Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,

We’re also excited to share Make A Wish 🌟 as the official non-profit partner of this year’s Fintech Formal. Help us spread the love on 11/11 and make a wish come true! We’ve set out a $20,000 fundraising goal and I know the fintech community can help us get there: help us hit our goal by donating here.

Finch Capital’s State of European Fintech report came out highlighting a number of key takeaways below.  Check out the report in the Long Reads section.

• Number of new fintechs founded and fintech investment deals is on the decline
• Consolidation of startups is predicted
• Fintech investors have a lot of dry powder

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.

🇪🇺 French insurtech Neat raised a €10m seed round from Octopus Ventures, New Alpha, Mundi Ventures, Founders Future and angels.

🇪🇺Neobank Upgraders raised a seed round.

🇪🇺 Treasury management fintech Payflows raised a $5.5m seed round led by Ribbit Capital and Headline.

🇪🇺 Spend management platform Yokoy raised an $80m Series B.

🇪🇺Crypto and web3 incubator Uplift raised $165m from Uniswap Labs.

🇬🇧 Open banking payments company Ordo raised a £10m Series A led by Equinox Systems.

🇬🇧 Koyo secured a Series A extension of £5m equity and £100m in debt, the latter coming from Atalaya Capital and the debt from existing investors.

🇬🇧 Payments infrastructure company Paytrix raised a £5m round from Bain Capital Ventures, Hambro Perks, BTV, Fin Capital and The Fintech Fund.

🌍 Employee financial wellness platform Northstar raised $24.4m in funding from PayPal, Thomson Reuters and others.

🌍 Expense management company TripActions raised $154m in equity and $150m in debt at a $9.2bn valuation from a16z, Premji, Coatue and more.

₿ Metaverse payments company Tilia has received investment from JP Morgan.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇪🇺 Turkish neobank Paycell, from mobile operator Turkcell, is coming to Europe with Solaris as a partner.

🇪🇺 Bunq has won a landmark victory in Dutch courts against the Dutch Central Bank to allow AI and ML to conduct AML.

🇪🇺 Lemon Markets has hired former N26 head Markus Gunter.

🇬🇧 Amazon has introduced a home insurance comparison service in the UK with quotes from Ageas UK, Co-op and LV.

🇬🇧 Revolut has expanded its travel features with a new home rental service with cashback up to 4%..

Digital Assets ₿

🇪🇺 Coinbase appointed former Solaris COO Daniel Seifert as its regional director of Europe as it looks to expand in the region.

🇪🇺 N26 has launched its crypto trading service, developed with Bitpanda.

🌍 NYDIG is laying off a third of its workforce, over 100 people.

🌍 Paxos and Mastercard are partnering to help institutions offer crypto trading.

🌍 Mango Markets hacker returned $67m after outing himself.

🌍 MakerDao founders bid to break up the protocol into smaller units is not supported by investor Andreessen Horowitz.

🌍 Brazilian neobank NuBank has launched NuCoin on the Polygon blockchain, as a way to reward loyal customers and increase engagement.

🌍 JP Morgan appointed ex-Celsius head of policy as its head of digital assets regulatory policy.

🌍 Plaid announced its bringing its service to crypto wallets. Plaid Wallet Onboard will allow developers to connect web3 wallets in one simple SDK.

🌍 Mango Markets will start to refund users for its $114m hack after $67m was returned.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇪🇺 Italian investment bank Mediobanca Group has acquired two fintechs, Soisy and HeidiPay, to boost its BNPL offering.

🇬🇧 Lloyds Bank has announced a fintech “Innovation Sandbox” supported by using technology from NayaOne.

🇬🇧 HSBC has had its climate ad’s banned by the ASA due to them being misleading. The bank is also going to upgrade some databases to Oracle.

🌍 Bank of America’s AI chatbot Erica has carried out one billion client interactions across 32 million customers since 2018.

🌍 JP Morgan has rolled out a platform to connect startups with investors.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇪🇺 The ECB has delayed its T2 gross settlement system by four months to give more time for testing.

🇬🇧 Colt Technology Services has completed a trial that demonstrates the viability of hosting and distributing multicast data in the cloud for capital markets firms.

🇬🇧 Payments processor Global Processing Services (GPS) is partnering with Featurespace to add adaptive behavioural analytics to detect fraud.

🇬🇧 NatWest has partnered with Vodeno Group to launch a BaaS business in the UK.

🌍 Canada’s real-time payments system, RTR, is delayed from next summer to an unspecified date for more testing.

🌍 Green Dot has replaced its CEO.

🌍 Jack Henry and Mastercard are partnering to allow credit unions and banks to give their consumers visibility into all of their financial accounts.

🌍 Fiserv is enabling card issuers to empower cardholders with programmable payment capabilities to give increased flexibility.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺 Klarna has launched a price comparison search tool called Spotlight.

🌍 Visa and Mastercard are being probed by the FTC over its debit security tokens.

🌍 Apple Pay is reported to have a market share of 2.4% of in-store transactions in the US.

🌍 Payments company Stripe could be preparing to make redundancies with managers being asked to give lower performance review ratings.

Regulatory Corner 🔎

🌍 The CFPB has indicated that Section 1033, basically the provision in Dodd-Frank that mandates consumer access to data, will go before its review panel before the end of 2022.

🌍 The IRS has expanded its definition of “digital assets” to include NFTs.

Longer reads 📜

• JPMorgan’s BlockChase: Dallying On Blockchain And Web 3 - Whitesight
• How Fintech VCs Can Actually Be Helpful - Alex Johnson
• State of European FinTech 2022 - Finch Capital
• My fintech startup operator experience from scaling Chime - Samir Rao
• The Fintech Effect - Plaid
• Sardine: Fintech’s Great Detective - Mario Gabriele
• If you think Bitcoin Spews Carbon, Wait Till You Hear About...Banking - Bill McKibben

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