🌊The Fintech Wave #59

Jan 16, 2023

Welcome to the first edition of The Fintech Wave in 2023. We will do one major change starting today - apart from fintech news, we will pay more attention to stocks. We will especially focus on dividend stocks and ETFs because looking in the long term (5+ yrs), dividend stocks and ETFs are one of the best ways to build passive income and accumulate wealth. Our goal is to come up with educational content and investing ideas every week.

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Meet the dividend kings👑

Dividend kings are stocks that have raised their dividends for at least 50 consecutive years. There are only 47 stocks that have done that. Looking in the long term, dividend stocks are one of the best ways to accumulate passive income. The best thing about dividend stocks is that they can provide two sources of income: income from dividend payments and capital appreciation of the stock price. This total return can add up to a nice amount over the long term.

Here are some dividends kings you might find interesting to invest in👇

*This is not financial advice. Always do your own due diligence

European News and Funding

Interesting crowdlending platform from Italy

EvenFi raised €2.2M for its crowdlending platform. To be honest, I never heard about crowdlending until now. Essentially, the platform connects valuable SMEs, interested in financing their growth projects with financiers looking for excellent investment opportunities. The minimum investment is only €20, so anybody can become an investor. EvenFi claims that investors can earn up to 12% per year, which sounds great.

Companies can post projects from EUR 30,000 up to a maximum of EUR 5 million, with a duration ranging from 4 to 60 months. We really liked this idea and are excited to see how this will develop in the future.

German neobank is shutting down🛑

Hamburg-based digital bank focused on Gen-Z, Ruuky, filed for bankruptcy. The startup was offering checking accounts, debit card, and mobile app with zero fees. But there are already tens of similar players in the German market. Hard to differentiate, just by saying you are focused on Gen Z.

At least customers’ balances are not affected, so you can withdraw the money.

Ruuky was making money only from the interchange fee when customers use their Mastercard. Not enough to survive in this environment if you cannot raise more money from investors.

Credit marketplace raises money💰

Prograd (London-based startup that just raised $2.5M) is a pretty good and smart combination of educational content and marketplace. They started with educational content about finances to get users and build a distribution channel and then monetize that via the marketplace.

It works in a way that users first answer questions about financial goals and the app gives them suggestions for financial products (loans, cards, etc.). Prograd then earns money from affiliate marketing. Great idea and execution.

Americas News and Funding

JP Morgan acquired the scam and now suing the founders

An unreal story hit the headlines this week. Turns out JP Morgan acquired student loan startup Frank for $175M in 2021, just to find out that company faked the number of users. Now JP Morgan is suing CEO Charlie Javice and Chief Growth Officer Olivier Amar.

So, the CEO hired a data science professor to create around 4M fake accounts. They bought a set of data from some marketing firm and created bots. The real number of users was around 300K. Obviously, there was zero due diligence from JP Morgan's side.

I'm not sure I understand how JP Morgan managed to buy a company with 4M fake customers. Even if Frank showed 4M fake customers, the company couldn’t fake the revenue. There has to be some revenue if you have 4M customers.

Of course, the CEO was on the Forbes List 30 under 30😂

Stripe lowered its valuation📉

Once the most valuable private company in the world, Stripe lowered its valuation for the 2nd time, and it’s now valued at $63B. This is an 11% cut, but it is still one of the most valuable private companies in the world.

Crypto ₿ites

Eurocoin (EUROC) is now available on Latin-American exchange

Circle is most known for its stablecoin USDC (acting as a virtual US dollar) and is one of the top 3 crypto companies in the world. After the global success of USDC, Circle decided to launch EURO COIN (Euro-backed stablecoin).