Fintech Fridays: All about payments! This week saw lots of increased activity in the payments space as regulators and market players are struggling to keep up with booming demand for new payments functionalities and transaction volumes.

France and the UK both respectively opened consultations around fintech payments, with France’s Competition authority taking the lead to ensure a level playing field in the financial services industry. Big news out of South America, with 60 million customer strong Airfox being acquired by Brazilian Via Varejo - likely to play into the opportunity to easy access retail banking opportunities in Brazil. Samsung and Google - the tech powerhouses were not ready to be left out of the payments playground this week with Samsung announcing Samsung Money, a partnership product with SoFi and powered by MasterCard, and Google confirming that it was indeed testing voice confirmations to serve as payment authorisations. All these payments and digital activities do need a place to call home - and cloud infrastructure is growing at an incredible rate - just look at KKR pumping $1 billion USD into a new venture to build and operate huge data centres from all over Europe to meet this burgeoning demand.

Funding was also not taking it slow this week with Marqeta taking home $150 million USD to become valued at $4.3 Billion USD, followed by UK’s previously dipping Starling bank bringing in $49 million USD. This was followed by smaller, but impressive rounds for Singapore’s GoBear raking in $17 million, Dutch based Floryn securing $10 million USD and Icelandic challenger bank Meniga raising $9.4 Million USD. Another strong week for the fintech landscape!

We sat down with Form3 this morning to talk about developments in the fintech market, watch it here!

Take a look at all things FinTech&COVID-19 on our resource page here.