Hi fintech friends, I'm Osborne, investor in early stage startups.

Miss me? 😄 I've been off for the past month for personal reasons, but glad to be back.

Please enjoy all the news and updates from the past week in today’s edition. If you feel TWIF brings you value, please share it with your friends (and maybe suggest they subscribe too).

🧐🏆 Posts of the Week

(Note: Neither TWIF nor I endorse any views in the tweets highlighted above.)

🇮🇳 India

📰 Market Updates

1. RBI's regulations for credit card bill payments via Bharat Bill Payments System came into effect on 1st July 2024, while HDFC, Axis, IDFC First and others were still not integrated into BBPS.
2. Indian fintech startups raised a total of $587mn in Jun, 2024.
3. Open Network for Digital Commerce is partnering with Banks to launch unsecured personal loan products on the network.
4. Paytm Payments Bank and its external auditor disputed over the business viability and have sought RBI's intervention.
5. The Global Basel Committee on banking supervision met to make amendments to its cryptoasset standards and disclosure framework for banks exposures.
6. NPCI launched UPI QR Payment acceptance across UAE.
7. Niva Bupa Health Insurance submitted its draft IPO prospectus to raise INR 3,000cr ($360mn) from the public.
8. IndiaFirst Life Insurance announced deferring its IPO "if it's able to consistently achieve growth that's higher than the industry's pace".
9. Per reports, half a dozen startups building stock gaming/simulation products have shut down their services since SEBI introduced the circular banning sharing live stock price data with thrid-party apps.

🚀 Product Launches

1. Flipkart launched Super.Money, a payments app.
2. Tifin, a US wealth management company, launched MyFi, an AI chat for retail investment guidance.
3. Paytm launched Health Saathi Plan, a health insurance product for its merchant partners.
4. SBI Bank launched a web-based invoice financing platform for small businesses.

📝 Regulatory Updates

1. SEBI (securities): Released a notification for the licensed stock market participants to maintain "True to Label" charges and introduce uniform and fixed fee across all market participants instead of slab-based charges.
2. RBI (central bank): Joined Project Nexus, a BIS project, along with central banks of 5 other Southeast Asian countries, to launch P2P and P2M cross border payments across the countries.

💰 Financing Announcements

1. Dice, a spend management startup, raised $5mn.

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🌏 Asia

📰 Market Updates

1. Fintech funding in Southeast Asia in H1 2024 was $899mn, the lowest funds raised in th past three years and 25% lower than in H1 2023.
2. SBI Group in Japan partnered with Kyobo, a Korean life insurance company, to launch tokenisation products in Japan.
3. Curlec, a Razorpay company in Malaysia, partnered with Seedflex, a Malaysian business loan startup, to launch loan advance product for Curlec's merchants.
4. Financial institutions in Asia Pacific are facing a skill gap of 2.5mm to combat cyber threats, according to a report by S&P Global Ratings.
5. TymeBank, a Singapore headquartered digital bank for South Africa, raised $78mn.
6. Salmon, a Philippine digital bank, launched Auto-Debit features for its payment service.
7. Paxos, a blockchain company, received full approval from MAS to issue and operate stablecoins.
8. Singapore's governmental organisations published its updated policies Terrorism Financing (TF) National Risk Assessment (NRA) and National Strategy for Countering the Financing of Terrorism (CFT).
9. According to a report on Vietnam's digital financial services, MoMo and Zalopay had the highest penetration rates of 62% and 45%.
10. Revolut Singapore reported usage across metrics increased significantly - customer registrations grew 77%, MAU grew 55%.
11. MAS along with other global financial institutions completed Phase 1 of the Global Layer 1 (GL1) initiative to tokenise assets under Project Guardian.
12. DBS Bank partnered with Mashreq Bank to launch same-day P2P retail cross border payments.
13. South Korea's central bank and Financial Supervisory Service introduced a transaction monitoring system to find crypto exchange accounts linked to “suspected” trading activity.

💰 Financing Announcements

1. Ascend Money, a Thai fintech startup, raised $195mn.
2. Superbank, an Indonesian digital bank jointly owned by Grab, Singtel and Kakaobank, raised $73mn from its shareholders.
3. Paywatch, a Philippine earned wage access startup, raised $14mn.
4. Heymax, a customer loyalty and rewards startup, raised $2.6mn.
5. Validus, a Singaporean small business financing startup, raised $18mn in debt.

ACQUISITIONS:

1. Jirnexu, the parent co. of RinggitPlus a Malaysian personal finance aggregation and comparison platform, acquired CompareHero, a similar Malaysian platform.

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