Hi fintech friends, I'm Osborne, Principal at EMVC!

Please enjoy all the news and updates from the past week in today’s edition. If you feel TWIF brings you value, please share it with your friends (and maybe suggest they subscribe too).

🧐🏆 Posts of the Week

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The motherships of Alternate Data, now NPCI is gonna introduce a Payments score of an Individual for better credit underwriting to enable NTC access credit!— Mehul Nath Jindal (@mehuljindal18) February 8, 2024

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I got one digit, one digit wrong and paid the wrong guy by UPI. First time ever. And no that money ain’t coming back.— Anupam Gupta (@b50) February 6, 2024

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🤯 This thing Stripe does is crazy to me…

They send personalized gifts to their customers when they achieve certain milestones 🎁

I spent a few hours researching about how this worked.

Here’s what I found: pic.twitter.com/hbkrq6QNw2— Nico Cerdeira (Failory.com) (@nicocerdeira) February 6, 2024

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Did you notice high failures on DigiLocker yesterday? What if I told you that this is related to the Paytm issue?

On one hand, Paytm has been instructed to halt onboarding for Paytm payments bank due to concerns about the misuse of PAN data. According to reports, multiple users…— Pete (@PeteJaison) February 7, 2024

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Heard in a banking room "If you think complaince is expensive, try non-compliance"— Savio Shetty (@abeautifulmind7) February 6, 2024

(Note: Neither TWIF nor I endorse any views in the tweets highlighted above.)

📈 Chart of the Week

Source: Deepak Shenoy, Founder, CapitalMind.

💼 Fintech Job of the Week

Arta Finance is the digital family office for the world. It empowers more people to gain the financial superpowers that, until now, were only accessible by ultra-high-net-worth individuals.

Arta is hiring for,

🇮🇳 India

📰 Market Updates

  • LICannounced growing its net profit by 49% YoY to INR 9,444cr ($1.15bn) and net premium income grew to INR 1.2tn ($14.2bn) for the quarter ended (Dec, 2023).

  • Jana Small Finance Banklaunched its IPO.

  • Paytmannounced forming a Group Advisory Committee to address compliance concerns.

  • Fintech startupsraised $438mm in Jan, 2024 across 20 deals, compared to $96mm from 10 deals in Dec, 2023.

  • An Indian parliamentary panelraised the issue of concentration of market cap in UPI payments. The NPCI introduced a 30% cap on UPI payment market share but Google Pay and PhonePe reportedly account for 83.3% market share as of Oct-Nov-23.

🚀 Product Launches

  1. Slice* launched a UPI-first prepaid account.

  2. MoneyWare, an EbixCash company, partnered withSpare8 to launch a digital gold leasing product.

  3. CCAvenuespartnered withIDFC First Bank to launch a credit card EMI solution.

  4. YES Bankpartnered withLeRemitt to launch cross border payments for small businesses.

  5. Paymart, a payments startup, partnered with five regional banks to launch virtual ATM's.

📝 Regulatory Updates

  1. RBI (central bank): Directed lenders to disclose loan pricing and charges if any, upfront. Proposed introducing a principle-based framework for authentication to replace OTP based authentication. Announced that its Digital Rupee (CBDC) can now be used programmatically and offline. Approved the Payment Aggregator license of Decentro and Nium.

  2. SEBI (securities): Released guidelines on how to draft proper disclosure and offer documents.

💰 Financing Announcements

  1. Metafin, a renewable energy focused financing startup, raised $5mm.

  2. CashInvoice, a supply chain financing startup, raised $3.4mm.

  3. Fabits, a goal based savings startup, raised an undisclosed amount.

ACQUISITIONS:

  1. Juspay, a payments infrastructure company, acquiredLotusPay, a payments platform.

  2. CREDacquiredKuvera, a mutual fund investing startup.

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🌏 Asia

📰 Market Updates

  1. Wiselaunched its cross border payments service in Philippines.

  2. Google Singapore is launching a new product to protect Android users from fraud.

  3. UBSlaunched Hong Kong’s first investment-grade tokenized warrant on the Ethereum public blockchain network.

  4. Ant Group, the financial services arm of Alibaba China, saw its quarterly net profit drop by 92% YoY to $11mm.

  5. Singaporean AI fintech startups received $333mm in funding in H2 2023.

  6. Syfe, a Singaporean wealth management firm, announced $3.1mm (+140% YoY) in revenue for FY23 (ended Mar, 2023).

  7. Juniper Researchreleased a report stating that %42% of all cross border payments will be real time payments by 2028.

  8. Mari Bank, a Singaporean digital bank of SEA Group, announced growing AUM to $149mm.

  9. Thailand's Ministry of FInance removed a 7% VAT on profits from cryptocurrency and digital token trades.

  10. MAS, Singpore's central bank, proposed to reduce the user information collected by insurance companies for certain insurance policies.

💰 Financing Announcements

  1. Oobit, a Singaporean crypto payments firm, raised $25mm.

  2. MediConCen, a Hong Kong-based tokenised insurance company, raised $6.85mm.

  3. Startale Labs, a Singaporean web3 infrastructure startup, raised $3.5mm.

  4. Validus Group, a Southeast Asian small business financing startup, raised an undisclosed amount.

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If you’ve made it this far - thanks! As always, you can always reach me at [email protected]. I’d genuinely appreciate any and all feedback. If you liked what you read, please consider sharing or subscribing.

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