Hello Fintech Friends,

I had a great time with the London fintech community celebrating this year’s UK Fintech Week yesterday!

Big thank you to everyone who braved the rain to make it to our Fintech Happy Hour, and to the Fintech Brain Food and Element Ventures teams for co-hosting with us.

Now I’m heading back to New York Fintech Week for our Fintech & Fitness Sculpt Class with Cowboy Ventures and Founder League and our NY Fintech Week Happy Hour with Citi Ventures, Navan, Valley Ventures, & Currencycloud! If you’re in town, please drop by and say hi.👋

Last but definitely not least… we’re finally coming back to Asia with our next Bangalore Fintech Happy Hour in India this coming Thursday ✈️

👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

💬 Quote of the Week

📖 Read of the Week

It’s been a good week for reading!

First, Bain Capital Ventures’ Matt Harris released Lessons From Ancient Rome: How Banks Can Learn to Love Start-Ups.

This has been a big part of our thesis at The Fintech Fund for a while: the Empire is Striking Back. In the build / buy / partner framework for incumbent responses to challengers, the first two options have always been difficult for banks. Trying to build your own fintech, as a regulated financial institution, is slow and cumbersome. Acquiring a fintech subjects it to the same bureaucracy and oversight that banks already deal with. But using tools like Themis and Minerva built for bank customers to compete more nimbly against fintechs could be the innovators’ dilemma solution that banks were waiting for. And in fact, in 783 interviews, 3/4 of global banks have said they "are planning to connect with an average of three fintech startups over the next eighteen months to boost their digitsation efforts."

At the end of the day, banks have three major built-in advantages: (1) licensing, (2) distribution, and (3) extremely low cost of capital. Partnering with fintechs to capitalize on these solutions could enable the empire to strike back.

Elsewhere, financial journalist JP Konig wrote an interesting analysis of the proposed distinction between trading stablecoins and payments stablecoins, and Bloomberg released urgent and depressing data to show that parents are increasingly dipping into their own savings to help financially support their adult children in the US.

📊 Stat of the Week

20% of Americans now use buy-now-pay-later loans just to buy their groceries. (Source)

“The share of households who said credit is harder to get versus a year ago rose to the highest level in a survey that dates back to 2014.” (Source)

Over one-third of gig workers (34%) have turned to an online or digital bank for their primary banking services. (Source)

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Lloyds Bank launched a service to let businesses make instant B2B payments even when the beneficiary’s bank details are unknown.

French bank Credit Agricole is partnering with payments fintech Worldline to launch a merchant payments joint venture in France, while Société Générale launched its own EUR stablecoin.

Liberty Bank launched its own SMB-focused neobank, called Owners Bank.

CaixaBank launched… an “environment-based metaverse experience”.

📰 Other News

The US SEC, which came under fire this week in a congressional grilling, proposed to expand the definition of an ‘exchange’ to include decentralized crypto platforms. Even the SEC’s Hester Pierce has come out swinging against the agency’s initiative, saying that it would “render innovation kaput.” Meanwhile in the UK, the London Stock Exchange Group plans to offer Bitcoin-based index derivatives.

Real-time payments are coming! Fiserv added 20 new banks to its FedNow pilot program. The Federal Reserve-engineered payment system is expected to launch in 3 months.

And the banking lobbies are at it again – this time, the European Credit Sector Associations group is lobbying to remove payments entirely from the scope of the EC’s upcoming European Digital Identity plan.

Depositors have pulled nearly $60 billion from US banks following the launch of Apple’s new high-yield savings account.

Goldman Sachs partnered with business spend management firm Coupa to enable B2B payments.

Blockchain testing continues: the Bank of England completed a blockchain-based pilot for central bank settlement and T Rowe Price is testing out the Avalanche blockchain subnet.

The UK’s FCA and the Payment Systems Regulator delivered a joint roadmap for the future of open banking.

HSBC is under pressure from a large shareholder to spin off its Asian business. Capital One announced it is leaving the auto floor plan financing market and was sued by Walmart this week, alleging that the bank didn’t meet the terms of their credit card partnership.

If only there was a bureau to protect against this kind of thing…

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

The biggest news of the week is Apple’s launch of a new high-yield savings account, offering a 4.15% APY (interestingly higher than the APY of its banking partner, Goldman.) The savings account will be built directly into Daily Cash and the Apple Pay UI in their mobile-first experience. (As someone who worked on Google’s shuttered Plex initiative, this brought a small tear to my eye.)

Virgin Money launched its own digital wealth platform in a partnership with abrdn.

Modern Treasury launched their reconciliation engine to offer end-to-end cash reconciliation for businesses.

Small business banking platform Lili launched accounting software - “Lili Smart.”.

Minna Technologies launched its Subscriber API, a single platform for subscription-based businesses, banks, and fintechs.

Puulse launched a platform in the UK and Europe to offer free advance payments for gig workers experiencing a productivity lull.

Square launched tap-to-pay functionality on Android phones for merchants in the U.S., Australia, Ireland, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. GoDaddy will offer merchants iPhone tap-to-pay.

Coris AI launched a way to determine merchant MCC and NAICS codes with 90%+ accuracy using AI.

Kredete launched an AI-powered lending platform for Nigerians and UP Fintech launched TigerGPT, an AI financial assistant.

Crypto startup Ondo launched a new stablecoin alternative that is backed by money-market funds to generate yield.

David Marcus, the former head of Facebook’s Novi / Libra initiative, launched a raft of features in his bitcoin-based real-time payment platform, Lightspark.

📰 Other News

Twitter! The news never ends - the social media giant partnered with eToro to let users trade stocks and crypto. Is this part of a larger banking dream?

Google Pay will allow its app store apps to offer non-Google billing options in the UK, under pressure from regulators. Meanwhile, Uniswap’s mobile app hit the Apple app store.

FTX is looking for new investors to help it restart the exchange…?

Italian neobank Illimity sold a copy of its own source code The Engineering Group for €55.5 million.

Wirex added a new top membership tier.

UK parliament is working to make widespread financial education a reality.

Coinbase says it could relocate entirely overseas if it does not get more crypto clarity from US regulators.

PayPal cut outgoing CEO Dan Schulman’s pay to $22 million.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Affirm and Stripe partnered on adaptive checkout in Canada.

Block (maker of Square) partnered with African crypto payments firm Yellowcard as an alternative payment option.

Kyckr and Blacksmith partnered on plug-and-play KYC and onboarding.

Come meet us in-person at fintechhappyhour.com, and join our angel investing syndicate.