What the heck happened at fintech Bench?

The large story

Cropped shot of young Asian woman handling personal banking and finance with laptop at home — **Picture Credit:**d3sign / Getty Pictures

It’s all the time information when an organization that has raised greater than $110 million in enterprise funding suddenly folds. But it surely’s much more eyebrow-raising when days later, that very same firm — on this case, Bench — gets acquired. Sadly, hundreds of consumers and tons of of staff alike have to be feeling the whiplash.

On this deep dive, TechCrunch’s Charles Rollet breaks down the small print of what led to Bench’s shutdown and simply who swooped in to purchase this fintech, which was backed by the likes of Shopify and Bain Capital Ventures. One tidbit: The transfer was so sudden that one buyer who saved years of information on Bench’s web site, and was even featured on its entrance web page earlier than it went offline, realized of the shutdown solely when TechCrunch known as him for a response.

{Dollars} and cents

Thomson Reuters' office — Thomson Reuters’ workplacePicture Credit:Pascal Le Segretain / Employees / Getty Pictures

We kicked off the brand new yr with information that Thomson Reuters had acquired tax automation company SafeSend in an all-cash transaction valued at $600 million. Based in 2008, Ann Arbor, Michigan-based SafeSend serves a cloud-based platform designed to streamline the processing and sharing of delicate monetary paperwork.

TechCrunch EIC Connie Loizos interviewed Robinhood CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev about his firm being named Yahoo Finance’s “comeback stoc k ” of the year, and rather more. Catch up here.

ICYMI

Uzbekistan’s mobile-exclusive financial institution, TBC Financial institution Uzbekistan, raised $37 million in a brand new funding spherical to bolster its dominating digital presence within the Central Asian nation by growing new AI and tech merchandise and attracting extra tech-savvy clients.

Tyme Group, a South African fintech, secured $250 million in a Collection D spherical, pushing its valuation to $1.5 billion. Notably, the funding was led by Nu Holdings — which owns Latin America’s Most worthy fintech, Nubank — investing $150 million for a ten% stake.

What else we’re writing

state compliance, startups, venture capital — **Picture Credit:**Bryce Durbin

Final week wasn’t an awesome one for PayPal. First, Dominic-Madori Davis broke the information that PayPal is being sued by the founding father of enterprise agency Andav Capital, Nisha Desai, who claims she was excluded from the cost large’s variety and fairness program as a result of she is Asian. Then one other new lawsuit alleges that the PayPal-owned browser extension Honey is dishonest creators out of cash.

In the meantime, Zack Whittaker reported {that a} U.S. on-line reward card retailer, MyGiftCardSupply, has secured a web-based storage server that was publicly exposing tons of of hundreds of buyer government-issued identification paperwork to the web.

And, Tage Kene-Okafor wrote about how Africa’s tech ecosystem lately obtained a lift of consideration, with South Africa’s TymeBank and Nigeria’s Moniepoint each raising funds in current weeks at valuations of over $1 billion, becoming a member of the coveted unicorn pantheon.

IPO information

Is 2025 the yr for the fintech IPO?

Earlier than 2024 got here to a detailed, Manish Singh wrote about how shares of digital funds agency MobiKwik surged 82% to ₹507.5 ($6) on their first day of trading and the way the Indian fintech’s $69 million IPO comes amid fierce competitors from bigger rivals. He additionally checked out the truth that Aye Finance, a lender concentrating on small- and medium-sized companies in India, is looking for to boost $171 million from its initial public offering.

In the meantime, Julie Bort reported on how digital financial institution Chime filed its confidential paperwork with the SEC, a second the corporate has been prepping for because it employed banker Morgan Stanley final September, with a watch to IPO in 2025.

Excessive-interest headlines

Whereas fintechs are nonetheless hiring, a lot of them don’t have as many open roles as they did only a few months in the past. Nevertheless, there are nonetheless plenty of open positions, and there are some firms which can be even hiring for extra roles than they had been final summer time.
Three crypto trade teams — the DeFi Schooling Fund, the Blockchain Affiliation, and the Texas Blockchain Council — are suing the Inside Income Service to dam new laws that require decentralized finance (DeFi) entities to report buyer info.
Mike Butcher checked out how revenue-based financing startups continue to raise capital in MENA, the place the mannequin simply appears to work.

Thanks for studying. We’ll see you once more subsequent week!

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