Fintech Nexus Newsletter

A $200m equity raise at a valuation double the previous round? No you did not wake up in 2021 this morning, it is (checks watch) definitely January 2024. I was just chatting with someone earlier this week about equity raises and I commented that there seems to be much more activity this month than in January 2023. While we are most definitely not back in 2021, VCs seem to be opening up their checkbooks a little more.

You could say Banking as a Service is under siege. The number of severe enforcement actions BaaS banks received skyrocketed in 2023 to 13.5% of the total. When you consider there are probably only around 100 banks out of 4,800 that are involved in banking as a service, you can see why this number is disturbing.

It is a bold or naïve CEO that prefaces a major announcement with the words, "This will shock the world". New PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said exactly that in his first public interview since becoming CEO. That was a week ago and he was referring to major announcements that would happen at the company's Innovation Day that it conducted yesterday.

It is a bold or naïve CEO that prefaces a major announcement with the words, "This will shock the world". New PayPal CEO Alex Chriss said exactly that in his first public interview since becoming CEO. That was a week ago and he was referring to major announcements that would happen at the company's Innovation Day that it conducted yesterday.

It was only Thursday of last week when our lead story was about the challenges banks were facing in the Banking-as-a-Service space. Then Friday we learned that Blue Ridge Bank was hit with its second regulatory action in less than 18 months and is now deemed to be in a "troubled condition".

The largest small business lender that you may not even know exists is Amazon Lending. The tech behemoth loans out billions of dollars every year to small businesses on its marketplace. Today, we learned about a new fintech partnership Amazon is entering into with SellersFi (formerly Sellers Funding). SellersFi is a seven-year-old small business lending fintech focused on e-commerce platforms. They provide e-commerce merchants with working capital, payments solutions and more.

Yesterday, Apple shared details on Apple Card usage for the first time. The card was introduced in 2019 and since then it has acquired 12 million users, not a bad effort in less than five years. Users earn Daily Cash rewards when they use the card and Apple reported that the total for 2023 was over $1 billion.

There is a new report out today that looks at the impact of generative AI on the workforce and what industries will be most impacted. We have heard before that white-collar jobs, those people with college degrees will be most impacted. This report tries to quantify some of this impact.

We have been following the recent developments in real-time payments with some interest. While adoption is increasing it is not going as fast as many industry observers had hoped.

It was three ago last week when LendingClub closed its acquisition of Radius Bank. At that time LendingClub entered into an operating agreement with the OCC that imposed capital restraints and growth limits on the fintech pioneer.