Hello Fintech Friends,

It's officially Formal Season and we're kicking it into high gear with a NYC Fintech Coffee with our friends and partners at Rise NYC next Monday, followed by the Sonar Launch Party & Happy Hour with our friends at Elementus next Tuesday, our Mexico City Happy Hour next Thursday and our Money2020 Kickoff Party next Sunday.

All of this ending with a big splash at the December NYC Fintech Formal, brought to you by:

• Bain & Co.: Identify new opportunities to accelerate your digital ambitions and delight your customers.
• Paytient: Paytient’s Health Payment Account (HPA) empowers people to pay for care over time with no interest and no fees — ever.
• Wolf & Co.: Wolf & Co provides a unique perspective to fintech companies pre-seed through post IPO.

📋 Fintech Outlook Survey

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

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💼 Fintech Job of the Week

Confido is a next-generation financial automation and intelligence platform that helps 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, leaving brands bogged down in manual, repetitive work. They're hiring a Founding Senior Full-Stack Engineer (back-end leaning).

• $165K - $195K
• 1.50% - 3.00%
• New York, Full-Time

💬 Quote of the Week

 🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

NatWest launched its own transaction categorization service for businesses and became the first UK bank to enable Mastercard's Click to Pay for all its debit customers.

Emirates NBD bank rolled out a digital wealth platform in Dubai. 

Lloyds Bank added a feature to let corporate customers to request digital Guarantees via paperless guarantees.

Saudi National Bank partnered with Mastercard on launching a UEFA Champions League card portfolio.

📰 Other News

Are... banks leading the crypto charge? JP Morgan transformed its money market fund shares into tokens to execute an over-the-counter derivatives trade and test out its new Tokenized Collateral Network blockchain. 

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange also introduced a new blockchain settlement platform. Spanish banks are testing out a new digital euro on existing payment infrastructure.

 But... The IMF published a new Crypto Risk Assessment Matrix paper and the UK's Financial Conduct Authority issued 146 alerts about crypto assets promotions on the first day of new rules.

The CFBP is feeling itself this week, with new guidance to stop large banks from charging junk fees to customers for basic services, rules to prevent financial institutions from using immigration status to discriminate against credit applicants, and an action against TransUnion for illegal rental background check practices.

Italy’s Intesa Sanpaolo is using artificial intelligence for regulatory analysis.

Wells Fargo extended its digital wealth platform to all customers.

Uh oh... will Metro Bank be the next bank to collapse in 2023? "Following late night negotiations over the weekend, Metro Bank has struck a deal to refinance £600m of debt and confirmed it is in talks to sell £3bn of its mortgage book."

Japan's interbank payments network went down, affecting 1.4 million money transfers.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Orum*, a payment processing and account verification solutions provider for real-time payment rails, launched Verify, which verifies bank accounts in 15 seconds or less for 100% of U.S. bank accounts (on any payment rail).

Acorns announced a new Premium Tier focused on families, including complimentary access to GoHenry, its financial education app for kids.

Klarna launched an AI-powered photo tool for shoppers.

Intake-to-pay platform Zip launched a new generative AI-enabled document intelligence and contract renewal tool.

Fraud and risk management platform DataVisor announced its new AI Co-Pilot, a generative-AI facilitated fraud solution.

Justifi launched a low-code payments solutions building platform.

Coris launched IndustryMark, a new merchant industry classification tool.

Spanish neobank EVO Banco launched a geotagging service for card purchases that uses AI and Google Maps to show customers the exact time and place where their transactions took place.

📰 Other News

CRED, an Indian provider of consumer financial products in e-commerce, wealth management and lending, grew its operating revenue by 255% to $168 million - a 3.5x surge.

Starling Bank got rid of the fee for its kids pocket money app.

Revolut rolled out the tenth version of its app to its 35 million global accountholders.

LatAm payments platform Kushki became a merchant acquirer via primary membership with Visa and Mastercard in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia.

Personal finance software provider Quicken unveiled a new logo and visual brand.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Till Financial partnered with Astra* on enabling instant transfers and account funding for kids and teen banking. 

Mobile bank account provider Green Dot partnered with investing platform Stockpile to make investing and personal finance more accessible to younger consumers.

National Australia Bank will use Trovata's tech to launch a new AI-enabled cash management, analytics and forecasting platform.

Kenyan buy-now-pay-later provider EDOMx partnered with finbots.ai for credit risk management.

Crypto layer 1 Sei Labs announced that it is currently a pay-as-you-go customer leveraging Plaid's KYC solutions (editor's note: the press release published by Sei claimed a partnership with Plaid, however Plaid reached out with a clarification: "We are not supporting SEI on wallet onboarding or bank account authentication. We do not have an active ecosystem support program that offers credits and discounts to companies in SEI's ecosystem nor do we offer exclusive networking and mentorship opportunities as listed in SEI's announcement.")

👎 The Bad News

It's been bad for BaaS this week -

Banking-as-a-service provider Synapse, which has reportedly been looking for an acquirer, laid off 40% of the company (86 people).

Solid’s Series B lead investor is suing the company its cofounders personally in attempt to recoup its $61 million investment for overstating revenues.

TradeShift fired its CEO over allegations of sexual assault.

Deception At Ghana's Dash: How $80M+ In Funding Went Down The Drain

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