FinTech IPO Index Surges 8% as Affirm Gets a Bump on Walmart BNPL Deal

Headed into the last week of the year — a shortened week due to the holidays — the FinTech IPO Index gained 8%.

BNPL Bounce Continues

Affirm shares gathered 6.9%, with a continued bounce on positive sentiment and partnerships surrounding buy now, pay later.

As PYMNTS reported this week, Affirm has expanded its long-standing partnership with Walmart. Through that expansion, Affirm pay-over-time options will be added to self-checkout kiosks at more than 4,500 Walmart stores in the U.S. In addition to Walmart’s stores, website and app, customers can also pay with Affirm at Walmart’s vision and auto centers.

nCino shares were up 5.6%.

The company said that it had expanded a partnership with Salesforce to accelerate cloud solutions deployments in the financial services industry. The two companies have been collaborating since 2011. As part of the agreement, the companies said, nCino will deepen its connectivity to Salesforce platform tools, such as for customer relationship management and Financial Services Cloud. Their expanded partnership lengthened the term of the agreement to 2031.

Robinhood was in the news this past week, and shares were up 6.6%. As PYMNTS reported, the company has been luring customers from more established brokers like Fidelity and Charles Schwab, having received about $1.1 billion in account transfers since Oct. 23, the day it began offering a 1% match on transferred brokerage accounts.

The news comes on the heels of recent company announcements that it had begun offering brokerage services to customers in the U.K., letting them trade upward of 6,000 U.S. listed stocks.

New Product Announcements and Expansions

Payoneer announced that it had added new features to improve the customer experience and help entrepreneurs easily connect with the global economy.

The new features include the “Add Funds” function, which allows clients to add single-currency funds directly from their local bank accounts into their multi-currency Payoneer accounts. Payoneer Checkout lets small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) accept online payments from their global customers at their online stores. The checkout function has been updated to include pre-dispute alerts to help SMB merchants avoid chargebacks. Payoneer shares were up 0.7%.

In other product related news, Expensify added a budgeting tool to its financial management app for businesses.

The new tool allows administrators to set monthly or annual budgets for teams, departments, employees or the company as a whole, Expensify said, adding that the budgeting tool provides both firms and employees with notifications on spending progress so that they are less likely to be surprised by overspending. Expensify shares lost 6.5% through the past five sessions.

In an announcement last week, Lufax Holding said that it received a letter from the New York Stock Exchange notifying Lufax that it was below the NYSE’s continued listing standards due to the trading price of Lufax’s American depositary shares.

The notice had no immediate impact on the listing of the company’s ADSs, which will continue to be listed and traded on the NYSE. The company will be considered to be below compliance standards if the average closing price of its security as reported on the consolidated tape is less than $1.00 over a consecutive 30 trading-day period. The company has six months to regain compliance. Lufax shares sank more than 24%.