Fintech Nexus Newsletter

The world's largest asset manager continues to embrace crypto. Yesterday, it was revealed (here is the SEC filing) that BlackRock has created a fund called the BlackRock USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund that will be launched in partnership with Securitize.

During the height of the 2021-22 fintech VC boom, no sector was hotter than spend management. Companies like Brex, Ramp and Navan all raised massive rounds at multi-billion dollar valuations. While the category has cooled off, like most areas of fintech, it is still attracting capital from some big names in venture capital.

Yesterday, there was a lot of talk about the Department of Justice’s anti-trust lawsuit against Apple. Simon Taylor called it the “biggest thing in fintech since Visa/Plaid.” American Banker gave us a history of the battles between banks and Apple over the years. And TechCrunch had no less than six articles covering this development.

Bloomberg reported on Friday that Chime is planning a 2025 IPO, according to "a person familiar with the matter." Chime is the largest consumer-facing fintech in the country and this blockbuster IPO has been anticipated ever since their massive 2021 funding round that valued the firm at $25 billion.

There are big changes coming to the world of interchange. Today, in a historic settlement, Visa and Mastercard have agreed to cap card interchange fees as they seek to end a legal fight that has spanned almost two decades.

In June of last year, Robinhood announced it was acquiring the credit card startup X1. Today, we learned about the fruits of that transaction: a new Gold Card from Robinhood.

When we covered the BlackRock announcement last week of their new tokenized treasuries fund I thought it was a big deal. One week in, this new investment vehicle (ticker symbol BUIDL) is proving to be quite popular. On-chain data shows that $245 million worth of BUIDL shares are now held in seven different wallets. That is the beauty of blockchain data, everything is transparent.

Banking as a Service (BaaS) continues to be in the crosshairs of the federal government. The latest banks to be hit with consent orders from the FDIC are Sutton Bank and Piermont Bank.

This deal was first rumored to be happening in mid-March.  Yesterday, it became official. Private equity firm Advent International has agreed to acquire Nuvei in an all-cash deal valued at $6.3 billion.

Being a direct-to-consumer fintech can be expensive and difficult. The path to profitability is often a long and winding one, so we have seen several companies pivot to B2B in the last year or so.