Fintech Focus For April 23, 2021

Quote To Start The Day: You’ll never find a rainbow if you’re looking down.

Source: Charlie Chaplin

One Big Thing In Fintech: Ant Group, operator of popular Chinese mobile payment service Alipay, plans to slash its direct carbon emissions by nearly a third by 2025 as part of its journey towards carbon neutrality at the end of this decade.

Source: SCMP

Other Key Fintech Developments:

• Welcome Tech closes $35M round.
• Metromile adds new CFO to team.
• Affirm will buy Returnly for $300M.
• HSBC launches AI-powered index.
• R3 Development Fund is investing.
• Neo-broker BUX has raised $80M.
• NYDIG has acquired Arctos Capital.
• The controversy on bitcoin mining.
• Traders turn to tried, tested algos.
• PicPay payments tool files for IPO.
• Bridge adding real-time payments.
• Cadence rebrands, raises funding.
• Digital Asset raises a $120M round.
• Robinhood adds COO for cryptos.
• Public adds Town Hall chat feature.
• FlexTrade adds QuantHouse data.
• Reef Finance set launch for Chain.
• Micro Bitcoin futures are launching.
• Sift raises $50M, added leadership.

Watch Out For This: Nearly 600,000 first-year college students take calculus annually in the U.S., and 250,000 fail, according to Woodie Flowers, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

At $2,000 per failed course, that’s nearly $500 million in losses for students each year.

How can that failure rate be cut in half? The professor suggests investing nearly $100 million into classroom alternatives like online learning.

That’s the idea behind Outlier.org, an online education platform created and led by Aaron Rasmussen, the co-founder of MasterClass, a streaming platform where anyone can learn from the world’s authority on a variety of topics.

In light of Outlier’s $30-million Series B round led by venture capital firm GV, Benzinga spoke with CEO and founder Rasmussen on motivations, recent developments and future plans.

Source: Benzinga

Interesting Reads:

• Program to pay farmers not to farm.
• Planes are providing a trove of data.
• Goldman sees SPAC driving frenzy.
• Senators unveiled bill for migration.
• Dimon sees JPM workers maskless.
• Elon, XPRIZE discussed challenges.

Market Moving Headline: Stocks fell Thursday following media reports that President Biden wants to nearly double the capital gains tax paid by wealthy Americans.

Source: Axios