The Fintech Wave🌊(#7)

Welcome to your weekly source of what’s going on in the Fintech world in Europe and North America. Feedback is welcome (you can contact us at fw@fintechwave.co) and if you like this newsletter please share with friends and encourage them to SIGN UP HERE.

TLDR; EU startups are raising 9-figure rounds💶. Stripe + Klarna. The online bank that invests only in green projects. Twitter is adding NFTs🖼️to profiles. List Shiba-Inu🐕 on Robinhood. ICO platform raised $100M💰. Check the greatest crypto trade ever in Tweets of the week. Keep reading for details👇

Europe News and Funding

BNPL💳for B2B

BNPL became a super popular option for customers to purchase goods, but fintech startups are now targeting B2B transactions also. Berlin-based Billie just raised another $100M, at a $640M valuation to continue to develop BNPL for B2B in Europe.

If you think about it, BNPL for B2B could help you start an online business with almost no money down. You can buy merchandise from wholesalers, use the BNPL option to pay in 6 installments. In the meantime, you sell merchandise on your website and pocket the margin. Barriers to entry into the online sales business are really low now.

Factoring💶startup raised £300 million

Fintech is disrupting every traditional financial product; this time it is factoring. Factoring is a financial transaction and a type of debtor finance in which a business sells its accounts receivable (i.e., invoices) to a third party (called a factor) at a discount. A business will sometimes factor its receivable assets to meet its present and immediate cash needs.

Storfund raised £300 million for their factoring platform. 50% of online purchases worldwide are made on marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, etc. But the problem for sellers is that marketplace is holding consumer payments to facilitate returns and refunds. So, it takes some time for sellers to actually receive money from sold merchandise. Factoring will help sellers to bridge the gap between sale and payment.

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North America News and Funding

Stripe + Klarna partnership📢

Huge announcement from Stripe. The most valuable private company in the world is partnering with Klarna, so businesses running on Stripe will be able to offer a “buy now pay later” option to their customers. Offer will be eligible for the USA and 19 European countries.

Based on Klarna’s research, offering BNLP to customers increases conversion up to 30%. Also, the average checkout value increase by 41%. If true, these are crazy numbers; every online business should offer BNLP.

For those unfamiliar with BNPL - it is payment options that allow customers to receive products immediately while spreading their payments out over time, usually with no interest.

Green🌲 online bank

Every week there is a new online bank on the market. It is very hard for them to differentiate, so they have to be very creative to focus on niches. Ando Money just raised $6M for sustainable banking service - their investments actively reduce emissions and only fund green initiatives.

Ando Money offers a usual savings account and debit card, but they use customers’ deposits to fund only green projects such as sustainable transportation, regenerative agriculture, clean energy, etc. Via the app, it is possible to see exactly where (and what) your money is funding and discover the power you and your friends have to change the world.

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Crypto ₿ites

Twitter and NFTs🖼️

Based on the leaked screenshots, Twitter is working to add the NFT tab to profiles. If true this will be huge for creators.

Jane Manchun Wong @wongmjane

Twitter is working on Collectibles profile tab, NFT view and NFT details view

More than 300 thousand signatures to list Shiba Inu🐕 coin on Robinhood

Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a decentralized cryptocurrency also known as Shiba Token. It was created in August 2020 by an anonymous person or team known as Ryoshi. Basically, it is a meme-based cryptocurrency. The coin became extremely popular and now people want it to be listed on Robinhood - a popular 0% fees trading platform in the USA. Listing Shiba Inu on Robinhood would probably increase the value of the coin by 200%.

You can sign the petition here.

$100M for ICO platform

A token listing platform and a crypto exchange, CoinList has raised $100 million in a Series A, at $1.5 billion. CoinList provides crypto projects a platform to list their new tokens and raise funds from the public - the platform was used for the projects such as Filecoin, Solana, Celo, etc. More than 5 million people are registered on the platform.

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Tweets of the Week

Morning Brew ☕️ @MorningBrew

This wallet bought roughly $8,000 of $SHIB last August. It's now worth $5.7 billion. From $8,000 to $5.7 billion in roughly 400 days. We may actually be looking at the greatest individual trade of all time.

Nik Sharma @mrsharma

There's one hack to building a great network that anyone can do: Be a good connector and make quality intros for other people. As long as the two people are a good fit, they do all the work of building a quality relationship, getting a deal done, etc., and you get the credit!

Paul Graham @paulg

Math and science education is particularly important for social mobility, because proficiency in these subjects is much harder to fake. A semi-smart rich kid can learn how to sound like he knows a lot about literature, but this is impossible with math.

Benedict Evans @benedictevans

Tesla bulls think it’s a software company. Tesla bears think it’s a car company. Check back in 5 years to see who was right.