Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,

Please find another week of fintech news, financings and exits below.

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Funding 💸

Highlights below of deals since the last post in the fintech space across the UK & Europe.

🇪🇺 Payment startup Ivy raised a $20m Series A which included Valar Ventures.

🇪🇺 Cyber insurance provider Dattak raised a €11m Series A from XAnge, Breega and Bpifrance.

🌍 Latam FX fintech Rextie has received debt investment from Citi.

🌍 Cross-border payment platform LemFi raised a $33m Series A led by Left Lane Capital.

🌍 Lighter Capital has secured a $130 debt facility from Atlas, i80, iPartners and the Victorian Government.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇬🇧LHV Bank has completed the transfer of its business from its Estonia affiliate to its new UK licensed banking entity. It also partnered with Raisin to enter the competitive personal savings market.

🇬🇧Metro Bank and Atom Bank co-founder Anthony Thompson is launching a new acceleration partner to help fintechs scale up.

🇬🇧Consumer lending marketplace Freedom Finance has rebranded to Aro.

🇬🇧 Digital wealth manager Moneyfarm announced its AUM hit £3.5bn.

🌍 A top court in Massachusetts ruled against Robinhood and asserted that it has a fiduciary duty of care and loyalty to its customers as a broker-dealer.

🌍 Spend management solution Rho has acquired Capital, a banking and fundraising platform.

Digital Assets ₿

🇪🇺 Officials from the Bank of Spain said the ECB must assess the impact of a digital euro on banks before launching.

🇪🇺 Crypto trading solution Hyphe received a German licence from Bafin.

🌍 Mastercard has scrapped its crypto partnership with Binance.

🌍 Prime Trust CEO admitted to losing $6m in client funds and $2m in its own treasury due to investing in terraUSD.

🌍 The US Treasury has proposed new tax reporting for crypto exchanges and payment processors, requiring them to report new information to crackdown on citizens not paying taxes.

🌍 The SEC has settled with Impact Theory for $6m over the sale of its NFTs which the SEC deemed "unregistered securities".

🌍 A Federal Reserve supervisory letter as outlined the process for member banks to use stablecoins.

🌍 Digital Currency Group has reached a deal with creditors of Genesis to resolve claims and provide recoveries of 70%-90%.

🌍 Grayscale won an appeal against the SEC's decision to block Grayscale's spot bitcoin ETF application and has ordered a review. The SEC has delayed a decision on spot bitcoin ETF's until October.

🌍 Crypto onramp solution MoonPay has created a venture division to fund fintechs and web3 startups.

🌍 Financial messaging network Swift has successfully completed a blockchain pilot facilitating the transfer of tokenized value across public and private blockchains.

🌍 Binance is to end its support for BUSD stablecoin after US regulators put it in their crosshairs.

🌍 Robinhood's on-chain activity looks to show that its crypto offering is no longer powered by Jump Trading. The neobroker also bought back its stake once owned by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇪🇺 The Central Bank of Ireland has admitted it incorrectly held personal credit histories for people longer than allowed, making it harder for them to get loans.

🇬🇧 NatWest and UK Finance are creating an ISO 20022 "ideathon" to explore the applications of the new messaging standard.

🌍 Goldman Sachs has sold Personal Financial Management unit to Creative Planning as it exits the mass-market retail bank space. The financial institution also received a warning over its risk and compliance of its fintech unit.

🌍 Bank of America is launching its Global Digital Disbursements technology and "Request for Pay" in Canada via Interac.

🌍 JP Morgan has increased its stake in C6, a Brazilian digital bank, from 40% to 46%.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🌍 Fiserv is partnering with Akoya through a new data sharing agreement. Fiserv will get direct access to consumer data via API through Akoya's network and Akoya will use Fiserv to access consumer data from nearly 3,000 FIs.

🌍 MSCI is extending its partnership with Google Cloud to develop gen AI services for its investment customers.

🌍 Online bank USAA has secured a licensing agreement with Discover over its remote deposit capture patents as it seeks to enforce its intellectual property more stringently.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺A2A payment solution Trustly acquired A2A recurring payment firm SlimPay for €70m.

🇪🇺 Klarna is using ChatGPT Enterprise internally for their day to day work. It also reported its first profitable month and halved losses. GMV +14% yoy to $21.8bn and revenues were +17% in Q2.

🇬🇧 Open banking payments increase over 9% MoM according to data from Open Banking Limited. 11.4m payments were made in July with the majority being one-off domestic payments for "account top-ups, bill payments or e-commerce".

🌍 Affirm reported GMV +25% (to $5.5bn) with virtual card and Affirm Card GMV +37% yoy (Affirm Card had 300,000 active customers) and total active consumers were +18% to 16.5m.

🌍 The WSJ reported that Visa and Mastercard are to increase both interchange and network fees for credit card in October.

🌍 The Fed reported the charge-off rate for consumer loans was 2% at the end of Q2, up from 1.1% yoy, indicating pressure in consumer debt.

🌍 Shopify and Amazon are partnering to allow merchants using Shopify's ecommerce tools to utilise Amazon's logistics network and have access to "Buy with Prime".

🌍 Venmo is partnering with Hallmark to improve cash gifting using cards.

🌍 X (FKA Twitter) has secured 7 MTL licences in the past month. It also changed its privacy policy to allow it to collect biometric data.

🌍 A security hole in the New York subway's system let any user see 7 days of rider history just by entering their card number.

Regulatory Corner 🔎

🌍 The CFPB has proposed a $2.7bn settlement with credit repair firms after a court ruled they illegally collected advance fees via telemarketing in violation of federal law.

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Longer reads 📜

• Lessons Learned #1 - Nik Milanovic
• $ADYEN's free fall - PART1 - Govro12
• What’s Next for FedNow - David Haber, Angela Strange, Seema Amble, Joe Schmidt, Marc Andrusko, and Gabriel Vasquez , a16z
• Lending business equation for your startup - Rohit Mittal

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See you next week!