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Hi all, Julie here. I'm back on Clubhouse tonight with Matt Harris of Bain Capital Ventures, Steve McLaughlin of FT Partners and one of my old Bloomberg colleagues, Sonali Basak, to preview the Robinhood hearings set for Thursday in DC. Highly recommend listening to at least a bit of this one!

Public's New Round

Robinhood isn’t the only startup in the brokerage space raising money. Public, a socially based investing app, just closed a new $220M funding round that raises the company’s valuation to $1.2B, about 4x where it was valued in its last round a mere two months ago. I’d bet others in this space are raising too after a year like 2020. Tiger Global, The Chainsmokers’ Mantis VC, and Will Smith’s Dreamers VC participated in the round, among others. Things are looking pretty good for a company that was founded less than two years ago.

Goldman Launches A Robo

The year is 2013, and Goldman Sachs is launching a robo advisor….Actually, it’s 2021 and Goldman is 8 years late to the party, but at least it’s finally happening. The new product, Marcus Invest, will allow customers to invest $1000 or more across a variety of ETFs for stocks and bonds, with an annual fee of 0.35%. Much like the robos that did launch around 2013, Goldman’s new service will use models and questionnaires that help its clients with portfolio allocation and help them meet their financial goals.

While Goldman has yet to convince me to move my assets to Marcus Invest from my current robo advisor, it is a nice added feature to people who may have a large amount of capital in Marcus Savings and want to earn more than interest. Oh and of course, Matt Levine had the best take.

*Note: I own 8 shares of Goldman Sachs.

Just Another Acquisition Corp.

This isn’t necessarily fintech, but given that a number of fintech companies have gone public via a SPAC, I couldn’t resist including this story. There is literally a company called Just Another Acquisition Corp. that filed with the SEC on Tuesday to raise $60M for an acquisition in an unspecified sector. While that doesn’t narrow down who it might try to acquire, the filing did say that it will look for targets with a valuation between $300M to $1.0B including debt. The SPAC frenzy continues to fascinate me as well as boggle my mind, though this tweet from Matt Harris of Bain painted a nice picture for me.

Mastercard Promoting Black Female Founders

This week, Mastercard announced a project called the Strivers Initiative, which will be aimed at elevating the visibility of Black female business owners. Kicking off with celebrity support from GRAMMY Award winning singer/songwriter Jennifer Hudson, the initiative will help support these businesses both with tools as well as a grant program in partnership with Fearless Fund. On top of this, there will be a "road show” with the intent of bringing awareness to the current state of women and minority-owned businesses in cities across the US, while also recommending actions that can help nurture leaders amongst these groups.

I'm going to use this section to send love and thoughts to our fintech friends in Texas and other areas that are going through tough times this week. Please reach out if there is anything Ian, me or our community can do to help!

Two job postings today from a consumer bank and a business bank:

1. ​Product Marketing Manager, Current: In this role, you will champion the voice of the customer when developing product and marketing strategies. You will also be responsible for business impact by working with a cross-functional team of marketing, product, data, design, engineering, and customer success to accelerate user growth, drive long-term loyalty, and foster brand love. As Current launches new products and features, you will quarterback those launches and activate end-to-end go-to-market strategies. 4+ year experience in product management or marketing.
2. ​Special Projects, Mercury: If the title of this role doesn't excite you enough already...Mercury has a ton of ideas for current and future products, and this role will play a big role in researching these new endeavors. You'll work closely with engineering, design, and business operations teams to launch and iterate on new projects and perform data analysis and market research to understand how Mercury users are using Mercury, and identify opportunities and risks that may present.

That's all for today. FTT Expert John Collins is bought tomorrow for our premium subscribers to digest the Robinhood hearings and how the future of regulation in the brokerage space may (and may not) change.

Julie VerHage-Greenberg is the co-founder of Fintech Today, where she focuses on editorial content and brand. Prior to joining, she was Bloomberg’s first fintech reporter, covering Robinhood from before it was a billion dollar company, breaking the news that Plaid was acquiring Quovo, and interviewing executives on Bloomberg TV and at several large conferences.

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