Welcome to TechCrunch Fintech (formerly The Interchange)! I’m filling in for Mary Ann, who is on a much-deserved break. This week, we look at Griffin Bank getting its license ahead of some heavy hitters, and we get into Stripe’s annual letter, some funding rounds, and more!
The big story
Top story for this week was Griffin Bank in the UK. The banking-as-a-service company has managed to do something that even the region’s most valuable fintech company, Revolut, has yet to do — get a banking license . Granted, as Mike Butcher writes, banking licenses are hard to come by (for Griffin it took a year), but Revolut has been talking about securing a banking license for the past three years.
Now that Griffin has a banking license, it offers a full-stack platform for fintech companies to offer banking, payments and wealth solutions through automated compliance and an integrated ledger. It is more likely that the company will offer bank accounts to businesses rather than consumers.
Analysis of the week
Alex Wilhelm and I read Stripe’s annual letter. Here are a few things we thought were worth talking about:
- The growth of the company is impressive. Hit it $1 trillion in total payment volume in 2023, while it is noted that its payment volume increased by 25%. That said, if the company actually processed exactly $1 trillion last year, that would mean $800 billion in processing in 2022 and $200 billion in TPV earnings in a single year. At Stripe’s size, that’s quite an effect.
- Stripe set record for startups in 2023 despite declining venture capital activity last year. Not only that, but the payments infrastructure company also reported that these companies were 60% more likely to start collecting revenue within their first year, and 57% more likely to process $1 million in their first year than those that were founded in 2019.
Dollars and cents
We have a new unicorn. Perfios, an India-based company that provides financial institutions with real-time data aggregation and analytics tools to help them streamline their customer journeys and make more informed decisions, has raised an $80 million funding round that increased its valuing it at over $1 billion. The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan led the round. The company said it plans to go public next year.
Manish Singh also wrote about India’s digital payments app Paytm securing a vital license it needed to survive and maintain the continuity of many of the app’s core features. This came a day before the company’s banking unit was scheduled to cease operations on March 15 due to regulatory restrictions.
OpenMeter, a startup that developed an open source platform that helps companies more easily track usage-based billing, raised a $3 million round from Y Combinator, Haystack and Sunflower Capital.
What else are we writing?
Reddit’s IPO could become a potential meme stock in the way the company chooses to frame it. In new SEC filing, Reddit’s IPO includes about 22 million shares, priced between $31 and $34. However, this could get really interesting, given that Reddit will allow members of its community to sell their shares immediately, rather than being subject to the usual lock-up agreements that typically prevent investors from selling shares for six months after an IPO.
Most subscription mobile apps don’t make money, according to an analysis by RevenueCat. Among the 29,000 apps it reviewed, the company found that only 17.2% of apps will even reach $1,000 in monthly revenue, but once they reach that point, the odds increase further.
TikTok has expanded its Effect Creator Rewards monetization program to more regions and lowered its payout limit. It is now in 33 territories across Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. The program rewards creators for the effects they create through TikTok’s AR development platform, Effect House. TikTok is also updating the program’s payment model, as creators will now only receive rewards for effects used in public videos.
High interest titles
HSBC to hire nearly 50 bankers for US startup venture lending
Green Dot to enable cash transactions for 3 more fintechs
With fintech funding down 70%, here’s what fintech high-flyers are worth now
Maxwell launches POS functionality that offers customized workflows for lenders
JPMorgan sees mixed results from Silicon Valley push
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