Hello Fintech Friends,

Monzo's £150 million Series I round continues to grow – we'll probably be covering it again next week – and it's not even the largest fundraise of the week.

‘Phantom debt’ from ‘buy now, pay later’ schemes is a $700 billion black hole that economists aren’t accounting for

Experts have been “lulled into complacency about where consumers are” as a result, a Wells Fargo analyst added.

Yahoo FinanceEleanor Pringle

I found this article interesting mostly because of the timeline in which buy-now-pay-later loans have grown as a payment method: Juniper Research estimates total transactions of $344 billion this year alone. (These estimates are always imprecise, but other forecasts land in the same neighborhood.)

Affirm was founded in 2012, Afterpay in 2014, and Klarna's GMV was only about $20 million per year through 2010... Installment payments are not a new financial services product, but the way these firms have made them accessible in the checkout flow seems to have unlocked a real consumer pain point.

But even $344 billion is just a small sliver of the $10 trillion+ volume of annual credit card transactions. It remains to be seen whether BNPL grows or plateaus, and whether the inevitable requirement of reporting to credit bureaus ultimately slows loan growth.

Please find another week of fintech financing events below. (PS: Have feedback for us? 👍👎 Let us know!)

📊 Stat of the Week

💸 Venture Financing

• Sikich, a professional services company that provides accounting technology, received a $250 private equity investment.
• Monzo, the UK neobank, added another £150 million to the £340 million Series I round that it previously announced.
• Canopy, an embedded accounting operating system, raised $35 million.
• Arbelos Markets, a principal liquidity provider in crypto derivatives markets, raised $28 million.
• Abyan Capital, a Saudi consumer roboadvisor, raised an $18 million Series A.
• Panax, an Israeli AI-driven cash flow management platform, raised a $10 million Series A.
• Numeric, an AI-powered accounting automation company, raised a $10 million seed round.
• Provable Markets, a Dutch provider of back-office tech for Securities Finance, raised an $8 million Series A.
• Infinity Fincorp, an Indian property loan provider to businesses, raised an $8 million extension to its prior $26 million round.
• Mitosis, a modular liquidity protocol for decentralized finance, raised $7 million.
• Plenty, a money management platform for couples to partner equally on budgeting, raised $5 million.
• Seamfix, a KYC and identity verification provider based in Nigeria, raised $4.5 million.
• Tuza, a price comparison engine for card payments in the UK, raised £4 million.
• Greenboard, a platform for automating financial back-office operations focused on compliance, raised a $4.5 million seed round.
• Swypex, an Egyptian corporate card platform (below), raised a $4 million round.
• Roam, an assumable mortgage platform for transferring low-rate mortgages, raised an additional $3 million.
• Moso, a crypto-based shop-to-earn platform, raised a $2 million seed round.
• Outpave, a spend management startup, raised a $1.2 million seed round.
• United Fintech, a European fintech rollup that has acquired companies including Cobalt, FairXchange, TTMZero, Athena Systems and NetDania, secured institutional funding from Danske Bank, Citi and BNP Paribas.
• Abound, a UK credit provider of over £300 million in loans, announced a new financing round that could extend up to £800 million.

💵 Debt Financing

• Pleo, a European provider of overdraft and spend management solutions, secured a €40 million debt financing facility from HSBC.
• P97, which provides e-commerce, marketing, and payment solutions for retail, secured a $10 credit line from Wells Fargo.

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