FinTech IPO Index Up 1.4%, Boosted by BNPL Names and Expensify’s Gains

June’s winding to its last few days of trading. Earnings season will begin in earnest in the next few weeks.

Through the past week, the FinTech IPO Index gained 1.4%, buoyed by platforms and partnerships, and announcements that were focused on crypto, too.

Expensify, up 10.8%, said this past week that it has expanded international support across its platform. The launch includes support for corporate card import from 10,000-plus more banks worldwide, multilingual capabilities, Euro-based billing, international reimbursements in New Expensify, and beta access to the Expensify Card across the U.K., EU, and soon Canada.

As part of the expansion, additional features include language localization beyond English and Spanish in New Expensify, with support for 10 more languages including French, German, Italian and Japanese.

SoFi announced that it added “crypto-powered capabilities” to its digital financial services. As part of the move, SoFi will enable members to buy, sell and hold coins such as bitcoin and ethereum, with plans to eventually offer stablecoins.

The announcement also encompassed other services, including “the ability to borrow against their crypto assets, expanding payment options, and introducing new staking features, as well as blockchain and digital asset infrastructure capabilities for other companies offered by Galileo, SoFi’s technology platform.”  The stock was up 9.2%.

Auto Shops Boost Affirm

Buy now, pay later (BNPL) names showed momentum, as Sezzle jumped 14.8% and Affirm shares gathered 8.5%. The later BNPL provider has been added by auto shop management platform Shopmonkey for pay-over-time options. Affirm is being offered as default payment method for car repair shops that use Shopmonkey’s payment processing solution.

The release noted that thousands of auto shops, most of them small to medium-sized businesses, use Shopmonkey’s payment processing tool. By using Affirm, approved customers of these shops get the option of splitting the cost of their repair bill into biweekly or monthly payment plans.

Upstart’s stock advanced 7.2%. Cobalt Credit Union, serving 115,000 members across the country with over $1.3 billion in assets,  announced its partnership with Upstart to offer personal loans, home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) and auto refinance loans to more consumers.

Cobalt Credit Union started lending as a partner on the Upstart Referral Network in March of this year, originating T-Prime personal loans, with plans to expand into auto refinance loans later this year. As part of the Upstart Referral Network, qualified loan applicants on Upstart.com who meet Cobalt’s credit policies receive tailored offers as they move to a Cobalt-branded experience to complete the online member application and closing process. Cobalt is also purchasing portfolios of HELOCs from Upstart’s affiliate, Upstart Mortgage, on an ongoing basis.

Decentralized finance company Defi Development was among the most notable decliners, sinking about 41%. The company launched a partnership with cryptocurrency exchange Kraken. This joint efforts mean that DeFi will work with Kraken to list the tokenized stock of its publicly traded equity on the Solana blockchain.

“We view the tokenization of our stock as a DeFi lego block, one that developers and institutions can build on top of,” said Joseph Onorati, CEO of DeFi.