Hello Fintech Friends,

Whoops… hit ‘send’ a day early on this one.

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

💬 Quote of the Week

“It is important to ensure that companies permitted to directly access critical payment systems are well-regulated, but it makes little sense to require a payments company to become a full-service bank, or to be regulated like one. They have entirely different business models and present different risks.”

• Nick Catino, Jonah Crane, and Daniel Gorfine (A Smart Solution to Advance Consumer-Centric Payments Innovation in America)

📖 Read of the Week

You’ll see a lot of Andreessen Horowitz in today’s newsletter. This week, the investor published How to Win the Future: An Agenda for the Third Generation of the Internet, which is essential reading if you care about the future of digital payments and money.

📊 Stat of the Week

The number of people in extreme poverty — defined as households spending less than $1.90 a day per person — had fallen from 1.9 billion people to 648 million people in 2019, even as the global population increased by 2.5 billion people. (Source)

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🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Bank of America launched a multi-payment option business-to-consumer portal.

📰 Other News

This week saw more developments in the emergence of low-cost, real-time international payments infrastructure. International payments networks EBA Clearing, SWIFT and The Clearing House all entered into a partnership to speed up and improve cross-border payments. It remains to be seen what effect this has on cross-border payment prices and providers. Unicredit partnered with JP Morgan to enable Swift’s ‘Swift Go’ service and let individuals and businesses send small instant payments across borders.

Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Coles, Woolworths, Azupay, Beem It and Merchant Warrior all signed up for a new QR code payment regime in Australia.

Beneficial State Bank became the first American bank to unionize in 40 years.

Santander started rolling out its recycled cards in Spain.

88 Bank in Ireland is closing a third of its branches permanently this week. SocGen will cut 3,700 jobs in its merger with Credit du Nord. Barclays, meanwhile, is growing its Glasgow tech team.

(Source)

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Fidel launched a reimbursement payment API.

Nigerian neobank Carbon launched a buy-now-pay-later service for its banking app.

UK banking and investing app Ziglu released a fee-free euro account.

API-based payment provider Bottomline launched a payment tracker.

Mbanq and Temenos partnered to launch a credit-union-as-a-service (CUaaS?) platform.

PhonePe and NBBL partnered to launch ClickPay for online bill payments in India.

A new UK digital asset financial services platform called BVNK launched.

Red Deer launched an active asset management platform.

📰 Other News

Coinbase is working on an NFT marketplace. Stripe announced a crypto team. Payments firm Wirex brought its crypto platform to Vietnam.

Mobile provider To The Moon added a debit card to its product offering.

mmob, an open finance partnership, signed up PensionBee, Upside, and Glint Pay. Core provider Jack Henry integrated with open banking services Finicity, Akoya and Plaid. UK digital money provider MoneyBrain joined Visa’s Fast Track program.

Starling Bank sees no customer concerns about the new £100 contactless limit.

United will let guests make in-flight purchases with PayPal QR codes. Google Pay allowed Bakkt users to provision their crypto-backed cards to its wallet. Spreedly integrated Stripe into its Connect platform.

The Crypto-Fintech Laboratory and BTC.com entered a partnership to develop new payment methods.

Women’s World Banking named Boost Capital and People’s Pension Trust as the winners of its Third Annual Fintech Innovation Challenge. Juniper Research gave its Future Digital Award for Fintech & Payments to Huawei.

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🇪🇺 Europe

• Fintech VibePay is going up against Klarna over its upcoming “Vibe” rewards launch in a trademark dispute.
• Monzo has abandoned its plans to get a US banking license in what represents a retreat from the US market for the UK neobank.
• The EU is looking to hit Apple with an antitrust suit over its restricting access to its NFC chip which powers Apple Pay.

🌏 Asia

• Centrum-BharatPE group received approval from RBI to start operations of its Small Finance Bank appointed Rajnish Kumar, former Chairman of SBI Bank, as Chairman of the Board.
• India’s UPI recorded 3.65 billion transactions worth $88.4 billion in September 2021.
• Open, a SMB neo banking startup, raised $100mm and M2P Fintech, a fintech infrastructure starutp, raised $35mm.
• Standard Chartered Bank signed a 10 year partnership with Atome to invest $500 million in the company and launch multiple products.

📜 Policy

In collaboration with Ben White.

• The White House is reportedly weighing an executive order on expanding crypto oversight via a “whole of government” approach.
• A group of 96 consumer advocates penned a letter to CFPB Director Chopra asking to reverse the 2020 advisory opinion on Earned Wage Access programs, instead asking they be covered as credit products.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended a proposal for the IRS to collect bank account information as part of tax authority.
• The Financial Stability Board released a 31-page report examining the adoption of its 2020 recommendations on global stablecoins.
• The CFPB published their proposed rules on Dodd-Frank 1071, which would require financial institutions to report data on small business lending to minorities.
• The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority is seeing staff turmoil over a new pay structure.
• OCC Comptroller Nominee Saule Omarova is seeing unfair criticism over her ethnic background.
• The Group of Seven set out policy principles for countries for Central Bank Digital Currencies.
• The CFPB’s new debt collection rules have industry scrambling.
• Former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond warned that the UK’s treatment of digital currencies poses a risk to the financial sector.

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