Fintech Focus For December 7, 2021

One Big Thing In Fintech: State Street Corporation STT, in collaboration with Vanguard and Symbiont, announced today that the firms have jointly completed the margin calculation process for a live trade of a 30-day foreign exchange forward contract through the use of Assembly, Symbiont’s distributed ledger technology.

Source: Finextra

Other Key Fintech Developments

• Bain taps ex-Affirm executive.
• Buffett fintech Nubank will list. (NYSE: BRK-B) (NYSE: BRK-A)
• A16z invests in Web3 startup.
• Raisin scales up AML efforts.
• Emerging Impact adds $1.5M.
• Hometap closes $60M round.
• Nearside gets $58M Series B.
• CME intros micro ETH future. CME
• Binance is renewing UK plans.
• First Foundation adds an app.
• BoG looks to DriveWealth tech.
• Stripe acquired OpenChannel. 
• Wealthsimple quit UK market.
• Enfuce has added new funds.
• FTX is looking to raise $1.5B.
• TradeDepot secures a round.
• India plans to regulate crypto.
• LSE eyes Quantile acquisition.
• Finaktiva adds $8M, expands.

Watch Out For This: Numerous secular tailwinds are underway; these include growth in areas such as: (i) digital payments (cryptocurrencies, contactless, mobile payments), (ii) buy now, pay later, (iii) software & mobile solutions, and (iv) increased ecommerce adoption. These growth trends should support healthy revenue and profitability growth for many issuers in the sector.

Source: Fitch

Interesting Reads:

• Crypto complex wipes billions.
• Dominance of BNPL growing.
• China easing amid slowdown.
• NYC adding vaccine mandate.

Market Moving Headline: All in all Many TMT funds have gone from capturing 30-40% of the SPX’s performance for most of the year (call it HSD/LDD%, with some peaks and valleys in between), to now finding themselves flat to down on the year.

While 2020 was a charmed year from a performance perspective, 2021 is truly shaping up to be a dud, leading to the worst performance years seen from the long/short community in a while.

Dealers are also meaningfully short gamma, so they're exacerbating moves to the downside (though this construct works in both directions for the market, and could yield an equally aggressive move to the upside).

Source: JPMorgan