This Week in Fintech (7/24)

10 hr ago

Hello Fintech Friends,

Women-led startups received just 2.3% of venture funding in 2020. VC friends, how do we change this?

Please find another week of fintech financings and exits below.

Editor’s Note: If you’re an early-stage startup founder raising equity or debt, I may be able to help - reach out to nik@thisweekinfintech.com.

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💸 Venture Financing

Bolt, a checkout provider, raised a $333 million Series D at a $4 billion valuation.
Soldo, a European business expense management platform, raised a $180 million Series C.
Employment Hero, an Australian payroll provider, raised a A$140 million Series E.
Spendesk, a French corporate spend management startup, raised €100 million.
Vestwell, an investment and retirement platform, raised $70 million from backers including Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs.
Titan, a retail investing platform, raised a $58 million Series B at a $450 million valuation.
Yapily, a UK open banking infrastructure provider, raised a $51 million Series B.
Properly, a Canadian real estate home-buying and selling platform, raised $35 million.
Lev, a commercial real estate lender, raised $30 million at a $130 million valuation.
Paystone, a Canadian payment processor, raised C$30 million.
Paro, a financial expertise platform for businesses, raised a $25 million Series B.
InDebted, an Australian debt collection provider, raised a A$25 million Series B.
Dwolla, an online payments platform, raised $21 million.
Daloopa, an AI financial data extraction tool, raised a $20 million Series A from backers including Credit Suisse.
Lightico, a financial document collection tool, raised a $15 million Series B from backers including Capital One.
Anduin, an invoice and billing solution for professional services firms, raised a $14 million seed round.
Prodigal, a loan servicing fintech, raised a $12 million Series A.
Esusu, a credit building startup, raised $10 million.
Artis, a business real-time lending and payment solution, raised a $7 million Series A.
WhenThen, a no-code payment operations platform, raised $6 million.
Vincent, an alternative investment search engine, raised $6 million.
Allocate, a platform to give retail investors access to venture capital funds, raised a $5 million seed.
Percent, a payments platform for charitable donations, raised $5 million.
Monarch Money, a new kind of PFM, raised $4.8 million in seed funding.
WLTH, an Australian digital lending and payments app, raised a $3 million seed round.
Clim8, a sustainable investment app, raised £2.85 million through crowdfunding.
GetEquity, a Nigerian startup funding platform, raised a $100,000 pre-seed.
Klar, the Mexican neobank, raised an unspecified Series B.
Capchase, a revenue-based financing platform, raised $280 million in debt and equity.
Zilch, a UK buy-now-pay-later provider, raised £80 million in combined debt and equity from Goldman Sachs.
Drivewealth is in the process of raising an up to $400 million Series D.

💰 Venture Funds

i80 Group, a credit provider to startups, has quietly provided over $1 billion in debt capital to fintech lenders.
Sequoia is coming to Latin America to invest in fintech.

☯️ Exits

💻 IPOs

South Korean neobank KakaoBank raised $2.2 billion in its IPO.
Robinhood is looking to raise up to $2 billion in an IPO that could value the company at anywhere from $13 to $40 billion.
MeridianLink, which provides back-end software to banks and fintechs, set terms for a $300 million IPO.
Riskified, an online payments fraud platform, filed for an IPO that could value it at $3 billion.
UK neobank Monzo could potentially be considering an IPO soon.
UK consumer credit company NewDay may be planning an IPO.

📈 SPACs

PayLink Direct, a payment service provider, will merge with vehicle protection plan platform Olive and go public through the MDH Acquisition Corp SPAC.

🤝 M&A - Fintech

Visa announced that it will acquire cross-border payments provider Currencycloud, valuing the business at £700 million. (What will Mastercard’s response acquisition be?)
Online billing and back-end accounts receivable giant Bill.com will acquire competitor Invoice2go, in a stock and cash transaction valued at approximately $625 million.
Buy-now-pay-later provider Klarna bought German discount shopping app Stocard for €113 million.
When minnows eat sharks: international transfer cryptocurrency Stellar Foundation is eyeing an acquisition of legacy remittances provider MoneyGram.
Latin America’s PicPay acquired Brazilian financial solutions provider Guiabolso.
Financial reporting software provider insightsoftware acquired APAC rival CALUMO.
European KYC startups Onegini and iWelcome announced their merger.
Vodafone could spin off Kenyan mobile money powerhouse M-Pesa.

💲 M&A - Investment Management

Canadian financial services holding company Great-West Lifeco acquired Prudential's retirement investing business for $3.5 billion.
Lightyear Capital in the UK announced that it will acquire Wren Sterling Financial Planning.

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🌎 Fintech Around the World

How Fintechs Can Build Trust with SMEs in Latin America

Rappi: LATAM's Super App

Africa, an overlooked continent for global investment is becoming a burgeoning Fintech leader

Fintech startups could make or break Africa’s new free-trade area

Sub-Saharan Africa gains 79m new mobile money accounts, hits total of 548m in 2020

In Africa, foreign firms are often disconnected from local ones

Who will benefit from the Mastercard ban in India?

📚 Deeper Reads

Square in Crypto/DeFi

FT Partners’ BNPL Report

Banks Spend More To Fend Off FinTechs

Fintech M&A Insights from Shearman & Sterling and Rise by Barclays

#25 Buy Now Pay Later

Recognizing Early-Stage Fintechs Driving Innovation in an Era of Uncertainty

Three-quarters of Americans Plan to Decrease Their Use of Credit Cards as Debt Falls out of Favor

57 promising fintechs building the behind-the-scenes tech revolutionizing Wall Street

Apex Next Investor Outlook

Squirrel Olympics

Want to be a This Week in Fintech Sponsor? Reach out to us at sponsor@thisweekinfintech.com.
Come meet us in-person at www.fintechhappyhour.com.

This Week in Fintech (7/23)

Nik Milanović

Jul 23

Hello Fintech Friends,

As we get into the dog days of summer, I hope everyone is taking some time for themselves!

I was surprised yesterday to see the news that the Stellar Foundation - an open-source cryptocurrency network - is considering acquiring legacy cross-border transfer company MoneyGram (after a blocked Ant Financial acquisition attempt in 2018).

What stands out to me is that Stellar is the challenger, and MoneyGram the incumbent. With fintech balance sheets swelling, something tells me this won’t be the last challenger-incumbent acquisition effort we see.

On a separate note - thank you to everyone who came out to our Seattle fintech happy hour last night! More coming in August.

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

💬 Quote of the Week
“I've been asked a lot of questions about BlockFi recently so I figured I'd do a quick Twitter thread as to what exactly is going on with BlockFi and the legal theory under which the BIA or "Blockfi Interest Account" is being alleged to be a security.”
Preston Byrne (Source)

📖 Read of the Week

This week, I really enjoyed Dan Akivis’ breakdown of the competition in faster (and real-time) payments in the US. This is as crowded a field as it gets, from meteoric challengers like Orum growing quickly, to incumbents like The Federal Reserve and The ClearingHouse fighting to make their solution the gold standard.

📊 Stat of the Week

UK consumers now owe an average of £244.37 per person to buy-now-pay-later providers. (Source)

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🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Mastercard launched a service to help facilitate real-time payments for customers on its network, PayPort+.

Santander is rolling out a consolidated cash management platform for its business clients.

Danske Bank launched a mortgage in Northern Ireland that is certified to be carbon neutral… (?)

📰 Other News

Small business-focused fintech Centime announced a partnership with First National Bank of Omaha to build a cash-flow management solution. American Express is partnering with fintech BodesWell to launch a financial planning tool.

Barclays added Mastercard account-to-account payments for business clients. Nationwide is using open banking to help customers with debt.

Nasdaq is partnering with SVB, Citi, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley to launch a new secondary marketplace for trading shares of private companies.

Mastercard made it easier to pay for cryptocurrencies with its products.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Square is launching business banking accounts (similar to Brex or Mercury).

Credit card fintech Upgrade launched the Upgrade Bitcoin Rewards Card with unlimited 1.5% bitcoin rewards.

Buy-now-pay-later provider Sezzle is launching a working capital platform for merchants. Competitor Afterpay launched a consumer money management app. Revenue-based financing platform Capchase launched its own buy-now-pay-later platform.

Fabrick, an Italian wealth management platform, partnered with consultant Prometeia to launch a Global Investment Portfolio.

Treasury Prime launched customized card controls to reduce fraud. Ramp launched a merchant-blocking feature for its corporate credit cards.

Neobank Revolut launched a travel booking feature.

Embedded payments provider Infinicept launched a partner network to help enable embedded payments.

📰 Other News

TurboTax’s parent company, Intuit, left the IRS’ Free File program. Intuit has repeatedly hid its - federally required - free tax filing option, lobbied to prevent Americans from filing their taxes for free, and attempted to acquire and shut down free competitors.

Venmo finally removed its feed so that strangers can’t see your payments.

Square is muscling its way into the crypto space with a bitcoin and defi business.

Facebook will enable Facebook Pay as a payment method for third-party e-commerce sites.

Crypto mortgage startup Figure signed a deal with Apollo to enable more mortgages on the blockchain. PayU and stablecoin provider Celo are partnering to enable more merchants to accept stablecoin payments.

Grab and Adyen are partnering to provide buy-now-pay-later across Southeast Asia.

Polish fintech Payment Financial and Lithuanian KYC provider iDenfy partnered.

Paysera is now licensed in Ukraine. MFS AFrica expanded to Sierra Leone. Prex expanded from Uruguay to Peru. Mendel is shooting for 50 Mexican clients.

More fintechs now have public earnings! Wise revenue grew 43% in Q1. Interactive Brokers fell behind estimates. Starling’s revenue grew 600%.

Techstars and Western Union partnered on a fintech accelerator.

Fintech venture funding over time (Source)

🇪🇺 Europe

Bank of Ireland launched video tutorials to help customers to use its digital banking services.
FTX is joining Copper’s ClearLoop settlement network to gain access to new institutional funds
Curve has partnered with Discover in Europe to let the card companies customers add their credit cards to the Curve app.

🌏 Asia

NPCI to launch FAST-tag enabled parking lots India starting with Maharashtra, India.
Paytm filed its draft IPO prospectus (DRHP) for India's largest IPO of $2.2 billion. Mobikwik filed its DRHP for IPO with a public offer of $225 million.
BharatPe is targeting $6 billion in annualised transaction processed value from POS business.

📜 Policy

In collaboration with Ben White.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen convened US Financial Regulators and encouraged them to “act quickly” on stablecoin regulations.
SEC Chair Gary Gensler stated that securities-backed crypto tokens must comply with the agency’s rules.
The OCC announced its intention to work with federal banking regulators to jointly revise the Community Reinvestment Act, which requires banks to serve low-income communities.
Senator Elizabeth Warren called for a new approach to free tax filing after Intuit announced it’s dropping its free file program.
The European Union proposed new rules to make cryptocurrency transfers traceable.
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority announced a series of techsprints focused on climate change.
The UK Treasury opened applications for government funding for high-tech firms.
New Jersey’s Attorney General issued a cease and desist order to crypto lending platform BlockFi.

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Come meet us in-person at www.fintechhappyhour.com.

This Week in Fintech (7/17)

Nik Milanović

Jul 17

Hello Fintech Friends,

Thank you to Martin, Pattie, and Zarik for the great photos from our Chicago happy hour. And a big, big thank you to Fifth Third Bank for sponsoring!

For anyone who missed yesterday’s announcement, we now have two international issues!

Lastly, calling all New Yorkers: our fintech happy hour is back on August 5th! Sign up here.

Please find another week of fintech financings and exits below.

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British fintech companies raised $5.7 billion over the first half of the year.

💸 Venture Financing

Revolut, the global neobank, raised $800 million, valuing the company at $33 billion. (John Street Capital gives a great breakdown of the business here.)
Insightsoftware, a global CFO suite, raised $800 million.
Carta, the cap table management software, is raising $500 to $600 million at a $7.4 billion valuation.
Lunar, a Scandinavian neobank, raised a €210 million Series D.
Quantexa, a financial crime platform, raised a $153 million Series D.
M1 Finance, a money management platform, raised a $150 million growth round at a $1.45 billion valuation.
Tide, a UK business finance platform that does business in India, raised a $100 million Series C.
Railsbank, a German banking-as-a-service provider, raised $70 million.
Augmentum, a publicly-listed UK fintech investment trust, raised £55 million.
Oy!, an Indonesian inter-bank transfer app, raised a $45 million Series A.
Cardless, a platform for brands to launch co-branded credit cards, raised a $40 million Series B.
Jasper Card, a rewards credit card, raised a $34 million Series A.
Sezzle, a buy-now-pay-later platform, raised $30 million from Discover, in an agreement which will also allow the network to launch Sezzle’s services to its customers.
Syfe, a Southeast Asian investment app, raised a $30 million Series B.
Morty, an online mortgage marketplace, raised a $25 million Series B.
Daloopa, an Indian financial data extraction startup, raised a $20 million Series A from Credit Suisse.
Play2Pay, a startup that allows customers to pay off bills by playing games, raised a $13 million Series A.
Tinvio, a Singaporean supply chain financing startup, raised a $12 million Series A.
Proper, an accounting platform for the real estate industry, raised a $9 million Series A.
Superfluid, a real-time finance platform, raised a $9 million seed round.
Marco Financial, a Latin America-focused business financier, raised a $7 million seed round.
Weavr, a UK embedded finance platform, raised a £7 million seed funding round.
Nethone, a Polish anti-fraud platform, raised $6.7 million.
Vara, an Indonesian digital payroll platform, raised a $4.8 million seed.
KodyPay, a payment method API for the hospitality industry, raised $3.25 million.
Limina, a Swedish platform modernizing investment management workflows, raised a $3 million Series A.
HelloFlow, a Danish no-code KYC platform for financial institutions, raised $1.6 million in seed funding.
CrediLinq, a Singaporean business lender, raised S$1.35 million.
Dinie, a Latin American embedded finance platform, raised funding from Accion.
Greenphire, a financial software for clinical trials, raised strategic funding from Thoma Bravo.
Apex Group, a global financial services provider, received an investment from Mubadala and Carlyle.
N26, a neobank, is looking to raise capital at a $10 billion valuation.
Mercury has reportedly raised a Series B at a $1.6 billion valuation.
Bolt, an online payments startup, is preparing to raise $300 million at a valuation potentially over $1 billion.

💵 Debt Financing

Jasper Card received $100 million in receivables financing from WebBank.
Marco Financial raised $75 million in debt alongside its seed round.

☯️ Exits

💻 IPOs

Blend Labs raised $360 million at a $5 billion valuation.
Paycor HCM - a payroll and HR software - set terms for an IPO at a $3.6 billion valuation.
Paytm is seeking Indian regulatory approval for an IPO that would value the company at $2.2 billion.
Indian mobile wallet MobiKwik is planning to raise up to $255 million at a $1 billion valuation in its IPO.
Bridge Investment Group, a real estate investment firm, raised $300 million in its IPO.
FinWise Bancorp, a Utah digital bank, filed for a $50 million IPO.
Southern States Bancshares, an Alabama bank, filed for a $35 million IPO.

📈 SPACs

Bullish, an American crypto exchange, will go public at a $9 billion valuation through a merger with the Far Peak Acquisition Corporation SPAC.
Sunlight Financial completed its SPAC merger with Spartan Acquisition Corp II on the NYSE.
Abri SPAC I filed for a $50 million IPO to buy a fintech.

🤝 M&A - Fintech

ABD Insurance and Financial Services is merging with Newfront Insurance at a $1.35 billion valuation.
Global payments platform Nium agreed to buy Wirecard’s Indian foreign exchange business and Nomu Pay bought the disgraced payments company’s Southeast Asian assets.
P27 Nordic Payments received approval for its pan-Nordic fintech payments platform.
Swiss exchange operator SIX bought international index and ETF data specialist Ultumus.
US homebuying platform Better acquired UK online mortgage broker Trussle.
Australian neobank Volt acquired fintech lender Australian Mortgage.
Healthcare payments software Waystar will acquire patient payments platform Patientco.
UK lender Together Financial is evaluating selling itself for $1.4 billion.
Klarna acquiredHero, an in-store social shopping platform.
RVU, the owner of Uswitch, Confused.com and Money.co.uk, boughtMojo Mortgages in order to expand into UK mortgage leadgen.

🏦 M&A - Bank

National Australia Bank is in talks to buy Citigroup’s Australian business.
First United Bank acquired a minority interest in Exencial Wealth Advisors.
Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui will buy 5% of American investment bank Jefferies.
Citigroup will sell its Venezuelan operations to Banco Nacional de Crédito.
Vanguard, the asset manager, made its first acquisition in its 46-year history: California-based wealth management boutique Just Invest.

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📚 Deeper Reads

Want to be a This Week in Fintech Sponsor? Reach out to us at sponsor@thisweekinfintech.com.
Come meet us in-person at www.fintechhappyhour.com.

This Week in Fintech (7/16)

Nik Milanović

Jul 16

Hello Fintech Friends,

Starting this week, we’re rolling out This Week in Fintech globally, with two new editions!

This Week in Fintech - Europe and UK, written by Michael Jenkins.
This Week in Fintech - India and Southeast Asia, written by Osborne Saldanha.

Michael and Osborne are both accomplished fintech operators, investors, and writers in their own right, and will bring a wealth of local knowledge and coverage to This Week in Fintech, in the same weekly format.

Please join me in welcoming them and subscribing to their newsletters :)

More meetups

If you went to our Chicago or Denver happy hours yesterday, please send us photos!

Next up is our Seattle fintech happy hour on Thursday, July 22nd at Tin Lizzie Lounge. Thank you to Sunjay Pandey for co-organizing and to Intellectus for sponsoring.

Next month, we’ll be in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York on August 5th.

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

💬 Quote of the Week
“Something astonishing is going on in fintech. Much more money is pouring into it than usual. In the second quarter of the year alone it attracted $34bn in venture-capital funding, a record [...] One in every five dollars invested by venture capital this year has gone into fintech.”
The Economist (Source)

📖 Read of the Week

I wrote a while ago on how most personal finance problems are really multidimensional issues: finances are the symptom, but there are often other root causes. This is something critical to understand if you work in consumer fintech: to improve people’s financial lives, you need to make sure that you are helping them - directly or via partnerships - with more than just their money management.

This week, journalist Lorie Konish covered the real reason that two thirds of Americans file for bankruptcy: medical costs. The astronomical cost of healthcare in the US has been devastating to the personal finances of many Americans, and unless we take a more holistic approach to ameliorating those costs, all the money management tips in the world won’t help.

📊 Stat of the Week

Fintech is responsible for roughly 1 in 5 (17%) of the world’s unicorns, more than any other sector. (Source)

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🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Frost Bank in the US is taking a page out of fintech’s book and allowing customers to access paychecks two days early.

American Express launched a self-service financial planning tool in partnership with fintech startup BodesWell.

A consortium of European banks - NatWest, CIBC, ITAU and NAB - launched Project Carbon to buy and sell carbon offsets and track emissions.

Postbank Bulgaria launched a digital wallet.

📰 Other News

Goldman Sachs and Apple are planning to collaborate on a buy-now-pay-later product to rival Affirm in the US.

Regions Bank and Built are collaborating on homebuilding finance. Mastercard and Verizon are partnering on 5G payments.

JP Morgan thinks trading revenues are back! Borrowing is also back in the US, with record auto loan and credit card signups.

ING is transferring its Australian retail banking operations to bank99. National Australia Bank is pumping A$160 million into its branch transformation.

China’s banks are pushing each employee to recruit up to 300 new digital yuan users per year. The Singaporean and French central banks are testing a cross-border stablecoin exchange. The Malaysian central bank received 29 applications for digital banking licenses.

The European Central Bank greenlit a digital euro. The Monetary Authority of Singapore will launch a global challenge to promote AI in the financial sector.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Propel launched a platform to help low-income families navigate government financial benefits.

SplitIt is launching buy-now-pay-later loans for in-store purchases. PayPal launched no-fee buy-now-pay-later in Australia. (Meanwhile, UK BNPL users surveyed think that the average time to pay off their debts is now up to 9 months.)

Latin America open banking platform Prometeo launched SPARK, a free credit platform for early-stage fintechs.

Quickbooks launched a card reader for in-store contactless payments.

Tally launched a bank account backed by physical gold.

Google Pay launched a virtual card to pay in-store out of its stored value wallet balance.

Boubyan Bank launched a digital Sharia-compliant bank in the UK.

📰 Other News

Square is building a hardware wallet for bitcoin and cryptocurrencies and a platform for decentralized financial services..

Indian payment giant Paytm is offering up to ₹1,000 with 0% APR to users. Google Pay partnered with Flexiloans to offer business loans in India.

Payroll API Pinwheel is now FCRA-compliant. Open baking platform Nordigen is integrated into Apple’s Siri.

Alkami and Constant partnered to make digital loan servicing easier. CBI and Crif partnered on open banking. Composecure will issue a metal Visa credit card for Crypto.com.

ProjectPay wants to streamline construction payments.

Finder is focused on global expansion. Greenhouse Lab launched a pan-African fintech startup accelerator.

LendUp appears to be closing down operations.

Mobile payments company Boku predicts that over half the world’s population will use mobile wallets by 2025.

📜 Policy

In collaboration with Ben White.

The White House issued an Executive Order on competition, calling on the CFPB to move forward with open banking rules and on Treasury to issue a new fintech report.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said during testimony that a report on Central Bank Digital Currencies is coming in September.
U.S. financial regulators issued a proposal for joint guidance on third-party risk management, carrying major potential impact for how banks oversee fintech partners. (Comments are due in 60 days.)
The House Financial Services Committee held a hearing Friday on artificial intelligence and online privacy.
The Bank of International Settlements published two new reports, one on the need for global cooperation on CBDC, and the other on regulatory oversight, competition and stability.
The CFPB levied a fine against lending fintech GreenSky for improperly issuing loans.
Sweden’s financial regulator is investigating Klarna’s recent data disruption as a violation of banking secrecy laws.
The European Central Bank approved the next stage of a digital euro - a 24 month investigation into use cases and impacts.
India’s government has banned Mastercard from issuing new debit or credit cards due to the company’s noncompliance over data storage rules.
Novus secured regulatory approval for a ‘conscious consumer’ focused fintech app.

Sponsored Content

Want to be a This Week in Fintech Sponsor? Reach out to us at sponsor@thisweekinfintech.com.
Come meet us in-person at www.fintechhappyhour.com.

This Week in Fintech (7/10)

Nik Milanović

Jul 10

Hello Fintech Friends,

We previously hosted two sets of fintech geographic deep-dives online in November ‘20 and March ‘21. Would people want to join another round? Let me know!

Our prior deep-dives:

Australia (presentation, recording)
Africa (Call transcript, presentation)
Australia (presentation, recording)
Canada (presentation, recording)
China (part one, part two, recording)
Europe (Call transcript, presentation)
India (Presentation)
Latin America (Call transcript, presentation)
Middle East & Africa (presentation, recording)
Southeast Asia (presentation, recording)
US (Call transcript, presentation)

Please find another week of fintech financings and exits below.

Editor’s Note: If you’re an early-stage startup founder raising equity or debt, I may be able to help - reach out to nik@thisweekinfintech.com.

Sponsored Content

💸 Venture Financing

Pine Labs, an Indian creator of a payments terminal, raised $600 million at a $3 billion valuation.
Bunq, a Dutch neobank, raised a €193 million Series A.
Clearco, a Canadian revenue-based financing platform for online companies, raised $215 million (just weeks after its last $100 million round at a $2 billion valuation).
Younited Credit, a French automated credit decisioning and document management platform, raised $170 million.
Pleo, a European spend management and CFO tool for European businesses, raised a $150 million Series C.
LoanPro, a loan management and servicing software provider, raised a $100 million growth round.
Unit21, a no-code anti-fraud platform for financial services, raised a $34 million Series B.
Entera, a startup that provides data to residential real-estate investors, raised $32 million.
Juni, a neobank for e-commerce and online marketing companies, raised a $21.5 million Series A.
Willa, a fintech platform for freelancers and the creative economy, raised an $18 million Series A.
Moneyhub, a UK open banking platform, raised $18 million.
Mintable, an NFT marketplace, raised $13 million from strategic investor Ripple.
Canopy, a technology provider for accounting firms, raised $11 million in funding.
Toqio, a white-label open banking startup, raised a $9.4 million seed.
AREX Markets, a Spanish and UK-based embedded lending and accounting provider, raised an €8.8 million Series A.
Lidya, a Nigerian small business lender that recently expanded to Europe, raised an $8.3 million pre-Series B.
Zerion, a decentralized finance investing platform, raised an $8.2 million Series A.
Smile Identity, a pan-African KYC and identity solution for financial services providers, raised a $7 million Series A.
British in-store payment service provider PayPoint made a £6.6m strategic investment in delivery company Snappy Group.
XCLAIM, a bankruptcy claim financing company, raised a $6.6 million seed.
Coast, a payments platform for trucking fleets, raised a $6 million seed round.
Glint, a UK gold-based payments system, raised over £3 million in crowdfunding.
Z1, a Brazilian neobank for teenagers, raised $2.5 million.
DigiKhata, a Pakistani small business accounting software, raised a $2 million seed.
StepEx, a UK student income-share agreement platform, raised a £1.1 million pre-seed.
Yalla Xash, a Moroccan money transfer platform, raised $675,000 to expand internationally.
UK neobank Revolut is reportedly raising between £750 million and £1 billion.
Perennial fintech banking partner Cross River Bank is raising $200 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.

☯️ Exits

💻 IPOs

UK cross-border payments company Wise, formerly known as Transferwise, completed the largest direct listing in UK history, ending the day up 10% at an $11 billion enterprise valuation, well above $6-7 billion market expectations.
Stripe, the US online payments monolith, hired a law firm to help it prepare for an IPO that will likely value it over its last private valuation of $95 billion.
Blend Labs, the digital banking transformation provider, set terms for its upcoming IPO at a valuation of nearly $4 billion.
Paytm, the Indian online payments monolith, plans to file for IPO (which is called a Draft Red Herring Prospectus in India) this month at an expected Rs16,600 crore ($2.23 billion) valuation.
Kakao Pay, South Korea’s e-commerce payment provider, plans to raise around $1.4 billion in its upcoming IPO in August.
Preston Hollow Community Capital, a lender for socially-conscious local community projects, filed for IPO.
Bridge Investment Group, a real estate investment manager, filed for a $300 million IPO.

📈 SPACs

Circle, a payments and treasury software solution for firms looking to compliantly manage cryptocurrencies, will go public through a combination with the Concord Acquisition SPAC at a $4.5 billion valuation.
Armada Acquisition, a fintech-focused SPAC, filed for a $150 million IPO.

🤝 M&A - Fintech

In an interesting deal, Malaysian airline AirAsia will buy the Thailand-based assets of Indonesian financial superapp Gojek for around $1 billion.
Google acquired Japanese cashless payments provider Pring for between $180 million and $270 million.
Private equity firm Sun Capital acquired digital mortgage software LoanLogics for between $50 and $100 million.
Sovos, a tax software provider, acquired Portugal-based accounting and invoicing companies PetaPilot and Saphety.
Swedish buy-now-pay-later startup Klarna is potentially sizing up its Australian rival Zip (a publicly-traded firm) for acquisition, having acquired 4% of the A$160 million lender.
Indian payment gateway PayU is reportedly considering an acquisition of business payments provider BillDesk for between $3 and $4 billion.

🏦 M&A - Bank

Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui will buy a controlling stake (74.9%) in Indian lender Fullerton India Credit Co. for $2 billion.
CaixaBank, Spain’s largest bank, will sell two businesses from its recently acquired rival Bankia to Global Payments for €277 million.

💲 M&A - Investment Management

US investor services firm American Stock Transfer & Trust Company will sell to private equity firm Siris Capital for $630 million.
Private equity firm Genstar Capital will acquire a majority stake in investment advisor Foreside Financial Group.