Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,

Join us for our first breakfast event in Berlin. RSVP here to join.

The road to Stablecon starts here. Join us at Electric House (Soho House, Notting Hill) for our stablecoin focused party. Expect music, drinks, and sharp conversation with a curated crowd of fintech leaders. RSVP as spots are limited.

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

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Check out our upcoming events and join us for our next London fintech breakfast.

Funding 💸

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

🇪🇺 SME lender Froda raised a €20m Series B from Incore Invest and angels.

🇪🇺Ta fintech TaxDown raised a €4m round from Bonsai Partners.

🇬🇧 B2B lender Hokodo raised a €10m equity round led by Korelya Capital and Opera Tech Ventures.

🇬🇧 Insurtech Marshmellow raised a $45m round from Passion Capital, Investec, BlackRock and Columbia Lake Partners.

🇬🇧 BaaS provider BKN301 raised a €21.5m Series B from Prosus, CDP Venture Capital, CRIF and Simnest.

🇬🇧 Embedded payments fintech Runa raised a $55m round from Fuel Ventures, Stride.vc, AlbionVC and 13books Capital.

🌍 Latam open banking platform Belvo raised a new $15m round.

🌍 Neobroking infrastructure provider Alpaca raised a $52m Series C.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇬🇧 Neobank Monzo surpassed 12 million customers.

🇬🇧 Cross-border transfer fintech Wise has launched a new feature to allow grouping an order with family and friends to make a payment together.

🇬🇧 B2B lender Liberis joined forces with Fincompare to scale its revenue-based financing in Germany.

🇬🇧 Neobank Revolut reported $1.4bn in pre-tax profits for its Fy 2024 with revenues +72% yoy to £3.1bn. It has also removed currency exchange fees during weekend hours for premium customers.

🇬🇧 Zopa Bank has reported over £34m in profits for the second year running, doubling last year's pre-tax profit.

🌍 Neobroker Webull went public via a SPAC.

Digital Assets ₿

🇪🇺 ING is working on a stablecoin alongside other tradfi and crypto firms.

🌍 Tokenization platform Securitize acquired the fund administration business of MG Stover.

🌍 Standard Chartered and exchange OKX launch a collateral mirroring program.

🌍 Circle is working with Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Soc Gen and Santander to build a cross-border payment network to compete with Swift.

🌍 Coinbase and other digital asset firms are reportedly considering applying for federal bank charters.

🌍 PayPal is offering US users a reward rate of 3.7% on their holdings of PYUSD, its stablecoin. It also partnered with Coinbase to increase adoption of the stablecoin with no fees on purchases.

🌍 Crypto exchange Kraken launched FX perpetuals, enabling 24/7 trading in foreign exchange pairs.

🌍 Cantor Fitzgerald, Tether and SoftBank are launching a publicly listed SPAC which will hold and promote bitcoin, aiming for $3bn worth of BTC.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇬🇧 Lloyds has retired 20 on-premises applications for its lending infrastructure and moved them to the cloud.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇬🇧 BaaS bank Griffin signed Haboo Money as a customer.

🇬🇧 Open banking platform Yapily signed fintech RiseUp as a customer for its A2A payment solution.

🌍 Open banking provider Plaid signed MoneyGram as a customer in the US.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺 Klarna signed Clover as a customer to distribute it instalment loans in the US.

🇪🇺 Payment provider Adyen was hit by a cyberattack.

🇬🇧 Checkout.com has signed eBay as a customer.

🇬🇧 Barclays is offloading its acquiring business through a partnership with Brookfield.

🌍 Global Payments is to acquire Worldpay for $22.7bn.

🌍 Block is to pay a $40m penalty for lax oversight of Cash App to NY regulators.

Longer reads/listens 📜

• 2 years in VC - Kaushik Subramanian
• Agentic Commerce Predictions – 2025 - Tom Noyes
• Adyen’s got company - Jevgenijs
• Stablecoins and the parallels with Money Market Funds - Shawn Lim, Artichoke Capital

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See you next week!