Hello Fintech Friends,

This week, we launched our Talent Collective. In just 4 days, we’ve received:.

80 applications to join the collective (and counting) from talented fintech people

• Seniority: Mid 20% / Senior 30% / Expert 40%
• Job categories: Business & Strategy 34% / Product 17% / Corporate Finance 13% / Sales 12%/ VC & Finance 8%
• Coming from companies like: Visa, Pipe, Morgan Stanley, Pleo, Brex, Blend, Plaid, Nubank, Google, Robinhood, Fast… (!!)

Now, it’s time for recruiters to join us. If you’d like to hire from the best group of fintech talent globally, pick up a Collective Pass here: https://this-week-in-fintech.pallet.com/hire

We’ll be offering Collective Passes for a discounted $150 / month for a limited time.

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

💬 Quote of the Week

“Observing two decades of government-driven fintech innovation leads to one critical insight: governments should stick to creating infrastructure. They should focus on building the backbone of the marketplace, driving competition and cooperation, to lower costs, and leave the consumer-level and retail-oriented innovation to the private sector.”

• Bright Simons (African governments can’t be both referees and players in consumer fintech)

📖 Read of the Week

This week, Finextra wrote out a helpful primer on Request to Pay, a new payment method that is in development in Europe. The RtP payments framework (different from real-time payments) would create a messaging service between merchants and consumers, so that merchants can request recurring bill payment pull transactions directly from consumers’ bank accounts, which consumers can in-turn approve.

The main benefit to merchants is circumventing costly credit card fees to bill on a recurring basis, while the benefit to consumers is the ability to pre-approve specific payment types to be ‘pulled’ from accounts on a recurring basis, without having to authorize the ‘push’ of those funds each time a bill is due.

📊 Stat of the Week

77 African fintech startups raised more than $1 million in 2021, 48% of all African funding went to fintech startups, and 93% of all African fintech funding went to Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, and Kenya. (Quartz Africa)

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Featured role of the week: Zoya makes halal investing easy by helping you build and monitor a shariah compliant investment portfolio with confidence and clarity. They’re hiring a Staff Engineer (Remote).

If you’re looking to hire from a group of 10,000+ smart, motivated fintech professionals, come pick up a Collective Pass and post a job here.

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Italy’s Banca Passadore launched its PassadorePay debit card product, built on Nexi.

NatWest is launching a carbon-tracking app for small businesses and buy-now-pay-later.

Mastercard launched new open banking payment tools and partnered with HSBC to launch a UK product that converts card payments to any merchant into the payment type of their choice.

📰 Other News

Equifax, Experian and TransUnion will remove most consumer medical debts from credit histories, so that people are no longer punished for having expensive medical conditions by complementing those conditions with expensive credit.

The European Payments Initiative gave up on its effort to build a rival payment network to Visa and Mastercard after half of its initial 31 members left the consortium. Meanwhile, the United Bank for Africa struck a deal with telco Cellulant to extend payments products across 19 African countries.

Mastercard added a ton of partners to its buy-now-pay-later program, including Amount, Deserve, H&R Block, i2c, Lithic, and Sutton Bank.

Goldman and Galaxy Digital executed their first OTC crypto options trade.

Investors are pushing back on JP Morgan’s plans to enter UK retail banking and digitize the bank.

UK bank Lloyds is partnering with ProjectPay on construction sector payments and cutting 60 of its bank branches.

The FDIC added a $120 billion bank to its problem bank list in Q4 - but nobody knows which one.

The OECD opened up its proposal on transparent crypto taxes for public comment. El Salvador is getting ready to launch its bitcoin bond.

FinCEN fined USAA $140 million for Bank Secrecy Act violations. Japanese prosecutors are set to indict SMBC Nikko for market manipulation.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Robinhood debuted a new debit card that will invest in stocks and crypto for users as they spend, and released a stock lending feature.

Acorns added crypto exposure to its investing product (coming soon to retirement) via ProShares’ bitcoin ETF.

Truework unveiled its income verification product for consumer lending.

Regulatory tech firm Tintra launched a web3 banking platform in the metaverse.

📰 Other News

If you live anywhere in Latin America, you’ve probably been to an Oxxo, the Mexican convenience store spanning the continent. Well, 5 months ago, Oxxo launched its banking arm, Spin, and is now poised to be one of the largest fintechs in the country.

Lemonade’s non-profit arm (which I just found out about) is prepping a climate insurance product for subsistence farmers.

CreditRich, which allows users to round up spare change to pay bills, announced a partnership with Qolo and a $1.5 billion valuation.

NextPay is building out crypto and billpay products for small businesses.

Finastra is collaborating with the Union of Arab Banks to help banks across the gulf states build better digital experiences.

FTX is partnering with African payments firm AZA Finance to support easier crypto and web3 tooling.

Embedded banking platform Bond partnered with Texas Medical Center to create embedded finance for healthcare.

Lithic grew its monthly processing volume by 10x in 2021.

Canadian fintech credit provider Thinking Capital rebranded as Driven and got into crypto.

Halo Investing opened a new HQ in Chicago and plans to hire 100 people.

Robinhood settled with the state of Vermont to pay $640,000 for a series of outages on its platform in 2020.

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