Yonder, a credit card startup founded by former ClearScore executives, has announced a 20 million British pound (about $26.3 million) seed round ahead of its launch in the United Kingdom, Financial IT reported Thursday (March 31).
The capital will used to hire staff and build a selection of rewards and features, the company said per the report.
The round was co-led by Northzone and LocalGlobe, with participation from Seedcamp and several angels, including Sharmadean Reid, Marshmallow founders Oliver Kent-Braham and Alex Kent-Braham, and Rio Ferdinand.
Yonder was founded by CEO Tim Chong, who said he struggled to find a quality credit provider as an Australian in London, according to the report. The frustration came despite a successful career and excellent credit score.
“For too long, credit cards have taken advantage of consumers,” Chong said, per the report. “Hidden fees, discriminatory credit scoring, and rewards that belong in the 1990s, all in the interest of bank’s quarterly earnings.”
PYMNTS reported this month that consumers with revolving credit are using it not just to fund spending splurges, but to manage their finances and boost long-term financial freedom.
Read more: Credit Cards Reemerge from the Pandemic as Multifaceted Financial Management Tools
At a time when six in 10 working Americans live paycheck to paycheck, traditional credit is still among the most powerful tools available. But it must be available and used smartly.
With 52% of active credit card users living paycheck to paycheck and “sometimes,” “always” or “usually” revolving their balances, compared to only 20% of active card users not living paycheck to paycheck, credit cards are clearly a budgeting tool for many.
Elan Financial Services Senior Vice President and Market Director Matthew Carpenter told PYMNTS, “As a card issuer, we want to make sure to give card members the resources to make those kinds of decisions and control their financial outcomes through education, resources, budgeting tools, along with giving card members some control in their payments.”
Cryptocurrency exchange Bybit has awarded a collective bounty of $4.2 million to five bounty hunters that have helped trace and freeze funds that were stolen from the exchange in a hack.
Bybit is offering a total bounty of $140 million, which is equal to 10% of the $1.4 billion that was taken in the hack, according to the company’s website called Lazarusbounty that provides information on the hack and the bounty.
“Join us on war against Lazarus,” Bybit Co-Founder and CEO Ben Zhou said in a Wednesday (Feb. 25) post on X announcing the site and referring to the hacker, Lazarus. “Industry first bounty site that shows aggregated full transparency on the sanctioned Lazarus money laundering activities.”
The site said that bounties will be awarded immediately when funds are confirmed as frozen, and that there will be bounties of 5% of the recovered funds to the entity that froze the funds and 5% to contributors who helped trace the funds.
The site also ranks involved parties like exchangers, mixers or bridges, dubbing them “good actors” or “bad actors” based on their response time and cooperation in either freezing the funds or providing updates on the funds’ movement.
“We have assigned a team to dedicate to maintain and update this website, we will not stop until Lazarus or bad actors in the industry is eliminated,” Zhou wrote in his post. “In the future we will open it up to other victims of Lazarus as well.”
Bybit said Friday (Feb. 21) that a cyberattacker stole some of its holdings, adding that the attacker was able to transfer these holdings to an unidentified address after gaining control of one of Bybit’s ethereum (ETH) cold wallets when it was executing a transfer to one of its warm wallets.
On Monday (Feb. 24), Bybit said it had replenished its reserve after the hack, conducting a fresh audit and restoring its reserve to a 1:1 ratio within 72 hours of the incident.
The attack showed that as the blockchain ecosystem grows, security challenges become more complex, PYMNTS reported Wednesday, noting that the attack was described as being likely the “largest incident ever, not just crypto.”