The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | January 9th

By Puja Sharma

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

 “Ant no Jack Ma”

‍♂️Following China’s unprecedented tech crackdown, billionaire Jack Ma is giving up controlling rights to Ant Group Co. The company announced that it would give 10 individuals the right to vote independently, effectively ending Ma’s control over Ant. The adjustment will not change the economic interests of any shareholders.

In 2020, Ma made a speech criticizing Chinese regulators just before Ant’s listing was scuttled. Xi Jinping’s vision of achieving “common prosperity” has led many of his peers to relinquish their formal corporate roles and increase donations to charity.

Ant has since focused on overhauling its business operations to appease regulators. It’s ramping up its capital base for its consumer loan affiliate and moved to build firewalls in an ecosystem that once allowed it to direct traffic from payment platform Alipay, with a billion users, to services like wealth management and consumer lending.

The change of control could mean that Ant will have to wait longer for a much-anticipated resumption of its initial public offering. Companies can’t list domestically on the country’s so-called A-share market if they have had a controller change in the past three years — or the past two years if listing on Shanghai’s STAR market. For Hong Kong’s stock exchange, this waiting period is one year.

Ma’s FinTech giant was poised to conduct the world’s biggest listing in 2020, challenging the nation’s biggest state lenders, before it was scuttled as regulators launched a crackdown on the industry.

Ma will still hold voting rights and economic interests in the company following the change. In a filing in July, affiliate Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reiterated that Ma “intends to reduce and thereafter limit his direct and indirect economic interest in Ant Group over time” to a percentage that doesn’t exceed 8.8%.

KreditBee in an extension of its Series D round raised an additional $100 million in primary funding from Advent International, a private equity investor.

On announcing the fundraising, Madhusudan Ekambaram, Co-Founder & CEO of KreditBee, said, “We are delighted to welcome a long-term financial and strategic partner in Advent. This reinforces the confidence in our profitable business model and its long-term sustainability of it. The latest round will help us to achieve our vision of serving over 400 million middle-income population in the country.”

Last month, the company raised Tranche one of Series D from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), Japan’s largest bank, along with existing investors Premji Invest, Motilal Oswal Alternates, NewQuest Capital Partners, and Mirae Asset Venture Investments. Avendus Capital acted as the exclusive financial advisor to KreditBee on the transaction.

The additional capital raised will be deployed towards scaling the existing business and diversifying its product offering by venturing into digitally enabled financial products. The company serves the credit and other personal finance requirements through its in-house RBI-registered NBFC – Krazybee Services Private Limited (Systemically important NBFC) along with partnerships with over 10 renowned financial institutions. The platform is on track to surpass an AUM of USD 1 billion over the next 6-9 months.

Shweta Jalan, the Managing Partner at Advent International, added, “We believe KreditBee’s proprietary underwriting tech stack is one of the best in the industry and helps in its ability to identify and underwrite future prime customers at an early stage. We are thrilled about this partnership and to assist KreditBee to drive further value creation in its next phase of sustainable growth.”

Financial Empowerment

The majority of African migrants currently live in Europe. It is expected that NALA will be able to provide a better and more affordable money transfer option across the EU because of the large numbers of people wanting to send money to their families and friends back home.

19 new European countries have been added to NALA’s send markets with the launch. In addition to Apple Pay and Google Pay integrations, it has expanded its services to include several other services. Also as part of the expansion, NALA launched NALA For Business to reduce fees for businesses with multi-country accounts.

The money transfer company has already expanded from the UK to the USA earlier this year. The US launch saw six members from the Tanzanian parliament in New York City.

While the number of options to send money to Africa from abroad continues to grow, the continent has remained the most expensive place to send money. A World Bank estimation suggests that the average transfer fee to Africa sits at around 9%.

NALA explained at its EU launch that it is working to provide a fair and transparent service to greater empower people with better financial control. It cited hidden fees in other existing money transfer options as one reason more transparent services are required.

OPEN, a digital current account provider partnered with Axis Bank to offer a fully native digital current account to SMEs, freelancers, homepreneurs, and influencers.

Through this partnership, the business community will have access to Axis Bank’s holistic banking experience and OPEN’s end-to-end financial automation tools for managing businesses, including payments, accounting, payroll, compliance, expense management, and many more.

This is Axis Bank’s first-ever partnership with a FinTech player to launch a fully digital current account. This digital current account will help customers save time and effort, as the authentication process will be completely digital using PAN and Aadhaar followed by a Video KYC.

The comfort of a contactless account opening process that takes away the hassle of paperwork with a zero-document upload feature, makes this current account product significantly different from others in the market.

With this account, customers can avail of 250+ banking services and claim up to 50% cash back through grab-deals. With this partnership, all existing Axis Bank account holders also get access to OPEN’s all-in-one digital banking platform that is used by over 30 lakh businesses currently.

What is the buzz

Ionia has announced that it has joined Visa’s FinTech Fast Track Program. The program allows Ionia to accelerate the process of integrating with Visa and allows it to more easily leverage and access Visa’s network and capabilities. Through Ionia’s embedded payments technology, cardholders can instantly spend rewards for all or any part of a transaction and can also spend a variety of digital currencies, including cryptocurrency. Ionia’s Visa card technology will be available to nearly 13 million consumers in 2023.

“We are excited to be a member of the Visa Fintech Fast Track Program,” notes Ionia CEO, Marshall Greenwald. “It’s another validation of our business and provides us preferred access to Visa’s growing partner network and experts so we can launch our card offerings with industry-leading value.”

“We’re excited to work with partners like Ionia in creating seamless payment solutions in digital currency,” said Vanessa Colella, SVP and Global Head of Innovation and Digital Partnerships at Visa. “By joining Visa’s Fintech Fast Track program, Ionia will gain access to Visa experts, technology, and resources to efficiently scale and bring innovative solutions to market.”