FTT Update: Purple Hats, Neobanks, and Insider Trading
Hi everyone, Parker here. It’s beginning to feel like fall here in NYC and I’m loving it. Looking forward to cozy weather and witnessing the trees transform. I’ve been bumping this tune nonstop, check it out if you’re looking for some new music.
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Money20/20 is back and in-person!
We’re sure it's been on your mind to attend this year and we would love the opportunity to show you what Treasury Prime has in store at Money20/20!
Meet with us and speak with one of our fintech or bank experts at one of our Treasury Prime happy hours, our VIP lounge at Canaletto’s, and more!
Do not miss out on all the great things happening at Money20/20. Be one of the first 200 people to visit our booth (#1928) and participate in our surprise giveaway.
Company News
JPMorgan Goes Neo
JPMorgan Chase will launch its highly anticipated digital bank in the UK next week, marking the first international expansion of JPMorgan’s consumer brand in its 222-year history. The neobank initiative puts JPMorgan Chase in the ring with challengers like Monzo, Revolut, and Starling. CEO of JPMorgan’s international consumer division Sanoke Viswanathan says the bank’s UK expansion is a “very big strategic commitment.”
Acorns Goes Crypto
Savings app Acorns has hired former Amazon exec David Hijirida as president, in anticipation of the startup’s debut as a public company and move towards crypto investing. Hijirida spent 12 years at Amazon managing global payments and advertising. He was also the CEO of digital bank Simple from 2018 until the neobank shut down in May. According to Acorns CEO Noah Kerner, David’s appointment as president will allow the startup to focus more on product development, branding, and vision.
RouteFusion Switches Up Their Stack
On Wednesday, fintech RouteFusion became the first and only cross-border payment company with a GraphQL API. GraphQL is a query language and server-side runtime that gives clients exactly the data they request and no more. Compared to traditional APIs, GraphQL allows engineers to work more efficiently, ultimately enabling better experiences for both developers and end-users. The overhaul took RouteFusion’s entire engineering team six months to complete.
Funding and Deals
Self Raises $50M
Self Financial, a fintech helping consumers build credit and savings at the same time, announced a $50M Series E yesterday. Altos Ventures led the round, including participation from Meritech Capital and Conductive Ventures. The fresh funding brings Self’s total raised to $127M since its 2015 inception.
Pine Labs Raises $100M... Weeks After Raising $600M
Pine Labs, an Indian fintech startup producing point-of-sales machines that connect to the cloud, just raised an additional $100M only weeks after announcing their $600M raise. The new injection was led by Invesco Developing Markets fund, a U.S-based investment management company. Early investors of Pine Labs include Sequoia Capital India, Temasek, PayPay, and Mastercard. “Over the last 18 months we have scaled our Prepaid Issuing stack, Online Payments, and also the Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) offering. We continue to make progress in the larger Asian markets with our BNPL platform. Very excited to have a marquee investor like Invesco join us in the journey,” CEO of Pine, B. Amrish Rau, said in a statement.
Square Co-founder Backs TomoCredit
This news is from earlier in the week, but worth mentioning. TomoCredit, a fintech that’s developed a credit card focused on building credit history for first-time borrowers, raised a $10M Series A on Wednesday. The round was led by Kapor Capital and KB Investment Inc, also featuring participation from Lewis & Clark Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Square co-founder Sam Wen, amongst others.
Crypto Watch
Opensea’s Insider Trading
On Tuesday, Twitter users accused Nate Chastain, the head of product at Opensea, of using insider knowledge to unfairly acquire profit. Citing transactional data logged on Etherscan, Twitter user Zuwu stated that Chastain seemed to be selling certain NFTs “shortly after the front-page-hype spike for profits.” Opensea, one of the biggest NFT marketplaces in the world, investigated the allegations, firing Nate shortly after. A day later, Opensea published a blog post on the incident acknowledging Chastain’s actions, also updating their policy on employee information use.
Axie’s ATH
Play-to-earn game Axie Infinity- which incorporates its own NFT collection- has now generated upwards of $2 billion in all-time sales. This makes Axie Infinity the most valuable NFT collection to date. According to DappRadar, Axie Infinity now has an all-time NFT sales volume of $2.05 billion. To date, more than 615,000 traders have bought or sold Axie Infinity NFTs, in upwards of 4,880,000 transactions.
Together With Fintech Meetup
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We just dropped dozens of amazing roles on our job board from companies such as Truework, Alloy, Coinbase, Affirm, Klarna, Chime and many others! If you’ve had luck landing a job or have roles that you would like to highlight, we want to hear from you!
Congratulations to Fintech Today community member and co-founder of TrueAccord Ohad Samet! This week, Ohad announced the launch of TrueAccord Retain, a digital-first solution for early-stage collections. Go Ohad, and the rest of the TrueAccord team!
And congratulations to Fintech Today community member Jasmine Savarese, from Socure! Earlier this week, Socure launched the industry’s first predictive document and identity verification solution with native fraud risk signals and intelligence, providing the only product on the market that offers fraud prediction, among other unique features. Read more here!
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Parker Jay-Pachirat is Chief of Staff at Fintech Today. Before FTT, she worked in product management for three years across several companies, also gaining experience in venture working for Unovis Asset Management and Impulsum Venture CoLab. Parker graduated from Occidental College in May of 2021 with a specialized focus on brain-machine-interfaces. Her senior thesis interrogated the way in which commercialized brain-machine-interfaces will disrupt society's prevailing models of ability and disability. In her free time, Parker enjoys reading, skiing, and techno.
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