The Kenyan fintech company IMFact collected about $4 million from FSD Africa Investment: the fintech company, which found an innovative solution to solve liquidity problems of microbusinesses and SMBs, demonstrated that its new business model is worth the attention of investment companies.

Even if 2021 came to an end, we retrace the most important fintech events of the past year with The Fintech Times: the magazine shares the most important funding success stories month by month.

Qonto is a well-known fintech startup in Europe: its focus on small and medium companies and freelancers rewarded the company, so that it raised $552 million in the last funding round, reaching a valuation of $5 billion.

Edward Woodford, founder and CEO of Zero Hash - a fintech company focused on providing B2B digital asset infrastructures, thinks that most financial firms and business owners will offer an NFT or crypto product within the next year. Investors seem to agree with him: Zero Hash has just raised $105 million in its last funding round.

Visa announced the VEI, the Visa Everywhere Initiative opened to UAE fintech firms and startups. Winners will have the opportunity to cooperate with Visa, monetary prizes and the opportunity to gain exposure to major fintech stakeholders.

The Canadian fintech firm, Koho Financial, has raised $210 million in the last funding round. The company focused on the creation of a new financial tool that allows users to save their money and earn interest, but without fees. Moreover, a partnership with ADP allows users to access up to 50% of their paychecks whenever they wish, and no interest is charged.

Thanks to data shared by Citi Global Insights, we know that fintech companies have received around $18 billion in funding since the beginning of 2022. Axios reported the data and shared some considerations: fintech funding is trending and amazing deals have been reached in almost 2 months. Is fintech tracing the path towards a new record?

Shamyl Malik, co-founder and CEO of Haruko, says that he wants his company to become the “one-stop-shop for crypto” – especially for institutions. The start-up has just announced a $10 million funding round, after investors showed interest in this initiative.

Climate fintech companies are raising billions both in the US and Europe: CommerzVentures shared 2022 data, analyzing almost 300 fintech start-ups. In Europe, the country that collected more funds is the UK.

Even if the financial technology industry is still one of the hottest markets, it is undoubtedly affected by geopolitical tensions in Europe: data provided by Crunchbase shows that in the last two weeks funds collected decreased by over 60% compared to previous weeks.

Zeta, the fintech company specialized in banking and credit card services, is considered a unicorn in the fintech space. The last funding round raised $30 million and one of the investors is Mastercard, which announced a five-year partnership with the fintech company.

Israel registered a surge in fintech investments in 2021. Fintech startups got 17% of the tech investments of the country. The segments that are growing faster are insurtech, trading, lending and payments services.

Gretel has just raised $1 billion in a pre-seed funding round led by RLC Ventures and Insurtech Gateway. The fintech company helps financial institutions to allow their customers to recover lost financial products.

The Launch Innovation Programme of Lloyds Banking Group is opened. The group opened this program for the second time to find new fintech partners from all around the world.

David M. Brear and Sim Rai are joined by Alan Ainsworth (OBIE), Axel Bruzelius (ArK Kapital) and Shaun Port (Chase UK) to discuss the latest funding rounds, regulatory frameworks and innovation in the fintech space.

Even if financial institutions recognize that climate change is a serious issue, they don’t agree on solutions. The People’s Bank of China is working on specific solutions: one of this solutions is to finance all those sectors that contribute to greening the Chinese financial system.

It is expected a new wave of consolidation in the UK fintech industry: financing rounds show that investors are willing to invest more in fintech, and that new technologies – mainly based on artificial intelligence – will be exploited to support the growth of the whole fintech industry.

The fintech company Qonto opened a crowd investing round that made the company raise €5 million in a few hours. The company opened the round via Crowdcube and was supported by over 1800 Qonto users.

Fintech firms are flexible enough to meet people’s needs quickly. Parents who want to save more for their children make no exception: fintech firms are answering positively, not just by offering different asset classes for investments, but also by offering rewards based on savings.

The European market is getting harder, but fintech companies don’t renounce to new investors: Penta is one of these companies. It is not a common fintech firm: differently from its competitors, for example, Penta doesn’t allow trials or free plans to open new bank accounts with the company, but promises a faster service and easy management. Maybe the German company is using this as a strength while seeking an evaluation between 400 and over 500 million dollars - as Bloomberg reports.

Benjamin Ensor and Tim Heard are joined by two special guests: Brad Goodall, CEO of Banked, and Julie Koch Fahler, co-founder of Agreena. They will discuss some of the most important fintech news: Series A funding rounds for fintech companies, BNPL and sustainable finance-related news.