April was marked by the aftereffects of Fintech Meetup, which leaves us channeling our inner Larry David and avoiding stop and chats for the foreseeable future. Ethan Singleton joined PerformLine to unpack their Fintech Meetup experience, discussing BaaS evolution, collaboration, compliance trends, and innovative products. Plus, they shared conference survival tips and their optimism for fintech’s future.

FS Vector partner Emily Goodman had an eventful month. She attended the inaugural Fintech Is Femme Leadership Summit at Rise by Barclays, which brought together 300 women (and a few men!) to hear from 25 female speakers representing the entire spectrum of fintech. Emily also co-hosts CryptoMondays Stamford, where she moderated a panel on the recent events in tokenization and the implications. The panel delved into the current state of tokenization, emerging trends, and the outlook for the future. Excitingly, their community has grown from just a handful of people two crypto winters ago to almost 1,900 members today. 

Our attention returned to the ongoing conversation surrounding bank partnerships and bank consent orders. Trevor Tanifum argued that the key issue is the need to build a compliant and defensible bank-fintech model, not the model itself. Days later the FDIC began releasing consent orders in pairs targeting banks with both direct and indirect sponsorship models. Since then we have observed a surplus of demand for partner banks with many fintechs searching for banks able and willing to onboard new partners.

Softbank-backed TabaPay announced that it will acquire Synapse assets, following the BaaS platform’s bankruptcy filing. Founded in 2014, Synapse was one of the earliest players in the space. This is now the third BaaS middleware company to be acquired, as Bond and Rize were acquired last year by banking incumbents FIS and Fifth Third, respectively. We’re eagerly watching to see how the technology and capabilities are deployed within their new homes. 

Empower plans to acquire Petal and announced it has completed the acquisition of Cashalo. Petal reportedly sought a buyer back in November as higher interest rates have hurt consumer lenders, including Petal which offers underserved consumers access to credit cards. Without a near term rate reduction, fintech lenders are searching for lower costs of capital and have been finding some success with banks and credit unions. 

While we await a U.S. fintech IPO, Ryan Reynolds’s Canadian fintech Nuvei has been taken private in an all-cash deal valued at approximately $6.3 billion. His successful foray into fintech will add another feather to his cap, encompassing ventures ranging from a gin company to a mobile carrier, and even a Welsh football club. As fintech startup valuations decline, private equity firms like Advent are seizing opportunities amidst the market’s recalibration and we expect to see much more fintech activity from private equity in the months to come. 

On the global stage, Japanese conglomerate Rakuten announced its plan to consolidate its various financial operations into a single entity, unifying the bank, insurance, securities, card company and other fintech businesses. This strategic move aims to harness group synergies to maximize each member’s lifetime value while minimizing customer acquisition costs, thereby maximizing group profit. The initiative mirrors the ongoing trend of fintech market consolidation, marking a potentially transformative phase in the industry’s landscape.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has introduced COSMIC (any guesses on what it stands for? Answer at the end), a digital platform aimed at bolstering the global financial system’s defenses against money laundering and terrorism financing. The MAS developed COSMIC in close collaboration between MAS and six major commercial banks in Singapore: DBS, OCBC, UOB, Citibank, HSBC as well as Standard Chartered Bank. This follows in the footsteps of the Australian Banking Association’s introduction of the Fraud Reporting Exchange (FRX) platform, launched in 2023. Answer: COSMIC stands for Collaborative Sharing of Money Laundering/Terrorism Financing (ML/TF) Information & Cases