Klarna may IPO soon; Zest Money sold off (TWIF 1/28)

Hello Fintech Friends,

What if modern money movement layers had higher per-transaction bandwidth? What if you could pass along as much information as necessary in the messaging layer tied to transactions?

In his latest monthly writeup, Ayokunle Omojola focuses on healthcare claims and tax deductions, but you can imagine the potential benefits of rich transaction messaging for a wide variety of use-cases.

If you were able to pass along rich receipt data in the transaction string, you could power financial budgeting apps and make refunds and returns a breeze. If you could layer in outstanding loan principle balances, you could help people more easily pay down debt. If you could toggle business / personal transactions, you could obviate the need for separate corporate cards. If you could capture and transfer biometric information, you could create more secure transaction auth for high-value or high-risk purchases (ie: only someone over 21 can buy alcohol, only someone who clears a background check can purchase weapons...)

Entire fintech ecosystems have cropped up around better understanding transaction data – companies like Spade, Banyan, Ntropy, Pave, Heron Data, MX, Plaid... What if we could augment the txn layer rather than read the tea leaves of txn strings?

And on that note...

Please find another week of fintech exits and deep reads below. (👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!)

📺

Sponsored Content

Big if true.

Just over the last two years @twifintech we’ve seen large deals get done, rounds get filled, acquisitions occur, and even (believe it or not) a literal marriage as a result of the community we’ve built.

This from a long time partner of ours recently: https://t.co/kwDNMqKnXY pic.twitter.com/LbGycWVEcp
— Alex (@CallMeGillette) January 24, 2024

📖 Read of the Week

☯️ Exits

💻 IPOs & SPACs

Perfios, an Indian financial data management software provider, is considering an IPO that could raise about $500 million in India
Klarna's CEO signaled that their US IPO may happen quite soon.

🤝 M&A - Fintech

Zest Money, the Indian personal lender and EMI paymants firm once valued at $450 million, was sold to financial services group DMI in a fire sale.
Objectway, an Italian software and services provider to banks and asset and wealth managers, acquired Canadian firm Nest Wealth.
Nordic corporate bank SEB will buy a minority stake in digital document exchange firm Kirva.
US software company Autodesk acquired Australian construction industry payment software company Payapps.
British software provider ieDigital acquired ABAKA, a purchase prediction algorithm for banking products, savings accounts and retirement solutions.
Girasol, a Curaçao-based provider of payment services, acquired FinZi, a Colombian digital wallet provider targeting young people with 250k+ users.

🏦 M&A - Bank and FinServ

French bank Credit Agricole bought a 7% stake in beleaguered payments provider Worldline.
Synchrony Financial agreed to acquire consumer bank Ally Financial's point-of-sale financing business, including $2.2 billion of loan receivables.
Swiss stock market operator SIX Group is considering a bid for fund distribution company Allfunds.

Hard times create strong FinReg,
FinReg create good times,
good times create deregulation,
and deregulation create hard times.
— Sean Tuffy (@SMTuffy) January 21, 2024

Crazy stat! And good reason to choose Rippling. https://t.co/0CS3o1NEt8
— Matt Janiga (@regulatorynerd) January 24, 2024

Prepping for @Mecury’s first board meeting of the year this week and reflecting on 2023.

Feeling thankful for the team's hard work and our customers' trust in us. In 2023 we:

* Grew net revenues 180% YoY
* Grew customers 60% YoY
* Grew trx volume by 90% YoY to $95B in ‘23
*…
— immad (@immad) January 24, 2024

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed today to block banks and other financial institutions from one potential source of new junk fee revenue – fees on transactions declined right at the swipe, tap, or click.” pic.twitter.com/mrqi5JltWs
— Ohad (@ohadsamet) January 24, 2024

Bad behavior by @CapitalOne...

When rates went up, they created a new account type, "360 Performance Savings" that pays 4.35%, but then left the rate low for existing "360 Savings" customers.

They used name confusion to make it even harder to figure out what happened. 🤦‍♂️
— Adam Nash (@adamnash) January 23, 2024