Hello Fintech Friends,

We have a few international events coming up for our communities in Berlin, Mexico City, and Bangkok:

Berlin Fintech Happy Hour · Luma

Who: Our Berlin Fintech Founders, Operators, Partners and Ecosystem Community What: Fintech Happy Hour with light bites Where: Mr. Susan Cocktail Bar When: May…

This Week in Fintech

This Week in Fintech: Fintech Happy Hour in Mexico City 🇲🇽 · Luma

Who: Our Latam Fintech Founders, Operators, & Investors Community What: Fintech Happy Hour Where: Haab Project Condesa When: Tuesday, April 30th, 2024 Why:…

This Week in Fintech

Fintech Cruise with Saison & Citi · Luma

** This event is selective and typically oversubscribed, so we prioritise fintech founders. If you’re raising, please make sure that you fill out all the form…

Qin En

TWIF News briefing - 19th April

Listen to this episode from The This Week in Fintech Podcast on Spotify. Tune into “This Week in Fintech” for a concise 10-minute episode that brings you the latest in fintech news, insights into micropayments, and a thought-provoking discussion on the future of carbon credits. Don’t miss out on understanding these key developments in the fintech landscape. News Roundup This week in fintech witnessed a flurry of product launches and strategic collaborations. Highlights include Mercury’s dive into personal banking services, Klarna’s new credit card with installment payment options in the US, and 1inch’s introduction of a crypto-to-fiat debit card. Additionally, BJ’s Restaurants and Ferry teamed up to digitally disburse tips via a new payroll card, while Episode Six and Loop launched a fintech-as-a-service offering in Saudi Arabia. Fintechionary: Micropayments In today’s Fintechionary, we explore ‘Micropayments’—tiny transactions typically under five dollars. These small sums are revolutionizing digital content consumption, enabling creators to monetize and consumers to access content affordably. Micropayments support a vibrant digital economy by emphasizing the value of every small piece of content. Signals: Review Our podcast also reviews Sophie Vo’s insightful article, “Signals: If a tree falls in the forest...”, which delves into the volatile yet promising world of carbon credits. Amidst significant corporate pullback and increased regulatory scrutiny, Vo discusses the $2.3 billion invested in climate fintechs last year, pointing to a potential growth to a $1.1 trillion industry by 2050. This balanced view presents both the challenges and burgeoning opportunities within the carbon credit market.

Spotify

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below. (👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!)

Raising debt capital is a crucial requirement for card, lending, and neobank startups, but most fintech operators don’t come from a capital markets background. That’s why Finley and Cross River Bank put together this comprehensive guide to raising debt capital. It outlines the people, processes, and partners you need to assemble to execute a debt capital raise. Download your free copy here.

Want to sponsor a newsletter? See our sponsorship information here.

💼 Fintech Job of the Week

Founding Front-End Engineer at Confido | Y Combinator

About Confido: Confido is a next-generation financial automation and intelligence platform helping fast-growing CPG brands operate and scale more efficiently. Despite advances in technology, the tools to run and grow a business in retail haven’t changed. Today, the vast majority of brands rely on the same error-prone and expensive manual spreadsheet-based workflows. Our first product helps brands track, account for, forecast, and optimize the up to 40% of revenue that is spent on retailer and distributor allowances, fines, promotions, and ads - helping brands become more profitable, eliminate dozens of hours of manual work, and unlock insights to GTM more efficiently. Today, we work with over a dozen fast-growing brands across categories and have raised 3.6M dollars from leading investors. The Role: We’re hiring a founding full-stack senior engineer with a concentration on front-end to expand our product capabilities and help in delighting our customers. The role will be based in NY, and we will gladly help you relocate if needed. Total compensation for the role will range between $150,000 and $180,000 + Benefits + Meaningful Equity (.75% - 1.5%). Responsibilities (1) Architect new components and products within the platform (2) Proficiency in designing data-intensive applications and streamlining complex concepts (3) Bring new designs and features to life from talking with customers, to designing, to implementation Requirements (1) Strong technical skills with 3 years of full-time experience (2) Comfortability with SQL and designing with data (3) Ability to quickly spin up frontend components using modern frontend frameworks (React preferred) Preferred qualifications (1) Excellent communication skills with the ability to talk directly with customers and convert to new features/improvements (2) Strong desire to work at an early-stage startup and touch all parts of the product

Y Combinator

Share your job with 2,000+ fintech people in our Slack #hiring-and-jobs channel.

💬 Quote of the Week

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Visa's merchant acceptance program launched Developer Assist, an AI-powered tool to help partners develop sophisticated payment flows, a new small and medium-sized business platform, and Tap to Phone, which allows sellers to accept contactless payments using a certified smartphone in 121 countries.

Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, the largest federal bank in Germany, partnered with crypto custodian Bitpanda to use its 'investment-as-a-service' infrastructure for customers to store and procure cryptocurrencies.

Mastercard launched a new mobile virtual card app to simplify travel and business expenses. The card network also partnered with DeFi platform 1inch and banking-as-a-service provider Baanx to launch a crypto-to-fiat debit card.

📰 Other News

US megabanks' net interest income didn't meet analyst expectations in spite of high a Fed rate.

Fintech ❤️ Banks: JPMorgan is using Codat's Supplier Enablement data API product to drive adoption of its virtual card for B2B payments.

Romanian neobank Salt, owned by Banca Transilvania Financial Group, went live on Starling's new BaaS platform Engine, onboarding 100,000 customers in its first two weeks.

London mayoral candidate Brian Rose wants to give London resident £100 in a new crypto token called the LONDON token.

Sanctions be damned: Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank recently posted dozens of advertisements for Russia-based jobs indicating ambitious plans to grow in the country.

The UK's Centre for Finance, Innovation and Technology is working on two open finance applications for providing financial advice to vulnerable consumers and to speed up credit assessments for small business loan applications.

Canada's continually-delayed Real-Time Rail payments system now won't launch until 2026.

The Bank of England was criticized by the former chair of the Federal Reserve for relying on outdated technology for its economic forecasts.

Source: Fintech Business Weekly

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Business banking provider Mercury* announced that it passed 100,000 startup users and launched Mercury Personal, a consumer bank account with a 5% APY on savings, $5 million in FDIC insurance through its sweep accounts, virtual debit cards, and smart routing rules for money movement. (Sheel from BTV breaks down the product features more here.)

Swedish buy-now-pay-later giant Klarna is launching its credit card in the US, which lets users pay in installments and get up to 10% cashback from some merchants.

Pipe is moving from direct to embedded with their latest product offering, capital-as-a-service for small businesses.

Ferry, a platform that facilitates automated instant tip payouts and tax compliance for hospitality businesses, launched an advanced payroll card and instant tip payment solution for BJ's Restaurants.

Something new: Cherub launched a dating app for the an angel investing community that matches investors and founders.

Full stack payment processor Finix launched a Merchant Underwriting solution to automate underwriting workflows and streamline merchant onboarding processes.

Core banking, payment processing, and ledger provider Episode Six partnered with e-money institution Loop to power a new banking-as-a-service offering built for fintech in Saudi Arabia.

Uruguay Innovation Hub launched a funds-matching investment program for startups.

EquityBrix launched a new fractional investment market for real estate.

Aurora Payments launched its new ARISE Payment Platform, a cloud-based, payment-agnostic (?) payment system designed SMBs.

Forter launched a suite of tokenization, anti-fraud, and identity solutions.

Raising debt capital is a crucial requirement for card, lending, and neobank startups, but most fintech operators don’t come from a capital markets background. That’s why Finley and Cross River Bank put together this comprehensive guide to raising debt capital. It outlines the people, processes, and partners you need to assemble to execute a debt capital raise. Download your free copy here.

Want to sponsor a newsletter? See our sponsorship information here.

📰 Other News

Costco is generating an estimated $100 to $200 million per month (!) in gold sales.

Brazilian neobank Nubank announced plans to go beyond providing banking services by launching its own mobile phone operator company.

Payments app Kevin completed its first account-to-account (direct bank pay) NFC transaction on an iPhone. It will be interesting to see whether low-friction mobile tap payments take off as a form of payment to replace credit cards, if merchants + payment apps are able to compete with rewards.

Shares in core banking provider Temenos rose after it was revealed that an investigation commissioned by the company found that the accusations of short seller Hindenburg were "inaccurate and misleading."

👎 The Bad News

German audit watchdog Apas found that EY's audits of collapsed payments firm Wirecard were – unsurprisingly – grossly negligent.

The CFPB issued an order against BloomTech, a fintech provider of income-sharing agreements and student loans, claiming that the startup deceived students about the cost of loans and making false claims about graduates’ hiring rates:

Come meet us in-person at thisweekinfintech.com/events