Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,
Congratulations to the many winners at the UK Fintech Award 2022 including Curve, Moneyhub, R3, PensionBee, Habito, Wombat, Token and Hypejar!
Please find another week of fintech news, financings and exits below. If you are reading this but haven’t already subscribed, you can click below 🙏
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Funding 💸
Highlights below of deals since the last post in the fintech space across the UK & Europe.
🇪🇺 Fraud startup Seon raised a $94m Series B led by IVP.
🇪🇺 Sustainable bank Helios raised a €9m Seed round from Serena, Verve Ventures, Raise, Plug and Play and Motier Ventures.
🇪🇺 Money automation fintech Flow Your Money raised a €3.5m seed round led by Eleven Ventures.
🇪🇺 B2B BNPL provider Mondu raised a €40m round from Valar Ventures.
🇪🇺 SME neobank Qonto raised €5m in a crowdfunding campaign.
🇬🇧 Super Payments, a new fintech from Funding Circle founder Desai, raised $30m from Accel and Local Globe.
🇬🇧 B2B payments fintech Previse raised a $10.4m Series B from Tencent.
🇬🇧 Immigrant lending fintech Pillar raised €15.6m in a round led by Global Founders Capital and Backed VC.
Challenger Banking 🚀
🇪🇺 N26 is cancelling some customers accounts and freezing credit according to Handelsblatt.
🇪🇺 Scalable Capital has expanded to Italy to bring its commission-free trading platform and crypto investing product deeper into Europe.
🇬🇧 Lender Shawbrook Bank is offering a discount on mortgage rates for borrowers who share their banking data via the open banking credit provider ClearScore.
🇬🇧 Revolut has partnered with Cross River Bank to help scale its US credit and loans offering. The neobank is also adding hundreds more jobs in India.
🇬🇧 Savings and investments fintech Chip is to build an alternative asset platform to let customers invest in fractional shares of luxury items.
🇬🇧 PensionBee has moved up into the London Stock Exchange’s Premium Segment and also announced a £17m run rate and AUM of £2.74bn.
🌍 Brex acquired Pry Financials, a software platform for budgeting and bookkeeping, for $90m.
Digital Assets ₿
🇬🇧 Crypto payments firm Mercuryo has partnered with payments provider Volt to add Open Banking payments to their list of onramp options.
🇬🇧 Crypto firm Ziglu is to be acquired by US neobroker Robinhood.
🌍 Coinbase pledged to give the market a heads-up on tokens it is considering to list with the announcement timing coincidentally coming out after discovery of a Ethereum wallet that bought tokens that exclusively featured on the list before it was published. It also launched its NFT marketplace.
🌍 The US government has alleged that a North Korean hacking group called Lazarus was responsible for the ~$600m Axie Infinity hack last month.
🌍 MetaMask has told users that automatic backups in Apple devices could allow hackers to steal their funds.
🌍 Tron is getting its own algorithmic stablecoin, USDD, and it will have a $10bn reserve as collateral.
🌍 Binance is limiting its service for Russian nationals, customers living in Russia and companies established in Russia in response to the EU’s new fifth sanctions package.
Traditional Banking 🏦
🇪🇺 SocGen has launched an accelerator program for startups that are innovating in the trade finance and transaction banking space.
🇪🇺 Commerzbank is rumoured to have applied for a crypto licence so it can provide exchange and crypto-asset services.
🇬🇧 Nationwide is streamlining the card dispute process after seeing an increase of over 250% during Covid.
🇬🇧 TSB has warned customers against an increase in impersonation fraud.
🇬🇧 Santander is shortening the opening hours of branches and moving to an appointment only model during the afternoons.
Fintech Infrastructure 🚧
🇪🇺 Core banking provider Mambu released some numbers of the weekend and reported 2020 revenue of €31.3m and gross profit of €14.5m giving a gross margin of 46%.
🇪🇺 Neobroker Trade Republic is switching its customers settlement accounts away from Solarisbank to Deutsche Bank.
🇬🇧 Core banking software provider Finastra has teamed up with EcoTree to provide banks a way to remove the carbon footprint associated with running its software.
Payments 💰
🇪🇺 Digital payments fintech TerraPay has secured a US money service licence in the US to support its cross-border payments infrastructure.
🌍 Stripe has hired James Phillips, from Microsoft, as its president of financial services.
Regulatory Corner 🔎
🇬🇧 The PRA is to increase its levy on financial firms by £24m so it can keep up with the pace of innovation and hire more staff.
🇬🇧 The FCA have successfully secured a £2m account forfeiture against QPay.
Longer reads 📜
Acceptance Hurdles - Tom Noyes
Central Bank Digital Identity - Dave Birch
Dune: The Data Must Flow - Mario Gabriele
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