Fintech Focus For February 18, 2021

Quote To Start The Day: I think the volume of SPACs is going to certainly outweigh the number of IPOs, but the IPOs are going to be bigger deals.

Source: Patrick Healey

One Big Thing In Fintech: Titan, an asset manager for retail investors, announced Tuesday it raised a $12.5 million Series A round led by venture capital firm General Catalyst. To date, the company has raised $16 million.

“Americans have almost $30 trillion of assets in retirement accounts, but most of that money is allocated to instruments that simply match market performance. Titan was founded on the idea that everyday investors should have access to vehicles that have the potential to outperform,” Joe Percoco, co-founder at Titan, told Benzinga during an interview.

Source: Benzinga

Other Key Fintech Developments:

• Vela added Cboe One’s market data.
• Northern Hills added Scienaptic tech.
• State Street launching research tech.
• BestEx adds new compliance officer.
• Grata expanded search engine tech.
• Blockchain.com closes $120M raise.
• Public.com raises $220M, cuts PFOF.
• Trading Technologies added leaders.
• Bee Mortgage App saw more growth.
• Diginex launches digital asset trading.
• BlackRock dabbling in bitcoin trades.
• Coinbase behind Tesla’s bitcoin buy.
• SeedFi banks $65M for growth, tech.
• Opera added Dify payments solution.
• Cboe enables electronic SPX auction.

Watch Out For This: The United Nations chief has sharply criticised the “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, pointing out that just 10 countries have administered 75 percent of all vaccinations.

Addressing a high-level meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday, Antonio Guterres said 130 countries have not received a single dose of vaccine.

“At this critical moment, vaccine equity is the biggest moral test before the global community,” he said.

Source: Al Jazeera

Interesting Reads:

• Multiverse helps with apprenticeships.
• Chip shortage posing risk to recovery.
• SRT Performance Division is no-more.
• SpaceX sees valuation grow to $74B.
• Unpacking the Texas rolling blackouts.
• Google, Facebook could pay for news.

Market Moving Headline: Keith Gill, one of the most influential voices that pushed GameStop on the WallStreetBets Reddit forum, was hit with a lawsuit that accused him of misrepresenting himself as an amateur investor and profiting by artificially inflating the price of the stock.

The proposed class action against Gill, who adopted the online nickname “Roaring Kitty,” was filed Tuesday in federal court in Massachusetts. The suit said Gill was actually a licensed securities professional who manipulated the market to profit himself. Gill touted GameStop shares through an extensive social media presence on Youtube, Twitter and Reddit.

Source: Al Jazeera