Weekly Fintech Newsletter | 2021 #41
BLOG
REPORT
The report recommendation of the week belongs to CFTE and their Fintech Job Report. According to CFTE’s research, the top 225 Fintech Unicorns, companies whose valuation exceed $1 billion, employ more than 300,000 individuals worldwide.
If Fintech was a city, it would only be surpassed by New York and London in terms of number of employees.
👉 Read more here.
ARTICLE
Account-to-Account payments (or Online Banking Payments) that use a consumer’s bank login to authenticate the user is a natural progression for multichannel purchases in a post-pandemic world.
For example, if someone wants to buy something online and pick it up in-store, flexibility when it comes to payments is crucial. This is also the case if goods are delivered to your home and you pay for what you keep, or for more experiential retail where different services in-store can be accessed.
👉 Read more here.
INSIGHTS
Building financial products from scratch is no small feat. Between navigating regulatory requirements, connecting into legacy systems, and building rules engines/ledgers, it can take large teams years to get a basic product off the ground. To address this, a category of infrastructure companies have emerged that are abstracting away the complexities on the back end to power financial experiences.
This post by Emily Man, Redpoint Ventures, covers the types of financial services that are most commonly embedded as well as the corresponding types of enabling infrastructure providers that have emerged to help platforms make this shift.
👉 Read more here.
FINTECH MAPS
NOW, ON TO THE SUMMARY OF LAST WEEK'S FINTECH SPACE
FINTECH HIGHLIGHTS
What everyone needs to know about Chile’s startup scene. Link here.
🇸🇪 Klarna is gearing up to disrupt UK banking in a big way. Link here.
🇬🇧 Revolut Junior users aged between 6 and 17 will now be able to make payments using Apple Pay. Link here.
🇺🇸 MoneyLion released its first quarterly earnings as a public company. Link here.
Today, there are about 3.9 billion smartphone users worldwide (approximately 50% of the world’s population). Link here.
PAYMENTS
The European Payments Initiative, a bank-backed effort to build a rival to Mastercard and Visa in Europe, is appealing for outside funding to get the project off the ground. Link here.
🇧🇷 Nubank, one of the world's largest digital banking platforms, reinventing over 48 million customers' financial lives in Latin America, today launched an E-commerce offering in its app, through a partnership with retail brands. Link here.
🇺🇸 Amazon Inc will stop accepting 🇺🇸 Visa Inc credit cards issued in the United Kingdom from next year because of the high transaction fees charged by the payment processor, the e-commerce giant said on Wednesday. Link here.
🇲🇽 Bitso, the leading Latin American crypto exchange with more than 3 million users, has announced an integration with payment solutions from Circle to make it easier, faster, and more secure for Mexican residents to send and receive cross-border payments to or from the United States. Link here.
🇺🇸 Mastercard announced it has exceeded the 100 million digital cards milestone from its partnerships with 100 fintech companies across Latin America and the Caribbean. Link here.
London-based Fintech start-up 🇬🇧 Lightyear has partnered with Currencycloud, the experts simplifying business in a multi-currency world, to achieve their goal of removing hidden fees when investing globally. Link here.
🇵🇰 LuLu International Exchange – a leading financial services provider in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has entered into a strategic partnership with Bank Alfalah Limited, a leading bank in Pakistan, to accelerate and scale cross border remittance payments from the UAE to Pakistan through the RippleNet platform. Link here.
This morning Plug (YC S21) Pagamentos (Plug) announced a $2.7 million seed round, led by Costanoa Ventures‘ latest partner, Amy Cheetham. Other investors in the round included Verve Capital and Norte Ventures, among others. Link here.
Digital payments gateways, have a unique use case, particularly when they can help people use their basic bank accounts to make payments. Ozow is one such player. Link here.
BNPL
🇯🇵 Smartpay K.K. announced the launch of its new "Buy Now Pay Later" (BNPL) service, which combines an all-in-one payment experience and interest free payment solution, designed to solve Japanese consumer payment issues and improve merchant conversion rates. Link here.
Four months after securing a $5.25 million seed round, Mexican buy now, pay later startup 🇲🇽 Aplazo is back with an even bigger round to expand adoption of the payment plan approach across that country. Link here.
🇦🇺 Afterpay, the leading 'Buy Now, Pay Later' platform, has partnered with API-first carbon removal marketplace Patch to give U.S. consumers the tools to offset the carbon footprint of their Afterpay purchases. Link here.
OPEN BANKING
Open banking infrastructure provider 🇬🇧 Yapily has officially launched in Spain after reaching 95 percent coverage across 52 of the country’s largest banks. Link here.
European open banking leader 🇩🇰 Aiia enters collaboration with one of the most successful software technology companies in the Nordics, Netcompany. Link here.
A new partnership with Europe’s leading banking platform 🇸🇪 Tink will allow Sustainability-as-a-Service provider ecolytiq - Every transaction has an impact to serve banks, financial institutions and fintechs better. Link here.
CRYPTO
Lydia has struck a deal to offer crypto and stock trading to its 5.5 million users through a white label deal with Bitpanda. Link here.
Payments giant 🇺🇸 Square released a white paper detailing a new decentralized protocol for exchanging digital and other assets known as tbDEX. Link here.
Having both been put under the cosh by financial regulators, Binance and 🇺🇸 Ripple have now outlined their visions for how the crypto industry should be governed. Link here.
🇱🇺 Bitstamp, the world’s longest-running cryptocurrency exchange, has announced it will become the main liquidity provider for LHV Bank, which starts offering cryptocurrency trading to its customers in another sign that crypto is continuing to gain notable buy-in from traditional banking and financial services. Link here.
INVESTMENT
🇫🇷 Shares is about to be launched for consumers in the United Kingdom and, in early 2022, the investing app will be spread across the entire European market. Link here.