Hello Fintech Friends,

As the holidays settle in we finally get a week of respite from no haha just kidding, here are 41 financings and M&A events.

It’s been a pretty wild year (in the world but yes in fintech too). I would be curious to hear people’s most outlandish predictions for where fintech will go in 2021, and with permission, will share the best ones in this newsletter.

Open Role Spotlight

Moov wants to break financial services out of their silo and open-source banking technology for the world. The company is hiring across the board for design, engineering, product, and sales.

Financings

• Creditas, a Brazilian lending startup, raised $255 million in new financing.
• GoCardless, a UK fintech that facilitates direct debit payments, raised $95 million in new capital.
• Real estate lending platform LendingHome raised a $75 million Series E.
• Lydia, a French mobile wallet and peer-to-peer payments app, raised an $86 million Series B extension.
• Social investing app Public raised a $65 million Series C.
• Vise, a company creating investment advisor tools, raised a $45 million Series B.
• Consumer lender Self Financial raised $40 million in new capital.
• Lendeavor, a healthcare lending fintech, rebranded as Provide and raised a $34 million Series A.
• Ramp, a corporate spend management and card startup, raised $30 million.
• Zilch, a UK buy-now-pay-later startup, raised $30 million in new funding.
• Canadian savings startup Neo Financial raised C$25 million in a Series A.
• Employee lender Salary Finance raised £20 million from backers including Experian.
• Arya raised $21 million to build financial services for Indian farmers.
• Wealth management platform Vestrata raised $4 million.
• Umba raised a $2 million seed to build a digital bank for emerging markets across Africa.
• Home loan advice and origination platform Homebuyer raised $1.4 million in seed funding.
• Gr4vy, a cloud orchestration layer for simplifying how businesses add payment systems to checkouts, raised a $1.1 million seed.
• Nigerian lending startup Indicina raised a six-figure funding round.
• American Express announced a strategic investment in institutional cryptocurrency startup FalconX.
• ING invested in UK data security startup eXate.

Exits and M&A

• Affirm will be postponing its upcoming IPO, valued at up to $10 billion, until 2021 for reasons that are still unclear.
• Apollo and Blackstone are both in talks to buy Wells Fargo’s $10 billion student loan book, as the bank continues to pare down assets after years of scandals led to a regulator-imposed freeze on asset growth.
• In a continued wave of regional banking mergers, Huntington Bank agreed to buy TCF for $6 billion.
• Asset management firm Oaktree Capital Group made a $5 billion for bankrupt Indian shadow lender Dewan Housing Finance.
• Private equity firms are also eyeing the purchase of Wells Fargo’s asset management arm for $3 billion.
• Online lender Upstart raised $180 million in its IPO at a market cap of $3.3 billion.
• Cardtronics agreed to sell itself to Apollo and Hudson for $2.3 billion.
• Bain Capital bought UK retirement investing service Liverpool Victoria Financial for £530 million.
• European payments firm Worldline took a controlling interest in Australian bank ANZ’s commercial acquiring business for A$485 million.
• GoDaddy acquired point-of-sale payments provider Poynt for $320 million in cash and $45 million in earnout.
• Private equity firm Inflexion will buy Norwegian financial data provider Infront ASA for $171 million.
• Capita PLC will buy £45 million of ParentPay, an education payments technology, from its parent Montagu.
• Fiserv will acquire online payment experience, rewards, and loyalty platform Ondot.
• AnaCap Financial Partners will acquire UK wealth management platform Novia Financial.
• IBM will acquire Canadian payments-as-a-service fintech Expertus.
• Private equity firm Corsair Capital acquired a majority stake in credit reporting solution provider IDIQ.
• Wahed Invest, an Islamic finance fintech company based in the US, acquired Islamic banking app Niyah in the UK.
• French bank Société Générale acquired online car buying platform Reezocar.
• Australia’s three leading national payment platforms eftpos, BPAY Group and New Payments Platform Australia will merge to fend off competitive threats from foreign payment providers.
• Norwegian browser-maker Opera will buy Estonian banking-as-a-service platform Pocosys.

SPAC

• Katapult, an e-commerce focused fintech that originates point-of-sale purchase options for non-prime consumers, agreed to merge with FinServ Acquisition Corp at an enterprise value of $1 billion.

Source: Fintech Takes