One might be forgiven for thinking that the public listing activity this week was all about Coinbase. The cryptocurrency exchange went public through a direct listing and closed at around $329, off of its intraday highs of about $429. Volume was strong, at 79 million shares traded, so the market cap at day’s end stood at $84 billion – though, at the peak of that day, it was well north of $100 billion.
But beyond that splashy debut, the PYMNTS SPAC/IPO Tracker showed some incremental growth in financial services – specifically, banking and payment listings.
We can see the appeal of platform firms in the headline that Grab, Southeast Asia’s biggest technology platform, said that it will merge with the special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) Altimeter to go public. The valuation would be close to $40 billion in would be the largest SPAC merger to date, as the firm’s revenues surged by 70 percent year over year – and the pandemic, of course, has been a tailwind for delivery and for the rise of the super app. As noted here earlier in the week, within the key markets of food delivery, ride-hailing and digital wallet payments, Grab expects its total addressable market to grow from approximately $52 billion in 2020 to more than $180 billion by 2025.
Digital Banking And AI, Too
There were other firms that went public or are planning to go public with roots in the banking and financial services space. In its own public listing debut, shares of Alkami Technology, which is focused on digital banking, surged 38 percent, as the firm raised $180 million through its IPO. The company has said that more than 160 FIs use its cloud-based digital banking offerings, which are sold through Software as a Service (SaaS). Revenues have grown more than 50 percent year over year as measured in 2020, to $112 million.
Separately, TaskUs, a business services outsourcing company, said this past week that it has filed for an IPO. Shares will be listed on the tech-heavy NASDAQ exchange, and the firm expects to sell $100 million in shares. TaskUs, according to the firm’s SEC filing, serves clients in the eCommerce, gaming, food delivery and streaming media space, spanning firms such as Zoom, Uber and Coinbase. The firm said it has seen a compound annual growth rate of more than 60 percent, with revenues of $478 million in 2020.
And as reported last week, UiPath, as reported by Yahoo! Finance, is targeting a $1 billion raise for its IPO in the United States. The firm’s platform, per its SEC filing, uses AI technology to, among other things, build “software robots” to perform business functions at client companies, tackling tasks such as updating information in databases and helping employees streamline workflows. For the fiscal year that ended in January 2021, revenues of $346 million represented roughly 72 percent growth from the previous year.
PYMNTS reported earlier in the month that the Swedish payments startup Trustly announced plans to file an IPO at a valuation of $9 billion. The firm uses its own network that facilitates payments directly from customers’ bank accounts. In 2020, Trustly processed $21 billion in transactions, and the firm has been seeing growth in buy now, pay later (BNPL) options.
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