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Hi all, Julie here.

Jordan (my husband and head of partnerships at FTT) joined me for today’s podcast. We recapped the big events of Q3, since somehow we are already closing in on 80 days left of 2021. He also changed his Twitter handle to @fintechbae after seeing Paul’s description of him on the podcast page.

Reminder: we launched a new product for students! For $5/month, students can now get access to all newsletters, certain Slack channels in our Community, Q&As with founders, and more. Feel free to ping me if you have any questions, and sign up here if you wanna get started!

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Company News

NerdWallet S-1 Filing

NerdWallet is pursuing a traditional IPO after Covid-19 dampened the business. According to the filing, NerdWallet generated $228.3M in revenues in 2019, a figure that rose only to $245.3M in 2020. More recently, growth has sped back up though, with NerdWallet posting $137.3M in H1 2020 revenues, a figure that expanded to $181.6M in the first half of 2021. The latter figure represents growth of ~32%, that’s much more IPO style than the prior.

Funding and Deals

Tiger Funds Another African Fintech

African startup Mono announced a $15M round led by Tiger Global. The company, which helps connect consumers’ bank accounts to financial applications, is similar to Plaid in the US. In Africa, more than half of the population is either unbanked or underbanked. Open finance players hope that access to a financial ecosystem via open APIs will improve access to financial information and lower entry costs for the underbanked. Mono claims to have processed over 200M financial data transactions from over 270 businesses, developers, and fintechs. The company also said it has connected over 150,000 bank accounts in the last two months and is growing 45x year-on-year in that regard.

More BaaS Funding

Productfy, a BaaS platform that aims to build “DeFi for traditional finance,” has raised $16M.

The company says it wants to be the “Shopify of embedded finance.” I’m just glad the saying “Amazon of financial services” isn’t getting thrown around a lot these days….

Anyways, Productfy’s platform helps developers “configure in hours, integrate in days, and go from idea to full stack deployment in as little as three weeks.” Since July, the startup has seen 119% month over month revenue growth. It currently has eight clients, and wants to use the new funding to further scale its offerings and compliance-as-a-service capabilities. In the fourth quarter, Productfy plans to launch a new Card-Issuance-as-a-Service solution aimed at helping brands improve their customer experience and build greater loyalty.

Crypto Watch

Dems Use NFTs to Outraise Republicans

NFTs are getting political, sort of. A group of Democratic operatives plans to turn political memorabilia and photos into NFTs in order to raise money (and hopefully more money than Republicans). On Monday, a new group called Front Row, plans to launch a political NFT marketplace that only Democratic campaigns and causes can use. The first NFTs for sale will be digital collectibles from the Texas Democratic Party.

MoonPay’s First Funding Round and $3B Valuation

Crypto payments startup MoonPay is raising its first round of venture capital (yes, first) at a $3.4B valuation, with Tiger Global Management and Coatue Management co-leading the $400M financing. The startup’s software allows people to use credit cards to buy cryptocurrencies or other digital assets from marketplaces such as OpenSea and Bitcoin.com, a space that’s definitely been growing a lot over the past year. The Information also said that MoonPay is set to generate $150M in net revenue this year, is profitable, and has processed over $1.2B in transactions so far this year.

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​VP of Banking Products, Dave:​

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Sunday was World Mental Health Day, and I think all of us could use some time to pause and reflect after the crazy two years we've had.

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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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