Welcome to?your?daily?FinTech?news!
- Buy Now, Pay Later (‘BNPL’) has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by changes in consumer preferences (younger customers often prefer installments over traditional revolving credit cards) coupled with a COVID-boosted shift in shopping patterns towards remote commerce. As BNPL has grown from a niche e-commerce payment method to a mainstream form of consumer credit, so has scrutiny from investors, regulators, and the public. Read all about it in The Paypers "Who’s Who in Payments Report 2022". Link here.
- Swoop, the one-stop money shop for businesses has raised ￡5.4m in a Series A funding round to accelerate international expansion and help more companies to access an array of financing options. The funding announcement follows a surge in demand for SME financing, with revenues at Swoop forecasted to increase by 450% this year. Andrea Reynolds, CEO and Co-Founder of Swoop, said the funding would be used to expand into new markets, with a particular focus on North America. Link here.
- Before 2022’s market turmoil came 2021’s bullish boom. Nowhere was this more apparent, apart from cryptocurrencies, was the fintech space where valuations and funding soared and big-ticket deals began to occur. One of the most high-profile fintech acquisitions in 2021 was when payments giant Visa showed how seriously it was taking the open banking trend when it nabbed Tink for €1.8bn. Link here.
- CRED is raising $140 million in a new financing round. It's the fourth funding in the past year and a half, as the Indian fintech startup courts millions of high credit score customers and broadens its offerings. Link here.
- Request Finance, a Web3 enterprise crypto payments startup, announced that it has closed a US$5.5 million seed funding round. Participants of the fundraising include metaverse company Animoca Brands, Europe’s early-stage venture capital investor Balderton Capital, and XAnge. Link here.
- Razer Fintech, the fintech arm of gaming company Razer Inc., has acquired PT. E2Pay Global Utama, an Indonesian payments company. The acquisition is expected to expand Razer Fintech’s Southeast Asian offline-to-online (O2O) digital payment network by adding E2Pay’s digital payment and e-money services, according to a press release Thursday. Link here.
- Paysafe Group, a leading specialized payments platform, has partnered with APEXX Global, the multi-award-winning global payments orchestration platform, to offer Paysafe’s payment processing services to APEXX Global’s merchant base. Link here.
- Nexi, the European PayTech, and Zuora, the leading cloud-based subscription management platform provider, announced a strategic partnership in the e-commerce sector: XPay, the gateway of Nexi for e-commerce, is now powered by payment services from Zuora. Link here.
- Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has been “asking questions” about the BNB exchange token but the exchange hasn’t yet been subpoenaed. Earlier this month, Bloomberg LP reported the SEC is investigating if the BNB token constitutes an unregistered security. Zhao told the audience at CoinDesk's Consensus 2022 that the SEC regularly asks questions about Binance and its products, and the exchange is in regular contact with authorities. Link here.
- Cryptocurrencies are a “threat to the safety of our payment schemes,” Anne Boden, CEO of U.K. digital Starling Bank, warned. Speaking at the Money 20/20 fintech conference in Amsterdam on Tuesday, Boden said crypto “is very dangerous” as it poses a very huge risk to the existing payment infrastructure. Link here.
- Jay-Z and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey are teaming up to launch a financial literacy program, titled The Bitcoin Academy, for residents of the Marcy Houses project in Brooklyn, New York, where the rapper grew up. “The simple goal is to provide people tools to build independence for themselves and then the community around them,” Jay-Z wrote. Link here.
- Ex-Klarna chief risk officer (CRO), Hanna Jacobsson, has been appointed as German insurtech wefox's new CRO with immediate effect. Link here.?
- Revolut, the global financial super app with more than 500,000 business customers worldwide, has launched new fee-free USD transfers to the UK. Revolut offers US bank details to its UK business customers, enabling them to accept USD transfers from US-based customers, payment apps and online marketplaces with no fees. As increasing numbers of UK B2B customers do business with the US, this saves senders both time and money. Link here.
- Neobank Cashplus Bank is introducing a Digital Health Check for its SME customers, powered by Mastercard. The service was prompted by the UK Government’s recently launched Help to Grow program of courses and support for SMEs, which has so far seen limited take-up, in part due to the requirement that five employees from an SME must enroll at a time. Link here.
- Few developments within financial services have happened with such breathtaking speed as the evolution of neobanks. Less than 10 years after the first next-generation mobile banks entered the market, these digital disruptors developed into a global standalone industry segment. Link here.
This ends?Your?Daily?Fintech?News. Let me know if there are any questions or comments. Until the next!
