Daily Fintech Newsletter | Mar. 18th
Hi!
In case you missed it, please see below today's most relevant fintech news.
Due to the integration between Flutterwave and Paypal, Flutterwave merchants in Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique & Senegal are able to easily accept payments from PayPal users worldwide. PayPal‘s 377 million+ users made transactions that saw PayPal end the year with a $936 billion total payment volume for the year 2020. This trillion-dollar opportunity didn’t include most African businesses until this new integration. "Africa, you’re welcome to 377 Million+ PayPal Users". Link here.
Cryptocurrency exchange Coinstash.com.au has announced hopes to leverage a multimillion-dollar raise to evolve into what they aim will become Australia’s first all-in-one cryptocurrency platform, becoming the nation’s first competitor to global names like Celsius and BlockFi. Link here.
Israeli broker, eToro, which made its name with the social trading feature, is planning for a merger with a blank-check acquisition company to publicly list its shares on Nasdaq, according to the local news agency, Calcalist. Link here.
Forward Advances, the revenue-based finance subsidiary of early-stage venture fund Forward Partners, announced a raise of £2.2m and the appointment of a new leadership team, to provide bespoke fundraising for entrepreneurs. Link here.
Perkbox, Europe’s rapidly growing ‘employee experience’ platform, has united with Zip Co to provide flexible payment solutions on shopping for employees. Link here.
Chime has held preliminary talks with investment banks about launching a stock market flotation, which could value the financial services startup at more than $30 billion, as soon as the end of 2021, people familiar with the matter told Reuters. Link here.
Online payments company Stripe has raised an additional $600 million (€502 million) with the State’s €10.5 billion sovereign wealth fund, among the investors. Link here.
French startup PayFit France has raised a $107 million Series D funding round (€90 million), led by Eurazeo Growth and Bpifrance Large Venture. Link here.
Ohpen announced the addition of Leni Boeren to its supervisory board. Boeren will join Leonard van Loon (NPM) and Michel Vrolijk (Amerborgh) to supervise Ohpen’s international growth as it brings its cloud-native combined savings, investment, and lending platform to the market. Link here.
Internet browser Opera has hired PayPal and WeChatPay veteran Allen Hu to run its recently launched fintech arm, Dify. Unveiled last month, Dify offers Opera's 50 million EU users an in-browser cashback service and digital wallet for online shopping. Link here.
This ends my Daily Fintech Newsletter. Let me know if there are any questions or news/insights worth mentioning in the next newsletter. Until the next!
Regards,
Marcel van Oost
marcelvanoost.com
My weekly newsletter
Sign up for my Weekly Digital Banking newsletter on Substack here.
My free daily newsletters
Sign up for my Daily Digital Banking newsletter here.
Co-invest alongside me in the most promising FinTech startups
Join our Angel Investors Syndicate. Link here.
Looking for funding?
If you are a startup looking for funding, sign up here.
Join our group
Do you have and use Telegram? Join our group and get the latest changes to the Fintech industry as they are happening.
Sign up to get my updates first!