Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,

A belated happy Easter to those that celebrate. 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.

🇪🇺 FP&A solution Scaleup Finance raised $8m led by Inveready and includes Crowberry Capital, Seed X, PROfounders, Fin Capital and CircleRock.

🇪🇺 Debt financing platform Scayl has come out of stealth and announced it raised €100m.

🇪🇺 Financial data infrastructure for asset managers Bavest raised a €1.1m round from ReZoom Capital and Nautic Ventures.

🇪🇺 Business planning platform Pigment raised a $145m Series D from ICONIQ Capital, IVP, Meritech Capital, Felix Capital and Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners.

🇪🇺 Group payment solution KohortPay raised €1.2m from Redstone VC, Bpifrance, Zone2boost and more.

🇪🇺 ESG data for FI's Iceberg Data Lab raised a $10m Series A from Beringea, MAIF Avenir and AXA.

🇪🇺 P2P trading platform Zaver raised a $10m Series A.

🇬🇧 Digital wealth solution Belong raised a £2.95m pre-seed round, the largest ever raised by female founders in Europe, from investors including Connect Ventures, Portage, Viola Fintech, January Ventures, Octopus and more.

🇬🇧 Regtech GSS raised a £37m Series A2 round from AlixPartners, Cynosure Group, MUFG and CBA.

🇬🇧 Crypto derivatives exchange Ubit raised a $20m Series A from eToro, BlackRock, Blockchain Capital and Crystal Capital Partners.

🌍 Latam BNPL solution Addi raised a $50m debt facility from Goldman Sachs and $36m in equity from A16Z and Union Square Ventures.

🌍 Investment accounting solution FundGuard raised a $100m Series C led by Key1 Capital.

🌍 Family financial education platform Goalsetter raised a $9.6m Series A extension from MassMutual.

🌍 EWA provider ZayZoon raised a $15m Series B extension led by Viola Fintech.

🌍 Uzbeki superapp Uzum raised a $114m Series A ($52m equity + $62m debt).

🌍 AI risk management solution ValidMind raised an $8.1m seed round.

🌍 Canada's credit-card-as-a-service solution Brim Financial raised a $85m Series C led by EDC Investments.

🌍 SMB fintech platform Hello Alice raised a Series C from investors including QED, Mastercard and more.

₿ Solana trading infrastructure provider Ellipsis Labs raised a $20m Series A from Paradigm.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🌍 Wisconsin passed a law that requires EWA providers to be licensed.

🌍 Bloomberg reports that Chime is to IPO next year.

🌍 Robinhood has launched a credit card with no annual fee, foreign transaction fees and 3% on all spend for its Gold members. It's co-founder Baiju Bhatt has resigned in order to pursue other entrepreneurial interests.

🌍 Chime has extended its fee-free overdraft to users of its credit builder card.

🌍 Varo Bank has introduced a new Line of Credit product, leveraging its bank charter.

🌍 A US Senator pushed back on the SBA and its push for non-banks to make 7(a) loans.

🌍 Quickbooks has added Invoice Financing and Line of Credit products for powered by WebBank.

🌍 Japanese financial services firm Rakuten is to consolidate its fintech units into one division.

Digital Assets ₿

🇪🇺 Post-trade clearing group Euroclear has invested in Iznes, a blockchain based network for fund distribution.

🇪🇺 French money transfer company Tempo France has suspended its classical remittances in order to focus on defi.

🌍 An executive from Binance has escaped custody in Nigeria where he was being detained.

🌍 SBF has been sentenced to 25 years for his role in stealing customer funds of FTX. FTX is selling two thirds of its stake in AI company Anthropic for $884m.

🌍 13 fintechs offering crypto services to Russian firms have been hit with sanctions from the US government.

🌍 The two founders of crypto exchange KuCoin have been charged with flouting AML rules. $1bn flowed out of the platform on the news.

🌍 The SEC is seeking nearly $2bn in a fine from Ripple for its misconduct in selling tokens to institutional investors that were unregistered securities.

🌍 After recently being banned in Spain, Worldcoin has now also got the boot from Portugal over data privacy concerns.

🌍 Coinbase has lost a motion to dismiss the SEC lawsuit against it and the case will move forward in April.

🌍 50 members of Congress have signed a letter to the SEC expressing their view that ETH is not a security.

🌍 The market for tokenized US Treasury debt has hit over $1bn, with BlackRock's recent fund seeing $245m of inflows already.

🌍 Grayscale is launching a "dynamic income fund" focused on PoS tokens for accredited investors.

🌍 Crypto.com has launched a trading platform in South Korea.

🌍 Ripple is to launch a stablecoin 100% backed by USD on its own XRP Ledger and Ethereum.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇪🇺 Danske Bank has signed as a customer for AWS as it transitions more of its technology to the cloud.

🇪🇺 58% of EU banks surveyed think the January 2025 deadline to offer instant payments is unrealistic.

🇪🇺 Banca Transilvania has launched Salt Bank in Romania to accelerate the adoption of digital banking.

🇪🇺 Commerzbank is to use the Swift network for process cross-border payments.

🇪🇺 Italian bank Bancomat has signed a multi-year deal with payment technology provider Nexi to create a new centralised infrastructure to enable Bancomat to offer innovative new payment services.

🇬🇧 The British Business Bank is to provide £660m in funding to SMBs in the North of England.

🇬🇧 Customers of Nationwide faced payment delays due to a "fault".

🇬🇧 UK banks are being asked to provide £10m to fund Open Banking Limited, the UK entity the is responsible for Open Banking.

🇬🇧 Co-Op bank is cutting 400 jobs to reduce costs.

🌍 BNY Mellon is using a supercomputer from Nvidia to support AI applications and manage its on-prem AI infrastructure.

🌍 US banks are being warned by the US Treasury to boost their risk management frameworks to combat AI-powered fraud.

🌍 JPMorgan Chase's Wealth Plan app that helps coach customers through heir finances has served more than one million customers in a year since it launched.

🌍 TD Bank is to use Google Cloud to develop new applications and to speed up deployment.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇪🇺 Embedded finance provider Paynetics has acquired ESG bank Novus.

🇪🇺 Embedded finance company Swan has integrated Wise Platform, the cross-border company's B2B platform that provides its customers with the ability to send/receive money in 190 countries.

🇪🇺 Open banking platform Neonomics is to power the funding of investment accounts for Endavu.

🇪🇺 The BIS has announced it plans to explore tokenised cross-border payments in a new pilot called Project Agora.

🇬🇧 Payment solution Worldpay is to use Mastercard's Ethoca Alerts to help merchants resolve disputes and chargebacks.

🇬🇧 Retail financial services support provider Fintel has acquired ifaDASH.

🇬🇧 Fintech Sikoia launched a AI-document processing and automation solution.

🇬🇧 Embedded banking platform ClearBank recorded its first year of profitability, with £18.4m in profits for 2023 driven by payment volumes and deposit increases. It is mulling a US expansion.

🌍 BaaS platform Synctera has laid of 15% of staff.

🌍 Modern Treasury has launched a Professional Services business to support the needs of large companies building payments infrastructure.

🌍 MoneyGram has partnered with Tencent to enable remittances on Weixin Pay wallet in China.

🌍 AWS has signed insurance company AXA as a customer to build a cloud based risk management platform.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺 Adyen is to power the payments for enterprise merchants on the Adobe Commerce platform.

🇪🇺 BNPL provider Klarna launched Wikipink, a data hub to demonstrate how UK customers use its solutions.

🇪🇺 Payment company Worldline has created an all-in-one ordering and payment kiosk with Tabesto.

🇪🇺 Trustly has partnered with Cross River Bank to integrate FedNow.

🇬🇧 Payments solution Volopa is working with ClearBank for its EMI licence and to provide access to UK payment rails.

🇬🇧 A report from NatWest and BCG has found that retailers experience a 5%-12% increase in conversion, a 15%-30% increase in AOV and 4%-7% increase in revenue from embedded finance.

🇬🇧 PSP Ecommpay has partnered with GoCardless to enable Direct Debit payments for its customers.

🌍 Stripe is powering Amazon's "Just Walk Out" technology in Australia and Canada.

🌍 Twitter received MTL licences in New Mexico, Oregon and Illinois, taking the total number of licences to 22.

🌍 Visa and Mastercard have settled a 20 year litigation with merchants to lower interchange on credit cards that could be worth up to $30bn over five years. Mastercard also announced it will increase its Acquirer Brand Volume Fee (aka assessment fee) from 0.13% to 0.14% for all credit, debit and prepaid cards.

🌍 The DOJ has called Apple's 0.15% charge for card transactions on Apple Pay, paid by issuers, is a "significant expense". The tech company has also come into the crosshairs of Russia's antitrust agency for removing banking and payment apps from its App Store.

🌍 The CFPB is to investigate credit card reward programs after increased complaints from consumers.

🌍 A federal judge sided with Walmart and allowed it to end its card partnership with Capital One early due to poor service. Capital One is mulling appealing.

🌍 Visa's token service has provided more than $2bn to APAC's digital economy from improved payment success and lower fraud. The card network also launched three new AI risk and fraud prevention tools in its Visa Protect suite of tools.

🌍 Capital One has said it will boost Discover's network and provide more competition to the duopoly of Visa and Mastercard. The CEO of Discover resigned and is to become the CEO of Ally.

🌍 PayPal won in court against the CFPB who was trying to place digital wallets under rules forcing companies offering prepaid services to disclose fees. It's cross-border money transfer service Xoom also enabled US users to transfer USD abroad from its PayPal USD stablecoin.

🌍 Canadian payment firm Nuvei is going private in a $6.3bn deal with PE firm Advent International.

🌍 PayPal and Venmo have activated Visa+, the card network's interoperable P2P service.

🌍 Payroll and payments company Papaya Global is working with digital asset company Fortris to enable companies to integrate digital assets into their payroll.

🌍 Digital wallet provider Skipify integrated Visa's Click to Pay into their wallet to streamline the checkout experience for consumers.

🌍 Walmart and Amazon are rethinking their self-checkout experiences.

🌍 TCH's RTP Network set a record for the of transactions in one day in March at 1.25 million.

Regulatory Corner 🔎

🇬🇧 The FCA has warned "finfluencers" to keep their social media ads within the bounds of the law with fresh guidance for memes, reels and gaming streams that promote financial services.

Longer reads 📜

• Credit for a new business paradigm: Revenue Based Financing - Giorgio Giuliani
• Private Payments - Marc Rubinstein
• United States v. Apple - Ben Thompson
• How 80-year-old Fidelity became a crypto pioneer—and what’s next after its successful Bitcoin ETF - Leo Schwartz

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See you next week!