Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! This week, we take a look at Robinhood's new Gold Card, challenges in the BaaS space, and how a small startup caught the eye of Stripe.
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big story
Robinhood unveiled its new gold card to much fanfare last week. It has a long list of great features, including 3% cashback and the ability to invest that cashback through the company's brokerage account. Users can also transfer that cash back to their Robinhood savings account, which provides him with his APY of 5%. I'll be interested to see how this new card impacts the company's bottom line. But we also learned how Robinhood incorporated the technology it acquired during its $95 million acquisition of startup X1 last summer and turned it into a potentially very lucrative new product. I am also fascinated by
This week's analysis
The Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) space faces challenges. BaaS startup Synctera recently implemented a restructuring that affected approximately 15% of its workforce. It's not the only VC-backed BaaS company to resort to layoffs in the past year to preserve cash. The same goes for Treasury Prime, Synapse, and Figures. Meanwhile, the FDIC issued a consent order to Sutton Bank and Piermont Bank, ordering them to “closely monitor fintech companies' compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act and money laundering regulations,” according to The American Banker.
dollars and cents
PayPal Ventures' latest investment is Qoala, an Indonesian startup that offers personal insurance products that cover a variety of risks, including accidents and phone screen damage. MassMutual Ventures also participated in Qoala's new $47 million funding round.
New Retirement, a Mill Valley-based company that builds software to help people create retirement plans, has raised $20 million in a series of funds.
We last checked out Zaver, a Swedish B2C pay later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when it raised a $5 million funding round in 2021. The company has now completed its $10 million extension of its Series A funding round. , the total Series A will be $20 million.
what else are you writing?
Read more about how Supaglue, a small four-person startup, caught the eye of Stripe. Supaglue, formerly known as Supergran, is an open source developer platform for user-facing integrations. The team will support real-time analytics and reporting across Stripe's revenue and financial automation suite platform and third-party apps.
Maju Kuruvilla is no longer the CEO of one-click checkout company Bolt. He will be replaced as interim CEO by Justin Grooms, Bolt's head of global sales. Kuruvilla, a former Amazon executive, took over as CEO in January 2022 after founder Ryan Breslow stepped down. The information details Boruto's struggles.
Interesting headlines
Inside Mercury's stumble from fintech hero to federal target
RealPage and Plaid teams stop rental fraud
In HR software battle, Rippling regains ground against Deal at a cost
Is Chime ready for an IPO? More major customers than Chase
Inside the CEO's bold claims about hot fintech startups, which TC previously covered here.
Cloverleaf raises $7.3 million in Series A extension
Abrigo acquires TPG Software
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