🌊The Fintech Wave(#8)
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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; Amazon is hiring a Head of Crypto. Visa and Mastercard invested in the same company. AI approves loans. ETH is on an all-time high. Pay for movie tickets with Shiba Inu coin. Keep reading for details👇
Europe News and Funding
More competitors on the EU B2B payments market
Nook raised $1.1M pre-seed for B2B payment infrastructure. This is the 3rd B2B payment company in the UK that raised money in the last few weeks. Thing is, the market is so big that there is enough space for dozen of similar companies. Business payments didn’t evolve as the rest of tech - in most cases it includes sending Purchase Order via PDF, paying huge fees for wire transfer, and waiting a few days for the money to arrive, so any innovation in this space will have a huge impact.
North America News and Funding
Visa and Mastercard💳 invested in the same company
In June, Mastercard announced a $50M investment into Deserve - white label mobile-centric API and SDK-based credit card technology. Deserve developed credit-card-as-a-service for fintechs, consumer brands, universities, and associations.
This week, Visa also announced an investment in the same startup. The amount is undisclosed. This summer Deserve launched the world’s first credit card with Crypto rewards, which was huge news at the time. Fintech infrastructure is developing so fast it is hard to track all the innovations. With Deserve platform, any consumer brand can create their credit card program and offer it to the customers. Just a few years ago that was unimaginable.
AI🧠 approves loans
Fintech startup which is developing AI for lenders, just took a loan from banks to continue to develop its platform :). Point Predictive is building artificial intelligence solutions for automotive, mortgages, and retail lending. In the lending industry, there is still a lot of manual work and document verifications done by people which is not only inefficient but also there is room for errors. Point Predictive software streamlines the underwriting process by automated data verification and identifying potential frauds or misrepresented information. So far, they analyzed more than 100 millions loans applications, so I suppose their algorithms are pretty well trained.
Amazon📦 is hiring a Head of Crypto
Important announcement from Amazon. They posted a job ad for “Head of Digital Currency and Blockchain”. Seems like Amazon could soon accept crypto payments on some of its platforms.
Crypto ₿ites
Ethereum on All-time-high
On Thursday Ethereum reached its all-time-high at $4416 per ETH. Could we see bull run to $10K?
NFT platforms are on 🔥
Every week at least one NFT platform raises money. This week GigaLabs raised $4.5M for its NFT creation platform to empower brands to create NFTs. The company is betting that every brand will have an NFT strategy in the future. NFTs are getting rapidly adopted and brands are looking to get involved, but it is still pretty hard to navigate through technicalities. The startup has a couple of products. NFT Bridge is a white-label solution that offers APIs, branded marketplace, and payment processing. RareRooms is a 3D gallery that serves as a showcase of NFT art pieces. Some of their customers are CNN, Turner Sports, Speedway Motorsports, etc.
If you ever wondered what are the use cases of NFTs, check the categories below.
AMC🎥 might allow customers to pay for movie tickets with Shiba Inu coin
A month ago, AMC announced it will allow customers to pay for movie tickets with Crypto - Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Dogecoin. On Friday, AMC CEO, post a Tweet asking users would they like to pay for tickets with Shiba Inu. More than 100K users vote “Yes”. If that really introduces Shiba Inu payments that will push the coin price even more. Shiba Inu is currently the world’s ninth-largest crypto by market cap.
Tweets of the Week
