The Monday Roundup: what we are watching this week | Jan 10th

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.

New year, new crypto fever

🪙 Recently, payments giant PayPal has confirmed theories around the launch of its own stablecoin as part of its recent cryptocurrency push. The speculation arose after the discovery of  “PayPal Coin” evidence, a currency pegged to the US dollar. According to Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s Senior  VP of Crypto and Digital Currencies, “we are exploring a stablecoin; if and when we seek to move forward, we will, of course, work closely with relevant regulators.” The move follows the company’s recent crypto initiatives, such as crypto trading new features and the use of digital currencies to pay for purchases.

📈NFT marketplace Opensea raised $300 million in a Series C funding round led by Coatue and Paradigm, after seeing more than $2.4 billion in transaction volume in the past 30 days, up 600x over the past year. The company says that the new funding will go toward accelerating product development, improving customer support, expanding the team, and “investing in the wider NFT and Web3 community.” Opensea is also the largest NFT marketplace, in terms of all-time sales, as the company has recorded $14.68 billion in sales across 1,387,357 traders worldwide.

India’s FinTech is set for 2022

💳 The “Stripe for India”, FinTech Razorpay has raised $375 million, in a round led by TCV, Lone Pine Capital, and Alkeon, hitting a $7.5 billion valuation. Razorpay allows merchants to accept more than 100 payment types and offers a suite of tools around payment acceptance, a market that in India is competitive, vast, and complex due to the scale of the country’s population and its advanced FinTech sector. The firm has spent the last two years riding the Covid wave as more businesses switch to digital payments and move online during the pandemic, recording huge growth in transaction volumes and hiring hundreds of employees. With the new funding in place, it plans to scale its neo-banking platform, launch new products, expand into South East Asia, and make acquisitions in the B2B SaaS space.

🤫 Indian merchant commerce platform Pine Labs has confidentially filed for a US initial public offering to raise about $500 million, and the listing could give the company a valuation of about $5.5 billion to $7 billion. Founded in 1998 to provide retail automation solutions to petroleum companies, Pine Labs now offers services and tools such as inventory management and payment terminals to merchants across Asia and the Middle East. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are the lead bankers on the IPO, but details have not been diffused yet.

Where’s the buzz

Biometric payment technology is upon us. Today, Fingerprint Cards AB, a software platform for biometric payment cards, announced it has achieved compliance with Mastercard’s new Fingerprint Sensor Evaluation Process. Fingerprint has proactively secured this updated approval to simplify the process for card manufacturers to launch second-generation biometric payment cards that will minimise the time to market, lower related costs, and boost the deployment of biometric payment cards at scale, supporting greater convenience and security for consumers making in-store purchases.