FinTech Weekly - Fintech News Issue #352

Benjamin Ensor and Tim Heard are joined by two special guests: Brad Goodall, CEO of Banked, and Julie Koch Fahler, co-founder of Agreena. They will discuss some of the most important fintech news: Series A funding rounds for fintech companies, BNPL and sustainable finance-related news.

Matt Williamson, vice president of Global Financial Services at Mobiquity, joins the Fintech Chatter to discuss how the fintech firm is providing leading digital products to create a more inclusive economy and frictionless customer experiences.

In September 2021 El Salvador became the first country in the world to introduce Bitcoin as legal tender. Even if not everyone agrees with this move, especially for concerns due to crypto volatility, the country is getting more than one benefit: among the advantages, tourism registered an impressive increase if compared to the levels reached before Bitcoin.

NFTs are always more important in today’s economy, and Coinbase wants to secure a place in this innovative market: the recent appointment of Lory Kehoe as the Director of NFT Success proves that.

Denada Ramnishta shares a particular point of view related to fintech. As the GM and Head of Corporate Strategy at Lendio, she highlights one particular aspect of the fintech system, made more evident by the pandemic: to succeed, companies should prioritise collaboration - not competition.

The European market is getting harder, but fintech companies don’t renounce to new investors: Penta is one of these companies. It is not a common fintech firm: differently from its competitors, for example, Penta doesn’t allow trials or free plans to open new bank accounts with the company, but promises a faster service and easy management. Maybe the German company is using this as a strength while seeking an evaluation between 400 and over 500 million dollars - as Bloomberg reports.

Digital banks and lenders are becoming extremely popular in Hong Kong: higher interest rates - thanks to the lack of costs for physical branches, gaming interfaces, rewards, real-time transaction reports for their customers, more flexibility. Will this harm traditional banks in one of the most banked cities in Asia?

Another milestone for fintech: after the records of 2021, in 2022 open banking managed to acquire over 5 million users only in the UK. This happened in a few months: in September, the number of users was at around 4 million. Payment systems and innovative banks are profiting from the impressive rise.

Vyne, the frictionless payments platform, and Gr4vy, which allows merchants to manage all the operations related to payments with one platform, announced their partnership: the result will be an easier access to open banking payments for merchants.