A gentle reminder that the Future of Finance is Embedded 🔗; The death of Binance US might not be exaggerated after all… 👀; Bears rule: crypto markets are in Liquidity Drought 🥵
FinTech is Eating the World, 14 September
Hey Everyone,
Happy Thursday! Today’s issue is super interesting as it will give you a gentle reminder that the Future of Finance is Embedded (recap of why, what’s driving this + who’s doing this well right now), we’ll look at the death of Binance US that might not be exaggerated after all (more key exec departures + a closer look at all the mess at Binance), and how bears rule as crypto markets are in liquidity drought (a look at the latest data & what it means). Let’s just jump straight into the hot stuff 🌶
A gentle reminder that the Future of Finance is Embedded 🔗
The news 🗞️ Despite a very tough FinTech funding environment, French banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform Swan has secured a €37 million equity raise in a funding round led by Lakestar.
This new funding round follows Swan’s €16M Series A led by Accel in 2021 and a €5M Seed round in 2020.
This piece of news isn’t about Swan per se. It’s about the future of finance, which is embedded.
Let’s take a look.
More on this 👉 Founded in 2019, Swan is an embedded finance platform that provides a complete toolkit to begin offering banking services such as issuing wallets, cards, and international bank account numbers with a simple API and a few lines of code.
Its co-founder & CEO Nico Benady previously co-founded two other payments startups, Limonetik and Antelop.
The USP 🥊 Swan company now has over 100 customers with product coverage across 30 European countries and has processed over €7 billion worth of transactions.
It already works with large, multi-national organizations such as Carrefour, which completed a successful cashback project in the past year and will deepen its enterprise capabilities by launching new product lines tailored for larger organizations.
Zoom out 🔎 But this isn’t about Swan. This serves as another good reminder that the future of finance is embedded.
Let’s do a brief recap of the key drivers here and what are the implications for the future.