FinTech news in Layoffs category

YC refused to admit that today’s layoffs and departure from growth stage is related to the banking crisis, it’s hard not to see the news amid the backdrop of a tech reckoning

FTX marked down Chipper Cash’s $2B valuation to $1.25B The company says it has over 5 million customers across Ghana, Uganda, Nigeria, Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa and Kenya — and more recently, the U.S. and U.K., where the FTX-backed startup expanded last year to facilitate peer-to-peer money movement from both countries to select regions in Africa.

Greenlight offers kids a debit card, banking app and financial education to make them financially smart and independent. In December, the Atlanta-headquartered startup introduced a web-based financial literacy library aligned with the K-12 national standards that will be free to schools, teachers and students. Additionally, the growing economic slowdown has impacted prominent fintech startups including Stripe, which laid off 14% of its workforce in November. It also in October added family safety features to its subscription plan called Greenlight Infinity which is priced at $14.98 per month for the whole family.

The difficulty of building a company in the venture services landscape was only further proved by the recent shutdown of Assure, a fintech company that helped investors issue special-purpose vehicles. When journalist asked AngelList Venture CEO Avlok Kohli about recent product changes that put it square in competition with Carta, he shrugged – adding that he has nothing new to add. It doesn’t help that several users of Carta’s services, which range from cap table management to fund administration, have been less than impressed by the platform in the recent months. According to Crunchbase data, Carta has raised $1.1 billion venture capital investors, including most recently a $500 million Series G by Silver Lake.

As with firms in other industries, crypto firms are aggressively undertaking major decisions to survive the downturn in the broader market, which has reversed much of the gains from the 13-year long bull run. The company estimates that it will incur approximately $149 million to $163 million in total restructuring expenses, consisting of approximately $58 million to $68 million in cash charges related to employee severance and other termination benefits, it disclosed (PDF) in a 8K filing with SEC Tuesday. The moves are part of the company efforts to cut its operating expenses by about 25% quarter over quarter, he said. But those of us who believe in crypto will keep building great products and increasing economic freedom in the world.

The NFT marketplace SuperRare is cutting 30% of its staff, according to a Slack message from CEO John Crain. SuperRare differentiates itself from competitors by focusing more closely on working with artists, but broader platforms like OpenSea were more successfully able to take advantage of the bull market. NFT marketplace OpenSea lays off 20% of its staff: ‘We have entered … crypto winter’ SuperRare raised a $9 million Series A in March 2021, led by Velvet Sea Ventures and 1confirmation.

Earlier this year, Stripe announced a new product called Financial Connections, which gives Stripe’s customers a way to connect directly to their customer’s bank accounts, to access financial data to speed up or run certain kinds of transactions. More recently, Plaid announced that it had named Meta veteran John Anderson to serve as its new head of payments as it began personally facilitating payments through its Transfer offering, in addition to facilitating its partners’ payments. In a practice that is becoming increasingly common, the company is also accelerating equity grants for employees who worked at the company for more than one year to the February 15, 2023 vesting date. Fintech decacorn Plaid is laying off 260 employees, or about 20% of its workforce, the company announced today.

It expanded to the U.K. — allowing people to send money from the European nation to Chipper Cash’s African markets — and the U.S. — to facilitate peer-to-peer money movement from the U.S. to Nigeria and Uganda. CEO Ham Serunjogi founded Chipper Cash with Maijid Moujaled in 2018 to offer a no-fee peer-to-peer cross-border payment service in Africa via its app. The investment came barely six months after Chipper Cash closed its first Series C round of $100 million, led by SVB Capital, the corporate venture capital arm of SVB Financial Group. Chipper Cash, an African cross-border payments company valued at $2.2 billion last year, has laid off a portion of its workforce.

Since Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire, made up of FTX, Alameda Research, and FTX Ventures, collapsed last week, there have been various reports of companies whose money are stuck on FTX, its crypto exchange platform. FTX, for instance, led the $150 million Series C extension round in Chipper Cash, an African payments company; Alameda Research, on the other hand, has backed Nestcoin, Nigeria- and Kenya-based web3 company Mara, Congolese web3 startup Jambo. Some of them include Galois Capital, a hedge fund with half of its assets stuck on FTX; Genesis Trading, which had about $175 million locked on the crypto exchange; Multicoin, the famed web3 venture capital firm that had nearly 10% of its assets under management trapped. According to several reports, companies with money stuck on FTX might get their money back depending on how much FTX’s assets are ultimately worth.

After the layoffs, Brex has just over 1,150 employees. Unsurprisingly, Brex cited the challenging macro environment in its decision.

At one point, John began having more visibility into the company’s records and found there were inconsistencies in how Better was managing loan documents, post-closings and HR documents. To get a better understanding of what’s happening on a human level, we talked to several former employees of the embattled startup who have been laid off in recent months, as well as current ones impacted by the new leave policy. In the meantime, workers who stayed at the company despite all the goings-on of the past year — only to be laid off with far less in severance pay than those who were laid off before them — feel betrayed.

Giesecke message was sent to around 500 Klarna employees, including in IT and and recruiting, though Klarna tells us in a separate statement that the job cuts will impact fewer than 100 employees globally. In May, the company shrunk its global workforce by an estimated 10%; it also raised funds at a $6.7 billion valuation in an $800 million round, down from the somewhat aspirational $45.6 billion valuation that Klarna was assigned by SoftBank when the Japanese conglomerate led a $640 million round in the company in June of last year. Our organization is built on 700 fast-moving teams that are constantly changing, and Klarna employees move between teams and departments every week. When layoffs follow layoffs, as is happening at a growing number of companies (TC’s Natasha Mascarenhas has observed this trend at Robinhood, On Deck, Gemini and others, for example), morale can sink further still.

Before Capiter, Mahmoud was the co-founder and COO of Egypt-born and Dubai-based ride-hailing company SWVL (the company, which went public via a SPAC deal last year, laid off 32% of its staff this May) Egyptian startup Capiter raises $33M to expand B2B e-commerce platform across MENA B2B e-commerce platforms operate either asset-light or inventory-heavy models. The latter requires more capital and for Capiter, which employs a hybrid model, it’s unclear how the company has exhausted its funds and is already looking to sell after raising millions from Quona Capital, MSA Capital, Shorooq Partners, Savola and others last year. This information was further corroborated in a local news report where Capiter’s Board allegedly said that the founders had not been reporting to the board, its representatives and shareholders during on-site in-person due diligence for a potential merger.

The company numbers are small compared to other layoffs that have taken place within Africa’s tech ecosystem over the past few months, especially among startups that have raised vast sums of venture capital within the last year or two; for instance, Swvl laid off 400; Wave, approximately 300; 54gene, 95; and Vezeeta, 50. Meanwhile, it was just last August that the digital bank, which provides zero to minimal fees on cards, account maintenance and transfers and is one of Africa’s soonicorns, raised $55 million — money that it planned to use to not only double down on new services for Nigeria but also to prepare its launch into more countries on the continent like Ghana and Uganda — in a Series B round that saw it valued at $500 million. As Kuda positions itself for pan-African and international expansion amidst an uncertain venture capital environment, it depicts the recent cut in its workforce as part of strategic steps for sustainable growth. When Kuda held a town hall meeting last month, cutting down seemingly redundant roles and dismissing nonperforming staff to reduce costs and extending runway were topics of conversation in light of current macroeconomic trends, according to sources.

As Clearco international workforce is cut, its global clients will now turn to Outfund, an e-commerce investor that operates in the U.K. and Australia. The latest workforce reduction is just one step Clearco has taken over the past few months, including prior rounds of layoffs, to refocus its business operations amid the changing e-commerce scene. When Clearco cut a quarter of staff in July, Romanow said at the time that it was considering strategic options for its international operations. One month after cutting 25% of its total staff, Clearco is conducting another round of layoffs as it retracts its international presence in the U.K., Germany, Ireland and Australia.

Digital mortgage lender Better.com has conducted its fourth round of layoffs since December 1, 2021.

It’s been a volatile year for retail investment behemoth Robinhood. The fintech company is laying off 23% of its workforce, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by TechCrunch. The layoff comes just three months after Robinhood cut 9% of full time staff. At the time of its last layoffs in late April, \[…\]

After assessing the current market conditions and uncertainty we’re seeing across the e-commerce sector, this was the most prudent action to take and was necessary to.

A source close to the company noted that there was a reduction of 7%, or 68 members, in Gemini’s company-wide Slack channel Monday morning. The company had not widely communicated the extent of Monday layoffs internally, leaving employees to speculate on the exact number of co-workers laid off in this most recent downsizing.

Wave, an African fintech that offers mobile money services in Senegal and Ivory Coast, laid off about 15% of its workforce last month. Thus, the layoffs affected almost 300 employees, most of whom worked in Wave’s new markets: Burkina Faso, Mali and Uganda. The Senegal-based startup likely has enough money in the bank for the next few years, and last week, it secured a €90 million syndicated loan from the International Finance Corporation (IFC), Lendable, Norfund and other lenders in one of the largest debt deals on the continent. journalist first got a whiff of the layoff news on LinkedIn, where Jessica Chervin, a former Andela executive who joined Wave as an expansion lead in March, wrote that she was leaving the company.

So if you include that company’s layoffs — which amounted to some 3,000 in the first quarter of 2022 — the fintech numbers inch up even higher and fintech becomes the category that saw the most layoffs by percentage — 15.4% — in the first half of 2022.

The Toronto-based company has been a leader in the realm of democratizing financial products for consumers, including stock trading, crypto asset sales and peer-to-peer money transfers. And now it appears that Wealthsimple is an example of another company that experienced a boom during the early days of the pandemic and is now seeing a slowdown in business. It will scale back its efforts in areas such as peer-to-peer payments, tax and merchant services.

Unfortunately for Klarna employees, the company hasn’t said who will be affected by the job cuts. Cutting 10% of the company’s workforce means that around 700 people will lose their job at the fintech company.

Digital mortgage company Better.com is gearing up for another round of layoffs, multiple sources with knowledge of internal happenings at the company have told journalist.

Diane Yu, CTO of Better.com, is transitioning from her position as chief technology officer to an advisory role a day after the digital mortgage lender announced a voluntary separation program to certain employees, according to an internal memo obtained by journalist.

The mass layoffs at digital mortgage lender Better.com have reportedly started, according to employees and other sources at the company, and affected workers are finding out by seeing a severance check in their Workday account — the company payroll app.

Online mortgage lender Better.com is poised to lay off roughly 50% of its staff of about 8,000 this week, sources familiar with internal happenings at the company told journalist on Monday.

The latest events at the company involve the resignations of four more top executives, including Clayton Carol, the company VP of finance; Christian Wallace, head of real estate; Paul Tyger, general manager of purchase; and Stephen Rosen, head of sales.

On its LinkedIn page, the company said: Today, we made the difficult decision to reduce the size of our company based on the impacts of the changing real estate market. Limited housing inventory has also created a challenging real estate market for home buyers; driving up prices and making homeownership less and less accessible.