Founded by former Silicon Valley engineers, UK-based Griffin Bank bills itself as an API-driven ‘Banking as a Service’ platform.
But Griffin isn’t likely to offer banking accounts directly to consumers, but to other businesses needing to offer embedded financial solutions such as savings accounts, safeguarding accounts and accounts for holding client money.
Last year in North America, Treasury Prime secured a $40 million Series C, Synctera $15 million and Omnio raised $9.8 million.
So they’re leveraging an existing financial relationship to bundle additional financial services in an embedded way.
All of that needs to sit in specially marked bank accounts.” Griffin’s aim, he says is to pick up as much of that business as possible.
London-based fintech company Monzo raised a late stage funding round of $430 million (£340 million), confirming a report from the Financial Times from a few weeks ago.
Founded in 2015, Monzo provides UK current accounts, debit cards and several financial products with a digital-first approach.
That’s why Monzo is sort of defying the odds with this new funding round, with Google playing a big part in this investment.
Monzo reached a post-money $4.5 billion valuation in 2022.
Now, Monzo has nine million retail customers in the U.K.
Credit bureaus relying on outdated third-party data are only getting a small piece of the puzzle, Georgina Merhom says.
User-permissioned data sources, that consumers provide with their permission, come from a variety of places.
In addition, user-permissioned data sources replace the self-reporting process, brokers trust between the institution and consumer and identifies opportunities that the bank would have otherwise overlooked, Merhom said.
Building a better credit bureau or finding new ways to verify data from people without a lot of credit is not a new concept.
“It costs banks $29 billion a year to process applications, and that’s not even including the money they pay credit bureaus,” Merhom said.
In 2022, Walmart acquired earned wage access provider Even to offer early pay access to its employees.
Other big U.S. companies, including Amazon, McDonald’s and Uber, also offer employees early wage access programs.
Like other earned wage access providers, Wagely charges a nominal flat membership fee to employees withdrawing their salaries early.
“This is something that no other competitor is even close to because other earned wage access companies are focusing on different things,” he said.
One of the areas where global earned wage access providers have shifted their focus nowadays is lending — in some cases, to lend money to employers.
Spain’s Embat, which has raised $16M, plans to compete with Trovata in real-time accountingFor obvious reasons, financial teams can spend a great deal of time on corporate treasury management, accounting and bank reconciliation, so anything that speeds up that process usually garners a lot of interest.
Today Embat, a Spanish fintech which does what they call “real-time treasury management”, has closed a financing round of $16 million Series AS led by Creandum.
Their solution automates accounting and bank reconciliation, and deals with corporate treasury management, centralising collections, payments, and treasury processes, thus saving time, says the startup.
Last year Embat partnered with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform in an effort to reduce errors for accounting teams.
Tomás Gil, co-founder and CTO of Embat, said the company has “significantly improved” its accounting and bank reconciliation module and was now applying AI to its platform.
Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and majority owner of Paytm Payments Bank, has stepped down from the board of the troubled unit days after the Indian regulator signalled continuity at the financial firm Paytm.
Paytm Payments Bank said Monday it was reconstituting the board of directors at the Paytm Payments Bank, an associate of Paytm, with the appointment of four executives — ex-Central Bank of India Chairman Srinivasan Sridhar, retired IAS officer Shri Debendranath Sarangi, former executive director of Bank of Baroda Shri Ashok Kumar Garg, and Retd.
The appointment follows the Indian central bank penalizing Paytm Payments Bank, in which Sharma owns a 51% stake, with severe business restrictions.
(Paytm owned a 49% stake in Paytm Payments Bank.)
TechCrunch reported early this month that the Indian central bank has weighed ordering a board shakeup at Paytm Payments Bank and removing some of the company officials, including Paytm founder Sharma.
FairMoney, a digital bank based in Lagos and headquartered in Paris, is in discussions to acquire Umba, a credit-led digital bank providing payroll and financial services to customers in Nigeria and Kenya, in a $20 million all-stock deal, sources tell TechCrunch.
Umba, founded by Tiernan Kennedy and Barry O’Mahony in San Francisco in 2018, was launched as a credit-led digital bank targeting emerging markets.
To date, the digital bank has secured around $20 million in funding, per PitchBook data.
FairMoney could likely be more interested in Umba’s microfinance license, obtained in 2022 through acquiring a majority shareholding in Daraja Microfinance Bank.
For FairMoney, acquiring Umba could streamline entry into Kenya, bypassing the lengthy licensing process that took Umba three years.
The company provides community and regional banks with end-to-end deposit management capabilities, including a deposit network so bank customers can grow, retain and manage their deposit base by sourcing deposits, sweeping funds and providing additional security to depositors.
In fact, ModernFi, founded in 2022 by Paolo Bertolotti and Adam DeVita, raised $4.5 million in a seed round a month prior to the SVB news.
Canapi Ventures led the round and was joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Remarkable Ventures and a group of banks including Huntington National Bank, First Horizon and Regions.
“On this whole notion of deposit growth, retention management became first, second and third priority for a lot of institutions.
Bertolotti plans to grow in engineering, new product development, compliance and regulatory adherence and in business development.
EUR wallets also come with bank details, which means that Zing customers can receive SEPA payments to their EUR wallet directly.
When it comes to sending money, Zing supports dozens of currencies — more currencies than the ten I listed above.
When you convert GBP to EUR, Zing charges 0.6% in exchange fees.
Plus accounts can exchange up to £3,000 per month without exchange fees.
Premium, Metal and Ultra customers don’t pay exchange fees, but they pay £7.99 to £45 per month in subscription fees.
For anyone experimenting with photography and looking to get out of the smartphone shooting mindset, film and instant photography offer an exciting, tactile starting place.
Okay, we already talked about another of Fujifilm’s instant cameras but this one is in a class of its own.
Like instant photos, film photography is making a comeback — and for good reason.
You could shop online, but browsing in person if you’ve got an old-school store nearby parallels the tactile charm of film photography.
Either way, you’ll help keep film photography shops in business and wind up with a thoughtful, one of a kind gift.
