Fintech Update, 4/22 - 4/28

Hi! It’s Monday, April 29, 2024

The Rundown

• One, the Walmart majority-owned fintech, started offering BNPL loans “for big-ticket items at some of the retailer’s more than 4,600 U.S. stores.” It’s worth noting that Walmart has worked closely with Affirm for years to offer installment loans. Affirm became Walmart’s exclusive partner in 2019 and recently expanded their partnership to include Affirm at self-checkout kiosks. It will be interesting to see if Walmart continues to work with multiple providers or if it will try to unify it all under a single overarching brand.

  
  Did you know that Walmart tried to start a bank in the early 2000s, before Congress stepped in?
  

• On the back of an expanded partnership with Stripe announced in May of last year, Uber rolled out its pay-by-bank feature this week. The offering enables users across Uber Rides and Uber Eats to securely connect their bank accounts through Link and Stripe Financial Connections.

• In addition to pay-by-bank, Uber has added Klarna’s Pay Now feature to its suite of available in-app payment options. The deal represents a significant opportunity for Klarna to expand its reach across Uber users in the US, Germany and Sweden. Interestingly enough, the deal does not include Klarna’s core BNPL offering – but combined with the announcement of Klarna’s US credit card launch that we covered last week, it does represent some great press as the Swedish payments giant gears up for IPO.

• Goldman Sachs will sell the clients and assets associated with its Marcus Invest offering to robo-advisory service Betterment as the global bank continues its retreat from consumer financial services. Goldman had added Invest – a set of automated investing features that recommends a portfolio of stock and bond ETFs based on a customer's specified risk level and timeline – to its Marcus online retail banking brand in 2021, but the bank recently has exited other retail lines of business, including terminating its credit card collaboration with Apple and selling its BNPL service Greensky. In its announcement, the bank did say it will continue to invest in Marcus, but with a focus on its core retail banking services.

• Visa launched open banking in the US using technology from Tink, the Swedish data aggregation startup it acquired two years ago for €1.8 billion. Visa/Tink already has deals with Adyen and Revolut in Europe, and is launching in the US with banks and fintechs including Capital One, Fiserv, Jack Henry, and Dwolla, signing data agreements allowing their users to connect accounts and provide trusted parties with access to financial data. Visa previously tried to buy open banking provider Plaid for $5.3B, but abandoned the deal in 2021 amid antitrust regulatory pressure. The Tink acquisition was not subjected to this level of regulatory attention.

• British financial crime detection startup ComplyAdvantage acquired San Francisco-based Golden Recursion to “bring additional sources into its data ingestion layer to provide clients with more comprehensive, real-time financial crime risk insights.”

• Stripe is accepting crypto again after a 6 year hiatus. The payments giant is slowly getting back into crypto after it shunned bitcoin in 2018 for being too volatile: announcing on Thursday that it will accept USDC stablecoin payments, and only USDC.

• Flutterwave, the Nigeria-based digital payments company and Africa’s most valuable startup, is preparing for an IPO. Flutterwave is making changes to its corporate team amid recent exits and regulatory pressure, to be “IPO-ready,” but CEO Olugbenga ‘GB’ Agboola did not share a timeline for the offering.

• British challenger bank Monese is considering spinning off its consumer and business-focused lines into separate companies as it seeks to recover from “mounting losses.”

Selected fundings 

• Pomelo, the fintech company that combines consumer credit and international money transfer, raised $35 million in Series A funding along with a $75 million expansion of its warehouse facility. 

• Fintoc, the Chilean fintech that helps online businesses accept payments from customer’s bank accounts instantly, raised $7 million in Series A funding.