Hello Fintech Friends,

Happy Thanksgiving to all our US readers!

I hope you’re getting some time to relax this holiday.

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

💬 Quote of the Week

“Meeting the financing needs of entrepreneurs of color will be critical in both ensuring the health of our small business sector, and in living up to commitments to address racial inequities. To meet those needs, we must find way to meet business owners of color where they are — and that means scaling the supply of affordable, responsible microloans.”

• The Aspen Institute and Business Ownership Initiative (Source)

📖 Read of the Week

“Payments in Japan have changed enormously in the last 20 years. The rate of change is accelerating. You will see some echoes of some of these trends where you live, sooner rather than later.” (Payments in Japan)

📊 Stat of the Week

Defi fraud, theft, and losses reached $10.5 billion in 2021. (Source)

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💼 Open Role Spotlight

Come find your place on the team at the most inspiring fintech startups! Browse open roles on This Week in Fintech’s job board.

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

📰 Other News

JP Morgan is suing Tesla for $162 million in warrants, which should lead to some good Tweets.

Blackrock is building a fintech cloud SaaS unit for wealth managers.

Both a consortium of 74 Japanese banks and Palau are testing a digital currency.

Italy’s Banca Carige opened a fully-digital bank branch. Bank of Ireland had to issue a refund to customers for a 4-month Strong Customer Authentication delay.

Marcus, by Goldman Sachs is now Goldman Sachs Marcus.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Wedge Financial launched an app to convert any asset into spendable cash.

Mox Bank launched a payroll account.

French payment app Lydia added stock and crypto trading, via Austrian platform Bitpanda.

Volume in the UK launched a one-click account-to-account payment option for merchants.

Afterpay launched buy-now-pay-later for subscriptions in the US.

QuantCube launched real-time economic and environmental change indicators.

SIX’s digital exchange launched with its first digital bond offering.

Stripe launched an online-to-offline payment terminal in Europe.

Russian food retailer X5 Group is launching banking services like payments, money transfers and rouble-denominated cashback.

Temenos launched Temenos Exchange, a fintech marketplace.

📰 Other News

Square released a whitepaper for a multi-currency decentralized exchange protocol. Maple Finance released a defi-syndicated loan.

Climate spending app Amplify launched in the UK and Ireland. SumUp will commit 1% of its future revenues to environmental causes.

Swiss Re and Baidu are working on autonomous vehicle insurance.

Twitter and the S&P 500 are working on a stock index that crowdsources public opinion.

UK based fiat on-ramp / off-ramp Transak is moving into the US thanks to its partnership with Zero Hash. Crypto firm Circle is moving into Asia. Financial data API Codat expanded to Australia via its Judo Bank alliance. Zip brought its in-store virtual card to the UK.

Nubank in Brazil is getting into e-commerce.

The UK’s Atom Bank switched to a four-day workweek.

Chime agreed to stop calling itself a bank. Swing and a miss for Revolut’s menstruation campaign...

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🇪🇺 Europe

• Revolut has received strong backlash over its menstruation campaign which has been criticised as being condescending and offensive
• Neobank N26 has put a hold on its global expansion plans and is withdrawing from the US to focus on domestic and French markets.
• The EU Commission has drafted a reform of the European Financial Market Regulation (Mifir) which includes a ban on Payment for Order Flow, which Trade Republic relies on for a lot of its revenues.

🌏 Asia

• Niti Aayog, a Government of India think tank, released a discussion paper on licensing and regulating digital banks.
• Indifi, an Indian SMB finance startup, raised $20mm.
• Bank Bumi Arta, a local Indonesian bank, raised $52mm from Ajaib, a stock investment startup, for a 24% shareholding.
• Swiss Re partnered with Baidu on autonomous vehicle insurance and StraitsX launched XIDR, an Indonesian rupiah denominated stablecoin.

📜 Policy

In collaboration with Ben White.

• US Prudential Regulators issued a joint statement on findings from a crypto sprint, indicating plans to roll out a broader crypto framework for banking regulation including custody services, purchase facilitation, stablecoins, loan collateralization, and bank capital and liquidity standards.
• The OCC added an interpretative letter, clarifying that banks must seek approval from their regulators before proceeding with crypto-related activities introduced under previous Comptroller Brian Brooks.
• President Joe Biden nominated Jerome Powell for Federal Reserve Chair and Lael Brainard for VP of Supervision, signaling a “continuity” approach to navigating the post-COVID economy.
• UK Finance released its strategy for Open Banking payments, noting OB payments are up to 2.5m per month, from 300,000 in 2008.
• The European Central Bank published a new framework for oversight of electronic payments, including cryptocurrencies.
• Former Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau spoke about the future of fintech and open banking in Canada at an Open Banking Expo conference.
• Bloomberg covered impending regulatory impacts on BNPL, including the potential CFPB payday rule to affect short-term credit including BNPL.
• US Regulators approved new rules requiring banks to report security incidents within 36 hours.
• UK’s payments regulator will require banks to reimburse customers who’ve been victimized by authorized push payment fraud and publish those reimbursements.
• India may ban private crypto and launch its own central bank digital currency.
• The CFPB sued fintech lender LendUp in September.

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