Daily Fintech Podcast 2022.2.2

This podcast episode is sponsored by Fintech Meetup. Fintech Meetup Is Almost Here! Only 30 Days Left To Get Your Ticket! The event will be Virtual, March 22nd to the 24th. Discounted startup rates are available for qualifying companies. 💫 News Highlight: Ryan Breslow, founder of Bolt, said he’s stepping down as chief executive officer, two weeks after securing an $11 billion valuation for the business. Breslow will become executive chairman, and Maju Kuruvilla, a 44-year-old Bolt executive and a former vice president at Amazon.com Inc., will be promoted to CEO. Breslow said in an interview that this was planned weeks ago before the latest financing was completed. ⚡ Just in Groupon shares are getting a huge lift from an apparently substantial appreciation of the company’s stake in the U.K.-based payments company SumUp. ⭐ Also, Subaio chose European open banking leader, Aiia, a Mastercard company, to enable a smarter way for assessing creditworthiness through Subaio’s new white-label offering. 👉🏻 Furthermore: MEDICI Global has identified PayPal, Square, Razorpay, Adyen, and Stripe as the largest payment gateways based on their Total Payment Volume. 🤝 M&As: Block has completed its $29bn acquisition of ‘buy now, pay later firm Afterpay. Under the deal, first announced back in August 2021, Block - which is headed by the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and owns the Square and Cash apps - has acquired all of the issued shares in Afterpay. UniCredit will continue to study potential mergers and acquisitions after deciding against a Russian deal due to geopolitical risks but won’t stray from plans to return billions in capital to shareholders. 💰 Funding rounds & investments: Pennylane raised $57 million (€50 million) in Series B funding. The round was led by existing investors Sequoia Capital, Global Founders Capital, and Partech. Bamboo raised $15 million in a new financing round. Dozens of tech executives, including the founders of Klarna, Skype, Delivery Hero, and Flutterwave, have launched a $ 200 million venture capital fund aimed at finding the next $ 1 billion or more in Africa 💼 Opportunities: Matt Cheung, a serial entrepreneur in the financial services sector, recommends recent graduates to broaden their job search. His advice is to not just look for graduate jobs in the big banks when a faster-growing and more exciting alternative is on offer.