The Weekly Wrap: all you need to know by Friday COB | May 19th

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

It’s “unlikely” J.P. Morgan Chase would acquire another struggling bank, according to CNBC this week, that was J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s answer to a question asked during the bank’s annual shareholder meeting this week. The answer came about two weeks after J.P. Morgan’s May 1 acquisition of First Republic Bank. This was the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) had taken over amid the second-biggest banking collapse seen since 2008.

Dimon added during the shareholder meeting that J.P. Morgan is now integrating the First Republic and that it “will further help advance our wealth as well as other initiatives,” Reuters reported Tuesday. Dimon also said during Tuesday’s shareholder meeting that it is not enough for banks to simply meet regulatory requirements, pointing to the recent turmoil in the industry after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank, according to the CNBC report.

Addressing other issues during the meeting, Dimon said J.P. Morgan is ready if interest rates and inflation should remain high, and that he is more concerned about geopolitical events, cyberattacks, and market turmoil, the report said.

The CEO said last week that the banking industry is going to see tough times as far as regulations go. “I think it’s going to get worse for banks — more regulations, more rules, and more requirements,” Dimon said at the time. “If you overdo certain rules, requirements, regulations — there are some of these community banks that tell me they have more compliance people than loan officers.”

Deals of the week

• Obie secures $25m in Series B funding
• Cardless secures $75m credit facility from i80 Group
• Everseen raises €65m Series A led by Crosspoint Capital Partners
• wefox raises $110m with J.P. Morgan & Barclays backed Credit Facility
• America First Credit Union selects FirstClose to offer instant home equity
• Fabrick acquires mobile payments firm Judopay, eyes expansion in UK
• Moomoo announces expansion into Malaysia
• Smart Pension raises $95m in Series E Funding led by Aquiline
• German BNPL provider Tilta goes live on Mambu
• RuPay introduces CVV-less payments for tokenized cards
• Abhi announces issue of Islamic bonds worth $7.1m
• MPOWER Financing closes $150m funding with Goldman Sachs
• BKN301 Group partners with Finastra to roll out Banking as a Service solution
• ai expands its footprint in the Middle East

Be on the lookout for

Seamless is hosting the FinTech event, “The Gateway to FinTech in the Middle East and Africa”, between 17-18th of July in Cairo, Egypt.

Seamless brings together the entire financial ecosystem to discuss, debate and evaluate the future of money across two days of keynote presentations, panels, case studies, interviews, and demos. Attendees will discover the trends, disruptors and innovations that are revolutionizing the industry as we know it.