Today's newsletter brought to you by our friends at Finley.

Hello Fintech Friends,

📈 After a grueling 2023, fintech companies are turning a corner and crushing customer growth, transaction growth, and deposit growth targets. More on that below.

♀️ Today is International Women's Day, an opportunity to reflect on representation and equity in financial services.

At This Week in Fintech, our (epic) team is mostly women. At The Fintech Fund, 17% of the founders we invest in are women, up from 12.5% last year (above the average in venture, but could still be better). Each year, there are more impressive women in fintech becoming founders, investors, and leaders.

And yet, the macro picture still leaves a lot to be desired. Per The Economist's glass ceiling index, the US scores 22 out of 29 countries for workplace opportunity. The percent of female appointments to financial services boards dropped year-over-year in Europe last year. In India, where women make up 17% of entry-level banking employees, they only hold 9% of senior positions. It's estimated that women entrepreneurs face a global financing gap of $1.7 trillion.

Where some see challenge, others see opportunity.

Fintech teams work hard to build a better financial world, and one of the easiest ways to do that is by hiring more women leaders, backing more women founders, and taking on more women customers. It's encouraging to see great organizations like NYC Fintech Women working to break the glass ceiling. What are other great examples of the people and companies in fintech driving equality forward? Share your stories with us at @twifintech.

🗽Attn: New Yorkers - are you a fintech founder who has raised your Series A or B? If so, TWIF and Wilson Sonsini would love to host you for a private dinner on March 25th. Let us know here if you'd like to join! (There are only a few spots left and will be based on partner approval.)

Please enjoy another week of fintech and banking news below. (👍👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!)

Raising debt capital is a crucial requirement for card, lending, and neobank startups, but most fintech operators don’t come from a capital markets background. That’s why Finley and Cross River Bank put together this comprehensive guide to raising debt capital. It outlines the people, processes, and partners you need to assemble to execute a debt capital raise. Download your free copy here.

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💼 Fintech Job of the Week

Assurance Senior Manager @ Griffin | This Week In Fintech

Griffin is a Banking-as-a-Service provider that helps companies build and launch financial services products.

This Week In Fintech

Looking for your next adventure in fintech? Come check out our job board, join our Talent Collective, or share your job with 2,000+ fintech people in our Slack #hiring-and-jobs channel.

🏦 Financial Services & Banking

🚀 Product Launches

German exchange Deutsche Börse released a regulated spot platform for institutional trading in crypto assets.

📰 Other News

It's been a busy busy week in financial services!

📉 New York Community Bank has been in hot water following last year's acquisition of failed crypto bank Signature. This week, its shares fell 40% and then rebounded on news of a $1 billion capital injection from a group led by former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

The White House and the CFPB announced that they will cap credit card late fees to bring them down from an average of $32 to $8.

Zelle transactions jumped 28% last year to $806 billion.

💳 JP Morgan is joining French credit and payments network Cartes Bancaires to enable its merchants to process card payments there rather than on Visa or Mastercard. Reports also emerged that JP Morgan previously pursued a possible deal with Discover to buy its credit card network, before Capital One's announced $35 billion acquisition.

🏦 The Central Bank of Egypt implemented an exchange rate flexibility, allowing the value of the Egyptian pound to be regulated by market forces following significant currency devaluation, raised interest rates by 6%, and uncapped credit cards, which had been limited at $250 per transaction. Meanwhile, Brazil's central bank is taking its wildly popular (160 million users) instant payment PIX rails global, making it available to tourists in other countries.

🇨🇳 China's mobile payments limits will be increased and tourist attractions will be encouraged to accept cash and bank cards, in order to attract more tourists.

Western Union and Visa signed a partnership to allow WU customers to send funds to eligible cards and bank accounts in 40 countries, while Mastercard and the Central Bank of Jordan are working to develop a payment ecosystem digitization blueprint for the country.

Experian added Apple's pay later loans to its credit reports.

Piling into the recent run-up in crypto prices, Morgan Stanley is evaluating bringing spot bitcoin ETFs to its brokerage. Meanwhile, Dutch bank Rabobank will execute €2 billion of paper transactions on the blockchain.

British bank Nationwide is testing an initiative to donate £200 to a comunity fund for every new account opened by local residents at locations where it is the last bank in town.

Interestingly, as increasing bank M&A creates more concentration in the US, some consumers are voting to return to smaller banks. Per the WSJ, “Community banks, which typically have less than $10 billion in assets and a concentrated footprint, grew deposits by about 1% in the third quarter from a year earlier. Credit unions grew deposits by a similar amount. Their loan books grew by 10% and 9%, respectively. Both far outpaced the broader banking industry, according to federal data.”

💻 Fintech

🚀 Product Launches

Transaction insights and cash-flow underwriting software provider Prism Data* launched CashScore FirstDetect, a first-party fraud risk score, powered by open banking data, that predicts the likelihood that a consumer will default on a loan right away.

Bank stablecoin payments platform Sila partnered with Trice, an instant payments platform for businesses and banks, to launch a real-time ACH orchestration product that runs on RTP and FedNow rails.

 Revolut built a fiat-to-crypto on-ramp for Metamask wallets.

Banking-as-a-service provider Synctera launched SyncteraPay, a solution to allow users to work with any payment provider and centralize transaction information in the Synctera Ledger

PayPal launched the PayPal Complete Payments, a suite of payment processing tools for online small businesses in the UK, Canada and 20 European markets.

Robinhood launched a new retirement product for gig workers.

CPACharge, an online payment solution for accounting professionals, announced its Next Day Payments feature.

ChargeAfter, an embedded lender for point-of-sale financing, launched a hub to let banks create, manage, and distribute lending products from one platform.

Standard Chartered's venture capital arm launched a chain financing marketplace for Ghanaian MSMEs.

Microsoft is offering a new AI copilot designed for finance teams.

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📰 Other News

Payment facilitator Adyen passed $1 trillion in annual payment volume in 2023.

Card issuing platform Marqeta reported 33% year over year processing volume growth in the fourth quarter to $62 billion.

Crypto exchange 21Shares increased its assets under management to over $5 billion. Neobank Dave hit profitability, added 683,000 new members, and increased monthly transacting members 11% to 2.1 million.

Venmo announced that tap-to-pay on iPhone will now be available for merchants using Venmo, PayPal, and Zettle to accept payments.

British online pension provider PensionBee will expand into the Defined Contribution pension market in the US. Altro, a credit building app that allows consumers to build credit from recurring monthly expenses, expanded into 47 states.

Winlevoss-led crypto exchange Gemini agreed to return $1.1 billion to its Earn customers who lost money through its Genesis partnership.

🤝 Partnership Corner

South African fintech SAVA, builder of a payments and transaction provider, partnered with Mastercard to support small businesses with payment solutions.

Cross-border payments firm Nium partnered with Secret Escapes to build enhanced payment services for its global network of hotel partners.

Everyware partnered with auto repair tech provider PACE to revolutionize payment processes for auto service dealers.

👎 The Bad News

When it rains it pours - after a suspension from RBI, Paytm's banking business was fined ₹55 million for anti-money laundering failures, and Bernstein analysts wrote that the new clarification means that Paytm’s Wallet (which has over 330 million customers) and FASTag products will cease to exist.

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