Hello TWIF UK & Europe friends,
TWIF is hosting an Executive Dinner with True Later
Last week, Stripe announced a partnership with Lloyds, the UK’s largest digital bank.
Lloyds services over 1 million businesses across the country. Stripe will offer solutions such as Tap to Pay, payment links, and traditional payment terminals — which can be bought for a one-off fee.
The key point of note is that “Lloyds Accept is integrated directly into the Lloyds Business Account”, meaning that payment acceptance comes as standard with the business banking offering.
Banks have already KYC’ed their clients for the bank account itself, adding payment processing should be an easy addition and a revenue generator for both parties.
A few years back, I wrote that technology such as Tap to Pay enables banks to offer payments without having to own the technology in-house.
This is even more the case today. Stripe has built up a world-class reputation as a payments infrastructure provider, and bank partnerships look to be a key growth area going forward.
Card acquiring is something that used to be a core part of the portfolio of UK banks, and often managed within the bank end-to-end, but today many banks do not maintain the expertise in-house. But what banks clearly do have is fantastic distribution.
Please find another week of fintech news, financings, and exits below!
Thanks for reading,
- Matt
📰 If you have stories for next week's edition you can contact us via email
Funding and Investments 💸
Highlights below of deals since the last post in the fintech space across the UK & Europe. Deal data powered by Dealroom.
Paymove raised €2.1m in seed funding, in a round led by 4growthVC, with backing from Kogito Ventures and strategic angel investors
Nepting secured an undisclosed investment from Five Arrows — the alternative assets arm of Rothschild & Co — to accelerate the growth of its payments acceptance software platform
sunbay.io raised €550k from Kogito Ventures with participation from s20 and angel investors, including Kahoot CTO Jostein Håvaldsrud
Banking 🏛️
🇬🇧 Barclays acquired GoHenry’s UK business, which helps children manage money on the go
🇬🇧 Monzo is working with Fair4All Finance to pilot a new version of their Flex Build card
🇬🇧 Lloyds deployed AI across its fraud systems to help detect payment scams in real time
🇪🇺 The ECB reined in Revolut’s growth last year due to “deficiencies”
Digital Assets ₿
🇪🇺 Hungary will decriminalise crypto trading in a reversal of restrictions put in place by the previous government
🌍 Raiku’s $rkuSOL launched on Solana, offering a new liquid staking token
🌍 Citi launches tokenized shares of private companies
🌍 Crossmint and Paga partnered to deliver a multi-chain stablecoin infrastructure to Africa and are creating a cross-platform bi-directional payment bridge
🌍 Zcash disclosed a critical vulnerability, which sent ZEC sharply lower
🌍 Digital Asset raised $355m to accelerate Canton’s role as onchain infrastructure for capital markets
Payments 💰
🇬🇧 Stripe is working with Lloyds to deliver small business payment infrastructure
🌍 Adyen acquired enterprise billing platform Orb for $335m
🌍 Mastercard expanded settlement capabilities to include stablecoins, weekends, and holidays
Artificial Intelligence ✨
🌍 Feedzai opened its fraud intelligence network to banks through a new Feedzai IQ Score product, which provides real-time access to anonymized, aggregated insights
🌍 OpenAI and Visa partnered to let AI agents make purchases on behalf of users
🌍 Checkout.com highlighted that consumer appetite for agentic commerce is growing
🌍 Coinbase launched a tool, transacting on the x402 protocol, which allows users’ own agents to execute trades and pay for premium research
🌍 Mastercard launched agent pay for machines (AP4M) with more than 30 launch partners
Long Reads 📜
Noyes Payments Blog on Visa and Mastercard’s differing stablecoin strategies
Anthropic has a thought-provoking long-read on how AI trains AI
Payments Culture takes a look at consumers and agentic commerce?
