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).

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

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🦉🏆 Tweets of the Week

📊 Stat of the week

Centralised Decentralised: The top 10,000 individual investors in Bitcoin control about one-third of the cryptocurrency in circulation. Top 10% of miners control 90% of the Bitcoin mining capacity, and just 0.1% (about 50 miners) control 50% of mining capacity. (Source)

🇮🇳 India

📰 Market Updates

1. Indian health insurers are seeing a surge in non-covid claims.
2. Indian banks sanctioned $1.5bn in loans to 200K borrowers (largely SMB's) as part of the Credit Outreach Program.
3. IFC Report claims that there is a $158bn finance gap for India’s 15mm women MSMEs, 66% don’t have bank account.
4. Smallcase launched partnerships with Groww, HDFC AMC, Axis AMC and others to enable their customers to purchase smallcases.

🚀 Product Launches

1. Razorpay launched TokenHQ, a multi card network tokenisation platform.
2. Cashfree Payments launched PAN verification for online merchants.
3. PayU launched PayU Token Hub, a multi card network tokenisation platform.

💰 Financing Announcements

1. Groww, a millennial investing startup, raised $251mm at $3bn valuation.
2. Acko, a direct to consumer insurance startup, raised $225mm at $1.1bn valuation.
3. Paytm Insurance, insurance arm of Paytm, raised $122mm from SwissRe.
4. Clear, a SMB tax filing startup, raised $75mm.
5. Drip Capital, an Indian cross border trade finance startup, raised $40mm.
6. Zolve*, a neo bank for immigrants, raised $40mm.
7. Avanti Finance, a technology focused non-bank lender, raised $15mm.
8. IDfy, a ID verification and onboarding startup, raised $11mm.
9. Bank Open, an SMB neo bank, raised additional $5mm as part of its $100mm fund raise.
10. XFlowPay, a SMB cross border payments startup, raised $6mm.
11. BASIC Home Loan, an affordable home loan startup, raised $3.5mm.
12. Siply, a micro-savings startup, raised $3.2mm.
13. Hypto, a fintech infrastructure startup, raised $3mm.
14. Hyy.pe, an NFT marketplace, raised $2mm.
15. BankSathi, an agent-driven distribution startup, raised $540K.
16. Colexion, a celebrity-focused NFT platform, raised additional funding from Polygon.

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🌏 Asia

📰 Market Updates

1. Kakao Pay, South Korea's largest payments company, listed on the Seoul exchanges to raise $1.3bn at top of range
2. Bank Jago, Indonesia's first digital bank backed by Gojek, turned profitable in Q3CY2021.
3. Nium launched a global platform for Crypto-as-a-Service.
4. Payoneer partnered with Coupang to launch payment and commerce services for South Korean and Global merchants.
5. Prosperna, a Philippine no code commerce startup, launched a free plan for SMB's.
6. Omise, Thai payments startup, launched operations in Malaysia.
7. Pakistan's Ministry of Science and Technology claimed that Pakistani startups raised $300mm in funding in 2021.
8. Swiss fintech companies are increasingly opening up offices in Singapore for access to South East Asia.
9. Partior, a blockchain based settlement and clearing platform, piloted SGD and USD settlements in near real time with participating banks.
10. Finverse, Hong Kong based open banking startup, wants to be the Plaid for South East Asia.
11. UOB partnered with Pine Labs owned Fave to launch rewards program on DigiBank TMRW.
12. OJK, Indonesia's central bank, released a digital banking blueprint. "The blueprint outlines working principles in five areas—data governance, technology, risk management, collaboration, and institutional arrangements.". Link to Blueprint in Bahasa
13. NTUC Income launched its micro insurance offering in Indonesia, Vietnam and Malaysia.
14. Touch ‘n Go Group, Malaysia's transit payments platform, partnered with Visa for network payments.
15. DBS Bank became the first South East Asian bank to join the Hedera Governing Council.
16. Velo Labs, a Singaporean cross border payment settlement startup, partnered with Inception, a Thai cross border payments startup, to enable sea

💰 Financing Announcements

1. Authing, a Chinese authentication and identity startup, raised $23mm.
2. Privy, an Indonesian digital ID startup, raised $17.5mm.
3. Investree, an Indonesian SMB lender, raised $10mm.
4. Finverse, Hong Kong based financial data startup, raised $1.8mm.
5. Melos Studios, a Taiwan-based music NFT platform, raised strategic funding from Binance.

Acquisitions:

1. Validus, a Singaporean P2P SMB lender, acquired KlearCard, an SMB expense management startup.
2. PolicyPal, a Singaporean insurance distribution startup, acquired ValueChampion, a financial product content 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, published on Friday’s.

🧐 Looking for context, deep dives and further insights?

Read the latest edition of Fintech Inside, also authored by me. New editions get published every Sunday at 9AM IST.

📜 Notable Nuggets

1. Coinbase Strategy Teardown: How Coinbase Grew Into The King Midas Of Crypto
2. Finance apps dominate Play Store and App Store – but have surprisingly low ratings
3. Making Financial Services Easy to Code
4. What is a DAO? All you need to know about a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation
5. The Great Competition to Give Away Money
6. Web3 vs Web2

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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