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

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Tweet of the week 🦉🏆

Funding 💸

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

🇪🇺 Insurtech Wefox raised a $55m credit facility from JPMorgan and Barclays in addition to a $55m equity extension to their Series D from Squarepoint.

🇪🇺AML startup Amlyze raised a $1m pre-seed round led by Practica Capital.

🇪🇺Business planning startup Pigment raised a $70m round from Accel, Blossom Capital, Visionaries Club and ICONIQ.

🇬🇧Pension fintech Smart raises a $95m Series E.

🇬🇧Group payments startup Hands-In raised a $550,000 seed round from angels from GoCardless, FIS , Curve, PayU, Freetrade, Elavon, Pay.com, Thredd.

🌍 African fintech M-Kopa raised $195m in debt and $55m in equity from investors.

🌍 Private credit marketplace Percent raised a $29.7m Series B led by White Star Capital.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇪🇺N26 is cutting 71 staff, a 4% reduction, due to a challenging macro climate. It is also launching a savings account in Spain.

🇬🇧Former UK head of Revolut text a disgruntled customer that he would be waiting for him "'in the garden with my shotgun". The neobank is also reported to have had its UK banking licence application rejected and also offered to withdraw it.

🇬🇧 After securing its UK licence, LHV Bank is increasing the size of loans it offers to £5m.

🌍 Nubank reported quarterly results of $1.6bn in revenue and profit of just over $141m.  ARPU was $8.60 compared to a cost per active customer of $0.80. Its 80m customers have 35m active credit cards and 56m active payment accounts, 6m personal loans and 1m insurance policies.

Digital Assets ₿

🇪🇺 Estonia's new strict KYC/AML rules have seen 100 active digital asset service providers comply but nearly 400 previously authorised companies no longer meet standards.

🇪🇺 Austrian crypto exchange Bitpanda is to invest $10m into AI.

🇪🇺 France is encouraging companies fleeing the US to its shores according to the Secretary General of the AMF.

🇪🇺Ripple has acquired Swiss crypto custody provider Metaco for $250m.

🇬🇧Crypto project Sweatcoin is partnering with the NHS to help prevent diabetes by incentivising movement using crypto tokens.

🇬🇧 The UK Treasury Committee is calling for regulation on crypto which would replicate regulations for gambling in a blow to the promise of the UK becoming a major crypto hub.

🌍 Terra founder Do Kwon has been released on $436,000 bail in Montenegro.

🌍 Liquidity on Binance has been on the decline in Q1 2023 due to the US banking failures and an end to its zero-fees which has driven liquidity providers to depart according to Kaiko. Its US entity is looking into ways to reduce the influence of founder CZ.

🌍 The Ethereum network was blocked for 25 minutes last week due to a malfunction that was quickly rectified by developers.

🌍 New regulations in Canada has caused Binance to pull out of the country.

🌍 The head of the DOJ's Crypto team said that no crypto exchange is "too big to fail".

🌍 The US Chamber of Commerce threw its support behind Coinbase in its fight with the SEC, asking for "regulatory clarity". Meanwhile the SEC is seeking a court order to dismiss Coinbase's request for clarity.

🌍 Crypto hardware provider Ledger has received community backlash over its recent Ledger Recovery Service.

🌍 Tether is to put some of its profits into bitcoin, putting some upward price pressure on the crypto.

🌍 Axie Infinity, the NFT game is now available in the Apple App store in Latin America and Southeast Asia.

🌍 Ripple had a favourable federal ruling in its case against the SEC allowing documents it wants to introduce to not be sealed as the SEC wanted. It is also starting a CBDC platform.

🌍  Hong Kong is testing a e-HK CBDC pilot with 16 firms.

🌍 Stablecoin issuer Circle has switched some of its reserves to overnight repo agreements instead of US Treasury's.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇪🇺 Deutsche Bank has secured spend management provider Moss as a customer for its payments in Europe.

🌍 HSBC and Scotia Capital have received $15m and $7.5m in fines respectively from the SEC due to employees communicating about business on personal devices without their companies maintaining a record.

🌍 The FDIC proposed new rules in the wake of recent bank failures which include a ~$16bn fee on large banks to meet the cost of covering failed bank's uninsured deposits.

🌍 Citi is expanding its embedded payments offering to merchants giving them the ability to offer credit via instalment loans and lines of credit, at the POS.

🌍 Australian banks launch Fraud Reporting Exchange (FRX), a platform to report scam payments in near real-time so that funds can be frozen and returned to customers before reaching fraudsters.

🌍 Senators grilled executives from SVB and Signature Bank this week highlighting poor risk management and "stupid bets".

🌍 Bank of America is launching a fintech accelerator for underrepresented founders.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇬🇧 ComplyAdvantage have launched Fraud Detection, a transaction monitoring tool to flag popular fraud scenarios that adapts to criminal behaviours.

🌍 Payroll aggregator Atomic launched SmartAuth, an authentication engine that adapts in real-time using AI.

🌍 Payment provider Jack Henry is ready to support FedNow in July with 20 clients taking part in its early adopter program.

🌍 Corporate spend solution Ramp launched Ramp Intelligence, a set of GPT powered solutions for companies to improve their productivity.

🌍 Plaid announced it now uses APIs for Capital One, JPMorgan, USAA and Wells Fargo. The aggregator also partnered with Prism Data to support customers underwriting consumers.

Payments 💰

🇬🇧Q1 earnings from payments platform Paysafe saw a 7% increase in revenue to ~$390m due to strong growth from digital wallets and ecommerce.

🇬🇧 Money transfer provider Zepz (aka WorldRemit) is cutting over 25% of its staff, some 420 employees.

🌍 Pay by bank provider Catch is targeting to expand into in-store payments this year.

🌍 BNPL provider Sezzle reported increased volumes in Q1, with monthly revenues increasing 25% yoy.

🌍 PayPal is looking to sell its cross-border business Xoom.

🌍 Visa and Mastercard are to reduce interchange fees for small merchants in Canada.

Longer reads 📜

• How “Payment Banks” Could Prevent the Next Bank Collapse - Mihir Desai and Sumit Rajpal
• Tipping at Self-Checkout Has Customers Crying ‘Emotional Blackmail’ - Rachel Wolfe
• Vivat Charles Schwab - Marc Rubinstein
• The Rise of FTX, and Sam Bankman-Fried, Was a Great Story. Its Implosion Is Even Better. - Alexandra Alter

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See you next week!