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.

🇪🇺 Solaris is rumoured to be raising €60m at the same valuation (€1.6bn) as its previous round.

🇪🇺 AI financial application vendor Flowx AI raised a $35m Series A from Day One, PortfoLion, Dawn Capital and SeedBlink.

🇬🇧 BaaS platform Manigo has come out of stealth with a $5.3m round from undisclosed investors.

🇬🇧 Insurtech Marshmallow has secured a £15m credit facility from Triple Point Private Credit.

🇬🇧 Lending software Trade Ledger received £3m from Barclays Bank and will implement its software in a three-year tech deal.

🇬🇧 Financial data platform AperiData raised £100k from Maven Capital Partners.

🌍 Digital Lender TymeBank, based in South Africa, raised $78m from Tencent.

🌍 Fintech venture firm QED raised two new funds totalling $925m.

🌍 Australian payment orchestrator Paydock raised a £25m Series A from Silverstripe Investment Management.

🌍 Bank technology provider Nymbus raised a $70m Series D led by Insight Partners.

🌍 Risk decisioning platform Ballerine raised a $5m Seed round from YC, Team8 and Equity.

₿ Open source protocol Worldcoin raised a $115m Series C led by Blockchain Capital and included a16z, Bain Capital Crypto and Distributed Global.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇪🇺 Swedish credit scoring provider Qred has been granted a full banking licence in Sweden.

🇬🇧Revolut has launched multi-currency business accounts in Australia and is looking to get a banking licence there. It has also received a Direct Credit Society licence from Brazil's Central bank allowing it to launch credit products in the country.

🇬🇧Starling Bank has launched a split payment tool to allow consumers to allocate portions of an incoming payment to different accounts. The bank's founder Anne Boden is also stepping down after the company reported record pre-tax profits of £195m.

🇬🇧 The CFO of Wise is standing down from March next year to focus on recovering from a bike accident last year.

🇬🇧 Monzo founder Tom Blomfield is moving to San Francisco to join Y Combinator as a partner leaving some departing shots for the attractiveness of the UK.

🇬🇧 Chase has announced it has 1.6m customers in the UK with £15bn in deposits after 20 months being in business. For perspective, Monzo hit 3m accounts in 24 months and it took Revolut nearly 30 months to reach 1m.

🇬🇧 Pension provider PensionBee has adopted the ViaNova industry standard for pension transfers.

🌍 The founder of student finance provider Frank has been indicted on charges of defrauding JP Morgan during its acquisition.

🌍 Venmo is launching Teen Accounts for teenagers that has a debit card and controls for parents.

🌍 LGBTQ+ neobank Daylight has shut down.

🌍 Block CEO Jack Dorsey said that its Cash App subsidiary is targeting older, higher income users to diversity its customer base.

Digital Assets ₿

🇪🇺 Bitpanda and Coinbase are partnering with Bitpanda enabling Coinbase to serve banks and fintechs outside of the US with regulated trading infrastructure and Coinbase becoming a main liquidity provider for Bitpanda.

🇬🇧 Coinbase has launched a subscription service, Coinbase One, in UK, US Germany and Ireland for zero-fee trading and higher staking for $29.99 per month.

🌍 Australian bank Westpac has banned customers sending funds to Binance in an effort to tackle crypto scam losses.

🌍 Digital Currency Group missed a $630m payment to its subsidiary Genesis last week according to crypto exchange Gemini which loaned assets to Genesis.

🌍 Ledger has paused its plans for a key recovery service after widespread backlash from the crypto community.

🌍 Reuters reported that Binance commingled customer funds and company revenue but Binance hit back on the "weak" report that was full of "conspiracy theories".

🌍 Japan is to implement strong AML rules from June which will include the "travel rule" of the FATF.

🌍 Cross-chain protocol Multichain suffered from user complains around delays causing market participants to pull liquidity from markets for its MULTI token. Binance suspended deposits for 10 bridged tokens across the Multichain network.

🌍 Bankrupt lender Celsius Network has been acquired by Fahrenheit, a consortium of crypto players.

🌍 Binance is to start lending ETH with NFTs as collateral. The US Treasury has blacklisted Binance wallets that allegedly have ties to North Korea.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇪🇺 CaixaBank has built an app that will let merchants take payments from their phones without the need for any new hardware.

🇬🇧NatWest has launched Tap to Pay on Android, allowing businesses to accept payments via Android smartphones. It has also bought back shares worth over £1.25bn from the government and is providing £1bn to support UK manufacturers' transition to net zero.

🌍 Treasury Secretary Yellen has indicated that more bank mergers may be needed.

🌍 First Citizen is suing HSBC for poaching 40 senior staff from SVB, the bank it acquired assets from.

🌍 Kuwait International Bank has partnered with Zwipe to create biometric payment cards.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇪🇺 BaaS provider Monese has launched XYB, a "coreless" banking platform.

🇬🇧Identity verification provider Onfido has acquire Airside Mobile, a identity solution for air travel.

🇬🇧 Truelayer has signed Airwallex as a customer for its A2A payments product.

🇬🇧 Stop Scams UK, a coalition of banks, telecos and tech firms has come together to tackle the growing issue of fraud.

🌍 US bank Fifth Third Bancorp has acquired BaaS provider Rize Money to grow its treasury business.

🌍 Credit scoring provider Prism Data partnered with Plaid to make it easier to underwrite consumers using bank data.

🌍 Marqeta's new CEO is to focus its go-to-market efforts on expanding into embedded finance.

🌍 Credit decisioning orchestrator Provenir secured its SOC2 audit.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺Klarna is to provide Airbnb customers flexible payment options for bookings over $500. It also reported Q1 results showing losses halved to $120m and credit losses declined more than a third.

🇪🇺Swedish payment provider Brite Payments has launched an Instant Payments Network using open banking.

🇪🇺Visa is building a tech hub in Poland and recruiting 1,500 tech and product staff.

🇪🇺 B2B payment provider Mollie is launching a POS in Belgium, Germany and Netherlands.

🇬🇧 Klarna has also introduced credit "opt out" which prevents them using Klarna Pay in 30, Pay in 3 or other Financing products to help consumers getting into debt spiral.

🇬🇧 Payment provider  Checkout.com has secured an acquiring licence in UAE.

🇬🇧 B2B BNPL provider Hokodo has partnered with payment provider Mangopay.

🌍 Stripe is to allow Airbnb guests to pay via bank account using their Financial Connections product.

🌍 Amazon has added age verification to the capabilities of Amazon One, its pay-by-palm technology.

🌍 Payment solution ACI Worldwide has enabled Swift Go, a low-value cross border real-time payments solution from Swift.

🌍 B2B payments provider Plastiq has filed for bankruptcy after a SPAC deal was aborted last year.

🌍 Stripe is to power the payments on Zara's resale platform

Regulatory Corner 🔎

🌍 Australia is introducing new rules that will put BNPL products on the same footing as credit products in order to tackle high consumer debt.

Longer reads 📜

• Is Tether a wildcat bank of Crypto Wild West? - Alex Mologoko, Elementus
• The 10-Minute Guide to Tether Reserves - Luca Prosperi

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See you next week!