Meet me at the crossroads - (03/04)

Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,

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

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

🇪🇺Payments provider Open Payments raised a €3m round led by Industrifonden and included Sony Financial Ventures, Global Brain and others.

🇪🇺 Danish farming fintech Agreena raised a €46m Series B from HV Capital, Anthemis and others.

🇪🇺 Wearable payments fintech wearonize raised a €1.9m round from Companisto.

🇪🇺Crypto hardware provider Ledger raised a $109m Series C.

🇪🇺 Crypto cashback and loyalty solution Lyzi raised a $512k round.

🇪🇺 Insurtech Koala Insurance raised a €2m seed round from Insurtech Gateway, Slimmer AI, Uneti Ventures and Sterling Oak.

🇬🇧 Loyalty solution Bink secured £9m in funding from Barclays and Lloyds.

🇬🇧Synthetic data solution Hazy raised a $9m Series A from investors including Nationwide, Wells Fargo, Logo Ventures and Sarus Capital.

🇬🇧 Climate data fintech Connect Earth raised a £4.65m round led by Gresham House Ventures.

🇬🇧Payments fintech Paytrix raised a $18.3m Series A co-led by Unusual Ventures, Motive Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.

🇬🇧 Trade finance fintech Finverity raised $5m after seeing 15x revenue growth last year from B&Y Venture Partners, Acrobator Ventures, Outward VC and S16 Angel Fund.

🇬🇧Financial analytics provider Essentia Analytics raised a £3m round from Hambro Perks.

🇬🇧Multi-entity banking platform Translucent raised a £2.7m pre-seed round led by LocalGlobe and included angels Craig Walker and Gary Turner (Xero Co-founders).

🌍 Singaporean cross border payments provider Thunes raised a $30m Series C from Marshall Wace.

🇪🇺Neobroker Nextmarkets is selling all of its subsidiaries and assets.

🇬🇧 Atlantic Money has complained to the EU about being delisted from Wise's price comparison engine.

🇬🇧Climate fintech Clim8 is closing after failing to raise new funding.

🇬🇧Tide has hit 500,000 customers, six years after launching with over 100,000 being female-led SMBs.

🇬🇧 Fintech super app Curve has lost its CFO and General Counsel recently, with both leaving on good terms.

🇬🇧FT reported that Revolut's board is frustrated with the company's statement about its latest audit report from BDO which portrayed it as a clean bill of health when it was far from it.

🌍 Bank owned Early Warning Services, the operator of the Zelle bank transfer service in the US is to pilot a digital wallet called Paze, designed to compete with CashApp, Apple Pay and PayPal with another button at checkout.

🌍 Mizho and Line have scrapped their plans for a mobile bank.

🇪🇺Crypto.com is departing Germany due to regulatory problems with an investigation from Bafin coming.

🇬🇧Government plans for an NFT by the Royal Mint have been ditched in a blow to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.

🌍 Binance employees knowingly coached users from the US and China evade its KYC controls and has been hit with a lawsuit from the CFTC. It also suffered a spot trading glitch and was forced to stop all trading for a few hours.

🌍 Coinbase's Wells Notice from the SEC is in relation to its staking products with it likely the exchange takes the battle to court.

🌍 SBF has been charged with trying to bribe Chinese officials.

🌍 Disney has stopped work on its Metaverse project amid company layoffs.

🇪🇺 German banks are trying to claim back €2bn they paid into a German restructuring fund which is now redundant given the European-wide Single Resolution Fund but is being withheld by Bafin and Bundesbank.

🇪🇺5 banks were raided by French authorities who are investigating a €100bn fraud.  Soc Gen, BNP, Natixis, HSBC and Exane were all part of the raids.

🇬🇧Barclays is closing another 14 branches this year, on top of the 55 already set for closure.

🇬🇧 Lloyds is launching a fintech program to look for potential partnerships called "Launch Innovation".

🇬🇧Lloyds and NatWest are closing 80 branches between them. Lloyds is closing 39 sites across its Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland branches, whilst Natwest is closing 40 and RBS two.

🌍 Regional bank First Citizen has acquired the deposits, loans and branches of SVB.

🌍 Singaporean financial institution DBS is in hot water with the Monetary Authority of Singapore because of a second outage in less than two years.

🌍 The Fed is weighing a "special assessment" levy on banks to protect the deposit insurance in the wake of Signature Bank and SVB collapses.  They are also debating limiting the burden on smaller banks by focusing the levy more on large banks.

🌍 Bank of America has seen 10m user for its life planning tool in the two and a half years since launch.

🌍 Bloomberg has released BloombergGPT, a LLM for public financial data.

🇬🇧 GoCardless has signed Plend as a customer for its VRP solution.

🇬🇧 A report from Coadec has reported that Open Banking in the UK, despite creating nearly 5,000 jobs and over £4bn in value, is a a "vital crossroads". SMEs account for 750k of the 7m users of open banking, making the penetration higher than for consumers.

🇬🇧 Salt Edge has signed ING Bank as a customer.

🇬🇧 Open banking platform Bud has expanded to the US with a new executive team after a recent fundraise.

🌍 Brazil payments and banking platform Pismo is up for sale with Visa and Mastercard rumoured to be interested.

🌍 Real-time data fraud monitor startup, Oscilar, has emerged from stealth and previously raised $20m in funding.

🇪🇺Klarna is to integrate ChatGPT to provide consumers with product recommendations.

🇪🇺Billie and Mollie have partnered to bring BNPL to the formers B2B payment customers.

🇪🇺POS giant Ingenico has acquired mPOS provider Phos.

🇬🇧 SMB payments provider Equals Group acquired Oonex, based in Belgium, to expand to Europe.

🇬🇧 The number of open banking payments surged from 25m in 2021 to 70m in 2022.

🌍 The FTC wants to help consumers have the option to "Click to Cancel" subscriptions.

🌍 Apple Pay Later has launched in the US to allow users to split purchases into four payments across six weeks with limits between $50 and $1,000. It is working with Goldman Sachs and Mastercard for the project.

🌍 Singapore and Malaysia are to link up their payment systems to enable cross border purchases using QR codes.

👍 👎 Have feedback for us? Let us know!See you next week!