Top five stories of the week – October 7, 2022

Here’s our pick of five of the best news stories from the world of finance and technology this week.

The $4.7 billion Prosus acquisition of India’s BillDesk falls through

Prosus’ mentioned acquisition of BillDesk falls through

Dutch e-commerce company Prosus has entered into an agreement to acquire Indian digital payment provider BillDesk.

Prosus subsidiary PayU was to buy BillDesk for $4.7 billion, but the firm says certain conditions were not met by the long cutoff date of September 30, 2022, and the deal was automatically terminated.

The news comes after the deal was given the go-ahead by the Competition Commission of India (CCI), with PayU securing CCI approval on 5 September.

The acquisition would have seen Prosus’ fintech business expand its reach in India and become one of the largest online payment providers globally in terms of total payment volume.

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British challenger Bank North collapses

Manchester-based neobank Bank North is winding down operations with immediate effect after failing to raise the funds needed for a full banking license from the Bank of England.

In a letter to the bank’s shareholders, chairman Ron Emerson stated that the firm had failed to secure funding within the required timeframe as it looked to become a fully regulated bank.

Bank North received a restricted banking license from the UK Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA) in August last year.

The company was founded in 2018 and originally operated as a small business lender in the UK. It went to crowdfunding in November 2021 following a £24m Series A earlier that year.

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Kim Kardashian was fined $1.26 million by the SEC for crypto campaign violations

SEC fines Kim K $1.26 million

Celebrity influencer Kim Kardashian has been fined $1.26 million by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for violating the anti-touting provision of the US federal securities laws.

The SEC says Kardashian was paid $250,000 to publish a post on her Instagram account about EMAX tokens, a crypto-asset offered by EthereumMax, but failed to disclose the payment she received for the campaign. The post contained a link to the company’s website, where potential investors could purchase EMAX tokens.

Gurbir Grewal, director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, says: “The federal securities laws are clear that any celebrity or other person promoting a crypto-asset security must disclose the nature, source and amount of the compensation they received in exchange for the promotion.”

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Railsr secures $46 million in Series C funding

Embedded finance platform Railsr has landed $46 million in a Series C funding round, consisting of $26 million in equity and $20 million in debt.

The equity portion of the fundraising was led by Anthos Capital and featured participation from existing investors Ventura, Outrun Ventures, CreditEase and Moneta. The debt facility is provided by Mars Capital, a new investor in Railsr.

Railsr chief executive and co-founder Nigel Verdon says the funding is a “significant step towards profitability”.

Railsr recently teamed up with fintech startup Maslife to offer embedded financial services. In August, it also appointed former Mastercard chairman Rick Haythornthwaite as its first chairman.

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Blockchain firm SETL partners with Swift to pilot common tokenization framework

Swift partners SETL to pilot tokenization framework

Enterprise Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and blockchain firm SETL have successfully piloted a common framework for Swift that connects tokenization systems between central securities depositories (CSDs) and global custodians.

Swift, SETL, Deutsche Börse-owned Clearstream, Northern Trust and other parties from the tokenized and traditional asset ecosystem explored the issuance, delivery versus payment (DVP) and redemption processes necessary to support a frictionless tokenized asset market.

The results of the pilot will be published ahead of Swift’s annual Sibos conference.

Anthony Culligan, chief engineer at SETL, says these experiments have the potential to create wider accessibility and interoperability between new security tokenization networks.

To avoid a patchwork of technologies and platforms that will eventually require merging, Swift focuses on interoperability, connecting market players and simplifying operations by taking on activities centrally that would otherwise have to be performed between institutions bilaterally.

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