Grab goes public in the largest SPAC deal ever 🙌🏼; Bitcoin-backed loans from Goldman Sachs? 🤔; BNPL is on steroids in Mexico🇲🇽🚀

Good Morning FinTech, December 6

Good day Everyone,

And happy Monday! I hope you managed to relax a bit over the weekend. To get your week going on a positive note, I invite you to explore 3 super interesting FinTech stories for today:

Grab goes public in the largest SPAC deal ever 🙌🏼

The SPAC 🤝 Grab, the Southeast Asian super app, has just completed its business combination with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Altimeter Growth.

As a result, Grab began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “GRAB.”

The company has raised over $11B of private funding before deciding to go public this year.

The Super App 📲 Launched in 2012, Grab sells an array of digital services such as transportation, food delivery, hotel bookings, online banking, mobile payments, and insurance services from its app, hence, earning the “super app” title.

It operates in most of Southeast Asia, serving more than 187M users (for context, this is nearly double Uber's users) in over 465 cities across eight countries. Still, revenue at the company was down 9% year-over-year as net losses expanded to $988M, up from $621M.

Blank debut 📉 Shares of $GRAB opened the trading day of the debut at $13.06 apiece which valued the company at nearly $40B.

But they lost more than a fifth of their value by Thursday’s closing bell, finishing more than 20% lower at $8.75 apiece.

At the point of the press, the stock is trading at $8.99 a share.