Exits & Deep Reads

Visa's jogo bonito (TWIF 7/2)

Praia, Cabo Verde

Hello Fintech Friends,

🤑 This week’s fintech exit news was dominated by Visa’s long-rumored acquisition of Brazilian payments provider Pismo for $1 billion, which it beat Mastercard in a bid to acquire. Pismo processes almost 50 billion API calls and $40 billion in transaction volumes annually, with clients in Brazil as big as Citi. The ‘startup’ now also operates in several countries across Latin America, including Mexico and Chile, as well as the U.S., Europe, India, Southeast Asia and Australia. Visa will use Pismo’s technology to provide core banking and issuer processing capabilities across debit, prepaid, credit and commercial cards.

Now the race is on for the next geographically-dominant payment processors.

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☀️ We’ll be taking a break next weekend (July 7th, 8th, and 9th) but will be back with more great fintech in your inbox the week following!

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

☯️ Exits

🤝 M&A - Fintech

Digital ID and KYC furnisher Socure (last valued at $4.5 billion) acquired its smaller rival Berbix for $70 million in a mixture of cash and stock.
Finder, a financial management and advice platform, announced that it will acquire Finch, the wealth management platform that lets customers earn and invest with cash back. (Separate from the API for employment provider also named Finch.)
Corporate card and expense management provider Ramp acquired AI-enabled customer service provider Cohere, which previously raised $3.5 million.
Banking-as-a-service provider BM Technologies announced an agreement to purchase digital banking provider Envel’s software technology.

🏦 M&A - Bank and FinServ

Laser Digital, the digital asset exchange business of Japanese bank conglomerate Nomura, will acquire trading solutions provider Elysium.
Asset manager Ares acquired a $3.5 billion portfolio of loans from regional bank PacWest to help it get the debt off its balance sheet.
Enento Group Oyj, a Scandinavian credit bureau, is reportedly eyeing a sale after takeover interest from US bureau TransUnion and private equity firm Apax.
Japanese banking conglomerate MUFG will acquire Indonesian car loan provider Mandala for Rp 7 trillion ($467 million).
Goldman Sachs will take a writedown on the sale of digital installment lender GreenSky, which it acquired in 2021 for $2.24 billion. One bidder said the origination platform is worth roughly $300 million, while another said it was worth closer to $500 million.
Enfusion, a provider of cloud-based portfolio management and risk systems to investment funds, is receiving takeover interest from private equity firms and strategic buyers at a valuation around $1 billion.

Given the level of bad information going around on Twitter about this, I wanted to dig in briefly on the Prime Trust situation and regulation.

First, to refresh everyone, on regulatory frameworks:

1 - Your primary rules come from your charter and your regulator. Regardless of…
— Austin Campbell (@CampbellJAustin) June 30, 2023