Acquisitions Dominate FinTech IPO Headlines as Index Climbs 2.2% for the Week

The FinTech IPO Index climbed 2.2% this week as a spate of acquisitions dominated the headlines headed into the end of the second quarter.

One of those acquisitions came from InsurTech provider Huize, which saw its stock top the $1 mark after a rocky Q2 in which its share price slipped below $0.57.

In an announcement this week, the company said it had acquired Global Care, an InsurTech company based in Vietnam offering digital solutions to the insurance industry.

The acquisition marks the first step in the global expansion of Huize’s new international brand Poni Insurtech, as Southeast Asia offers “significant market parallels to China including rapidly growing economies, large and young demographics, urbanizing middle-class populations and increasing demand for digital insurance solutions,” Huize said in the release.

Global Care’s suite of cloud-based API solutions, the companies said, enable insurers to streamline and digitize their sales processes, policy administration and operations. In 2023, Global Care facilitated 13.5 million policies on its platform, with revenue more than quadrupling year over year and registered users growing in excess of 1.3 million.

Nubank Gets Data

In other acquisition-related news, digital banking platform Nubank has acquired data intelligence company Hyperplane, saying the move will accelerate its artificial intelligence (AI)-first strategy. With the addition of Hyperplane’s capabilities to Nubank’s existing AI resources, Nubank will be able to offer its customers and more personalized financial products and services, the companies said Wednesday.

Nubank, whose digital banking platform serves over 100 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, currently processes petabytes of data daily using its existing data infrastructure and analytics, according to the announcement.

Nubank shares rose slightly from $12 to $13 through the past five trading sessions.

Hyperplane, whose data intelligence platform helps banks use their first-party data to create personalized customer experiences, designed its AI systems to ingest and analyze unstructured data at scale.

Following its acquisition by Nubank, Hyperplane will power the digital banking platform’s core machine learning (ML) capabilities and build foundational models that the product and engineering teams use to create connections between broad contexts, generate insights, support decision-making and enhance the customer experience.

International investment firm XP’s stock broke even for the week at $17.97 after the company this week announced an offer to purchase for cash all of its outstanding 3.25% Senior Unsecured Notes Due 2026, where the aggregate principal amount stands at more than $736 million.

Elsewhere, Upstart said that Pennsylvania-based Diamond Credit Union, which holds over $1 billion in assets with over 64,000 members, has partnered with Upstart to provide personal loans to new and existing members.

Diamond Credit Union became an Upstart Referral Network lending partner in April 2023. Per the latest release, via that Upstart Referral Network, qualified personal loan applicants on Upstart who meet Diamond Credit Union’s credit policies will receive tailored offers as they transition into a Diamond Credit Union-branded experience to complete the online member application and closing process.

Upstart shares rose $2 from $21 to $23 for the week.

In news related to management changes, MoneyLion has appointed Pinterest and Google veteran Jon Kaplan as its first chief revenue officer (CRO). In his new position, Kaplan will focus on expanding MoneyLion’s market share and leveraging the company’s data assets to create new revenue opportunities, the financial technology ecosystem firm said on Monday. MoneyLion shares trended down for the week, from $75.50 to $71.80.