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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Editor’s Note: If you’re an early-stage startup founder raising equity, I may be able to help - reach out to osborne@thisweekinfintech.com.

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🦉🏆 Tweets of the Week

🇮🇳 India

📰 Market Updates

• After the RBI released a consultation paper seeking comments on introducing charges in India payments systems (including UPI), India's Ministry of Finance released a statement that it has no consideration to levy charges on UPI.
• Google claimed to have removed 2,000+ lending apps from the India Play Store since Jan, 2022.

🚀 Product Launches

• RazorpayX Payroll, Razorpay's small business neobanking and payroll management arm, launched WhatsApp integration to access payslips, claim reimbursements and others.
• Tata Neu partnered with HDFC Bank to launch a co-branded credit card.
• Kreditbee partnered with Cashfree Payments to launch pay later conversion for purchases made online.
• Jupiter partnered with RazorpayX to launch salary accounts.
• CoinDCX launched Okto, an umbrella app to access web3 products including DeFi, NFT's and more.

📝 Regulatory Updates

• SEBI (securities): Mandated that all capital markets participants become Financial Information Providers on the Account Aggregator framework.
• RBI (central bank): Lifted business restrictions imposed on American Express after 16 months.
• IRDAI (Insurance): Eased the cap on commissions payout for insurance companies to a company level, reviewed annually. Earlier, commissions were restricted at the product level.

💰 Financing Announcements

• Early Salary, a consumer lending startup, raised $97mm.
• Liquide, an investment advisory startup, raised $2.2mm.
• Indium Finance, a lender SaaS startup, raised $562K.

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🌏 Asia

📰 Market Updates

• FOMO Pay partnered with Ripple to launch cross border payments.
• Funding Societies received $50mm in debt from HSBC for lending to small businesses.
• PayMongo, a Philippine payments startup, is facing problems in its founding team as the CEO has gone on "voluntary leave" and the CFO "denied stealing money, apologised for remarks against female colleagues".
• Tokopedia, an Indonesian commerce company, launched BNPL on its platform.
• Atome, a Singaporean BNPL company, partnered with Mastercard to launch the Atome card in the Philippines.
• ANT Group partnered with Kenanga Bank in Malaysia to launch a wealth super app.
• Fave, a Malaysian rewards platform owned by Pine Labs, extended its QR payments offering by integrating with DBS PayLah and Singtel's Dash.
• DBS Bank claimed that DDex, its digital asset exchange platform, saw BTC volumes grow four times between April to June, 2022 and ETH volumes grew 65% during the same time.
• UOB Singapore launched a SME app for credit distribution and auto underwriting.
• Siam Commercial Bank (SCB) of Thailand discontinued its plans to acquire Bitkub, a Thai crypto exchange, for $500mm claiming that Bitkub needs to fix its regulatory issues.

💰 Financing Announcements

• SolanaFM, a Singaporean Solana blockchain exploring startup, raised $4.5mm
• Cashgrow, a Vietnamese payments startup, raised $3.5mm.
• Mahaana Wealth, a Pakistani wealth management startup, raised $2.1mm.
• Credify, a Vietnamese banking and payments infrastructure startup, raised $1mm.
• Chekk, a Hong Kong based digital identity startup, raised an undisclosed amount.

🌏 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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