Canadian Fintech: SVB finds a home 🤗
Laurentian Bank up for sale. What's a charge card? Uplift gets an Upgrade.
Morning!
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💰 Funding
MPOWER, an international student lender, raised a $150m credit line to finance Canadian & American university students. Toronto based Passage recently raised $40m to compete in this market as well.
Local Logic, a provider of “neighbourhood insight scores” (livability, demographics, housing, etc.), raised $17.5m. Think Google Maps for real estate brokers and investors. HonestDoor provides similar embeddable real estate data.
Peloton Technologies, raised $1.5m to compete in the very crowded payment processor market alongside Buckzy, Vopay, Apaylo, Zum and others.
🤝 M&A
Laurentian Bank is up for sale for an estimated $2.6b. The Quebec lender is likely to go to Scotia or TD. This is the third major bank acquisition in the last year: HSBC to RBC & Home Capital to Smith Financial.
National Bank has acquired the $1b Canadian loan book of defunct tech lender Silicon Valley Bank. Unlike the deals above, NBC is acquiring a portfolio not an operating business (brand, staff, technology, etc).
US fintech lender Upgrade, acquired travel-focused BNPL Uplift for $135m (a 50% discount on their last valuation).
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🚀 Product
Shopify launched a charge card for its US merchants. What’s a charge card? It’s a credit card that doesn’t revolve, which means you have to pay off the entire balance monthly. Charge cards sit somewhere in between debit and credit in terms of the risk they carry and the interchange fees they charge to compensate.
Shopify already provides payment processing, bank accounts, loans, and expense management.
Jifiti, a white label lending software, announced that it is powering Vancouver based Tabit, a BNPL for B2B sellers.
Homewise, an online mortgage brokerage passed $500m in funded loans.
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