Neobank and payment markets news briefing - January 2019

By asgard.ai

Published in

asgard.ai

4 min readJan 27, 2019

Hi everyone!

I am Clément CEO of asgard.ai, a market intelligence company. We are building a product to help businesses to track any market or company’s activity.

You can imagine I go through lots of interesting news and I thought it would be nice to share them with you. Enjoy the read!

08/01: Fintech start-up Plaid to buy competitor Quovo for $200 million in its first major deal.
25/01: Mastercard tops Visa’s offer to buy British payments firm Earthport.

11/01: Square has launched its first-ever SDK for app developers to integrate in-app payments.
15/01: Ingenico debuts its AI-based payment chatbot enabled by IBM Watson
25/01: TSYS, the U.S. payment processing company, launches Vital POS challenging Square and Stripe.
25/01: Lydia launches shared accounts for its mobile payment app

21/01: Revolut experiences embarrassing app failure that leaves some customers hanging.

07/01: Starling Bank to enter France and Germany as Brexit looms
08/01: Robinhood crypto trading app prepares to expand with UK launch and London office.
10/01: TransferWise opens an office and applies for a banking license in Brussels to avoid service disruption after Brexit
18/01: Tandem Bank’s CEO Ricky Knox has put plans to expand in Germany on hold until after March 2019 and the UK’s exit from the EU.
09/01: Digital banking outfit Monzo to create over 300 jobs in Cardiff as it opens operations center in Cardiff.

16/01: Mastercard will end automatic free trial billing globally in April 2019.

17/01: American Express drops after missing Wall Street’s fourth-quarter expectations
23/01: A profit warning by Ingenico sent the French payment group down more than 13 percent to six-year lows.

22/01: The European Union fined Mastercard Inc. €570.6 million over charges it artificially raised the costs of card payments inside the bloc.
25/01: Visa’s European arm pays 13.2 million euros to settle Italy tax dispute

04/01: Chime, a U.S.-based app-only bank, announced earlier this week it is on track to open more than 100,000 bank accounts per month and expects to reach one million total this quarter.
18/01: Tandem reaches half a million customers
22/01: There are now 2.5 million customers using the five largest UK neobanks — Monzo, Revolut, Atom, Starling, Tandem — up from 600,000 a year earlier.

07/01: The Royal Bank of Scotland’s (RBS) new digital-only retail bank Bó has invested £2 million in the digital current account Loot Financial Services, taking its total stake to 25%.
10/01: N26 just earned unicorn status with a $300 million funding round.
22/01: Mooncard, a France-based FinTech that provides businesses with payments cards and expense management solutions, has announced $5.7 million in fundraising.
25/01: Mexican digital bank Albo raises $7.4 million to boost access to financial services.
29/01: Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures leads $30 million investment in next-gen credit card startup Petal

09/01: Cross River Bank teams with Stripe to speed up debit push payments.
14/01: Tide Collaborates With ClearBank to transform UK SME banking market.
18/01: MineralTree Integrates with Mastercard for AP payments.
23/01: Stripe and Funding Circle said their collaboration will let Stripe users integrate their sales data with Funding Circle for faster decisions on loan applications.
24/01: Swedish neobank PFC and Wirecard partner for digital banking services.
24/01: Moven and Almoayed are partnering to promote open banking in the MENA region.
24/01: Mastercard has chosen UK-based Konsentus to deliver third-party provider (TPP) identity and regulatory checking solutions as part of its new suite of open banking services.
28/01: Monzo teams up with Flux to add itemized receipts and loyalty points

03/01: Square finds its Sarah Friar replacement with new CFO Amrita Ahuja
08/01: UK online bank Monzo hires a financial market veteran as chairman
10/01: Revolut hires Freetrade co-founder and former CTO as head of Wealth & Trading Product
11/01: Square’s leadership exodus continues as payments chief leaves for Visa.
14/01: PayPal hires Apple vet Allison Johnson as its first CMO in 6 Years

This report has been made by asgard.ai, a market intelligence company helping businesses to track any market or company’s activity.