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Hi all, Julie here.

Highlight of my weekend was finally getting to meet our legendary podcast producer, Paul, in person! He lives in Houston and drove up for our housewarming party on Sunday :) Speaking of our podcast, check out our most recent episode with AcreTrader Founder Carter Malloy!

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Company News

South Korean Lender IPO

It’s not just the US that’s seeing all the fintech IPOs. South Korea’s first internet-only lender to go public, KakaoBank, surged more than 70% in its trading debut in Seoul to become the country’s largest retail lender by market value. For those that aren’t super familiar with KakaoBank (like me) it was formed in 2016 after the Korean government offered online-banking permits for the first time in 2015. It’s parent company is internet company Kakao, which has 46M active users.

Funding and Deals

Canopy Raises $15M

Canopy Servicing announced it recently closed a new funding round after seeing a ramp in growth during the first half of 2021. The startup sells software to fintech companies and others, allowing customers to create loan programs and service the resulting products. Canopy’s service costs around 50 cents per account per month, and around 40% of its customers are seed and Series A-scale startups. Canopy’s customer count grew 4.5x from February to May of 2021. The big question now will be if it can scale to larger companies.

Kroo’s Interesting Round

Tell me you don’t want VC money without telling me you don’t want VC money. London-based Kroo, a social banking app, raised $24.5M in a round led by Rudy Karsan, a high-net-worth tech entrepreneur. The company plans to use the funds to move towards getting a full banking license in early 2022. It currently offers prepaid debit cards and tools to track personal finances, as well as social features like creating group payments.

Car Ownership In Africa

I don’t know about you, but I love learning more about what’s going on in fintech outside of the US. It can tell you so much about how the local market works. For instance, in 2019, Africa had fewer than 900,000 new vehicle sales while the U.S. sold more than 17M. AKA: owning a car is a luxury. Enter Moove. The African mobility company is raising $23M to help more people get access to car ownership. In particular, those that drive for a living. The company embeds its alternative credit-scoring technology, allowing access to proprietary performance and revenue analytics to underwrite loans. It then provides loans to these drivers by selling them new vehicles and financing up to 95% of the purchase within five days of sign up. They can choose to pay back their loans over 24, 36, or 48 months, using a percentage of the weekly revenue generated while driving on Uber with an interest rate around 10%. If you were to go to a traditional lender in the region, you might have to cough up a 10-50% deposit and pay 20 to 25%.

Pintu’s New Round

Just two months after its last funding announcement, Indonesian crypto assets platform Pintu has closed a $35M round led by Lightspeed Ventures. It plans to use the new cash to hire aggressively in order to keep building out the platform. During the first half of 2021, Pintu said app downloads grew by 3.5x through organic growth, while active traders on the platform increased by 4x. It currently offers trading on 16 cryptocurrencies, with plans to add more coins as well as NFT tokens.

Crypto Watch

Crypto and DC Faceoff

That leads us to our crypto section. You might have heard about some stuff happening in DC over the past week or so. U.S. Senators Cynthia Lummis and Pat Toomey announced a compromise in a contentious tax provision in the Senate’s infrastructure bill on Monday that would exempt crypto transaction validators from a broadened definition of “broker.”

“We’re not proposing anything sweeping or anything radical – [the compromise] makes clear that a broker means only those persons that conduct transactions where consumers buy, sell and trade digital assets,” Toomey said in a press conference.

However, the Senate already held a number of procedural votes on Sunday to advance the bill’s original text, which means that unless it gets unanimous consent on the compromise before a final vote by Tuesday, the original provision will be sent to the House of Representatives. The bill seeks to fund $1T in both infrastructure maintenance and new initiatives like electric vehicle charging stations, with $28B raised over the next 10 years through expanded crypto tax reporting requirements as one of the ways it plans to pay for it.

A Crypto Bank

Crypto startup Circle said it intends to become “a full-reserve national commercial bank.”

If approved, it’s safe to say it would be highly regulated. In fact, it would have supervision from the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. This comes after it announced plans to go public via a SPAC that would value it at $4.5B.

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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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