The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | March 14th

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.

Neobanks’ new wins

Danish neobank Lunar secured a €70 million Series D-2 funding round, which took the company’s total Series D funding to €280 million, following the previous round in October 2020. The round was led by Nordic investment firms Heartland and Kinnevik and Chinese tech giant Tencent, but existing investors like IDC Ventures, Fuel Ventures, MW&L Capital Partners and Trustpilot founder and CEO Peter Mühlmann also took part. The money injection will be used to fund M&A activities and launch a crypto trading platform and B2B payments solution.

Stilt, the leading provider of financial services for immigrants, announced a $14 million Series A funding round led by Link Ventures, with participation from Petrushka Investments, Hillsven Capital, and others. Stilt also has closed on a new $100 million debt facility for lending to its loan customers, bringing its total raised to $375 million in equity and debt financing. The company will also launch Onbo, a credit as-a-service offering allowing businesses to build and offer a credit product, without needing a bank sponsor via open APIs.

Avant-garde banks

Belgian bank KBC is launching its own FinTech called DISCAI to sell its AI-based applications to third parties. The offering starts with an anti-money laundering tool and will see other applications being gradually released into the market. In this next phase, DISCAI will assist companies and organisations from various sectors in their search for high-performance and innovative solutions to the technological and regulatory challenges in their particular area of business.  The new firm is also partnering with KPMG which will attract interested B2B parties and support the implementation of the technology in various countries.

Thai Siam Commercial Bank‘s technology arm SCB 10X is following JPMorgan into the metaverse by opening an HQ in the Sandbox, a blockchain-based virtual world platform. SCB will mark its launch by hosting a virtual summit and workshop to highlight the creative possibilities in the future virtual economy. Following the establishment of its foothold in the metaverse, SCB also said its headquarters will invite users to engage with a world “designed to reflect the past, present and future” of Thai culture.

Where is the buzz

Visa and Mastercard will increase the fees paid by merchants to accept payments via their card in the next month. The rise was already planned long ago, but had been delayed by two years due to the pandemic and it will apply mainly to online and e-commerce transactions, as Visa pointed out. Last year merchants paid an estimated $55.4 billion to Visa and Mastercard in interchange fees, yet, with this new measure, Mastercard will remove fees on transactions below $5 and Visa will reduce them for merchants with less than $250,000 in transaction value per year.