Rapyd’s rapid fundraise 💸; Indonesian BNPL giant SPACing🇮🇩; HSBC wants to be a FinTech VC 😎

Good Morning FinTech. 15/30

Good morning Everyone,

And happy Wednesday! We’re in the middle of the week, and I hope you are all well and safe. Here are 3 FinTech stories to make your day better:

Rapyd’s rapid fundraise 💸

Another one in the bank 🏦 Global FinTech-as-a-Service company Rapyd has raised a massive $300M Series E funding round led by Target Global. According to TechCrunch, the fresh funding values the company at $8.75 billion.

Really rapid 🚀 The newest funding is coming just 7 months after Rapyd announced another $300 million round, its Series D. That last round was at a $2.5 billion valuation.

The USP 📲 Rapyd provides a range of financial services like payments, mobile wallets, money transfers, card issuing, fraud protection and more, all by way of an API for third parties to integrate quickly into their own services. Hence, think of them like FinTech-as-a-Service company. Something similar to Stripe, just not that massive. Yet.

M&As to come 🤝 Rapyd has been starting the M&A march in earnest already this year, acquiring payments and card issuing company Valitor in July for $100M to expand deeper into Europe, and starting an investment arm called Rapyd Ventures. Acquisitions will likely be to continue getting deeper into its current markets.

✈️ THE TAKEAWAY

FinTech-as-a-Service is the future of FinTech. And if not, it’s a lucrative and massive market for sure. We can clearly see that startups building these infrastructures are seeing huge gains at the moment, hence, major growth rounds only support this trend. More importantly, in a global world, there’s an unprecedented need for all-in-one solutions when it comes to financial services. This is why Stripe is at least $100B business, and Rapyd wants to be there too.

Indonesian BNPL giant SPACing🇮🇩

The deal 💸 The owner of the Indonesian buy now, pay later platform Kredivo is set to go public in a $2.5 billion merger with a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by Victory Park Capital.

FinAccel and VPC Impact Acquisition Holdings II have entered a definitive agreement that will see the BNPL firm secure gross proceeds of $430M, including a private placement of $120M.

The product 📲 Kredivo provides customers instant credit financing for e-commerce and offline purchases, as well as personal loans, based on proprietary, AI-enabled real-time decisioning. The firm has nearly 4 million approved customers in Indonesia and has set its sights on expanding to new markets such as Vietnam and Thailand. Think of it like Australia’s Afterpay or Sweden’s Klarna.

✈️ THE TAKEAWAY

Huge and untapped market. In the Western world, credit is almost readily accessible, while traditional banks in Southeast Asia have historically provided little consumer credit. This effectively means a large opportunity for Kredivo to tap into other credit needs, such as personal loans, for instance. More importantly, 66% of Southeast Asia’s population is unbanked or under-banked, thus, there’s another massive opportunity to serve these customers with other financial services, outside of credit.

HSBC wants to be a FinTech VC 😎

The Bank VC 👀 Banking giant HSBC has created a specialist venture capital arm specifically for the purpose of investing in companies “that will participate in the transformation of financial services.” 

Series A & B 💸 HSBC’s new VC strategy will see it participate in Series A and B rounds of firms in either B2B software or financial services sectors across Europe and Asia.

What’s the catch? 🤔 By launching this new strategy, HSBC is hoping to open channels of communications between these young, innovative companies and asset managers, family offices, private banks, and high-net-worth individuals.

“As part of our commitment to provide clients with exciting investment opportunities, this strategy will give them access to high growth sectors and parts of the world where economies are expanding fast such as the Greater Bay Area in China,” Joanna Munro, CEO of HSBC Alternatives, said.

✈️ THE TAKEAWAY

Banks & FinTechs can’t live without each other 🤷‍♂️. It’s evident that big banks have long been eyeing up FinTechs and trying to get involved - either directly or not. HSBC has come up with a new way to get involved, and it makes total sense. By being at the forefront of innovation, the bank can not only follow the pulse of what’s happening but also get its skin in the game and hence stay relevant and valuable.

🔎 What else I’m watching

• More money into BaaS 💸 FinTech startup Banking Circle seeks to raise approximately $500M in a forthcoming funding round. The potential new funding would push the company’s valuation to approximately EUR 5B euros, which is equivalent to $5.9B.

• Tencent goes NFTs 😎 Chinese tech titan Tencent has launched an NFT trading platform named Huanhe.

• Another block for Binance 🥊 HSBC is now blocking U.K. customers from using credit cards to make payments to crypto exchange Binance “wherever possible,” the banking giant said Tuesday. The decision follows the U.K. Financial Conducts Authority’s June announcement that Binance was not allowed to conduct any regulated activities in the country. 

• SEC eyes on crypto 👀 SEC chairman Gary Gensler wants to see Congressional legislation focused on “crypto trading, lending, and DeFi platforms” and granting regulators additional authorities to regulate the crypto ecosystem.

• Private jets are lame for FinTech 🤷‍♂️ The Stripe president and co-founder John Collison is part of a consortium bidding for Ireland’s Weston Airport.

💸 Following the Money

• Alternative lender ThinCats secured a £400M debt facility to support SMEs through the Recovery Loan Scheme.

• Element Ventures, a new B2B FinTech-focused VC has closed its first $130M fund.

• PayPal has joined a $250M round in Vietnamese FinTech VNLife.

• Bitpanda to invest €10M to build a blockchain R&D hub.

• Capital on Tap, the alternative lender, has secured a $100M credit facility from Atalaya Capital Management to help it grow even more. 

• Crypto tax firm Zenledger raised $6M amid the Senate infrastructure bill battle.

• Payment technology company EVO Payments announced its acquisition of the U.K.-based payment gateway Anderson Zaks Limited. The companies did not release any terms of the acquisition.

• Mexico City-based B2B software and payments company Yaydoo closed a $20.4M Series A funding round.

• UK-based payments platform Paysafe has signed a definitive agreement to acquire PagoEfectivo, a Peru-based alternative payments (APM) platform. 

• Mercury, a startup that offers banking services for startups, has raised $120M during its Series B funding round and is now valued at $1.62B.

👋 That’s it for today! Thank you for reading and have a productive Wednesday! And if you enjoyed this newsletter, invite your friends and colleagues to sign up:

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