Its a been a rocky few weeks of late as the bad news surrounding the global economy starts to hit home and this is effecting the FinTech market.
After a record-breaking year in 2021, investment in Canadian FinTech has begun to drop like a stone – more than 50% in the first six months of 2022, according to a KPMG report.
Canadian FinTech companies saw $810 million in total investment across 85 deals in H1 2022, down from $1.9 billion in H2 2021.
The drop from H1 2021 was even more marked, although that period was an outlier, seeing a bumper $5.4 billion in investment across 108 deals.
Global M&A
The global economy also seems to be affecting the mergers and acquisitions market.
UBS pulled the plug on its $1.4 billion acquisition of robo-advisor Wealthfront but says it is still committed to its growth plans in the US and strengthening its digital offering.
The firms did not specify why they have mutually agreed to terminate the deal, which was announced in January.
Bolt, the online checkout company, has also announced it will not push ahead with its $1.5 billion deal to buy blockchain infrastructure provider Wyre.
Bolt announced the acquisition in April, touting its plan to integrate Wyre’s APIs, which enable simple and secure crypto to fiat payments, into its platform. However, while the two companies will continue to work together on bringing crypto to Bolt, the acquisition is cancelled.
In a rare bit of good news though, JP Morgan says it has struck a deal to buy cloud-native payments technology firm Renovite Technologies. Renovite will become part of JP Morgan Payments, which combines the bank’s corporate treasury services, trade finance, card and merchant services.
Renovite has built six proprietary, cloud-agnostic and payment token-agnostic payments products to help its clients to optimise infrastructure, including switch, reconciliation, security, issuing, ATM and testing.
The firm has worked with JP Morgan since last year and will now help it build its next-generation merchant acquiring platform, bolster the its payments modernisation strategy and support its journey to the cloud.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
