Good morning & happy Tuesday! FinTech IPOs are back, so today all eyes are on Brazilian digital payments darling PicPay that's going public this week on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker $PICS ' We're going to unpack their strategy, financials, and challenging governance to see whether this new Latin American stock is worth your time and money in the years to come (plus, inside you'll also find deep dives into other LatAm gems Nubank NU 0.00%' & MercadoLibre MELI 0.00%', and why I'm super bullish on both). So let's jump straight into the awesome stuff '' Following the money ' In 2017, Joesley and Wesley Batista stood at the center of Brazil's largest corruption scandal, admitting to paying $123 million in bribes to nearly 1,900 politicians through their meatpacking empire JBS. 8 years later, these same brothers control PicPay, Brazil's second-largest digital bank, which is going public tomorrow, and is being asked U.S. public market investors to value it at up to $2.5 billion '...

The Amsterdam-listed buyout firm will pay $400m in cash and up to $800m in CVC equity for the base consideration. Additional earnout payments of up to $200m in cash and $200m in equity are linked to Marathon's performance between 2027 and 2029. The acquisition will significantly expand CVC's footprint in the US credit market and increase fee-paying assets in its credit unit to around '61bn, or $72bn. CVC said the deal is expected to be accretive to earnings per share from 2028, before synergies. Founded in 1998, Marathon manages more than $24bn across asset-based, real estate, opportunistic, and public credit strategies. Co-founders Bruce Richards and Lou Hanover will continue to co-head the business, which will be rebranded CVC-Marathon. 'Expanding credit capability in the US to complement our market-leading European platform has been a clear priority for CVC, and we are delighted to partner with Bruce, Lou, and the team,' CVC chief executive Rob Lucas said in a statement. 'Marathon's outstanding track record across multiple cycles, combined with its performance and investment-led culture, aligns perfectly with CVC's approach,' he added....

The news was big in the fintech world with Brex claiming the pairing would represent 'the largest bank-fintech deal in history.' (Visa had planned to buy Plaid in 2020 for $5.3 billion until that deal fell apart a year later due to regulatory concerns.) 'Acquiring Brex accelerates this journey, especially in the business payments marketplace,' he said. 'Brex invented the integrated combination of corporate credit cards, spend management software and banking together in a single platform. They have taken the rarest of journeys for a fintech, building a vertically integrated platform from the bottom of the tech stack to the top.' While $5 billion is no small sum, it is less than half the $12.3 billion that San Francisco-based Brex was valued at in October 2021. In total, the company has raised $1.7 billion in equity and debt since its 2017 inception ' with about $1.2 billion of that being venture funding. The company has 1,100 employees, according to a Brex spokesperson who also told Crunchbase News that its business is growing 40% year over year and is profitable. Customers include Anthropic, Robinhood, DoorDash, Toast, Zoom and Intel, among others....

Good day & happy Thursday! Today, all eyes are on Mastercard, which clearly wants to be the toll road for AI shopping (what their recent partnerships and announcments actually mean & why this could be huge + bonus deep dive into Google's UCP, OpenAI's Super App ambitions, and the analysis of Mastercard's latest financials inside), and Bermuda that's now a laboratory for onchain finance (what Coinbase & Circle are trying to do and why it's one of the most interesting experiments in FinTech + bonus deep dives into Coinbase & Circle inside). So let's jump straight into the interesting stuff '' That's exactly why payments giant Mastercard MA 0.00%' just announced it's joining Google's Universal Commerce Protocol while simultaneously integrating its Agent Pay product into Microsoft's Copilot Checkout and OpenAI's Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. The company is also refocusing Start Path, its decade-old startup accelerator, on AI commerce ventures. On the surface, this looks like a payments giant doing routine partnership deals. Look closer, and you'll see a company making an aggressive bet on who captures value when machines start spending money....