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Hi all, Julie here.

Excited to hang out with some fintech folks in Austin tonight at Point72 Ventures’ happy hour! Jordan is stoked to meet more of you at Money2020 in a few days too. I’m sitting it out this year, but am definitely having some FOMO already. Thanks to Activant, Truework, and Mercury for sponsoring our Monday night event :)

Today's Partner, ComplyAdvantage

Paxos is a fast-growing blockchain tech company. Their compliance team was on a mission to increase the efficiency of customer onboarding, reduce customer wait times, and streamline transaction monitoring processes. Put simply, Paxos needed a compliance solution that could keep up with its rapid growth.

With ComplyAdvantage’s search algorithms and dynamic AML risk database, rather than having to manually monitor for any changes in risk status for new and existing customers, the compliance team was able to automate the process. Paxos also wanted a customer screening solution that included adverse media/negative news. They chose ComplyAdvantage for our breadth of coverage and categorization. Using ComplyAdvantage’s transaction monitoring solution, Paxos was able to reduce the time spent reviewing transactions and remediating alerts. Paxos also saw an 80% improvement in efficiency. Find out more!​

Company News

Plaid Pushing Deeper Into Payments

Plaid is making a move into the payments business, unveiling a new program this week that will use its software to make it easier and cheaper for consumers and businesses to make digital payments funded by their bank accounts. Plaid has teamed up with dozens of payment processors and tech companies including Square, Stripe, Silicon Valley Bank and Galileo to handle the actual money movement. Those companies would then give their customers a pay-by-bank option alongside other payment methods.

Goldman and Amex Team Up

Goldman is partnering with Amex to deploy a cloud-based payment service for large corporate clients. The new payment system will embed Amex’s virtual cards into the Goldman Sachs TxB platform, which already offers ACH, wire, and foreign currency payments. The solution, launching more broadly in 2022, will support multiple payment options for Amex Corporate Card Members and offer data and analytics in one integrated platform.

The Growing Creator Economy

Really interesting post/stats from Stripe here on the creator economy. Here’s just one piece:

“In aggregating monetization across these 50 platforms, we’ve found that creators will soon pass more than $10B in aggregate earnings. While 2020 saw a jump in new creators, it wasn’t a one-time spike. A year later, creators are still coming online at a record clip: the number of creators is up a whopping 48% year-over-year. In total, these platforms have onboarded 668,000 creators.”

Wise X Music

Speaking of creators, The Orchard (not the other Orchard) announced a partnership with Wise to offer a new service creating a faster, cheaper way for music labels to pay artists across multiple countries and currencies. The solution is being offered through The Orchard’s new Collaborators tool, which enables music labels to digitally split, track and send royalty payments to their artists and collaborators. At launch, labels from 27 countries will be able to send payments using the real exchange rate to their artists in 28 countries, including the US, UK, Japan, and Australia, as well as countries in the Eurozone.

Funding and Deals

Beliebers in Current

All you need to know is that Hailey Bieber has invested in Current and is now promoting them on her social channels. What a world.

More LatAm Funding

Only ~5 months after raising a $9M in seed funding, LatAm fintech Pomelo announced a $35M Series A led by Tiger Global. Founded earlier this year (not a typo), Pomelo is aiming to build a fintech-as-a-service platform. Its infrastructure aims to allow fintechs and embedded finance players to launch virtual accounts and issue prepaid and credit cards via “compliant” onboarding processes. Pomelo says that while cards have an estimated payments volume of $900B per year, 95% of these transactions are being processed by local incumbents. Because of this, it can take a really long time to get cards up and running.

Brex Might Be Worth $12B

The corporate finance space is still going strong. Brex is raising $300M in funding at a $12.3B valuation just six months after it was valued at $7.4B. Greenoaks is said to be leading the investment. This comes on top of its “Brex API” announcement this week, where developers can build workflows that are customized for their company’s individual needs. Brex told TechCrunch at the time of its last raise that it grew its “total customer” figure by 80% in the first quarter of 2021. Companies like Ramp, Rho, Mercury, TripActions and others have also seen lots of investor interest and growth in their businesses over the past 12-18 months. There’s more than enough room for 1-2 winners in this piece of fintech, but I wonder if more M&A is in store for 2022?

Crypto Watch

FTX’s Monster Round

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX has raised $420M in a new round of funding, valuing the company at $25B. The Bahamas-based firm (wait what I didn’t know that?!) also raised $900M at an $18B valuation in July. The digital currency exchange competes with the likes of Coinbase (current market cap of $63B), Binance and Kraken. It specializes in derivatives and trading on leverage, because just trading crypto itself is so 2020.

The MLB Is Hopping Into NFTville

Candy Digital, a NFT startup, announced that it has raised a $100M series A at a $1.5B valuation. Lead investors include Softbank and Insight Partners, but features many investors who you may recognize, including Peyton Manning, Michael Rubin, Mike Novogratz and Gary Vaynerchuk. Candy is unique in that it is building MLB’s official NFT ecosystem where fans and collectors will be able to purchase, trade, and share officially licensed NFTs, which Candy and the MLB alike hopes will deepen fans’ love for their teams and the game.

NFT Games

Parallel, a sci-fi card game based on the Ethereum blockchain, has raised $50M at a $500M valuation from crypto VC firm Paradigm. The project is based around a fantasy storyline about humanity’s escape from space following an apocalyptic attempt to resolve a global energy crisis. According to crypto tracker CryptoSlam, the platform did nearly $105M in transaction volume in August.

Together With Fintech Meetup

Why are leading fintechs, banks, networks, investors and others joining Fintech Meetup? Simple--they know it is the easiest and most efficient way to find new solutions, partners and customers! They don’t have speakers and content so they can focus 100% on facilitating double opt-in, 1-1 speed date meetings (30,000+ of them, actually).

Don’t miss out--join hundreds of organizations who have already signed up:

• Fintechs including Akoya, Alliance Data, Alloy, Alviere, Argyle, Autobooks, Azimuth, Botdoc, Certa, Checkout.com, Dave, FISPAN, MANTL, Nuance, Nymbus, PPRO, Ripple, Signal Intent, Sila, Socure, Synctera, Urban FT (to name just a few!)
• Banks including Bank of America, Citi, Federal Reserve, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, JP Morgan, Santander, Wells Fargo & more
• Networks including American Express, Discover, Mastercard & Visa
• Investors including Bain Capital, General Atlantic, Mosaik Partners, Next Level, Point 72, Vestigo & more
• Plus Credit Unions, CUSOs, Community Banks, Tech Cos and more!

Online, March 22-24. Qualifying Startups get special startup rate tickets, qualifying Banks & Credit Unions eligible for FREE tickets. Get your ticket!

We love highlighting roles at up and coming companies! Today, we’re bringing you two opportunities to be a member of the team at early stage startup, Brick, founded by our friend, Chapman Snowden.

​Fullstack Software Engineer​

​Backend Software Engineer​

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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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