Fintech Nexus Newsletter

Forbes is out with its ninth annual Fintech 50 this morning, a subjective list of the hottest startups in fintech. The list is created by Forbes editors, is only open to private companies and it involves analyzing data as well as interviews with company CEOs and industry insiders.

Today, Klarna announced an interesting new global partnership with Uber. Klarna is now a payment option for Uber users in the U.S., Germany and Sweden. Interestingly, Klarna is not offering its typical Pay-in-4 payment method. Instead, this is for the Pay Now option that allows users to pay in full with their Klarna account in one click.

The OpenAI story was eclipsed yesterday by monumental news in the world of crypto. The world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, has agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines to the U.S. government for violating anti-money-laundering requirements. 

Until now, if you wanted to use the myriad of Stripe's product offerings, you had to process payments through Stripe. But that is no longer the case. At the company's annual conference in San Francisco yesterday, Stripe Chief Product Officer Will Gaybrick announced that the company is "extending our modularity to the very core of Stripe: payments processing."

For some time Fnality has focused on the development of a wholesale payments system built on blockchain. Today, they closed a funding round to help launch.

UK digital banking pioneer Monzo reported its financial results for the 2023-24 fiscal year today. The numbers are impressive. Total revenue was £880 million for the year, more than 2x the £356 million from the previous year.

Twitter/X has been going state-by-state obtaining money transmitter licenses. The social media platform is now approved in 12 states.

For the past two decades, the investment banking ecosystem in fintech has been dominated by one player: Steve McLaughlin's FT Partners. Now, that is not to say that other investments have not done deals. The really big deals are often done by the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, or JPMorgan Chase.

Late Friday, we learned that Synapse has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and that its assets will be acquired by payments infrastructure company TabaPay. This will not come as a surprise to anyone who has been following the slow-moving Synapse saga for the last 12+ months. The company had done multiple rounds of layoffs and had an ongoing dispute with Mercury.

While check usage has been in decline for years, for many businesses it is still a primary method of payment. According to the Federal Reserve we processed over three billion commercial checks in 2023 valued at over $8 trillion.