A rollercoaster week on pair with scorching summer temperatures across much of Europe as we see the the Wirecard fiasco grow bigger and bigger, culminating in the
former CEO’s arrest earlier this week and the UK’s FCA suspending all transactions via Wirecard Card Solutions as of today! Global payments platform
MasterCard made a high profile purchase - laying down $825 million USD in a deal with Finincity to expand its global open banking offering. Another giant staying with the times is Jack Ma’s Ant Financial group, as they changed their name to
Ant Technologies - in line with their ideology of becoming a TechFin instead of a Fintech. Go Figure! Bad news for
Messaging platform WhatsApp which launched its maiden payments trial in Brazil to much fanfare last week as the Central Bank of Brasil halted the service amid an investigation around competition infringements and consumer safety. This isn’t the first time WhatsApp is having regulatory issues with its payments service - the platform abandoned India as a test ground for the same reason. Funding was looking healthy this week, with Checkout.com soaring to a $5.5 billion USD valuation on the back of its
$150 million funding round. Investors weren’t stingy with
Thai fintech Synqa either, allowing it to raise $80 million in a series C round. A French SME bank,
Memo Bank was able to lock down $23 million and new
cryptocurrency challenger Ziglu raised 5.25 million GBP in it’s seed round - not bad! That’s all from us for now - go catch some sun!
We sat down today with Jan-Willem Van der Schoot from
Mastercard to discuss the recent news from the FinTech sector, check it out
here
- The Holland FinTech Team
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