Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,

Drop me a DM on Twitter or LinkedIn if you are M2020 Europe this week and want to chat about fintech!

Please find another week of fintech news, financings and exits below. If you are reading this but haven’t already subscribed, you can click below 🙏

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Identity verification plays a critical role in fraud detection, customer acquisition and regulatory compliance. The Onfido Real Identity Platform makes it simple. It’s an end-to-end identity verification solution featuring a comprehensive library of checks and signals and powerful no-code workflow builder. See it in action at Money20/20 Europe.

Tweet of the week 🦉🏆

Funding 💸

Highlights below of deals since the last post in the fintech space across the UK & Europe.

🇪🇺 BNPL provider Mondu raised €43m led by Valar Ventures.

🇪🇺 Ecolytic raised a €13.5m round led by Visa.

🇪🇺 Trade Republic has extended its Series C in a €250m raise at a €5bn valuation.

🇪🇺 Payment gateway Craftgate raised $2m from APY Ventures.

🇪🇺 Savings and investments fintech Froots raised €2.5m.

🇪🇺 Social investing fintech Quin raised a $15m Series A led by Portage Ventures.

🇪🇺Business accounting platform Numarics raised a CHF2.1m seed round

🇬🇧Web3 infrastructure Merge raised a $9.5m seed round led by Octopus Ventures and included Hashed, Coinbase Ventures, Alameda and angels.

🇬🇧 Neobank Kroo raised £26m as it looks to expand its team and product.

🇬🇧 Proportunity raised €7m from investors on Seedblink.

🇬🇧Bill management startup ApTap raised a seed round from Silicon Roundabout Ventures.

🌍 Crypto lender Babel Finance raised an $80m Series A at a $2bn valuation while it waits for licence approval in UK, HK and Luxembourg.

🌍 Binance launches a $500m web3 investment fund.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇪🇺 German neobank Nuri is laying off 20% of staff.

🇪🇺 Business bank Holvi reported 35,000 customers and turnover of €6.2m after its founder bought the business back from BBVA.

🇪🇺 Softbank backed lender Clearco arrived in Germany with €500m to support local businesses.

🇬🇧 Investment platform Wombat partnered with Currencycloud to launch a free Instant Investing Account with access to US stocks.

🇬🇧 Curve has cut 60-70 people due to concerns around a recession, following the footsteps of a number of other fintechs.

🌍 11 former Goldman Sachs and Apple employees have joined Walmart’s fintech arm Hazel.

🌍 Wealthsimple has relaunched as a super app

Digital Assets ₿

🌍  The Terra project is attempting to revive itself after its recent implosion with a new blockchain, Terra 2.0.

🌍 Mirror Protocol is rumoured to have suffered another exploit with $2m drained from the platform due to a bug in a token pricing oracle.

🌍 Fireblocks appointed former Bank of England head of fintech Varun Paul as director.

🌍 Former head of product at OpenSea has been indicted for wire fraud and money laundering on insider trading allegations.

🌍 Crypto exchange Gemini is cutting its headcount by 10% and is being sued by the CFTC for misleading the regulator.

🌍 New York Senate has passed a moratorium on carbon powered crypto mining.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇬🇧 Barclays is shutting 27 branches this year.

🇬🇧 NatWest launched Confirmation of Payee via API to let its corporate customers embed the tool in their own payment processes.

🇬🇧 Lloyds Bank reported 1m checked their credit score in April, 432% higher than in March.

🌍 JP Morgan made its summer reading list available in the metaverse.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇪🇺 Trustly acquired open banking provider Ecospend.

🇪🇺 Nordigen has secured Coingrig as a customer.

🇬🇧 Onfido has expanded its Real Identity Platform which allows customers to source and manage many identity vendors to meet local compliance needs and combat fraud.

🇬🇧 Thought Machine partnered with Salt Edge to offer open banking SaaS solutions to banks.

🇬🇧 Yapily has partnered with OpenPayd to provide a unified payments and open banking API that allows funds to be sent to an OpenPayd account using Yapily and also for Yapily to integrate OpenPayd’s embedded finance infrastructure.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺 Klarna is to focus on its profitability in the short term with cuts to headcount and fears of a recession. It reached 500,000 customers in Ireland and is launching physical Visa cards through a partnership wit Marqeta.

🇪🇺 An error with H5000 Verifone terminals meant customers in Germany were unable to use them for payments.

🇪🇺 SumUp is rumoured to have laid off 100 employees, affecting its expansion in Brazil.

🇪🇺 Mollie has joined Plaid’s Payment Partner Ecosystem to give SMEs an easier onboarding process to Mollie’s platform. Mollie also appointed former Klarna CTO as its own CTO.

🇬🇧 Clearpay is expanding in-store payments to SMEs in the UK with a virtual Clearpay card.

🇬🇧 Marketplace Fruugo has partnered with Adyen to offer its customers local payment methods in 41 countries.

🇬🇧 Rakuten Europe has launched a cashback program in UK, Spain and Germany.

🌍 Finix is to go head-to-head with Stripe as it has also become a payments facilitator.

🌍 Affirm is partnering with Stripe to distribute its Affirm Adaptive Checkout to any merchant using Stripe for its payments in the US, allowing any merchant to offer BNPL to its customers.

🌍 Square is working with Apple to bring Tap to Pay on iPhones to Square merchants.

🌍 Flagship Advisors reported a strong uptick in B2B card spend.

Regulatory Corner 🔎

🇪🇺 European regulators are pushing for laws to revoke licences of firms that fail AML rules.

Sponsored Content 

Identity verification plays a critical role in fraud detection, customer acquisition and regulatory compliance. The Onfido Real Identity Platform makes it simple. It’s an end-to-end identity verification solution featuring a comprehensive library of checks and signals and powerful no-code workflow builder. See it in action at Money20/20 Europe.

Longer reads 📜

• Identity Will Define the Future of Payment Networks - Tom Noyes
• The Future Of Financial Services Will Run On Open Rails - Sanjeev Kumar & Kshitja Kaur
• Give Alternative Assets to the people - Giorgio Giuliani
• Reputation in Web3: Ships Built on the Great Flood - Dark Star
• Time to Money as a competitive advantage- Ayo

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See you next week!