Business banking startup Mercury, founded in 2020, is now launching a consumer banking product.
“We already have a few hundred thousand users of our business banking product, and a lot of people have expressed that they want a personal banking product,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.
The person also said the fintech partner banking market as a whole has been the target of more regulatory scrutiny.
Crossing overBut success in B2B banking doesn’t automatically queue up Mercury to handle consumer banking.
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The cross-border payments market is forecasted to reach over $250 trillion by 2027, according to the Bank of England.
So it’s no surprise that one of the trends among Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch of nearly 30 fintech startups is how to more easily move money globally.
Users get a U.S. bank account and access to low-cost local payment rails.
InfinityWhat it does: Cross-border banking for small businesses in IndiaWe heard from a lot of childhood friends during the past two days, so it was refreshing to see two siblings form a company.
Businesses in India account for $700 billion in cross-border trades per year, and Infinity makes 1% from those transactions.
Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)!
TC reporter Tage Kene-Okafor reported on how Uber led a $100 million investment into African mobility fintech Moove as the startup’s valuation hit $750 million.
He also wrote about how Zone raised $8.5 million to scale its decentralized payment infrastructure.
Dollars and centsNon-sexy industries can appeal to investors too.
The YC-backed startup raised $4.1 million last year with the goal of serving high-earning millennials and Gen Zers.
Nsave, a fintech based in Geneva making banking in Switzerland accessible to people in countries at war or those with unstable banking sectors or facing high inflation, has raised $4 million seed funding.
Amer Baroudi and Abdallah AbuHashem co-founded nsave in 2021 from lived experiences.
“And then based on the risk scores, you might be prompted into different streams of questions or enhanced due-diligence mechanisms.
Also, in war-torn countries like Sudan, people with savings in local banks have a hard time accessing their money.
“Now nsave is live, there’s finally a trusted option to protect their users against the rampant inflation of distressed economies, providing safe, stable offshore accounts to people who need them the most.”
Miami-based Onyx Private, a Y Combinator-backed digital bank that provided banking and investment services for high-earning Millennials and Gen Zers, is terminating its bank operations.
Y Combinator has listed the company as “inactive” on its on its website, something Santos could not explain.
Santos claimed that Onyx had been exploring the idea over the past year and had made developments with some partners.
Santos today declined to disclose how many banking customers Onyx had.
Although a source told TechCrunch that regulatory issues may have played a part in this decision, Santos dismissed that, telling us that no regulatory issues caused the startup to shut down its direct-to-consumer banking operations.
This week, we look at Griffin Bank getting its license ahead of some heavy hitters, and we go inside Stripe’s annual letter, some funding rounds, and more!
The banking-as-a-service company managed to do something that even the region’s most valuable fintech company, Revolut, hasn’t been able to do yet — obtain a banking license.
Granted, as Mike Butcher writes, banking licenses are difficult to come by (Griffin’s took a year), but Revolut has talked about securing a banking license for the past three years.
Now that Griffin has a banking license, it offers a full-stack platform for fintech companies to offer banking, payments and wealth solutions via automated compliance and an integrated ledger.
In a new SEC filing, Reddit’s IPO involves around 22 million shares, priced between $31 and $34.
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.
Prometeo, a startup out of Uruguay building channels to enable open banking across Latin America, is today announcing that it has picked up $13 million in funding to expand its business.
A lot of open banking these days focused on national rollouts — not least because banking conventions and regulations are often very localized.
(It’s not the only company that believes that open banking has a big role to play in financial services in the future: last year, the open banking startup Ivy raised funding specifically to expand to Latin America; and Christine wrote here extensively on Finerio, an ambitious open banking startup out of Mexico.
More recently, last year it led a $14 million round into nocnoc, a Latin America cross-border commerce specialist.
It also owns the point-of-sale payments company Zettle, which has been making very big inroads into Latin America for years now.
South Korean internet giant Kakao — in the middle of multiple investigations over antitrust and securities violations — has appointed a new CEO as it tries to turn the ship around.
Shina Chung, who had been running the company’s venture arm, is moving to the top role at the company.
Separately, just last month, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol called for a review of the monopolistic practices of Kakao’s taxi-hailing unit, Kakao Mobility.
Korea’s antitrust regulator had already fined Kakao Mobility about $20.3 million for unfair service in February.
Kakao Mobility, which has about 74% of the ride-hailing market in the country as of September, separately is trying to lower the temperature around this controvery.
Startups often overlook the importance of having a single point of failure for their business. This can lead to disastrous consequences, as was seen recently with Silicon Valley Bank. A…
