Being a direct-to-consumer fintech can be expensive and difficult.
The path to profitability is often a long and winding one, so we have seen several companies pivot to B2B in the last year or so.
Goldman's push into consumer finance continues to be a disaster. While CEO David Solomon had grand plans, the entire move has proven to be an unmitigated disaster.
The US dollar stablecoin market has long been dominated by Tether (USDT) and Circle (USDC). Together these stablecoins have a market cap of around $140 billion or so.
While others have tried, notably PayPal last year, there is no other stablecoin with a market cap of more than $3 billion.
We know consumers love BNPL, with millions preferring it over credit cards as a purchase method.
We also know that much has been written about consumers misusing BNPL and causing themselves financial difficulties.
Anyway you slice it, we have not been doing a good job in stopping money laundering.
It is estimated that we only catch 1-2% of all illicit money flowing through the banking system. Yet as an industry, we spend many billions of dollars in this fight.
In May of last year, Petal announced it had raised a new funding round and was spinning off its infrastructure unit, Prism Data.
But then we heard in November that Petal was struggling and looking for a buyer.
While it is not yet a wave, fintech consolidation is starting to pick up. And yesterday we learned of another deal, this one in the investing space.
While this deal was telegraphed a few months ago there was an official announcement yesterday. Leading investment fintech Yieldstreet is acquiring the real estate platform Cadre.
No, you did not wake up back in 2021 but there is news this morning of a €285 Million (over $300m) fintech funding round.
Germany-founded but London-based SumUp has closed the massive funding round that is "mostly equity" which tempers our initial enthusiasm somewhat. But even a nine-figure equity round is enough to make the news these days.
Twitter/X has been going state-by-state obtaining money transmitter licenses. The social media platform is now approved in 12 states.
Today, Google has announced a pilot program with Affirm and Zip to bring BNPL natively into the Google Pay wallet.
Consumers continue to choose BNPL as a payment option and its popularity continues to grow, particularly during the holiday shopping season.