Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,

It has been a rollercoaster of a week with too much being written and tweeted about  SVB.  Real companies and real people, including staff at SVB and SVB UK have been impacted and my thoughts go out to them all. Some informative posts written by people who actually understand what went on are included in the long reads section.

In other news, we are hosting our next happy hour in London during UK for Fintech Week alongside Simon Taylor of Fintech Brain Food and sponsored by Element Ventures. If that wasn't enough to get you to attend, TWIF's illustrious founder Nik will also be there. Check it out here!

Fintech investment in Italy grew 41% last year, to a record $805m across 55 deals whilst Spanish investment dropped over 60% to $336m according to FinTech Global Research.

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

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Tweet of the week 🦉🏆

Funding 💸

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

🇪🇺 Digital financial advisor platform Kalfa raised a TRY 15m seed round led by Bogazici Ventures.

🇪🇺Digital banking app Turan raised a TRY20m seed round.

🇪🇺Alternative asset platform Cashlink raised a Series A from TX Ventures.

🇪🇺 Neobroker Capex raised a $40m convertible note.

🇪🇺 Digital accounting solution Finmatics raised a €6m Series A from Mangrove Capital Partners and eQventure.

🇪🇺 Payments solution Glaze raised a $1.1m round from Brunnur Ventures.

🇪🇺 Web3 identity infrastructure provider Violet raised a $15m round from Balderton, Brevan Howard, BlueYard Capital, Fintech Collective, Coinbase and Ethereal Ventures.

🇬🇧 Payment orchestrator Apexx Global raised a $25m Series B from Forward Partners, MMC and Alliance Ventures.

🇬🇧Property fintech Jrny raised a pre-seed round led by Tenity.

🇬🇧Personal financial management app SmartPurse raised a seed round led by Tenity.

🌍 Consumer insights platform Monnai raised a $6.5m Series A led by Tiger Global.

🌍 Stripe has raised $6.5bn at a $50bn valuation from GIC, Goldman Sachs, Temasek and existing investors.

₿ Web3 wallet and payment solution for web2 companies Tweed raised a $4m seed led by Accel.

₿ Web3 metaverse payments platform Tilia raised a $22m round from JPMorgan and Dunamu.

Challenger Banking 🚀

🇬🇧 Fintech lender Sonovate lent out more than £1bn in 2022 for the first time, a 58% increase from 2021.

🇬🇧 Scottish neobank for SMEs Alba has secured authorisation from the PRA and FCA, with restrictions (AwR)

🌍 Personalised consumer engagement platform Dynamic Yield has partnered with Mastercard to launch Element for hyper personalisation in eComm and banking.

Digital Assets ₿

🇬🇧 Crypto payment provider Wirex is launching its multi-currency card in Australia.

🇬🇧 Binance has been cut off by payments partner Paysafe and has halted sterling deposits and withdrawals.

🌍 Payments provider Worldline is introducing a white-label shopping mall concept for firms wanting to expand into the metaverse.

🌍 Crypto exchange Huobi has created a $100m fund to protect its HT token with the help of Tron blockchain founder Justin Sun.

🌍 Kucoin is in the crosshairs of US authorities as New York State AG allegedly it has violated securities law.

🌍 Digital asset custody service Anchorage Digital is laying off 20% of staff.

🌍 The market cap of USDT is more than double that of USDC after the fallout of the SVB saga impacted the latter's.

🌍 Crypto bank Signature Bank was being investigated by DOJ for lax AML processes.

Traditional Banking 🏦

🇪🇺 A deal to save Credit Suisse concluded over the weekend, with a $3.25bn deal from UBS.  Shares of Credit Suisse dropped this week upon news that it found material weaknesses in its financial reporting process and a major investor ruled out further investment.

🇪🇺Danish FI Sparxpres is partnering with core banking provider Tuum and Trifork, an IT provider, to create a card and financing platform.

🇬🇧 Bank of Scotland is allowing its users to customise how much they spend on gambling using their debit card.

🇬🇧 HSBC has acquired the UK arm of SVB for £1 and is to inject $2.1bn of liquidity into the entity.

🌍 Lawsuits have started to come in for the executives of SVB as a group of venture capital investors are working to reclaim parts of the bank.

🌍 11 banks are depositing $30bn at First Republic as a statement of confidence in an attempt to stem its outflows.  Bank of America, Citi, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo are each depositing $5bn with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley each depositing $2.5bn.

Fintech Infrastructure 🚧

🇬🇧 Open finance could be a priority in a new Data Protection and Innovation Bill after the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology proposed a revision.

🇬🇧 Bank of African UK has migrated its core infrastructure to Oracle Cloud.

🇬🇧 Mastercard has been certified as a digital ID provider in the UK under the DIATF framework.

🌍 Nigeria's central bank approved an open banking framework modelled on PSD2.

🌍 Morgan Stanley's Wealth division and Stripe are both integrating GPT-4 into their respective services.

Payments 💰

🇪🇺 Nexi has signed Carrefour Italia as a customer.

🇪🇺 French payment providers Synalcom and Qori have merged to form Sylq to offer merchants a payments platform for all their needs.

🇬🇧 B2B BNPL solution Hokodo is partnering with BNP Paribas to provide the banks invoice factoring business with a new way to pay.

🇬🇧 300 UK payment firms received a letter from the FCA this week warning them they would be shut down unless they addressed "unacceptable" risk to consumers due to lack of controls, safeguarding of money in insolvency and poor reconciliation processes.

🌍 A pushback from Republican lawmakers has meant card networks Visa, Mastercard, Discover and American Express have paused creating a new category for firearm merchants.

🌍 Payments provider Square has launched an accelerator program for Black and Latino retail entrepreneurs.

🌍 Payshap, a real-time interbank payment service for low value payments has launched in South Africa aimed at the underbanked category.

🌍 African payments fintech Chipper Cash is exploring a sale.

Longer reads 📜

• Money Stuff: Startup Bank Had a Startup Bank Run - Matt Levine (reposting from last week)
• Banking in very uncertain times - Patrick McKenzie
• The Death of Silicon Valley (Bank) - Ben Thompson
• Framing the Fintech Geo Expansion Opportunity in the US-Europe Corridor - Flagship Advisory Partners
• Peeling Back the Onion of Embedded Finance - Flagship Advisory Partners
• How Fintech Can Jump on the Generative AI Bandwagon - Sarah Hinkfuss, Bain Capital Ventures

👍 👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!

See you next week!