Thursday, 1st of December, 2022

Hi,?

I'm not a big soccer fan, but yesterday's match between Argentina and Poland made me realize a few things.

?It's not always the result that counts toward being proud of yourself.?

Sometimes the opponent is stronger, has more experience, or is better than us, which is ok. Every defeat can be turned into a success.

The analogy of sports is also useful in building internal teams - nothing builds like a common goal or the will to survive.

In our professional lives, we are constantly competing against others.?

And often, we are the underdog. But that doesn't mean we can't win.?

We may not always score the winning goal, but as long as we give it our all and never give up, we can walk away from any situation proud of ourselves.?

So next time you feel down about a personal or professional loss, remember that every game is an opportunity to learn, grow, and succeed.

Cheers,?

Radek?

Finance & Tech

• Despite mounting losses, buy now, pay later giant Klarna is forecasting its first monthly profit in the second half of 2023. The news came yesterday as Klarna announced Q3 losses of $200m for the period ending 30 September 2022, nearly double the $106m in losses that the lender reported in Q3 2021. CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski pointed to the quarter-on-quarter reduction in losses that the fintech has managed, with operating losses falling sharply as a result of two rounds of job cuts impacting more than 10 per cent of staff. “Klarna has made huge progress on our path to profitability, which we expect to hit on a monthly basis in the second half of 2023, with our operating result improving $169m or 42 per cent on last quarter,” said Sebastian Siemiatkowski . Read more.?
• MarketFinance , one of the first UK fintech lending companies, is rebranding as Kriya . The new name comes from a Sanskrit word “denoting a state of flow and completed action”, according to a statement from the firm, and refers to the companies growing focus on frictionless payment and credit solutions. Alongside the rebrand, Kriya has appointed three new board members to help its increasing pivot to B2B payments and embedded finance. Michael Woodburn, a former Chief Operating Officer at Capital One is its new board chairman while Luke Griffiths, Chief Commercial Officer at Klarna, and Myles Dawson, former UK Managing Director, Adyen, have joined as directors. Read more.?
• Senior payments experts at the European Central Bank have dismissed bitcoin as a marketing scam that should not be legitimised by regulatory intervention. In a blog post published by the European Central Bank, Ulrich Bindseil, director general of market infrastructure and payments and Jürgen Schaaf, an advisor to the central bank, bill the vurrent turmoil in the crypto markets as "bitcoin's last stand". "For bitcoin proponents, the seeming stabilisation signals a breather on the way to new heights," they write. "More likely, however, it is an artificially induced last gasp before the road to irrelevance - and this was already foreseeable before FTX went bust and sent the bitcoin price to well below $16,000." Read more.?
• Digital asset market maker Keyrock has secured $72 million Series B funding from investors including Ripple, SIX Fintech Ventures and Middlegame Ventures. Since its launch in 2017, Keyrock has become a global liquidity pprovider to over 85 trading venues both centralised and decentralised. In the past year, the firm has expanded into 200 new markets and has seen threefold growth in terms of trading volume while the overall market shrunk by 50%. Keyrock CEO Kevin de Patoul, says the firm will use its funding to invest further into infrastructure development, scalability tools, as well as regulatory licensing across Europe, the US and Singapore. "The new round of funding allows us to dramatically accelerate executing our vision to provide liquidity solutions for all digital assets," he says. "By doubling down on our focus on clients and scalability, we will be looking to expand into new markets with targeted services.” Read more.?
• 瑞银集团 has joined a $20 million Series B capital raise for Shield, a workplace intelligence platform for compliance teams at financial services firms. The round - led by Macquarie Capital and joined by UBS Next, Mindset Ventures and OurCrowd - follows a $15 million Series A earlier this year for Tel Aviv-based Shield. Shiran Weitzman, CEO, Shield, says: "We’re thrilled to be able to begin work with UBS on multiple levels - as a client and now as an investor in our latest funding round. Read more.?
• Maersk and IBM are to shut down the TradeLens blockchain platform for global supply chains in the face of market apathy towards the project. Commercially-available since December 2018, TradLens enabled participants to digitally connect, share information and collaborate across the shipping supply chain ecosystem. In closing the project, Rotem Hershko, head of business platforms at Maersk, says: "TradeLens was founded on the bold vision to make a leap in global supply chain digitization as an open and neutral industry platform. Unfortunately, while we successfully developed a viable platform, the need for full global industry collaboration has not been achieved. As a result, TradeLens has not reached the level of commercial viability necessary to continue work and meet the financial expectations as an independent business." Read more.?
• The central banks of France and Luxembourg have used an experimental CBDC to settle a EUR100 million digital native bond. The so-called Venus initiative saw the bond issued by the European Investment Bank under Luxembourg law, and settled using a tokenised representation of euro central bank money. The EIB appointed Goldman Sachs, Santander and Société Générale as banking syndication to issue and distribute the digital native bonds. Read more.?
• German neo bank N26 tops the rankings for the number of fresh startups created by former alumni, while Klarna takes the crown for the most fintech startups founded by ex-staff, according to a study by Accel and Dealroom. The figures come from an analysis of the state of startup creation from existing unicorns in Europe and Israel. Among other insights, the data sheds light on how the ecosystem’s fintech unicorns are producing the next generation of startups from across the region, with companies like Klarna, N26 and Monzo birthing hundreds of successful founders and executives. Read more.?
• Meal replacement startup Huel — which makes snacks and shakes for people too busy to throw together a sandwich — is today announcing a new Series B funding round of $24m. It values the eight-year-old startup at $560m. Idris Elba — the actor who’s officially not the next James Bond (probably) — and his wife Sabrina invested in the company, alongside UK comedian and TV presenter Jonathan Ross and activewear brand TALA’s CEO Grace Beverley. Some conventional investors are also involved, including growth equity investor Highland Europe, which also led Huel’s previous funding round of ￡20m in 2018. Huel, a portmanteau of “human fuel”, was founded by Julian Hearn, the former founder of marketing company Mash Up Media which exited in 2011. It wasn’t the first meal replacement startup around — the US’s Soylent got there first — nor was it the last. Read more.?

Number to Remember

?1 billion

• 5G is about to hit a major milestone. Telecom equipment maker Ericsson says in its latest mobility report that 1 billion wireless subscribers around the globe will be connected to 5G by the end of the year. That’s still far behind 4G, which grew to around 5 billion subscribers in 2022. But Ericsson predicts that 4G growth will peak at the end of the year, with 5G racing in to replace the reigning connectivity standard. While faster speeds are on the way for many of us, we’ll probably have to pay more for it, too. Read more.?

Reader’s Corner?

• In place of the big bucks that larger corporations can offer employees, early-stage startups typically offer equity — a way to incentivise employees of young businesses by giving workers a direct stake in the success of the company. (Sifted has a handy guide explaining how startup equity works.) But the startup world in 2022 has been shaken up by several waves of layoffs, with some of the biggest names in the business, like Klarna, Gorillas and Cazoo, cutting their headcounts after being hit by trying economic conditions. So if you’re laid off, what do you need to know about your equity? Read more.