Hello Fintech Friends,

🌴 We're coming to Miami for Fintech Americas! Join us on May 4th for some networking, socializing and fun! We will be hosting a Luncheon with Galileo and VU Security at Fontainebleau. Sign up here. We can't wait to see you there :)

🏙️ Also, if you missed this week’s kickoff happy hour for Fintech Week, we’ll be back in New York on May 10th for our Spring Happy Hour with our friends at Array, Atomic, FinGoal, MethodFi, & VGS.

This week, we had a great guest writeup in Signals from Rize’s Charlie Graham: Fintech joins the frontlines of the war in Ukraine.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is uprooting the global financial system. As new technology accelerates a changing world order, fintech has a renewed responsibility towards its end users. - Charlie Graham

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Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below.

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📖 Read of the Week

I highly recommend this read from the National Bureau of Economic Research, Anatomy of a Run: The Terra Luna Crash:

"In contrast to traditional financial institutions, blockchain and price data were in principle observable to all investors. However, we find that larger and more sophisticated investors withdrew their funds more quickly and decisively. These results underscore the fact that observability and free access do not, by themselves, level the playing field for investors if there are significant differences in their ability to process and interpret information."

I also enjoyed this writeup by Tarsadia’s Rikhil Bajaj as the first part of a longer series – Digital Asset Technology: The Next Evolution of FinTech (Part I) – arguing that fintech has paved the way for the next era of innovation in financial services, which will take the form of decentralization.

📊 Stat of the Week

"A new report shows that global mobile money registered accounts rose to 1.6 billion and transaction volumes hit $1.26 trillion in 2022." (Source)

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

Dutch bank ABN Amro partnered with Swedish fintech firm Gimi to roll out a financial literacy app for kids.

Chase launched 1% APY on its UK checking accounts.

Mastercard and India's M1xchange launched digital invoice discounting for farmers.

Russia is launching a new payment system with no restrictions for digital currencies, to get around US sanctions and avoid capital flight.

📰 Other News

The European Union released a monumental piece of legislation last week, MiCA (Markets in Crypto Assets). The laws create a comprehensive pan-European regime meant to allow crypto companies to develop products in a consumer-friendly way, emphasizing transparency, disclosure, authorization, and transaction oversight. Meanwhile, in the US, the house of representatives faces internal discord over its attempts to revive a stablecoin regulation bill...

P27 Nordic Payments, which is attempting to develop cross-border instant payments framework for Scandinavia, withdrew its second clearing application. The European Payments Initiative is also scaling back its attempts to launch a challenger to the major card networks Visa and Mastercard. By way of contrast, Visa's roadmap, however, includes not just real-time payments but also stablecoin payments.

TransUnion will start delivering credit scores for crypto lending.

Austria's Raiffeisenlandesbank will offfer crypto investing services.

JP Morgan is using ChatGPT to analyse Federal Reserve speeches.

Following the failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, Moody’s downgraded 11 regional banks with similar balance sheet weakness, including Zions, U.S. Bank, and Western Alliance.

Goldman Sachs, which is Apple's banking partner, is watching to see whether the tech giant's new savings account cannibalizes users from its own high-yield account.

The US' Biden Adminstration is reportedly (?) planning to hike mortgage rates on good-credit homebuyers to subsidize high-risk homebuyers.

The European Central Bak is urging US banks to move hundreds of billions of dollars in assets to the EU.

The CFPB fired its employee who sent identifying consumer data to his personal email.

Singapore's United Overseas Bank will invest S$500 in a new global technology center. The bank consortium Paze is now signing up new merchants.

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

It's a big week for SMB and e-commerce merchant products!

Shopify launched its own bill pay feature to take on the expense management solutions of small business banking platforms like Brex, Mercury*, and Ramp.

Maast launched embedded financial solutions for software providers.

TreviPay and Mirakl are partnering to launch invoicing and payment solutions for marketplcae businesses.

Metapraxis launched a calculator to help FP&A teams deliver annual budgets.

Telco Africell launched its mobile money platform, Afrimoney.

Array launched a debt manager to provide a comprehensive overview of credit and loan account information.

The ex-President of FTX launched a new crypto trading platform.

Klarna launched an AI-powered personal shopping feed.

📰 Other News

The Catawba Indian Nation in the US passed its own digital economic zone banking code.

Amazon partnered with Citi to let its cardholders pay for products in installments over time.

Coinbase, which is making overtures about leaving the US and exploring other hubs, received a license to operate in Bermuda. Gemini’s planned offshore derivatives exchange could also be the first move in a broader flight from the US; the firm recently opened an Indian office.

Greenwood, a neobank for Black and Latino individuals and businesses, canceled its waitlist so that all cusotmers could go live. UK small business-focused neobank Tide onboarded 50,000 new customers in India.

Remittances provider MoneyGram brought its web and mobile app – MoneyGram Online – to Chile. Remittances firm Transfermate secured an e-money license in Ireland.

Incomm Payments is creating 200 jobs with its new Brazilian tech hub.

Payments firm Dwolla reported 45% quarter-over-quarter growth in its partner ecosystem.

🤝 Partnership Corner

Solar lending outfit Sunstone Credit partnered with Yotta Energy to make residential solar more affordable.

👎 The Bad News

Fintech-focused VC Anthemis laid off 16 employees (28% of its team) as part of a broader fund restructuring.

Coinbase is suing the SEC to demand more comprehensive crypto regulation.

Meanwhile, the SEC charged Betterment with misstating how its tax loss harvesting program worked, fining the roboadvisor $9 million.