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Hi all, Julie here.

First off, huge thanks to NYC Fintech Women for the feature this morning! Honored to be sitting alongside a bunch of other amazing females in our space. Let me know who else you think they should nominate!

Second, if you need a good laugh, check out the latest episode of Howard Lindzon’s Panic With Friends podcast. Might be the funnest hour of my life this past month.

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Company News

Robinhood’s Earnings Show Big Swing to Crypto

There are some crazy stats in Robinhood’s most recent earnings report when it comes to crypto. Natalie Luu from Lightspeed touched on them yesterday in her post for us on embedded crypto, but you should definitely dig into the numbers a bit deeper for yourself too. I think my biggest question for Robinhood moving forward is whether or not its best quarters ever are behind them. Would love to hear your thoughts!

Schwab Gives Staff A Pandemic Raise

Charles Schwab is giving most of its employees a special 5% pay raise as record stock market levels propel the industry’s earnings. I love that it’s doing this, but I believe it also speaks to the war for talent and how important it is to keep employees happy these days. Thankfully for Schwab, it has the money to spend. The company said that in the first half of the year, clients opened 4.8M new accounts and new assets totaled $257B, double the year-earlier amount.

UnitedMasters’ New Features With beatBread and Paperchain

Cool news out of the creator economy. Independent music distribution service UnitedMasters is adding advances and instant royalty payments to its artists. The company has partnered up with music fintech companies beatBread to bring advances and Paperchain for real time payments. Through beatBread, qualifying UnitedMasters clients can get advances of up to $1M, and through Paperchain, artists can get their royalty earnings right away. Paperchain and beatBread are also joining UnitedMasters’ service SplitPay, which allows qualifying artists to automatically split their earnings with their team and with collaborators rather than having to manually divide and pay out the cash themselves.

Marqeta’s Climate Move

Stuff like this is going to start being a requirement for companies rather than a nice to have, IMO. Marqeta has launched a new recycled card initiative to offset its plastic footprint.

The card issuing platform will now offer its customers the choice to issue physical cards made from 43% recycled material, and has entered into a partnership with social enterprise rePurpose Global to further reduce its plastic footprint - which will offset the creation of roughly 34M cards. Who’s next?

Funding and Deals

African Fintech Pngme Raises Again

Less than a year after its $3M seed, African fintech Pngme is announcing another $15M in funding. The company’s platform helps fintech companies and others in the financial space with three core products: an API, mobile SDK, and customer management platform. The company says this will help African companies offer more tailored experiences to their users.

DriveWealth Gets New Funding

DriveWealth, which helps companies like Cash App offer fractional trading, has raised $450M with a valuation of just under $3B. It was led by Insight Partners and Accel, with participation from SoftBank’s Vision Fund, Citi Ventures, cryptocurrency exchange FTX and more.

E-Commerce Funding Boom

The shift to buying things online has certainly helped companies that make developer tools to help e-commerce sites provide better shopping experiences. One of those is Nacelle, and it just announced a $50M round from Tiger Global. The company said its revenue grew 690% in the past year, and that it wants to start providing a dynamic layer of functionality on top of the tech stack for storefronts that are traditionally static, and even introducing some livestream capabilities later this year.

Crypto Watch

DeFi Index

Mike Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital is launching a DeFi index with Bloomberg. Announced Thursday, the Galaxy DeFi Index Fund seeks to provide institutional investors access to returns based on the performance of DeFi tokens. It offers exposure to major decentralized lending and exchange platforms like Uniswap, Aave, Maker, Yearn and others (weightings below). The constituents represented are selected based on institutional trading and custody readiness in the US, as well as quality of pricing.

Together With TrueAccord

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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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