Welcome to?your?daily?FinTech?news!
- The duo behind?Robinhood's Snacks podcast is spinning the program out of the stock trading company and relaunching it on Monday as "The Best One Yet." Why it matters: Robinhood's podcast and its broader media business, which includes a newsletter, has built a massive following among the retail trading crowd. Link here.?
- India has 100 unicorns now. The Bengaluru-headquartered neobank?Open Financial Technologies?entered the coveted club on Monday with a new funding round, it said. The five-year-old startup did not disclose the size of its Series D funding, but a source familiar with the matter said it’s $50 million. Link here.?
- Last week, €499m was raised across 15 FinTech deals.?Link here.?
- Open banking and open finance solutions have the potential to become catalysts for growth and, let it be redundant, innovation for other productive sectors, such as banks, especially in regions such as Latin America, where there are high rates of unbanked people, high rates of bank fraud and where cash is still the king of all transactions. Read the full blog post by?Belvo?founder?Pablo Viguera. Link here.?
- Check out the Philippines FinTech Report 2022 by?Fintech News Philippines????? Link here.?
- See all of this week’s FinTech deal activity in?Financial Technology Partners / FT Partners?weekly overview. Link here.?
- Bunsen, the UK’s first marketplace for the outdated school supplies industry, is announcing its ￡250,000 pre-seed round. Link here.?
- When?Tope Alabi?moved back to Nigeria in 2019 after 20 years in the U.S., he knew he wanted to start a company applying what he learned working at blockchain consultant Consensys.?Afriex?was launched amongst an explosion of fintech companies targeting underserved, and often overlooked, consumers in Africa. Link here.?
- Visa?Inc. shares surged after the payments giant said spending on its network jumped, even with the suspension of operations in Russia and as the lingering impacts of the omicron variant hindered travel in the first few weeks of the year. Link here.?
- NALA, a Tanzania based Fintech company, has teamed up with Kenya’s?Cellulant, a Pan-African Payments Company, to oversee and allow remittance payments from the United Kingdom and the United States into Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Tanzania and Ghana for customers. Link here.?
- Brazil's Senate has passed the country's first bill governing cryptocurrencies in a plenary session, which will set the stage for the creation of a regulatory framework for the country's crypto industry. Link here.?
- Change, an Amsterdam-based cryptocurrency platform for retail investors, announced that it has acquired a new Dutch licence that will enable it to provide services with traditional and new-age financial assets throughout the EU. Link here.?
- Startups have been quick to adopt cryptocurrencies, but governments and regulators have — so far — been less enthusiastic. But new rules from the EU last month promising to “boost benefits and curb threats” in the form of fraud and environmental impact could mean a change in attitude. In?Sifted?Talks, they asked their expert panel what the future holds for the crypto. Link here.?
- After a week of making headlines, one-click-checkout startup Bolt has issued a public response to questions about how it’s faring in the competitive space. CEO?Maju Kuruvilla???issued a blog post today acknowledging that the company “has become very popular in the media these past few months.” Link here.?
- Kard‘s rewards-as-a-service API streamlines the process for card issuers, allowing them to create a customized rewards program tailored to their particular customer base by choosing from Kard’s set of merchant partnerships. Link here.?
- Just five months after launching its 10-person Austin, Texas office,?Wise?is now preparing to scale it up to over 100 staff. Link here.?
- Payment provider?Fiserv?has reported financial results for the first quarter of 2022, looking toward a good outlook for 2022 in spite of various challenges. The company said there were “challenging macroeconomic factors that created some uncertainty, according to Frank Bisignano, president, and CEO of the company. Link here.?
- Nordic financial services group?SEB?has signed its first Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) customer in retail fintech start-up Humla. The new fintech will be powered by a BaaS platform developed by SEB’s innovation studio?SEBx. Link here.?
- German authorities searched?Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in Frankfurt on 29 April, a move the bank said was related to suspicious activity reports it filed to an anti-money-laundering agency. Agents from Frankfurt’s prosecutor’s office, German financial regulator?BaFin?and the federal police showed up at Deutsche Bank with a search warrant issued by the Frankfurt local court, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. It said it couldn’t provide further information. Link here.?
- African start-ups set up a new record in the first quarter of the year (2022) by raising over US$1.8bn. This is two and half times what they managed to raise in the same period last year (US$730m). Link here.?
- Brazilian fintech?Nubank?is expected to pay up to BRL 816 million in compensation to top executives and board members in 2022, according to a document published by the neobank. Link here.?
- Belvo?is expanding B2B banking coverage in Brazil. Link here.?
This ends?Your?Daily?Fintech?News. Let me know if there are any questions or comments. Until the next!
