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.

🇬🇧 Bank technology provider BankiFi raised a £4m round from Praetura Ventures.

🇬🇧 Connected Earth, a carbon enrichment service for financial products raised a seed round and joined the 2022 FIS Fintech Accelerator program.

🇬🇧 Fixed mortgage provider Perenna raised a $30m Series A.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇪🇺 Digital wealth manager Scalable Capital announced it has doubled client assets in the past year to €10bn.

🇪🇺 Investment app eToro is deepening its US operations through an acquisition of options trading app Gatsby for $50m.

🇬🇧 Revolut has secured crypto authorisation from the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission and will use its European hub to provide crypto services to its 17m European customers as MiCA comes into force. It also rebranded its service for 6-17 year olds as Revolut<18.

🇬🇧 Digital banks Starling and Monzo were ranked as the top personal and business bank accounts.  RBS was ranked last.

Digital Assets ₿

🇪🇺 Insolvent crypto firm Nuri has 200,000 customers not the 500,000 that it previously claimed according to its insolvency administrator

🇬🇧 The Digital Financial Market Infrastructure consortium (DFMI), a group of tech companies including IBM, Finastra and others, are running a retail CBDC pilot with a live digital sterling stablecoin.

🇬🇧 Crypto.com has secured an FCA crypto asset licence, enabling it to conduct crypto services in the UK.

🇬🇧 Robinhood is trying to renegotiate its Ziglu acquisition, reducing the valuation by 60%.

🇬🇧 Crypto onramp Ramp Network announced an off-ramp service to provide faster payouts and the ability to transact inside an application.

🌍  Founder of crypto exchange Huobi Global is looking to sell a majority stake to Tron founder Justin Sun and FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried.

🌍 Tornado Cash software developer Alexey Pertsev was arrested in Amsterdam on money laundering charges. Alexey was not an employee but a developer who contributed code to the decentralised protocol. The saga has created a lot of fears in the web3 developer community and more broadly.

🌍 MakerDao founder Rune Christensen is considering dropping the USD peg to DAI after recent US sanctions on Tornado Cash and freezing of USDC and predicts a worsening of relationships between the crypto community and US regulators.

🌍 Galaxy Digital has abandoned its plan to buy BitGo due to a missed deadline for the production of financial statements.

🌍 FTX has partnered with Paradigm to launch spread trading on the FTX platform. The crypto exchange also received a sent cease-and-desist letter from the FDIC over its deposit insurance claims.

🌍 The Ethereum merge will take place at 20:57:34 U.K. time, on Sept. 14.

🌍 The Federal Reserve has finalised its guidance for novel financial institutions to access its “master accounts” which could help crypto banks like Kraken.

🌍 Crypto lender Celsius Network has won approval from a judge to sell Bitcoin that it mines to fund operations.

🌍 Genesis Trading CEO is stepping down immediately and leaving the firm.

🌍 Coinbase CEO has said he would rather stop his firms Ethereum staking service than censor sanctioned transactions by the government. A study of insider trading found suspicious trading in 10%-25% of new crypto listings.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇪🇺 Allianz has been told by its regulator BaFin to improve its internal controls after a fraud scandal in the US.

🇪🇺 ABN Amro’s payment app Tikkie can now handle bill splitting and group expenses for its 8m users.

🇪🇺 Some Benelux banks are pushing to have their Payconiq mobile payments subsidiary included in the European Payments Initiative.

🇬🇧 Barclaycard is joining BT’s partnership network to support small businesses.

🇬🇧 NatWest announced its open banking payments tool Payit has processed £1bn.

🇬🇧 Barclays is closing another 18 branches, taking its total to 178 this year.

🇬🇧 Lloyds completed the first transaction using a digital promissory note through a partnership with Enigio.

🌍 Emirates NBD is partnering with Microsoft and Dubai International Financial Centre to run a metaverse accelerator.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇬🇧 Payment services provider Modulr has signed up crypto app Nebeus to issue cards.

🌍 WebBank is to become an issuer for Amex as the payments network seeks to expand its cards issued.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺 Klarna is to allow UK customers to view all online orders on its app, regardless if they used Klarna to make the purchase, by scraping data from email accounts.

🇪🇺 Shares in Adyen dropped nearly 15% after it reported results 3% below estimates, taking the stock down 30% this year.  Volumes were up 60% yoy but increased costs mean lower profit margins.

🇬🇧 Payment implant startup Walletmor announced it has sold 1,000 biopolymer devices that are implanted under the skin.

🇬🇧 Super, the payments app from Funding Circle founder Samir Desai has opened up a waitlist.

🌍 Retailers are said to be angry at the 3% price for them to accept Mastercard Installments with retailers expecting to unenroll from the program they were automatically enrolled into.

🌍 BigCommerce has expanded its partnership with Affirm, allowing the eCommerce platforms merchants to use Affirm’s adaptive checkout BNPL product.

Longer reads 📜

• Family Fortunes - Marc Rubinstein
• The Future of NFTs, Part 1 - JPizzolato
• Women in Fintech Industry Research - FT Partners
• Aggregation as a Web3 Identity Stop-Gap - Jared Franklin
• The reinvention of Goldman Sachs: what has David Solomon achieved - Joshua Franklin, FT
• A PFM App by Any Other Name - Alex Johnson
• The fintech infrastructure landscape and four predictions for the future - Luca Bocchio and Richard Kotite
• The Fintech Obsession with Virtual Accounts - Daniel Cronin
• What I miss about working at Stripe - Brie Wolfson

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See you next week!