The Weekly Wrap: all you need to know by Friday COB | February 3rd

By Puja Sharma

The Weekly Wrap is published every Friday and recaps the week’s main stories and deals, as well as upcoming events and announcements. For Prime subscribers only.

The Big Story

Another BigTech company, PayPal, announced that it intends to reduce its workforce by 7%, or 2,000 employees. This makes it one of the BigTech companies in the process of trimming its workforce. The fintech company is impacted by an economic slowdown, as per the local media report.

This move aligns with the actions of BigTech companies and Wall Street giants, who are also implementing layoffs to control costs. The layoffs come after some big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have taken a similar approach.

PayPal President and CEO Dan Schulman wrote to the employees announcing the move which read, “Over the past year, we made significant progress in strengthening and reshaping our company to address the challenging macro-economic environment while continuing to invest to meet our customers’ needs. While we have made substantial progress in right-sizing our cost structure and focused our resources on our core strategic priorities, we have more work to do. We must continue to change as our world, our customers, and our competitive landscape evolves.

Addressing these changes requires us to make hard decisions that will impact some of our colleagues. Today, I’m writing to share the difficult news that we will be reducing our global workforce by approximately 2,000 full-time employees, which is about 7% of our total workforce. These reductions will occur over the coming weeks, with some organizations impacted more than others.

Deals of the week

• Hnry secures $35m in Series B fundraise
• Hawk AI accelerates global expansion with $17m Series B
• Lloyds invests £4m in car payments app Caura
• Digital bank Zopa raises £75m to accelerate growth
• Convergence Partners raises $296m to drive digital inclusion across Africa
• Raylo raises £110m in funding led by NatWest and Quilam Capital
• Finastra launches ALM IQ for banks to better manage risk and compliance
• Lloyds invests £4m in car payments app Caura
• Worldline extends card processing partnership with ING bank

Be on the lookout for

7^th Annual Legal, Regulatory and Compliance Forum on FinTech & Emerging Payment Systems
18-19 April, 2023

On April 18-19, 2023, American Conference Institute will host the 7th Annual Legal, Regulatory and Compliance Forum on FinTech & Emerging Payment Systems in New York. Gain key insights into the hurdles arising amid extraordinary market expansion and regulatory compliance uncertainty.

This year’s speakers include Elizabeth Corbett (General Counsel, Petal Card, Inc.), Sulejman Dizdarevic (Director & Assistant General Counsel, Discover), Elan Mendel (Senior Vice President Assistant General Counsel Regulatory Affairs, Mastercard).