Fintech

Sending money across borders is filled with friction, like long wait times, high transaction costs and markups on currency exchange. A startup called Parallax wants to make the process faster and cheaper with a cross-border payments system that can be used for stablecoin, crypto or traditional curr

W elcome to the technewss Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It's inspired by the daily technewss+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Some fintech companies are weathering the storm better than others and seeing an end in sight.

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis was easily the most destructive economic crisis since the Great Depression. And yet, it's not without a touch of irony that without it, we wouldn't have a thriving startup ecosystem. In an attempt to reboot the global economy, central banks slashed interest

Fintech giant Square says its services are coming back online after a daylong outage left small business owners unable to process payments. The Block-owned company had, up until Friday morning on the U.S. West Coast, been battling a prolonged outage that had downed its services since Thursday after

In 2021, U.K. neobank Zopa, which has been around since 2004, leapt to a $1 billion valuation on the back of a big investment from SoftBank and a plan to go public by 2022. Now it’s 2023, and Zopa is today announcing another fundraise of a different kind as it continues to wait for the IPO ma

Digital innovation across our financial industry is evolving at the pace of Moore's law on steroids — reshaping the structure of our markets, transitioning buying power to the consumer, and dislocating segments of the customer value chain once dominated by traditional banks. Fintechs have bee

Some of India’s biggest fintech startups are making deeper inroads into soundboxes, unveiling a new push to the pocket-sized devices whose chimes are fast becoming the new “ka-ching” for millions of Indian merchants. Paytm, whose soundbox leads the market and is used by over 7 mil

Anchor, a Nigerian banking-as-a-service (BaaS) provider, has raised $2.4 million in seed investment. Justin Kan's Goat Capital led the financing round, which also welcomed participation from FoundersX, Rebel Fund and some existing investors, including Y Combinator and Byld Ventures. The fintech

Things continue to look up for European fintech giant Klarna. Around this time last year, it would have been hard to say that. Alex Wilhelm explained the ins and outs of Klarna's first-quarter earnings in May, along with a little history on its rather tense 2022 when the company's valuation

Open banking — where traditional banks open up their data with APIs to build new financial services for their customers — has the potential to be one of the payment world’s big disruptors: get it to work right, and it could supplant giant networks (and network fees) like Visa̵

India’s PhonePe is getting into stock and mutual fund investment, the latest in a series of expansions by the Walmart-backed payments app as it looks to leverage its 450 million-plus user base to win in new categories. The Bengaluru-headquartered startup, which has raised $850 million in rece

Jio Financial Services, the financial services unit of Mukesh Ambani-run Indian conglomerate Reliance Industries, plans to expand to merchant lending and insurance, Ambani said at Reliance’s annual general meeting in a speech that is likely to have repercussions for countless startups. “

Starbucks is testing a new way for customers to pay for their favorite beverages — without even having to pull out their phone. The company confirmed an internal test of “scanless pay,” a new contactless checkout method that would leverage a Starbucks app’s user’s curr

Shares of Better.com are getting hammered into the ground Thursday morning after the digital mortgage company completed its long-delayed SPAC merger and began to trade as a public company for the first time. When Better first announced plans to go public in 2021 at a $7.7 billion valuation, it was