Hi fintech friends,

Please enjoy all the news and updates from the past week in today’s edition. If you feel TWIF brings you value, please share it with your friends (and maybe suggest they subscribe too).

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🦉🏆 Tweets of the Week

🇮🇳 India

📰 Market Updates

• The Indian Finance Ministry urged banks to explore partnerships and co-lending opportunities with fintech startups.
• Slice* updated its terms of service to reflect credit card operations.
• Credit card additions grew 23.2% YoY to 76.9mm and spends grew 118% YoY and 8% MoM to $14.8bn in May, 2022.
• Arya.AG, an agri-finance startup, claimed to cross INR 500 cr ($65mm) in loan book.
• India's Central Board for Direct Taxes clarified regarding 1% TDS on crypto transactions that "if the consideration is in kind or in exchange for another crypto, both buyer and seller have to pay the tax deducted at source (TDS) on crypto transactions."
• Intuit plans to discontinue offering Quickbooks online, its accounting software platform, in India.
• RBI's Financial Stability Report (FSR) for June, 2022, claimed that delinquencies (DPD90) of fintech lenders reduced from 4.83% in Sept, 2021 to 2.26% in March, 2022, compared to that of NBFC's and HFCs at 2.36% and private banks at 1.40%.
• The RBI FSR also claimed that the Indian capital markets have less than 10mm unique active users.
• LazyPay, PayU's consumer credit platform, is discontinuing its prepaid credit products and fast-tracking its co-branded card partnership with SBM Bank.
• HDFC Bank, India's largest private bank, had a technical glitch that caused a transfer of INR 1,000 ($130mm) to 4,468 users.
• WhatsApp is readying $400mm to deploy for its payments business in India.
• Digio, a digital documentation startup, received in-principle license to operate an Account Aggregator platform.

🚀 Product Launches

• NeoGrowth launched Accelerator Business Loan, a fast track SMB loan product for loans up to INR 20 lacs ($26,000).
• Cashfree launched tokenisation interoperability in Token Vault, its card tokenisation product.

📝 Regulatory Updates

• RBI (central bank): Released the financial stability report for June, 2022.

💰 Financing Announcements

1. ProgCap, a B2B BNPL startup, raised $40mm.
2. Solv, a SMB marketplace and finance startup, raised $40mm.
3. GetVantage, a revenue based finance startup, raised $36mm (equity and debt).
4. Cheq, a credit discovery and management startup, raised $10mm.
5. Mohash, a a DeFi yield startup for debt markets, raised $6mm.
6. AquaExchange, an aquaculture finance startup, raised $3mm.
7. Fitmint, crypto rewards startup, raised $1.6mm.
8. Perfios Account Aggregator, the account aggregator startup by Perfios, raised $536K from Bajaj Finance.

ACQUISITION:

1. Pagarbook, a SMB employee management startup, acquired Vara, its counterpart in Indonesia.

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🌏 Asia

📰 Market Updates

• Commercial Banks and the central bank in Pakistan appealed to the Supreme Court challenging the Federal Shariat Court's direction to the government for complete transformation of the banking system into a Shariah-compliant one.
• China's central bank and BIS set up a renmibi liquidity arrangement.
• Klatyn, a South Korean NFT marketplace, partnered with OpenSea to expand NFT offerings in the region.
• Three Arrows Capital, the now liquidated crypto hedge fund, was reprimanded by MAS for providing false information to the regulator and exceeding the assets under management (AUM) threshold.
• K Bank, a South Korean digital lender, filed its draft IPO prospectus.

💰 Financing Announcements

1. ShopUp, a Bangladeshi B2B commerce and fintech startup, raised $65mm.
2. Mapan, an Indonesian financial inclusion startup, raised $15mm.
3. Lista, a Philippine SMB booking startup, raised $5.1mm.
4. Yufin, a Philippine digital payment acceptance startup, raised $1mm.

ACQUISITION:

1. Funding Societies, a Singaporean SMB lending startup, acquired CardUp, a Singaporean B2B payments startup.

🌏 International

Please find our global coverage and consider subscribing.

• US and Global, written by Nik Milanovic published on Friday’s and Saturday’s.
• Europe and UK, written by Michael Jenkins published on Monday’s.
• Latin America, written by Christine Chang.
• Africa, written by Benjamin Dada.

If you’ve made it this far - thanks! As always, you can always reach me at osborne@thisweekinfintech.com. I’d genuinely appreciate any and all feedback. If you liked what you read, please consider sharing or subscribing.

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