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Hi all, Julie here.

Happy Monday! Over the weekend, a piece I helped Mario from The Generalist with was published! He brought together a stellar crew to dive into Robinhood’s S-1. Check it out!

Today's Partner, Kunai

Kunai has been on the forefront of Digital and Financial Services for years, and believes customers want what they want, when and how they want it. It exists to cut through the noise and consider how FinTech and FinServ are delivering for customers.

Today, Kunai partners with leading companies including Mastercard and Visa to build seamless customer experiences that unite digital products with FinTech. It promises to deliver digital experiences your customers will love while reducing time to value through Kunai’s implementation knowledge and IP. Interested in partnering with Kunai? Get in touch!

Company News

Facebook Getting More Into Payments

Facebook Pay is expanding beyond the company’s own platforms, as well as participating retailers. Shopify merchants are first in line to add the system on their sites, with others to follow after it launches in August. From a personal perspective, while it’s nice to have data stored that I can simply autofill, I’d much rather do that with a tool like Apple Pay than with Facebook. Something about it just doesn’t sit well with me. I doubt I’m the only one, but I’m sure there are others that are more than happy to make the online shopping experience that much easier. It will be interesting to see how this roll out does!

Mastercard and Real Time Payments

Big UK news. Mastercard and one of its tech partners, Form3, are offering services to provide connectivity to the Faster Payments network in the UK. This service is being offered to financial institutions as well as Payment Service Providers. It’ll be interesting to see if other countries follow suit as real time payments finally seem to be taking off. If you want a primer on that space, definitely check out our deep dive here.

Funding and Deals

Robinhood to Raise $2B+ In IPO

We finally have more details on what valuation Robinhood may go public at. Spoiler, it’s a big one. The company is seeking a valuation of $35B, marketing 55M shares for $38 to $42 each, according to a filing Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, raising more than $2B. This makes August the likely time frame for its debut, as this new filing means Robinhood is going to be starting its roadshow, which you can tune into via a livestream on Saturday (the valuation could change as well based on how this goes).

Paytm to Go Public

We missed this on Friday after the newsletter was published, but big news out of India. Digital payments giant Paytm, one of the region’s most valuable private companies, plans to raise up to $2.2B in an IPO. Launched in 2009 as a tool for people to make payments from their phones, Paytm now offers loans, e-commerce, insurance and more, counting more than 333M people as customers. The chart below and this thread shows you why this company is bound to be a hot one.
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Bill.com Makes Another Acquisition

After buying Divvy earlier this year, Bill.com is adding Invoice2go to its roster for $625M. Invoice2go is a mobile-first accounts receivable software provider helping small businesses. Its offerings can help manage invoicing and payments, build company brands, and more. Bill.com said the acquisition was to help its current AR offerings, rather than trying to build out new offerings itself. The most interesting thing to watch with both Divvy and Invoice2go will be seeing how well these products get integrated into Bill.com and how long it takes. Not saying that M&A doesn’t work of course, but there is a ton that happens behind the scenes in order to make things come together.

Crypto Watch

Dorsey + Musk + Wood

While I was in SF, I met up with a lot of people from Square. Partially by accident, partially by design. Anyways, something each one of them mentioned they were excited about was the upcoming discussion between their boss, Jack Dorsey, and Elon Musk. Now, we’re finding out that Ark’s Cathie Wood is going to be in on the discussion as well. I believe this is a free event to attend and it’s happening on Wednesday, though I don’t know what time. I’ll tweet about it once I find out :)

Together With LendIt Fintech Nexus

Nexus is a high-end partnering event for fintech decisionmakers to pitch, partner and get deals done. High quality networking designed specifically for senior executives is at the center of the Nexus experience. We've built 24 VIP meeting blocks and three social events into two days at the luxurious oceanfront Loews Miami Beach. At Nexus you can expect high-quality, double-opt-in, one-on-one meetings with our curated audience. There are no panels or keynotes. Just business.

If you are:

• A Bank or Credit Union executive seeking technology solutions and partners to upgrade or replace existing tech stacks;
• An equity investor looking to meet fintechs;
• A fixed income investor looking to meet lending platforms; or
• A fintech executive seeking partnerships with or capital from established financial institutions and/or investors,

Then you need to be there. Learn more and apply to join here!​

Role of the day:

In honor of Blend going public last week, here is an exciting role from them on FTT Jobs: Strategic Operations - Integrations. Blend is looking for a world-class operator with strong project management skills to help with integrating its first major strategic acquisition 👀 You will be reporting into the integration management leader within the Strategic Operations team. Over the next 12 months you’ll predominantly support functional leads in planning and executing against their plans, to allow for a smooth integration between the two companies. Once integrations are complete, you’ll focus more of your time on core Strategic Operations type functions, such as leading high-impact, cross-functional projects, help identifying and implementing new opportunities to grow Blend’s business, and more. Click above to apply!

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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