Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,

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

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There will be no TWIF UK & Europe newsletter next week. The next newsletter will be on Monday 8th April.

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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.

🇪🇺 BaaS provider Solaris raised a €96m Series F from SBI Group.

🇪🇺 AI sales and operations platform for insurance and pension Xaver raised a €5m pre-seed round led by Motive Ventures and Cavalry Ventures.

🇪🇺 Neobank for emerging markets nsave raised a $4m seed round led by Sequoia Capital and TQ Ventures.

🇪🇺 Quant trading solution Quantmatix raised a €2.7m seed round from Enterprise Ireland, Halo Business and Angel Network.

🇪🇺 Digital payment solution Bezahl.de raised a €22m Series B from Seaya, Motive Partners, Walter Ventures and PayPal Ventures.

🇪🇺 B2B lender Flowpay raised a €2.1m seed round from Techstars, Allard Luchsinger, DEPO Ventures, Kartik Varma, Soulmate Ventures and angels.

🇬🇧 Monzo is reportedly selling a $50m stake to the Singapore sovereign wealth fund, GIC.

🇬🇧 Payment solution AccessPay raised £9.4m from Beringea, True Ventures, Route 66 Ventures, Mastercard, Pratura Ventures and NatWest.

🇬🇧 Regtech CUBE Global raised a £9.7m round from Hg Capital.

🇬🇧 Claims automation solution Sprout.ai raised a €2.1m round led by Techstars, DEPO Ventures and Soulmates Ventures.

🌍 Automotive payments company NX Technologies raised a $24m Series B led by PayPal Ventures.

🌍 Budgeting app Copilot raised a $6m Series A led by Adjacent.

🌍 Spend management solution Coast raised $25m in equity led by BoxGroup and Avid Ventures and $67m in debt from SVB and Triple Point Capital.

🌍 African mobility fintech Moove raised a $100m Series B led by Uber.

₿ Crypto payment network Zone raised a $8.5m round led by Flourish Ventures and TLcom Capital.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇪🇺 Neobank Revolut has ended its partnership with DKB for reward miles.

🇬🇧 Revolut launched a iPad based POS for the hospitality industry.

🇬🇧 Neobroker Robinhood has gone live in the UK at the third attempt.

🇬🇧 Neobroker Public is shutting down its UK and European operations after less than a year in operation.

🇬🇧 Property lender April Mortgages partnered with core banking software provider Ohpen to power its UK lending operations.

🇬🇧 African cross-border transfer service Nala is profitable.

🇬🇧 Credit builder BuildMyCreditScore said its users see a increase of 52 points in their credit scores in the first three months of use.

🌍 Finance superapp M1 Finance was fined $850,000 by Finra for misleading social media posts.

🌍 US neobank Onyx Private is closing accounts and pivoting to a B2B model.

Digital Assets ₿

🌍 US prosecutors are looking for a 40-50 year prison sentence for FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.

🌍 Bankrupt lender Genesis settled with the SEC for $21m to resolve allegations of selling unregistered securities through its Gemini Earn program.

🌍 The Japanese Government Pension Investment Fund, the largest state pension fund in the world, is seeking information about bitcoin as it looks into allocations.

🌍 Crypto exchange Coinbase is to improve its trading infrastructure as customers reported problems buying and selling Bitcoin at times of high volumes. The exchange is also launching futures trading for more alt coins.

🌍 Blackrock and Securitize have tokenized US Treasuries and created the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund.

🌍 The UN has said that 50% of North Korea's foreign currecy gains came from hacks and crypto attacks.

🌍 Crypto exchange Kraken launched a custody service for institutional clients.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇬🇧 Nationwide has added a Sign language version of its website.

🌍 JPMorgan was fined $348m by US regulators for deficiencies in its trade surveillance program.

🌍 A technical glitch at Commercial Bank of Ethiopia enabled customers to withdraw and transfer funds that were not in their accounts, costing them £31m.

🌍 Bank of America has revamped its digital experiences and combined five of its apps into one.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇬🇧 LHV Bank has licensed ChatGPT for all of its employees.

🇬🇧 Payment processor Thredd is entering the US card issuing market through a partnership with BaaS provider B4B Payments, a Banking Circle unit.

🇬🇧 Embedded finance company Railsr has approached payments company Equals Group about a merger.

🌍 Credit bureau TransUnion has launched an AI-powered data and analytics platform to connect different datasets to assess risk, marketing and fraud in a single platform.

🌍 Marqeta has seen $2bn in payments volume from its new earned wage access debit-card product offering.

🌍 Galileo has launched an expanded BNPL solution for post-purchase instalment options.

🌍 Payment company FIS is partnering with AI software solution Stratyfy to launch a tool to combat card transaction fraud.

🌍 The BIS in conjunction with three central banks ave piloted using LLMs and OCR to extract climate-related data for corporate reports.

🌍 ACH non-profit governing body NACHA has approved new rules requiring fraud monitoring of ACH transactions and encourage receiving banks to return suspicious transactions.

🌍 International financial messaging organization Swift is to build a national confirmation of payee service in Australia.

🌍 US open banking platform Link Money is working with SVB to process and move money for merchants and create an improved Pay By Bank product.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺 Payment firm iDeal and bank Rabobank are piloting a stored iDeal profile at participating merchants to make online purchases easier.

🇪🇺 Adyen has secured BT as a customer and created BT Tap to Pay, allowing SMBs to accept in-person contactless payments with iPhone.

🇪🇺 Trustly and MoneyGram have partnered to enable consumers to pay for international transfers directly from their bank account.

🇪🇺 PSP Micropayment has partnered with open banking platform Tink to enable merchants to offer "pay-by-bank" at checkout.

🇬🇧 BNPL solution Zilch is looking to IPO next year.

🇬🇧 PSP Checkout.com is to use Bolt for its one-click checkout solution and Bolt will use Checkout.com as its payment processor.

🇬🇧 A payment outage meant bakery Greggs had to temporarily close several stores after supermarkets Sainsbury's and Tesco also faced an IT outage at the weekend.

🌍 Canadian payments company Nuvei is close to being acquired by Advant International.

🌍 Payments firm Shift4 has not received bids of sufficient value from potential buyers.

🌍 BNPL solution Afterpay has expanded its partner merchants to include premium fashion brands.

🌍 Mastercard has extended its partnership with Chinese fintech Alipay to enable the latter's digital wallet users to send money across borders to 180 markets.

🌍 JPMorgan remained at the top of the merchant acquiring table with TPV of $2.4trn in 2023, followed by Fiserv ($1.8trn) and Worldpay ($1.7trn). Stripe jumped from 9th last year to 6th this year.

🌍 Apple has been sued in the US for monopolising the smartphone market through a list of actions that includes preventing third-party apps from using the NFC chip. The company has also been challenged over its app store policies relating to payments by Meta, Microsoft, Spotify, Match Group and Epic Games.

Regulatory Corner 🔎

🌍 The CFPB has warned of open banking standard setting organizations being dominated by certain parties with market power.

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See you next week!