Sign up for my Daily Fintech or Daily Digital Banking Newsletters here. Check out my latest podcast episode below:
Welcome to another episode of our Daily Fintech Podcast.
THE NEWS HIGHLIGHT OF THE DAY IS
After Apple shook up the Buy Now, Pay Later market with news that it would now be a competitor to established firms, PayPal this morning is introducing another buy now, pay later product to follow the 2020 launch of its “Pay in 4″ installment program. The new offering, PayPal Pay Monthly,” is designed to give customers a more flexible way to pay, the U.S. payments giant said. Instead of having to pay off purchases over a 6-week period as before, “Pay Monthly” users can break down the total cost into monthly payments over a 6 to 24-month period. Consumers can also use the product to make larger purchases. TechCrunch article by Sarah Perez article.
JUST IN:
Last month, Shopify, a cloud-based, multi-channel commerce platform designed for SMEs, asked customers of Mollie, a Dutch unicorn that provides a payments platform, to use its payment gateway instead of Mollie’s payments solution.
ALSO:
Brandon Krieg, the CEO, and co-founder of the investment app Stash, called out related platforms that rely on payment for order flow (PFOF) and backed a government initiative to regulate the practice.
WHAT ABOUT FUNDING ROUNDS AND INVESTMENTS?
Bits of Stock™, a rewards platform that lets shoppers automatically earn fractional shares, has raised $4.4 million in seed funding from Keen Venture Partners and Yellow Accelerator by Snap.
Berlin-based crypto API provider Pile has raised €2.8m in a pre-seed funding round
Cryptio has raised $10 million in Series A funding for its enterprise crypto back-office platform.
WHAT ABOUT CRYPTO?
The first US crypto rewards credit card on the American Express network through a new partnership with crypto wealth management platform and wallet provider Abra is here.
WHAT ARE THE LATEST INSIGHTS?
If you're an entrepreneur and want to start a business in Latin America, Chile is the country for you. With over 158K new companies started in just 2020, the "country of poets" has one of the highest entrepreneurship rates in the world. Over the last 30 years, Chile has evolved from a military dictatorship into one of LatAm's most prosperous nations.