Affirm inks deal with Amazon 🤝; Alpacas in FinTech🦙; MetaMask growth illustrates crypto adoption 📲
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Hey Everyone,
And happy Saturday! I’m pretty much certain you had a wonderful week. To make it better, I invite you to take a look at three stories that were moving headlines this week. You can uncover other stories, keep the FinTech pulse daily and get at least X5 more by becoming a subscriber. Join the community here:
And here’s a mix of 3 great stories from this week:
Affirm inks deal with Amazon 🤝
Amazon goes BNPL 📲Amazon is diving into the buy now, pay later space. The e-commerce giant has teamed up with Affirm for its first partnership with an installment payment player on the popular e-commerce site.
Affirm’s buy now, pay later checkout option will be available to certain Amazon customers in the U.S. starting Friday with a broader rollout in the coming months. The partnership will let Amazon customers split purchases of $50 or more into smaller, monthly installments.
Affirm said some of the Amazon customer loans will bear interest, but some will come with 0% APR. Other installment-type options are available on Amazon through credit cards.
The effect 🚀 Affirm’s stock spiked as much as 48% after-hours Friday on the news, adding more than $8 billion to its market capitalization, later settling up around 33%. Amazon shares were unchanged.
Affirm is one of the best-known installment payment options. It works with more than 12,000 merchants, including Peloton and Walmart.
✈️ THE TAKEAWAY
BNPL is here to stay. That’s more and more obvious now, especially considering that younger generations prefer this payment method over traditional credit cards (I’ve written about that in earlier newsletters). Furthermore, it’s a massive move for Affirm as it now gets to have two of the largest retail heavyweights tied to its payment network (hence, the massive stock surge). When it comes to Amazon itself, it’s definitely part of their strategic thinking and customer-first approach. I’d probably view it as a trial and if it takes off very well, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon Pay Later sometime soon.
Alpacas in FinTech🦙
Literally, alpacas🦙 Alpaca, a stock brokerage platform that offers APIs for FinTech apps to connect and trade in US stocks, has raised $50M and laid out its plan to launch cryptocurrency trading.
Tribe Capital led the Series B funding round, with participation from Horizons Ventures, Eldridge, Positive Sum, Portage Ventures, Spark Capital, and Social Leverage.
The growth 📈 Launched in 2018, Alpaca has seen a 1500% year-to-date growth in brokerage accounts and expanding partnerships across Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa, North and Latin Americas.
"By the end of the year, we’re going to see close to 100 global fintech apps built with our APIs go live with their stock trading platforms” (Yoshi Yokokawa, CEO of Alpaca)
Crypto 👀 The firm is now set to launch a cryptocurrency product for both its retail consumers and B2B partners. Customers will soon be able to buy, sell, hold, and trade cryptocurrencies via Alpaca’s developer-first APIs.
✈️ THE TAKEAWAY
Investing-as-a-Service. With the massive retail investment surge and growing adoption globally, investment APIs aka investing-as-a-service is a very hot vertical in FinTech right now. You can only look at Robinhood’s and Coinbase’s last results and you will get the picture. And Alpaca is providing the infrastructure to connect both worlds. Something to watch for indeed.
MetaMask growth illustrates crypto adoption 📲
User growth 👥 The blockchain technology company ConsenSys recently announced that its MetaMask cryptocurrency wallet has surpassed 10 million monthly active users. This milestone marks a 19-fold growth since July of last year, and “positions MetaMask as the leading non-custodial wallet by users globally”.
The USP 🥊 MetaMask is a mobile app and browser extension that works as a cryptocurrency wallet for interactions with the Ethereum blockchain and Ethereum-compatible networks such as Polygon, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
Global footprint 🌎 As of this month, the top 15 countries using MetaMask include the Philippines, United States, Vietnam, United Kingdom, China, India, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, Turkey, Germany, France, Canada, and Spain.
✈️ THE TAKEAWAY
Hand in hand. It’s not about MetaMask per se here - it’s about growing crypto adoption, particularly - Ethereum. According to ConsenSys itself, MetaMask’s growth has followed that of Ethereum’s ecosystem. Take this for example - just $2B in crypto assets were committed to decentralized finance (DeFi) in 2019, compared to the more than $80B supported by Ethereum today. That’s a massive jump in less than 2 years! It’s clear that crypto adoption is accelerating and both competition and innovation is only going to increase in the next year or so.
🔎 What else I’m watching
Super App. From a retailer 🤔 Japan-based retail group Aeon has announced it will launch its mobile payment service Aeon Pay in September 2021. Aeon aims to make its mobile payment service a super app that any retailer can use, and plans to consolidate its online shopping businesses and prepaid cards under Aeon Pay. According to Nikkei Asia, the company is one of the latest players in Japan's booming mobile payment sector where internet companies are vying to create one-stop shopping solutions for varied services -- from banking to travel to telephone access.
China is building a Global Clearing Network🇨🇳 China aims to build an international clearing and settlement network for mobile payments using the digital yuan, the People’s Daily wrote. The network will be a “breakthrough point” in the cross-border use of digital currency, the op-ed said. China also wants to use the digital yuan to improve the monitoring and early warning capabilities regarding cross-border flows of the yuan, according to the article. Will China take over the world with this? 🤔
To survive, you need oversight? 🤔 The $2.1 trillion cryptocurrency trading space has grown so large so fast that it’s too big to survive without regulatory oversight, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chairman Gary Gensler told the Financial Times. He said that without a regulatory framework, the crypto industry could lose the public’s trust despite the popularity the trading space is now experiencing. What about DAOs and DEXes? 🤔
💸 Following the Money
US-based investment analytics firmAumni has secured $50M in a Series B investment round led by JPMorgan.
Singapore-based FinTech company Honest Bank has raised $19.7M in its Series A round led by Insignia Ventures Partners and Digital Horizon VC.
Coinpanion, a new crypto platform for retail investors, has raised €1.8M in a seed investment round.
👋 That’s it for today! Thank you for reading and have a productive weekend! And if you enjoyed this newsletter, invite your friends and colleagues to sign up:
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