PayPal’s + Pinterest a High Profile Example of Payments & Commerce Convergence
Almost 20 years ago, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. PayPal was subsequently spun-off from eBay while growing into the leading global e-commerce payment service provider (“PSP”), worth more than $300 billion. On Wednesday, October 20th, PayPal signaled a potential acquisition of Pinterest, a $40 billion digital marketplace and visual discovery engine. Where eBay and […]
Payoneer’s Recent IPO Highlights the Importance of Global Disbursements
The growth of e-commerce and the gig-economy transformed businesses and gave rise to marketplaces and aggregators like Amazon, AirBnB, Upwork, and more. Global payout providers support marketplaces and aggregators, enabling merchant payment disbursements and cross-border money transfers to pay sellers, employees, agents, and/or consumers (‘payees’). These global payout providers are bridging the gap between traditional […]
Serrala & Tink Partnership: Genesis of Open Banking in B2B Payments
As we explored previously in this article, the integration of software and payment services in European B2B/corporate payments is relatively immature compared to the US. There is, however, great potential for this trend given Europe’s robust bank payments infrastructure and shift towards open banking. Most of the early adoption of open banking has focused on […]
EU Banks are Missing the Boat on BNPL
Buy now, pay later (“BNPL”) is experiencing huge growth in awareness, uptake, and press coverage. Klarna is the largest and most visible standard-bearer, showcasing a 33% revenue growth rate and a $46 billion valuation in its last funding round in June 2021 implying a 30x revenue multiple. Fintech incumbents have issued a slew of BNPL […]
Payments Orchestration Reshaping Merchant Payments
Merchants face ever-expanding complexity for managing payments across geographies, channels, and use cases. Merchants want the ability to quickly adapt their payment infrastructure to embrace growth while delivering robust customer experiences. In parallel, payments technology is shifting into the cloud and opening and embedding into broader API ecosystems. As a result of both merchant demands […]
P27 Illustrates the Potential for Modern A2A Rails to Spur Fintech Innovation
Even payments and fintech experts often think of the Nordics as a single market with common consumer behavior, business demographics, and culture. While there are similarities, each Nordic market has a distinct payments infrastructure. The bank systems and networks are fragmented, built on domestic rules which make intra-Nordic cross-border transactions cumbersome. Nonetheless, this is set […]
The Top 20 Neobanks: Growth via Product Expansion
Neobanks have been highly influential in prodding traditional banks to digitize and improve the customer experience, but many still face a long road towards scale and profitability. The strength of the product catalog is a key growth driver; therefore, we examined the offerings of the top 20 neobanks in Europe and North America as measured […]
Updating Your Payments and Fintech Roadmap for 2021
As we previously discussed in a three-part series, COVID-19 has impacted the payments and fintech landscape across the board, including M&A activity (as investors continue to love digital payments), sectors (for instance travel and restaurant verticals have suffered, while groceries and online retail have thrived), and has shifted customer preferences towards digital channels and form […]
Dissecting the European Open Banking / PSD2 TPP landscape
Since the introduction of PSD2 and open banking regulations in early 2018, 451 third party providers (TPPs) have procured licenses for payment services (PIS) and account services (AIS). Out of the 451, 422 are currently active.
Marqeta IPO: Investors’ Love of Digital Payments Also Extends to Issuing
Investors love SaaS and integrated payments, as we recently showed here. Marqeta, a next generation issuer processor, went public on June 9 with a market cap at close of $16 billion, 13% above the IPO price. Based on Marqeta’s historical revenue growth rate of cca. 100%, this valuation corresponds to approximately 68x forward twelve months’ […]