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.

🇪🇺SMB lender SME Finance raised a €100m credit facility from Fasanara Capital.

🇪🇺 Embedded finance platform Prestatech raised a €4m Series A led by CDP Venture Capital.

🇪🇺Asset management software solution Next Gate Tech raised a €8m round from Volta Ventures, Expon Capital, NewAlpha Asset Management and others.

🌍 PhonePe has raised an additional $100m, part of a broader effort to complete a $1bn funding round.

🌍 Prime broker Clear Street raised a $270m Series B extension from NextGen Venture Partners, Belvedere Capital Partners, IMC, Walleye Capital and others.

🌍 Digital identity provider ID.me raised a $132m Series D led by Viking Global Investors and also included and others.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇪🇺 Investment platform Econos is closing after a run in with Bafin.

🇬🇧 Puulse, an advance payment app for gig workers has launched in the UK and Europe to help workers smooth out their income.

🇬🇧Monzo has partnered with Plaid in the US that will allow the neobanks US customers to connect their accounts to fintech apps via Plaid's network.

🌍 Robinhood is to pay $10m in penalties for operational and technical failures due to outages in 2020.

🌍 The US Small Business Administration is to allow new nonbank lenders to its 7(a) loan program, a huge boost for fintechs wanting to lend SMBs up to $5m through which the SBA provides some level of guarantees.

Digital Assets ₿

🇬🇧 The Bank of England has started to recruit for its Britcoin unit.

🌍 OpenSea relaunched its Pro service as Gem as it attempts to recoup lost market share from Blur which launched a tiered token incentive structure.

🌍 A damning report on the operations of bankrupt FTX from FTX CEO was submitted with the bankruptcy court in Delaware. The exchange was reported to have recovered over $7bn in assets and is considering relaunching the exchange.

🌍 The US government has pointed to the use of DeFi to transfer and launder criminal proceeds by North Korea, cybercriminals and ransomware attackers.

🌍 Ripple is working with the Central Bank of Montenegro for a CBDC pilot.

🌍 Founder of Libra and payments head at Meta David Marcus launched Lightspark Platform, a payments solution on top of the Lightning Network.

🌍 Tron's TRX token has been delisted by Binance.US after its founder, Justin Sun, was sued by the SEC.

🌍 Ethereum completed its Shanghai upgrade this week which would allow withdrawals of staked ether and finish the transition to a PoS network.

🌍 Twitter is to offer crypto and share trading through a new partnership with eToro.

🌍 The IMF is to publish a handbook to guide countries that want to create a CBDC.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇪🇺Soc Gen is partnering with payment provider Lemonway to offer the fintechs payments services to its corporate clients.

🇪🇺 Deutsche Bank is shutting down its software operations in Russia.

🇬🇧NatWest is launching a program to help Ukrainian women start careers in tech.

🇬🇧 RBS has partnered with a mentoring platform to provide female entrepreneurs in Scotland with a mentor.

🇬🇧 Virgin Money is launching a digital wealth platform through a partnership with abrdn.

🇬🇧 The former chief information officer at TSB Bank has been fined £80,000 for the poorly executed IT migration in 2018 that saw customers locked out of their accounts.

🌍 JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has hailed AI as "groundbreaking" and said the bank has 300 use cases in production already.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇪🇺 Core banking provider Mambu has expanded its partnership with Orange Bank to launch in France

🇬🇧Moneyhub is offering its APIs on Amazon's marketplace to help businesses leverage open banking.

🇬🇧 Finastra and Anapaya have partnered to offer banks in Switzerland access to SSFN, a secure communication network.

🌍 Plaid is to launch Instant Payouts, a real-time payout solution to send funds instantly, anytime using the RTP rails.

Payments 💰

🇬🇧 Payment gateway Cardstream Group launched its PayFac-as-a-service product.

🇬🇧Marketplace payment provider Ryft secured a FCA licence and will expand its team and service to compete with Stripe.

🌍 India has expanded the functionality of UPI to allow banks to issue credit lines.

🌍 PayPal has added Apple Pay as a payment option at checkout for SMBs.

🌍 Walmart is suing Capital One in an attempt to end its credit card partnership for failing to live up to its customer care standards. It wants its new fintech company One to be involved.

🌍 Visa is launching Visa+, an interoperable P2P payments network by partnering with different P2P apps such as PayPal, Western Union, Tabapay, i2c and DailyPay. It will not require a use of a Visa card but instead a payment address linked to a Venmo or PayPal account.

🌍 Whatsapp is finally launching PIX payments in Brazil.

🌍 As of July, Mastercard will be adding a $0.02 for its "Authorization Optimizer" service when enhanced intelligence is used.  The fee will apply to all CNP transactions that decline due to NSF.

Longer reads 📜

• Open banking in the age of AI - Marc Siewert, Klarna Kosma
• The future of BaaS - Simon Taylor
• Disintermediating traditional banking, in real-time - Shubhang Jani
• Monerium: a new generation of on/off-ramp - Giorgio Giuliani

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See you next week!