PayUp Receives $5M Line of Credit to Factor Invoices for SMBs

Upstart is laying off 365 employees due to reduced demand for lending. The artificial intelligence (AI) lending platform said in a Tuesday (Jan. 31) filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that the cuts will amount to about 20% of its current workforce. “On January 31, 2023, in response...

Business-to-business (B2B) payments are fueling the uptake of buy now, pay later (BNPL) in Europe. While the explosion of the BNPL concept has primarily centered on the business-to-consumer (B2C) sector, in recent years, BNPL for business has been gaining traction, buoyed by increasing funding rounds and partnerships. In Europe, for...

Software firm ACI Worldwide says it is expanding amid a global boom in real-time payments. The expansion means ACI now covers about a third of the world’s countries that offer real-time payments services, the company said in a Wednesday (Feb. 1). “ACI now powers 25 domestic and pan-regional real-time...

Unbanked and Mastercard have partnered to accelerate decentralized finance (DeFi) card issuance in Europe. Through this partnership, the two companies will use their existing footprint in the United Kingdom and the continent to work with Web3 organizations to enable the issuance of cryptocurrency-powered card programs, the companies said in a Thursday (Feb. 2) press release.

Intelligence platform Craft has raised $32 million to help companies track supplier networks. The company announced the Series B equity financing Wednesday (Feb. 1), saying it would use the funds to accelerate research and development and deepen its go-to-market execution. Based in San Francisco, Craft offers a data platform that...

Inflation’s impact on the affordability of housing is putting the American dream of home ownership further out of reach for more consumers, with even renting now outpacing the financial realities of more people. PYMNTS has assiduously tracked the effects of inflation from the start of the current economic crisis,...

Mark Zuckerberg’s expensive pivot toward building a virtual world continues to be just that — expensive. “None of the signals I see in today’s environment lead me to believe we should shift the Reality Labs (RL) strategy long-term,” the social media CEO said Wednesday (Feb. 1) during his Menlo Park, California-based company’s fourth quarter 2022 earnings call.

Sightline Payments is deploying Visa-branded Play+ cards to expand omnichannel payment solutions for casino resorts. This combination will bring together Sightline Payments’ Play+ accounts for the U.S. sports betting and casino gaming market and Visa’s tokenization efforts in order to enable customers to use digital payments instead of carrying cash at casino resorts, Sightline Payments said in a Thursday (Feb. 2) press release.

ShopUp has raised $30 million to expand its B2B commerce platform in Bangladesh. The firm will use the new debt financing to build supply chain infrastructure and expand the financial services it offers to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), ShopUp said in a Thursday (Feb. 2) press release. “The new...

Xolvis has teamed with Volt to integrate open banking payments into its platform. The Munich-based software developer announced in a Thursday (Feb. 2) blog post that it will enable open banking payments for its customers in Europe thanks to the partnership with Volt, a London-based FinTech that specializes in real-time, account-to-account payments.

Even small changes may reap cost-cutting rewards for small businesses seeking to weather 2023’s projected rocky road. Economic news over the past few days has felt grim. Grocers are seeing even their higher-income customers buy less, and interest rate hikes are influencing the shopping behaviors of the same demographic. Discretionary items such as smartphones are also experiencing record sales slumps.

Healthcare remains among the most paper-based industries in America, which means stakeholders from patients to providers to payers are missing out on digital efficiencies. Probing the intractable use of paper and steps required to change it, PYMNTS’ Karen Webster was joined by Bank of America (BoA) Managing Director, Co-Head Global Commercial Banking Sue Caras; Kaiser Permanente Vice President and Assistant Treasurer, Cash Management Sheila Stephens; and Cigna Treasury Managing Director and Assistant Treasurer Scott Lambert.

GoLogiq is to continue growing its wealth management capabilities by acquiring Nest Egg. The proposed transaction, which is subject to customary closing terms, aims to add Nest Egg’s wealth-building platform for Gen Z and millennial consumers to GoLogiq’s range of FinTech and mobile solutions, the firms said in a Tuesday (Jan. 31) press release.

Lendica’s embedded finance integrations are now available for Shopify and Salesforce. With these new integrations, customers can use the PayLater and FundNow products to delay payments to their vendors or speed up collection from wholesale accounts, Lendica said in a Wednesday (Feb. 1) press release. “We founded Lendica to...

Egypt’s MNT-Halan has raised $400 million at a valuation of over $1 billion. The funding was announced by the Cairo-based FinTech on Monday (Feb. 1). The largest chunk of the fresh capital was from Chimera Abu Dhabi, which has invested more than $200 million in exchange for over 20% of the company, MNT-Halan said.

Tech stocks roared back to life coming into a new month — and suddenly February looks a lot brighter than the beginning of this year ever did. The FinTech IPO Index was up 10.5%, marking a five-day rally that has brought the group up more than 35% year to date.

If Sezzle CEO Charlie Youakim had to write a book about the FinTech bubble that burst in 2022, he’d call it “Crazy Money.”. That nugget came up in a conversation between Youakim and PYMNTS’ Karen Webster during the first discussion in the new series “FinTech Reset: The Pivot to Profitability.”

Maybe the customer was right all along in reacting cautiously to the news of easing inflation. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday (Jan. 30) that the U.S. consumer is “starting to freak out,” pointing to dipped car sales, slumping retail and decreased service-based spending as signs of pullback. With consumer spending representing 70% of the U.S. economy, any continued drop in spending could make a negative financial ripple across all sectors, and some experts are raising their recession risk predictions for the coming year.

ECommerce data platform Triple Whale has raised $25 million in a Series B funding round. The round, led by NFX and Elephant, with strategic participation from Shopify, will let the Ohio company expand to larger brands, and invest in automation and artificial intelligence (AI), Triple Whale said in a Thursday (Feb. 2) news release.

With 2023 off to a running start, treasury is calling the shots differently, with a refined focus forged in the crucible of 2022. Julie Lubell, global head of Trends and Advisory at J.P. Morgan Payments, discussed with Karen Webster the new roadmap for investing and corporate strategies that take the triumphs and failures of the past three years and create something new.