Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,

Please find another week of fintech news, financings and exits below.

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Funding 💸

Highlights below of deals since the last post in the fintech space across the UK & Europe. Deal data powered by Dealroom.

🇪🇺 Checkout abandonment solution Fero raised a $3m round from Volta Ventures, Coatue Management and Antler.

🇬🇧 BNPL solution Zilch raised money from eBay at a $2bn valuation.

🇬🇧 Atom Bank raised £100m from BBVA, Toscafund Asset Management and Infinity Investment Partners.

🇬🇧 Insurtech Eleos raised £615k from Fuel Ventures, APX, Magic Fund and Indico Capital Partners.

🇬🇧 Institutional digital asset platform Avantgarde Finance raised a $5.5m Series A from Jump Capital, Acrew Capital, Coinshares Ventures and Blockchange Ventures.

🇬🇧 Insurtech Sprout.ai raised a £5.4m round from Amadeus Capital, Playfair Capital, Octopus Ventures, Techstars and more.

🌍 Middle East BNPL solution Tabby secured a $200m Series D at a $1.5bn valuation.

🌍 Latam BaaS solution QI Tech raised a $200m Series B led by General Atlantic.

🌍 Banking solution for the over 60s Charlie raised a $16m Series A and $7m in debt financing led by TTV Capital.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇬🇧 Revolut has hired a new CEO for Revolut NewCo, the entity it has prepared for when it receives its UK banking licence.

🇬🇧 Neobank Kroo launched a crowdfunding campaign.

🇬🇧 Business lender Funding Circle received an SBA licence in the US.

🌍 Financial wellness solution Bloom Credit launched a credit reporting service for rent payments.

🌍 Intuit is reportedly shutting down Mint and pushing users to use Credit Karma that it acquired in 2020.

🌍 Nubank has reached 90m customers in Latam.

Digital Assets ₿

🇬🇧 The government released results of its digital asset consultation and proposes a regulatory framework starting next year.

🇬🇧 Ziglu founder Mark Hipperson has rejoined the company after resigning last year.

🇬🇧 HSBC has tested a tokenised deposit platform for intra-company treasury transactions. It has also tokenised gold.

🇬🇧 PayPal has been approved by the FCA as a crypto service provider.

🌍 Gemini has filed a complaint against bankrupt lender Genesis over shares in GBTC worth $1.6bn.

🌍 Kraken is to begin sharing user information with the IRS this month after receiving a court order. They have to share user info who have conducted $20,000 or more in a single year between 2016 and 2020.

🌍 Students in Australia have been piloting the use of CBDCs to pay for goods at on-campus vendors.

🌍 Circle is to phase out support of consumer accounts minting USDC and EURC.

🌍 BlackRock's bitcoin ETF has secured liquidity from trading firms including Jane Street, Virtu Financial, Jump Trading and Hudson River Trading.

🌍 Visa successfully piloted the use of tokenised deposits for B2B payments with HSBC and Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong as part of an e-HK CBSC program.

🌍 Zodia Custody, the digital asset custody provider owned by Standard Chartered has expanded its services in Hong Kong.

🌍 PayPal has been subpoenaed by the SEC about its USD stablecoin.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇪🇺 Allied Irish Bank has apologised for a recent glitch in its online banking.

🇪🇺 Deutsche Bank is closing 250 of its Postbank branches.

🇬🇧 TSB, Santander and Metro Bank topped the PSRs list of banks with the most amount of APP fraud sent per £m of transactions.

🌍 DBS has been prevented from acquiring new business ventures or reducing its branch or ATM network by regulators as it tackles the fallout from its digital banking outages.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🌍 Plaid partnered with payment provider Adyen to offer Pay-by-bank functionality in the US.

🌍 Payment provider Dwolla has launched Dwolla Connect, a service for customers to transfer open finance data to Dwolla to enable bank verification through third parties.

🌍 Treasury Prime launched OneKey, an instant payment rail allowing fintechs to transfer money between banks in milliseconds.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺 Payment acquiring firm Ingenico is partnering with embedded lending provider Jifiti to allow its customers to offer lending solutions at the POS.

🇪🇺US payment processor Shift4 has acquired payment solution Finaro to expand into Europe.

🇪🇺 EPI has closed its acquisition of iDeal and Payconiq.

🇪🇺 Mollie has received a Payment Institution licence from the FCA.

🇪🇺 Klarna is cutting 500 jobs and outsourcing them to a partner.

🇬🇧 Wise has secured Payhawk as a customer for its global payment capabilities.

🇬🇧 The PSR released performance of APP scams which showed AIB and Danske Bank as the two banks with the lowest refunded APP fraud by value.

🇬🇧 The FCA found that more than 25% of Brit's used BNPL during a six-month period.

🇬🇧 Mangopay has secured an UK EMI licence.

🇬🇧 TrueLayer is to power account funding and payouts for gambling operator William Hill.

🇬🇧 Tribe Payments solutions are available on Temenos partner ecosystem.

🇬🇧 Payment orchestrator BR-DGE partnered with fraud provider Sift to increase fraud protection for merchants,

🌍 Fleet payment solution Wex is to acquire software provider Payzer for $250m.

🌍 PayPal is selling its Happy Returns unit to UPS.

🌍 Payment solution Payoneer has partnered with Etsy as the marketplace expands into emerging markets.

🌍 Airbnb is expanding its Pay Over Time product with Klarna to Australia.

🌍 Singapore is testing a single interoperable QR code scheme that would combine multiple QR codes in a single label.

🌍 Remittance provider Sendwave received a $1.5m penalty from the CFPB for deceiving users.

Longer reads 📜

• A first principles look at small business lending - Alex Johnson
• Things Lie About Their Identities Just Like People Do - Dave Birch
• Moving to a decentralised identity model and reusable credentials – a paradigm shift or an implementation nightmare? - Mouro Capital
• Elon Musk and the Twitter Jerk Circuit - Jareau Wade
• Banking as a Service (BaaS) Unpacked - Chris Dean
• Caroline Ellison Was Supposed to Shock the SBF Trial. Instead, the Defense Team Has - Katie Baker, The Ringer

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See you next week!