Hello Fintech Friends,

Thank you to everyone who replied to our call for Events Leads. We’re excited to share that Katie Harper and Cristina Ciaravalli are joining the team to scale our fintech community!

Our community of readers, builders, hackers, dreamers, investors, and fintech friends is the most important part of our work, and we’re lucky to have Katie and Cristina’s vision to help us grow in an exciting and inclusive way.

If you’d like to sponsor an event with us, host one, or bring Fintech Happy Hour to a new city, please reach out.

September Happy Hour Schedule:

• 9/9 - Denver (thank you to HMBradley and Rapyd for sponsoring)
• 9/16 - Miami (thank you to Zilch for sponsoring)
• 9/16 - Los Angeles (thank you to Argyle and Onfido for sponsoring)
• 9/22 - Washington DC (thank you to Rize and Hummingbird for sponsoring)
• 9/30 - San Francisco (thank you to Sila and Argyle for sponsoring)
• 9/30 - New York (thank you to NYC Fintech Women, Silicon Valley Bank, and Vouch for sponsoring)

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

💬 Quote of the Week

“A lot of non-fintech companies will become fintech companies… We think there is just a tremendous opportunity for this business.”

• Sheel Mohnot, $T Opportunities in Fintech Are Still Yet to Come (Source)

📖 Read of the Week

In Does decentralized finance really help the underbanked?, American Banker takes a critical view of the quickly-growing investing product class’ claims to bring financial services to those left out of the financial grid. The userbase is still predominantly male, wealthy, based in rich countries, and institutional.

However, maybe this is too critical a lens too early: defi is still in its infancy. Many truly innovative and pervasive solutions begin their life as toys, and then as tools available only to well-off consumers. If we had written-off cell phones for ‘exclusiveness’ in their first years, we would have lost decades of supercharged economic development that resulted from putting a computer in the pocket of 5.2 billion people worldwide.

📊 Stat of the Week

Startups in Africa have raised over $2 billion so far in 2021 (Source)

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🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

The Central Bank of Nigeria and fintech Bitt are launching an official digital wallet for its CBDC, the Speed Wallet.

Standard Chartered bank is partnering with supply chain financing platform Linklogis to build a trade finance platform.

Payments Canada launched Lynx, the country’s new high-value payment rails.

📰 Other News

The United Kingdom will raise its contactless payment limit to £100 in October.

Worldline and German fintech ecolytiq are partnering to build a carbon footprint calculator.

Citi is considering adding bitcoin futures trading for its institutional wealth clients. The upswing in trading and investing is leading Fidelity to hire 9,000 new employees.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Funding Circle launched a buy-now-pay-later product for small businesses.

PayPal is launching a stock-trading platform for its US customers.

Laybuy launched a buy-now-pay-later app in the UK.

Iwoca and FundingXchange are offering a cash advance product for small businesses.

📰 Other News

Stripe integrated with China’s UnionPay, one of the world’s largest payment networks and provided the back-end for Twitter’s paid super-follow subscribers. Astra partnered with Plaid to enable fintechs to add automated recurring bank transfers.

In big tech news this week,

• Facebook is now holding off on the launch of its Novi wallet until its Diem cryptocurrency is ready, but started rolling out Facebook Pay as a payment option outside of its apps.
• Apple is adding drivers’ licenses to its digital wallets.
• Google Pay is partnering with Indian lenders to offer consumers time deposits.
• Tiktok and Shopify are piloting an expanded e-commerce product. (Tiktok, meanwhile, is scaling down its fintech ambitions.)
• Amazon announced that it is partnering with Affirm to allow Amazon customers to pay for any purchase over $50 in installments.

Robinhood is currently building an early direct deposit paycheck feature. Square is looking to build a decentralized bitcoin exchange. Kalshi is building a marketplace for buying and selling opinions.

Sensibill and Freeagent are collaborating on small business accounting.

Worldline enabled its merchants to accept crypto payments at the point of sale.

Kredivo, the Indonesian buy-now-pay-later startup, entered Vietnam. Nudge became one of the first fintech companies to be offered the new Japanese credit card license.

The open banking group Financial Data Exchange grew to 22 million consumer accounts on its API.

🇪🇺 Europe

• Etoro reported strong results for Q2 2021 which included 2.6m new users (+121% yoy), $362m commission and $291m trading income which were +125% and +136% yoy respectively. AUM was $9.4bn.
• NatWest and Mastercard have extended their Pay by Bank (PbBa) to mobile app users across the NatWest Group which includes RBS, Ulster Bank and Coutts. There will be a PbBa button at the checkout which hands off to their banking app. Natwest also launched “Housemate” to help renters split bills and are installing 600 EV chargers at their UK sites.
• Klarna has reached 20m customers in the US, doubling its numbers in just over a year resulting in a 77% increase in GMV in H1 2021 globally whilst its credit losses for H1 2021 also increased 55% yoy. It also revealed it has 660k active Klarna cards (83% increase yoy). The company was blasted by Money.co.uk over its claims of being fairer than credit cards.

🌏 Asia

• Prosus owned PayU India will acquire BillDesk for $ 4.7bn, subject to approvals, which will be India’s largest Fintech acquisition.
• BharatPe partnered with Axis Bank to roll out POS devices. mSwipe launched e-RUPI integration across its POS devices.
• China's Weibo banned stock tip accounts with millions of followers.

📜 Policy

In collaboration with Ben White.

• The SEC issued a request for information on “digital engagement practices” used by broker-dealers and investment advisors.
• SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in an interview with Barron’s that banning payment for order flow is “on the table.”
• The Fed, OCC, and FDIC put out an extensive guide for how community banks should engage with financial technology companies.
• Former CFTC Commissioner J. Christopher Giancarlo departed the board at Block.Fi after four months.
• Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) issued a request for feedback on ideas for proposals to ensure legislation supports crypto development. Proposals due 9/27/21.
• The Federal Reserve received scant input on its request for information regarding its FedNow system.
• New York’s Department of Financial Services has a new leader after Adrienne Harris, a former Treasury Department official, was named by Gov. Kathy Hochul.
• California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation is hosting office hours for fintech companies.
• The UK is proposing a departure from Europe’s GDPR following Brexit.
• South Korea passed a bill banning Apple and Google from requiring that developers use their payment systems.
• Brazil delayed their Open Banking rollout by one month.
• Colombia rolled out a fintech sandbox.

Sponsored Content

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