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  • 📈 Tines Bags $125M to Kill Tedious Tasks

📈 Tines Bags $125M to Kill Tedious Tasks

Car Loan Scandal: Banks Brace for Billions

February 12, 2025

This is Cliff Equity, the UK’s business newsletter that keeps you informed on what’s important in tech, business and finance in less than 5 minutes

In today’s stories:

  • Tines Bags $125M to Kill Tedious Tasks

  • Car Loan Scandal: Banks Brace for Billions

  • Proxymity Powers Up Proxy Voting With $26M

The summary: Tines has stormed into unicorn territory with its AI-powered automation platform, helping enterprises ditch tedious tasks, stay secure, and embrace the future of work—without the usual data-sharing headaches.

The details:

  • Tines, the AI-powered workflow automation startup, just bagged a hefty $125 million Series C round, propelling it to unicorn status with a $1.125 billion valuation. Investors include Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, and Activant.

  • Founded by ex-security engineers fed up with tedious tasks, Tines began as a no-code security automation tool before expanding into IT and DevOps—now automating over a billion tasks per week.

  • Big-name customers like Coinbase, Databricks, and CrowdStrike rely on Tines for smarter, AI-powered workflows, all while keeping data firmly within their own infrastructure—no dodgy third-party sharing here.

  • With fresh funding in the bank, Tines is doubling down on AI, aiming to be the ultimate orchestrator of secure, intelligent automation across the enterprise world.

Why it matters: Tines’ unicorn leap shows that AI-driven automation isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a necessity for enterprises drowning in manual tasks. With security-conscious design and heavyweight customers on board, it’s proving that automation can be both powerful and private (a rarity these days). As businesses scramble to integrate AI without causing a compliance nightmare, Tines is positioning itself as the go-to fixer for the mess.

The summary: A brewing multibillion-pound car loan scandal has lenders scrambling, regulators circling, and even the Chancellor weighing in—setting the stage for a financial showdown that could shake up the industry and drive up borrowing costs.

The details:

  • Close Brothers is bracing for a £165m hit from the car loan commission scandal, but warns the final bill could be much steeper—or, if they’re lucky, much lower. No pressure, then.

  • The finance giant has scrapped dividends and is raising £400m to keep its balance sheet in shape, while assuring regulators it’ll stay on the right side of capital requirements.

  • At the heart of the scandal? Dealers secretly tweaking interest rates to pocket bigger commissions—banned in 2021 but now coming back to haunt lenders, with potential compensation claims in the billions.

  • With the FCA circling, the Supreme Court getting involved, and even the Chancellor wading in, this saga is shaping up to be the PPI scandal’s messier little sibling.

Why it matters: Close Brothers and other lenders could be staring down the barrel of a multi-billion-pound compensation fiasco, making life very uncomfortable for their balance sheets—and their shareholders. If regulators force payouts, banks may have to claw back losses elsewhere, which could mean pricier loans for everyone (because, naturally, the customer always foots the bill in the end). And with the Supreme Court, the FCA, and even the Chancellor getting stuck in, this financial soap opera is far from its final episode—grab the popcorn.

The summary: Proxymity's $26M boost is turbocharging its mission to transform proxy voting into a slick, real-time digital system, winning over top financial players and setting a new standard for transparency in investor communications.

The details:

  • Fintech fixer-upper – Proxymity just bagged $26M from heavy-hitting investors like BNP Paribas and J.P. Morgan, bringing its total funding to a tidy $98.5M. The mission? To revolutionise proxy voting and investor communications with real-time digital connections.

  • A Citi-born brainchild – Dreamt up by Dean Little and Jonathan Smalley within Citi, Proxymity spun out in 2020 and is now backed by seven of the world’s top ten Global Custodians, managing a casual $200 trillion in assets.

  • Proxy voting, but make it modern – Say goodbye to snail-paced, error-prone voting. Proxymity’s tech extends deadlines, reduces vote rejections, and lets investors track their ballots in real time—no more vanishing votes!

  • Industry stamp of approval – With the EU’s Shareholder Rights Directive II looming, financial giants are doubling down on Proxymity’s vision of making investor communications slicker, smarter, and scandal-free.

Why it matters: When the world’s biggest financial institutions throw millions at a fintech, you know it’s shaking things up—Proxymity is dragging proxy voting out of the dark ages and into the digital fast lane. No more lost votes, dodgy deadlines, or Byzantine bureaucracy—investors, issuers, and intermediaries finally get a transparent, real-time system that actually works. With regulators tightening the screws on shareholder rights, the financial bigwigs aren’t just investing in Proxymity—they’re betting on the future of how corporate democracy is run.