🌊The Fintech Wave(#18)
Hi all, greetings from the cold🥶Boston. Pretty active week in the fintech world so we curated the most interesting news. TLDR; Check the most ridiculous Tweet of the year. Nubank went public. The online bank focused on immigrants. Blockchain analysis company valued at $4.2B. A lot of good Tweets at the end👇
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The most ridiculous business Tweet of the year👇
Europe News and Funding
A banking infrastructure🏦 startup is now worth $4.9B
Europan fintech infrastructure is developing rapidly; maybe even faster than in the USA. Amsterdam-based Mambu, raised €235M for its cloud banking platform.
Banks, lenders, fintechs, telcos, and retailers, are looking to use fintech products to attract customers and get more revenue. Mambu is helping them to build fintech products. Even, N26 is one of their customers.
Their platform consists of already made solutions so customers can just integrate it into their systems: credit decisioning, payment processing, AML, KYC, regulatory, CRM, accounting, and customer experience. They actually handle the total ecosystem. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Mambu on the IPO within a year or two.
Americas News and Funding
The online bank💳 focused on immigrants
Online banks are targeting different demographic and ethnic groups in order to differentiate from their competitors. It is a super competitive market since there are currently more than 60 neobanks in the USA, offering pretty much the same product.
Majority - neobanks for immigrants just raised $27M. Although immigrants can open an account in any bank in the USA, Majority wants to offer a few more benefits for immigrants.
Their target market is 1M immigrants that come to the USA each year. They charge $5 per month for the account, with a 30-days free trial. Apart from banking, they also offer no-fee money transfers, low-cost international calling, and discounts at their partner stores.
This sounds great, but $5 per month is worth only if the customer will be using all those benefits. If a customer just needs a banking account to receive a salary, most the neobanks give that for free with no monthly cost. It will be interesting to follow Majority to see how many customers they will get in the next year.
Nubank ($NU) went public📈
A few weeks ago we wrote about Nubank - the largest neobank in Latam - is going public. On Thursday, Nubank went public on New York Stock Exchange ($NU), raising $2.6B. The company is currently valued at $52B, which is the 3rd most valuable Brazilian company.
When the market opened, the stock went up 25% from the IPO price, so early investors got rich. Nubank has more than 48M customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The bank is still not profitable since they put growth over profit and the CY21 YTD loss is around $206M.
I think in the mid-term they can become profitable because they will start offering loans and credit cards, which should account for most of the revenue. Also, 48M customers are a huge starting base to offer these products.
Crypto ₿ites
Police👮for digital crimes is here
One of the main features of blockchain and crypto is anonymity (not 100%, but pretty good compared to any other financial product). That’s why every once in a while we hear that crypto was used to pay for illegal activities.
Because frauds in blockchain are very sophisticated financial institutions and governments need special tools. The most popular is probably Chainalysis, currently valued at $4.2B. This week another blockchain startup raises money - TRM Labs got $60M from Tiger Global.
The company is building blockchain data with advanced analytics to help financial institutions and governments fight fraud, money laundering, and financial crime. Their tool can investigate the source and destination of crypto funds and also screen crypto wallets and transactions for Anti-money laundering and compliance.
Tweets of the Week
