The Weekly Wrap: all you need to know by Friday COB | March 24th

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

The Indian digital payments company PhonePe announced that it has secured an additional $200 million from Walmart, bringing its total funds raised for this tranche to $650 million. The raise places PhonePe’s pre-money valuation at $12 billion.

PhonePe said that it expects further investments for its ongoing fundraise of up to US$1 billion in capital and that the announcements will be made in due course.

The fintech made a domicile shift from Singapore to India and had to fork out INR 8000 crores (approximately $18.35 million) in taxes for the move. PhonePe plans to deploy these funds to scale up its payments and insurance businesses in India, as well as to launch and scale new businesses like lending, stockbroking, Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC)-based shopping and account aggregators

Sameer Nigam, CEO and Founder of PhonePe said, ‘’We would like to thank Walmart, our majority investor, for their continued support of our long-term aspirations. We are excited about the next phase of our growth as we build new offerings for Indian consumers and merchants, along with enabling financial inclusion across the nation.’”

Deals of the week

• PhonePe raises $200m in funding from Walmart
• Mangopay acquires PayTech WhenThen to boost pay-in capabilities
• Merchants National Bank partners with Teslar Software to digitise lending processes
• Santander Bank Austria taps Pelican AI for Intelligent Payments Processing
• Mollie and Billie bring Buy Now, Pay Later to B2B customers in Europe
• German FinTech Unzer enters BNPL market with new product launch
• Finastra and Aspire Systems team to accelerate instant payments
• Lebanese FinTech Purpl launches digital wallet on Mambu
• Western Union announces partnership with MoMo App
• Merchants National Bank partners with Teslar Software to digitise lending processes
• Bank ABC partners with Temenos and NdcTech to implement next-gen core banking system
• Vemanti and Finastra team up to build neobank for SMEs in Southeast Asia

Be on the lookout for

Fintech Revolution Summit aims to bring together FinTech leaders and experts in the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry to discuss and deliberate the trends around fintech and investment opportunities for the finance sector. The Summit will be held in Hanoi, Vietnam, March 27th and 28th, 2023.

The summit aims to connect CFOs, CTOs, investors, CDOs, head of innovations, and payments across Southeast Asia with fintech innovators. FinTech founders, central bank officials, BFSI experts, regulators, policy-makers, technologists, entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and media from around the world will come together to learn, discuss, debate, and network.