Visa announced the VEI, the Visa Everywhere Initiative opened to UAE fintech firms and startups. Winners will have the opportunity to cooperate with Visa, monetary prizes and the opportunity to gain exposure to major fintech stakeholders.

Good news for fintech: F-Prime Capital announced the launch of the F-Prime Fintech Index, which will track major fintech companies and their performances, allowing investors to better choose where to put their money.

DriveWealth - the startup that helps fintech firms offer stocks - is acquiring a crypto firm - Crypto-Systems. According to the CEO of DriveWealth, Bob Cortright, they want to avoid unsustainable fees and wild spreads, to make crypto markets more "regular".

According to Finextra, the fintech industry managed to double investments: the industry received an impressive $91.5 billion worth investments worldwide. As Satya Patel (co-founder of Homebrew) stated, "financial services is one of the biggest sectors on the globe".

The Egyptian fintech Kashat and Mastercars signed a five-year agreement that will allow the fintech to better provide financial services to Egyptian people - especially the unbanked. The goal? Creating a more financial inclusive country.

Mary Ann Azevedo (TechCrunch) interviews 10 investors to know what they look for when investing in startups: Anish Acharya (Andreessen Horowitz), Christina Melas-Kyriazi (Bain Capital Ventures), Ethan Choi (Accel), Pete Flint (NFX), Munish Varma (SoftBank Investment Advisers), Nigel Morris (QED Investors), Tyler Griffin (Financial Venture Studio), Mark Fiorentino (Index Ventures) and Sheel Mohnot (Better Tomorrow Ventures).

Fintech firms and banks are cooperating to find more innovative solutions for merchants and to enhance security: one of these collaborations is represented by the partnership between Bank of America and Banked to reduce transaction fees.

Synctera provides its platform and tools to fintech creators, communities and entrepreneurs. The platform has recently participate in the partnership between Lineage Bank - the U.S. community bank - and GoGetr - the fintech platform that helps people with their savings and health.

Shamyl Malik, co-founder and CEO of Haruko, says that he wants his company to become the “one-stop-shop for crypto” – especially for institutions. The start-up has just announced a $10 million funding round, after investors showed interest in this initiative.

Climate fintech companies are raising billions both in the US and Europe: CommerzVentures shared 2022 data, analyzing almost 300 fintech start-ups. In Europe, the country that collected more funds is the UK.

Even if the financial technology industry is still one of the hottest markets, it is undoubtedly affected by geopolitical tensions in Europe: data provided by Crunchbase shows that in the last two weeks funds collected decreased by over 60% compared to previous weeks.

Zeta, the fintech company specialized in banking and credit card services, is considered a unicorn in the fintech space. The last funding round raised $30 million and one of the investors is Mastercard, which announced a five-year partnership with the fintech company.

Israel registered a surge in fintech investments in 2021. Fintech startups got 17% of the tech investments of the country. The segments that are growing faster are insurtech, trading, lending and payments services.

Gretel has just raised $1 billion in a pre-seed funding round led by RLC Ventures and Insurtech Gateway. The fintech company helps financial institutions to allow their customers to recover lost financial products.

The Launch Innovation Programme of Lloyds Banking Group is opened. The group opened this program for the second time to find new fintech partners from all around the world.

People’s Bank of China and Chinese financial regulators want to encourage “controllable risks” to improve financial technology in the region. The central banks would like banks to cooperate more with external institutions and increase the number of fintech services.

The fintechaverse enters the speculation mode that always follows acquisitions made by Apple: Ron Shevlin analyzes the acquisition of Credit Kudos. There might be several reasons for this investment – the launch of a new card, a new BNPL scheme, A2A payments, the acquisition of new technologies.

Visa launches a new NFT program: the business owners that will be selected will be included in a one-year program that will allow them to expand their activities thanks to non-fungible tokens.

Nordic Fintech announced a €132 million offer to acquire Instabank. Instabank was founded in 2016, and so far managed to reach over 60,000 clients with its secured and unsecured loans and savings solutions.

Wei Zhou, former CFO of Binance, bought Coins.ph. The crypto exchange and wallet provider was bought by Gojek, an Indonesian tech company, for $95 million. Now, Zhou wants to steer Coins back to its roots in the crypto space.

Even if financial institutions recognize that climate change is a serious issue, they don’t agree on solutions. The People’s Bank of China is working on specific solutions: one of this solutions is to finance all those sectors that contribute to greening the Chinese financial system.

After the unsuccessful listing of the first tweet ever on OpenSea, Ron Shevlin shares thoughts and data on what’s happening to the NFT (non-fungible token) market.

It is expected a new wave of consolidation in the UK fintech industry: financing rounds show that investors are willing to invest more in fintech, and that new technologies – mainly based on artificial intelligence – will be exploited to support the growth of the whole fintech industry.

Twitter accepted the bid of Elon Musk: the company announced that it accepted the offer of around $44 billion, and even if the deal should close in 2022, the offer still needs to be approved by stockholders.

Also Stripe joins the crypto space: the firm announced that it will give its users the possibility to pay with cryptos. The company focuses on a stablecoin, USDC.

The fintech company Qonto opened a crowd investing round that made the company raise €5 million in a few hours. The company opened the round via Crowdcube and was supported by over 1800 Qonto users.

According to data from CBInsights, the fintech industry received investments for over $28 billion in the first quarter of 2022. The best performer was Europe, and for what concerns sectors even insurtech and payments tech experienced declines.

Fidelity exploits fintech opportunities not only thanks to the metaverse, but also by expanding its financial services: Fidelity Investments will allow its users to invest part of their savings in Bitcoin.

The banking giant, Truist, finds it hard to appeal to the youngest generations of users. This is the reason behind its last acquisition: the financial institution acquired Long Game, a fintech startup involved in the gamefi space.

After six months, the Swedish fintech Klarna has a team of 20 people in Portugal, but the company wants to increase its presence in the country by opening a new product development center.