Fintech Highlights - 1/3/2022

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Pinned to the Top

Shopify is removing every meeting with more than two people from its employees’ calendars and telling them to refrain from adding them back for at least two weeks as part of a broader effort to limit the amount time its staff spends in meetings, Bloomberg and Forbes reported on Tuesday. The e-commerce firm is also reportedly reintroducing a ban on meetings held on Wednesdays and restricting meetings of more than 50 people to a designated window on Thursdays.

The amount of time tech employees have spent in meetings has ballooned in recent years with the rise of remote work, making it harder for some workers to focus on important projects. Other tech companies, including Uber and Meta Platforms, previously have given staffers consistent meeting-free windows.

The BFD

Microsoft is working to incorporate OpenAI's ChatGPT technology in its Bing search engine, The Information reports.

Why it matters: Bing has been a distant second to Google for years. The hot new AI-driven chatbot could give people a fresh reason to try out the Microsoft-owned search service.

Microsoft has already poured $1 billion into OpenAI, and has a business arrangement that gives it dibs on commercial use of various technologies.

Last year, Microsoft added image generator Dall-E 2 (another OpenAI product) to a new Designer app as well as to Bing's Image Creator tool.

Microsoft has been reselling GPT and other OpenAI technologies to large businesses.

The big picture: Industry watchers have speculated that the rise of large language models — the branch of AI that powers ChatGPT — could reshape the search industry, now dominated by Google.

Instead of providing lists of links, a ChatGPT-style search engine would answer questions directly. That could be a boon for users — but could also undermine the business of selling paid search results.

Google has been working on similar technology, but has been slow to make it publicly available. But CEO Sundar Pichai has personally intervened, viewing ChatGPT as a "code red" moment for the company, the N.Y. Times reports.

M&A

Binance reportedly is in talks to buy a stake in South Korean digital asset exchange Gopax. More here →

Fintech

Plooto, a Toronto-based payments automation startup, raised $20m in Series B funding. Plooto provides end-to-end accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) automation software for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). About 8,500 finance teams, accountants and bookkeepers use the company’s cloud-based solutions, according to the press release. More here →

Money View, an Indian personalized credit startup, raised $75m in Series E funding at a $900m valuation. The eight-year-old startup offers personalized credit products and financial management solutions to customers who otherwise don’t have a credit score and so can’t avail credit from banks and other financial institutions. More here →

Manafa, a Saudi SME financing startup, raised around $28m in Series A funding. Founded in 2018, Manafa offers SMEs in various sectors debt and equity financing based on a crowdfunding model, which allows institutional investors to gain access to SME financing opportunities. More here →

Akulaku, an Indonesia-based banking and digital finance platform, raised $250m. Akulaku, which operates in the Philippines and Malaysia in addition to Indoensia, offers a virtual credit card and installment shopping platform, as well as an investment platform and neobank. Founded in 2016, its target is to serve 50 million users by 2025.  More here →

Crypto

Hardware Wallet Startup Cypherock Raises $1M to Skip Seed Phrases The firm’s new hardware wallet uses encrypted NFC-based cards to reduce risks related to seed phrases.

From the Stash

Fiserv partners with Wedge for payment capabilities - Mechanics Cooperative Bank expands relationship with Finastra  More here →

Finextra reported that “Klarna has launched a platform that connects retailers with creators and influencers that can help them reach their target markets - The Creator Platform promises to match retailers with the right influencers and then track performance metrics — including traffic, sales and conversion rates — in real time. Already live in the US, it is now available in all markets in which Klarna operates, providing an additional marketing channel for the firm’s 450,000 retail partners.” More here →

American Express is going deeper on B2B payments. On December 1, the credit card giant launched Amex Business Link. A spokesperson told me this will offer “a new B2B payments solution for network issuers and acquirers to offer to their business customers.” Its goal is to provide “more streamlined, efficient, and flexible ways for businesses to pay each other on the Amex network” More here →

Block’s Square wants to get into the credit card game — but it’s going the partnership route to get there. The company announced that it’s teaming up with American Express to launch a new credit card targeted at Square sellers on the Amex network. Details were tough to come by at publish time — Square says it’ll reveal more about the card early next year — but the press release suggests that the card, soon available to all “eligible” Square sellers in the U.S., will integrate with Square’s existing services to let cardholders organize their finances and manage cash flow from a single pane of glass. More here →

Top 5 stories of 2022: Bank and fintech partnerships, acquisitions - Financial institutions looking to modernize their internal systems in 2022 have often turned to fintech acquisitions or partnerships for cloud computing, digital banking, robotic process automation, payments capabilities and more. Here are Bank Automation News’ five most-read transaction stories of 2022 - More here →

Forecast: Which Fintech Sectors Will VCs Favor In 2023? - Financial services remained the leading sector for venture investment in 2022 despite an overall pullback in venture funding and shockwaves in the crypto industry. And fintech is expected to remain strong in 2023, with areas from payments to accounting management likely to lead the way.  More here →

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