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Happy Holidays (Plus: 2024 In Review)

Hello Fintech Friends,

👋 Welcome to the 3,000+ new readers who’ve joined us since last week. You’re joining 150,000+ other friends, colleagues, and subscribers building the future of financial services.

📈 We had a great 2024 – TWIF grew from 80k subscribers to 150k+, we doubled the size of our Slack community, and we crossed 100+ cities with TWIF events. And we're still just getting started; be on the lookout for a big announcement in Jan.

🎄If you're here on the free plan, consider giving yourself an early new year's gift with a TWIF Premium plan. TWIF Premium gives you access to our full Signals archive, with weekly deep-dives into products and companies, monthly public markets updates, CEO interviews, and more.

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📸 Our photos and aftermovie from last week's Fintech Formal are now out – see how good you look:

I want to give everyone an inbox break for the holidays, so this will be my last writeup of 2024.

Five years ago in December 2019, I wrote Fintech’s next decade will look radically different. I made a few predictions about fintech's defining features in the 2020s, writing that fintech would:

Be portable and interoperable: Like mobile phones, customers will be able to easily transition between ‘carriers’.
Become more ubiquitous and accessible: Basic financial products will become a commodity and bring unbanked participants ‘online’.
Move to the background: The users of financial tools won’t have to develop 1:1 relationships with the providers of those tools.
Centralize into a few places and steer on ‘autopilot’.

Some of those were on-point, some we're wildly off. We're now at the halfway mark, so in January I'll check in on those predictions and adjust / revise / add some for the next half decade.

No time to read today's newsletter? Give it a listen here instead:

This Week in Fintech - 2024 Year in Review

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Here's the run-down of what happened in fintech in 2024:

January

The first bitcoin ETFs were proposed, the IRS announced a free competitor to TurboTax, Binance settled with US authorities, Circle filed a confidential S-1 and Kaspi set terms for their IPOs, Apple opened up NFC payments, and Bilt raised $200 million.

February

Apple passed $10B in user deposits, FIS sold off its $35B WorldPay acquisition, Capital One and Discover announced a $35B mega-merger, and Monzo leaked its £350M raise at a £4B valuation.

March

Webull announced a $7B SPAC, Nubank became profitable, Mastercard and AmEx got into open banking with new product launches, Marqeta issued $1B in a day and Stripe and Adyen both processed over $1T in annual payments, Uzum became Uzbekistan's first unicorn, Mastercard and Visa settled (or so we thought) with merchants on their fees, and Africa's Moove raised a $100M Series B.

April

Canada's Nuvei got taken private by Advent International for $6.3B, we launched our Generative AI in Financial services report with Visa, Santander brought its neobank to the US and Mexico, Revolut received its Mexican banking license, Mercury passed 100,000 startup customers, and Stripe issued a tender offer at a $65B valuation.

May

Chime crossed $1.5B in ARR with over 7M customers, Brazil's PIX hit 150M regular users with over $400B in monthly payments, Nubank reached 100M customers, Mercury passed 200,000 customers, FIS rolled out it BaaS product Atelio, Visa and JPMorgan partnered on Visa Direct payments, Auditboard got acquired for $3B, Google launched fraud and scam protection, and India proposed its own digital currency.

June

Capital One partnered with Adyen and Stripe to launch direct data share, Apple annnounced tap-to-cash NFC phone payments, Robinhood bought crypto exchange Bitstamp for $200M in cash, Alphasense raised $650M at $4B, Visa crossed 10B tokens issued since inception, Mastercard launched its "Mastercard for Fintechs" program, and BaaS platform Synapse began to melt down, bringing its banking partner Evolve with it.

July

Revolut shot past £1.8B in annual revenue with £438M in profit and, at long last, received its UK banking license, Goldman launched its own internal Gen AI, BVNK rolled out self custody for stablecoins, Blackrock bought Preqin for $3.2 billion to get into private markets, Bain Capital took financial data giant Envestnet private at $4.5B, Citigroup got hit with $136M of fines, and JP Morgan mulled over charging for checking accounts.

August

Bridge partnered with Coinbase to let users deposit fiat to their crypto wallets, Revolut brought cash deposits to the UK, Bilt raised a $150M extension at $3.25B, BNP Paribas got into alternative assets with its €5.1B Axa SA acquisition, Monzo hit 10M users, Google Wallet launched support for drivers' licenses, the FDIC contemplated new rules for brokered deposits, and Klarna passed $66 million in adjusted operating profit for H1 and picked banks for its upcoming IPO.

September

Payroll platform Oyster became a unicorn, Mercado Libre got into banking in Mexico, Plaid partnered with PNC on data access, Revolut passed 10M British users, Visa acquired fraud-prevention firm Featurespace for close to $1B, Paylocity agreed to acquire corporate spend startup Airbase for $325M, and TBC Bank – launched by the ex-Tinkoff team – made it to Uzbekistan.

October

BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank, and Worldine, partnered to launch wero, a European payments network and digital wallet meant to challenge Visa and Mastercard, JP Morgan and the BIS announced blockchain projects, SWIFT sent over 5B payment messages in the year, Visa launched a new stablecoin-as-a-service platform to help banks issue and manage fiat-backed tokens, Yellow Card passed $3B in African crypto volume, and Stripe acquired stablecoin provider Bridge for over $1B.

November

Brazilian neobank giant Nubank announced its own mobile plan, more Indian fintechs started acquiring banks for their licenses, Coinbase partnered with Visa on real-time crypto deposits via Visa Direct, Affirm launched a payment card, Mexican fintech Klar announced a targeted 2026 IPO, ServiceTitan filed for its end-of-year IPO, and India's PayU announced plans for a 2025 IPO.

December

Debanking became the hot topic in fintech, Google filed a lawsuit against the CFPB, Ripple won approval from the New York DFS to launch its own stablecoin, Walmart-owned fintech platform One raised $300M at a $2.5B pre-money valuation, Brigit was acquired for $460M, and ServiceTitan raised over $600M in a last-minute end-of-year IPO at a $6.5B valuation.

Let's see what next year has in-store...

I'll be on my honeymoon and very offline for the next few weeks, so enjoy the new year and see you in 2025!

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

(👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know! Find me at @nikmilanovic, @twifintech, and @ndm)

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🏦 Financial Services & Banking

Visa Direct to Deliver Faster Bank Transfers in a Minute or Less: Visa announced enhancements to its Visa Direct service, enabling bank transfers to be completed in under a minute. This development aims to improve the speed and efficiency of digital payments for consumers and businesses.

Vanguard wealth management restructuring: Vanguard is carving out its $900bn wealth and advice business into a separate unit to speed investment and meet rising demand.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

CardFlight Announces New SwipeSimple Feature Enabling Faster Checkout with Saved Cards-on-File: CardFlight introduced a new feature in its SwipeSimple platform that allows merchants to offer quicker checkouts by saving customers' card information on file.

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📰 Other News

JuicyWay Processes Over $1B in Cross-Border Payments: An African payments startup specializing in stablecoins processed over $1 billion in cross-border payments, growing by word-of-mouth.

Hyperliquid Sees Over $1 Billion USDC Net Inflows Since Token Launch: Hyperliquid, a defi exchange, experienced net inflows exceeding $1 billion in USDC following the launch of its token.

SEC Approves Crypto Wallet Maker Exodus to List on NYSE American After Denying It in May: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) granted approval for Exodus, a cryptocurrency wallet provider, to list its shares on the NYSE American exchange.

Bitso Surpasses $12 Billion in Transactions in 2024: Bitso, a crypto exchange operating in Latin America, announced that it processed over $12 billion in transactions in 2024 – 90% year-over-year growth.

FSOC Says Financial Landscape Unprepared for Increasing FinTech, Crypto Influence: The Financial Stability Oversight Council expressed concerns that the current financial system is not adequately prepared to handle the growing influence of fintech and cryptocurrency sectors. The council emphasizes the need for regulatory updates to address potential risks associated with these rapidly evolving industries.

I say it's time to trash the store-of-value function of money, which is a meaningless, unhelpful, and redundant concept.

The defining functions of money are unit-of-account and medium-of-exchange.

👉 https://t.co/3ecldLr74c
— John Paul Koning (@jp_koning) December 13, 2024

FTX and its affiliated debtors today announced that its court-approved Chapter 11 plan of reorganization will become effective on January 3, 2025, with the first distribution expected to occur within 60 days of the effective date.

FTX also announced today that it has entered… pic.twitter.com/0QqZYImBIG
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) December 16, 2024

🤝 Partnership Corner

Standard Chartered Inks Reserve Management Deal for Paxos Stablecoins: Standard Chartered entered into an agreement to provide cash management, trading, and custody services for Paxos-issued stablecoins, including Global Dollar (USDG) and Lift Dollar (USDL).

Morgan Stanley Selects Wise Platform to Enhance Payments Capabilities for Corporate Clients: Morgan Stanley partnered with Wise to offer high-speed cross-border settlement services to its corporate clients.

Zero Hash*, Stripe, Circle, and Remote Partner on Payouts: Remote, the company that lets you hire people and manage contractors all around the world, is introducing crypto payouts on Tuesday powered by a group of fintech and stablecoin providers.

👎 The Bad News

One guarantee with the TomoCredit story: If it can get weirder, it will.

TomoCredit, a fintech startup offering credit-building services, is facing increasing challenges, including a lawsuit alleging trademark infringement and unfair competition. (The whole story is great, read Jason Mikula's summary here of how Tomo entirely fabricated their prior use of a trademarked term.) Additionally, major credit bureaus—Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax—have reportedly ceased their data partnerships with the company, blocking its ability to report credit lines and affecting its credit-building offers – even though it is still marketing these to users. But instead of remedying the issues, the company is going on a PR blitz to cover them up.

💸 Venture Financing

Nubank invested $150 million in South African neobank Tyme Group's Series D, valuing the company at $1.5 billion and elevating it to unicorn status.
Parafin, an embedded lender, raised $100 million in a funding round, increasing its valuation to $750 million.
BVNK, a stablecoin infrastructure provider, raised $50 million at a valuation around $750 million.
Basis*, an AI startup specializing in accounting automation, raised $34 million in a Series A.
Bureau, an anti-fraud platform, secured $30 million in a Series B round as global fraud losses hit $486 billion.
Anatomy raised $19 million to develop a digital lockbox for health care financial data, offering secure storage and management of patient information.
One Card secured $25.5 million in funding to expand its credit solutions in India.
Volume raised a $6 million seed round to strengthen its account-to-account payments platform amid increasing market demand.
Leap Financial AI raised $3.5 million for its cross-border payments platform using artificial intelligence.
Symmio, a Singaporean provider of a decentralized derivatives protocol, raised $3.1 million in funding to develop its technology solutions and expand its customer base.
Juicyway secured $3 million in pre-seed funding to create efficient cross-border payment systems using stablecoins.
Yei Finance, a defi investing protocol, completed a $2 million seed round.
StablR, a European stablecoin provider, received an investment from stablecoin issuer Tether.

And Tether – the stablecoin issuer with a $140 billion market cap and $7.7 billion in annual profits – plans to invest up to $3 billion in 2025 across artificial intelligence, finance, biotech, education and mining.

☯️ Exits

💻 IPOs & SPACs

American neobank giant Chime submitted a confidential filing for IPO. The company was last valued at $25 billion in 2021, has raised $2.65 billion to-date, and has 7 million customers (and 18 million app downloads).
Aye Finance, a lender backed by Alphabet targeting small- and medium-sized businesses in India, is seeking to raise $171 million from its initial public offering, it disclosed in a filing Tuesday. It is currently valued at around $400 million.

🤝 M&A - Fintech

Thunder Bridge Capital Partners IV completed a business combination with Coincheck Group, forming a public entity focused on advancing cryptocurrency exchange services.
Paystone, a Canadian fintech, acquired Ackroo for $21 million to strengthen its payments and loyalty solutions offerings in North America.
FIS agreed to acquire supply chain finance provider Demica in a $300 million deal, aiming to expand its corporate treasury solutions portfolio.
Shift4 acquired UK paytech Card Industry Professionals, enhancing its European market reach and expanding its payment processing capabilities.
Crypto.com purchased UAE-based brokerage Orion, increasing its presence in the Middle East and diversifying its financial services.

🏦 M&A - Bank and FinServ

Insignia Financial, an Australian investment management company, rejected a $17 billion takeover bid from Bain Capital, citing undervaluation and strategic misalignment.