🌊The Fintech Wave(#34)
We are welcoming 5 new members of the Fintech Wave community who have joined us since Monday. I hope you all survived the market crash last week and didn’t lose too much. No diversification could help here. This is how the market looked on Thursday. On the other side, fintech startups were pretty active, more than 20 of them raised money.
TLDR; Now you can receive your future paycheck at any time - check the app. The first bitcoin-backed loan from a traditional bank. New Canadian fintech unicorn. A platform that helps banks launch new fintech products. Also, check the Twitter threads at the end.
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Europe News and Funding
The startup provides access to salary💸 in real-time
Polish startup Flexee just raised €2.8M for its salary payment solution. Flexee allows users to withdraw the earned money in advance without waiting until payday.
There are a lot of neobanks that offer their users an option to receive a salary 2 earlier (in the USA salaries are usually sent on Wed and employee gets it on Friday), but Flexee is bringing this to a whole new level. With Flexee app, employees can pay out a part of their future paycheck – on any day. They just enter the amount and get it transferred to their account.
The best thing is that now you can be paid more than once a month. This option can be used as an additional benefit to attract employees.
A platform that helps fintechs launch a new products
The startup is solving an obvious problem: building a new fintech product is still hard and time-consuming and they want to simplify it. Any organization that wants to ship new products can connect through SaaScada API and build in the below’s areas.
Unfortunately, the pricing was not shown on the website. They also wrote it is possible to launch the product within 3 months, which I like because it’s a realistic assumption. I saw a few similar startups that claim you can launch within a week, which is not very possible.
Americas News and Funding
$145M for Canadian online bank💳
Neo Financial, an online bank from Canada, just closed its Series C round and became a new Canadian unicorn.
Most online banks just offer checking accounts and debit card, but Neo Financial is a bit different here. The startup has even more products than traditional banks. This is including banking, savings, and investing in a single app. Also, there is a plan to enter the mortgage market and offers “Buy Now Pay Later” that can be used in physical stores. With this Neo offers complete financial solutions within a single app, and one of the best neobanks out there.
The company passed the 1 million customers mark. Also, for those who think years ahead, Neo also offers a feature that helps you plan and save for your retirement.
Stripe launched🚀a new product and was soon accused to break NDAs
New drama in the fintech world. Stripe launched a product called Financial Connections that helps to share financial data between two parties. Plaid CEO accused Stripe’s project manager of breaking NDAs. Based on Plaid's CEO, Stripe did an RFP (Request For Proposals) to find partners for this product and they had multiple meetings with Plaid where they asked a lot of questions about the product (but that is the point of RFP).
Stripe PM is saying a totally opposite story; they met but they never discussed RFP. In the end, everything was kinda stored out when Stripe CEO Patric Collins send an email explaining the situation. You can read the letter here. Plaid CEO deleted below Tweet.
Crypto ₿ites
The first bitcoin-backed loan from a traditional bank
Goldman Sachs announced that the first ever Bitcoin-backed loan was lent to Coinbase. The size of the loan was not disclosed, but this is a huge step for crypto. Bitcoin is now officially an asset class and probably other banks will follow Goldman Sachs.
Compliant crypto payments for EU companies
Copenhagen-based Januar just raised 6M Seed round for its crypto payment solution. Essentially, Januar is an IBAN account for crypto business, the first of its kind.
Januar provides account and payment solutions for crypto businesses across Europe in a fully regulated environment. This will help companies from all over the Europe to start adopting crypto in their business.
Tweets and Threads of the Week
