Join our AMA with Frank Rotman (TWIF 3/19)

Behind photographer Evgenia Arbugaeva's dreamlike vision of the Russian Arctic (NatGeo)

Hello Fintech Friends,

Ask-Me-Anything with Frank Rotman - Thursday, March 23rd

Frank Rotman has been a pillar of the fintech community since before it was called 'fintech'. As the Founding Partner of QED Investors, he has led investments into industry trailblazers like Credit Karma, Prosper, Avant, SoFi, GreenSky, LendUp, and Current. He has been on the front lines of banking for over 20 years, building Capital One's subprime business since the early days of its formation (when it was known as OakStone Financial).

Today, Frank spends some of his time disambiguating key concepts in banking, lending, and fintech for the rest of us via his Twitter. So naturally, he was the first person we turned to in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank meltdown for our new AMA series.

This Thursday, March 23rd, Frank has agreed to make himself available in the Finnovation Community Slack to answer any and all of your questions – not just on fintech, but on financial services, life, philosophy, and the universe.

Come ask Frank anything on March 23rd

Know someone else who should join the Finnovation community for an AMA? Let us know at news@thisweekinfintech.com!

Also, if you're a founder, the The Forbes Fintech 50 list for 2023 is now open for applications for the next two weeks.

Will I see you in London on April 20th?

👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!

Please find another week of fintech exits and deep reads below.

☯️ Exits

💻 IPOs & SPACs

Australian buy-now-pay-later provider Sezzle plans to list its shares for trading on the Nasdaq (without an IPO or share sale).

🤝 M&A - Fintech

Nigerian consumer credit fintech FairMoney acquired merchant payment services provider PayForce in a cash-and-stock deal in the range of $15 million to $20 million.
Payments, banking, and regulated data provider Cuscal acquired Basiq Pty.
Software builder Orion Innovation acquired core banking implementation partner Banktech Software.
African p2p payments startup Chipper is reportedly weighing a sale of the company.
Fintech software giant Bloomberg entered an agreement to acquire front-office solutions provider Broadway Technology.
French payments firms Synalcom, an electronic payments provider for 20,000 merchants, and Qori are merging to form a new merchant payments platform called Sylq.
Private equity firm Motive Partners is reportedly working to acquire payments technology platform ACI Worldwide for around $2.5 billion.
Private equity firm Helios is working with advisors to sell a stake in Crown Agents Bank, a cross-border payments firm.
Pushpay, a New Zealand based charitable donation payments services for US nonprofits, received a takeover bid for NZ$1.62 billion ($1 billion).

🏦 M&A - Bank and FinServ

HSBC acquired the distressed UK branch of Silicon Valley Bank for £1.
Vietnam’s VPBank is reportedly nearing a sale of 15% of the company to Japanese bank SFMG.

My payments "chart of the year" is from McKinsey's 2022 Global Payments Report. Asia represents 50% of the payments revenue pool and 60% of growth. https://t.co/lU8J8vfaGR pic.twitter.com/4mqPy2k0jd
— Tom Noyes (@noyesclt) March 9, 2023

Sweep networks just became the coolest thing in fintech (Mercury launching their Vault product)

Useful reads on how the product works under the hood

From Mercury: https://t.co/lF8nRkDnft

From Evolve: https://t.co/OGaN6s7avM https://t.co/zyttxYK3UT
— Bruno Werneck de Almeida (@brunoswerneck) March 13, 2023

Yo the "average" American had $5,300 in checking in 2019 so I don't think they are losing sleep over the $250k cap pic.twitter.com/OFxUZmBCd7
— ~JON (@joncoffey) March 13, 2023