The Interchange: Things go from bad to worse at Better.com

Aurora’s filing says that Better’s financial performance “deteriorated” as a result of numerous factors, including fluctuating and increasing interest rates, the continued impact of the reorganization of its sales and operations teams in the third quarter of 2021, continued investments in its business (including investments to expand its product offerings) and the effects of “negative media coverage” following, and severance costs associated with, a series of mass layoffs that began on December 1, 2021.Well before Better.com garnered negative media coverage due to the manner in which CEO and co-founder Vishal Garg callously laid off 900 employees, the controversial executive made headlines for being the target of multiple lawsuits by PIMCO, Goldman Sachs and other investors involving entities he controlled. — many believed to be underwriting managers.The saga continues.I reached out to Better.com for comment but had not heard back at the time of writing.Terry Angelos has left his role as senior vice president and global head of fintech at Visa after seven years to become CEO of fractional investment trading startup DriveWealth. Alex Wilhelm takes a look at what happened to Affirm’s and Upstart’s stocks and what it means for the sector as a whole.Payments giant Adyen announced an expansion to its partnership with BNPL giant Afterpay, going from including Afterpay as a payment option for merchants to now processing those payments for Afterpay across several markets including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Europe, U.S., and the U.K. Adyen said that its global reach and focus on enterprise businesses as an acquirer provides Afterpay “with the capability needed for its fast growing business.”More on the topic of BNPL — Visa announced a new installments partner program, Visa Ready for BNPL, which the credit card processing giant said will fast-track implementation and scalability of Visa’s BNPL offering by enabling fintechs and select issuers “to easily and quickly” integrate Visa’s solutions. With more than 20 partners already live, Visa says the program enables tech companies that would like to have their own BNPL solution reach Visa’s “vast network” of clients.In just over three years, one-click checkout startup Bolt has seen its valuation surge to $11 billion from $250 million. The round brings the company’s valuation to $842 million, nearly doubling the $447 million it was valued at after its Series C.Egyptian fintech Paymob, which enables merchants to accept digital payments online and in-store, raised $50 million in Series B funding. It just came out of stealth with $8 million in seed money from Coatue — you can read more about it in Anita Ramaswamy’s article here.The rise of digital payments has changed the nature of how people do business with each other; and open banking — a movement in banking where incumbents are finally adopting newer technology such as APIs to open their systems to modern integrations — is leading to a wave of new payment methods, all of which are hoping to become as standard as cash or paying with cards. In the latest development on this theme, a U.K. startup called Token.io has closed $40 million in funding to expand its own particular push in payments tech — account-to-account payments and accessing accounts for transactions by way of a single API — deeper into the U.K. and across Europe.Software as a service has become the default for how organizations adopt and use apps these days, thanks to advances in cloud computing and networking, and the flexibility of pay-as-you-use models that adapt to the evolving needs of a business. Last week, a company called Paddle, which has built a large business out of providing the billing backend for those SaaS products, announced a large funding round of $200 million as it gears up for its own next stage of growth.While (former) startups like Lemonade came along to attack the tired world of insurance, the travel insurance market is now coming in for the same treatment from the likes of SafetyWing (covered by TC here) and Battleface.