Fintech Focus For February 25, 2021

Quote To Start The Day: Technology is the best enabler of banking the unbanked.

Source: Sultan Meghji

One Big Thing In Fintech: An outage at the Federal Reserve is creating settlement issues for many financial institutions and exchanges. The Fed's service status page shows that most of its services are currently down, including its settlement network.

Source: The Block

Other Key Fintech Developments:

• StockCharts adds streaming service.
• DTCC proposes an approach to T+1.
• Neuravest launches, delivers AI tech.
• Episode Six taps $30M in new funds.
• Primary Venture raising $150M fund.
• dYdX contract trades via StarkWare.
• TP ICAP launching Matchbook tech.
• Simplex, Opera partnering on crypto.
• Powell: Events on digital dollar near.
• Stripe, Afterpay team on BNPL tech.
• ASYMmetric ETFs, Schuringa raise.
• CoinShares asset manager will IPO.
• Modulus launched BaaS technology.
• Brazilian fintech RecargaPay raises.
• Standard Bank Group, Hedera team.
• Zelros raised $11M in Series funding.

Watch Out For This: Almost one-quarter of Americans said they don’t plan to get vaccinated for Covid-19, according to a Census Bureau survey.

Source: Bloomberg

Interesting Reads:

• StorageOS secures $10M in funding.
• Bond market and the Biden economy.
• Canva bought Vienna-based Kaleido.
• Advice: If I’m burnt out, what do I do?
• The VCs firms joining the SPAC rush.
• Europe kicks off bid to better gig work.
• Media platform tapping cryptography.
• USPS to modernize the delivery fleet.

Market Moving Headline: For more than a decade, progressives have tried and failed to impose a financial transaction tax. But there is new momentum for such a levy as the national debt skyrockets during the pandemic and in the wake of the GameStop trading frenzy that shined a bright light on market structure concerns.

Source: CNN