Fintech Highlights - 3/1/2022

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Here’s what’s worth watching this week….. 👇

Pinned to the Top

Paperwork is a financial wellness solution that transforms the way people organize and manage their financial lives.

Today the company announced that it has closed $2.5 million in seed funding in a raise led by Kickstart Fund with participation from Launchpad Capital, AARP, StartUp Mavericks, and a host of influential angel investors.

Lead by some seasoned fintech founders, including CEO Kevin Cimring (who founded Jemstep, a robo-advisory that was purchased by Invesco) Paperwork is intended to help families organize and house all their financial picture to help protect themselves throughout their life journey.

As demographics shift and more boomers start making plans for their finances and estates, platforms like Paperwork may be the glue that holds families together, making it easy to plan, understand and move forward with one of the most painful times of our lives.

More here ->

The BFD

SoFi has agreed to acquire Technisys, a Latin America-based banking software company, for $1.1 billion in an all-stock deal. SoFi estimates that the acquisition will generate up to $800 million in additional revenue and up to $85 million in cost savings through 2025.

Why it's the BFD: SoFi, which recently became a bank after acquiring Golden Pacific Bancorp, is continuing its acquisition spree, which has included Galileo Financial Technologies for $1.2 billion in 2020.

Details: ​​Technisys' shareholders will receive approximately 84 million shares of SoFi common stock, less than 10% of SoFi's fully diluted share count as of Sept. 30, 2021.

The bottom line: "The deal gives SoFi control of its own core-banking platform, the back-end technology that banks use to power mobile-banking apps, open accounts and keep track of customer deposits." — Peter Rudegeair, WSJ

M&A

Webster Financial agreed to acquire Bend Financial, a cloud-based provider of health savings accounts. Bend's client-facing experience utilizes cloud native technology and user-centered design to offer a simplified and modern approach to HSA management and engagement. More here ->

Embedded Fintech

Intergiro is out of stealth-mode. A privately funded, bootstrapped startup for the last five years, it is now emerging as part of this embedded banking movement, calling itself “a financial cloud” on which almost any kind of company can offer banking services. Intergiro has been around (with a different name) since 2014, was re-shaped in 2017, a closed beta launched in 2019. But the public launch was in 2021. More here ->

HUBUC, a Spain-based embedded finance startup, raised $10m in funding. Billing itself as “AWS for financial services” the startup does the heavy lifting of embedding financial services into business offerings via an API with no-code solutions. This means bank accounts, payments, virtual and physical cards as well as real-time FX rates and digital wallets can be offered. More here ->

Fintechs

Finotta, an Overland Park, KS based leader in mobile banking personalization, announced today that it has partnered with First United Bank & Trust, a $12.5B privately held bank headquartered in Durant, Okla., to launch its Personified Platform to First United’s 150,000+ mobile customers. More here ->

Chipper, a platform to help student loan borrowers pay off their debt faster, raised $5.6M of seed funding. Chipper uses your everyday spare change to consistently chip away at your student loan debt. More here ->

Skipify, a San Mateo-based instant online checkout startup, raised an undisclosed amount from PayPal Ventures, Synchrony, Amex Ventures and Okta Ventures. Launched in 2018, Skipify is striving to develop a frictionless commerce experience for brands and shoppers and provide a secure omnichannel payments network. The platform enables shoppers to rapidly buy products across text, email, social, affiliate, display and web channels. More here ->

Promise, an Oakland, Calif.-based utilities payments startup, raised $25m in Series B funding. Promise works with utilities and government agencies to provide flexibility in payments for people who can’t cover their whole water or electricity bill at once. The company has seen enormous growth over 2021, and just raised a $25 million B round to keep accelerating. More here ->

Productfy Inc., a banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform that aims to build “DeFi for traditional finance,” has raised $16 million in a Series A round of funding. Poductfy wants to be the “Shopify of embedded finance.” The company claims that with its platform, developers can “configure in hours, integrate in days, and go from idea to full stack deployment in as little as three weeks.”  More here ->

French startup Finary has raised a $9 million Series A round. The company has built a comprehensive aggregator so that wealthy individuals can get the full picture when it comes to tracking wealth. And that means that Finary isn’t restricted to bank accounts. More here ->

PayMongo, a Philippines-based payments fintech, raised $31m in Series B. The company works with businesses of all sizes, but targets micro-, small- and medium-sized businesses in particular, enabling them to accept different forms of payments, including credit cards, online wallets and over-the-counter. Its products include PayMongo API and e-commerce plugins. More here ->

Dowsure Technologies, a Chinese cross-border payments startup, raised $20m in Series B funding. Dowsure is highly recognized as the leader in this market by providing unified lending experiences for cross platform sellers, including Amazon, eBay, Shopee, Lazada and DTC sellers from Shopify and more.  More here ->

Nous, a U.K.-based household finance startup, raised $9m in seed funding. The startup’s wider pitch and “social mission” is to use (first party) household finance data and (third party) vendor data to build models that can progressively automate the management of essential service switching and/or contact renegotiating to offer a sort of household savings-as-a-(subscription)-service. More here ->

EdfaPay, a Saudi Arabia-based mobile payments startup, raised $1.6m in pre-seed funding. The company is in the process of launching several financial solutions to the Saudi market targeting small and mid-size companies. EdfaPay products and services will help these companies to easily collect customers’ payments through the use of smartphones without the need to use the legacy traditional point of sale or any other physical payment devices. More here ->

Niyo, an India-based fintech startup, raised $100m in Series C funding. Niyo provides digital savings accounts and other banking services to largely salaried individuals in India. It works with banks to help them deliver a more modern and expansive user experience and features. More here ->

NayaPay, a Pakistan-based fintech startup, raised $13m in seed funding. the super-app allows people residing in Pakistan to send and receive money, split bills and make payments conveniently from smartphones. They have also issued virtual and physical Visa cards linked to the NayaPay wallet, further allowing its users to make POS payments and businesses to accept payments. More here ->

FPL Technologies, an Indian credit card startup doing business as OneCard, is in talks to raise over $100m. Founded by banking veterans, OneCard operates a mobile-first credit card. Its cards come without any joining or annual fee and give customers more control and flexibility over how and where they transact. It also offers a range of personalized rewards and loans to customers.  More here ->

Crypto

Amber Group, a Singapore-based cryptocurrency-trading company, raised $200m in funding at a reported $3b valuation. ​​ More here ->

Insuretechs

Nirvana Insurance, a San Francisco-based commercial fleet insurance company, raised $22m in Series A funding. Nirvana is a technology-driven platform that modernizes commercial fleet insurance using vast amounts of data from sensors on trucks. The company uses telematics data to transform the stubbornly analog world of truck insurance to help fleets mitigate risk; improve driver performance; drop costs, and make the insurance process easier for everyone. More here ->

Proptech

Piñata, a New Jersey-based protech startup is out to make renters feel rewarded and help build their credit. It just raised $13 million in Series A funding toward that effort. More here ->

Facilio, a New York-based property operations software provider, raised $35m in Series B funding. Founded in 2017, Facilio offers a platform for commercial, corporate enterprise, health care, and retail properties that leverages AI to analyze data from disparate systems. The company’s suite of applications target maintenance, operational visibility, sustainability, and remote equipment performance monitoring use cases. More here ->

Funnel Leasing, a Tampa, Fla.-based residential property leasing startup, raised $36.5m in Series B funding. Founded in 2010, the Lutz, Fla.-based Funnel is a marketing, communications and leasing platform that seeks to streamline every stage of the rental life cycle. It works to create efficiencies for property teams and to improve the apartment leasing process through automation and added conveniences for renters. More here ->

Groundfloor, the first real estate crowdfunding platform to gain regulatory approval, announced today that it raised its first round of institutional capital since 2015. Groundfloor’s platform offers investments in real estate debt to its 150,000+ users, with a minimum investment of $10. Nearly all of the products available on its platform are open to non-accredited investors. More here ->

From the Stash

If you know nothing about embedded finance, start here. — medium.com Embedded finance is this new thing that is starting to take early form in the FinTech space. In essence, it involves financial products becoming native to user experience and business operations. We…

What embedded finance can't do — newsletter.fintechtakes.com Banks missed on digital account opening. They can't afford to miss this time.

Embedded Fintech: Which financial services should be embedded? (Part II) — medium.com In the first part of this series, we outlined why we think non-fintech platforms should care about embedded fintech. We believe true embedded fintech refers to non-fintech companies leveraging…

Web creator Tim Berners-Lee’s startup Inrupt raises $30 million — techcrunch.com Tim Berners-Lee’s startup, Inrupt, has raised about $30 million in its Series A financing round, a source familiar with the matter said. Forte Ventures led Inrupt’s new round, the two said Thursday, but both declined to disclose the size of the deal. The round saw participation from “all existing investors,” including Akamai Technologies and Glasswing […]

Is it time to worry about fintech valuations? — techcrunch.com Unless you own many shares of financial technology startups, this will be fun.

Banking 2025: The rise of the invisible bank. — www.americanbanker.com Digital banking will become less visible because it will be embedded in other daily activities with the help of AI, voice interfaces and other emerging technologies.

How can traditional banks adapt or evolve to compete with fintech? What moat do they have? — fintechnerdcollective.com Each month we ask some of the brightest (and most curious) minds in fintech one key question. They can answer however they see fit. The goal is to crowdsource some knowledge, have a little fun, and…

Fintech Roundup: More female founders in fintech? Yes, please. — techcrunch.com Welcome to my new weekly fintech focused column. I’ll be publishing this every Sunday, so in between posts, be sure to listen to the Equity podcast and hear Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and me riff on all things startups! And if you want to have this hit your inbox directly once it turns into a […]

Reports / Webinars

The Leadership in Insurance Podcast: Classification, Covid & Customer Experience : An Interview with Alan Ringvald, CEO, Relativity6 — open.spotify.com

We had a great conversation this week where we discussed a wide range of topics such as: Solving the industry classification problem How can you predict the value of a company when you don’t know what industry they are in?

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