Issue #340 December 2nd, 2021

Also user authentication systems are going to change. According to data collected by PYMNTS, 71% of account holders would like to use biometric authentication. This is mainly due to frauds against users. Biometric authentication would be safer, and a new system is under the scrutiny of the EMVCo.

Among the topics discussed on this weeks episode, The Fintech Times team talks about the evolution of payments and the surge in the use of “buy now, pay later” - BNPL - payment services.

Asia is a leader in fintech adoption, and Singapore is attracting the largest amount of fintech investments. According to KPMG, the country reached $98 billion worth of investments only in the first half of 2021, against the $42 billion of the US.

The Forbes’ yearly list of “30 under 30” in finance highlights that most of these successful entrepreneurs are involved in fintech and cryptos. On the 2022 list, crypto entrepreneurs reached an all-time high, being 11 out of 30 the crypto companies featured on the list.

CoinShares is acquiring the French fintech company Napoleon, a company specialized in creating pre-built portfolios and strategies for crypto investors. The acquisition should be completed by the second week of December, and the investment amounts to over €13 million.

David Marcus, executive at Meta - formerly known as Facebook - announced that he will leave the company by the end of the year. David Marcus led the crypto-related projects of the company, and earlier the social media expansion of Facebook through Messenger, but now he wants to pursue personal entrepreneurial projects.

The new fintech solution proposed by Massive could lead us to a new way of considering compute power and payments: the company announced a funding event for a project that should allow users to pay for apps and services with compute power.

The world’s first green fintech taxonomy is being reviewed by its authors: the Green Digital Finance Alliance - GDFA - and the Swiss Green Fintech network should publish the document by the end of the first quarter of 2022.

Even if 2021 has been the year of the fintech boom, it is also the year that saw the failures of big fintech companies: Google, Robinhood, Binance, Facebook, N26 were not able to reach their goals. What does 2022 hold for fintech?

The company doesn’t want to sleepwalk into a digital skills gap, as the Deloitte’s Risk Analytics and FinTech Lead for Scotland, Kent Mackenzie, said. For this reason, the company launched an app that will allow its users to learn finance, financial independence, and the role of technology in the digital future of financial services.

The stockbroker AJ Bell wants to compete with a number of trading fintechs - like Revolut and eToro - by offering a new app that will allow users to make commission-free investments in the first half of 2022.