Fintech Highlights - 7/13/2021

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Pinned to the Top

There are emerging hubs all over the U.S. and Canada pulling tech talent away from the superstar cities — but the tech centers are holding onto their dominance, according to a new analysis from the commercial real estate firm CBRE.

The big picture: The pandemic has pushed millions of people to move out of cities, but it hasn't been enough to knock places like the Bay Area and New York out of the top spots to start tech companies.

Between the lines: Among the top 10 markets — with tech talent pools well over 150,000 people — the San Francisco and Toronto metro areas have the highest concentration of workers. About 11% of the Bay Area workforce is in tech, and the same is true for Toronto.

• Compare that with the 3.8% and 3.7% concentrations in New York and Los Angeles, respectively.
• A high concentration of tech workers can create environments more conducive to innovation, says Colin Yasukochi, executive director of CBRE's tech insights center and author of this report.

Several cities — large and small — saw huge gains in their tech talent pools in the last five years.

• Among the big metros, Toronto's pool grew by 43%, Seattle's by 35% and Montreal's by 31%.
• Among the small ones, Orlando, Florida, saw a 30% gain; Nashville, Tennessee, 36%, and Edmonton, Canada, 53%.

Fintechs

Daylight, which describes itself as the first LGBTQ+ digital banking platform in the United States, has secured $5 million in a seed funding round. The company’s services are targeted toward LGBTQ+ people, their families, and allies — or as Daylight describes it, “values-based consumers who want to support the queer community.” More here ->

Side, a real estate technology company that works to turn agents and independent brokerages into boutique brands and businesses, has raised “$50 million-plus. In 2019, Side represented over $5 billion in annual home sales across all of its partners. Today, the company’s community of agent partners represents over $15 billion in annual production volume. And it’s predicting that by the end of 2021, it will have closed over $20 billion in home sales, positioning the company “as a top 10 national brokerage by volume.” More here ->

SmartAsset, a marketplace that connects consumers to financial advisors, announced today that it has raised $110 million. Besides pairing consumers with advisors with its Automated Financial Modeling software, SmartAsset claims to reach over 100 million people each month through its personal finance content, tools and “personalized” calculators. More here ->

Coast, a company that is aiming to meet those needs with the mission of becoming “the financial platform for the future of transportation" has raised $6 million. Coast’s goal is to use technology to provide fleet business owners and their employees payments products that are intuitive and easy to use. More here ->

Taptap Send, a London-based startup which provides a “free” mobile money transfer service from eight countries to 15 others, has raised $13.4 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its scope and the services that it provides to its customers. More here ->

Atom Finance, a New York-based investment research platform, raised $28 million in Series B funding. Atom offers an alternative to established investment platforms like the Bloomberg Terminal and Yahoo Finance. More here ->

Vero, a New York-based property leasing infrastructure platform, raised $5 million in Series A funding. VERO consolidates a broken leasing process in one simple platform, making lease management easier and more affordable for property managers while providing transparency and cost savings for renters. On average, it takes less than 17 minutes to apply and sign a lease with VERO–compared to the industry average of seven days. More here ->

Slice, an Indian fintech startup that has built a “super card” for millennials in India, said on Monday it has raised $20 million in a new financing round and is adding new features to change how people engage with their credit cards. More here ->

Mercuryo, a London-based cross-border payment network, raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. The London-based company describes itself as “a crypto infrastructure company” that aims to make blockchain useful for businesses via its “digital asset payment gateway.” Specifically, it aggregates various payment solutions and provides fiat and crypto payments and payouts for businesses. More here ->

Place Technology, a financial forecasting and business planning software provider, raised a $2.5M seed extension led by Geekdom Fund. The company has raised approx. $6M to date. PlaceCPM combines transactional-level financial and cash forecasting, budgeting, modeling, consolidations and core planning with advanced collaboration, workflows, reporting and visualization tools in one easy to use application natively built on the Salesforce Platform.

Insuretechs

Lula, a Miami-based insurance infrastructure startup, announced it has raised $18 million. The startup’s self-proclaimed mission is to provide companies of all sizes — from startups to multinational corporations — with insurance infrastructure. Think of it as a “Stripe for insurance,” its founders say. By August of 2020, the company launched an MVP (minimum viable product) and since then has been growing about 30% month over month after reaching profitability in its first four months. More here ->

From the Stash

Intelligent document process market ‘exploding’ — bankautomationnews.com

When Citizens Bank wanted to import data from the financial statements of its commercial borrowers, it turned to intelligent document processing (IDP) to automate aspects of the process, which previously relied on manual keying. Intelligent document processing leverages artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to read and process documents.

Finastra grows fintech marketplace for bank solutions

Banking technology provider Finastra is aggregating some of the many fintech offerings available on its FusionFabric.cloud marketplace, which has more than 150 apps for banks to tap for digital banking, cross-border payments, regulatory compliance and reporting, among other services.

Stripe employees took 10 percent pay cuts to leave NYC, San Francisco — nypost.com Stripe, an online payments company valued at $95 billion, said in September that workers who moved elsewhere would get a one-time bonus of $20,000 but a permanent salary cut.

Reports / Webinars

How ‘Soft Fascination’ Helps Restore Your Tired Brain | by Markham Heid | Jun, 2021 | Elemental — elemental.medium.com Attention fatigue is a threat to your cognitive and mental health. “How ‘Soft Fascination’ Helps Restore Your Tired Brain” is published by Markham Heid in Elemental.

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