Exits & Deep Reads

SplitIt splits with ASX in favor of a $50 million go-private deal (TWIF 8/20)

Surfing Byron Bay

Hello Fintech Friends,

We were excited to see that The Fintech Fund’s portfolio company Vault* was ranked the #1 best business bank account in Canada this week! If you operate a Canadian business and want an easy multicurrency-native banking option, check out Vault.

Please find another week of fintech exits and deep reads below. (👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!)

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📖 Read of the Week

This week, Cowboy Ventures’ Jillian Williams writes about the ongoing challenge of mitigating fraud risk in a digital-first, real-time-payments world, and the universe of companies built to help financial institutions combat fraud. (Including portfolio co’s TrueBiz*, Themis*, and Hummingbird*.)

While over at The Generalist, Plaid got the sponsored writeup treatment from Mario Gabriele in Plaid: Finance's Next Great Network. It’s worth a read on the aggregator’s shifting strategy, shedding its screen-scraping roots and building a permissioned, authenticated financial data and payments network.

I also found these two spreadsheets helpful this week (disclosure: I do not maintain them and cannot vouch for their accuracy):

☯️ Exits

🤝 M&A - Fintech

Australian listed buy-now-pay-later provider SplitIt, dealing with a market slump in BNPL and lending interest, agreed to delist from the Australian Stock Exchange with $50 million capital injection from Motive Partners, $25 million of which becomes available when it delists from the ASX and re-lists as a Cayman Islands company, the second $25 million of which is conditional on hitting undisclosed revenue targets. SplitIt is headquartered in Atlanta.
Relatedly, Turkish payments and cashback provider Param agreed to acquire Czech buy-now-pay-later provider Twisto in order to obtain its licenses and expand into the European market.
The FTC dropped their antitrust lawsuit against InterContinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, which proposed to merge with mortgage software provider Black Knight for $13.1 billion.
Uruguayan payments provider DLocal was exploring a sale following activist pressure… that is, before a new exec appointment sent share prices soaring up.
Alternative investment platform Yieldstreet is nearing a deal to acquire real estate investment platform Cadre, once valued at $800 million, for around $100 million.
AP automation and invoice processing firm Basware made a £17.8 million cash offer for Irish accounts payable automation and analytics provider Glantus.
Brazilian payments provider Matera acquired artificial intelligence-powered customer retention firm Cinnecta.

🏦 M&A - Bank and FinServ

Mastercard agreed to purchase a minority stake in the fintech division of MTN Group, Africa’s largest telco, for $5.2 billion.
Apollo and Sixth Street are emerging as the early bidders for Goldman Sachs' spinout of its distressed Greensky lending business.

Private equity firm TPG approached accounting firm EY about buying a stake in their consulting arm.

“We're facing right now in emerging markets & especially in Africa the worst macroeconomic situation in a decade or more... It's heavily impacting the purchasing power of consumers.”

— Jumia's CEO on the earnings call today

The company lost 1M active customers over the last yr pic.twitter.com/UxkyVUIqO3
— Emeka Ajene ✍🏽 (@eajene) August 15, 2023

In Sweden its solved, check out "BankID" - It's a multi-billion dollar idea if exported right.

We use it not only to login to things, but to do taxes, book doctors, login to banks, verify transfers, shop online.

It's connected to our physical identity and works with faceID…
— Linus (●ᴗ●) (@LinusEkenstam) August 17, 2023