The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | Jan 24th

By Gaia Lamperti

The Monday Roundup sets the scene for the week’s biggest news stories, industry deals, and upcoming events. For Prime subscribers only.

Payments news

Verifone, a global FinTech leader and payment solution provider to the world’s best-known retail brands, and Affirm, the payment network that empowers consumers and helps merchants drive growth,  have announced a new partnership. The deal will enable merchants to offer their customers the ability to pay at their own pace using Affirm online and in-store, offering a full range of payment options, including biweekly and monthly payments with as low as 0% APR. In the coming months, merchants will be able to implement the solution with just one integration of their e-commerce or in-store solutions to Verifone’s Cloud Services platform.

Indian embedded finance company M2P Solutions has raised $56 million in a Series C1 raise led by New York-based global private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners with participation from MUFG Innovation Partners, a CVC company of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Inc. (MUFG), existing investors Tiger Global and Better Capital. In total, the company has raised more than $100 million in the past year and plans on expanding its suite of API-based services internationally.

ID deals

API provider Plaid is buying Cognito, a company that can help with the “major challenge” of ID verification, with a $250 million deal that was paid in cash and stock. Cognito’s technology is used by hundreds of digital finance firms, including Plaid customers, to quickly, simply and safely verify users while ensuring KYC and AML compliance. Recently, the Open Banking giant has been putting together an ecosystem of payment partners in North America and Europe, which includes Square, Dwolla and Currencycloud, for a move into account-to-account payments.

Meanwhile, the Money and Pensions Service (MaPS) has signed a £1.8 million deal with Dutch outfit Digidentity to provide an identity service for its Pensions Dashboards Programme. The identity service provider will have a key function for dashboards, aiming to give users confidence that access to their pension information is protected and that information is released to the right person. MaPS said it was keen to encourage other organisations, such as banks, FinTech companies and pension providers, to offer their own dashboards that would compete with its own.

Where is the buzz

FinTech company Chime has called in Goldman Sachs to help prepare an initial public offering that could value the digital banking giant at up to $40 billion. Founded in 2013, Chime offers a fee-free, user-friendly banking app, which provides an accompanying debit card – on which the business earns interchange revenue – and auto-savings account. Reportedly, the company is thinking about a New York list, after it has taken advantage of the rise in digital banking during the pandemic, in August it raised $750 million at a $25 billion valuation.