Fintech Update, 4/1 - 4/7

Apr 08, 2024

Hi! It’s Monday, April 8, 2024

JPMorgan announced that it will allow marketers to target their users with deals and discounts based on prior spending history. Marketers in the new program, called Chase Media Solutions, will pay the bank when customers purchase items. According to the WSJ, this “new unit is born out of the company’s 2022 acquisition of card-linked marketing platform Figg.” The program should serve to help marketers more effectively target potential customers and should serve to help Chase cardholders by surfacing personalized offers and earning cash back with the brands they already shop at or are just discovering. Our take? Transaction data is a goldmine. Whether it can be applied to underwriting, marketing, or personal finance management, the value of the data is clear. Chase’s recent move highlights the value of this data in advertising especially in a time when 3rd party cookies and browser pixels are being deprecated. They’ll use it to try to compete for customer deposits and transactions with other financial institutions and fintechs.

PayPal’s cross-border money service Xoom now supports international transfers using its new stablecoin PYUSD. Users can convert PYUSD into USD to fund transfers to “recipients in approximately 160 countries globally” by converting PYUSD to USD with no crypto sale fee. Recipients will receive funds in the fiat currency selected by the sender (subject to exchange rate fees).
Speaking of stablecoins – Ripple announced it is launching a USD stablecoin. Though Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse seems to think the market for stablecoins “will look different [in the future],” we anticipate the crypto company will encounter some serious competitive tailwinds. Entering into the US market places Ripple in direct competition to other providers that have already gained a substantial toehold, including Circle, Tether, and PayPal.

A Manhattan jury found Do Kwon and his Singapore-based Terraform Labs liable on civil fraud charges brought by the SEC. The SEC’s attorney said the platform, whose TerraUSD and Luna tokens collapsed in 2022, roiling the cryptocurrency market, was “built on lies.” Kwon is under arrest in Montenegro, and both the US and South Korea are seeking his extradition on criminal charges.

The chief investment officer for wealth management at Goldman maintains that the bank “do[es] not believe [crypto] is an asset class.” The bank has no plans to participate in crypto despite new offerings from traditional finance players like BlackRock, JPM, Fidelity, and Citi.

Nuvei announced that it will be taken private by Advent International for $34 per share in an all-cash transaction, valuing the payments company at nearly $6.3B.

Alex Johnson pondered the question “Who is Baas For?” Spoiler alert, it’s for everyone!

Parisian business forecasting platform Pigment raised $145 million in a Series D funding round led by Iconiq.
Toronto-based payments company Brim Financial raised $85 million in a Series C funding round.
Seso, which offers online worker recruitment and documentation to help farms find workers and secure their visas, raised $26 million in a Series B funding round.
European business identity verification startup Condukt raised £2.5 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Lightspeed.
Latin American income and verification startup Palenca raised $2.4 million in a new funding round led by Experian.