Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,

Nik Milanovic, founder of the This Week in Fintech organisation and all round fintech guru launched, The Fintech Fund this week, an early-stage community investment fund.

The fund will be a $10m fund ‘by fintech people, for fintech people’ and has raised $4 million to date from notable investors including Sheel Mohnot and Jake Gibson of Better Tomorrow Ventures, Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures, and Stephany Kirkpatrick of Orum.io.

For more details, read more about it at Tech Crunch and reach out to fund@thisweekinfintech.com.

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

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Want to be a This Week in Fintech - UK & Europe sponsor? Reach out to me at michael@thisweekinfintech.com, find me on Twitter and see our sponsorship information here.

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💼 Open Role Spotlight

Come find your place on the team at the most inspiring fintech startups! Browse open roles on This Week in Fintech’s job board.

Funding 💸

There were 22 deals in the fintech space across the UK and Europe since the last post, with a total investment of $872m. Some highlights are below.

🇪🇺 Greek payments platform Viva Wallet has sold a 49% stake to JPMorgan.

🇪🇺 Core banking provider Tuum raised a €15m Series A led by Portage Ventures and included BlackFin and Karma Ventures.

🇪🇺 ID platform Veriff raised a $100m Series C led by Tiger Global and also included Accel, Alkeon and IVP.

🇪🇺 German insurer Wefox raised CHF 800m from undisclosed investors.

🇬🇧 Everything has raised €2m round from angel investors to reinvent premium bonds.

🇬🇧 GoCardless raised $192m from JP Morgan Chase Strategic Investments at a $1bn valuation.

🌍 ConsenSys is in talks to raise new funds at double the valuation from November 2021 despite the current market conditions.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇪🇺 Vanguard looks set to launch its robo advisor service in Germany.

🇬🇧 Tide announced it has 7% market share of UK SMEs with nearly 400,000 members, adding 100,000 in 2021.

🇬🇧 Huawei is partnering with Curve to circumvent US restrictions preventing them using Google’s Android software.

🇬🇧 Monzo looks to be expanding into the wealth management space with its job posting for a general manager for investments.

🇬🇧 Wise announced its Auto Conversion feature, allowing a user to automatically convert money between 24 supported currencies at a desired exchange rate.

🇬🇧 Moneyfarm has sold a minority stake to M&G on the back of an impressive 72% increase in AUM and 128% increase in customers in 2021 (£2.2bn and 80,000 respectively). The two also signed a partnership to launch a new UK digital investment service under the M&G name.

🌍 Walmart’s fintech business Hazel has acquired Even Responsible Finance and One Finance as it seeks to build a super app.

Digital Assets ₿

🇪🇺 German savings bank officials have spoken out against previously reported plans to introduce crypto for their customers.

🇬🇧 Co-founder of LendInvest, Christian Faes, has set up a crypto mining business in Texas to be powered by renewables.

🌍  Crypto’s environmental impact has been discussed by the US Energy and Commerce Committee.

🌍  Twitter will now verify NFT profile pictures and place a hexagon around it for Twitter Blue subscribers.

🌍 Bloomberg reported that Meta is looking to sell its stablecoin project Diem’s assets, with the WSJ reporting a price of $200m to Silvergate Capital.

🌍 The IMF is urging El Salvador to stop its Bitcoin experiment due to its large risks.

🌍 MoonPay has released an NFT checkout solution for credit cards.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇪🇺 Santander has launched Zinia, a BNPL service in Germany.

🇪🇺 UBS has snapped up Wealthfront for $1.4bn.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇬🇧 Thought Machine have signed Al Rajhi Bank Malaysia as a customer for building Shariah-compliant financial products.

🇬🇧 Fintech infrastructure platform Modulr has been granted a Dutch EMI license, allowing it to expand its services across Europe.

🇬🇧 Financial infrastructure fintech TrueLayer is expanding to Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Portugal.

🌍 Plaid settled a US lawsuit for obtaining more financial data than was needed and is paying $58m to impacted users whilst admitting no wrongdoing.  It also announced Plaid Portal, a tool to see which apps consumers have connected their financial accounts with.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺 Klarna has launched its physical card in the UK with a “Pay in 30” offering, mimicking credit card functionality.  It also launched new savings accounts in Germany.

🇪🇺 UniCredit Bank is partnering with Nexi to bring mobile phone POS technology to its merchants.

🇬🇧 Barclaycard confirmed over 90% of all eligible credit and debit transactions in 2021 were contactless with the total amount spent increasing 40%.  Average number of transactions were 180 for a total spend of £2,293 (average tx £12.74)

🇬🇧 The Payment Systems Regulator has outlined new rules to boost competition in the card acquiring space requiring providers to be more transparent with pricing, a standard of messaging to make it easy for comparing and reducing switching costs.

🌍 Australian BNPL company Zip is in talks to acquire US rival Sezzle.

🌍 Apple is set to enable any iPhone to become a POS with its acquisition in 2020 of Mobeewave in the coming months according to Bloomberg.

🌍 Affirm announced the Affirm SuperApp alongside a new browser extension, providing consumers a one-stop shop into spending, cashback, savings and payments.

🌍 Stripe and Spotify are partnering to enable podcasters to accept payments.

Regulatory Corner 🔎

In collaboration with Kat Cloud

🇪🇺 The ECB is to run climate risk stress tests on banks to determine how prepared they are for financial shocks caused by global warming.

Longer reads 📜

• 2021 Annual Fintech Almanac - FT Partners
• Interchange is going towards 0 - Tom Noyes
• How Binance, Coinbase and 22 other exchanges handle your data - Anna Baydakova
• Helium ($HNT) Could Be a Generational Investment - MoneroMahesh
• Multiplayer Fintech — A Year Later - Braid
• Why a social media platform will win the digital wallet war - Nik Milanovic
• How Financial Technology Is Making It Easier to Donate to Charities - Demetria Gallegos
• Crypto wallets as the new bank account - Joe Pizzolato

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See you next week!