Hello Fintech Friends,

Today’s newsletter is brought to you by our friends at Casca.

Please find another week of fintech exits and deep reads below.

Have feedback for us? Let us know. Find me at @nikmilanovic, @twifintech, and @ndm

Over 30 million U.S. businesses are stuck with slow, manual loan processes—or forced into costly online financing. With Casca, banks can eliminate the human bottleneck, cutting turnaround times, boosting approvals, and offering more competitive rates. The result: faster growth for your customers, and a bigger, more profitable lending portfolio for you.

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Reads of the Week

Beyond stablecoins: The evolution of digital money

Solutions for an evolving landscape for traditional finance and capital markets through Google Cloud Universal Ledger.

Google Cloud

Fintechs Consider Raising Prices Due To JPMorgan’s Looming Fees

Major fintechs companies including Betterment and Rocket Money tell Forbes that, if Chase’s data access fees cause their costs to go up significantly, they’ll need to raise prices for consumers.

ForbesJeff Kauflin

Exits

IPOs & SPACs

• Buy-now-pay-later platform Klarna revived its U.S. IPO plans with a target valuation of up to $14 billion.
• SK Finance, backed by TPG, shelved its planned India IPO after weak investor demand. The non-bank lender sought to launch the deal earlier this month but demand fell short, even after cutting the proposed offer to 16 billion rupees ($183 million).
• Commercial Bancgroup filed for a $173 million IPO to expand its Tennessee-based community banking operations.
• Trump Media & Crypto.com launched a SPAC to build a $6.4 billion crypto-treasury anchored in CRO tokens.
• M3-Brigade Acquisition VI priced a $300 million SPAC IPO targeting large crypto and blockchain companies.
• Bitcoin Infrastructure Acquisition filed for a $200 million SPAC IPO focused on digital asset infrastructure.
• CSLM Digital Asset Acquisition III priced a $200 million SPAC IPO aimed at blockchain and digital asset businesses.

M&A - Fintech

• The Carlyle Group closed its acquisition of financial advice tech provider Intelliflo for up to $200 million, including $135 million up front and $65 million in earn-outs.
• Wealthsimple acquired the investment research platform Fey from Montreal, with financial terms undisclosed.
• Swedbank bought Barclays’s ownership stake in consumer credit provider Entercard for approximately $275 million, making Entercard its wholly owned subsidiary.
• Bow River Capital purchased Park Cities' asset-based financing business, gaining a 12-person team and new lending capabilities.
• Guideline entered into an agreement to be acquired by Gusto, after serving around 65,000 customers and managing over $20 billion in assets.

M&A - Banks and Financial Institutions

• UniCredit boosted its equity stake in Commerzbank to approximately 26% by converting synthetic holdings into physical shares.
• Fund solutions provider JTC rejected Permira’s preliminary £2 billion takeover proposal, sending its shares to record highs.
• Barclays agreed to sell its stake in joint venture Entercard to partner Swedbank for an estimated 2.6 billion crowns ($273.2 million).
• Desjardins Group signed a definitive agreement to take Guardian Capital private in a C$1.67 billion all-cash deal, joining their asset-management platforms.

Send: Stablecoins are a fast lane for global payouts

Global financial services are being rebuilt on stablecoins, block by block. In my previous posts, I outlined our vision at BVNK for Fintech 2.

LinkedInJesse Hemson-Struthers

Google Cloud Universal Ledger: A Neutral Layer 1 for Institutions | Rich Widmann posted on the topic | LinkedIn

All this talk of Layer 1 blockchains has brought Google’s own Layer 1 into focus. As a product leader in crypto, you know that if you’re building a Layer 1 it has to be differentiated. Thanks to Chuk Okpalugo for his helpful chart comparing Stripe and Circle blockchains - I went ahead and added information about our blockchain which we call the Google Cloud Universal Ledger or GCUL. GCUL brings together years of R&D at Google to provide financial institutions with a novel Layer 1 that is performant, credibly neutral and enables Python-based smart contracts. It’s why institutions like the CME Group chose the Universal Ledger to explore tokenization and payments on one of the largest commodities exchanges in the world leveraging GCUL: https://lnkd.in/g3ciy53Y Besides bringing to bear Google’s distribution, GCUL is a neutral infrastructure layer. Tether won’t use Circle’s blockchain - and Adyen probably won’t use Stripe’s blockchain. But any financial institution can build with GCUL. We’ll be releasing more technical details in the coming months! James Tromans Tomas Chudy Nalin Mittal | 130 comments on LinkedIn

LinkedInRich Widmann

Over 30 million U.S. businesses are stuck with slow, manual loan processes—or forced into costly online financing. With Casca, banks can eliminate the human bottleneck, cutting turnaround times, boosting approvals, and offering more competitive rates. The result: faster growth for your customers, and a bigger, more profitable lending portfolio for you.

Want to sponsor a newsletter? See our sponsorship information here.