I tease at the top of the show, you have some news that you will be telling us about very shortly. Thank you so much for joining us.
We also have a welcome back to the show for Simone Joyce, Chief Executive Officer at Paypa Plane. Welcome back, Simone. How have you been? And can you tell us a little bit more about what you're up to at Paypa Plane, please? Yes.

**Simone Joyce** (2:51)
Thank you, Laura. It's lovely to be back with you all.
Yes, happy to. For those who don't know about Paypa Plane, we work with payment agreements as a service for banks and enterprises, but increasingly as payment agreement frameworks for payment industries. That's something that we're increasingly doing with both the Australian and the UK industries at the moment. A payment agreement is essentially a digital token that can travel on any transaction rail with any payment for payer not present payments, to make sure that things like payer consent, what's happened over time, who agreed to what and when, can travel with the individual transactions. That's designed to introduce a whole lot of transparency and functionality for end users, but increasingly address first-party fraud or dispute fraud, introduce interoperability across the top of payment systems as new ones are introduced, and to help ensure that domestic regulatory and policy settings can apply as global technology players play an increasing role in our payment industries such as with agentic commerce.

**Laura Watkins** (3:59)
Amazing. Thank you so much. Last but not least, completing our panel, we have a welcome back to the show for Sophie Winwood, co-founder and CEO of UnlockVC. Sophie, great to have you with us. How are things and what can you tell us about UnlockVC? Yeah, things are really good actually. I think it's definitely not slowing down yet. We thought we'd go into a bit of a summer slowdown, but I don't know about everyone else, still very busy.
I'm co-founder and CEO of UnlockVC. We are a community platform for women in venture capital. But I'm also a Fintech investor, VC investor and angel investor myself and have been a certified Fintech nerd for a very long time now.
Well, that's what we love to hear on this show. And all of your many skills are going to come into play as we get into this discussion. So let's get started. Our first story today is that Ant International raises $1.2 billion in a Series A round. The story in Fenextra and many other places. So as I said, Ant International raise approximately $1.2 billion in a Series A funding round with participation from Ant Group, Alibaba Group and a number of international investors. Since becoming an independent business in 2024, Ant International has focused on helping merchants operate across borders through its four core businesses, Alipay Plus, Antom, World First and Better. Today, it connects more than 150 million merchants with over 2 billion consumer accounts worldwide. The company says the funding will accelerate its global expansion and further develop AI-powered payment, treasury, account management, and financing services for merchants and enterprises. Okay. So, this is an unusually large series A at 1.2 billion. It's bigger than many companies raise across their entire lifetime, let alone in a first round after spinning out independently. Sophie, coming to you first with your investor background, what does this tell you and why is this round so large? Yeah. I think firstly, for everyone out there who is currently thinking about or raising a series A, this is not a series A round. I think the reason that they're using this nomenclature is because it's the first round post the spin out. But I think just a little bit of history of Ant Group, which is it was spun out of Ant Financial, Ant Financial is a huge Chinese fintech of its own right. It back in 2018, which is when I first got into fintech, it raised the biggest round in the history of private funding, which was 14 billion, I believe.