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Hi all, Julie here.

Sitting here thankful that Jordan offered to take the car to the dealer today to get a new tire so I could sit at home in the AC. It’s the little things.

Anyways, we have not one but TWO exciting events next week. For those of you attending Fintech_devcon, we’re hosting an event with Nik from TWIF sponsored by HMBradley, Rapyd and Ramsey Solutions. Sign up here to get more details.

For those of you that will be in NY next week, we’re hosting an event in SoHo on Wednesday the 8th sponsored by TripActions that you should head over to! Lots of folks from Alloy, Current, Point72 and more. Sign up here :)

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Company News

Google Pay In India

If you use Google’s payments wallet in India, you may soon have access to time deposits through a partnership with Equitas Small Finance Bank. The process is quick and rates go as high as 6.35% for a one-year deposit. The companies are promoting this as a financial inclusion move that will also encourage savings in the region. Whether it helps with that or not, there are certainly a lot of underbanked users in the region that have mobile phones and could benefit from a product like this.

Cooling IPO Market In South Korea

South Korea’s Kakao Pay lowered its targeted initial public offering to $1.3B at the behest of Korean regulators. The Pangyo-based company, which is the largest online payment service in the region, said it plans to debut in Seoul on October 14. The Financial Supervisory Service didn’t explain why it asked Kakao Pay to revise its prospectus. The company said it’s revenue more than doubled to 284B won last year and it cut net losses by 61% to 25B won. The amount of transactions in the first half of this year also rose 62% to 47.3T won, while payment services rose 82%.

Funding and Deals

Nubank Acquisition

Brazilian behemoth Nubank announced an acquisition of Spin Pay, which supports retailers accepting payments through the Pix platform. The move is meant to help Nubank bolster its payment offerings and expand its portfolio to offer Pix, which is a popular instant payments platform in the region. Pix was created and is owned by the Central Bank, but is operated by local banks, digital accounts and wallets, and facilitates money transfers between people and merchants in 10 seconds, 24/7.

Zip Buys Africa’s Payflex

The BNPL consolidation continues. Australia’s Zip is set to acquire South Africa’s BNPL player Payflex, which has grown from 70 merchants in 2019 to over 1,000 active merchants today. Zip’s CEO said: “We started the year with a clear strategy for global expansion, and we have seen record growth, ending the year with $5,8B in total transaction volume, and more than 7.3M customers and 51K merchants around the world.” The announcement was tied into Zip’s latest earnings report. Here are some highlights:

• Record revenue of $403.2M, up 150% YoY.
• Record transaction volumes of $5.8B, up 176% YoY.
• Customer numbers increased to 7.3M, up 248% YoY.
• Merchants on Zip’s integrated network increased to 51.3K, up 109% YoY.
• Net bad debts as a percentage of transaction volumes were 1.28%.

Oh Snap! More Funding

Snap announced a $90M round of financing to help high school teams, clubs and other activity groups do fundraising. The round was led by Elysian Park Ventures, which is the private investment arm affiliated with the ownership group of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The fresh capital will go towards creating a new program and financial management software built specifically to support high school arts and athletic programs. The company also has ambitions to help school administrators, athletic directors, principals and others to budget, track and manage every aspect of their programs. I, for one, hope this works :)

Crypto Watch

FTX Makes An Acquisition

The U.S. affiliate of crypto exchange FTX has agreed to buy derivatives exchange and clearinghouse LedgerX. This would allow FTX to offer options and futures contracts on Bitcoin and Ethereum to investors of all sizes. What could go wrong?

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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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