A $4 million investment by QED Investors in Upswing Fintech

The Upswing Fintech startup is working with a few leading banks on the stack, which will go live in a phased manner in 2022. The funding will be used in building plug-and-play platforms for open finance

FREMONT, CA: An open finance B2B ecosystem enabler named Upswing Financial Technologies has increased USD 4 Million from marquee global fund QED Investors and a clutch of other fintech founders. The funding is likely to effortlessly assist fintech and consumer tech players in supplying financial services. QED, a fintech-focused fund- based in Alexandria, founded by Nigel Morris and Frank Rotman in 2007, has backed 25 unicorns globally, including Nubank, Credit Karma, and SoFi. The investors focused on disruptive financial services companies in the US, the UK and Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa.

Senior career bankers  Anupam Bagchi and Nihar Gupta founded Upswing in 2021 in Mumbai. Their prior experience in institutions like Kotak, Axis, Standard Chartered, and NPCI has also helped them build Neobank Jupiter in their leadership roles. Experts remarked that Upswing’s open finance-as-a-service platform is highly customizable, simple, and modular. This further significantly reduces the integration efforts of consumer tech players to launch financial products like savings accounts, deposits, and lending services. However, currently, customers would choose to access their financial assistance from any digital interface which might not even belong to a bank.

The partner and head of Asia at QED Investors opinion that this coming decade is likely to witness consumer companies offering banking and financial products. Upswing is expected to be a vital ecosystem player offering consumer-centric solutions and the proper compliance and security infrastructure. Recently it has been observed that fintech startups have been in the limelight either for securing funds from investors or going for acquisitions. Fintech unicorn Perfios acquiring Karza technologies for more than USD 80 Mn has been one such instance. Further examples include, backed by Apis Partners LLP, Xoxoday secured $30 Mn from Giift last month. Mosambee had also acquired BNPL-focused fintech startup Benow.

On the whole, India’s overall fintech market scenario is expected to witness a CAGR growth of 31 percent during 2022-2025. Moreover, lending tech accounts for 47 percent, followed by insurtech at 26 percent, and digital payments at 16 percent.