Daily Fintech Crunch: 08/05/2022

Dear All,

Its Sunday and therefore its special!

Hope you all are having an enjoyable weekend and cant get back to work tomorrow (not!). Bitcoin price is down to $34k (ouch!) and the Fear Index has been on the rise (see below). Bitcoin's price?has seen a nearly 50% drop in value since its all-time high above $68,000 on Nov. 10. Depending on who you speak too, some say the slide will continue and we will go under the 30k mark, others have different opinions. Despite falling back significantly from its?latest all-time high price, many experts still expect?Bitcoin’s price to rise above $100,000?at some point —?describing it as a matter of when, not if. One interesting observation for me is that the crypto market have been increasingly tracking the stock market lately, which combined with more mainstream adoption and the slumping prices we’ve seen to start the year, makes it even more intertwined with macroeconomic factors.

Getting back to today's crunch, here are the newsbites from the world of Fintech and beyond....

? Fintech:

• Valar Ventures Management, led by Peter Thiel, is spearheading a $185 million investment round for Canada's Neo Financial Technologies Inc., valuing the company at more than $1 billion as it aims to expand into mortgages.

• Stripe launched a new product earlier today that covers some important holes in its push to be the financial services layer for merchants and other organizations whose models are dependent on allowing transactions.

• Andreessen Horowitz, which made its first investment in India last year, intends to be aggressive in the world's second-largest internet market.

• Alan, a French insurance company, has secured $193 million from an investment consortium led by Canada's Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, bringing its worth to $3 billion.

• Klarna will report the use of BNPL products and missed payments to the UK credit reference bureaus in order to assist clients to improve credit ratings and prevent them from accumulating multiple lines of credit.

• Billie Playter, Mondu, and Hokodo have all secured funds from investors in the last several months and are leading the way in BNPL's growth.

• Backflip, a real estate and fintech startup that improves how entrepreneurs invest in residential properties has announced an $8 million equity seed round led by Vertical Venture Partners (VVP) and LiveOak Venture Partners (LiveOak), with participation from Revel Partners, Great Oaks VC, and Greg Waldorf, former founding investor and Board Member at Trulia and Zillow.

• PHOENIX Group, the UK's leading long-term savings and retirement firm, has inaugurated a new Innovation Forum to harness the latest fintech innovation to develop more connections and promote the well-being of its clients, therefore advancing wider financial inclusion.

• Alchemy expands its end-to-end lending platform into Latin America to provide a premium solution for small enterprises.

?? Crypto & DeFi:

• Gucci will begin taking cryptocurrency payments in five of its US stores by the end of the month, with ambitions to extend to all 111 US sites.

?? Metaverse & NFTs:

• Following JP Morgan, the first bank to enter the metaverse with great fanfare earlier this year, numerous banks across the world have followed suit.

• People are presently more inclined to dread the metaverse than to be enthused about it, according to a new study of more than 2,500 US adults.

?? Other News:

• Russian President Vladimir Putin's administration forced a Russian oligarch to sell his entire stake in the bank he founded after he publicly criticized Russia's war in Ukraine on Instagram last month.

?? Report of the Day:

• The United States, with 19 brokerages, and the United Kingdom, with 15, have the world's largest brokerage fintech ecosystems, followed by Cyprus. This report also noted India, Australia, Hong Kong, and the UAE emerge as global financial technology innovation hubs.

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday. Until tomorrow, goodnight

– Arjun Vir Singh