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Hi all, Julie here.

I got to catch up with Sandy Kemper of C2FO last week. I’ll never forget the first time I met this guy from Kansas City. He came into Bloomberg HQ wearing cowboy boots and insisted we sit outside since it was such a nice day. Needless to say, he’s fun and this was a great episode!

Today's Partner, Unit21

I've been hearing a lot more about Unit21 lately. It's the leading risk, fraud, and compliance command center that helps operators observe and report suspicious activity. Given the crazy customer growth that fintech has seen, making sure everything is kept safe is that much more important. Customers like Coinbase, Intuit, and Twitter have increased their operational efficiency by trusting Unit21’s secure and flexible no-code platform.

Its customers have accomplished the following:

• ​Intuit achieved a 65% reduction in alert investigations
• ​LINE automated false positive resolution by 60%
• ​Lili reduced fraud loss by 50%

If your organization is looking to balance risk and growth, it sounds like Unit21 is a great place to go. Give your organization the control to operate without code, enhance your investigation workflows, and reduce operational costs.

​Schedule a call to learn how Unit21 can give you a competitive advantage.

Company News

Opendoor’s New Credit Facility

Real estate tech startup Opendoor is in talks with lenders for a new revolving credit facility of roughly $2B, according to Bloomberg. The company, which buys homes from consumers and lists them for resale, has seen quite the boom during the pandemic. It is now rapidly accelerating the number of homes it purchases and wants to use the new credit line to continue doing just that. Example: it acquired 8,500 homes in the second quarter, more than double the number it bought in the first three months of the year. Zillow, which I am now very familiar with after buying a home of my own, is Opendoor’s biggest competitor and also borrowed $450M through a first-of-its-kind bond offering recently.

SoFi Earnings

It’s fun to finally get a challenger bank that’s public so we can get a bit of a better look at how things are shaping up each quarter. SoFi reported earnings yesterday and saw revenue double in its latest quarter, but had an outlook that wasn’t as rosy as what analysts had been hoping for.

• Second-quarter net loss of $165.3M vs net income of $7.8M a year earlier
• Revenue rose to $231.3M from $115.0M
• Total member base grew to 2.6M from 1.2M a year earlier
• SoFi generated total net revenue of $166.3M in its lending business this past quarter, up from $95.9M a year prior
• It saw 981,440 product originations in the lending business, including 18,102 home loans, 544,068 personal loans and 419,270 student loans
• SoFi’s technology business (Galileo) had 78.9M accounts as of the second quarter, up from 36.0M a year prior, and revenue here increased to $45.3M from $19.0M

While a lot of the above is good, shares fell more than 10% thanks to guidance. SoFi expects adjusted net revenue of $245M to $255M and Ebitda of a $7M loss to $3M in earnings, while analysts had been looking for a positive Ebitda of $11.8M.

Brex Withdraws Bank Application

Corporate finance startup Brex voluntarily withdrew its applications to form an industrial loan company (ILC) and gain deposit insurance. It said it might resubmit it at a later date, after initially submitting this application in February. Not too surprising since Square also withdrew its application and resubmitted it before getting approved, but this shows just how hard this path still is.

Funding and Deals

Business Banking M&A

More fintech consolidation! This time in the business banking space. U.S. Bank has agreed to purchase Bento for Business with hopes to increase the bank’s small business banking features. Bento, for those that aren’t familiar, helps SMBs with debit card-based payment and expense management tools. As someone that grew up with parents that ran a small business, I LOVE finally seeing more attention devoted to this space.

Crypto Watch

TaxBit Tackles Taxes

In case you didn’t know, taxes around crypto are pretty complicated. That might be why TaxBit, a maker of cryptocurrency tax and accounting software, has seen a ton of interest and just announced a new round of funding that values the company at more than $1.3B. It’s also a space that’s changing by the week with governments figuring out a path forward for regulations and how taxes on the industry should evolve. TaxBit seeks to cut through the complexity by offering individuals and institutions tools to track portfolios and trades and simplify tax reporting.

Messi x Crypto

I’m trying to get Ian to write more in depth about this, so bug him about it on Twitter for me ;) In case you missed it, the world of sports and fintech are once again colliding. Lionel Messi's transfer to Paris Saint-Germain included a payment in cryptocurrency fan tokens! Like other digital currencies, fan tokens can be traded on exchanges. PSG said there had been a high volume of trading of its fan tokens after reports of Messi's move to the club emerged. PSG's token, which has a market capitalisation of about $52M, soared over 130% in just five days amid speculation over Messi's arrival to an all-time high of over $60. These fan tokens were created as a way to give fans say over (mostly minor) club divisions. It’ll be interesting to see how many tokens Messi was given and how involved he gets in some of these decisions moving forward.

Together With TrueAccord

How did Snap Finance improve their liquidation rates by 25 - 35%? Read the case study to see how implementing TrueAccord's digital-first, ML-driven collections solution led to increased recovery and how collection maintains data security and compliance in a changing regulatory environment.

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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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